The new seekers | 22 March 2018

As Bob Shennan, the BBC’s director of radio and music admitted this week, there are almost two million podcast-only listeners in the UK who never tune into BBC Radio. They’re captivated by specialist music (Heart, Absolute, etc), specialist talks (mostly religious such as Premier Christian) or specialist news and current affairs (the Economist, Monocle). And they never feel the need to cross over into Auntie’s sphere of influence. The BBC’s response, says Shennan, must be to produce ‘a revitalised audio product’ to meet the needs, or rather demands, of these new audiences.

‘Audio product’ seems a long way from Music While You Work or Down Your Way. Soon, Shennan envisages, most listeners will be using voice apps to order up what they want to listen to from a vast range of programming, sometimes from what are now called ‘linear’ (i.e. traditional scheduled) stations by switching on (or tuning in) in the old-fashioned way, at other times by dipping into preselected podcasts, or streaming from the web, or maybe resurrecting something from the ‘deep archive’.

More intriguing was Shennan’s admission, in the same speech, that the UK (unlike Norway) is still not ready to switch off analogue and go digital-only, at first planned for 2015, then put off until 2017, and now receding, as DAB sets begin to look more and more like cassette-players or video-recorders. There’s no need now (or at least not for the foreseeable future) to junk that old Roberts set in the kitchen, its loudspeaker muffled under layers of grease, flour and icing sugar. It still gives the best signal (DAB has never worked properly in my area).

On Sunday night it gave me the rasping, haunting sound of the Revd Gary Davis, blues singer from the Deep South, who was featured in Gary O’Donoghue’s programme for Radio 3, Blind, Black and Blue (produced by Lee Kumutat and a team of blind editors and technicians).