Too late for Spangles to save Radio Scotland!

MY love affair with radio began with a wrist-borne transistor radio as big as the pillow I hid it under for clandestine late-night listening to Scots DJ Stuart Henry on Radio Luxembourg.

That led to Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show on BBC Radio 1 and, like most of the country pre banal breakfast TV, I caught Terry Wogan ahead of school, as well as Jimmy Young and John Dunn – another Scot – as my parents’ GEC Starfinder radio was permanently on Radio 2.

Growing up in the deep south-west of Scotland, I heard Dublin-based pirate station Radio Nova loud and clear.

It was set up by Radio Caroline veteran ‘Spangles Muldoon’ and I was baffled by jingles involving a Mexican cab driver ‘Sorry – no speakee de English’ and ‘What time ees eet?’

Years later, I found the jingles had been bought in cheap from a defunct Texan station.

Radio Scotland? It never spoke to me. Too Central Belt, frankly. So I am not surprised it’s again shedding listeners, down 100,000 in a year and reaching only 18 per cent of the adult population, according to Radio Joint Audience Research. The old jibe that it’s just Radio Milngavie is getting another run-out.

The BBC blame podcasts and I grasp their impact – you can listen when you want and select the content. But isn’t there a bigger malaise, rooted in the BBC’s right-on, soggy-Left agenda?

Radio 4’s Today does not have its troubles to seek and its new format has cost it listeners, yet it still knocks Good Morning Scotland into a cocked hat.

The overlong Kaye Adams Programme has Kaye as an occasional guest and remains crippled by its subject choice. Phone-in shows work best on commercial stations with a shock jock who can provoke and not with Auntie Beeb, whose stultifying need to be evenhanded snuffs debate.

Thursdays sum up the problem. On Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time is informative and entertaining. Why switch over to hear Mrs Cannybuddie calling Kaye with tales of how the school bus was late this morning? John Beattie is less nuanced as a broadcaster than he was at No.8 for Scotland at rugby, but at least he’s not Fred MacAulay.

And if you think things are grim midweek, Saturdays are a desert of blokey, pub-bore football.

Sunday’s GMS review of the newspapers always has me roaring at the radio with its outrageous Leftie bias. It fair sets me up for the token religious slot (rebranded ‘ethical’ lest ‘God’ offend anyone); Take the Floor (yawn); jazz (closed book); and yep, yet more sport.

DONALDA MacKinnon (salary a cool £170,000) has been Director of BBC Scotland for over a year. She is supposed to be hiving off Radio Scotland’s music content to a new channel. It will do well, as music always finds its own audience.

But how much longer must we licencefee payers wait for Radio Scotland to broadcast the ‘high quality, original, challenging, innovative and engaging’ programmes it promises in its charter?

Stripped of tunes, Radio Scotland’s schedule is going to take a lot of filling.

Five hours of Kaye’s Tales Of the Obvious From the School Run and abandoning Saturday to ‘he gave it 110 per cent with that cultured left foot’ won’t make the station the force it ought to be.

Shame old Spangles has gone to the great studio in the sky. He could have taught Donalda a thing or two about entertaining radio.