How radio became Britain’s broadcasting battleground
As Simon Mayo quits his Drivetime show, Charlotte Runcie asks why the BBC’S top talent is defecting to its commercial rivals
Listeners to Radio 2 have every right to be furious. Finally, Simon Mayo has put his Drivetime show out of its misery, after an undignified few months during which he was forced to share it with Jo Whiley, in a madcap scheme designed to massage the BBC’S lopsided gender equality stats.
It was a disaster. Whiley and Mayo, excellent broadcasters individually and friends, were not used to sharing a microphone. Overnight, Drivetime lost the identity it had nurtured carefully over eight years. So many listeners complained that the BBC published a response asking people to “give it a chance”. Well, now there will be no more chances, because Mayo’s off, apparently to focus on his 5 Live film show and his writing career. He tweeted that “beyond that, other radio adventures beckon”. There were reports that he had been poached to present a breakfast show on Smooth Radio, but the BBC has played these rumours down. Ultimately, the BBC’S ridiculous decision to create a monster mash-up has lost them one of their best presenters – for no good reason.
All this may not mean much at first if you’re not a radio nerd. (If you are a radio nerd, welcome to the family – The Archers will be on in a minute.) But it matters a great deal to anyone who pays the licence fee, because it’s the worst symptom yet of a disease that has gripped the BBC ever since it was forced to publish its stars’ salaries.
Before they were disclosed, we expected three big revelations. One was that women would be paid less than men, another was that certain TV presenters would be on astronomical amounts, and the third was that the details of said presenters’ pay would lead to them being poached by rival broadcasters, such as Sky or Netflix. The first prediction turned out to be true, but the second and third slightly off. Stars Gary Lineker, Graham Norton and Huw Edwards were duly revealed to be paid enough to afford a pair of diamond underpants for every day of the week, but they don’t appear to be going anywhere new in search of enough to buy matching socks.
But while we were nosily grubbing over how many thousands of pounds the TV chaps earned, the real story was unfolding behind mics, not in front of cameras. Quietly, rivals began making moves. And it wasn’t the TV stars who were vulnerable to poaching. The hunting ground, it turned out, was radio.
In late August, Eddie Mair declared he would be departing PM on Radio 4, and joining LBC. In September, Chris Evans announced he was leaving his Radio 2 breakfast show to join Virgin Radio. And now Mayo is heading for the hills, too. That’s three of the BBC’S best-paid and most popular presenters jumping ship within two months.
It looked as if BBC presenters were being paid too much, but commercial rivals considered them a bargain. It must have helped their case, when making advances, that in the wake of pay details being published, many presenters were vilified in the media, told to hang their heads in shame and take a pay cut. Many presenters – Lineker and Norton on TV, for instance, and John Humphrys and Jeremy Vine on radio – took the flak and stayed. But you can understand why others, on receiving a better offer and the flattering confirmation that, actually, they were both valued and valuable, decided to take some extra money and run. The exodus also tells a broader story about the clout of commercial radio. If Mayo does go to Smooth, he’ll be stablemates with Mair at LBC, as both networks are owned by radio behemoth Global. Evans, meanwhile, will be their rival at Virgin, a station with a fraction of the BBC’S listeners but one that Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Group is said to be attempting to build into the biggest commercial radio station in the UK. And Murdoch seemingly has a taste for blood: he bought Talksport in 2016 and outbid the BBC for radio rights to the England cricket team’s tours of Sri Lanka, the West Indies and South Africa, brazenly robbing Test Match
Special of its purpose in life. Everyone thought that the big fight between Murdoch and the BBC would be the battle between BBC One and Sky, but this war has a face for radio.
Commercial radio has always been a lucrative industry, but never before has that been quite so obvious. As well as out-spending it, commercial stations are eating away at the BBC’S monopoly on quality. At the ARIAS, radio’s most prestigious awards, which the BBC tends to sweep, winners included Absolute Radio and Magic FM and smaller independent local stations. And rightly so: many are broadcasting thrilling radio. The BBC can no longer tell us that it offers something unique in radio. It’s a fiction that used to allow them to pay presenters below market rate for work that, it seemed, wouldn’t have a home on any other network. That’s evidently not true any more.
This morning, BBC executives must be asking themselves: “Why are our presenters worth so much more than we can pay?” As ever, the problem is demand and supply. Talented broadcasters are made, not born, and Mair, Mayo and Evans owe a portion of their success to the space and time the BBC has given them to develop their skills and brand, on flagship shows.
Any broadcaster will tell you that good radio is far more difficult to make than it sounds. Mair, Mayo and Evans are worth so much simply because not many people can do what they do and make it sound easy. That’s it. Stations will pay vastly inflated sums for scarce resources, but it must be galling for the BBC to spend decades developing talent, only for someone with a case full of cash to lure them away.
It’s still early days, and more radio defections may well come, but surely the BBC can’t afford to lose much more talent. If the corporation continues haemorrhaging its best people, then publishing its salaries might turn out to have been a dire wound.
Since the BBC revealed how much it pays big names, rivals have been poaching the stars of its radio shows, not TV