Long live iplayer Radio – BBC Sounds is awful
Why is the BBC killing the perfectly good iplayer Radio app next Monday when its alternative, is still so broken? “Sounds is already improving how we listen to radio,” said James Purnell, the BBC’S Director of Radio, in a blog post last week. Leaving the bizarre grammar of that sentence to hang in the air, he continued: “With just one app, rather than two, we’ll be able to focus all our energies on growing Sounds so that we can serve everyone.”
I like the iplayer Radio app very much. For one thing, when you’re listening to live radio, you can see the schedules at a glance and there’s lots of information about the programme you’re currently listening to. During a Radio 4 drama you can read an introductory synopsis and the cast list, or for live programmes you can see details of the day’s guests and what time they will be interviewed. On BBC Sounds you only get the name of the programme.
The search function on BBC Sounds is labyrinthine. The app isn’t compatible with older devices. It’s slow to load and its orange colour scheme could stun a horse, but is presumably designed to entice
teenage listeners.
In fact it all seems to be aimed at some mythical youth demographic. I’m 30 years old but it makes me feel as if I’m from the Bronze Age. The app is always recommending me giggly podcasts about sex or reality TV star Gemma Collins. It’s all set up to promote its own podcasts and music mixes, not speech radio. When I actually, through a miracle, manage to find an episode of a programme I want to hear, at the end it tends to autoplay something completely unrelated. It’s a bit of a surprise to hear BBC Hereford and Worcester sports news when I live in neither Hereford nor Worcester.
I don’t want any of these things. I just want to listen to the radio. This is apparently too complicated a desire. The iplayer Radio app is fine as it is, but soon it will die, and for no good reason. Purnell has promised to improve Sounds and keep listening to listeners’ feedback. How kind. I suppose we must all continue to provide it.
It was strangely apt this week to hear Digital Future: The New Underclass (Radio 4, Tuesday), a lively documentary all about the people left behind by the supposedly flourishing digital revolution. Increasingly, the institutions of our
daily lives require us to do everything online. Applying for a school for your child, paying your council tax bill, or filling in a tax return, for instance, are almost impossible now without the internet.
The programme pointed out that it’s not just those who didn’t grow up with the internet who lack digital skills. Some young people might be perfectly capable of using smartphones, but utterly at sea with larger machines, and therefore unable to handle documents, forms and spreadsheets. Young people with learning difficulties can struggle to understand how computers work. And then there are people who just don’t have internet access, including people in very rural areas and those who just can’t afford it.
Anyone who needs Universal Credit, for instance, must apply for the benefit using an online form and keep an online journal, which is difficult if you can’t afford your own computer or internet access and your local library only lets you use their digital facilities for a couple of hours.
The programme was presented by Dr Josie Barnard, a teacher of creative writing who has been researching how life is becoming ever more impossible without digital skills. She was humane and sensitive, and her guests articulately described very real problems with internet use.
It was a timely programme suggesting that digital is not always automatically the best way to do things, and that we have to consider the many people it excludes. I wonder if the team behind BBC Sounds was listening.
Radio has also been a bit sluggish lately at covering Brexit. It always seems behind the times, somehow, perhaps because the news is moving just too fast, and I find myself getting updates mostly from newspaper liveblogs instead.
Maybe, though, it’s because Brexit is a curiously visual phenomenon. The major developments have centred around images that are more powerful than words: the infamous bus, Jacob Rees-mogg reclining in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson in front of those policemen. Such events are hard to render in audio. They need to be seen to be believed.