Media Matters Stephen Glover
It’s dull, it doesn’t make money and Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like it
When Times Radio was launched in June, I raised a silent mental cheer.
Here was a serious, new, national radio station challenging the hegemony of the left-leaning BBC. It had succeeded in poaching several able broadcasters, including the Corporation’s admirable deputy political editor, John Pienaar. What was there not to like?
Five months later, I should report that not a single person has ever mentioned a Times Radio programme to me in private conversation.
There are endless puffs of the station in the pages of the Times and Sunday Times, and it reciprocates by ceaselessly plugging its newspaper siblings. Government ministers dutifully give it interviews, which are generally conducted in a much less stormy fashion than on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5. But there seems to have been very little ‘cut through’ to the national consciousness.
Doubtless these things take time. Most of us are set in our ways, and though we may grumble about Auntie she has been part of our lives for so long that it is hard to desert her for an upstart. Moreover, however irritating Radios 4 and 5 can sometimes be, they command enormous journalistic resources which even a station backed by Rupert Murdoch cannot hope to match.
Yet I wonder whether there isn’t a deeper problem. Times Radio is worthy and competent. It is civilised and discursive. Unlike the BBC, it strives to be neutral – and succeeds. It is, in fact, entirely creditable. But it is also rather dull.
The station gives an impression of having all the time in the world. The likes of Matt Chorley and Mariella Frostrup have three hours a day, four times a week, to fill, without any assistance from a co-host. Interviews are apt to drag on, and there is much lengthy rumination on the part of presenters.
If you value an absence of aggression and have a high boredom threshold, Times Radio might suit you. I’m afraid that, for me, it resembles a moderately interesting dinner party that has gone on too long. A useful comparison is between Radio 4’s
Today programme and Times Radio’s morning slot (which, at a mammoth four hours, lasts an hour longer) introduced by Aasmah Mir and Stig Abell.
I ought to prefer Times Radio, as I am often infuriated by the eagerness of the BBC’S Nick Robinson to interrupt hapless ministers as soon as they have started to answer a question. But I find it too leisurely and easy-going. One moment, Stig is giving a politician a comfortable ride; the next, he is genially trying to flog you a subscription to the Times and
Sunday Times.
It’s odd that Rupert Murdoch, the architect of the modern Sun, should have helped to give birth to something so bland and inoffensive. Or was he not paying much attention? He is rumoured to be less than ecstatic about his extremely well-behaved new baby, and one can see why.
Murdoch must be losing lots of money on the venture, since the station is free and there are no advertisements. The object of the exercise appears to be to promote the two newspapers and to try to build up a larger readership, while cocking a snook at the BBC.
Will many of us switch? The problem is that, with limited resources, Times Radio is trying to beat Radios 4 and 5 on their own turf. It would make more of a splash if it were more opinionated and had some ‘edge’. It should be a little shocking and irreverent.
I appreciate that it can’t afford to run counter to the values of its mother ship, the Times. But a national radio station that had some of the rumbustious and controversialist character of the Sun would be more widely noticed.
On the whole, the Times’s obituary of the magnificent Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who died in early October, was fair and balanced, and it was strikingly well written. But there was one extraordinary misjudgement about the former editor and peerless columnist.
The obituarist declared that, ‘despite his aspirations’, Perry was ‘no intellectual’. This is nonsense. It would be almost as outrageous to declare that Alexander the Great was ‘no soldier’. Perry conformed more exactly to my conception of an intellectual than almost anyone I have ever met.
If he had read his obituary, he would have been hurt. The writer intended to wound posthumously. Who was he (it must have been a man)? Someone, I would guess, familiar with the ways of Fleet Street over the past half-century. I wonder whether my old friend Tony Howard, who died in 2010, may have had a hand in commissioning it. He was obits editor of the Times between 1993 and 1999. In that role he mischievously asked me to write the obituary of my former colleague Andreas Whittam Smith, hoping for something barbed. More out of laziness than on principle, I didn’t write it.
Did Tony plant land mines about other eminent journalists that will blow up long after his death?