Paul Danon

The head of BBC radio describes the possible privatisation of Radios 1 and 2 as a “cultural travesty”, adding that those stations “underpin the nation’s cultural life in the broadest sense”. Leaving to one side the unusual juxtaposition of “Radio 2″ and “cultural” in the same text, what, I wonder, could “in the broadest sense” mean? OK, so pop music is culture of sorts (and I do think that Radio 1’s late-night mixes are very cleverly presented), but what’s with all the breadth? Could “in the broadest sense” be a BBC-euphemism like “strong language”? The latter expression means obscenity or even blasphemy but, since the BBC can’t admit to broadcasting that, it needs somehow to associate vile, crude, insulting and offensive words with strength. Perhaps “in the broadest sense” means “actually quite trivial and lowbrow and mainly ephemeral”. That’s certainly broad if not cultural.

Microsoft has taken a further step in connecting various devices on line. I saw it all years ago. In the way things wrok, I write: “Commonly called ‘a network of networks of networks of networks’, the internet is actually a vast kind of collective sort of brain thingy which allows you to connect your gas-stove to the TV aerial and tell the heater in the greenhouse to switch on the cigarette-lighter in the car. I mean its potential is mind-boggling. The internet was started at the vast underground European Ear, Nose And Throat Research Complex (EENATRC) which straddles the border between Austria and Belgium. Here, a humble British scientist called Timbo Nersley hit upon the idea of running a piece of bare copper wire from the earphone-socket on his pocket calculator to the coin-weighing mechanism in the Coke machine along the hall. With trembling hands, Nersley cautiously pressed a random selection of buttons and within minutes there appeared on the screen the message: ‘Error 404. DNS lookup failure.‘ Simultaneously, the floor of the research centre began to swim with foaming brown soda and all the lights went out. The internet had been born and the world would never be the same again.”

Ofcom has been consulting on wireless broadband and admits that it’s been overwhelmed. It’s going to re-open the consultation after howls from the industry at its proposals. In commerce, a unit which fails is closed and replaced. In the world of government and quangos, you just start again but still get paid.

Peter Bazalgette, media-mogul, says BBC Radios 1 and 2 should be privatised, which makes so much sense. Think of the millions in revenue that have been forgone since those stations started in 1967. He also wants Channel 4 privatised, which will come as a surprise to some. Surely, don’t all those advertisements which interrupt the programmes mean it’s already private? C4 is, in fact, more government-owned than the BBC, which is slightly at arm’s length from the state. When it comes to serving the public, C4 arguably does as well if not better than the Beeb, yet without a penny of public money.

A think-tank wants London-style mayors for everywhere, but just hold on a minute. Such folks are elected dictators. Many folks voting in next month’s London-wide elections will think the London Assembly is some sort of county-council which the mayor uses to govern, but this is false. The assembly is a pretty toothless regulator which asks the mayor embarrassing (and sometimes cringe-makingly sympathetic) questions which he routinely ridicules or parrys. A better model of accountability is the one being demonstrated in parliament at the moment, where MPs are calling the prime minister to account over his abolition of the 10p tax-rate. Advocates of mayors say they give strong government, but then Zimbabwe has that. London doesn’t actually need a city-wide mayor. The boroughs have large enough populations to be unitary authorities (each with its own mayor, BTW) and there’s already a body for handling matters such as transport which cross borough-boundaries: it’s called national government.

St George’s day sees a new way of mapping northern France and southern England. Instead of the customary aquatic frontier between the two nations, several counties and départements become the manche (sleeve) region of the EU.

When the government consulted the public on the BBC, they got this from me.

The case for change

I am fed up with mixed programming. Even with the present analogue AM and FM frequencies, there is no excuse for it. Rather than moaning about it (too much), let me suggest what should be done without the deployment of any new resources in the corporation. Things just need to be moved around.

Rolling news

With its globally unrivalled resources, the BBC can sustain two rolling news TV channels, one domestic and one global, yet it does not seem to want to do the same for radio. I am fed up with going from hard news to silly plays about people who can’t sort out their lives, or going from intelligent discussion to inane phoneins. 198kHz needs to be NewsRadio, a rolling news channel which would be like Today only all day and every day. All other networks would opt in to its hourly bulletins and then opt back out to the things they did best. NewsRadio can, of course, appear on FM and digital but the key thing is that it will be universally available without deviation from its mission or fatuous regional opt-outs. Indeed, World Service might do well to opt in.

BBC local radio in London

All other local radio stations seem to do to a good job. Only the capital’s station consistently fails, yet it should be the flagship. It must stop trying to compete with funky pirates broadcasting through coathangers from highrises. It must deploy the full resources of the BBC to knock competitors like LBC into a cocked hat. Since it is in the capital, it should be briefed to compete with NewsRadio for attention. The Evening Standard punches way above its weight because it’s London’s evening newspaper. People throughout the south-east should strain to receive BBC radio in London for similar reasons. Maybe it should almost see itself as an ITN to the BBC. London is no village and we’d be silly to kid ourselves about it, yet it could stand alone as a nation. BBC radio in London should be as good as a national station for Belgium, Denmark or Switzerland. Maybe BBC Scotland (with just half the potential listeners) is a model. What isn’t a model for BBC local radio in London is PunkkFM.

Sport

I naively thought that the point of Radio Five was to quarantine sport from those of us who loathed it with a pathological hatred, yet, even though Five has a second digital frequency, sport still leeches into other networks. Enough is enough. You can have 12 sports radio channels if you want but, on rolling news, you must only report sport when it is news. Last Saturday’s results matter not a jot. All that matters is who wins championships, leagues and gold medals — once a year or every four years. So, there can be SportRadio 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 but there shall the sport remain.

Drama and talks

This is like sport. Have as many channels as you want. BBC7 is great, as is Radio Four at times. A while ago Mr Tariq Ali suggested the potentially marvellous Radio Einstein for intellectuals. You find some quite intelligent speech-programmes on Radio Two too, but only by accident. Such material needs to be grouped so that those of us who are depressed by rolling news can chill. Only, we must be allowed to choose when to do that.

Music

This area is stupendously over-catered-for by the BBC and commercial stations. However, it has its place as long as controllers don’t hide quality news, speech and current affairs programmes in their schedules. Bandwidth allowing, let’s have as many channels as there are genres. There must surely be room for two BBC non-pop channels: one featuring the western canon and the other for world music combined with the avant garde. I think you’ll find two distinct listenerships for whom to cater. One will see music as a way of relaxing and enjoyment. The other will see it as an intellectual gymnasium. The former can listen to WesternCanonRadio and the latter can listen to Muzikqxz. Guess which one will get more listeners.

Commercialism

There is a case for impartiality in news which is why NewsRadio might not carry advertising. However, music and drama needn’t be seen to be lofty so they can carry advertising which would pay for NewsRadio without the need for a subsidy from the TV-licence.

Getting real

Controllers and presenters need to exercise humility and realism. With wide bandwidth people simply won’t tune in and listen to the same station regardless of what comes on it. The news is more important than the newsreaders and interviewers, who spend a lot of time editorialising and interrupting. The presenters must step back and let the material speak or sing for itself.

You have mail

A piece on handling lots of email alludes to the quaint notions that:

• email somehow isn’t part of work (yet for many of us it is our main medium)
• if you only look at your email twice a day you’ll somehow get less of it and need less time to deal with it.

Meanwhile, the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery treats people for whom so-called social networking has become an obsession.

The curse of Mordac

The Dilbert website has relaunched and, from a review, looks great. You can even write your own text in the speech-balloons. However, I can’t see most of the content when I go to it with Firefox 2.0.0.14.

• rent-a-dog

A man who used to have fried breakfasts and eight lagers a night switched to baked beans and lost 10 stone (140 pounds, 64 kilograms). [Sky] I thought the beans themselves were OK but that the sauce was sugary and, therefore, fattening. I read something a while ago that said that an egg a day was OK, so I started having an egg almost every day, but now they say it’ll kill you.

Service level

This time the discussion of public broadcasting centres on ITV. I must admit that I never saw ITV as doing public service broadcasting. It only does news because of charter-guarantees. I suppose there are ITV documentaries and serious drama, but that prompts me to wonder what public service broadcasting actually is. (This isn’t an idle discussion because it involves money that’s extracted from the public by force.) In the early days, there may have been times when announcements conveyed to the public were of practical use; there was also wartime when broadcasting was a government-mouthpiece. However, these days, is even news a public service, and is it a public service to send someone around the world for six months to film hippos mating? Is screening an opera any more of a public service than transmitting a soap-opera? The Archers used to contain information for farmers. How’s about this? Privatise all TV and radio except for channels called The Government Channel on which all the worthy stuff about fire-prevention and completing your income-tax return can go.

Digital books

Random House publishers today launch a so-called tool for reading digital books. The source is short on detail, using words like “widget”. It may just be a PR device for saying that the company publishes electronic books. It would be absurd for companies each to be setting up their own technological platform for online (or offline) reading. Amazon’s Kindle isn’t in the UK yet and it’s out of stock in the US just now.

• You may have thought that your computer’s cluttered desktop was a mess, but it’s actually art.

Dr Randall Pausch, a virtual reality (VR) expert who has pancreatic cancer, has given a talk which makes one think about death and life-goals. He wanted to be a spaceman, an American football-star and a designer of Disneyland rides. He didn’t do it all, but his enthusiasm is remarkable and he has made progress in life by asking for what he’s wanted (and working hard for it). Everyone, he says, should become an academic so that (as far as I can tell) one can be a consultant. Presentations of his students’ VR coursework attracted interest from all university-departments. He recommends that one maintains a child-like enthusiasm and sense of fun. Dr Pausch says that brick walls (life’s obstacles) “are there to separate us from the people who don’t really want to achieve their childhood dreams”. This is an interesting take on life-goals, which are usually couched in terms of terribly grown-up things you decide to do once you’re an adult. Dare one confess one’s childhood-dreams online?

Google reader

Google reader fans with Firefox may wish to know this: “All platforms with Firefox: Just posted a quick fix to the Better GReader Firefox extension which restores the in-reader Preview feature again. You can now load the source web page on any RSS post right inside Google Reader by hitting the small Preview button at the bottom of the post with this user script enabled (again.)” It comes from here and, while obviously not in English, may be comprehensible to some.

Licence premises

The broadcasting-regulator is reviewing public-service broadcasting. Guardian readers don’t want the BBC’s licence-fee shared with other broadcasters. The EU says the UK licence is a tax so, as a recent purchaser of one, I can get my oar in. Advertisements won’t spoil soap-operas, light entertainment, music or sports-programmes, so, if the BBC must produce such output, let them use ads to finance the serious output and forgo the licence.

Wikipedia

The Guardian has a piece on Wikipedia. James Wales, founder, is described as an inclusionist “who believes that if people want an article about every Pokémon character, then hey, let it happen.” I confess to being irritated by portentous articles about rock-albums which describe their subjects as though they were great art. Also painful are pages about computer-games which are carefully documented as though they were reality.

Space

Remarkable pic of the Stickney crater on Phobos. Story.