Gone but not forgotten

In place of:


Comes:


For those mourning Wogan, tune into Channel 4 each day a five pm for his utterly pointless game show, Wogan's Perfect Recall (spot the gag in the title).

Actually, the strange thing is, it's more of the same all round. However, on the bright side, Sarah Kennedy's show has been curtailed as Evans seems to like getting up and starting work whereas Wogan ran the shortest show in radio.

Besides, I'm sure there'll be plenty ofradio phone-ins allowing Wogan's former listeners to let off steam.

I'll let off some steam. In order to replace Evans, Radio 2 have employed Simon Mayo who for the last eight years has been broadcasting a (mostly) wonderful afternoon show on FiveLive. In order to replace Mayo comes Richard Bacon who, sadly, just reminds me of how much preparation Mayo used to do.

Whilst it's not exactly the toughest job in the world, Mayo was the hardest working man in it. He's a sad loss, especially as now, he gets less time to interrogate issues because he's back to being a drivetime host on a music station.

Evans and Mayo had very similar, very odd openings. They were both determined to talk about their choice of first record and then to "introduce the team". How very American.

Evans' tone was the same as always (which is fine) whilst Mayo has switched to a more upbeat pitch, more hurried than on his news/talk programme. Perhaps he's just aware of how much there is to fit in between the records.

The point about all of this is simple, the BBC still produces the best radio programmes in this country. Radios 2, 4, 5live, 6 music and 7 are shining lights of the medium (well those are the ones I listen to, the others could be pretty good too). Any change is potentially a weakening of the quality.

I think of the BBC as a sandcastle. It's a brilliant creation but vulnerable to attacks. And the attacks are often completely and utterly pointless. Changes to the schedule make the BBC the news story. With the Ross resignation, the BBC has been the story a little too often recently. I hope that the tide recedes quickly (see what I did there) and we can all carry on like we did before, hating commercial radio and hoping Chris Moyles gets a job in it as soon as possible.

Protecting Us From The Hooded Claw Since 1821

I really like Martin Kelner. I can't help it. His podcasts are truly terrible, a totally unprofessional mixture of bad jokes, appalling accents and woeful singing. And yet I have subscribed even though I now have to pay. From time to time I listen to his BBC Radio Leeds show, even though I live in London (although his untimely sacking has led to him charging for his podcasts...). And I make a point of reading his Screen Break column in the Guardian.

Today I have been rewarded with this excellent piece on my current bete noir ("Edouard, what's the French for bete noir?" "Martin, we don't have one."), Inside Sport.

Read. Enjoy. Complain to the BBC about the utter shite they are passing off as journalism. Or you could try posting on their "blog" (cough) and wait to see if they bother to add it to their celebratory comments.

I don't mean to be rude. Was I being rude?

Sports journalism is one of those over-confident areas, so sure of itself because it deals in big names and big fan numbers. When a new show comes along that wants to be taken seriously and is described in these terms:


Inside Sport is new, so it's not emulating anything. Our aim is to have a good balance of original journalism, features that other areas of television don't have the inclination to do, and interviews that have more depth about the individual.

then the inclination is always going to be to knock it as pretentious twaddle. The nature of this programme is to create news content for all the 24 hour providers connected with the channel (in this case www.bbc.co.uk, BBC News24 and Five Live). Here's the big scoop the BBC's new sports journalism programme Inside Sport managed last night:


Chelsea captain John Terry says he has spoken to the club about becoming their manager when he retires.

Stunning. Absolutely stunning. The blurb has pretentions way and above the content. Once again proving that simply because we have more information, it doesn't mean we have better information.

And now, with the time coming up to eight forty, it's thought for the day.

Institutional blogging must stop.
Whilst the BBC and the Guardian are two of the media institutions I hold dear (well, probably the only two really) their insistance on calling everything on their websites "a blog" to indicate it is an opinion piece is really an abuse of terminology. It's an editorial, it's a column, it seems it's whatever they want it to be. But in truth all they've become is an excuse for nitwits that while away a couple of hours at work by getting in to a slagging match at the end of said "blog".
This is not democracy guys, this is not an expression of your communicative rights. It's, oh what's the point.