Have you heard Radio 1 recently? Have you had the top of your head sawn off and polystyrene foam pumped into the cavity? An endless fugue of established mid-market banal pop music interspersed with horribly perky or wacky imbecilic chatter. But that’s not the point either; the point is that this moronic inferno is the staple of about 500 other radio channels across the nation, national and local. Almost everything else you hear on the radio is Radio 1 under another name, whereas 6 Music is almost the definition of public service broadcasting:a channel that encourages innovation in an area of importance both culturally and commercially, and that would not be broadcast elsewhere if the BBC didn’t do it.
So what does Thompson do? Axes 6, and keeps 1. Because, of course, 6 gets a small audience and 1 gets a large-ish audience. No argument.
Catherine Bennett in The Observer argues the rationale behind the Asian Network was wrong from the start
Jenny Abramsky's opening fanfare for Asian Network in 2002 – "One of the most important things the BBC has ever done" – tells you what it was really for. It arrived after Greg Dyke came up with "hideously white". The true lesson of Asian Network is that, where hideous whiteness is concerned, ghettos don't change anything.
The Feral Beast in The Independent is, as usual, focussed on bigger things
Mark Thompson makes all the right cost-cutting noises, but there's still cash sloshing round The Andrew Marr Show. I'm told producers desperate to lure big names to review Sunday papers have taken to dispatching the papers by taxi to their homes, rather than make the bigwigs schlep into the studio early to read them. How grand.
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