News nudge

More to come from the BBC Trust on Monday or Tuesday - their review of Radio Five Live's service licence. TalkSPORT will be standing by with bated breath, having lead a campaign arguing that the station has moved from "75%  news" to something under 50%, padding the schedules with celebrity and entertainment chat. What, of course, TalkSPORT want is that 5Live does more dull stuff, sending more weekday listeners to its own never-ending discussions of sporting factoids and tittle-tattle.

I'm guessing that the Trust will give Adrian Van Klaveren a nudge away from panels of stand-up comedians, certainly as ingredients in daily news programmes. I'm inferring this from the Trust's interim report on Delivering Quality First, which pretty much ordered AVK to re-instate 5Live Investigates, thus

We do not agree with the Executive’s proposal to decommission dedicated weekly current affairs on 5 live.

The Executive proposed to decommission its weekly one hour current affairs programme on 5 live, replacing its slot in the schedule with an extended football phone in, and instead running some current affairs output within the existing parts of 5 live’s schedule. We have assessed this proposal in the context of our service review of 5 live, which we will publish later this month. January 2012 13 We see current affairs as an important part of the journalistic offer of 5 live and something that contributes to BBC radio’s overall distinctiveness. The proposal would leave the station, which is primarily a news service and contributes to the BBC’s editorial aspirations for its journalistic output, without a dedicated current affairs/investigative slot. In light of this, and the relatively small financial saving the proposal would make, we have asked the Executive to retain dedicated current affairs output and re-think plans in this area.

The interesting element of this change is that the Trust offers no evidence of deep-seated public concern about the proposed cancellation.  I wonder if there might have been some lobbying.....