Canal news

Catherine Nixey, who I've quoted before on the Mayo/Whiley mess, offers some more sharp thoughts on Radio Two in The Times.

"Whiley was fine where she was. Not thrilling, but if you wanted to spend your evenings listening to a slightly classier version of “Now That’s What I Call Indie”, she was there. And Mayo was great: relaxed, easy, likeable. Together, however, they were excruciating. A much better schedule tweak would have been to ditch the baffling Vine and bump Vanessa Feltz up from the 5am slot, or perhaps poach the superb Emma Barnett from Radio 5 Live.

"Or to find new female presenters altogether. In one interview, Bob Shennan, the BBC’s director of radio and music, implied that he’d like more women, but they hadn’t had the necessary airtime to be given the big jobs. There just aren’t, this argument runs, enough women in the pipeline — as if Radio 2 were the lower reaches of an alimentary canal only digesting the presenters that Radio 1 consumed 20 years ago. This opinion is lazy, self-exculpatory and a view not unrelated to the lower reaches of the canal itself."

Chris Evans, Steve Wright, Simon Mayo, Jo Whiley, Sara Cox, Mark Radcliffe, Zoe Ball, Tony Blackburn, Johnnnie Walker, Gary Davies and Trevor Nelson all still have a berth at Radio 2, with Radio 1 in their CVs.

Bob and Lewis have been nurturing women in odd bits of the schedule for some time - Liza Tarbuck, Cerys Matthews, Melanie Sykes, Claudia Winkleman, Anneka Rice, Ana Matronic, Fearne Cotton, and more. If Bob and Lewis are still looking for females from Radio 1 in the 90s, they might track down Jakki Brambles, Emma Freud, Mary Anne Hobbs or Lisa I'Anson,