Businesslike

Talking of letting things slip through your fingers, let's look at the music quiz Popmaster, which is following Ken Bruce to Greatest Hits Radio from April 3, and is expected to air at 9.30am each weekday, spookily exactly the time Ken currently starts on Radio 2. 

Popmaster started in February 1998; John Birt was Director-General, and, through the primary school economics of Producer Choice, the BBC (physical) Record Library was on the wane. It was often 'cheaper' for an occasional user of music to pop down to HMV in Oxford Street and buy a CD.  There was too much pressure on the record library assistants to help with research, and the card index was become increasingly 'gappy'. 

Phil Swern had set himself the challenge of owning every UK Top 40 single from the fifties onwards, and bunged up his parents' house with 20,000 discs at the age of 19. At 50, he was an established radio producer and writing the questions for Popmaster, having run Pick of The Pops for Radio 1 in the 80s and 90s. 

It was Radio 2 producer Colin Martin who put Ken Bruce and Phil Swern together in the development of Popmaster. Colin started his broadcasting career in the tv props department, and his music career as a drummer in the 1960s, playing in The Ingoes (he left when they morphed into The Blossom Toes) and The Artwoods, alongside keyboard player Jon Lord, of Deep Purple fame. His first Radio 2 credit came producing Brian Matthew in 1981. 

By July 1998, Ken, Colin and Phil had decided it was a winner, and applied to copyright the title. It was formally granted in 2000. 

Around 2010, the BBC sought an outside company to provide it with digital popular music. Phil Swern, by then, had been working with a digital music company founded by Andy Hill. “We got together and started I Like Music. For several years, we quietly started digitising everything, starting with ABBA and finishing with ZZ Top and not telling anyone. And when we digitised the whole of the Top 40, it was too late for any other company to offer it. So when the BBC wanted a digital library, they put it out to tender .... and quite a number of companies bid for it and we were shortlisted. Then the BBC gave a list out asking for 30 to 40 titles – some were hits, some were quite well known but not hits and the rest were quite obscure. We supplied all but four and I don’t think the nearest competitor came close. We won the contract, so now it’s our library that they use."

Fast forward to September 2017, and Hill and Swern set up a company called Popmaster Ltd; Andy leaves in 2018, after the arrival of Vanessa Brady as a director, followed later the same year by Ken Bruce.  

Colin Martin left Radio 2 in 2006, having run the station's music policy since 2000.