This blog has now closed. Please visit my new blog, Stepreo.

Archive: breakfast

Has the BBC failed digital radio?

15 March 2011 22:42

Categories: *, Current affairs, Media, Radio

BBC Asian Network logo

The news that the BBC is considering reversing its decision to close down the Asian Network marks the corporation’s second major U-turn on a digital radio service closure. The first was the more high-profile threat to close 6 Music.

The dithering indecisiveness is enough. But what really annoys me about these decisions is the underlying reason behind them — ratings — and the story it tells.

Lacklustre awareness

Both 6 Music and the Asian Network had relatively poor ratings before the BBC announced that the services would close. In that sense, it was easy to see why the savings-seeking BBC was lining them up for the chop.

Then something funny happened. Ratings shot through the roof. After its closure was announced, the number of 6 Music listeners doubled from 600,000 a week to 1.2 million a week. It wasn’t just a flash in the pan either. Since 6 Music was saved from the axe, ratings have remained over the 1 million mark.

The problem is that beforehand, awareness of BBC 6 Music was extremely low. Only 20 per cent of UK adults had even heard of the station. No wonder ratings are so poor if four fifths of the potential audience doesn’t even know of its existence!

Similarly, ratings for the Asian Network have increased by a third since its closure was announced. The increase in ratings has been given as the reason for the BBC’s U-turn.

Publicity vacuum hurts BBC digital radio

The problem is that the closure threat was the most publicity 6 Music and the Asian Network had ever had. The BBC isn’t usually shy of promoting its own services, but it has completely failed to sell its digital radio stations to the public at large. In fact, it has completely failed to sell digital radio full stop.

Just look at the digital radio listenership figures — figure 3.34 in this Ofcom report (PDF) (via James Cridland).

Bar chart of digital radio listening figures

A measley 18 per cent of Radio 1 listeners listen over a digital format. The highest figure among BBC radio stations (excluding those available on digital platforms only) is 5 Live — 36 per cent. These listeners have a significant incentive to move to digital though, as otherwise 5 Live is only available on poor quality medium wave frequencies.

Meanwhile, over half of listeners to Absolute Radio listen over a digital platform. Absolute’s success in pursuing digital platforms is well-documented.

Skewed priorities

Considering that the BBC is supposed to be investing in digital radio, it is not doing a very good job of promoting it. Despite having great content on its digital services, the BBC is shy of actually promoting them.

In this department, it is being considerably outperformed by Absolute Radio, a commercial outlet that doesn’t have a chunk of license fee money set aside for pushing digital. The BBC seems to have lost all of its enthusiasim for digital, even when it is producing excellent digital services.

As James Cridland pointed out, fans following the Ashes earlier this year will not have missed a ball were they listening on 5 Live Sports Extra, as I did. Yet all over the news the following day was the fact that BBC radio listeners were deprived of the victorious moment because the shipping forecast was being broadcast on Radio 4 longwave at the time.

This provided plenty of good coverage in the shape of, “ha, that crazy old shipping forecast, eh?!” All very good. But why wasn’t the point driven home that an excellent digital service was broadcasting the cricket completely uninterrupted?

I am sure there are lots of avid cricket fans out there that rely on their longwave signal. But I have checked, and I don’t even own any equipment that can pick up longwave. I suspect if I were to go to the shops to buy a radio, I would have to make a special effort to find one that could receive longwave. Meanwhile, I could pick up a DAB radio for about £30 with no trouble whatsoever.

Where are the promos?

Why did the Radio 2 breakfast slot get a big push when Chris Evans started presenting it? The Radio 2 breakfast show is the most popular radio programme in the country, with around 10 million listeners. If there is one radio show that does not need promoting, it is this — whether it has a new presenter or not.

With radio, the BBC seems to have got its marketing priorities all wrong. Where are the big promos for stations like 6 Music, Radio 7 or the Asian Network? Why isn’t it pushing 5 Live Sports Extra harder at avid sports fans?

With radio, the BBC seems to have got its marketing priorities all wrong. Where are the big promos for stations like 6 Music, Radio 7 or the Asian Network?

4 comments

Weetabix idents

31 July 2007 16:39

Categories: Entertainment, Food and drink, General, Personal, Television

Perhaps my geekiest guilty pleasure is an interest in television idents. Many a lonely Friday evening has been spent perusing such websites as TV Ark and The TV Room. Not because I’m a sad loner, you understand, but because it’s the really cool thing to do these days.

I also love cereals. The most functional cereal of them all is Weetabix. It’s the only way to go if you have a particularly challenging day ahead. There is nothing in the world that three Weetabix can’t solve. Except perhaps indigestion.

So an advertising campaign that combines the might of Weetabix with the quaint kitsch of classic television idents cannot be anything but awesome. I don’t watch much television these days, so I guess there is the chance that everyone in the world apart from me already knew about it and this post is a bit like going, “ALL BECAUSE THE LADY LOVES MILK TRAY! LOL!”

The only way I learned about the Weetabix advertising campaign was from a post at Idents.tv. I had seen one of the adverts before out of the corner of my eye, probably when I was fast forwarding through the adverts during a grand prix. It didn’t occur to me that it was supposed to mimic idents, with their trippy ambient music and strange abstract visuals.

The TV theme is continued at the Weetabix.tv website, where all of the ident-adverts are available to view. A lot of them have clearly been inspired by classic BBC Two idents from the 1990s.

We have all seen idents thousands of times. Yet, they are forgotten by many and treated as though they are merely wallpaper at best and an annoyance at worst. Yet, idents are the most familiar sight on television; a reminder that all is right in the world. They are beautiful pieces of design that are almost always better than the programme that follows them. So it’s great to see idents being recognised by Weetabix in their advertising campaign.

5 comments

How much can they not get it?

11 March 2007 21:47

Categories: Blogging, Current affairs, Entertainment, Radio, Technology

As usual for a Sunday, I woke up this morning listening to Julian Worricker’s programme on Radio Five Live. Today, in place of the Five Live Report, was a one-off programme about “Blogging in the UK”.

“Oh, that’ll be interesting,” I thought, so I stayed in bed and waited for it to come on. I was to discover that the programme wasn’t about blogging at all.

Blogging in the UK was originally part of ‘Your Five Live’, which I mentioned in my post about user generated content. Specifically, it was a feature of Five Live’s Breakfast programme.

The idea was to take a day during ‘Your Five Live’ week — the 22nd of January — and encourage as many first time bloggers to write about their day. The results are predictably awful, reinforcing the stereotypes about how bloggers are just people who write about what they had for breakfast.

And it shows just how little whoever came up with the idea actually knows about what blogging is about. For a start, the entries were posted by users in the comments of the Breakfast programme’s blog. This isn’t blogging. This is just a list of people’s mundane day to day activities.

Of course, there are plenty of bloggers out there who write about their day to day life (to good effect or otherwise). The fact that blogging can provide people with such an easy way to express themselves and write down their thoughts is one of blogging’s greatest strengths. But this Five Live stunt is not blogging, and it shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Blogging is a commitment. You put yourself out there and write posts on something resembling a regular basis and try to find like-minded people to share your experiences with. The people who appeared on the radio this morning were not bloggers doing it for the love of blogging. I get the impression that most of them were just looking for the chance to say how much they love their baby boy on the radio.

In fairness, there were a few interesting soliloquies in this half-hour extravaganza of first-time non-blogging. For instance, I was interested in the post describing a woman’s attempts to cope with her partner’s constant heavy drinking. That was a real window into a world I had never really experienced before.

Also, there did seem to be a few people who had a way with words. But for every one of these interesting posts there were at least three banal entries by people about dropping off their kids at school and breastfeeding the baby — and these were the ones that were selected to appear on the radio!

Furthermore, it completely lacks the interaction of blogging. Blogs are discovered, as I said, by like-minded people. Talented bloggers who put in the effort find themselves with a big audience, and many bloggers receive the odd comment and communities are built. The people who participated in this experiment got none of that. They were hand-picked by an editor to appear on the radio for a one-off.

This is not a celebration of British blogging, and I seriously doubt if anybody who wasn’t interested in blogging before would have been swayed by this morning’s lamentable programme.

I wouldn’t have minded this at all if the programme wasn’t billed as being about “Blogging in the UK”. If they had called it “Bores ranting away about mundane subjects” it would have been a more accurate description. But then Five Live’s Breakfast programme wouldn’t have been able to hop onto the blogging bandwagon.

To add insult to injury, because it was done by Five Live Breakfast, this project involved Nicky Campbell. I could have just deleted this entire post and replaced it with the words “Nicky Campbell” and it would have been just as valid. I’ve never listened to Radio Five Live that early in the morning ever since he started presenting the Breakfast programme. I can hardly think of a less pleasant way to spend the morning.

Radio Five Live can and does understand blogging. In fact, I seem to remember Julian Worricker’s programme profiled a few prominent bloggers a year or two ago. But best of all is the weekly Pods and Blogs segment on the wonderful Up All Night programme. Pods and Blogs is made by people who really get what it’s all about, and their segment serves as a reminder of just how much wonderful stuff is going on in the blogosphere (putting the musings of someone like me somewhat into perspective).

As an aside, am I the only person who gets a bit annoyed whenever somebody (almost always a non-blogger) calls a post a “blog”? (See how many people talk about “writing their first blog” in the Breakfast comments.) The blog is the whole thing, surely? People must think it is like “Captain’s Log” or something. (“Captain’s Log, Date 11/03/2007. Today I had four Weetabix for breakfast.”)

But back in the old days when people had to do truly awful things like write stuff down with a pen and paper, I seriously don’t think that anybody in their right mind said, “I am just writing a log now,” or, “It took me fifteen minutes to write that diary!” Diary entries have their modern equivalents: blog posts.

5 comments

The most important meal of the day. Well that’s dinner, isn’t it?

3 November 2006 01:21

Categories: Commuting, Entertainment, Food and drink, General, Personal, Radio, University

I am a huge fan of the radio programme Up All Night. On Wednesday nights / Thursday mornings — if I am awake — I like to listen to Dr Karl’s science phone in. The man is smart and enthusiastic. He’s one of those people that can explain everything in layman’s terms.

But one day he said something that I could never agree with. It might be sound advice, but I cannot take it. Something like, say, “try to take five portions of fruit and veg a day” is fine enough advice for me. But what Dr Karl said on this occasion defies all common sense. He said: “Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dine like a pauper.” Never will I do this!

Mike Flynn says, Down with breakfast. I agree. I know that breakfast is meant to be the most important meal of the day, because it breaks your fast and all that. But if I must eat breakfast, at least allow me to have a sufficiently small breakfast. Preferably one that won’t turn my backside into a drainpipe.

It’s true. I can’t just get up and eat breakfast then go about my business. I don’t think I have a very strong stomach. Eating breakfast early in the morning makes me a bit ill you see. If I have a free morning then I will almost always leave about half an hour or an hour before eating. This is fine.

But if I have something to do early in the morning I obviously just have to eat my breakfast pretty much as soon as I get up. But I simply don’t have the appetite if I have just got up. It takes at least half an hour for me to feel like wanting to eat something.

Now you smartarse responsible adults reading this will just be thinking, “why don’t you just get up half an hour earlier then?” Don’t be so preposterous. I need every last wink of sleep I can get, particularly if I’m going to stay up all night listening to worthy science phone-ins.

Besides, I once heard on the Thursday night / Friday morning sleep phone in that it is natural for people my age not to get up until about midday. One time, when we were being forced to play some rubbish ball game in the freezing cold at 10am, my PE teacher was obviously concerned at our breathless gasping. She did a straw poll, asking how many of us had eaten breakfast. Less than half had eaten breakfast. Do you know why? Because we need our sleep damnit!

The idea that I need my breakfast in order to function during the day goes against all of my real life experiences. Sure, if I don’t eat my breakfast I might get a rumble in my tummy by about 11 o’clock, but I get that even if I’ve had breakfast. I must have gone to school dozens of times without ever eating a bean until lunch, and look at me — I’m still alive.

I don’t need my breakfast. I need to sleep in the mornings! I don’t want to be forcing fibre down my gullet only for it to be ejected within the space of a train journey (20 pence piece at the ready for entry to the loos at Waverley Station).

This morning I woke up on my friend’s sofa in Dundee having spent the night over. There was no breakfast for me to have. I thought, well I’d better have breakfast because it’s the most important meal of the day apparently and I have to breakfast like a king. So I popped into the Spar. I couldn’t find anything that didn’t have to be heated in the microwave.

Knowing that having such an early breakfast would only make me ill anyway, I just hopped on the train home. My first food came an hour and a half after I woke up. Sure, I was starving when I got home. But boy, it was a great breakfast. I appreciated it much more than I would have appreciated any soggy sandwich I might have bought from a convenience store. And there was no need for a sloppy poop toilet trip.

Sometimes I’m lucky in that I won’t need to dispose of my waste following an early breakfast. But I will still have an unsettled stomach. It’s no wonder nobody will sit next to me during lectures because at some point during that first lesson I will have to unleash a gastric gas catastrophe. It isn’t pleasant. I can’t imagine what must be going on in my innards for such foul smells to be created.

Maybe you think I’m ill or I have some sort of allergy, but I doubt it. As I said, if I leave a bit of time after waking up before eating then I have no problems whatsoever. I can wolf down as much cereal as I like during the evening with no dire(-rhoea) consequences. If I have an allergy to anything, it’s to the morning.

I certainly don’t have an aversion to traditional breakfast-time foods. Infact I have at least one bowl of cereal per day — but always at around 9pm. Additionally I had some toast this evening. Yesterday lunchtime I had a bowl of fruity porridge. I’m not averse to the odd afternoon fry-up either. Even croissants are for lunchtime as far as I’m concerned.

So, if breakfast isn’t the best meal of the day, what is? Well, unlike Mike Flynn, I don’t think it’s lunch. Sandwiches might be good, but I’ve had some awful sandwiches in my time. It’s pretty hit and miss. Also, I have to pace myself when having lunch. I’ve got to be careful not to eat too much in case I don’t have enough room for a later meal that must be eaten with the family round the table.

The best meal of the day certainly isn’t anything called “tea”. Tea is not a meal. It is a hot drink that tastes like compost if you leave the bag in for too long.

You’ve guessed it, mostly because it’s in the title of this post: The best meal is dinner. The most diverse of the meals, dinner also usually provides you with the only hot meal of the day. Possibly the only decent slab of meat of the day. A nice mountain of filling carbohydrates. And I don’t care if I’m meant to eat like a pauper at this time. This is the biggest meal of the day. Fact.

Dinner is also a gateway into the evening, a period of freedom. Breakfast is usually just leading up to a hellish train journey and a bleary-eyed morning of work. Even lunch heralds the beginning of more work. Dinner links the end of work to the start of a relaxing, restful evening.

So down with breakfast indeed. Let’s hear it for dinner, the proper most important meal of the day.

8 comments

Bloody Corn Flakes

29 August 2005 13:20

Categories: Food and drink, Humour, Personal

I really hate Corn Flakes because, no matter what you try, when you pour the milk it always seems to rebound off a corn flake crevice in spetacular fashion, causing the milk to go all over the place.

Frosties are even worse because the sugar coating seems to form a kind of protective shield which magnifies the effect, causing milk to go all over more of the place.

Gah.

3 comments