Radio 1 have announced changes to their specialist schedule. But we don’t really have a full picture of what their plans are; just a few little headline-grabbing snippets.

As far as I can tell it is a refinement of the current system which sees a different genre assigned to each day (rock music on Tuesdays, urban on Wednesdays, dance on Thursdays). Recently Radio 1 added an ‘experimental’ section to their website alongside the other three. Radio 1 have quite a liberal interpretation of the word ‘experimental’. It seems to mean anything that isn’t utter shit.

Steve Lamacq has been removed. Thank goodness for that. I can’t stand the man. He belongs on 6Music, where nobody can hear him. The removal of Lamacq Live presumably frees up Monday to be used as another genre-dedicated day. So we’ll be seeing a dedicated experimental music strand, which is good news.

There is a clue here: Mary Anne Hobbes is moving to Thursday nights with a new show dedicated to “experimental dance music”. If you ignore Mary Anne Hobbes’ awful yapping, her Breezeblock programme is one of the best on Radio 1.

Chris Coco is leaving Radio 1 in September. He currently presents The Blue Room, which is a good programme although it’s difficult to listen to because of its timeslot (5am–7am on Saturday and Sunday mornings). I preferred Rob da Bank doing that programme though. Whenever I listened to Chris Coco he always seemed to be playing his own music.

Colin Murray is going to present a daily new music show from 10pm–12am. This effectively makes Colin Murray the first permanent replacement for John Peel, although everybody involved will probably be trying to avoid that comparison.

I don’t mind Colin Murray, but I’m not sure he’s the right choice for the late-night music slot. It seems to me like they have decided to drag a ‘face’ into the slot to attract fickle listeners. Will the quality of the music remain the same with Murray at the helm?

There is a new hour-long programme called In New Music We Trust which will be concentrating on a different genre each day. It sounds like a disaster already. It has a bad name and an hour doesn’t seem long enough to me. Without knowing more about the programme I can’t say much, but it sounds like a watered-down OneMusic.

DJ Martian sums it all up here. As his post shows, these announcements leave many holes yet to be filled, so it’s difficult to know what Radio 1 will sound like in the autumn.

Update: The Complete New Radio 1 Schedule. This actually looks like a disaster now. ‘In New Music We Trust’ now looks like a way of gently killing off the station’s dinosaurs.