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Archive: stephen-nolan

The future of 5 Live

6 March 2008 19:24

Categories: Current affairs, Media, Politics, Radio

Radio 5 Live has a new controller, Adrian van Klaveren. This is of interest to me because pretty much whenever I listen to the radio it is Radio 5 Live.

No doubt he will want to make his presence felt and will be making changes soon enough. So it’s a good opportunity to have a look at where 5 Live has gone wrong and where it remains as good as ever. Scott’s post on the same topic last week is also worth a look.

I discovered Radio 5 Live in early 2001 when I began to outgrow the local music stations. The brash presenters and samey music began to grate to the extreme, and there was nothing for me to listen to. Scanning around the radio looking for something to listen to overnight, I discovered the amazing Up All Night and stuck with 5 Live permanently.

Before I start blasting right in, I should point out one thing that is so important that I will say it in bold red letters. Don’t touch Up All Night!

I can’t understand why the best programme on radio is shoved away at the arse end of the day. The programme is a fine mixture of laid-back but intelligent analysis of the day’s events and a number of excellent regular features.

Pods and Blogs, Dr Karl’s science phone-in, the etymology phone-in, Cash Peters (worth it just for all the awesome banter) and more are all practically must-listen material. Even stuff I am not usually interested in — world football, films, even Bollywood news — is perfectly enjoyable on Up All Night.

The advantage of Up All Night is that it was there on the first night of 5 Live and has been on for the best part of a decade and a half. Over the years, it has gathered up great features like a glittery tumble weed, experimenting now and again with new ideas and ways of approaching the slot. For instance, I remember the days when the hugely successful, 90 minute long world football phone-in was just a small five or ten minute slot about Brazilian football. It has evolved beautifully.

It’s difficult to imagine any of the other programmes on 5 Live, apart from perhaps Simon Mayo, managing this. I can understand why you can’t have a 90 minute long slot about Brazilian football in the middle of the day. The fact that news is happening all the time means that the daytime shows have to be more flexible. But that isn’t an excuse for them to be utter shit.

When I began listening to 5 Live I was really happy at first. I couldn’t stand Nicky Campbell, but given that I was still at school back in those days he was really easy to avoid. When he moved to breakfast I had to start looking yet again for a new station to listen to, at least between 6am and 9am.

I remember his first show on the breakfast slot. Ego-boy Campbell thought the whole show was his and kept on talking over his co-host. The frosty relationship between Nicky Campbell, Victoria Derbyshire and Fi Glover made for really embarrassing broadcasting and unbearable listening.

I have avoided the breakfast slot like the plague ever since. Inexplicably, the awful Nicky Campbell is still in the breakfast slot, still making a total arse of himself.

The rot began to spread over to the other slots. Once the excellent Fi Glover fled the station, allegedly unable to take Campbell’s bravado any longer, the morning phone-in slot went to Victoria Derbyshire. Derby-shite more like!

The decision was seemingly at attempt for the station to shed its “Radio Bloke” reputation. The fact that every single one of her stand-ins has done a much better job than Derbyshire ever could says it all. John Pienaar, Phil Williams and especially Matthew Bannister were a joy to listen to in the morning. But Victoria Derbyshire is just awful.

She so often sounds completely out of her depth. It is particularly cringe-worthy when she has to deal with a sensitive topic. It sounds like she read in a book somewhere that staying silent a lot is a good way to deal with a sensitive situation. But obviously you can’t just stay quiet on the radio. You have to say something as well. And she says the most banal things. “…It must be awful…,” she says trying to fake a quiver in her voice. No shit Sherlock.

A recent interview with Kenny Richey was one of the worst examples. Lots of silences and lots of “it must have been so difficult” interspersed with strange probing questions about the crimes of his fellow inmates, as if that had anything to do with it.

The very premise of the show doesn’t help. It is the stereotypical “Speak Your Brains” phone-in for knuckle-heads. It’s not much different to this video. There is a poll out today saying that no-one speaks for thick white working-class people.

The people who answered that poll can’t have listened to Victoria Derbyshire. And the irony of unemployed people complaining about immigrants getting so many benefits. At that time of the morning, you can safely hazard a guess that many of the callers are on the dole, and are also thick as pigshit. If this is what a BBC phone-in is like, I shudder to imagine what a station like TalkSport or LBC would be saying.

Thankfully, the rest of the day on 5 Live is okay. Simon Mayo is really good. I was never so keen in the past, but given that so many of 5 Live’s other great presenters have jumped ship he is like a shining beacon. Drive has changed little and remains as good and bad as it always has been. If anything, it has improved since Anita Anand became one of the presenters.

Sport on 5 is not my thing, but it will be there until 5 Live shuts up shop, so there’s no point complaining about it. I don’t mind Richard Bacon as much as some people, but when you look at the roll call of the slot’s previous few presenters — Anita Anand, Matthew Bannister, Fi Glover — you can’t help but think we have gone down a rung.

Weekends are just one long disaster zone, with sirens wailing and smoke pouring out of the windows. Is Homer Simpson at the controls? I don’t mind the sport. That’s part of 5 Live so you have to live with it. Besides, they do Formula 1 as well so I can’t complain.

But what about all of the programmes around it? Saturday morning was one slot I was always iffy about. Even when the quite excellent Adrian Chiles was presenting that slot, the programme was inexplicably dull. It seemed to be aimed at boring sport fans who fancied themselves as amateur Stattos.

It hasn’t got much better under the control of Eamonn Holmes. Luckily Adam and Joe are on 6 Music on Saturday mornings these days, otherwise I would still be sleeping through until 1pm avoiding all of the dross.

And just what on earth has happened to Sunday mornings over the past few months? I hope there is a good reason for Julian Worricker’s disappearance, because his replacement Gabby Logan is terrible. Logan is yet another one of those stars that the BBC has poached from another channel at great expense without even knowing what to do with her (see also Johnny Vaughan, Graham Norton, Richard Blackwood). Is she qualified to broadcast about subjects other than sport? It doesn’t sound like it.

Then in the evening there is smooth, calm Stephen Nolan. That was sarcasm there. This loud mouth just approaches every topic from the most controversial and inflammatory angle. His treatment of sensitive subjects has all the tact and subtlety of a bulldozer knocking over a child’s sandcastle. When you factor in the fact that Stephen Nolan is from Northern Ireland, I should think it is a miracle that this audio arsonist is still alive.

To be honest, the only thing that keeps me listening to 5 Live so much is Up All Night — and the fact that all the other radio stations are even worse.

30 comments

Nobody has confidence in the FIA

22 October 2007 01:25

Categories: Entertainment, Formula 1, Max Must Go, Radio

A full race review will come later. But I have to talk about the stewards’ investigation because it is so pressing.

I was hoping — as was everyone else who loves sport — that the World Championship would be decided on the track. I was hoping that there would be no irregularities found after the race. After the year Formula 1 has had, to have the World Champion decided in a private room between three men was the last thing we needed.

Unfortunately, the nature of the sport means that it is not always that way. Sometimes the scrutineers find something on the cars that causes a result to be changed after the fans have left the circuit. It happens a few times a year. This is a regrettable reality of Formula 1, but it is the reality. It was just unfortunate that it had to happen on this of all days.

Once it was announced that the Williams and BMW cars were being investigated for fuel irregularities, it was clear to me that the FIA were stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they disqualified the four drivers, they would be accused of handing the Championship to Hamilton. If they didn’t (as they haven’t), then they would have been accused of stealing the Championship from Hamilton.

Surprise, surprise, now that the decision — that the drivers will not be disqualified — has been confirmed, sure enough I can hear Stephen Nolan on BBC Radio 5 Live doing his nut about it (luckily David Croft is rather more balanced). There is no doubt in my mind that the reaction from some other people would have been equally angry had the decision gone the other way.

Earlier on this evening I was listening to the 606 phone-in, and everyone seemed to have a different conspiracy theory about the race. Depending on who you listen to, the FIA are pro-Ferrari, pro-Hamilton, anti-Hamilton, anti-McLaren. McLaren are pro-Alonso, anti-Alonso, anti-Hamilton, pro-Hamilton.

It is a sign of the bad management at the FIA that this could happen. Here we were in a situation where the stewards’ decision, whichever way it went, would have been criticised. And whenever anything slightly abnormal happens there is somebody out there ready with a conspiracy theory about it.

Murray Walker always used to say, “Anything can happen in Formula 1 — and it usually does.” Today it would be better to say, “Anything can happen in Formula 1 — and when it does, point the finger at the FIA.”

This has come about because Max Mosley has politicised the sport to a poisonous degree. The FIA has created far too many ridiculous rules, making the sport more convoluted than it should be. And Max Mosley does business on the basis of personal grudges rather than what is good for the sport.

It is sad — but understandable — that people can not have confidence in the decisions made by the FIA. It is yet another sign for me that the sooner Max Mosley is removed from his post as President of the FIA the better.

20 comments

User generated content doesn’t belong on the mainstream media

19 February 2007 15:06

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

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about “citizen journalism” and its relationship with the mainstream media. “User generated content” is very trendy at the moment. I had expected that to happen, but it hasn’t turned out quite the way I expected it.

Some people seem dead set on framing the whole issue as some kind of colossal battle between the mainstream media and citizen journalism. But bloggers often depend on the mainstream media for its stories — with a few notable exceptions of course. And by the same token, the mainstream media depends on citizens more and more to send in images of big news events such as the London bombings.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately it has become a sickeningly trendy thing for news outlets to do now. Now every time a turkey sneezes it’s all, “Send us your pictures to news@sky.com”, or even worse, “Have your say by recording yourself on your 3G phone.” I mean really. UGC has become a gimmick used by news channels to make them look all hip and cool.

Channel Five News seems particularly keen on the idea of citizen journalism. But they are so eager to push it forward that they end up completely missing the point. For one thing, one report I saw was an irredeemably dull item about cycle lanes. Not cycle lanes in general. Cycle lanes in one gentleman’s town.

Clearly, this man was quite concerned about cycle lanes (I can’t remember why, it was so boring). But what had obviously happened was that he emailed some special “Speak your brains” email address and some producer picked it up and said, “Great! That’s a really boring story, just like what them citizen journalists are into. Let’s do it!” And then they sent along a professional production crew and got this chap to talk about cycle lanes.

But that isn’t citizen journalism at all. The production crew probably made the decision that he would cheesily present the whole item in his cycling gear, riding down the cycle lanes and then “happening to bump into a camera” and mouth off about cycle lanes in a monotone fashion.

All they needed was a pointless two-way and that would have been it — citizen journalism becomes everything that’s bad about the mainstream media. Essentially it was a normal news report in every way, except that it was presented by somebody with little or no television experience. This is more like Points of View than blogging. In the blogosphere, this “story” about cycle lanes would never have attracted any attention whatsoever. Channel Five decided to put it on its prime time news programme.

The point for me about blogging is that normal-ish people have a big conversation. Sometimes they write about their own experiences and create their own stories about the world around them. People eventually find like-minded people and share their experiences, debate and have a conversation. Channel Five just took some guy with a hobby horse and plonked him in front of a camera.

Radio Five Live recently had some boring thing called “Your Five Live” or something. I think it lasted an entire week. And it was terrible. All week they were trailing a special debate to be. chaired by that voice of reason Stephen Nolan, about “the issue you told us concerned you the most”. Yes, you guessed it — immigration. That issue that seems to attract the regular Five Live phone-in callers but doesn’t seem to fuss people in the blogosphere that much.

I didn’t listen to the debate. I would probably have found it too depressing. It would have been a carnival of the knuckle-draggers. Maybe I am being a snob. Surely these are normal people who have every right to voice their opinion. Well, yes. But any old fool can rant down a microphone.

As I said, the point about blogging is that you have a proper discussion and a debate. Sometimes Five Live manages this, but more often it doesn’t. You just get somebody inflicting us with his verbal diarrhoea before being cut off by the presenter because it’s time for the news.

And just have a look at BBC News 24 or Sky News. Large chunks of the day are often dedicated to “Have your say” “debates”. What this actually means is numbskulls sending in emails and some editor somewhere picking the juiciest ones which a presenter then reads one line of. What you get is half a dozen emailers all of which have their own personal chips on their shoulder — but no conversation, no debate, no intelligence.

A new programme on Channel 4 caught my eye this weekend. It’s called Homemade, and it actually bills itself as YouTube for the television. People generate their own content and submit it to Channel 4. But once again this completely misses the point. The point about YouTube is that you decide for yourself what you want to watch.

Homemade is still put together by a bunch of television professionals who have chosen what they would like us to watch. The viewer gets no choice in the matter here. And we could especially do without the annoying Dave Berry presenting links between all of the clips.

All we have now is a rag-bag of items filmed on poor-quality cameras. Presumably the producers of Homemade thought the randomness and low quality images was what made YouTube popular. Well, not so. Most people just use YouTube to watch actual television programmes anyway.

The mainstream media needs to realise what user generated content can actually be useful for. At the moment, it is just a trendy gimmick — and its uses get more annoying by the week. People will always want television stations to create quality, big-budget programmes. If people wanted something home made they would watch YouTube, not Channel 4.

As for the news programmes, they need to be more aware that their job is to report the big news stories with expert analysis. If people wanted to know what people on the street thought, they would just read a blog. As things stand, user generated content on news programmes are toe-curlingly embarassing and always encourage me to switch off.

That is not to say that citizens can’t have an input in the news. Images of Concorde on fire and the inside of the bombed train in London genuinely added to the story, and professionals were not in a position to film these. That is the sort of cooperation between “citizens” and the “mainstream media” that can work brilliantly. The rest is just awful, gimmicky rubbish.

This post by Kevin Anderson is very interesting. The key quote:

The mainstream media believes that “user-generated content” has to come through their sites, their walled gardens of tightly controlled participation, so they miss the vastly larger opportunity that exists on the internet as a whole.

11 comments

Radio limbo pt. 1

28 March 2006 20:54

Categories: Entertainment, General

I’ve had a bit of an up and down relationship with the radio. I’m the sort of person who wants to be able to tune into a radio station and be able to listen to it whenever my whim takes me, at any time of the day. But whenever I think I’ve found what I’m looking for, it doesn’t take long for me to become disillusioned.

I officially gave up on music radio when Beat 106 went to shit about five years ago. I spent some time in radio limbo looking for the least worst radio programmes. Overnight was particularly bad. I remember even listening to Virgin Radio overnight at one point — a true low point.

But then I discovered Up All Night on Radio Five Live. Up All Night is the best radio programme in the world. There are a number of must-hear (if you can stay up late enough) regular slots on this programme including one about blogs and podcasts. I don’t know why the rest of Radio Five Live isn’t like that — probably because people who are awake during the day are stupid.

So I decided to stick with Radio Five Live all day round. It was okay at first, but the little chops and changes that have happened to the station over the past five years since I started listening to it have not always met with my approval. It began when Nicky Campbell was moved to the Breakfast programme. If you want to wake up pleasently, don’t listen to Five Live. It’s bad enough that Nicky Campbell is on the radio at all, never mind when you’re trying to eat your breakfast.

Then when Fi Glover left the mid-morning phone-in they chose Victoria Derbyshire to replace her. This was probably part of their attempt to shed the ‘Radio Bloke’ image, although she is quite a blokey woman so I don’t think they thought it through. Anyway, phone-ins are bad enough, but Victoria Derbyshire is just terrible. Sometimes she doesn’t even attempt to sound interested. She makes it obvious that she’s just going through the motions. Like a robot sometimes. Whenever Julian Worricker or Matthew Bannister sit in the programme improves enormously. When Derbyshire is at the helm, though, it becomes practically impossible to listen to.

So in general, I avoid Five Live in the mornings. But weekends are off the scale. I know Richard Bacon got a lot of criticism when he presented the weekend programme, but I’ve got a fair bit of respect for the guy and I thought he did a pretty good job on it. When Bacon left he was replaced by Stephen Nolan, who I simply cannot bear. All he does is shout all the time, and he is often quite rude to the callers. Every conversation, no matter how trivial, is turned into an all-out war due to his style. It’s awful.

The Saturday morning programme on Five Live (currently presented by Eamonn Holmes) is very boring unless you are very interested in “quirky” “sport” “stories” along the lines of some old bore who cycled backwards across Europe whilst juggling eggs. Can’t stand it.

Brian Hayes on Friday nights used to send me to sleep (possibly a good idea at that time of night anyway), but I became used to his programme. Now I have read on Iain Dale’s blog that Hayes is being replaced by Stephen Nolan because of some pissy regional quota.

A huge amount of Five Live’s schedule is a complete no-go area for me now. So what can I tune into now? That’s another post for another time. Ha!

9 comments