[cma-l] ALL FM on today's Guardian (19 May)

[Salvatore Scifo]

Hi there,
Martin Kelner's on today's Guardian on ALL FM

'...at a time, when fundraising must be near to impossible, financing this
community stuff is possibly a better use of a teensy-weensy bit of the
licence fee than coffee and biscuits and Meatloaf for Sue.'

Further details below....

Best,

Salvo
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Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/19/radio.bbc1


Heard the same song three times today? Blame the craze for 'testing' tunes

    * Martin Kelner
    * The Guardian
    * Monday May 19 2008

About this article
This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday May 19 2008 on p7 of the
News & features section.


How many times in your life is it possible to listen to Sweet Talkin'
Woman by ELO without wishing to immerse your head in a bowl of warm
couscous, screaming, "Death, where is thy sting?"? I only ask because I
heard the song three times yesterday on three different radio stations.

Don't get me wrong, it is a perfectly decent pop song - I have played it
on the radio myself probably hundreds of times - but why the sudden
ubiquity of a 30-year-old track? Is ELO on the road again, has Jeff Lynne
died, does the tune appear on the soundtrack of the latest Judd Apatow
romp?

None of the above, as it happens. I believe it "tests well". Music
programmers are crazy about testing. The way this works is that a group of
people of a similar age and gender to the audience being targeted by the
station are played 40 seconds of a series of songs, and asked to give them
a score. Popular songs get played on the radio a lot.

The problem is that during the day most of my local radio stations are
aiming at a broadly similar audience, roughly women of a certain age, from
around 30 to a shade over 55. Those who claim to be in the know say this
is the constituency that will help you to a good score in the quarterly
Rajar figures.

The slavish adherence to this perceived wisdom was made clear to me at the
BBC local station that sacked me just over a year ago (on the same day
Madeleine McCann went missing actually, which is probably why you never
saw much about it in the newspapers) for not being "female friendly"
enough. Fair enough. I was probably still addressing BBC local radio's
previous target audience, Dave and Sue, an imaginary couple of whom we
were given detailed profiles and photographs, just so we knew exactly who
we were aiming our music and chat at.

Virtual Dave was a plumber, we were told, his wife, Sue, a school
secretary. They shopped at Asda, liked to visit stately homes, had bought
new boots for a walking holiday (I am not making any of this up), drove a
second-hand Ford Focus, liked to go to concerts "by groups like The
Pretenders" (I am still not making anything up), and Dave's dad Wilf was
waiting for an operation. I am not able to enlighten you on the fate of
virtual Wilf, but Dave died.

Both Daves actually. The chap who posed for the picture - a BBC employee
in East Anglia - sadly passed on just as the BBC's audience gurus were
killing off virtual Dave. And there was I, still doing my plumbing
material.

With Sue left on her own, our programme editor set about testing tunes on
what he called "170 Sues" in Newcastle. We were even sent pictures of the
Sues for the benefit of presenters not sure what ladies in their middle
years look like. I'd Do Anything for Love by Meat Loaf, pictured below,
seems to be Sue's current favourite, according to a letter in the BBC's
in-house journal Ariel complaining about the frequency with which it crops
up.

While the BBC does some rattling good work in the area of local news and
sport, you have to question whether this kind of malarkey is the very best
use of public money. In Manchester, for instance, there is a community
station called ALL FM - ALL stands for Ardwick, Longsight, and
Levenshulme, three of Manchester's poorer neighbourhoods - who had to go
round begging local banks, in the teeth of a credit crunch, for a couple
of hundred pounds to replace its manky, sticky old sofa for guests.

Nobody gets paid for presenting at ALL FM, and many of the programmes are
the kind of quaint niche shows BBC local radio did in its early days, like
Fire Safety Matters, presented by firemen Steve and Tony. "Push your
button at 10.30am," says the programme listing, "and test your smoke
alarm." Musically, one show promises "everything from Sarah Vaughan to
Japanese bluegrass".

I am not saying I would cancel all arrangements to listen - not to the
firemen anyway - but in an area, and at a time, when fundraising must be
near to impossible, financing this community stuff is possibly a better
use of a teensy-weensy bit of the licence fee than coffee and biscuits and
Meatloaf for Sue.

I have recently been presenting late-night shows at the weekend for Real
Radio, a Guardian Media Group station, where the playlist - ironically, in
view of the commercial pressures - is not quite as narrow as the local BBC
opposition. But here, research is still king and the audience is
apparently saying it wants lots of familiar oldies, especially from the
1980s, and - at the time of writing - Rockstar by Nickleback more or less
on the hour every hour.

What it does not want is me playing records I have brought in from home
and swapping dubious jokes with my mates. So I have been encouraged by my
employers to take early retirement from music radio, the great relief
being that I can say so long, Sweet Talkin' Woman.
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-- 
Salvatore Scifo,
Lecturer in Community Media
Media Information & Communication
Department of Applied Social Sciences
London Metropolitan University
Ladbroke House, Room LH 326
62-66 Highbury Grove
London N5 2AD


W: www.communitymedia.eu


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