It is not only fans of Fred MacAulay (Comedy Festival gig at Glasgow King's tonight) who will be disappointed in the new schedule at BBC Radio Scotland.
In what appears to be a local manifestation of a national strategy, the broadcaster seems intent on making savings at the expense of the livelihood of hard-working musicians. In the station's new running order, talk shows and sports programming have made ground at the expense of curated music , with most of the best-loved shows now pushed back to beyond 9pm. It is not going too far to suggest that, for many listeners, those evening music programmes - Classics Unwrapped, Vic Galloway, Ricky Ross's country show, Stephen Duffy's Jazz House, Roddy Hart, Iain Anderson and Tom Morton - are what give Radio Scotland its particular identity. While it remains to be heard how the proposed Tonight at the Quay show shapes up, the immediate impression is that Friday evening has become a music-free zone, and opportunities for the musical community of Scotland to be heard on the network - and earn crucial Performing Rights Society money from that exposure - have been significantly reduced. The Musicians Union in Scotland has noted the change and is monitoring the situation, conscious that the union nationally has only just taken the BBC Trust to task after its review of the national radio networks. MU general secretary John Smith said: "The proposal to reduce the number of live sessions on Radio 1 from 250 to 160 is very concerning and the BBC should remember the u-turn it was forced to make over 6Music when it became clear how much the public valued that station."
There is, indeed, a lesson to be learned from the place of 6Music in the hearts of a generation of listeners who grew up with John Peel Sessions, and a younger one that has learned to love their recycling alongside new music, and it is one for which Radio Scotland already had its own model in the work of broadcasters like Peter Easton and John Cavanagh in years gone by. Filling two and a half hours of early evening schedule from Monday to Thursday with a listener-generated request show, Get It On, looks lazy, and distinctly old hat by comparison with the inventive radio to be found online and elsewhere in the digital age. Add in three hours of morning phone-in with Kaye Adams on the same days, and you begin to wonder which decade we are living in.
But then, that all depends on what sort of station Radio Scotland thinks it is. Consigned to the back two pages of the Radio Times under the "where you are" strapline "Radio in your area", it is just another local radio station. And by swapping properly produced, specialist-presented curated programming for listener-created swathes of schedule-filler and cheap chat, Radio Scotland is behaving exactly like local radio stations across the nation below the border. And not unlike commercial radio, unsupported by the licence fee, which is why some might look with concern at the recent signing of ex-Radio Clyde DJ Suzie McGuire.
Perhaps, however, this trend on Scotland's national radio station is simply a broadcasting manifestation of a greater malaise. Although Scotland's modern identity, and the impetus for devolution and autonomy, was shaped by cultural as much as political forces, it now seems to be defined not by creativity, but by loudmouths online, in social media and in print - on both sides of the independence question. Listen in as they colonise all that open air-space Radio Scotland is making available. Of course, many of us will not.
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