Talk radio has become a shadow of its former self

What ever happened to daytime talk radio. In recent months I’ve been getting so bored of BBC 5 live and have decided to tune out. Its corrosive diet of servitude and fear, poured out by presenters who sound like they were born in the same pod is trying. The women all sound hoarse, like they’ve been on the whiskey and fags all night and the blokes are so fucking wooden and monotone you just want to smash your device up and savour the sound of silence. You forget you are listening to it half the time; they drone on about Jeremy Corbyn being a closet Nazi or raise the spectrum of a terrorist attack if a car backfires in London. This will guarantee the whole station going into lockdown with an embargo on other news, before the all clear is given so that we can all breathe again. As a nation we crave the hype and the broadcasters are happy to supply it but believe it or not it wasn’t always like this. As a kid radio came into my life via Peter Jones and his dulcet tones commentating on football. He created the pictures in my head as there was little to no live football on TV and was a master in his field. His haunting description of the Hillsborough disaster after the bodies had been cleared ‘and the sun shines now’, still raises the hairs on the back of my neck but by ’89 I’d moved on from the John Peel show, Radio Luxemburg and Jones’s eloquent commentaries and was living in London about to get a job with LBC. At that stage the commercial radio market was relatively small. Only Capital and LBC had a license in London in a market dominated by the BBC. Many of the stations around the country were independently run which offered diversity and choice and London was the epicentre of the revolution. The market grew quickly as licenses were awarded but many of those stations like Kiss FM were quickly swallowed up by big media players such as Emap, who sanitised its output and content, giving us a fore runner of what we have today. LBC for a while bucked the trend maintaining its integrity. Even with Dame Shirley Porter having a go at the reins its output was rarely sullied and an excellent array of broadcasters became the listeners mouth piece and friend. The station with its AM service had Pete Murry, Dougie Cameron and Frank Bough who were like your best mates. The later used to festoon us with champagne after his morning show. possibly fuelled after a night of crack cocaine and high class prostitutes, which the tabloids later got him on. On the other side the FM service had more of a news format but had some hard hitters fronting it. Brian Hayes was like a Rottweiler and the Australian Mike Carlton, who was youngest journalist to have covered the Vietnam war, was both smooth and equally delving in his style. Add on the likes of Angela Rippon and Michael Parkinson, who once had the front to call me a ‘cheeky bugger’, when I questioned him knocking off early one day and you could see and hear it was a great team. Sadly good things don’t last and the inevitable cut backs, falling ratings and the globalisation of the media industry saw it eaten up too. Its demise saw us loose an independent mouthpiece and herald the phasing out of the broadcast mavericks and with it the introduction of the Stepford sons and daughters who rule our airways today. Don’t get me wrong I applaud the increased diversity; I am disabled after all, but I miss the colour that radio should be all about. LBC now owned by Sky has gone mainstream. The podcasts and video feeds give it an air of it being a hybrid TV station which has resulted in a loss of intimacy and its new cadre of broadcasters are not in the same class as their predecessors. Ferrari on drivetime is pompous, O’Brien sounds like he’s just dragged himself out of bed, whilst Foggerty and Dale, sing from the same hymn sheet. There are then the diatribes of Farage & Mogg, who appear to be marooned on another planet. It’s only a matter of time then before Tommy Robinson will be getting whisked to the studio fresh from his cell to spout his odious rhetoric. Maybe I’m just a dinosaur and live in a different era, but when I worked there I seem to remember constructive journalism, intelligent broadcasters and a general goal to report the truth. How it’s changed. The broadcasters are now just puppets disseminating news that is often unproven and slanting the conversation towards a right wing agenda. The case in point being the recent revelations that 75% of news stories about Jeremy Corbyn were not true. The news didn’t surprise me but it was disappointing. It was a further kick in the teeth for clarity and fairness and a sign that the true issues that effect us are being ignored.