BBC Radio 5 is losing its audience. Why? And does it matter? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
By Tony Attwood
In case you don’t live in the UK, or in case you do but don’t listen to the radio, I should explain. BBC Radio 5 Live is the BBC station which covers sport. In fact there are two Radio 5′s – there’s also a second digital-only channel which carries commentary on events when there are two events on at once that the station has the rights to cover.
The problem BBC Radio 5 Live has is that its audience is down. Down 3.4% on the previous three months and down 6% year on the year.
Of course since this is a BBC station that does not mean much in terms of money – the station is funded by the “licence fee” – a tax that everyone with a television receiving device has to pay in the UK. But the BBC does look at audience figures in the belief that if numbers go too low it might well come under government pressure to cut some of its services and let commercial broadcasters take over.
In this regard, the BBC does have a national rival – Talk Sprot. Radio 5 has the rights to live coverage or some games, Talk Sprot gets some others. Local stations also cover some games.
So why is the audience diminishing?
Obviously it is possible that Radio 5′s audience is on the slide because of things completely unrelated to football or any other sport. It is on air all day long, and runs some news coverage, phone ins, chit-chat entertainment spots which assume that everyone watches soaps every night, and similar sorts of thing. The station has been travelling down market for years.
As for football however, it is more or less travelling nowhere. It’s live commentaries on games are fairly much as they were five or ten years ago, and so can sound increasingly irrelevant and out of date. The lead commentator is Alan Green who often baits Talk Sprot, and indeed Stan Collymore, which is quite an endearing feature, but his endless negative commentary on refs has for some years seemed odd.
Green thinks the refs are doing a poor job, and says so. Fair enough. Most people involved with Untold would agree. But neither he nor the station ever go further. The refs are doing a bad job because…. Why? He never says.
Leaving the question hanging around like that certainly makes the whole debate seem bizarre, but resolutely Radio 5 doesn’t seem to want to enter that door.
Meanwhile on its lead football phone in (“606″) the mood has become singularly boorish with those taking the calls shouting down callers – and it is noticeable that virtually no pro-Arsenal calls get through. If one does listen to the phone-in any calls about Arsenal appear to be from Anti-Arsenal Arsenal callers. Sir Alex F-Word on the other hand appears to be venerated.
Indeed it is often the case that callers appear to have an agreed agenda, much of the time repeating the same phrase over and over, without any concept of debate. The BBC must be aware of this, and yet do nothing about it.
Part of the problem with Radio 5 seems to me to be its mindset – which is one of being “there” at the “big moment” and clinging on to the “big moment” rather than giving out information about what else is happening. What they don’t seem to get is that despite the propaganda from Manchester United to the effect that virtually everyone is a Man U supporter, this isn’t actually true. The majority of their audience don’t support the club. The same is true – what we all want is information – what we get is opinion, opinion, and opinion.
Thus to give an example, when Man City beat Man U to the championship at the end of last season the station spent half an hour talking to ex-players after the match, without once giving a run down of other scores. It was as if the history of the clubs was more important to most of us, than what had happened on that day in football.
In many ways in fact Radio 5 seems to have become increasingly irrelevant by refusing to recognise the way in which football itself is changing and the way in which the world of supporters has changed. One gets the feeling that they still see us as rosy cheeked people with scarves and rattles, excited because the man from the radio is here with a mic. Rather than the fact that we know that anything we say that doesn’t fit with the station’s vision of sport is not going to be broadcast.
Elsewhere having won the right to cover international matches Radio 5 endlessly presents the notion that international football (particularly that played by England) is a “good thing” when there clearly is a very large number of people who actually loathe internationals as they disrupt the work of the club that they support and the club that pays the players’ wages.
It is indeed this refusal to accept an issue such as this as a debating point that singularly counts against Radio 5. It is in effect selecting the issues that are acceptable, and the attitude within those issues which is acceptable. And then it defines how we are supposed to talk about these issues.
The other problem the station has is its insistence on using the same old experts over and over again in the style of other stations. Thus we hear ex-Arsenal players adopting the same position that can be heard repeatedly on other media – nothing is fresh, nothing is new, so there is no point is listening. We know most ex-Arsenal players are told by the media to be negative about Arsenal, so they do, poor lambs. It is on every station. Do we need it on Radio 5 as well?
It is, I think, interesting to reflect on what Radio 5 is doing, at the time of the change that has taken place on Arsenal TV in which a highly negative anti-Wenger commentator was removed and a very positive presenter replaced him. The breath of fresh air made the station worth listening to. Yet it took ages for this to happen. Radio, its seems, moves slowly.
This is not to say that Radio 5 should adopt a pro-Arsenal stance, any more than I want it to adopt stance which is pro any other club. Rather I would like it to reassess the way it controls the debate and the way it looks as football programming on radio. It is not, in my opinion, suitable to say, “International football is good” and leave it at that. Rather it needs to open the debate and recognise the widespread hostility to international football.
It is not adequate to note that there is corruption in football around the world, but to ignore the notion that there might be some in England.
Radio 5 could be a good place to listen to discussion on football and match commentaries, but to be so it needs to throw off the historic approach to football on the BBC, and instead start to look for alternatives.