They can dress it up all they like but the fact remains that moving the Radio 1 chart show from Sunday to Friday and cutting it down by one hour is the broadcasting equivalent of the hospital practice of moving an ailing patient to the bed nearest the door. All the emollient management-speak about channels and brands and keeping pace with youth doesn’t change the fact that nobody outside the record business and the radio stations has actually given a hoot about the charts since the BBC and the record companies colluded in playing new singles months before their release.
That began the slow killing of the golden goose. Technology did the rest. The major hits are, if anything, more popular than they’ve ever been, but the weekly battle of the uppers, the downers and hanging-arounders simply does not matter to anyone in the human race. Charts used to be a way of organising manufacture and distribution. In the digital age, neither exists. Come July, the show will move.
Meanwhile, if you wish to remind yourself of a time when the chart show was the last hit of teen oxygen before the melancholy ritual of packing your satchel in preparation for Monday morning, it’s still available in its old slot as Scott Mills sits in for Clara Amfo on The Official Chart (Sunday, 4pm, Radio 1).
In Lives In A Landscape (Wednesday, 11am, Radio 4), Alan Dein finds an interesting initiative connecting health and social care in Rotherham. GPs actually prescribe visits to the local rugby club Rotherham Titans for some of their more isolated senior patients. They sign up to attend a luncheon club where they are served by mountainous young players who enquire about their families; they are encouraged to look after their own fitness; and they even learn the difference between a loose and a tight-head prop.
On match days, they then go and exhort their newly adopted boys to visit violence on that week’s opposition, even though – as they freely admit – some of them have difficulty actually seeing what’s going on in the middle of the pitch. The benefits of being exposed to all this excitement and companionship are simple and obvious. “It’s horrible to go home after this and just talk to yourself,” says one patient.
The eternally youthful Gary Crowley has popped up online broadcasting his Punk & New Wave Show (Tuesdays, 4pm, sohoradiolondon.com). The sample I heard began with the Only Ones’ Another Girl, Another Planet, achieved escape velocity with Flamin’ Groovies’ Shake Some Action, and finished with Television’s Marquee Moon, which I suppose is what we call classic rock nowadays. You can see them at work through the window of Soho Radio HQ in London’s Great Windmill Street.
The reliable Sue McGregor is back with a new series of The Reunion (Sunday, 11.15am, Radio 4), which kicks off with an A-list panel discussing the brouhaha surrounding the publication of Peter Wright’s memoirs Spycatcher in 1987. This includes the previously shadowy and now ubiquitous Stella Rimington of MI5; Paul Greengrass, a humble ghostwriter at the time and now a big film director; Richard Norton-Taylor who covered the story for this newspaper; and former cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong.
Speaking of venerable public servants, Iggy Pop begins a new run this week (Friday, 7pm, 6Music). Although he doesn’t touch the stuff any more, he has identified this slot as “the happy hour” at the end of the working week and promises to be an “atmospheric bartender”.
