Idiots in charge of Radio

Imagine that you are in charge of a large corporation whose function is the provision of Radio transmission to a whole nation or a public serrvice basis, and imagine that this large corporation operates transmitters on a number of different wavebands and frequencies.

Now let us suppose that about while almost all of the frequencies you use can be received by ninety percent of the population, there is only one of all those frequencies that can be received by the entire population. For ten percent of the population that frequency (which happens to be the only one on the Long Wave Band) is the only one they can ever receive.

Now all is well until it turns out that there is a single-interest group to whom you want to allocate several hundred hours of air-time per year, and you have to decide which of your numerous frequencies to let them have.

One might imagine that anyone making such a decision would prefer to spread this requirement over a number of the available frequencies, so that it no one group of listeners becomes too unfairly inconvenienced, but what if there was some reason why all of the air-time devoted to this particular special interest group should always be on the same particular frequency ?

You now have a choice:

1. You could allocate one of the ordinary FM frequencies for this purpose, and those who normally listen to that programme (but were not part of the special interest group) would then have to suffer the inconvenience of listening to something else instead, or

2. You could allow the special interest group unrestricted access to the Long Wave Band frequency, which of course would mean that ten percent of the population will be deprived of any alternative to the special-interest transmission. If they do not want to listen to that, then that would be just their hard luck.

One might have thought that given such alternatives, any official with a shred of understanding of the implications would choose the first of the above alternatives (and even share the load a bit by making some of the lost programming available on other FM frequencies). Why would one knowingly vicimise ten percent of the population?

If you would like to know why a supposedly responsible official would choose No 2, then ask the senior management of the BBC why such a large proportion of Radio 4's long wave transmission is devoted to Cricket.

Why does Cricket have a right toso many hundreds of hours of airtime?

If such a vast amount of time is justified, then why can it not be shared between all the BBC's networks?

If it must all be on one of their networks then why should the one chosen be the only one accessible to many people?

You may think that those are fair questions to which there should be straightforward answers, but to date no one in the BBC has even been able to understand the issue at all.

They insist that there are a few tens of thousands of people who want to listen to uninterrupted cricket all day whenever there is a match in progress (anywhere in the world), and of course that may be true, but however often I have asked they have been unable to understand that there are people in UK who do not live in London or enjoy radio reception of as good a standard as is available in the London area.

Another example of this same mental handicap can be found in the way Digital Radio is being introduced.

All conventional broadcasting is to be phased out in 2015 (including the long wave as above), and those responsible "hope that it will be possible" to get the new Digital transmitters running all over the country by then. (ie where I live we could be left with no radio transmission at all for a while)

I asked why there could not have been a time of "parallel running" in which both systems were available to allow time for us all to change over, get new equipment etc.

The answer was that there HAD BEEN such parallel running; both systems had been running for some years. Well of course they had in favoured areas such as London, but what about the millions of people not so favoured ?