Hurrah for a place where listeners can ask questions, says Gillian Reynolds Hurrah for Feedback (Radio 4, Fri), where listeners can ask questions. Nothing of its kind is to be found anywhere on television any more. Where once there was Right to Reply on Channel 4 and Terry Wogan whimsically pursuing queries on BBC1, there is now only a void. At the same time, there are constant invitations by individual programmes to phone in, or text, or press the red button on the digital handset to interact with what is going out on air. Every time we do, it is added to the statistics as evidence that the programme is being heard or seen. The comments we make are not necessarily noticed or answered. With Feedback you can be certain that Roger Bolton will pursue the question, thoroughly. Bolton is a seasoned professional who has himself felt the heat of complaint. Remember Death on the Rock, a This Week special, transmitted on ITV in 1988 against the will of the then Home Secretary, subjected thereafter to a huge inquiry and vindicated? Bolton was editor of This Week at the time. There are few still around with his admirable record of establishing fact and pursuing evasion. He arrived as presenter of Feedback 10 years ago. The programme was already, by then, an independent production. Now here's something odd. The BBC no longer acknowledges in its printed publicity or on the website which independent company makes it. As we learned from Feedback this week, the BBC has no such modesty about its own brands. Listeners had inquired about news bulletins now ending with the tag, "BBC News for Radio 4" instead of "BBC Radio 4 News." Why the change? It sounds odd, as if we might think the news were coming from somewhere else – Sky or ITN. Steve Mitchell, editor of radio news, said it is because people are listening to Radio 4 in new ways (presumably via phones and computers) and this is to "simplify the identity of the brand", to "strengthen its identity", to add "authority and credibility". Well, surely, if that's good enough for the BBC, it's good enough for whichever independent supplies Feedback to the BBC. Feedback itself made news this week by carrying a story, pursued on the pages of this newspaper yesterday, about Gardeners' Question Time and its use of a colloquial name for a dark coloured flower, BMW, or "black man's willy". Given Radio 4's acute sensitivity towards matters of race, the independent producer who supplies GQT seemed remarkably carefree in his answer but may now be worrying about the renewal of his contract. Meanwhile, Feedback also covered the interesting question of why Radio 4 seems to be signing up so many Radio Five Live presenters. Jane Garvey, still settling in on Woman's Hour, is the latest, but Fi Glover preceded her, as more recently did Anita Anand. But it isn't just presenters, as regular listeners to both networks will know. Radio 4's controller, Mark Damazer, seems to be turning into the Roman Abramovich of radio, signing old Five Live's ideas as if he'd just thought of them himself. For example, Five Live carried an obituary programme until quite recently. One of Damazer's first commissions when he arrived at Radio 4 three years ago was an obituary programme, Last Word (Fridays), and a dull thing it is, too, a prodigious waste of Matthew Bannister and a good producer. But then Bannister was once a Five Live star himself, heard at his best broadcasting live and running a sequence when a big story is breaking, as with the July bombings two years ago. Five Live still has the brilliant Weekend Business, broadcast live on Sunday evenings. Radio 4 now has a Saturday business programme, The Bottom Line, which, as it is recorded on a Thursday, never matches the topicality or impact of Five Live's. You may have heard a bit of Weekend Business without knowing it yesterday morning, when Radio 4 news carried a quote from it, Jayne-Anne Gadhia of Virgin Money talking about the possibility of taking over Northern Rock. The quote was newsworthy but surely, I should have thought, also worthy of attribution. If it's a good idea for Radio 4's news to say where it comes from, surely other suppliers deserve equal credit. |