Concrete Pencil: Save 6Music
Dan Bourke thinks killing 6Music is "cowardly, short-sighted and wrong-headed"
OK, first things first, it is only a radio station. So there's no need to emigrate. And I won't, despite what I said at breakfast, vote Tory if they say they'll save 6Music.
(And I came to that decision before I read that Ed Vaizey, the shadowy culture bod, said he was a fan.)
But 6Music is, to me, the opposite of Canary Wharf. The opposite of being here.
Whenever I'm at home, it is there. It has taught my eight-month-old daughter most of what she knows about the tune.
Adam and Joe. Gideon Coe. Marc Riley. She knows their voices well and she will miss them.
As I write they are playing Marquee Moon by Television. The theme tune to my GCSE revision, and not something you'd catch Chris Moyles pumping out.
As for the artists I found out about on it: countless. Joanna Newsom. Darren Hayman And The Secondary Modern. Robert Calvert.
And that's just from the Freak Zone. Ah, the Freak Zone: Sunday nights with Stuart Maconie.
You can always tell if it's on from the second you turn on the DAB. Eerie whistling? Ten seconds of silence? A rock opera by Sparks about the life of Ingmar Bergman? Must be the Freak Zone.
6Music is brilliant and the decision to kill it (and the Asian network, which is also due to be panned) is cowardly, short-sighted and wrong-headed.
Cowardly because the west London, gastro-pub idiots who run the BBC want to show they're incredibly butch by cutting stuff, but they aren't going anyway near more obvious but harder targets.
Costs too much? Could be catered for easily by commercial stations? Radio One, Radio One, Radio One?
The move is short-sighted because analogue radio is being switched off in 2015, and the station will then be perfectly placed to attract a much bigger audience.
And it's wrong-headed because it is not logically possible for a station to be at the same time both not popular enough and a threat to commercial stations. Which one is it?
Either a minority audience is being catered for (and if that's not the point of public service broadcasting, what the devil is?). Or it's providing plenty of listeners per pound invested, in which case it's good value for licence payers.
And what commercial station is going to play a rock opera by Sparks about the life of Ingmar Bergman? Magic FM?
There now follows a three-month consultation on the BBC's review, which, rather ludicrously, is called Putting Quality First.
And then the BBC Trust will decide if it agrees that the station should close. If they decide yes, it will close at the end of 2011.
It is just a radio station. And John Peel was just a DJ. And these things matter.
If you agree, go to bbc.co.uk/bbctrust to register your disquiet.
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Thank you!!
Nicely put!
Save 6music.
The 3 pertinent questions to have came out of this whole fiasco.
1.Why has a potential Government secretary
for culture not listened to 6 music all this time?
2.How can such a ridiculous paradox come about
where it is not popular enough. Then it has to make way for the commercial sector because it is in danger of becoming a monopoly ?
3. Are Adam and Joe coming back ?