In the self-flagellating manner in which the BBC reports on itself, last Sunday Radio 4’s Pick of the Week played out Shaun Keaveny’s emotional farewell to Radio 6 Music. Keaveny, 49, left a fortnight ago, after 14 years with the station — including 11 as breakfast host, then two as its afternoon presenter. His voice wavering, he spoke of the “community” and “fellowship” of a radio show. But it was how he introduced his valediction that made listeners emotional: “When I was informed that I wouldn’t be doing this show any more …”
It is the intimate trick of radio to infiltrate your personal space; for a presenter to feel like a friend. When schedules are rearranged, and DJs axed, it can feel like a violation; like a stranger coming into your home and rearranging the furniture.
They are a passionate lot, BBC Radio 6 Music listeners, with a proprietorial attitude to their station. (Justifiably so: in 2010, after a passionate listeners’ campaign, the BBC Trust rejected a management proposal to axe the digital-only station.) Keaveny’s revelations provoked frenzied, dismayed speculation, not just about him and his politics (he’s been anti-Boris on Twitter) but also about the station’s direction. Scrolling through the 1,000-plus comments on 6 Music’s Facebook page, a theme emerged: amid grumblings of ageism, dedicated listeners were anxious about not only beloved presenters being sidelined, but themselves too.
So was BBC Radio 6 Music ever meant to be a station its listeners grew old gracefully with? At the moment there’s a core contradiction that a station with a target audience of 25 to 44-year-olds has presenters with an average age of 56. And the overwhelming majority are white men.
I am a dedicated Radio 6 listener. I can’t remember if it was the Adam and Joe show move from XFM, or Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour that first got me listening, but I stayed. I tuned to 6 Music when Bowie and Prince died. During my first faltering mornings of motherhood there was always the gentle-voiced Lauren Laverne in the background.
Like others, over the past year I have noticed its playlist is venturing into grime, jazz, hip-hop and throbbing stuff you’d expect to hear in a club near dawn. I neither know nor like it all, but I suspect that is rather the point. I am beyond the station’s target age.
Samantha Moy, promoted to station controller in July 2020, seems to be in both an enviable and an invidious position. In the pre-lockdown first quarter of 2020, 6 Music celebrated its highest audience yet of 2.56 million listeners, making it the UK’s most successful digital-only station. However, 6 Music’s primary remit is not to grow audience but to entice younger audiences. So there is a dance between the new and the old: bring in a presenter like the 30-year-old Jamz Supernova from Radio 1Xtra, quite the step change from 17 years of Saturday afternoons with Liz Kershaw, then have a whole day such as last Friday’s marking the 30th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Next week the station will announce a new Friday presenter, recruited via an auditioning process.
6 Music’s listenership does not necessarily welcome change. Some, like me, still chafe against moves in 2019 that gave Mary Anne Hobbs’s breathy vocals and chillout-room vibe a mid-morning slot, when she seems better suited to an evening ease-in. Others kvetch about the diminishment of Radcliffe and Maconie: from October they lose another hour. Craig Charles’s Teatime Takeoverwas a hit of the first lockdown, but not everyone is happy now he’s been given the weekday afternoon slot, prompting Keaveny’s departure.
Should 6 Music’s loyal fans just move on? The problem is the BBC has created no clear next step for musically curious Gen Xers. Radio 2 is too mainstream. And nothing from the commercial sector matches 6 Music’s knowledge and eclecticism. Absolute, Virgin and Radio X (whose forebear XFM proved that an indie station could thrive) have marquee presenters, but not the BBC’s archive or reach, or the technological cohesiveness of Sounds.
Perhaps what is needed is a Radio 6 Extra, to which audiences and presenters might seamlessly migrate? Might the likeable, popular Keaveny be given a spot there? “I wasn’t sacked,” he told The Sunday Times’s Jonathan Dean last week. “They offered me . . . Shall we say . . . a lesser commitment? I’ve got a mortgage to pay. It was hard.”
Keaveny has launched a podcast, The Line-Up, inviting a musician guest to build their dream festival. But he hopes to return to live radio. For now he will be missed.
www.thetimes.co.uk
Young people, eh?
