Radio Nowhere

There was a time when my life revolved around BBC Radio Five Live. I have always loved ‘rolling news’ and when ‘Scud Radio’ was set up in the first gulf war in order to give continuous news coverage, I felt my life was so much better. I felt I was learning so much more about the world, too, far more than I ever learned at school and from my family. If there was a major event somewhere around the world, Five Live would cover it. And during the night, when I woke up fretting, unable to sleep, the rolling news would be even better, more local, more spread around the world. These days, I can barely listen to it at all.

In common with much of the BBC’s news output,  Five Live is scared of holding government to account. So called neutrality and impartiality have gone out the window, particularly since the 2016 EU referendum when the corporation disgraced itself by allowing the lies and deceit of Vote Leave to go unchallenged, to enable the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to put forward untruths which eventually saw us leave Europe. But to be fair, it started before then. Brexit was merely the nadir. But now, what is the point of Five Live?

The Breakfast Show sounds more like an audio version of a tabloid newspaper. There is so much going on around the world, yet all I hear currently is gossip and tittle-tattle from the ‘race’ to succeed Boris Johnson as PM. Real life in the UK and the rest of the world is forgotten as we listen to noise. Much of the rest of the station is turning into a phone-in.

Breakfast is packed with texts and emails from people who may for all we know be bots or simply don’t exist at all. And where there used to be a one hour phone in, the cheap alternative to producing something intellectually challenging, we now have two hours of Nicky Campbell, admittedly the best in the business, but if we really wanted phone-ins, wouldn’t we instead tune to Rupert Murdoch’s repulsive right wing Talk Radio or the increasingly left of centre LBC in order to suit our prejudices? And actually people do listen in increasing numbers for phone-ins, just not me.

It’s the same all day, with viewer phone-ins and texts, worsening from late evening and now through the night. No more rolling news, just endless tat about “what’s your favourite colour?” Well, not quite that awful but you get the drift.

I really do want to know what’s going on with the drought in the USA where the big dams are drying up, the storms in Australia, the chaos in Sri Lanka and the frozen baby mammoth found in Canada, but all I hear is Rishi Sunak this, Penny Mordaunt that, politics as entertainment. It would be nice if the Five Live journalists actually asked challenging questions of these barmy right wing liars but they don’t.

If it serves one purpose these days, it gets me up in the morning because my partner sets it to come on early to wake her up. My increasing deafness is, for once, a Brucey bonus for a while, but I know I have to get up soon to avoid more and listen instead to some decent music, which means BBC 6 Music.

Apart from its unbeatable, unrivalled sports coverage, there’s not much left for me on Five Live. Listening to a radio version of a right of centre newspaper is not something I can cope with these days.