RADIO DUMBRIA’S LATEST LOW

By Phil Schedules

THE shit-for-brains BBC philistines who screwed up the output of BBC Radio Cumbria by pretending most of it could be done from Lancashire have much to answer for.

For those who no longer listen, the county’s once-loved BBC station – the so-called “sound of Cumbria” – was blatantly dumbed down a year ago in the fruitless search for mythical younger listeners.

Taking the signal to leave under this “re-organisation” were many of the station’s older, trusted familiar voices. Their spots in the schedules were then filled by handing over to “DJs” based in Lancashire – some of whom wouldn’t sound out of place on “Ospickle radio”.

With this hollowing out of local programming, there has been a loss of local knowledge which leads to the inevitable tripping-up over place names here, such as Swarthmoor.

It was renamed “Swarvve Mooer” the other week. Listeners in Cumbria sometimes have to sit through presenters banging on about Blackpool or interviews with NHS bods in Birkenhead.

Radio Cumbria’s “sonic identity” jingles are now loud, young, repetitive and vaguely Transatlantic, and the playlist seems to feature more songs which are Millennial, American and forgettable. Fine for youthful Lancashire, less so here.

But it means that the once-unmistakeable BBC Radio Cumbria sadly now sounds like any other run-of-the-mill commercial station anywhere else in the country.

Anyone with half a brain cell could see that this clumsy change in tone was only going to drive away Cumbria’s remaining loyal, older listeners.

It’s quite possible that this has been done to create the conditions by which BBC regional bigwigs can make further cutbacks here.

Worse still is that presenters broadcasting from distant Lancashire struggle to “read the room” here in Cumbria, which leads to some excruciating gear changes.

These days after 5pm, it’s not ‘hard news’ the Lancashire presenters are focussing on like before, but light teatime bants and “high NRG” pop songs. Between which they sometimes have to sandwich in grim news segments from here in Cumbria.

This was never more apparent than this week.

On Tuesday night, the happy-go-lucky Lancs presenter in the teatime slot was playing cheery Christmas numbers like Frosty the Snowman and talking about his trainers.

Mid-programme he then had to segway into a serious down-the-line interview with a Cumbrian-based broadcast journalist who had been out in the field.

The experienced local journalist had spent the day going around shattered Kirkby Lonsdale in the wake of Sunday’s awful, tragic fire which claimed the life of a local man.

When it was over, the presenter, who had respectfully lowered his voice several octaves, had to quickly crank the tempo back up and pretend the conversation had never happened.

Rattling high-speed through the traffic and travel news for Cumbria, it patently did not register with him that the “road closure in Kirkby Lonsdale due to an unsafe building,” was directly connected to the fatal fire that the journalist had just been telling him about only moments earlier.