Comment – Page 51 – thecumbriachronic.co.uk

CRUMBRIA: 5.03.2026

IN the suicidal push for younger listeners at the expense of its actual ones, BBC Radio Dumbria now sounds like any other dumbed-down commercial radio station.

What’s more, its news bulletins – once an essential listen for genuine exclusives about Crumbria are now “piss poor”, give or take the odd contribution from its more seasoned hands like John Bowness.

And the departure from the Carlisle station of many of the old guard also means that the new kids on the mic are left exposed.

At one time, before going live, the trainees could have consulted the wise grey cardigans in the office before publicly tripping up over local place names like Beckermet, or confusing Stainton, Carlisle, with Stainton, Penrith.

But with high-up BBC philistines having cut back on local journalism and replaced its output with cheesy presenters chatting shit, the station can be regularly relied upon to drop an on-air bollock.

Yesterday, it was the turn of one of its eager young newsreaders.

In the teatime bulletins, she could barely conceal her astonishment at a bombshell scoop. (300 pieces of ordnance had been found on Eskmeals beach, necessitating an 11-day closure.)

While it’s an unusually sizeable amount, she told listeners in incredulous tones: “Ordnance found on Eskmeals beach near Ravenglass is a natural by-product of test firings!”

Before she added the slightly disbelieving caveat:

“That’s according to Captain Nick Wood, second in command of the explosive ordnance squadron.”

(Coming up next? Shit Found In Woods: Bear Denies All Knowledge – Shocker!)

Of course, any local reporter with a modicum of local knowledge of West Cumbria would have been familiar with the existence of the long-established test firing range on the west coast. It has existed in some form or another since, er, 1897.

So it was left to her extremely patient interviewee to give her, and the station’s more informed listeners, the idiot’s guide.

Captain Wood told the station: “Eskmeals do a lot of firings, and through the world wars, there would have been a lot of testings and lots of firings out to sea over some significant distances…and this is just a natural by-product of doing test-firings at sea that eventually, years and years will pass, and they will eventually find their way back.”

BBC Radio Dumbria also ran an online story last week about the shock discovery.

“Mystery surrounds a beach which has been shut for a week following reports of a suspected ordnance,” it thundered.

A mystery, it seems, only to untutored BBC journalists with no awareness of the 129-year-old firing range or the probability that the tide, now and then, will deposit an altogether different kind of shell on the beach.

But don’t blame the novices, blame the management.

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