Yep. They certainly are.

In fact, there's only a handful of UK stations in profit at present.

During the first few years of Crapital (way back in the 70s), it was a goldmine. The owners - all London-based, well-known media luvvies - made a killing.

Then they got rid of Aiden Day - their programme controller who actually knew how to run a commercial station properly - and they had a very high turnover of staff. Kenny Everett (their biggest draw) left, returned, then left for good when he found that he couldn't work with the "media studies" graduates that they'd filled the station with. Michael Aspirin, Nicky Horne and pretty soon all the presenters who'd launched the station had left, and they were left with trendy dross, a playlist of 32 records (on a Sony CD jukebox by this time), and bugger all advertising revenue.

That's how it is today, except that the situation is much worse, because there's loads of competing commercial stations now. They still haven't got a clue about running a successful commercial radio station, and they keep "relaunching" the station every couple of years in increasingly desperate efforts to make it pay.....

I've run successful commercial stations. It's not too hard if you don't fill your staff with "media studies" wankers and trustafarians who think that the world owes them a living! These clueless morons at the current crop of commercial stations just think that the presenter and music is just filler between their advertising breaks. They're even resorting to "voice tracking" - a pernicious degradation of radio presenting - with the DJs (basically) "phoning in the show". It's soulless, it's not worth listening to - and that's why most people play CDs or iPods in their cars.

The current crop of pirates aren't any better. There are a couple who do have some idea, and are actually worth listening to, but the vast majority haven't got a clue......

Albert H wrote:the vast majority haven't got a clue......

Ha ha, welcome back old friend

Very provocative. Have you considered doing a late night phone-in? I don't disagree with you by the way, it's been heading that way since the mid 80's.

I won't be throwing my hat into the ring for may day by the way, as it will end up sounding "poptastic, mate"!

Hi Shuffy

I've done late-night phone-in shows. Used to be great fun. That was until we had a spate of "I'm going to kill myself" calls. None of them got to air, but they clogged up the lines, whining on about how unfair life was. We used to connect them straight to the Samaritans.....

shuffy wrote:

Albert H wrote:the vast majority haven't got a clue......

Ha ha, welcome back old friend

Agree, why I signed up again. I do like Albert's posts and it looks like a lot of the pretentious rude boy pricks have gone

sharky wrote:

Lengman wrote:

fuze wrote:just another dreamer.

Yep, Sharky is definitely a dreamer. The gimp has neva dun raydio in his lyf. I mean, it's not like he used to do some work behind the scenes for a station you and Kaz played on 4 years ago...

Not like i've setup over 5 stations over my period of radio time, including my own which had a very nice run until I stepped away and it fell on it's face...
Would have expected more from you Fuze, but it's cool... Maybe I should've kept quiet and just put it on but I thought i'd give some of the ' residents ' here, a chance for some input; Silly me!!

No worries sharky, let us know when its on then if it happenes...

Yeah no worries.... I get exactly what you mean tho.

is it just gonna be run direct coz its alot of work to do just to come on for 1 day or just mp3 player

Albert H wrote:We used to connect them straight to the Samaritans.....

I did a brief stint at the Samaritans, so thanks for the business. I couldn't afford food or heating in those days, so sitting in a warm room being fed was quite appealing... most of the callers however, were not. I don't want to go into too much detail but let's just say, if there had been some kind of Samaritans ombudsman at the time, I'm sure they would have heard my name mentioned.

It's been a while and I've never managed this but if I was running a station these days, I'd still want to have a phone-in (Yes, I'm Mr 80's ILR)

2 pirates from back in the day who did great phone-in's - KFM in Stockport, Sunday morning small hours - offensive as hell and very funny. PCRL in Birmingham ran a good phone-in on weekday evenings, this would have been around 1988. It was surprising to hear this sort of thing by a pirate, it was proper community radio talking about serious issues. The sort of thing you'd get on 5 Live these days.

Anyway I'm completely off topic now so back under my rock.

We used to do Phone-Outs - get the listeners to send us their phone numbers, and we'd call a few lucky ones up during the week's broadcast! This was back before Caller ID became a regular thing!

ir8 pir8 wrote:is it just gonna be run direct coz its alot of work to do just to come on for 1 day or just mp3 player

You'll have to wait and see I should have actually said Weekend!!!

so it's not this weekend its the weekend after i work in stevenage and live near hatfield and a lot of the london stations have got legals on there but depends what dial you chose .