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Oct 15, 2024

From Ken Bruce at the BBC to Frank Skinner on Absolute, British radio has an ageism problem

It has become evident that British radio has a problem with ageism, and Skinner is the latest casualty Listeners to The Frank Skinner Show (Absolute Radio) were in for a nasty shock. “We’ve just

It has become evident that British radio has a problem with ageism, and Skinner is the latest casualty

Listeners to The Frank Skinner Show (Absolute Radio) were in for a nasty shock. “We’ve just celebrated our 15th anniversary,” said the comedian, in that avuncular, loveably adenoidal voice of his. “Every year I do self-deprecating jokes about the fact that we probably won’t get it renewed. Guess what? We didn’t.”

He wasn’t joking. “We’re sacked… I’m not going to pretend I took it well. I took it the way David Tennant took it as the 10th Doctor, when he started to regenerate, and said ‘I don’t want to go!’ It’s a baffling decision. Skinner’s podcast – the trimmed-down, all-chat version of his three-hour music show with co-host Emily Dean and comedian Pierre Novellie – is a delight, the silly and surprisingly erudite chatter ranging from joke-crafting to Dylan Thomas. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” Skinner said, had inspired him to draft a firm email to Absolute. With a few episodes still left in his contract, Skinner compared himself to Thomas Tuchel, lame duck manager of football club Bayern Munich, doggedly working till the end of the season. (Novellie: “And how’s that going for Thomas?” Skinner: “Very badly.”) Dean tried to cheer him up: “You could always go on TikTok, be an influencer.” “More of an effluencer,” he sighed.Skinner told a story about talking in the pub with a man who claimed that the phrase “beer killed my pig” was an age-old rural expression (meaning “drink ruined my life”). “What killed the pig of this show?” he mused. “Poetry, Anglo-Saxon history and references to Roman-Catholic theology, probably.”

Speaking of poetry: I fear this might also mean the end for Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast, his other Absolute show, and the single best programme about poetry in any format – I’ve sung its praises in this column before. Meanwhile, The Frank Skinner Show has won three Radio Academy Gold Awards – the Oscars of the wireless – and saw him inducted into the Radio Academy Hall of Fame in 2015. His show is (according to Absolute) the single most successful podcast in commercial radio. So why kill these golden pigs?Money, perhaps. Absolute’s owned by Bauer, the beleaguered conglomerate which last month oversaw a bloodbath of top presenters on sister station Scala, and dropped all its radio channels from Freeview in December. Bauer’s cost-cutting led it to break the terms of its licence by axing Absolute’s AM service, landing it with a £25,000 Ofcom fine last year.

Ageism might have been a factor in Skinner’s sacking. At 67, he’s technically a pensioner. But radio, unlike football, is not a young man’s game. There’s no reason a good broadcaster can’t keep going until they drop. Look at Tony Blackburn, or Melvyn Bragg. BBC local radio DJ Bill Rennells was going strong at 92, until he was sacked last Christmas.

“Endemic ageism” was the reason Vanessa Feltz gave for her departure from Radio 2, two years ago, but it seems Auntie didn’t hold that against her: she’s back on BBC radio at 62, hosting an addictive new late-night philosophy show, P’s & Q’s (Radio 4), and sounding more energetic than most of us.

It’s In Our Time meets The Moral Maze. As per the slightly irritating title, the show poses big abstract questions – or “Q’s” – to a panel of three “P’s”: a philosopher, a practitioner (a shrink, for instance) and someone with personal experience of a related issue. The panellists are uniformly sage, earnest and well-meaning. The puckish Feltz is all chaos and mischief, saying the quiet parts out loud. When it comes to supporting medical charities, she admitted, superstition and ego play a part. “Lots of us are giving so we don’t catch it: ‘Let the lord not smite me with this particular ague or ailment or pestilence!’”

The second episode, on the theme of charity, began with a dilemma posed by the philosopher Peter Singer. You’re walking past a pond, in which a child is drowning. You’re wearing your best suit. It was expensive – let’s say £800. Do you jump in to save him? Obviously, most people say “yes”, agreeing it’s better to lose out financially than let a child die through inaction.

If so, what’s the rationale for buying the suit in the first place? Your £800 could have gone to, say, the RNLI, and helped to save a dozen drowning children. By spending rather than giving, aren’t you letting them die through inaction? Butwhen do you stop giving? Must we all live like St Francis of Assisi, penniless but holy? Where do we draw the line? Big Qs, indeed.