Change across the board at the Beeb this year, of course - when the Hutton White Wash (sorry, I mean Inquiry) led to the resignation of chairman Gavyn Davies and popular Director General Greg Dyke. They were replaced by two men who were both former BBC execs and former (or, in one case, current) Channel 4 bosses - Michael Grade and Mark Thompson. Following the fallout of Hutton, and with the Beeb's charter renewal pending, they got busy planning some radical reforms which involve, primarily, sacking half the work force, and moving the rest to Manchester, or something like that anyway.
Of course for us music types (especially those of us who don't actually work for the BBC) the more interesting changes at the Corporation were taking place behind the scenes at flagging music show Top of the Pops. Despite fucking with the format, replacing quality music with cheap celebrity chat, keeping the show in the same slot as the increasingly massive Coronation Street and recruiting Fern Cotton, one of the most irritating TV presenters of all time, for some completely unknown reason the Beeb's flagship pop show struggled to improve on its disappointing viewing figures. The BBC's solution, revealed at the latter end of 2004 and due to take place in the New Year, is to move the show to Sunday nights on BBC2, presumably so it can find a new voice in a new age, and then be quietly axed. It's a crying shame of course, but we all prefer Popworld now anyway, don't we?
Similar changes are also pending over at Radio 1, who will revamp their chart show in the New Year. All that celebrity gossip, news and interviews stuff proved so popular on TOTP, they are going to introduce it on the UK Top 40 Show too. Wonderful. Ah well, at least in JK and Joel they have decent presenters. And of course Radio 1, after several years of decline, had a good year in 2004, mainly because of, and I'm reluctant to admit this, one Chris Moyles. Anyone and their mother could do a better breakfast show than Sara Cox of course (I know me and my mother could), but Moyles has proved hugely popular since taking over the flagship show and helped the Beeb's pop station turn the tide and start building audience. Given the long-time-coming-yet-still-disappointing retirement of Mark and Lard, the arrival of Fern-Cotton-level irritating Edith Bowman to daytime and, of course, the sad sad loss of John Peel, the fact Radio 1 had a good year is a testament to the people who run the station.
Not that we'd know, because of course real music fans are splashing out on a digital radio set and tuning in to 6Music instead. Both digital TV and digital radio continued their steady growth in 2004, helped, surely, by the BBC's constant cross-promotion for their digital services on their analogue stations. Both government and the commercial sector are desperate for digital to take off of course, so they tended to turn a blind eye to the Beeb's extensive self-promotion in the digital domain. The only real challenge to BBC's dominance in the terrestrial digital space came when they were forced to allow Top Up TV to add pay-per-view channels to the BBC's Freeview network. But no one, as yet, has objected to the frequent use of the phrase "now on BBC4".