As expected, GCap CEO Fru Hazlitt will leave the radio company once its takeover by Global Radio is completed on 6 Jun. Hazlitt, who only joined the firm last December, is expected to get a handsome pay off, for coming in, trying to stop the Global takeover and not succeeding. Good work if you can get it. GCap Chairman Richard Eyre will also step down.
Somewhat confusingly, Global Radio Chairman and CEO Charles Allen and Ashley Tabor will quit their current roles and take over the Chairman and CEO jobs at GCap respectively. This is because the two companies have to keep separate management until the merger is approved by the Office Of Fair Trading. If and when the merger is approved Allen and Tabor will take the top two jobs at the merged company.
Eyre took the opportunity of his resignation from the GCap chair position to call on the BBC to privatise Radio 1 and Radio 2, saying it was "no longer appropriate" for the Beeb to use licence fee money to bank roll too very mainstream radio stations, which could happily exist, some say, in the commercial sector. He reckons the Beeb spends £1 billion a year on the two national stations, and given that the BBC is claiming to be struggling to make ends meet after not getting quite the licence fee deal it hoped for, they are obvious services to be taken outside the Corporation.
Speaking at Broadcast's Radio 3.0 conference, Eyre said: "If GCap is worth £375m then Radio 1 and Radio 2 must be worth a billion. I know this is an enormous and hideous proposal for the people who have built them. But look - BBC management does not own Radio 1 or Radio 2 any more than I own GCap. If your income goes down then you can't continue to do everything, which is a very difficult thing for the BBC to accept. I would much rather that they established their real priorities and attended to those excellently rather than sighing deeply and knocking 10% or 15% off everything"
He added that the Beeb could divert money and effort wasted, sorry, I mean spent on Radios 1 and 2 onto more interesting online propositions for young people: "Outside of music and websites for teenage TV shows such as [teen brand] BBC Switch it is really hard to find much online that clearly has a young target audience".