Well, you win some and you lose some I guess. Following the bad news earlier this week that the High Court did not consider he had a legal case against radio ratings body RAJAR over the way they compile the ratings and the impact that had on TalkSport’s listening figures, Kelvin MacKenzie got some very good news yesterday when he became the surprise winner of the new Edinburgh radio licence.
MacKenzie beat eleven other rival bids for the valuable analogue radio licence with a talk radio proposition. On being awarded the licence MacKenzie told reporters: "I'm enormously grateful to Ofcom for having the vision to grant a speech licence for Edinburgh. This will be the first local speech licence to be granted since LBC was launched 31 years ago - and it's the first one ever outside London. The people of Edinburgh have very strong and intelligent views and now they will have a very strong station that will put them on air in a world where people feel increasingly disenfranchised. Speech stations give you a voice."
As much as we like music radio here at CMU, he’s probably right that the Scottish capital needs a good talk station more than anything else. The short lived Scot FM once promised speech programming for the central belt of Scotland back in the mid-nineties - but they quickly opted for low-brow phone ins and, eventually, a predominantly cheesy music programme policy instead. Let’s hope MacKenzie’s Wireless Group maintains its commitment to producing a good talk station of the LBC type.
Whether OfCom’s decision regarding Edinburgh means the media regulator will be favouring more speech-based stations as it awards the last 30 analogue radio licences in the next few years remains to be seen. The other licence issued yesterday, for Blackburn, went to The Bee which, while boasting a more familiar formula including “a blend of contemporary and classic hits”, also includes some feature based programming.