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Major questions have been raised about the controversial head of Wales’ only national English language radio station, with one former executive saying that she is “struggling”, while a listener says her new schedule is “bloody disgraceful”.
In launching a contentious new line-up which has seen her station continue plunging down market, headline-grabbing Carolyn Hitt Editor of BBC Cymru Radio Wales (RW) declared: “The listeners are the lifeblood of Radio Wales”, but it seems that some of those same listeners are extremely angry.
One told The Eye: “It’s bloody disgraceful. But hey, on Planet Hitt, who cares as long as Wynne Evans and Eleri Sion have daily shows!” A former senior manager proclaimed: “It’s desperation stakes. The station is haemorrhaging listeners. Executives will point to shifting audience trends, but essentially it’s a fundamental quality issue. Hitt is really struggling”. Our Editor, Phil Parry (who presented Wales at One, Good Evening Wales, as well as the weekly debate series People’s Assembly) said: “This strategy of going deeper down market clearly hasn’t worked – the listening figures are awful. You have to wonder why they persist in it”.
Other outraged audience members sent The Eye details which have prompted their fury of the new RW breakfast show which has just gone on air, hosted by James Williams and Dot Davies. In proudly announcing it, BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW) said it wanted “…to refresh its weekday schedule, including a new-look Radio Wales Breakfast”.
But one said: “Realistically the station’s Editor, Carolyn Hitt, has lost legitimacy because of the appalling audience decline”.
Mike Flynn, one of the main people fronting programmes at the station during its launch told The Eye: “The latest schedule looks like just moving the deckchairs on a sinking ship”
As this comment alludes to, the station (and Ms Hitt) has already faced huge challenges, although the Editor is relatively new to the job. In December, the numbers for the audience share (in the RAJARs) focused attention on earlier record-breaking low listening rates highlighted by The Eye, as well as how they had emerged on the day Ms Hitt had taken up her difficult post after leaving the Western Mail (WM).
Apart from underlining the fact that the terrible figures came out as she assumed her unenviable position, appalled listeners on the Digital Spy (DS) online forum, also said that the output on her station was “inane” and a “self-parody”. Another critic made the point about the interesting timing, and said the shocking RAJARs: “coincided exactly with the new Radio Wales editor (and ex Western Mail columnist) Carolyn Hitt sitting in the editors seat after taking over…”.
As well as setting a record-breaking low, the RAJARs also revealed that almost 95 percent of the available audience in Wales did not listen to it at all!
The BBC, though, were unabashed, and despite the recent difficulties, the ‘Director of Content and Services’ Rhuanedd Richards (a former Chief Executive of Plaid Cymru [Plad]), earlier described Ms Hitt, as a “brilliant addition to the team”.
But in the eulogy to her she failed to mention that homosexuality is unlawful in the host nation of the football World Cup in Qatar which she covered on her radio station, when Ms Hitt is herself gay. It carries a punishment of up to three years in prison, as well as carrying the possibility of the death penalty for Muslims under sharia law. Also conspicuous by its absence in Ms Richards’ praising speech, was that Ms Hitt has also said on Twitter that she votes for Plaid, and is prepared to “pick up the ball” for independence, when the news service she is overseeing is meant to be neutral.
Ms Hitt’s sexuality could have made it difficult monitoring coverage of matches in Qatar, when Wales qualified for a World Cup for the first time in 64 years.
Indeed there has been intense criticism of Qatar’s human rights record generally, as well as the background to the World Cup in the country. However it is difficult to speak out about what is happening, and critics have had their emails hacked.
As Ms Hitt took up her post, the RAJARs made plain the scale of the task ahead of her, with the awful numbers set against a backdrop of large amounts of money spent on ‘famous’ name hosts. Mr Flynn said: “The people in charge need to take responsibility and resign”.
In March RAJAR figures showed that the ‘reach’ of RW was only 329,000. Past years have been almost as bad for the station. In 2020 the figures revealed a slight increase on the previous year, but a substantial drop compared with two years earlier, a massive decrease on the year before that, and how more than 40,000 listeners had been lost in one three month period, despite the cash spent on new schedules. They also showed that the total listening hours were 2,667,000, down from 3,074,000 in September 2019 (although up from 2,147,000 in December 2018).
The Eye have reported how previously, a former radio executive at the troubled service, had said: “It’s (the audience numbers are) peaking at weekdays mid mornings, with Wynne Evans the only highlight. There’s an over reliance on celebrities who have little or no substance, and the breakfast programme is a disgrace”.
Phil, who presented on RW for seven years until 2006, said: “I really don’t see how much longer this can go on. This is PUBLIC money we’re talking about after all!”.
But the station has often hit the headlines for unfortunate reasons. Our journalists have been alone in reporting that Ms Hitt’s predecessor as RW Editor, Colin Paterson, had an unwise affair with the presenter Lucy Owen, and the story about it was included in another critical DS comment concerning RW with the message above the link saying “…the record low listening figures at Radio Wales under it’s (sic) current management (were) amplified this year by criticism from former award winning reporters and presenters”.
For many staff at BBC CW, Mr Paterson’s romance with the married Mrs Owen represented a major potential conflict of interest, because officials had commissioned a RW programme fronted by her, called ‘Sunday morning with Lucy Owen’, and media executives both inside as well as outside the corporation have told The Eye that they were worried about their partnership’s possible impact on the process.
Mr Flynn was equally unimpressed by The Eye’s disclosure of this relationship. He told us: “If Paterson has been having an affair with a Wales Today and Radio Wales presenter he needs to be suspended immediately”.
Meanwhile, when Mr Paterson’s former paramour, Mrs Owen, was newsreading on BBC Wales Today (WT), programme-makers used a picture of Brighton Pavilion during coverage of the start of the hugely important Muslim month of Ramadan instead of a mosque, and the mistake was then featured in the Brighton Argus.
One Twitter user complained: “BBC Wales showing a picture of the Brighton Pavilion and getting it confused for a mosque when talking about Ramadan is kind of f****d?”. Another wrote furiously: “Not happy they’ve used a shot of Brighton Pavilion as though it’s a mosque (presumably)”.
Mrs Owen had also tweeted over Christmas 2020 about how she had taken a trip to the beach at Southerndown in the Vale of Glamorgan, when others were governed by lockdown regulations. She treated us, too, to a video of how she had suffered a “turkey drama” (presumably at her South Wales home) by leaving plastic on the roast, but it cannot compare with the crisis endured by the families to whom she broadcasted every night with the latest lockdown rules. She announced online, as she showed us what had happened: “I left a bit of the plastic on it…”
In the past, Mrs Owen has called a ‘crisis’, as well, wearing odd shoes into the office to broadcast the lunchtime bulletin, and asked whether anyone would notice. She even included for us a shocked face emoji after that comment, and following it Mrs Owen published on Twitter: “Crisis over!”.
Yet this presenter could, perhaps, have focused on the BBC CW website saying the same day that coronavirus/Covid-19 was the biggest cause of death in Wales that month, which many might see as a real drama. This was what she would have read instead of complaining about wearing odd shoes: “The mortality rate rose “significantly” for a second month, to 260 deaths per 100,000 people in Wales. It was also more than twice the rate in the most deprived areas compared with the least deprived area”.
The senior corporation executive who she had an affair with (Ms Hitt’s forerunner at RW, Mr Paterson), has been in the news for the wrong reasons too. He posted a video on Facebook (FB) about how he also went to the beach–this time at nearby Ogmore–over Christmas 2020, which he said was “Balmy”.
However the Welsh Government (WG) rules at the time appeared clear enough: “If you are travelling away from home, you should travel to meet your Christmas bubble and return home in the course of 25 December...You should keep taking steps to reduce the spread of the virus, and this will help ensure that you enjoy Christmas Day as safely as possible.” Travel advice from South Wales Police (SWP) warned people then about going to beaches “you shouldn’t be driving to these places”. Bizarrely, Mr Paterson had also retweeted details of the lockdown restrictions from his own radio station which covered the Christmas period then.
As critical comments have shown, Mr Paterson’s reliance on ‘celebrity’ in radio programmes (continued under Ms Hitt’s stewardship, apart from the new programme fronted by Mr Williams and Ms Davies), has also come under scrutiny. After we reported several years ago that angry listeners had contacted The Eye, once it emerged the programme of singing star and broadcaster Aled Jones was suddenly dropped from the airwaves with RW, came news of a very different sort. On November 4 in 2017 we showed how new schedules were about to be published by the BBC, but the popular Sunday programme of Mr Jones did not appear. At the time the BBC told The Eye, that they did “make changes to when programmes run”.
But it transpired that the popular presenter would not be on the airwaves at all at the BBC, while the broadcaster investigated alleged inappropriate behaviour more than a decade earlier. The singer and TV host from Anglesey,who found fame at the age of 12 with his top five Christmas hit Walking in the Air, said he was “deeply sorry” for any upset caused but strongly denied any “inappropriate contact”, and a spokesman for Mr Jones said that while the matter did not relate to any broadcast work, he had voluntarily agreed not to go on the BBC while it was investigated.
In a statement, the spokesman added: “Whilst he accepts that his (Mr Jones’) behaviour over a decade ago was occasionally juvenile, as was that of others, he never intended to harass or distress and he strongly denies any inappropriate contact. He is, however, deeply sorry for any upset caused and hopes this matter is resolved soon.” Mr Jones’ spokesman added that the allegations from a single female complainant of inappropriate messages and contact, reported in the Sun, did not relate to any broadcast work, and related to a matter more than 10 years before.
However the controversies concerning RW (as well as the BBC generally) have mounted, and the overall man in charge of BBC CW (Director Rhodri Talfan Davies) is mentioned in Private Eye (PE) in the same sentence as “clusterfuck”.
It has become clear that there have been problems for the BBC, and the corporation has endured heavy criticism over a logo which had been unveiled.
Two network television presenters, Richard Madeley and Susanna Reid, greeted it with derision. “I mean, I can barely look at it“, Mr Madeley scoffed. “Oh, it’s like something from (the hit television comedy series) W1A, isn’t it?”, Ms Reid added.
“The future is so bright I have to wear shades!” Mr Madeley japed ironically on air. “Well, what is the difference? Can you imagine a designer going to the BBC exec and saying, ‘I think you’ll like this’ and them going, ‘oh my God, that was worth half a million’”. He went on to say: “[The BBC] are like Millwall supporters: everybody hates them but they don’t care”. “You can’t say that everybody hates the BBC!” a ‘shocked’ Ms Reid laughed.
But it’s no laughing matter when serious questions are asked about the head of Wales’ only national English language radio station, with one former executive saying that she is “struggling”, while a listener says her new schedule is “bloody disgraceful” as a new breakfast show is launched…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing 39 year award-winning career in journalism (including some of the stories he covered during his 23 years at the BBC) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
Tomorrow – our satirical writer Edwin Phillips reads a rejection letter for a business grant application by the parents of a Welsh conman who The Eye have exposed, and is now serving a long prison sentence for serious drug offences.
