- Unhappy birthday - 15th November 2024
- Migration story - 14th November 2024
- Numbers game - 13th November 2024
As our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, spent 23 years with the BBC (including many with Radio Wales [RW]), he looks with concern now at a marking of the station’s anniversary this week, when audience figures have plunged, a past Editor had an affair with a programme host, and a presenter was taken off air after ‘alleged inappropriate behaviour’.
Surely this is a time to hide in a dark room and hope everything goes away, not a time for celebration!
Yet it appears that Wales’ only national English-language radio station (BBC Cymru Radio Wales [RW]) is proud of its ‘achievement’ at reaching 46.
The station was launched on November 13 1978 but in recent years it has been beset by controversies.
It has a weekly audience of only 348,000 listeners and a listening share of just 5.5 per cent, but those aren’t the only facts NOT to be proud of.
The previous head, tiggerish Colin Paterson, left as Head of BBC Radio Wales and BBC Wales Sport, to become Head of BBC Audio for Wales and the West of England.
But this promotion (if that’s what it is) seems bizarre in the context of the wreckage that he left behind, and the pieces his replacement (Carolyn Hitt) may have been forced to pick up, for Mr Paterson presided over record-breaking low listening figures at RW.
Even so, Ms Hitt appeared to be pleased by RW’s record, and has written in WalesOnline (WO): “…by 1985 only Radio 1 pipped Radio Wales for listeners to the morning slot”.
However the numbers since then have been less positive.
At one point RAJAR figures revealed just how appalling the situation became – there was a 10 per cent plunge in the number of hours people tuned in, and his station had a weekly ‘reach’ of just 314,000, which was a drop of seven points.
These dreadful statistics compared with a weekly ‘reach’ in the same quarter for BBC Radio Scotland (RS) of 877,000, while the equivalent figures at the time for BBC Radio Ulster (RU) were of NO DROP WHATSOEVER in listening hours, and a ‘reach’ of 34,000, which was an INCREASE of three per cent!
The figures have gone up since, but not by much.
One of the main presenters at RW during its launch, re-stated his call for Mr Paterson, and his then superior, Rhodri Talfan Davies, to resign from their current positions (not be promoted).
Mike Flynn told The Eye: “Both of these so called media executives (Mr Davies and Mr Paterson) are answerable to the public who pay their salaries via the licence fee and should resign. But they are frightened to reveal the audience for the abysmal Claire Summers programme (which has now been axed) that replaced Good Morning Wales (GMW). I would like to know what the real figures are across daytimes and weekends and how they waste over £18 million. It is about time they started to answer a few questions.”
A former radio executive, said about the listening figures for RW: “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 (at the time) is a disgrace”.
I presented the lunchtime programme, Wales at One, the drive-time show Good Evening Wales, as well as the weekly debate series People’s Assembly, for seven years until 2006, and have said publicly that this CANNOT go on. Those in charge need to take responsibility for how public money is being spent, NOT be proud of the ‘achievements’ at a failing radio station.
But RW, has often hit the headlines for unfortunate reasons. Our journalists have been alone in reporting that Mr Paterson had an affair with the presenter Lucy Owen, and the story about it was included in a Digital Spy (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…by criticism from former award winning reporters and presenters”.
For many staff at BBC CW, Mr Paterson’s romance with the married Ms Owen represented a major potential conflict of interest, because officials had commissioned a RW programme hosted by Ms Owen, called ‘Sunday morning with Lucy Owen’, and media executives both inside as well as outside the corporation have told me 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 previous relationship. He said: “If Paterson has been having an affair with a Wales Today and Radio Wales presenter it brings his management skills in to question and he needs to be suspended immediately”.
Ms Owen had also tweeted (or X’d!) 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 to 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, Ms Owen has also described as a ‘crisis’ 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/X: “Crisis over!”.
Yet she 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 man she had an affair with (Mr Paterson), has also been in the news for the wrong reasons. He posted a video on Facebook (FB) about how he too went to the beach over Christmas 2020 – this time at nearby Ogmore, which he said was “Balmy”.
Yet 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”.
Mr Paterson’s reliance on ‘celebrity’ in radio programmes 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”.
However it transpired that the Songs of Praise 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 issued at the time, 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 said 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.
Perhaps RW should also be “…sorry for any upset caused…” after all that has happened, rather than marking an anniversary of being created in the first place…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing lengthy award-winning career in journalism (including some of the stories he covered during his 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!
