"David Holdsworth has announced a new direction for BBC local radio stations, with a focus on personalities and production" *
...a lot of questions need to be answered, and someone held to account for what is a failing/mainly dismal service, that lost its way in a mire of journalists, editors and manic, hasty, 'gender-balancing', under Holdsworth's 'watch'.
Why did it take this man so many YEARS to understand what everyone else in the business KNEW needed to be done!?
The speech breakfast shows should have been replaced with 'music and speech' ones years ago, and most of the 'editors' pensioned off. Having hastily trained 25 year olds doing a breakfast show aimed at 50-70 year olds is ridiculous.
As regards "We will be offering training with more emphasis on production and presentation skills" that has never been in doubt. With public money the BBC over-trained, over-researched, and over 'gender-balanced'.
But given that there is a huge staff mis-balance of non-musical/ personality-less journalists on these failing stations HOW do they propose to give the 'personality' training and WHO with!?
They don't have those skills.... and have no BUDGET to employ yet more people...
Will they get rid of the hastily-trained female breakfast 'presenters' only taken on last year (at Lord Tony's behest) to 'gender balance' the stations?
Will they get rid of the truly awful, lethargic, personality-less 'voice idents' made by McCasso?
Surely, having to make these changes goes against everything Holdsworth perpetrated?
He oversaw a failing, journalist-heavy regime.
It's time for David Holdsworth to resign.
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Update: a quote from my August 2013 blog:
To Tony Hall:
I'd love to charge a large consultancy fee, but here is some free advice: the PROBLEM with BBC Local Radio breakfast shows is that :
- They are run by NEWS side of the BBC
- The presenters are often ex-University students
- The presenters are too young to relate to the audience
- The shows sound like a radio version of Blue Peter
Your solution is to employ former ILR presenters from each area, have a 80/20% mix of music/news, and pay for them by getting rid of a whole tier of Local Radio management, as 'guru' John Myers suggested in a report the BBC seem to have lost.
Look in your filing cabinets Tony!
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* http://radiotoday.co.uk/2015/07/bbc-local-radio-to-reduce-news-programming/#comment-62034
