Searching For Vodka, Country Music And Mermaids?
Radio critics seem to be a dying breed. I don't mean the people who like to criticise radio programmes. There are plenty of those and I'm just glad that some of them don't know where I live. No, I mean the professional columnists who are paid to write about radio in the newspapers.
Last week I panicked when I couldn't find Paul Donovan's Radio Waves column in the Culture section. Some months ago it was moved from its prime location next to A. A. Gill's television review. It's now buried in the back pages near the small print of the radio listings. I suppose there's a logic to that but you can wear out three thumbs hunting for it.
Today I discovered that Paul was writing about the legal shenanigans between and (that was after he made some dodgy joke about Scots and booze).
This struck a chord with me because, from time to time we do run into problems with the names of programmes and, indeed, the name of the radio station. There are those who maintain that the Radio Scotland moniker belongs to that from the 1960s. I have sympathy for this passionate nostalgia, but I also have to point out that we're actually called Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio Scotland.
Celtic Connections was another problem for us. You may hear that name and think of the festival of music that brightens up every winter in Glasgow. But long before that festival came into being, we had a programme called Celtic Connections. Eventually we made the decision to change the name because it was causing too much confusion when Celtic Connections - the programme - was covering . Things became even more complicated when we were covering an Old Firm match on the same day.
We also get lawyer's letters from time to time. The folk who run the in Nashville once took exception to us having a country music programme called The Brand New Opry. When we eventually deciphered their argument it boiled down to the rhyming of 'brand' with 'grand' and, of course, the use of the word 'opry'.
Now, we could have taken a stance and spent thousands of dollars of your licence fee battling it out in the American courts, but we didn't. Instead we substituted the word 'opry' with 'country' and, as internet listening became more common, that made a lot of sense.
Internet search engines, you see, rely on programme makers being fairly straightforward when it comes to titles. Most producers like to be creative - even enigmatic - when it comes to naming a programme. I once had a series about hoaxes entitled 'Waiting for Mermaids' but you had to listen to the first ten minutes of the first programme to understand that.
On the internet a show called 'The history of hoaxes' or "Scottish comedy' is likely to be found a lot faster and easier by the very people who would be interested in listening to it.
It's simple, obvious...does what it says on the tin...but just not as much fun.
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