Carryng on from the thread about the closure of the Henry Ayrton SAhow in the North of England.

I spoke to an ex-BBC executive last night during a social occasion.

His advice was as follows.

There is little point in pursuing local radio looking for folk music. The BBC has reduced all sorts of specialist music programmes from local radio – not just folk – and is continuing to do so.

That is not to say we should not pursue this – but rather use it as a lever to get more folk on Radio 2. If you add all the audiences in folk-clubs together and all the musicians in sessions together and all the people that go to festivals together and assume that they are all different people it is unlikely that you will come up with more than 400,000 people. In fact of course they are mostly the same people and that figure is considerably less. My friend thought that the Mike Harding show attracted about 750,000 listeners on a regular basis.

He therefore suggests we campaign for more folk music on Radio 2. Now I know there are people who have been doing this for years and have occasionally become disillusioned over the responses from the BBC. I started doing it years ago. (And I confess - gave up).

However there is no doubt there is more stuff coming on stream at the moment e.g. the success of the Carthy programme on BBC 4 and the way that is showing more folk; the respect that the Radio 2 Folk Awards get; Young Tradition Awards; the perceived success of A Place in England on Radio 3; a the network of contacts built up over the PEL issue; the folk music degrees;the higher profile of folk in the mainstream of music etc etc…….

We have some good arguments in our favour but the best two I am assured are first that it is getting "cool" amongst the younger generation; it is not done by commercial radio and the BBC does have a remit to play music not played elsewhere. I don't have a vision in my own mind how such a new programme might be defined so I wonder if people would like to share their thoughts via this thread.

And in the meantime I will try and find out where the pressure is best applied.

Dave
www.collectorsfolk.co.uk
www.holmfirthfestival.com