R2OK!

Lady Boil De Spudswell · Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 429 Location: Location, Location

Appears we're not alone! See the letters page of next week's Radio Times.

Hope they're all passed to Lesley. We may get a reprieve yet!

... I won't hold my breath!
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Who Can Take A Sunrise, Sprinkle It With Dew...

gfloyd · Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 3:52 pm Post subject:

A very weird review in one of today's papers of Titch.............
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Radio review

Elisabeth Mahoney
Tuesday January 30, 2007
The Guardian

Newly installed on Radio 2 on Sunday evenings, Alan Titchmarsh proffers Melodies for You. The m-word in the title is depressing: on Saturdays, Radio 2 is a-fizz with the latest tracks; on Sundays it slumbers through a cobwebbed array of melodies and show tunes.
In his opening show, Titchmarsh seemed to be hiding behind the music, as if to soften the blow for anyone craving the recently deleted Your Hundred Best Tunes. His selection of melodies was inoffensive enough, and you could imagine him humming along as he tends a flowerbed. He has a clear, approachable radio voice and is a warm communicator, though I could live without his attempts at humour. "A very willowy blonde with long hair and wonderful, um, yes ... " he quips, all saucy suggestion, glancing at a photograph of a young female opera singer. Despite these moments, the show needs more personality, and more of Titchmarsh swooning over the music. For now, it's a bit of an impersonal jukebox. This cosy Sunday night show must develop a distinct sense of identity if it is to take root.
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His name was ernie ........ and he drove the fastest milk cart in the west.....

Lady Boil De Spudswell · Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 429 Location: Location, Location

Lady Boil De Spudswell · Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 429 Location: Location, Location

Behind Geddon's Wall · Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 4:39 pm Post subject:

I don't think that Alan Titcjmarsh needs to "swoon" over the music - his job is to present it, and the music should be more important than the presenter ( weekday afternoon presenters please take note)
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Geddon

You simply mustn't blame yourself -- the days were perfect
And so were exactly what I was born to spoil
For I am the Rider to the World's End
Bound across the cinder causeway
From the furnace to the quarry
Through the fields of oil

iknewdavidjacobsmum · Joined: 07 Dec 2006 Posts: 336

Gillian Reynolds has a lengthy article on YHBT, Alan Tichmarsh and R2 in general in todays Telegraph.
I didn't listen on Sunday as I find his presentation on T.V. irritating.

gfloyd · Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 4:55 pm Post subject: Reynolds article

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from the Telegraph 30-01-2007
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It's risky to make older listeners feel unwanted, says Gillian Reynolds

"Radio 2 altered its Sunday schedule last weekend. A new, two-hour, early-evening programme, Alan Titchmarsh with Melodies for You, replaced two older, later, alternating ones, Melodies for You presented by Sheridan Morley and Your Hundred Best Tunes presented by Richard Baker. Russell Davies's show was, in the process, shunted from 2.30pm to 9pm. All this dismayed a significant segment of Radio 2's audience.

Concerned listeners have been emailing the BBC in their hundreds. Cross readers have been writing to ask why we did not alert them to the dropping of Your Hundred Best Tunes. But we did. We carried the news as soon as it was announced. The previews I wrote last weekend showed what the changes would be, speculated about why they were being made, and indicated listener unease.

advertisementThis last point is the interesting thing. It is something that applies far wider than Radio 2 and has to do with the nature of radio. When we like what we hear, we grow loyal to it. We take ownership of the programmes, believe they belong to us, build a personal relationship with the people who present them, make spaces in our day to be with them.

Radio is like that. Listening is as personal as reading, an active pursuit. It makes pictures in the mind, awakens memories, connects the past with the present, vividly. This is why it works as an advertising medium. All loyal listeners dread change in case it also means loss.

Radio 2 listeners, particularly long-standing ones, have an additional concern. If you are over 60 and have been with Radio 2 since the days when Jimmy Young ruled the mornings (or, like me, can remember it when it was the Light Programme and Val Doonican had a Friday afternoon show) you might have been made to feel progressively less welcome.

The network has always been big, but in the past 10 years it has become not only the biggest but the sharpest, the shiniest, the one with the power to make new artists (Jamie Cullum, Katie Melua), influence musical trends (the new significance of folk), retain big-name presenters (Michael Parkinson, Jonathan Ross) and attract new ones (Jeremy Vine, Chris Evans, Russell Brand).

In becoming such a force, it has incurred the deadly enmity of commercial radio. In making older listeners feel unwanted, it is, as a public-service network, taking a bigger risk.

The challenge Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas had to face was from that dratted baby-boomer generation, those born in the decade after the war who have dominated social change ever since. Anyone born before 1945 has grown used to being shoved aside by them, but now they are hitting their 60s and casting an even longer shadow. Pirate radio was their romance. Punk, to them, is nostalgia. Douglas has successfully captured this massive audience segment by making them feel young again, in touch, up to the mark.

And the rest of us? Well, we can have a good laugh with Wogan whenever he makes rude remarks about the music on his show. And, up to now, there have always been the weekends when the music isn't playlisted and there's room for reminiscence beyond the good old days of Northern Soul. The shift last Sunday afternoon was definitely towards those boomer parvenus.

The moving of Russell Davies from 2.30pm to 9pm was the signal. The music on this intelligent, informed, associative programme sometimes goes back as far as the 1930s. That's dinosaur time for the loon-pant generation. It's their loss. This is a great show. It makes you laugh, sing, think. Where else would you hear that Les Paul, father of multi-tracking, is 91 and still playing? I'll follow wherever it goes.

Alan Titchmarsh with Melodies for You (6.30pm-8.30pm) began with Elgar and ended with Fauré. In between came Malcolm Arnold, Vivian Ellis, Ivor Novello, Jim Parker, Sousa, Gershwin, Saint-Saëns (with a dash of Ogden Nash) and, yes, Frank Sinatra. I loved it. I missed The Archers for it. I even missed Coronation Street.

If it's a tad heavy on how many famous people Titchmarsh knows, it's definitely a place where good tunes still matter more than how old you are. For the BBC, this makes a change both timely and prudent".
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His name was ernie ........ and he drove the fastest milk cart in the west.....

John W · Joined: 07 Dec 2006 Posts: 3367 Location: Warwickshire, UK

Hi,

Thanks for these quotes from the media which I hadn't got round to looking for yet (ern, can I put 'quote' around your mail? I had to enter search 'melodies' for the article on the Telegraph site)

I enjoyed Reynolds report (Telegraph), she understands the music, it's appeal and the history of Radio 2, and the changing trends in music listening. Odd she didn't mention growth in light classical and CFM.

Mahoney (MediaGuardian) on the other hands displays ignorance. Much prefer Jill day's work there.

John W
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John W