always listening in

Personalisation and immediacy are going to be critical for music - on broadband, mobile, podcasting - and we want users to be able to create their own virtual radio channels out of the wealth of our music output, channels which reflect their tastes and priorities.

BBC director general, Mark Thompson

Radio comedy will also receive a bit of a boost as part of the Creative Future with more mainstream comedy shows and series expected.The commissioning of interactive and online spin-offs is to be more closely integrated with radio and TV comedy.

• BBC - Press Office - Creative Future

Jamie Theakston’s Heart 107 breakfast show has just gone national. The show is not syndicated to Heart’s other stations in across the UK but only on digital (Heart’s Birmingham and Nottingham FM stations are still local DJs for local people).

But get this - the show goes out an hour later after being edited to remove any London specific content. So if Theakston talks about a nght out he’s had in London it’ll get cut. Strange indeed. I get the feeling nobody is going listen.

Read more at mediaguardian.co.uk:

• Heart Surgery

I was a huge He-man fan when I was a kid - I loved the action figures with the springy waists that could punch.

Anyway, looks interesting - I haven’t had a chance to listen to it myself, I should have some time over the weekend so I’ll post something next week.

• Masters Cast - The First He-Man and She-Ra Podcast

A friend has just given me the MP3 of Stewart Lee’s fantastic interview of Alan Moore. Moore is the creator of some of the great comic book ‘heros’ including V for Vendetta and Constantine. He talks about the creation of V and how he turned the idea of the comic book hero on it’s head.

It’s a shame the BBC listen again archive doesn’t stretch back to when the show was first broadcast (Jan 05). I have the MP3s so leave a comment if you’d like me to pass them on to you.

• Transcript of the Alan Moore interview

Broadcasting House is a real treat of a show. Funny writing, really good journalism, big hitting BBC reporters - Evan Davis this week and host Fi Glover’s irreverent style make for some fantastic radio.

It’s a shame that when Fi is away (she’s away having a baby) the stand-in really isn’t up to the job.

Paddy O’Connell is a good Radio 4 host, but he doesn’t have the ironic style needed to present the show. Fi and Eddie Mair before her both suited the show brilliantly and bought it all together. Paddy seems to struggle when it comes to delivering the lines, it’s almost if he can’t let go and run with it. Come back soon Fi, Broadcasting House is missing you!

• BBC - Radio 4 - Broadcasting House

The Gronyad reports last week that top BBC radio stars earn loads of cash according to a BBC leak. No surprise there. The really shock is how much the top earners get compared to the jobbing DJs. Jonathan Ross heads the high earners making on average £25 a minute for his Saturday morning Radio 2 show - £530,000 a year.

The real surprise was the difference in salaries between the stars and the jobbing DJs. Pete Tong only earns £70,000 grand - seems a little low compared to the stars like Chris Evans who gets £510,000. The BBC are apparently expecting a round of salary renegotiations and stars being poached as a result

Radio 4 presenter salaries haven’t been leaked yet - now that would cause some real problems at Broadcasting House between the Today programme presenters if there are any huge differences.

• Fear, loathing and envy at the BBC as mole spills salary secrets of radio stars

He is absolutely disgusting. I can’t understand why they have replaced the relaxing Johnnie Walker

Unamed Radio 2 listener
From Chorus of complaints over Evans’ drivetime debut from mediaguardian.co.uk

Good ol’ Chris Evans, glad to see he hasn’t changed. I missed his drive time debut. Did anybody catch it?

Looking forward to the Chilli’s almost live on Radio One.

You can hear the show from 7pm Easter Monday and then from 9pm an hour long documentary and the gig will be available from the BBC Radio Player.

The documentary, ‘From skateboards to stadiums’ featuring Zane Lowe interviewing all the band members also features the band’s mums - nice.

• BBC - Radio 1 Presents - Red Hot Chili Peppers

From next month Radio 2 will be offering a Best of Wogan weekly podcast.

Wogan has dubbed the weekly compilation a Togcast, named after his fans who are known as Terry’s Old Geezers and Gals.

• Wogan to Podcast

I for one won’t be listening, I’m not one of Tel’s 2 million daily listeners. I really can’t be doing with Radio 2 in the daytime and Wake up to Wogan really doesn’t float my boat.

A Forrester Research consumer poll found that 25 percent of online consumers expressed interest in podcasts, citing the ability to listen to programming on their own schedule. Just 1 percent of households, however, said they regularly listened to podcasts and only 2 percent had sampled them.

Podcast Listeners Still Few

Trying to get hold of download statistics for podcasts is a relaly tricky job. Nobody except the beeb publishes them it seems. The BBC’s head of podcasting says:

In February, the latest month for which statistics are available, 1.7 million people downloaded BBC content. The Chris Moyles show on BBC Radio 1 is the most popular.

But that only tells the BBC how many files are downloaded. It does not say anything about the number of individuals or whether people are even listening to the files.

Setting up iTunes or iPodder to download podcasts is easy - adding them to an iPod is pretty easy, getting the time to listen to them all, now that’s tough.

The Mighty Boosh may be doing a film or maybe even a Muppets style sketch/entertainment show they’ve revelaed in an interview with Design Magazine.

Watch out Ant and Dec.

• The Mighty Boosh - Noel Fielding Interview @ Designer Magazine (2006)

I’ve just been listening back to some MP3 clips I downloaded from Adam’s website recently. One of the clips - a hilarious preview of R-Kelly’s new DVD and it makes for some of the best radio I’ve heard. Go have a listen.

• Adam and Joe and extracts from R Kelly’s insane DVD

Interesting documentary coming this Wednesday looking at modern day Brunels.

They’ve moved mountains, broken world speed records and could soon take the ‘long’ and the ‘haul’ out of long-haul flying but still, which modern British engineer could possibly compare with the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel? In a new four-part series celebrating the bicentenary of one of the greatest of Britons, Sue Nelson encounters Britain’s Modern Brunels.

Wednesdays 12 April to 3 May 2006 9.00-9.30pm.

• BBC - Radio 4 - Britain’s Modern Brunels

At long last the Guardian has announced some proper podcasts .

Newsdesk: a daily opinion and round up piece.

Media talk: a weekly podcast from the MediaGuardian folks. The first show has a report from the launch of series 2 of Dr Who with interviews from David Tenant and Russell T Davies.

Science weekly follows the excellent science coverage in the paper with more of the same reasoned science writing.

And finally Westminster weekly which is pretty self explanatory politics update.

The Guardian don’t seem to be publicising the podcasts as yet as there are no links from the homepage, it took me about 5 minutes to find them. So expect an official launch soon.

• Guardian Unlimited: Podcasts

I am preparing a comparison of the major UK newspapers’ podcasts, watch this space.