London Live

I'm sure London news is less important to people in London than the likes of Reporting Scotland are in Scotland, but I suspect another reason would be the time it takes to actually get home in the capital. I always feel for ITV London in this regard and I'm not entirely surprised they go down a more daytime TV entertainment route.

Having grown up with tales of how wonderful the old Capital Radio was it's a shame for me that London has no clear-cut mass audience properly local radio station. But supply and demand.

Even if you go back to the seventies. BBC Radio London launched in 1970 and struggled even during that decade. Once Capital with a general entertainment service launched and LBC (after a very shaky start) which even then was nationally skewed thanks to them providing the IRN service mopped up the audience.

Once the then 'incremental' radio stations went on-air, that fragmented the audience into those who liked different musical formats over general 'locally' skewed services, which because of the size of the TSA and the population, could never truly be local in the first place.

London Live launched at a time when there are various channels providing general entertainment already with advertising budgets being split between online, tv, radio and press, the latter which is also in decline.

From about 1978, until the mid to late 80s, Capital was a model example of a station that managed
to comply with the IBA's 'PSB straightjacket', and 9 hours per day 'needletime' and be incredibly popular. It was assessable (as a service, and physically) with its Euston Tower foyer that contained an embedded Job Centre and other 'social services' for a wide demographic spread. We will never see its like again, but I'm glad to have witnessed that era.

Yes, and that period coincided with Thames and LWT's local services being in their pomp too (Thames News, Reporting London, The London Programme, The Six O'Clock Show). Couldn't happen now without returning them to a straitjacket.

Yes, and as you suggest LBC and Capital were pretty much the nearest thing we had to national independent radio in those days - there was a glamour about them because in the days before national radio, they were the only big mainstream alternatives to the Beeb. Indeed local stations flourished in the main probably because we didn't have national radio at the time.

Like others on this thread, I'd have loved to have been in London when Capital and LBC and LWT and so on were in their pomp, because elsewhere in the UK, with its single one-size-fits-all ILR station and dull regional news, they always seemed incredibly exciting, but that's mostly because they had a massive amount of glamour connected to them for being quasi-national affairs. They certainly did stuff for London but as far as the audience was concerned I doubt that was the attraction.



I was being a bit whimsical, but I do think the value of local news is overstated. I watch the local news, but as a supplement to the national news, not instead of it. When I get up in the morning I want the national news, local news is simply not important, unless you go really hyper-local and talk about bins.

The rest of it just doesn't really matter. It's like some of our American friends on this forum referring to "pulling up the radar" to check the weather. It doesn't matter in Britain, a single forecast is enough, the weather is barely that bad to have any great impact. The tube being down is an inconvenience, yes, but I can sort that out myself.

As I say, shops and offices and so on that want rolling tickers of news and info can already get it, and they can get it tailored to their specific requirements while they're at it. They don't need a TV channel providing it.

It also helped that Capital was on FM at a time when Radio 1 was mostly medium-wave only. I grew up in London at the time, and Capital was everywhere. Radio 1 was something you listened to on holiday. And the original LBC was a unique format, largely inspiring Five Live (indeed, Brian Hayes - very much the voice of LBC during the 80s - went to Five Live).




I take your point, and I don't blame you for saying so. But there is the public service angle here - local media scrutiny of official bodies is at an all-time low, and that's something that's been highlighted by the Grenfell Tower tragedy, where the local paper closed four years ago and the local council and its attitude to its housing stock had been pretty much left unreported, except by a residents' blog.

Television isn't the best medium for this kind of coverage, but the papers which feed into London's news coverage are mostly giving up this kind of reporting now - many London boroughs, particularly across south and inner west London, have no investigative journalism outlets, and some haven't had for years. (Indeed, it's now the BBC that's being asked to bail out local news publishers by funding pooled local council reporters.)

If this was 1987 or even 1997 it would be easy to imagine the fears of the Grenfell residents would haven been picked up by a local paper, then picked up by, say, The London Programme, and the relevant decision-makers held to account. That chain has broken now.

This boring stuff does matter - it really can mean life and death. While nobody's suggesting a red button multiscreen open of 32 different council scrutiny panels, the whole system - on TV, in print, on radio and online - is bust. London Live was never the answer because its model assumed things were just fine and dandy. And now they've blown it, and Ofcom let them.

It certainly was surreal that Radio 1 with it's big name 'Fab FM' DJ's were well known across the country....except London. Capital owned the pop market in the capital as seen when they'd do roadshows with 20/40,000 people in parks, when I recall going to a Radio 1 event in Crystal Palace which hardly had anyone there and this was after the switch to FM.

Capital may have screamed London in their imaging, but it was largely an entertainment station with national names. Pat Sharp was more well known for being on Capital than his short stint on Radio 1. He and Mick Brown sang charity records for Capital's Help a London Child charity, yet had UK chart hits despite being virtually unknown outside the M25 (until Funhouse launched). Capital really was the national pop station the UK never had in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

But your overeststming people and underestimating the ease of being able to flick to channel 7 and leave it on all day. As for the need for national news the tickers could do that and sign some sort of content deal with ITN, I do see how the latter might be where the cost starts to come in.

There's no cost and ease in setting up such a service, though - unless you've a high eight-figure sum tucked away in your back pocket...

In an alternative universe, and if the IBA in 1972 had been tasked with providing a single national commercial radio service, we might well have ended up with a national version of Capital, that really wouldn't have differed
that much for the 'local' version. The only problem would have been probably quasi-national FM coverage, until
the FM band was opened up from the mid-late 80s

Wasn't the original incarnation of Capital Radio more adult contemporary than pop based initially?

Going by this aircheck of Kenny Everett from 1974, AC/CHR.