[Stooky Bill]

Yes non news based speech radio is something that's never lasted long outside of the BBC. The original Talk Radio UK was billed as 'talk based entertainment' and very little of its launch line up was a newstalk format.

I was an LBC listener in the last few years of its original license, then there was a lot of hours of phone in dedicated to calling into experts or guests, especially on MW. The Chrysalis era LBC had a lunchtime show with Sandi Toksvig for a while.

Thing is that phone in is cheap. The only place in the commercial sector doing speech but not phone in is Times Radio, I don't know how much that's making.

The sad thing is that there's little room on radio for presenters that are great at doing free-form entertainment radio like Iain Lee and Danny Baker. A lot of the late night phone in shows around the country have gone too.

I don't think a non news based speech radio station will ever be a thing now because podcasts have that all sewn up. Global have several podcasts which do just that - Nick Abbot and Carol Mcgiffen have reunited their old LBC partnership for example. They've got podcasts from people like Richard Hammond, Frankie Boyle and Jonathan Ross, that's where the ideas and creativity is going