[Stooky Bill]

The last remaining element of the David Lloyd era is James O'Brien's Mystery Hour.

Steve Allen's early breakfast also continued well into the Global era where he took no calls and the format was him bitching about celebs, talking about what he did in Twickenham and reading texts from listeners.

However David Lloyd was forward thinking by introducing a paywall catch-up service for those who couldn't listen to the shows live, but the decision to axe newstalk for 20 hours a day of pub ammo chatter reflected in their Rajar of the time.

Mystery Hour partly survived because of days like today when there's elections on. The rest of the 'hours' were gradually ditched.

The problem with having a format that's part entertainment, part news, part phone in is that it's very difficult to sell to advertisers. It's difficult to sell the station to a certain audience because they don't know what that audience will be. Also they don't really understand it as it's a BBC thing and they never have to sell ads there.

Mixed format radio has disappeared in general, the days of having pop music programmes and specialist music and speech on a radio station is long gone.


That said I've often wondered how well a purely entertaining radio station would do. One with no music, no news, no topical chat, just presenters doing live free form phone ins, zoo format discussions, guests etc. Think of Iain Lee, Danny Baker and Virgin era Nick Abbot, and presenters like Frank Skinner. Would be an absolute compliance nightmare, but fun to listen to. Though I imagine podcasts are filling that audience