Issue 113 / April-May 2021

PREVIEWS
RADIO
THE
POPULAR
MUSIC
SHOW
BBC Radio Merseyside
After almost a year off the
airwaves, PMS’s Roger Hill
provides the lowdown on the
show’s new format.
The events of the last year have severely
shaken the metronomic balance of the cultural
calendar. As restrictions have seen live music
reduced to a rare, socially-distanced hum, ghost
lights continue an extended run on theatre stages and
festivals move online, the aftershocks have been felt on
institutional radio, too.
From national to local stations, the BBC was forced
to restructure its programming to meet the limitations
and demands of the new normal. The changes meant
that, from March 2020, certain shows and presenters
covered elongated hours, while others were removed
from the schedule altogether as the Corporation assumed
a more defined role as a public broadcaster.
On BBC Radio Merseyside, one such programme
that was placed on hiatus was THE POPULAR MUSIC
SHOW. Fronted by Roger Hill and a revolving team of
presenters, the programme is lauded for its left turns,
deep digging and connoisseur curation of sounds from
Merseyside to the far reaches of the world. To this day
it remains the longest-running alternative music show
in the UK. However, the 43rd year of its running was far
quieter than the team had expected as it departed its late
Sunday night slot.
After a challenging year, the
programme has returned to BBC
Radio Merseyside, albeit with a few
tweaks and new features to meet
the continuing impacts on scheduling.
Roger Hill fills us in on the set-up of the
new show, the future of late-night radio
and the importance of presenting new,
expansive cultural discoveries on a local
public broadcaster.
PMS spent the best part of a year off air
due to the pandemic and the resulting
changes to schedules. Did you notice the
landscape of radio changing in that period
of time?
It was very easy to notice, because the BBC
completely restructured local radio. There was
no space for pretty much anything that was
individual programmes, so many, like ours, went
off.
I saw that the BBC decided, for the first time in
a long time, what it wanted to use local radio for.
In other words, what this access to local people was
about. People do like to be talked to as though they live
somewhere particular, provide information, raise spirits –
local radio does that. It’s the first time in almost 40 years
of my being involved with it that local radio actually got
its mission back.
With this restructuring, did you think there was a gap
left in terms of the cultural offer and exploration in a
musical sense? How did this affect your planning when
returning to the air in January?
I said to the team, ‘Who listens to us anyway? Who
are the people who either go on iPlayer or listen late at
night and want to hear what we were doing?’ It boiled
down to a combination of the culturally aware and the
independent thinkers, if you like, the doers, the people
who go to gigs, get Bido lito! for example. We framed the
new show around the idea that there was a community
there that, essentially, the rest of Radio Merseyside
wasn’t speaking to.
Do you think there is a new frame around radio itself,
a new way of looking at it? And is this something that
you’ve taken on, or is it a case of repurposing what you
had?
At the moment, monthly at least, we will have an
extension to PMS that can be heard on Melodic
Distraction. The change for us, I think, is in thinking about
what we do as the one-hour show. Just as Bido Lito!
became more than a magazine, similarly PMS becomes
more than a programme; it becomes an information
system, it could become an online platform, regular email
newsletter. It becomes a focus for something. But we
don’t want to do this too much, otherwise we’ll never get
any more time back from the BBC!
Talk me through the reformat a little bit and how the
show might be operating differently.
The first thing that’s important is the new time [9pm]
and I think that is important as we’ll capture people
who wouldn’t necessarily be coming to find us. We’ve
introduced spoken word, too, and we’ve had some
really good features from that so far this year. We’re
still the only programme on the station that plays world
music. Although we can’t do festivals currently, we’re
obviously keeping people abreast of developments in
that area. Every programme has mentions in it, too, as
we call it now. And they’re not always just musical, but
they’re about cultural activities and online activities.
And also, we’ve got a five-minute section, which is five
recommendations, five aspects to look forward to. That is
definitely a nod towards cultural events and happenings.
If the first section is really kind of music and speech, the
second is about what to do during your week, the third is
about the electronic, the digital, the online and everything
else. And then, finally, we have a 15-minute flourish at
the end, where we remind people that we’ve got a very
deep, good archive, and remind people about what’s on
our mixes.
As you know, over the past 40 years or more, latenight
radio slots like John Peel’s were presented as a
particular kind of exploration and cultural navigation.
Do you think that this slot for music programmes still
has merit? And do you think that can come back? Or do
you think we’re moving into an age where everything
has to be a little bit more on demand?
It’s a good question, but a question that’s very hard to
give an answer to at the moment, except to say that
since [last] March late-night radio no longer exists locally.
The BBC has gone through so many revolutions over the
years. It will be past my time, I think, but eventually there
may come a time when the BBC rediscovers the joys of
what we might call ‘free floating navigation late-night
radio at a local level’. I mean, I don’t think it’s completely
out, I think it just happens to be what the BBC is into at
the moment. It knows it’s in a tougher market than it was
10 to 20 years ago. There are far more radio stations
out there, far more niche radio stations. We were very
loose on the old show, but it’s not like that now. But that
doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for that kind of radio.
We are now definitely in the structured programme
market that we weren’t in, originally.
Do you think local radio will be at a loss without the
more freeform late-night music programming?
I think, bearing in mind the bigger picture, we’re just
going to have to embrace it, to be honest. But it’s
one of those things where I often wondered whether
the listeners who joined us at midnight on a Sunday
had actually been listening to anything else on Radio
Merseyside. They may only have parachuted in for us
and then parachuted out again and, therefore, the radio
station didn’t get any huge benefit from the numbers
which transfer out into the rest of the station. So, I think
the BBC probably wouldn’t go back and do it again.
Does it matter to you to remain on a public service
broadcaster? Does that change the essence and the
ethos of the programme?
I took the view, and I’ve always had this, that there was
something about working for the BBC and broadcasting
on the BBC airwaves and being part of the BBC
information system, which was a dignifying – if dignity
is something that we want to attach to our kind of music
– but also empowering. I think I always thought that it
would be best to keep something that was PMS on Radio
Merseyside, even if we had to start thinking outside the
box a bit.
It does matter to be on the BBC for me personally. But
then, of course, I started out that way. I suppose maybe
there’s a real sense of loyalty, sentimentality, a sense of
the BBC is a generally good thing and it’s nice to be part
of a good thing with a kind of international dimension
to it. So, for me, there is a benefit of being there. But we
are, as you can tell, reaching out and putting ourselves
outside the BBC as well as inside. And in a sense, because
we’ve always been a bit of a trailblazer as a programme,
maybe we will be the model of how the developments will
happen in the future. !
Interview: Elliot Ryder / @elliot_ryder
The Popular Music show now runs bi-weekly at 9pm on
BBC Radio Merseyside. The next live broadcasts are on
2nd, 16th, 30th April.
pmsradio.co.uk
bbc.co.uk/programmes/p098fwxp
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