Archives for December 2009

Danny Baker's exclusive interview with Sir Elton John goes out on 5 live and in vision on the Red Button on Saturday morning and I hope you'll find the time to check it out over the following seven days on iPlayer, podcast and Red Button on demand. We recorded it just before Christmas and as Elton mentions, it's the only radio interview he did in 2009, which makes it a bit of a special event.

"The Let's Try And Book Elton John Project" began in August when Danny and I were in the pub gassing about about his new two hour Saturday morning show. As ever, the "planning meeting" was heavily peppered with gossip and anecdotes including some great Danny stories about his first job as a school leaver at One Stop Records, in London's South Molton Street. The shop was a super-cool destination for music fans in the early '70s and Elton John, Marc Bolan and string of stars would hang out there, while a baby-faced Baker soaked up the chat, the album covers and catalogue numbers. But it had been years since he had last bumped into Elton (spookily, back in South Molton Street of all places) and they were not in touch. So, I left the pub that night with a secret mission to surprise Dan by trying to get Elton to guest on his show.

We all know certain celebs turn out for the opening of envelopes, but Sir Elton isn't one of them. All Autumn he was touring the USA, developing new music projects and charity fundraising. He was firmly off the UK media promotional merry-go-round. Then he fell ill. So, it was no surprise that our approaches for an interview were politely refused. Then out of the blue, his office got back in touch. Elton would record an hour long chat with Danny just before Christmas and we could video it too.

Weeks later, we finally found ourselves face-to-face with Elton, tucked away in a very discreet BBC studio with the 5 live interactive team behind the cameras. Outside the snow was falling, but unfortunately so was the board of Watford FC. Suddenly, our special guest was wanted by radio and TV news crews to comment on the boardroom battle going on at Vicarage Rd and, what's more, they knew he was in the building. Sadly for the news agenda, there was only one subject that Elton wouldn't discuss that morning: the politics at Watford FC. Otherwise it was no holds barred.

Elton's chat with Danny is a bit different to other interviews I've heard. It's more like eavesdropping on two old mates exchanging happy memories and a shared passion for music, record collecting and football. As they bounce from subject to subject, you get a real sense of who Elton John really is in private.

Thanks to everyone at 5 live who worked with us to get it online and on video for Red Button viewers.

Clare Davison is Producer of the Danny Baker Show. You can watch the show and interview on the BBC Radio 5 live website as well as via the red button on your TV from 09:00GMT on Saturday 02 January 2010.

• Find out more about the show
• Subscribe to Danny's podcast

It's been a busy year for the 5 live interactive team. We built a brand-new website, developed 5 live now and launched Danny Baker on the red button. There were a range of visual treats on offer from the Hull Octoberfest and from Edinburgh during the Mayo visualisation trial. We were delighted to win the Sony Gold multiplatform award for our work at Wimbledon.

But that was 2009 and we're working hard on a range of new offerings for next year. As I write our video producer Guy Oldfield is busy editing something special for January 2nd. On the red button on the first Saturday of the year you will be able to see Danny Baker in conversation with Elton John. If you miss it, you can catch it on demand throughout that week.

We've spent the last couple of months listening to your feedback about our new website and will be making a raft of changes during the 2nd phase of development in 2010. We'll be working hard to make audio even more available and even easier to navigate from across the schedule. In addition we will be improving the 5 Live football player and our services on mobile.

5 Live Now has been extremely well-received and hundreds of listeners have contributed to the conversation during the phone-in. Early in the New Year we will roll out the service on Victoria Derbyshire's programme.

We've some exciting plans around Richard Bacon's new show and will be concentrating our efforts on some of the year's big events.

The General Election will be our main focus early in 2010 with the World Cup perhaps the year's biggest draw. Our online traffic tripled during the event in 2006, and you never know maybe this time England will get a bit further.

We're keen to know what you want from 5 Live online, on interactive TV and on your mobile phone so please leave a comment below and we will try and make it happen.

And a Merry Christmas from everyone at 5 Live Interactive!

Brett Spencer is Interactive Editor for BBC Radio 5 live

• Picture by Doug Wheller. Used under licence.

One of the things I aim to do on this blog is to tell the story of 5 live's move to Salford. As 2009 draws to a close, it's a good moment to sum up how the planning for the move is progressing.

We've made a lot of progress in terms of being able to say who will be part of the station in Salford. We start our new weekday schedule on Monday January 11th 2010 with a set of presenters who are committed to making the move and being part of 5 live at our new home in the north-west of England. The latest person to commit is Shelagh Fogarty so I'm delighted to say that her award-winning partnership with Nicky Campbell will continue after we've moved to Salford in mid-2011. Overall we will have a line-up of talented and experienced broadcasters who I think will be able to take 5 live from strength to strength over the next few years.

January 11th will also see the launch of Tony Livesey's late night programme from Manchester, already the home of Stephen Nolan's programme. Nighttime editor Jonathan Aspinwall wrote in more detail about moving Nighttime to Manchester earlier today. Moving this programme will give us good practical experience of moving a team and output from London to Manchester as well as being a significant shift in 5 live's centre of gravity.

The building which will be our new home is now being fitted out with cabling and technology and all the other things needed to make a state-of-the-art broadcasting centre. Once that is finished (and it's a huge job), we'll begin a process of testing and trying out our new surroundings before moving programmes in a phased way during 2011. We are trying to achieve some very specific benefits. For the BBC as a whole it's about connecting better with audiences wherever in the UK they live and in particular improving the BBC's performance and reputation in the North of England.

For 5 live, it should help us offer a more distinctive agenda, tailored to the interests of our audience, with as broad a range of voices and contributors as possible. We aim to sound like a radio station free of any metropolitan bias which covers events and stories in every part of the UK. A base outside London should make that easier to achieve to the full - as I've written here before, if you were starting 5 live today I'm certain you would not choose be based in London. Moving something already established raises another set of issues but it seems to me that 2009 has been a year where we've laid some very important foundations for making the move as smoothly and seamlessly as possible.

Adrian Van Klaveren is Controller of BBC Radio 5 live

• The picture shows Adrian and Richard Bacon touring the Salford Quays site earlier this year. There are more pictures from the tour here.

5 live's journey to the North continues with the move of 5 live's late night, weekday output to Manchester. Tony Livesey's new show will begin broadcasting from the BBC's Manchester Oxford Road headquarters on Monday January 11th. It's a major landmark in the planning for 5 live's full move in 2011.

Tony Livesey will take over from Richard Bacon in the first of the station's London-based programmes to make the move North prior to the whole station moving to BBC North's state-of-the-art broadcasting space at Salford Quays in 2011. Stephen Nolan's programmes on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays already come from Manchester so now the station's late night strand will come from Manchester seven days a week. The existing unit will be joined by a team of 'early movers' working across the seven-day operation. We'll still be doing what 5 live does best - being at the centre of all the big news, sport and entertainment stories.

Tony has presented lots of 5 live programmes over the last two years. He recently stood in for Nicky on Breakfast with Shelagh. The 5 live audience have responded well to Tony's warm and witty style of broadcasting. His work on Inside Sport and on Sports programmes in the Northwest means that he gets to talk to some of the biggest sports stars in the country.

He'll bring all of that to his new show. Plus he'll be swapping stories with listeners right across the UK. Hope you'll be listening.

Jonathan Aspinwall is Nighttime Editor, BBC Radio 5 live, based in Manchester.

• Picture by Duncan Hull. Used under licence.
• Some pictures of the new studios in Salford taken earlier this year.

I'm sat at my desk today waiting for the avalanche of special taped programmes for Christmas to appear.

We've got twenty taped shows sprinkled throughout the Christmas and New Year schedule on 5 live this year. Programmes are made for us by our news programmes, sports production team and a variety of independent production companies.

Earlier this year our tennis pundit Annabel Croft spent a week on the streets of London for a BBC One documentary on homelessness. She spent some time, outside Waterloo Station with a chap called James. She was left with a real sense that James really wanted to try to help himself move off the streets.

On Christmas Eve at 1800, you can hear Annabel's documentary James - My Alcoholic Friend. It's a special follow-up to that TV documentary in which Annabel's aim is to get James off the streets and re-united with his family.

On Christmas Day at 1700, repeated on New Years' Day at 1300, you can hear In Search of the Real Drogba. Football journalist Ian McGarry travelled to the Ivory Coast with the Chelsea striker to find out more about his mission to build a new hospital in the country.

Ian gets some great access and you will hear some in-depth interviews with Didier Drogba who talks about life as a controversial Premier League player, what part religion plays in his life and why his charity work is so important to him.

Stephen Nolan turns into news quiz host on Christmas morning at 1100 for Beat the Newsmaker with guests including tv news host Nicolas Owen and Jackie Brambles.

Soccer AM'S Max Rushden makes his 5 live debut in a live show on Christmas Day at midday. Snapshot Christmas spends one hour capturing as many stories as possible from people all over the country to get a real sense of the variety of ways people are spending their Christmas Day.

Jenson Button - Champion of the World on Christmas Night at 2100 looks back at a dramatic Formula One season.

5 live Drive host Peter Allen has broadcast his programme in 2009 from Catterick barracks, from Afghanistan, and from a new miltary hospital in Edinburgh. They were three of his most powerful shows this year and the best bits from each of them can be heard in Frontline 09 which will be broadcast on New Years' Day at 1800.

We hope you enjoy some of the festive treats and best wishes to all on the blog for a happy Christmas.

Jonathan Wall is Commissioning Editor for BBC Radio 5 live

• The 5 live schedule has details of all the programmes mentioned.
• The picture, Vintage Christmas decorations, is by missteee and is used under licence.

We've had our moments with bad language on 5live Breakfast before. I'll never forget when, a few years ago, Nicky got his tongue tied trying to say West Kent Hunt. We got a couple of complaints - and a lot of people saying they'd never laughed so much. It was unintentional and certainly unplanned.

As it was when a very polite sounding woman on the phone-in earlier this year suddenly said "Oh f*** it!" in the middle of a well-argued, reasoned argument. She just, it seems, got caught up in the passion of her point - and forgot where she was. When the former Arsenal footballer Emmanuel Petit was on a while back to talk about the row over Thierry Henry's handball and described the reaction as "bull****" it was equally unexpected.

But when Rage Against the Machine swore on Breakfast this morning, some people felt we should have seen it coming. The song Killing in the Name includes the F-word in the lyrics - and when the band accepted our request for an interview for today's programme and then agreed to perform the song live from Los Angeles, we were aware of the need to address this issue.

Which is why our producer had several conversations with the band and their management about the requirement not to swear. We told them it was a breakfast show. We took them at their word when they said there would be no bad language. When it became clear on air they were including the F-words, we faded the song out and apologised.

Not before we heard some swearing on air. We're sorry for that and I apologise again to anyone who was offended.

The response on texts was in many ways similar to the West Kent Hunt incident. A minority were angry or offended. Some thought we had been naïve. A fair number reckoned the song was awful. But many people said they find these live, unplanned, unpredictable moments the highlight of their listening - and they were quick to tell us so.

Richard Jackson is Editor of the 5 live Breakfast Show

• Listen again to the item on the 5 live web site.
• The video was shot in the studio in LA and the picture shows the band performing in Paris in 2008. It's by Fábio Nascimento and it's used under licence.
• Rage Against the Machine's performance was covered by The Mail, Sky News and The Guardian. Chris on the Vexed blog pronounced the item 'awesome', Nialler 9 'amazing.

Between now and the new year I've got blog posts lined up from three of 5 live's top editors. Jonathan Wall, the network's Commissioning Editor, will tell us what's happening on 5 live over Christmas; Brett Spencer, Interactive Editor, will provide an early preview of next year's activity on the web site and the red button. Jonathan Aspinwall, editor of Up All Night, will talk us through the challenges of moving his programme - the first at 5 live to do so - to the new studios in Manchester.

Other posts from programme producers are in the works and I'll be starting a survey of 5 live's use of 'social media': why do presenters and programme makers want to use Facebook and Twitter? Are they overdoing it? Or are they just following their listeners?

Steve Bowbrick is Editor of the 5 live blog

Radio 4 followed up Victoria's appearance on Today with a long item about media access to Zimbabwe on Wednesday's Media Show. Presenter Ed Stourton (subbing for Steve Hewlett), started by saying: "...we're going to spend a good deal of this show discussing another show on another network because we think it's so interesting". Listen to the item here:

Olly Grant in The Telegraph previewed the Harare programme (under the headline 'The BBC and Zimbabwe: how the Corporation got back in') and focused on the shift in Zimbabwean Government policy that permitted the BBC's return. He quotes the programme's producer, with some fascinating insights:

"We were told they were keen to open up to the media because they want to capitalise on the World Cup in South Africa in June," says Louisa Compton, the editor of Derbyshire's show, who realised they could combine the show with an already-planned trip to Friday's World Cup draw in Cape Town. "A million phone calls and faxes" later, with negotiations channelled through the BBC's Johannesburg Bureau, Compton finally got the green light from Zanu-PF, who retain control of the country's publicity department. "It was the most difficult project I've ever organised," Compton says.

Camilla Redmond in The Guardian reviewed the outside broadcast. She thought the show got off to 'a bumpy start' but concluded positively:

...the show had done a great job of bringing to life what life in Zimbabwe is now like.

Voice of America added a line about 5 live's visit to Harare to the end of an article about radio stations broadcasting to Zimbabwean audiences from outside the country.

Victoria's own diary piece in Sunday's Observer is about the BBC's preparations for the trip, which involved the kind of 'hazardous environments' training course that war correspondents are required to take. She wrote:

When I first met up with my course compatriots - from the World Service, Newsnight, Radio 4, Millbank - there was a teeny competitive thing going on - not so much name dropping as conflict dropping. "When I was in Somalia/Iraq/Afghanistan/Liberia..." I kept quiet about the sperm washing item we did on last Tuesday's programme.

Victoria has uploaded some photos from Zimbabwe to her Facebook page and to her programme page (including the one I've used to illustrate this post, which shows women working on a Harare street) and she's been sending regular updates from her trip on Twitter and on her blog.

Steve Bowbrick is Editor of the 5 live blog

• Listen to Victoria's programme from Harare on the 5 live web site.

Victoria Derbyshire's programme has been coming live from Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, this morning. It's been pretty gripping stuff with many fascinating insights into the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans. We've heard some amazing conversations with people from all walks of life, although, as she says on her blog, it's not straightforward:

Some people don't want to be interviewed - that could be because they are slightly fearful, or it could be because they are busy. But those who have agreed to talk seem to have spoken openly.

She's also been taking calls and messages from knowledgable listeners in the UK - listen again on the 5 live web site if you didn't catch the programme live. Read updates from her trip, including some fascinating video diaries, on the Victoria Derbyshire blog and follow her on Twitter for updates through the day.

Victoria appeared on Radio 4's Today this morning, talking live from Harare about today's budget, food supplies, political freedom and white farmers:

Steve Bowbrick is Editor of the 5 live blog

• Louisa Compton, Victoria's producer, posted here in advance of the Zimbabwe trip.