You and the Night and No Music

"It's three o'clock in Accra..." said the voice preceeding the news on BBC World Service. With Ghana also being on the Greenwich Meridian, it's one of the few occasions when they're actually giving the right GMT time as well as what always seem to me like the rather pointless local times in other randomly picked cities around the world.

As pointless as the weather forecasts on so many local stations in the UK which insist on picking on arbitrary towns and villages in their bulletins: "It's currently three degrees in Pratt's Bottom". Are we really to believe these announcements are giving accurate and useful information for the benefit of resident listeners in the area concerned? Rather cynically, perhaps, I've always thought them more a somewhat contrived pretence at being a truly local station with a reporter and weather measuring equipment in the locale concerned.

At least Ofcom, the British regulator of broadcast services, are now giving out new "community" radio licences to a new tranche of areas, including several of the communities in East and West London. I'm looking forward to seeing how many of these I can pin down on FM once they get to air.

This is potentially an exciting new development in UK radio. At a time when local newspaper sales are shrinking, Community Radio Licences offer a unique opportunity to reach people: from where they're listening, to where they're listening. Truly local news, information, features, chat, even maybe educational programmes.

Surely this is where local times should come from, not some huge powerhouse of a broadcasting studio in the centre of the world's most cosmopolitan city: This is London.

Which brings me back to my music-free overnight listening choice. How ironic that nearly every time I tune into World Service, I hear the voices I was working with in local radio in Brighton in the early nineties: David Legge, today's newsreader, who used to do the light and easy "milkman's shift" on Radio Sussex, prior to the flagship breakfast programme "Good Morning Sussex" with Stewart Macintosh (who I was later to work with at the other end of the day).

Both of these Englishmen are now very accomplished and respected World Service presenters- but how very different is their style in the all-speech world.