The death of BBC Radio 4Extra

When it was first announced in 2022 that the BBC was thinking of scrapping its digital only radio station 4Extra I was shocked and outraged enough to write the following piece for Medium.

Now that the decision is final and 4Extra will cease broadcasting in Spring 2027, I wanted to re-publish what I wrote then as I feel even more outraged and saddened four years on than I did then.

It's such a waste and the BBC clearly isn't going to realise what it's lost until it's far, far too late.

Anyone wanting to read more about 4Extra might want to check out the two posts I wrote in January early 2023 about the audacious experiment that was Jake Yapp's Unwinding. The first of which you can read here, and the second of which you can read here. We will never see it's like again. 

A Love Letter to BBC Radio 4Extra

The BBC launched its digital radio station BBC7, later 4Extra, in 2002. Now it plans to close it

When I first heard in late May that BBC Director General Tim Davie planned to scrap 4Extra, I was not exactly surprised (to my mind, the BBC have never really understood the popularity of the station) but I was very saddened. It all seemed so pointless.

The closure is part of a series of cuts over the next couple of years which are meant to make up for the deficit caused by the UK government freezing the BBC licence fee. But 4Extra only costs the corporation £3 million a year. Or, as a recent episode of Radio 4’s Feedback programme put it, “Two Gary Linekar’s”. Scrapping the station wouldn’t even touch the financial black hole the BBC finds itself in, so why do it?

Is the BBC’s relationship with the station akin to the one that ITV had with its ratings busting show Heartbeat? A show that was massively successful but in such a way (for its gentle, nostalgic characters and storylines), and with such an audience (older viewers) that the station was utterly embarrassed by it and ended up killing the show off?

There could be something in this, if only because 4Extra punches above its weight in terms of listeners (RAJAR figures for February 2022 report 4Extra’s listeners at 1.89million, more than Radio 1Xtra, which is not being threatened with the axe) and, yes, it is stereotyped as the station where pensioners go to listen to repeats of Hancocks Half Hour and The Goon Show.

But to stereotype 4Extra in this way is to underestimate the variety and breadth of its programming.

The station has, over the past twenty years, commissioned some exceptionally strong content, particularly Ben Moor’s Sci-Fi comedy Undone (3 series of this cult gem were commissioned by BBC7 and broadcast between 2006 and 2010) and Podcast Radio Hour (a long running review programme for podcasts).

The Comedy Club strand of programming, which broadcasts seven days a week between 10pm and midnight provides good late evening listening to contemporary and recent (ish) British radio comedies, as well as providing regular presenting shifts to the current crop of comedians. A gig that many, I suspect, appreciated during the past two years when Zoom gigs were their main source of income.

During the hell that was the 2019 Brexit negotiations, the station was a refuge for those who needed a break from shouty politics, thanks to its lack of news bulletins or current affairs programming.

In recent years, the station has provided a wider audience for harder to find programming, for example a recent broadcast of a fascinating documentary about the songwriters Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, which was originally broadcast on BBC Radio Bristol in 2021. They’ve also broadcast content from the US’s NPR such as TED Radio Hour and The Moth Radio Hour, and podcasts such as Serial, which was broadcast on the station in 2014.

Because of its remit, 4Extra can dedicate long hours, weeks and months to themed broadcasting. This would include their broadcast of every episode of every series of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy at 6:30pm, Monday-Friday, for months, with no break between series. It might not have been original content, but it’s a feat that needs saluting all the same.

On the subject of the stations Sci Fi content, it should also be pointed out that — for me — a key part of the stations appeal is its stranding pattern: You know that if you turn on between 6pm and 7pm it’s Sci Fi/Fantasy/Horror, 7pm — 8pm is vintage comedy, 8–9pm is crime and thrillers, and so on.

Some of the shows 4Extra introduced me to would include the aforementioned Undone, Andy Hamilton’s sitcom set in Hell Old Harry’s Game, the surreal opus that is The Brightonomicon, Dr Phil Hammond’s NHS GP satire Polyoaks, multiple Simon Brett comedies, the impeccable Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics, the delightfully eccentric Big Science with Helen Keen, Noirish Roman gumshoe Falco, Medieval slueth Cadfael, the whimsically amusing The Blackburn Files, the moreish To Hull And Back, and 1980s cop drama Detective. Regardless of the schedule, it should also be said (and a recent contributor to Feedback mentioned this) that the station is an absolute godsend after midnight if you can’t sleep.

Critics will tell you that 4Extra is cosy, comfortable. Like a pair of slippers. But, as the commissioning of Undone and the audience sourced satire show Newsjack demonstrate, the station is also innovative. A case in point is its long running Friday night show Podcast Radio Hour. Just as, years ago, John Peels Radio 1 show made musical sense of Riot Grrrl for me, so Radio 4Extra was the station to demonstrate to me not only what a podcast was, but also why they were so popular. This was because it took the bold step of broadcasting the whole of series 1 of Serial on week nights over several weeks in 2014. When Podcast Radio Hour was launched not long after, I felt as though I’d been given the keys to the podcast cupboard: The show introduced me to the likes of Best Pick, Reasons To Be Cheerful, and We Are History.

I first began listening to 4Extra via the digibox/TV back when it was still BBC7 and I was still living at home. Often dad and I couldn’t find anything on TV to watch so we’d listen to some of the radio adaptations of novels, particularly Whiskey Galore and Cold Comfort Farm.

Once I’d left home I saved up to buy a digital radio so that I could listen to 6Music. But I found myself listening to 4Extra a lot more, especially on weekday evenings once I’d got in from work. I could cook to Hancocks Half Hour, Round The Horne, The Navy Lark or The Goon Show, all shows I’d heard on BBC cassettes years ago.

I purchased a portable digital radio a couple of years later in order to listen to The Comedy Club in bed. Once 4Extra is taken off the air, and is only available via BBC Sounds, I’ll have to fork out several hundred pounds for a smartphone in order to listen in bed. And that’s only going to be an option if 4Extra exists online in its current recognisable form, rather than being absorbed into BBC Sounds as non-structured ‘content’.

Judging from the volume of upset letters back in May to the Radio Times, and to the similarly large and upset volume of correspondence to last weeks episode of Feedback, I have come to the conclusion that I am very far from alone in my sense of sadness at the BBC’s decision to scrap the station.

What has made me angry has been the vagueness of the announcement, and the failure of Tim Davie to in any way defend or justify his decision to scrap the station. Is he hoping to whip up a storm that will see the station saved? This worked for 6Music and the Asian Network when they were under the axe. Or does he just not care? It could be that he expects the 4Extra audience to die off soon and, as such, suspects the outcry won’t last long. I hope that I am mistaken, but it doesn’t look good.

Lurid and ridiculous tabloid stories with a punk link, part 3: The Punk Princess

Princess Gloria Von Thurn Und Taxis kept the tabloids, broadsheets and society columns going for years in the late 1980s and early 1990s thanks to her punk past, outrageous outfits and haircuts, and her passion for motorbikes. Eccentric aristocracy always make good copy, and a punk princess who comes across as down to earth and not minding interacting with the press, seems to have cheered the press pack up after years of following Princess Diana about. Think of it as reporting on Steps for years then suddenly getting the brief to follow Lady Gaga and/or Charlotte Church on a night out in the early to mid noughties. 

How Gloria came to be The Punk Princess in the first place reads like something out of a Human League song: She was working [as a waitress?] in a cocktail bar… in Munich, not Sheffield, when “confirmed bachelor” Prince Johannes Baptista de Jesus Maria Louis Miguel Friedrich Bonfifazius Lommoral Furst Von Thurn und Taxis decided to marry her. She was 19, he was 53. Following their marriage, a profile piece by Dylan Jones in the Sunday Times from 1993 reveals, both parties pretty much carried on as they had when they were single: He apparently continued to “dally with young men” and she continued to ride motorbikes and hang out with rich types and popstars while wearing chain mail, mini skirts and designer leathers while sporting “baroque punk hairstyles”. 

After the death of her husband, Gloria put on the pearls and tweeds and put away the hair dye and motorbikes. This led to reports that she was trying to sort the estate out while not treating the servants well. 

In 2014 she was interviewed by Vanity Fair and it was revealed that her interests lay more in portraiture than punk. The piece also mentioned that she had close links to the Catholic Church and that she was a friend of Pope Benedict. The picture accompanying the piece showed her in glasses, sporting a huge egg neckace, while flanked by two leather clad bikers. 

Rotten Wood: A brief etymological history of punk

What do words really mean? Do they mean more than one thing? Where did they come from?

Such questions refer to etymology: The history and origins of words. 

My interest in the etymology of punk lies in my past as an English graduate. While researching and writing the initial series of essays that sewed the seed for the ongoing punk women book project, I was reminded of the fact that the word 'punk' had been in existence since Shakespeare's time, if not earlier. 

I was also still working at the university library at the time, and the floor I shelved on was mainly made up of Languages (the 400's), Literature (the 800's) and History (900s) books.* Meaning that I was in daily proximity to not just the language dictionaries, but also the etymological dictionaries; great big bulky things that explained the history of specific English words over the centuries.  

Study of these etymological dictionaries revealed that the earliest usage of the word punk dates back to 1596, although this excellent piece published on the British Library website has it slightly earlier at 'before 1575', from a ballad called 'Simon The Olde Kinge', at which point the word referred to a prostitute. Specifically, it was used to refer to women in Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and in Jonson’s The Alchemist, two texts I studied for my degree. The word 'punkling', in use around the same time, refers to a young prostitute. 

The British Library piece mentioned above also found the word punk being used to refer to a young man being kept by an older man for sex as early as 1698, from a "bawdy song, 'Women's Complaint to Venus'."

Traditional ballads, which were sung, printed and distributed on the streets, were historical sources that I didn't have access to when writing this piece, but in retrospect it feels obvious that as sources they would be ahead of the game when it comes to changes in slang and language use over the centuries. 

So far as the Etymological dictionary research went, the next recorded use of the word punk is in the 18th century when it was used (mainly in the US) to describe a piece of rotten wood.

It's early in the history of the word but already we have three entirely separate meanings of the word that suggest someone, or something, is suspect. 

In the late nineteenth century there's a slight twist in etymological proceedings with the use of the phrase 'punk and plaster' being used by tramps to refer to bread and butter, which no doubt says much about the state of British bread baking at the time, as well as the British enthusiasm for butter. 

It's in the early twentieth century that the word punk becomes more codified to formally include the meaning 'passive male prostitute', often in a prison context, following on from it's earlier, seventeenth century usage to refer to a young man being kept by an older man for sex. It's also in the early twentieth century that we first encounter the word being used to refer to a 'worthless person'. It is these two particular set of meanings that are often quoted when the etymological origins of punk are being discussed, either because people haven't bothered to look any further back, or because it has suited the agendas of various punk writers over the years to go with this particular origin story: It being somewhat sexier to them than sixteenth century strumpets and harlots presumably. 

In order to try and hammer down the precise timeline for when the word punk starts to be used to refer to a particular style of music, I've had to go beyond etymological dictionaries and look as well at dictionaries and histories of music journalism. In terms of when the word punk was first used to describe music or subculture, the Oxford English dictionary says 1974 but this is a bit too late to be entirely accurate, and the British Library article agrees. 

If we’re taking into account journalists use of it to describe artists and scenes that didn’t end up being codified as punk in the recognised sound of 1976 sense, it goes back a few years earlier than that. Like me, the British Library article has homed in on the ? and the Mysterians song '96 Tears', which was released in 1966. As the British Library piece acknowledges, this song was retrospectively described as being punk by the US rock journalist Dave Marsh in 1971. The piece also points out that that the words 'punk music' were also used a year earlier, in 1970, on flyers to promote the minimalist electronic music of the band Suicide. 

As such, I would conclude that the use of the word punk to describe a particular musical and cultural moment in time that we would recognise historically as the punk scene probably starts around 1974 or 1975, but in terms of its use to describe music and musicians, it’s a few years before that. 

What's striking about the etymological history of punk is that, right from the start, the word was being used as a pejorative, a negative. Whether that be to refer to a woman or girl thought to be a prostitute, or to rotten wood, to suspect bread, to a man or a boy thought to be a prostitute, or to a generally worthless person. If it was punk, it was suspect, no good, worthless, terrible. And if you were a music writer in the late 1960s or early to mid 1970s and you saw music being made by some generally suspect youths, rougher than the normal rock'n'roll stars in waiting, it would perhaps be a natural leap to think of them as punks and the music they made as punk music. If there were rumours that some of the young, sexy, male musicians attached to those scenes did sell themselves for sex then all the better as that would fit a certain unspoken subcultural credo about rock'n'roll, male delinquency and male homosexuality. The earlier etymological history of punk could therefore be conveniently forgotten about.

That said, because the first known usage of the word punk is from either 'before 1575' or 1596, and at both points it was just another way of calling a woman or girl a strumpet, harlot or prostitute. This means that, if we look at the history of the word punk in a crushingly literal sense, the first punk was definitely a woman.

* It also contained Philosophy (100's) and Generalia (000's), the latter of which contained all the comix books and all the history of journalism books.

Photo by Brian Lundquist on Unsplash

Droll, disinterested and devastatingly incisive: How The Economist covered punk

During my 2014 journey through various newspaper databases I would occasionally come across reports by writers at The Economist. The quality and insight of these stories piqued my interest and led me to do a separate durational study on The Economist database for stories involving the word 'punk' for the years 1975-1995. 

While there were less results than in my wider search, those that I did find tended to be of a marked contrast to the stories I was reading in the Daily Mail and The Times. By contrast to the hysteria, The Economist tended to write about punk in a removed, faux disinterested, frequently droll, always devastatingly incisive way. 

As is often the case with that publication, their writers seemed to have a knack, at the height of public and press hysteria over punk, to cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter. This is particularly evident in two stories they published about punk in the summer of 1977.

The first, titled ‘More money than music in nihilism’, concerns punk and the Silver Jubilee. The unnamed writer (The Economist doesn’t use bylines), sets out his or her stall quite early on, with the following:

Punk, or new-wave rock, gained notoriety when Mr Bill Grundy of Thames Television interviewed the Sex Pistols last year. The group so shocked the public (ie, delighted the press) and scared the record companies with its obscene language that it has already made £125,000 in broken recording contracts alone.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but, while they aren’t revealing anything readers probably didn’t already know here, the tone is striking. It suggests that both writer and publication are not prepared to join in with the moral panic around punk: they will comment on it, but they aren’t fooled by the machinations in the press and music industry that are fuelling it, and they don’t think their readers should be fooled either. 

Further on into the piece, the writer muses on what is meant to be shocking about punk, and concludes with the following shrewd observation:

This can be seen as just a re affirmation of rock music’s anti-establishment roots, which have been somewhat replaced over the past 10 years as the original working-class heroes have learned to enjoy the lifestyles of the rich.

Again, not imparting any new information here, but putting the point across in a delightfully low key snarky manner. They also aren’t fooled by the working class posturing of some of the punk fraternity either, reporting that while Mick Jones “once claimed that he had never lived below the 17th floor”, his bandmate Joe Strummer “went to a public school.”

The second of their pieces from the summer of 1977 is my personal favourite. It concerns the ongoing pitched battles between Teds and Punks on London’s Kings Road that summer, and is headed up ‘For an unlimited season, in Chelsea’. Full marks for droll understatement there.

In amongst the initial reportage of pitched battles on the Kings Road (or ‘Tribal warfare’ as the writer has it) are some interesting nuggets of information, including the observation that other people outside of the two tribes were being caught up in the violence, simply by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Last Saturday this meant a group of homosexuals who were protesting against the conviction of the editor of Gay News on a charge of blasphemous libel. 

As well as revealing in one stark sentence the extent to which the past is indeed a different country, I can’t imagine any other publication reporting on the Teds v Punks skirmishes including this particular detail.

The report goes on to describe the pitched battles as being “London’s latest tourist attraction” and points out that, as well as participants travelling from outside of London to be there, there were also some who’d travelled from outside of the country to be there as well, the report mentioning “continental” Teds and Punks. 

There then follows a thoughtful section on why the Teds and Punks have more in common than that which divides them, and the report concludes by offering some theories as to why it’s all kicking off in Chelsea in the first place. Their conclusion being that anti-hooligan strategies employed by the Metropolitan Police against Chelsea FC have led to violent elements gathering on or around the Kings Road instead, thus fuelling the violence. Not a popular conclusion, I suspect, when it came to fuelling the moral panic around punk, but I daresay there was something in it. 

While The Economist doesn’t report on punk per se in the 1980s, there is a thoughtful piece about the youth of Poland from summer 1982 (‘A lost generation’) that points out that, since the outlawing of Solidarity at the end of 1981, many of the country’s youth have turned away from politics and have embraced punk instead. 

Other mentions of punk throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s include referring to Colonel Qaddafi as “the Libyan punk” in 1981, some ruminating on punks fashion legacy in 1988, and a deliciously bitchy piece on Nigel Kennedy from 1991, following his dissing by the controller of Radio 3, John Drummond.

Mr Kennedy’s carefully cultivated cockney accent and extravagant clothes led Mr Drummond to accuse him of becoming the ‘Liberace of the nineties.’ 

Ouch. It’s like reading the 1990s equivalent of Bridgerton’s Lady Whistledown. 

Does any of this matter? In some ways yes, in some ways no. What The Economist coverage does, nearly fifty years after it was written, is provide a wider context to press coverage about the UK punk scene in those early years of hysteria and mayhem. The very nature of the coverage suggests that not everyone in the press was prepared to play along with the moral panic around punk, and that some intelligent mainstream press reportage and coverage was happening outside of punk. It’s important that intelligent and important questions were being asked, and that context was being provided. It’s easy to forget this when you look at the cultural narrative around punk, which tends to be written in black and white binary opposites.

Photo of London by Hugo Sousa on Unsplash

A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse

F. Tennyson Jesse's 1934 novel was based on what the back cover describes as "a sensational murder trial in the 1920s", namely the Thompson/Bywaters case. For anyone reading the book who is aware of that case, it means that you are coming to the book already knowing what the ending will be. While it's unusual to come to a novel already knowing the ending, it doesn't actually spoil the enjoyment of what feels like a surprisingly modern story.

Our tale begins just before the outbreak of World War I as a bildungsroman, with the teenage London born and based (anti) heroine Julia Almond about to leave high school to study fashion illustration at college. The picture we get of Julia at this point is of a slightly spoilt, slightly attractive, charismatic child given to pashes on teachers. She has a throughly developed imagination and her chief loves in life are her teacher, her dog Bobby and her own space. At this point, she is about 75% Collette's Claudine, 25% St Trinians.

From the fashion illustration course she uses her connections to gain an apprenticeship at a fashion boutique, where she rises through the years from apprentice to shop girl to fashion buyer and dependable second in command. She has her own money, she has glamorous friends who she goes to see in plays at the theatre, and can be found creeping up the stairs to bed at her parents house in the early hours of the morning.

When her father dies, her income is not enough for her or her mother to live on and it is decided that Julia's loathsome aunt, uncle and cousin will move into the house to keep them afloat financially. This arrangement means her mother acting like a skivvy to the Beales and Julia being forced to share her room with a younger cousin who bears a remarkable resemblance to a slightly older Violet Elizabeth Bott from Just William.

Julia, feeling claustrophobic and trapped, is faced with a choice at this point: She can move out, gain a greater degree of independence but be forced to live a hand to mouth existence in seedy digs on her wages, she can stay at home and endure the unpleasant, interfering Beales and continue to share a room with the nauseating Elsa, or she can accept the offer of marriage from Herbert Starling, a family friend and older man recently widowed, who has lusted after her for years.  She chooses to marry Herbert, despite having no real idea of what marriage will mean.

Her marriage to Herbert Starling, and what it will mean, isn't exactly up there with Tess Derbyfield being 'rescued' by Alec D'Urberville, but it's similar in the sense that it's at this point that a sense of unease begins to creep into the readers mind. At first, things are largely fine - Julia has a nice flat in a nice neighbourhood with a nice maid, who loves her dog Bobby. Herbert is away, fighting in the war, so she doesn't spend much time with him and is largely left to her own devices outside of work. She can, at this point, essentially live the life she wanted - that of a working single woman, living in a nice house. It's when the war ends that things change and she's forced to reckon with the consequences of what marriage means.

Julia, unusually, manages to hold onto her job and is quickly earning more than her husband in his gentleman's fashion outlet. This, and her unwillingness to allow him his 'rights', cause a great deal of the tension in the marriage, which didn't start from a happy place to begin with. 

When Julia re-meets Leonard Croft, who appears early on in the book as a naughty child in a class of younger children that the teenage Julia is asked to look after for the afternoon, she is attracted to this confident, charismatic younger man just as he is to her. 

Tennyson Jesse does a good job of summoning up the feverish atmosphere of Leo and Julia's love affair and their letters to each other, and this section of the book speeds along while also building a sense of increased desperation and the sense that their inner worlds are bleeding into the real world, with disastrous consequences. 

The later sections of the book are the ones that feel the most modern in some ways, with the issues Julia faces still relevant today. It is, needless to say, the final section of the book that is the most harrowing. Tennyson Jesse has created a heroine who is so vivid, so alive, so determined that it's a shock to see her brought so low.

This is a book that haunts you and stays with you long after you have finished reading it.