You can listen to Tony Blackburn for hours. Three a day, fifteen a week, sixty a month, and so on, ad nauseam. If you don’t like him, you can turn him off. But that won’t make any difference. Nine-till-twelve, five days a week, the peak-ether’s his, to do much as he likes with.
Radio is based on untested assumptions. None more so (and probably none less flatteringly so) than daytime Radio One. Blackburn might have been a fluffy, piquant, whimsical, inconsequential pop-and-chatter Ariel and never made an assumption in his life. But that isn’t the case. Tony Blackburn thinks about radio, thinks about what he’s doing, and expands on his conclusions with disarming enthusiasm. He’s surprisingly forthright. And indeed, he’s buoyant, as well he might be. His thinking underlies the character of most of Radio One.
His feeling for music, as such, is uncluttered: “I’m not interested in going into music deeply, because that’s when you lose the audience,” he explains. “John Peel does that sort of thing. If I were offered a show like his, I’d turn it down. If he did a morning show, it wouldn’t be worth turning the transmitter on. Pop music is like a can of beans. It’s there. You open it up, and enjoy it. A record comes in, and if I like it – if we like it – I play it for six weeks, bash it to smithereens, and it’s dropped. Two or three years later it becomes an oldie. Pop may have some lasting value, but I’m not that deeply involved with it. I can’t talk about music too sensibly. That’s why I don’t like doing review programmes. I like a record or I don’t. And if I do, I don’t really know why.”
The details of Blackburn’s career are a little too stark to reveal much more of his personality, anything by way of hidden depths. He had just completed a diploma in business studies when he answered a music paper ad with an audition tape and was broadcasting for the pirate Radio London within three days. The Marine Offences Bill was in process but Blackburn had a manager, Harold Davison, who masterminded his appointment to Radio One. He’s been there, ever more substantially, ever since. It wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind. All along, he’d wanted to be a singer.
And he still has ambitions towards which he sees music as “a stepping stone.” “What I’d like to do is quiz shows. I’d like to be doing things like Hughie Green. I admire Hughie Green very much. I think he’s very good at what he does. I’d like to do something like that. Or The Sale of the Century. Something out-and-out commercial.” Pop-and-chatter has its restrictions. He’d like to do a chat show, like Parkinson. But he feels, as yet that he hasn’t either the age, or the depth of character, for something quite so heavy.
Blackburn has a taste for authority. He’s a Conservative. And a taste for money. He’s opposed to the tax system, as he often remarks on his programme. It doesn’t provide enough incentive for people to be be productive. For him, for instance, to go out and open supermarkets. Being a DJ is a risky business, in contrast with mining, for example, where a miner as assured of a job in the pits for life, and it merits in consequence a high rate of pay. Not anyone could do it, he says. Anyone can be a miner.
Authority is the keynote of his music policy. There’s too much freedom of choice at the BBC, he feels. One person should choose all the music, for all the shows. It wouldn’t affect him: “If the right person were choosing the records, they would choose the ones I like anyway.”
If Tony Blackburn has a dream, it is to see Radio 1 modelled on American AM radio, and better still, limited to 40 records. It has a devastating simplicity. Radio London used to do it, he remembers. “The Fat Forty we used to call it. You start off with a top-ten record. Then any record between 11 and 40. Then a climber: a new release or a revived 45 top-ten an American record or an album track, and that makes up half an hour. You just revolve the system, 24 hours a day. That’s the basic way to get a big audience, because they only want to hear hit records. If you drift one record away from a familiar tune, you’ve had it.”
Blackburn has thought hard about this system. He realises that it implies a high degree of audience manipulation. But he doesn’t mind. “We all do it,” he says. He quotes one of his favourite radio stations, WABC, in New York City. As he points out, it plays hit records. “There might sometimes be one you’re not sure about, but if you listen to the station for a little bit, you’re brainwashed into liking it (As a matter of opinion WABC is arguably the most drearily garrulous and least imaginative of New York’s music stations. It has the city’s highest ratings and bears an unnerving similarity to daytime Radio ONE).
The impact of brainwashing, of a sustained dose of narrowly selected music and aimless banter, is something else Blackburn has thought about but not much. The question, one of several which might fairly arise, of whether this kind of dosage compounds the servitude of housebound women is another thing he doesn’t go
“too deeply” into. Even so, he thinks not. There is a compelling thoroughness about Tony Blackburn’s views and a dogged, unreserved loyalty that those elements of daytime radio that unfailingly attract the most pertinent criticism.
He declares his show as “a pleasant bit of entertainment in the background. If you like – inane chatter. I think there’s room for a station that comes on and is full of a lot of people talking a load of nonsense.” But the whole thing is, that it isn’t to be taken seriously, something his critics (and he is not without them) obviously fail to appreciate. You mustn’t listen the wrong way, not too hard. “It would drive me mad,” says Tony Blackburn, “if I had to physically sit and listen to David Hamilton’s show. Or mine, for that matter.”
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