Saturday, February 17, 2007
I've been listening to Radio 4's Archive Hour on gay and lesbian radio. No surprises that the 'B' word isn't ever mentioned. But in it's coverage of BBC queer programming amidst the work by other radio stations it does bring back memories, most strongly of 'Out This Week', a sometimes rather po-faced half-hour news and current-affairs programme on Radio 5 that I came across while coming out in the mid-nineties. It apparently ran for five years and I probably listened to it for about the last three. By the time they had finished they'd already been transferred to a late slot on Sunday evenings and the BBC announced it was cancelling the show because 'gay issues were now mainstream' so we didn't need our little show any more. And ten years on you realise what bollocks that was. True, back then I couldn't believe they bring back Doctor Who let alone have him snog a dashing fifty-first century guy, that openly queer people wouldn't get typecast as 'the gay' on TV and in films. But it's still a hetero, hetero, hetero world out there and all the gay marriages in Ambridge are going to change that. The fact that an hour long programme can cover the last ten years of queer radio in the last five minutes of the show would suggest a marginalisation of the LGB voice on radio, not that it's conquered the mainstream. So, when do we get rid of Women's Hour , on the grounds that surely women's issues are mainstream? When do we get rid of all the Radio 4 shows about books and reading as that has been proved to be a fairly mainstream activity? When do we get rid of Quote, Unquote , because it's shit?
Labels: BBC, bisexual, documentaries, gay, lesbian, media, news, queer, radio, Radio 4, Radio 5
