• It’s been quite a week for us all at LBC. In case you missed it the station went national on Tuesday on the Digital One DAB platform. If you think about it, it is quite ludicrous that this country has never had a national newstalk station. Talk Radio, in its various incarnations, was indeed a speech radio station, but it wasn’t a phonein station as such. And neither is 5 Live, although there are phonein elements to it with 606 and Nicky Campbell’s Your Call. My point is that there has never been a national radio station where for more or less 24 hours a day listeners can phone in and take part in the conversation. When I went to Sydney a couple of years ago I found out that there are eleven such radio stations in Sydney alone. In the USA they are two a penny. So why not here? Maybe it’s the ludicrous was British radio is regulated, or maybe the industry has been short-sighted enough to believe that advertisers would be reluctant to advertise on a station which would inevitably have presenters with strong opinions and callers with even stronger ones. Maybe they thought the advertisers wouldn’t want to advertise in the middle of a phonein on female genital mutilation.

Actually, the truth is something more prosaic. I suspect it’s more to do with the stranglehold the BBC has always had on speech radio. I remember around 10 years ago I presented a monthly book programme on the late lamented OneWord Radio. After a couple of years the BBC decided that it would replicate OneWord and started BBC 7 (now Radio 4 Extra). Well no one could compete with that and within a matter of months OneWord shut down.

OneWord never had a big backer. It was a startup on a limited budget. LBC is part of Global Radio which also owns Capital, Classic FM, XFM, Heart and Smooth. It’s the UK’s biggest radio group. By enabling LBC to go national Global have made a clear statement of intent and it’s now up to us to repay the confidence and financial investment they have made in us.

LBC – Leading Britain’s Conversation from Cute Kitty on Vimeo.

  • To coincide with us going national, we also have a new Imaging package. I have no idea what it cost, but these things never come cheap, and this new imaging is eyewateringly brilliant. Each segment of the day has its own version of the main package and on Drive, I think we have the best one of all. It gives me goosebumps every time I hear the talkup music or the top of the hour opener. I actually think it has made me a better presenter, as it helps me kick off each hour in a really pacy, upbeat way. My colleague, Chris Lowrie, who has overseen the whole project should be justly proud of himself.

When you go national you want to hit the ground running and demonstrate that what you do is relevant not just to existing listeners but new listeners all over the country. ‘Big names, Iain, big names’ was the mantra from our Managing Editor James Rea. Well, I think between my production team and me, we delivered, with Michael Gove, Harriet Harman, Germaine Greer, Andrew Mitchell, Alastair Campbell, Lord Ashcroft, Danny Alexander, Jeremy Hunt, Ed Balls, Philip Hammond, Natalie Bennett, Zac Goldsmith, David Davis, Helen Mirren and many others gracing our airwaves over the last four days of the week. And we had huge amounts of press coverage with my interviews with Gove, Alexander, Balls and Hammond generating mentions in the Mail, Guardian, Telegraph and Sun throughout the week.

  • On Thursday we had our quarterly meeting where we get the detailed breakdown of our listening figures. It’s a meeting which all presenters and producers approach with some trepidation. But I was pleased to find out that the figures for DRIVE have increased both year on year and quarter on quarter. We now have 427,000 listeners in London compared to 365,000 for the same quarter (September to December) in 2012. The audience share has also increased from 2.7% t0 4.0%, only 0.1% behind Peter Allen on 5Live.

It will be interesting to see how quickly we as a station, and Drive as a programme, can grow a national audience. We’re not changing our editorial content but I don’t think we need to. Very few of our segments are ever exclusively about London anyway. I want to make much more use of the Global newsrooms around the country, but the phonein subjects will remain similar to what we have done in the past. What will gradually change is the number of calls we take from outside London and the South East. Only a fool would predict how many extra national listeners we will have in the first few weeks, but over time there is certainly the potential to at least double the audience.

  • I think LBC has an incredibly bright future ahead of it. If you’ve never tried us out, do tune your digital radio to LBC between 4 and 8pm on a weekday and see what you think. In case you hadn’t worked it out, that’s when I’m on…