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Those of us who lived through the early 1990s in Britain will remember intense debate about the form that BBC radio's intended "rolling news" station, inspired by the giving-over of Radio 4's FM frequency to rolling news during the Gulf War and then its Long Wave frequency to rolling news during the 1992 election. The original idea was for a rolling news station on Long Wave based on the traditional Radio 4 approach and style and simulcasting that station's main programmes (Today, The World at One, PM, The World Tonight) as its backbone, but concerted political pressure on the BBC - especially from the 'Year in Provence' crowd who could pick up Radio 4 on LW but no other British radio - led them to turn around and create a combined rolling news & sport station which became the enduring success story of Radio 5 Live, now almost a quarter-century with us.

Whether the growth of the Premier League could have survived within a curious combination of styles and formats such as the original Radio 5 is highly debatable in itself, and it is likely that the station's children's output would have been doomed anyway after the 'People & Programmes' report of February 1995, considered far too middle-class and elitist. But the tone that Five Live adopted - very much in line with that report - with its younger, more working-class and more non-metropolitan approach, was wildly different from the tone that the originally-planned News Service would have taken, and was quickly recognised as an almost accidental success enabling the BBC to reach and connect with new audiences. Multiple other things were changing in British life at the time, of course, not least its politics ...

... and this is where an intriguing suggestion comes to mind. The blokey, sport-driven, soundbite-led approach of Five Live was made for Tony Blair (who became Labour leader shortly after it began broadcasting; it launched on 28th March 1994, and John Smith died on 12th May) and Blair for Five Live; their rises seem directly aligned and connected to each other. Neither, you feel, could have thrived so well without the other. Part of the reason for the unexpected outcome of the 2017 general election was that it was the first for 25 years without Blair or Cameron, i.e. without a pop-culture-driven ordained and chosen winner. That 1992 election itself had, very significantly, been the last before Five Live and before the Premier League, chiefly, had by association taken Sky News into a considerable amount of homes already on analogue satellite by 1997. I think it is fair to say that, had the originally-planned News Service existed and Five Live not existed, the phantom 1997 election could have been far more driven by the traditional idea of serious politics, and therefore much less well-suited to a Blair figure.

So here is the big question: if News Service had just been launched and Five Live hadn't been, would the impetus, reason and desire for the Labour Party to choose Blair after John Smith died not have been there, and would there have been a much greater impetus, reason and desire for the party to choose a much more serious politician such as Gordon Brown, whose style and approach would have fitted much better with the Radio 4-based News Service that might have existed? I'd say yes, definitely. And then what?
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