Gong

Tuesday night and another party for our new Mayor, as Boris attended the radio industry’s annual gong-fest, the Sony Radio Awards.

Johnson joined a few hundred producers, presenters, managers and agents in the (somewhat warm) Great Room of the Grosvenor House Hotel on London’s Park Lane, to hand out the Radio Academy’s Community Award. A little lacklustre, the Mayor did at least find fun in the fact that the winner was Lights out London, by Capital Radio.

It was a deservedly great night for the BBC World Service, which picked up four golds, for Newshour (The News & Current Affairs Programme Award), World Have Your Say (The Listener Participation Award), Owen Bennett-Jones (The News Journalist of the Year) and the brilliant Bangladesh Boat Project (The Multiplatform Radio Award) which deserves all the plaudits it gets, for a clever use of Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps and more.

Elsewhere at the ceremony, Chris Moyles’s parents were brought on stage to present their son with his Breakfast Show Award. Unfortunately Moyles didn’t have the grace and wit to make the most out of the surprise, but instead fell back on his standard self-indulgent, churlish fare.

More heartening was a wonderful thank-you to the BBC’s departing Director of Audio and Music (that’s radio to us normal people). Jenny Abramski is leaving the Corporation to chair the National Lottery Heritage Fund and her old commercial foe Ralph Bernard presented her with a Special Award and a loving tribute to 39 and a half years of working in radio.

While Simon Mayo picked up an extremely well deserved gold for Speech Broadcaster of the Year, Jon Ronson and Geoff Lloyd were robbed of the glory that should have been theirs in the Feature Award and Music Personality categories.

Finally, the Academy’s special Gold Award went to a familiar voice on Radio 2 and the Light Programme before that, Brian Matthew, who closed the night with a funny but moving speech. 

Oh happy day

A little good news to cheer despondent Londoners today, as radio station Talk Sport has sacked presenter James Whale for breaching broadcasting rules on political impartiality.

Whale, who in recent photographs, has seemed to be modelling himself after Gary Glitter, is known for his outspoken views and had been at the station since its 1995 beginnings as Talk Radio.

Complaints were made to regulator Ofcom, after he urged his audience to vote for Boris, a spokesperson for Talk Sport said of the outburst on March 20th: “there was a clear breach of the rules and that we had no choice but to terminate his contract”.

The presenter’s agent Stuart Hobday said it’s come as a “huge shock” to Whale, though quite how he can be surprised after working for over 30 years in speech radio, an industry governed by political regulations which have barely changed in that time, is a mystery to most onlookers. In fact it is understood that the host not only told listeners to ‘vote Boris’ once, but repeated his views on a subsequent broadcast.

Ofcom has yet to complete it’s investigation, which follows a ruling it made last year that concluded the station was responsible for a serious breach of the same broadcasting code on impartiality in politics when another phone-in host and MP George Galloway criticised a rival for the constituency of Poplar and Limehouse, Jim Fitzpatrick.

Maybe, just maybe, there is justice after all.