For underground music talent, it’s back to the BBC barricades. In 2010, a high-profile campaign was launched to save leftfield-leaning new music station 6 Music. Were it not for the 25,000 emails that bombarded the BBC in support of the station, we might never have heard of Fontaines DC, Idles or Jockstrap. And now a similar groundswell of objection is rising to the news that all 32 of the station’s talent-hunting BBC Introducing DJs nationwide have been put on notice of redundancy, following leaked proposals that suggest the Beeb is considering culling two-thirds of their output, or merging shows into larger regional broadcasts.
Now this might, at first glance, look like a very post-Brexit sort of streamlining; cutting down on frivolous, niche-interest expenditure so that more of our precious license fee can be syphoned into Claudia Winkleman’s Traitors knitwear budget. Plus, the most high-profile acts discovered through the network – Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, Blossoms, Florence + The Machine, James Bay – strongly suggest that UK culture might be better off if BBC Introducing were encased in concrete and kicked off a boat into the North Sea.
