jonathan.rawle.org

It has emerged that customers in Northern Ireland who bank with the Nationwide building society, and who used cash machines belonging to Northern Bank, did not have the sums of money they withdrew debited from their accounts. The fault has existed since November, and 7,500 customers have been affected, withdrawing a total of £375,000 between them. However, it has only just been discovered, and Nationwide have written to all the affected customers to tell them that the amount owed will be deducted from their accounts on 10 March.

Nationwide have apologised for the error, and have, quite rightly, said that if anyone goes overdrawn as a result, they will not be charged. Yet some people still aren’t happy, and have complained that it’s too much money to take from their accounts at once. Yet if they don’t have the money still in their accounts, it’s money they’ve spent twice over, which rightly belongs to the bank.

Why didn’t people notice that the money hadn’t been taken from their accounts? If people are in real hardship because Nationwide are claiming their money, the amount in question must be a significant sum to them. So why weren’t they suspicious when they suddenly had that extra money to spend? If on the other hand, the cash withdrawn is only a small amount to a particular customer so that they didn’t notice, it’s also too small an amount to make a fuss over when it has to be repaid.

This had been going on for more than three months, yet it seems none of the customers affected reported it to Nationwide for a long time. Surely they will all have received at least two monthly statements during that time, so should have noticed the discrepancy? Some of them must have been hoping the bank wouldn’t find out, and they’d get to keep the extra money. As for the rest, they probably don’t even look at their statements. People should really get into the habit of checking their bank statements – after all, next time around, it could be that the bank has debited the withdrawals twice. It’s in the customer’s interest to check that all the transactions are correct.

Following the news that GCap Media are to scrap their theJazz and Planet Rock digital radio stations, it seemed that Classic FM, as an analogue station, would emerge unscathed. Unfortunately, the closures have had a knock-on effect that has changed Classic FM for the worst.

In the week, I’m only really able to listen to the station in the evening. Changes at this time of day include the scrapping of the 6:30pm Classic Newsnight programme. While this was not the best news programme imaginable, it was the only news bulletin I could catch after work, having usually missed most of Radio 4’s news. Instead, Smooth Classics at Seven has been extended by an hour, becoming Smooth Classics at Six. Smooth Classics, presented by John Brunning, was always one of my favourite programmes. Unfortunately, they have now pushed John out in favour of Margherita Taylor, who apparently used to present a programme called Easy Jazz at Six on theJazz. I’m afraid I am so far unable to get used to Ms Taylor’s voice. I don’t know if she’s supposed to be a celebrity because she’s been on TV; I’m not interested in celebrities. I liked John Brunning’s smooth voice presenting this programme. Margherita Taylor appears to have a “trendy” voice with an end-of-sentence intonation I don’t appreciate.

In turn, John Brunning has displaced Nick Bailey as the presenter of the Evening Concert programme, which has been renamed The Full Works. For around five years, Nick has presented the programme live, enabling him to read out listeners’ e-mailed comments as he received them (including several of mine over the years!) This gave the programme a much more personal touch, and meant it was better company for anyone listening alone. Early indications are that The Full Works is no longer presented live. Nick Bailey has now been pushed into the overnight slot, starting from 2am, displacing Mark Griffiths who has now left the station. I’m quite certain Nick isn’t happy about losing the Concert and having to present overnight.

One aspect of the new schedule that has proved most controversial is the introduction of two hours of jazz each night, starting at midnight. The programme is presented by Helen Mayhew, who is also a refugee from theJazz. Lisa Duncombe, the young violinist who was given a job after complaining that the station didn’t promote young artists enough, has also been given the axe. Classic FM used to promote itself as the country’s only 100% classical station, as opposed to rival BBC Radio 3, which has always played jazz. That distinction has now been lost. I should probably go to bed at midnight anyway, but I have to say that, despite my reservations, the jazz programme is the change I mind the least. The music is still quite relaxing, and at that time of night the music is only background to reading or whatever, rather than being for serious listening.

The station has responded to complaints about the introduction of jazz by claiming:

Radio stations periodically change their programming line-ups and our research shows that there is a very strong cross-over between listeners to classical music and jazz.

That is implying that they introduced the new schedule as a result of careful audience research. I would contend that they have done no such thing. The new schedule was introduced in a hurry after GCap decided to pull out of DAB. The evidence for this is clear. In the past, new schedules on Classic FM have been the subject of much fanfare and promotion for weeks beforehand. Now they are calling this the biggest change in 15 years, yet there was no mention of the new schedule until just before it started this week. In the just-released April issue of the Classic FM magazine, they have just managed to get the new schedule in there. But there is a detailed listing of the music that will be played on the Evening Concert in March, with an accompanying article by Nick Bailey who it says, “presents the Classic FM Evening Concert every weekday night from 9pm”. That shows these changes to the schedule weren’t carefully planned as the result of audience research. They were rushed through for commercial and contractual reasons as a result of theJazz closing, after much of the magazine had already been produced.

The jingle that accompanies the new programmes can only be described as naff. I don’t believe it was created by David Arnold, the composer of the famous Classic FM jingle, and of the many arrangements that are heard on the station. It was no doubt recorded in a hurry, again because the schedule change wasn’t planned very far in advance. And what on Earth is the slogan “We raise you up” supposed to mean?!

It seems GCap needed to find a job for Margherita Taylor as a matter or urgency. Perhaps she had some sort of contract that would have been expensive for GCap to terminate – more expensive than sacking Mark Griffiths anyway. Perhaps the contract also specified that Ms Taylor’s programme should be at a time when decent numbers of people are listening, not in the middle of the night. So to make way for her, they have shunted along two long-standing presenters on the station who had presented their respective programmes for many years extremely successfully. The same may be said for Helen Mayhew replacing Lisa Duncombe, although there the motivation is probably also an attempt to appease jazz fans: they can still listen to jazz, as long as they don’t mind staying up until 2am!

I am quite unimpressed with the changes to Classic FM’s schedule. Because of what are ultimately business decisions by the owners, they have spoilt my favourite station quite a bit. Now I can’t listen to the news, I can’t hear “Mr Smooth” present his classics, and I can’t enjoy listening to the concert with Nick Bailey. I hope some of these changes can be reversed when theJazz’s former presenters’ contracts expire. I know that other listeners are unhappy, particularly with the jazz programme. Yet they are unlikely to abandon the station as there aren’t many alternatives. Unless, that is, GCap’s own internet broadcasting strategy turns out to be the way forward, in which case people may well discover that there are many good classical music stations around the world (from countries without draconian copyright laws) and so they can consider abandoning the station that puts business before its listeners.

Today it was proposed that smokers should have to buy an annual permit if they want to be able to buy cigarettes. The proposal, by government advisory board Health England, is that smokers would have to choose to “opt in” to buying tobacco by paying £10 a year for a permit. The permit would have to be renewed every year, which would involve filling in a long form. This, more than the cost, would hopefully deter some smokers. It is also thought that, faced with having to make a conscious decision to apply for the licence, some of the many smokers who would like to give up would be helped to reach their goal more quickly.

I think this is a great idea, and is actually something that had occurred to me before. Such a licence would also help to prevent sale of tobacco to under-18s, as shopkeepers would have to check the licence, so would not have to guess young people’s ages. It would also mean that smokers’ permits could be revoked if they were found to be deliberately disobeying no smoking laws, or even as punishment if they were convicted of other public order offences (e.g. fighting outside the pub).

The licences need only have a photograph of the holder and a minimum of details, so they needn’t be seen as a breach of someone’s privacy. The holder’s name needn’t even be printed on the it. However, I wouldn’t have any objections to the database of smokers’ names being available to insurance companies, to weed out a few cheats who falsely claim to be non-smokers.

I have to say, though, that I don’t think the £10 charge is necessary. A modest rise in tobacco duty would cover the costs of the scheme. As the health board’s chairman, Julian Le Grand, has said, it’s the form-filling that will put smokers off, not the fee – I don’t imagine £10 per year is going to deter many people, given the fortune they must already be spending on cigarettes. If the permits were available for free on completion of the application form, it would prevent pro-smoking groups being able to complain it was simply “an extra form of taxation” on smokers. If they continued to oppose the permits, one could draw the conclusion that they support sale of cigarettes to under-age people, or that the tobacco manufacturers intend to keep people hooked on smoking who really would like to give up.

Of course, there are people who are saying, “Now it’s tobacco, next it’ll be alcohol.” I actually think a similar sort of permit for buying alcohol (but not necessarily renewable every year) would be a good idea. It would prevent sale of alcohol to under-age people. It could also end the ridiculous situation where a middle-aged person is buying a bottle of wine from the supermarket, but the young checkout operator isn’t old enough to approve the sale to them, even though the customer is clearly over 40, sometimes resulting in the whole queue of people at the checkout being held up for a couple of minutes. The ability to revoke alcohol permits from people would also be a very useful tool in tackling anti-social behaviour. Anyone who’d had their alcohol licence taken off them for a few weeks would no doubt be the subject of ridicule by their peers, the thought of which would be a big deterrent to drunken bad behaviour in the first place.

I do hope the tobacco permit idea is adopted, but think they should reconsider the admin fee. This is an important public health measure, so I hope the government doesn’t simply intend to use it as an opportunity for another stealth tax – or at least, make it look that way to other people.

Who would spend ages doing hard sums when you can use a calculator? Who would wash their clothes by hand when you can just put them in the washing machine? And who would listen to an old, hard-to-tune analogue radio when you could have a new DAB digital radio?

That was the gist of a recent series of adverts on Classic FM, promoting DAB digital radio. I had grown increasingly annoyed by these frequent and repetitive adverts, which usually told listeners about all the extra stations they could receive (although many, like me, are loyal listeners of Classic FM so would probably not want those) and also said how much easier it is to tune a digital radio (but only slightly easier, particularly if you have an FM radio with RDS…) They used to advertise the “crystal clear sound”, but more recently, that has been changed to “digital quality sound”, which doesn’t really mean a lot.

The reason for the continuous advertising of DAB was that GCap Media, owners of Classic FM, held a 63% in Digital One, the national commercial radio multiplex. Naturally, it was in their interest to persuade people to buy digital radios.

Yesterday, however, it was announced that GCap are going to sell their stake in Digital One and to pull out of DAB, closing their digital stations theJazz and Planet Rock in the process. Instead, they are going to concentrate on FM and broadband radio. Funnily enough, this item didn’t make it onto Classic FM’s Classic Newsnight programme, but there has been a notable absence of digital radio adverts since.

I have never bought a digital radio, mainly because I have doubts about the sound quality. DAB is already an out-of-date system, using the inefficient MP2 codec (yes, that’s one before MP3!) It is capable of delivering good quality sound, but only if the bitrate is high enough (at least 192 kbits/s). Unfortunately, in order to squeeze all the extra stations into the limited bandwidth allocated for digital radio by the government, both the BBC and commercial operators have reduced the bitrate to as low as 64 kbit/s in some cases, with an average bitrate of only 128 kbit/s. The result is that digital radio can sound worse than FM. It’s true that you don’t get the background hiss that is associated with FM, but then if your DAB reception is poor, you can end up with silence. Not only have they reduced the bitrate to insufficient levels, but in order to accommodate the extra stations, some music stations, including the aforementioned theJazz and Planet Rock are even broadcast in mono! While most DAB radios so far have been small portable sets, it’s clear that the system would not be sufficient to replace the tuners in hi-fi systems.

Hopefully, GCap’s dramatic change in strategy will now result in a rethink of digital radio, and speed up the adoption of the far superior DAB+ standard, which uses more efficient audio codecs.

Unfortunately, though, Classic FM listeners still won’t have escaped from GCap’s self-advertisements. A few weeks ago, they launched “My Classic FM”, which provides six internet radio stations. With hindsight, we have to wonder: was this an early indication of GCap’s new policy of focussing on broadband radio? Sadly, the adverts for My Classic FM are just as irritating and repetitive as the ones for DAB, but that’s the price we have to pay for listening to commercial radio.

digitalradiotech.co.uk has a lot of information about digital radio, in particular sound quality and bitrate issues.

I have just switched to a new layout, which has been a work in (very slow) progress for a while now. Hopefully the new design is an improvement on the old one. For comparison (and posterity), here are the two side by side:

The new layout is much wider, which means anyone with a resolution of 800×600 will see a horizontal scrollbar. That was quite a hard decision to make, but from the stats, very few visitors use such a small screen these days. The page header is now much shorter, meaning less space at the top is wasted. The layout has been specifically designed to allow 500 pixel-width images to be displayed in the content.

Other new features include:

• Upgrade to WordPress 2.3
• Tag support (once I start to add tags to articles!)
• e-mail notifications for both new posts and comments
• Integrated Google search

and various other minor enhancements I’ll leave you to discover!

Please note that several of those features should be considered beta tests at this stage. Do let me know if you have any problems using any part of the site.

Now all I need to do is get back to writing new articles…