Baker And Kelly Offline

I decided to put this up on here, rather than on the venerable “other place” because it isn’t strictly about football (insert your own jokes here).

The announcement that Danny Baker has split with Wippit amongst considerable acrimony probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anybody. Wherever he has gone throughout his career, Baker seems to have a knack of falling out with his employers, from getting fired by the BBC for supposedly inciting listeners to violence against referees on “6-0-6″ (he said nothing of the sort) to getting the push from Talk Radio for “not talking about football enough” (arguably guilty as charged, though this is surely a matter of opinion), and to see his latest offering, a pair of podcasts, go down the tubes is no great surprise.

To say that the disappearance of his football podcasts with fellow broadcaster Danny Kelly is a disappointment to football supporters would be something of an understatement. Despite the game’s ubiquity in this country, quality football broadcasting on Britain is very thin on the ground indeed. Baker & Kelly, who arguably pioneered the format of the radio phone-in had, as previously mentioned, managed to get themselves fired twice the airwaves, and a ten week long comeback in Radio 5 was notable mostly for the way that it was shunted around the schedules. In the meantime, the medium that they had done so much for slid down the tubes, with a succession of incompetent presenters on “6-0-6″ seeming to be hell bent on proving the cliche that people that are interested in football are a bunch of morons who take it all very much too seriously.

The return of Baker & Kelly, with an accompanying web site, was like the proverbial Mannah from heaven. An appreciation society quickly sprung up on Facebook, the podcast went to the top of the download charts and all seemed rosy, until a couple of weeks ago, when the weekly show mysteriously failed to materialise. The same thing happened last week, and this time the truth came out through a message on the web site.  The show’s thousands of listeners have now been left scratching their heads, and wondering what, exactly has gone wrong.

Over the last few days, of course, there have been conflicting statements from both sides of the divide. Baker’s statement is plain, and to the point – they promised him that he would be paid, and hasn’t been so. When he complained about this, he was pointed to certain clauses in his contract. Wippit have countered that the contract was all arranged through his agents, and that what this consisted of should have been pointed out to him in the first place. It is, with any honesty, difficult to know (and we will probably never know) what exactly did happen. What we know for certain is that there will be no further podcasts from Baker for the forseeable future, and that there is a good chance that there will be no more at all.

All of this raises the interesting question of what Baker was hoping to make out of the venture. He has occasionally alluded to his relative ignorance of new technology and new media before, so is this a matter of his expectations being unrealistic in the new, some might say more democratic, media landscape? Or did Wippit make promises to him that they were never going to be able to fulfil, before falling back on small print in their contracts? For what it’s worth, I think that both sides went about it in completely the wrong way. “The All Day Breakfast Show” was launched in the summer and, within weeks, was getting at least tens of thousands of downloads per week. In September, though, Wippit started charging a subscription of £2 per week for a minimum of three shows. This brought about a considerable amount of bad publicity – no figures are available for what happened to the listening figures since then.

So, can you make any money out of podcasting? The obvious answer to that is, “probably, yes”. I don’t, however, think that people will, in massive numbers, pay for podcasts. There are big commercial players in the podcasting world now, such as the BBC, The Guardian and The Times. None of them charge to download, though, and this is telling. If anybody was going to charge to download, it would be Murdoch’s New International. The fact of the matter is that, much as I doubt whether people would pay, in great numbers for pay-per-listen radio. It’s just not a medium that people will pay money for.  The obvious answer to this is sponsorship. There is certainly plenty of money available for advertising on the internet, and being top of the Itunes download list would guarantee that there would be plenty of interest from potential sponsors. Also, the costs of podcasting should, theoretically, be low. This is why so many people do it over streaming broadcasts – the levels of infrastructure and bandwidth required are much lower. Only a small amount of the sponsors’ money would need to be spent on running the project.

Baker will, of course, be back (to a point, he hasn’t gone away, he still has a daily show on BBC London radio) – he’s too popular and feels the pull of the medium too strongly to be able to stay away from it all for long.  It is a shame that, in the current, vacuous atmosphere of football broadcasting in Britain, one of the few genuinely innovative shows has gone to the wall, and just as it seemed to be building up a head of steam, too. That said, hopefully when it does come back, it will be with tempered expectations of what can be made from it, and with a better understanding of the fact that the landscape of the media has changed forever.

If you haven’t come here from 200percent,  haven’t heard the Baker & Kelly radio shows or podcasts before and want to find out more, you can do so here and here.