Radio is split in two.

It’s not commercial radio v the BBC. One jealous of the other’s huge budgets and predictable incomes, while the other secretly wants to give the audience what they want but find themselves tied up in ever more elaborate justifications for the way they work.

It’s talk v the rest.

Commercial radio bangs on again and again how they can’t make excellent talk. Then IR people go away and win awards for speech content, or leave commercial radio and promptly make excellent speech for the BBC. Close to a century ago I worked with Lisa Kerr and then Edith Bowman on Forth FM programmes that won Sony. I had arrived, however, from the BBC.

Talk 107, despite flashes of brilliance, was stillborn thanks to a group management that didn’t have a clue about making engaging talk radio. Their policy of keeping things exclusively local in Scotland’s capital meant the station was rarely ever talking about what the listeners were. By the time it had become relevant, the audience had moved on.

Other commercial experiences with local talk have been in the face of some of the BBC’s strongest local radio stations (take a bow, CityTalk).

Meanwhile the BBC has staffing levels that the for-profit companies can only dream of. Even in the national regions, daily speech strands have editors, producers, reporters and others working on daily programmes.

While this continues, commercial speech radio will never thrive outside London.

But the answer isn’t to critique the BBC into cutting even more.

I would argue that BBC radio is the thing we should aspire to. In some of it’s strands it’s head and shoulders above commercial radio. People that come from the commercial side should aspire to working with the lavishly staffed and engineered broadcaster, with the time to produce programmes that are shorter with more resource. The notion of ‘creative idleness’, a anathema to the group accountants in IR, is accepted.

Surely those that serve their time in the multi skilled world would bring ideas and enthusiasm to Auntie? They have much to offer and can easily bring the populist touch that is missing from much of the corporations non-sport speech.

One thing has to happen, though. The BBC has to do a better job of bringing in talent from the broader industry. There is no such thing as ‘too commercial radio’. People can adapt – heck they have to in order to work in commercial radio.

If the BBC begins to acknowledge it’s role at the top of the radio career ladder instead of droning on about distinctiveness, it’s survival going forward is clearer. Commercial radio will also win as it’s best talent has more opportunity to grow.

Tim Davie has done a lot to make the BBC more of an all-industry radio resource. It’s time his regions did the same.