It’s been brewing for a while, but a week or two ago, the BBC announced that Radio 4’s broadcasts on long wave will end on 27th June.  This has been met with a pretty furious response from a surprisingly large number of people.

Long wave is a very old form of AM radio broadcasting, and Radio 4 is now the very last UK station that still broadcasts on it. The only other station I can remember on long wave, and the only one I ever regularly listened to, was the Irish pop station Atlantic 252, which I was quite fond of in my teens. It ran from 1989 to 2002, although was recently revived as a digital/web station. My abiding memory of it was the very poor sound quality, although it does demonstrate the key advantage of long wave – signals travel a very long way, and it’s very effective in that regard. Almost the whole of the UK is covered by the main Radio 4 long wave transmitter in Redditch, in the Midlands.

The main reason the service is closing is because the transmitter uses equipment that is now over 90 years old, and it’s no longer cost-effective to maintain it for the rapidly-dwindling pool of listeners. One of the main reasons for continuing the service was to provide access to vital information in remote areas, such as the famous Shipping Forecast, and for the benefit of people where other broadcast media faces obstacles, such as mountains. Anyway, there’s now suitable alternative sources of media and information to fill these gaps, and the BBC has concluded that the transmitter, expensive to run and on the verge of running out of vital spare parts, can be closed.

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m a hardcore enthusiast of anything vintage and analogue, and on a few occasions recently, knowing its days are numbered, I’ve listened to Radio 4 long wave in my car (that’s the only long wave radio I have access to). However, you won’t hear any objections from me about its closure. I completely understand why it’s no longer viable, and why this step is being taken. However, there’s been a considerable amount of protest over it, and a LOT of people are very angry about it indeed, having come up with a lot of arguments about why it should be kept.

A big source of protest on this is the Keep Long Wave website, which claims a Change.org petition has attracted over 7500 signatures. The comments on the site are passionate and furious, and focus on several arguments for keeping the long wave transmitter. These include the poor reception on DAB and FM in some remote areas, the extensive reach of the signal abroad, and the usefulness of long wave broadcasting in a major emergency.

Let’s take the “remote areas” argument first, as it sounds pretty reasonable. There’s claims in comments on the website that in some areas of the UK, Radio 4’s long wave signal is the only broadcast media available, and therefore is a lifeline. This sounds extremely suspect to me, and I can’t believe it’s true. I’ve been to some very remote areas on hiking trips, and I’ve never had problems picking up several radio stations, both FM and AM, in those areas. I can’t believe that there’s actually any permanently-inhabited home in the UK that can’t receive any of the following:

• FM radio
• DAB radio
• AM medium wave radio (Radio 4 doesn’t broadcast on medium wave, but a number of news/talk radio stations, both BBC and commercial, do, so you can argue that an equivalent news and information service is available by this means. In my area, BBC Radio Scotland springs to mind)
• Internet by landline
• Internet by cable/fibre
• Internet by satellite
• Internet by mobile phone network
• TV by terrestrial digital
• TV by cable
• TV by satellite

So, for anyone to be truly disadvantaged by the Radio 4 long wave closure, they’d need to have no regular access to any of these forms of media, and honestly, even the most remote corners of the UK have these reliably available now. You might run into difficulties on the side of a mountain, but in any permanently-occupied home, are you seriously trying to tell me that no other form of communication or media is available?

I remember this being an argument in favour of keeping the 405-line TV system when it was switched off in 1985. I was only 10 at the time, but I remember a piece on breakfast TV about a farming family that lived in a very remote Welsh valley, and weren’t going to be able to receive 625-line broadcasts unless they forked out a lot of money for an aerial on a hillside, linked to their home by cable. Similar worries were raised when analogue TV was switched off in the early 2010s, but there’s now many alternatives available, such as satellite and internet TV services, and many rural areas have seen a huge amount of investment in reliable broadband in order to attract people to live and work in them. So, I’m not buying any of this as an argument in favour of keeping long wave. Access to media is far better in most parts of the UK than it ever was in the past.

How many of those 7500 signatories of the petition are regular Radio 4 long wave listeners that genuinely have absolutely no access whatsoever to any of the forms of broadcasting I’ve listed above? I’ll wager it’s a lot less than 7500, and it’s probably less than a dozen. This reminds me of the thousands of people protesting against the closure of rural branch lines during the Beeching railway cuts of the 1960s, signing petitions and turning up to public meetings by car, when the trains carried only two or three people each.

Next up, the long wave signal travels long distances, and can be received abroad. Again, I very much doubt that listeners abroad have no other means of accessing Radio 4 – it’s available on multiple digital platforms – and I also question whether the BBC really needs to consider these foreign long wave listeners in making their decision. The BBC has a duty to its licence payers, and it provides multiple channels to both home and overseas listeners to keep access to Radio 4 content. Some argue it’s essential for the Shipping Forecast, but this is now only broadcast 2 or 3 times a day, and it’s probably only done because there’ll be an outcry if it’s axed. Again, technology has provided seafarers with much better access to live weather information, and I very much doubt anyone will be seriously inconvenienced by this service being switched off.

Let’s take the “national emergency” argument. The claim is that the huge area covered by just one transmitter makes long wave of vital importance in keeping people informed in a major emergency. In the past, of course, this has been associated with the outbreak of nuclear war, and radio was always considered to be absolutely essential in communicating with survivors should this ever happen. However, relying on one transmitter in such circumstances is a terrible idea – surely the Soviets must have known that if we were to rely on that one means of communication, an attack on Redditch would wipe out any ability to communicate with the entire nation. Declassified documents from the 1970s reveal that the BBC was clearly aware of this, and planned local broadcasts from medium wave transmitters distributed across the country in various bunkers. In the modern era, assuming your long wave transmitter isn’t nuked and continues to function, is it really useful in an emergency? I very much doubt it. All the radio enthusiasts advancing this argument are forgetting something very significant – the number of people who actually own any form of analogue radio at all – let alone one that can pick up long wave – is getting smaller and smaller all the time. What’s the point of a powerful transmitter that covers the whole country, if hardly anyone can actually pick up the broadcasts? There’s been a huge move away from analogue broadcasting in recent years. FM radio is still in a healthy state, but medium wave has died a death in recent years, with only a handful of stations available. When DAB was first launched, switching off FM was seen as a serious possibility. This is not the way to communicate with people in emergencies. What you need is a way of broadcasting instantly to a device everyone owns – and we all know how that’s done now.

Some argue that these modern systems are prone to cyber-attack, and that we need an analogue backup, but Radio 4 is now entirely produced and distributed on digital formats, and only the last link in the long wave chain is analogue. However protected from cyber attack the transmitter itself is, it’s no good at all if the feed to it is attacked.

It’s not often you’ll hear me defend the death of a form of media, but in all honesty, I can’t get too moved or upset about this, because I genuinely think it won’t adversely affect anyone. We’ve been through similar things before, and we’ve lived to tell the tale. It’s not the Blitz, it’s not the Cold War, it’s not the era of flaky analogue broadcasting systems that run into trouble all the time, it’s the era of a pretty much permanently-connected and switched-on world that has, rightly or wrongly, put all its eggs in the digital basket. Sure, be nostalgic about long wave, and mourn its passing, but don’t pretend it’s some form of crisis that will plunge significant numbers into broadcast darkness.

It won’t.