Radio Times

Has this situation now been confirmed? and if it is the case, what regional news programmes are listed (presumably they've stopped listing Look North) and what are the local radio pages like?

Well, now it's happened - from the issue on sale today, Radio Times is appearing in a 'London/Anglia/Midlands' edition. The regional news section lists BBC London News, Look East, South East Today, South Today, Midlands Today and even Look North. ITV variations are given for Granada, Meridian, West, Yorkshire and Wales.

And the local radio pages now list Asian Network, Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Coventry & Warwickshire, Derby, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hereford & Worcester, Kent, Leicester, Lincolnshire, London, Norfolk, Northampton, Nottingham, Oxford, Shropshire, Stoke, Suffolk, Three Counties and WM. But infuriatingly, not the station that actually covers my area, Southern Counties Radio.

So if I want to know what's on local television in my area, and on local radio in my area, I need two different editions of the Radio Times. I'm used to living in a regional no-man's land (Surrey) but this is ridiculous.

Can anyone who has the South/West/South West edition confirm whether they still have the South East & East local radio stations in their edition, and if and how London regional programmes are covered in the television pages? Maybe I need to be getting the other edition?!

If your " local " edition of Radio Times has Asian Network on the Local Radio pages, what appears in the bottom right corner of the National radio pages? In the Scotland / Border edition Talksport and Asian Network are squeezed into there.

I say it lists Asian Network, in fact what it says is: "For the Birmingham area, see our digital radio listings shown on the previous pages. For the Leicester area, details as on previous pages except:" and then it lists three programmes that differ on Leicester MW to the national version of the Asian Network. In all, it takes up about an inch-and-a-half of space.

Yes we do.

We still get Berkshire, Bristol, Somerset, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Guernsey, Hereford/Worcester, Jersey, London, Norfolk, Northampton, Oxford, Solent, Dorset, Southern Counties, Three Counties, Wiltshire and Swindon; in pretty small print, as you can imagine.


They're in the regional panel, down at the bottom of the daytime terrestrial page; also in very small print.

You can imagine the size of the print when I say they share the panel with the variations for BBC East, ITV Anglia, BBC East Midlands, BBC West Midlands, ITV Central, ITV Channel, BBC1 Wales, BBC2 Wales, BBC 2W (Digital) and ITV Wales; plus a full list of programme titles for S4C Analogue.

Right, I'm off, where's me magnifying glass?

Thanks for that. So now there are just three English so-called 'regional' editions, which each seem to list the variations for just about every other region, they really might just as well go the whole hog, bow to the inevitable and go for one edition for England like TV Times, which is where all these continual mergers are clearly heading towards. By ditching the pointless 'digital channels at a glance' panel there should be enough room to expand the main channels' space to allow for proper coverage of the few regional variations that still exist in England, and the local radio section would only need two more pages to list all 39 stations at the same (rather mean) level of detail as at the moment.

In the meantime, until such time that Southern Counties is restored to the London etc edition, I think I might, for the first time in 26 years, be moving over to the dark side and changing editions (I remember once when I was young getting upset that my mum had bought the TVS edition of TV Times by mistake instead of the Thames/LWT edition!)

I've put in an order for a scanning electron microscope. The radio pages are just ridiculously hard to read.

The edition of Radio Times starting from tomorrow has no " Bank Holiday " on the Monday pages in the Scottish editions ( It's not a bank holiday here ). Are the words included in the English editions?

If they are being missed out just in the Scottish edition, then this is a relatively new practice...

No its the same in England - no mention of the Bank Holiday but then looking at the schedules it would seem the TV Channels have forgotten it's a Bank Holiday with a mainly normal line up.

Oh for a James Bond Movie.......

Eh? In my copy the words 'Bank Holiday' are printed in black lettering next to the date!

Oh yes DOH!

Still compared to the illustrations and bold graphics for a Bank Holiday as in the past it's pretty lame.

Looking at the London/Anglia/Midlands edition, there is a lot of regional news programmes to fit in, but why are they listing South Today? Surely if you live in this area you get the South/West/South West version?

Also they list Yorkshire and North Midlands' Look North but Calendar isn't listed or any other Yorkshire listings, so what's the point in that?

On the radio pages, it actually makes sense for London/Anglia listeners as they have stopped listing all the South West stations in their edition. All they've done is take the usual Midlands spread and added 4 extra channels (Essex, Kent, London 94.9 and Suffolk), all the others were duplicated anyway

The logical conclusion in all this would be to remove all the London/Anglia radio stations from the South/West/South West edition so the 3 different radio page variations finally match the TV pages

There's also no need listing BBC Radio Scotland in the North edition