Speech radio: there's never been more to talk about

Earlier this year I had the good fortune to work for a week in Nigeria. Now, I'm a techy who plugs things in to other things while rebooting other things; but I'm also hugely excited by great radio. There's no point in doing the plugging in if the end product isn't going to be of any value.

It was a little before 6am when I got into the car from the airport. On the radio, Cool FM Abuja. It was in the days after Whitney Houston had passed away. Immediately, I was engaged as the breakfast presenters started their obstensibly "music radio" show. But, brilliantly, with speech, and lots of it. Commanding, engaging speech. Callers with thoughts on Whitney Houston, but edited well. Musical montages and more discussion, deftly delivered. From a viable commercial radio station delivering audiences.

I was working at a station in Yola, Adamawa state, way out east. What struck me was the overwhelming amount of talking - and though it was delivered in Hausa, I was engaged by it. The tone of the delivery. The humour in the voices. In time, I worked out a great deal about what the presenters felt about what they were talking about even though I had no idea what they were talking about. This is the power of engaging radio - and it's not just for geeks like me.

So, back to the UK and fast forward to this week. We've had the frankly catastrophic decision by the BBC in London to 'refresh the schedule' by removing one of the UK's most talented speech broadcasters, Danny Baker. Alongside that, more problematically, the BBC is eating itself like never before as enquiry after enquiry mires the great organisation deeper into accountancy, contingency and death by committee.

Not so long ago radio lost one of the country's longest serving Radio 1 speech broadcasters, Chris Moyles. Jonathan Ross is missing in action. Speech is now a distant memory for a raft of commercial radio licences. Then, a chorus of posts in this house saying, in clever ways, the same thing over and over again.

That commercial speech radio CAN be profitable. That it CAN and does deliver an audience. That, actually, radio's finest trump card against all the other media out there is that it can talk to people (and, even more than ever, converse with people). Spotify can't do that. YouTube can't do that. TV can't do that in the same way, and not all the time. Plus you don't get DVB-T on phones and mobile TV IP streaming is laughable.

So, someone needs to rise to a challenge.

Disclosure. I'm a founder director of British Public Radio (alright, we can work on the name). We've been quietly, and loudly sometimes, working away for about a year, forging alliances, bringing people with content together and searching out the folk who could help us start this thing up. I can't tell you how excited we are about it right now. Oh, alright, I can tell you. We're very excited and we need more of you - those people sitting there saying "yeah, you're right, it is rubbish that Danny Baker isn't on the radio at the moment" - to tell us how to do it. We don't pretend to have all the answers. We think we are doing pretty well but what we've done so far is the product of a lot of conversations, research and even more conversations. We need more of that. Talking stuff.

Pretty soon we will put something up online that will start to mould what this might become. You might hate it, so tell us. Don't moan about it under a silly name on Digital Spy, just tell us.

We're so convinced this can fly commercially that we've a decent, realistic business plan that's going in front of folk with the vision and the cash to start this up. We don't plan on borrowing their money for long. We're not about to set up an expensive studio suite in a prime location and deliver a single unending broadcast stream. This is all about engaging a changing audience with great content in every which way we can. A lot of what we want to do is already being done, but in piecemeal. This project aims to bring all that amazing, humorous, thoughtful, entertaining content into a radio home. Where great speech should be.

So, this is our plea. Let's build a popular, viable, engaging radio entity. Where captivating content is disappearing, let's replace it. To work well, this needs to be the closest thing in radio to open source programming you can get. So, help us mould how this thing will sound. I learnt in February that the UK can learn a great deal from the amazing radio that's being produced every day in places like Nigeria and we have the plan - and, most likely, so do you - to do just that.

You can find out about Tim, Matt and me at www.britishpublicradio.com or just email or call us. It is the right time to speak.