The sound of sunshine

I haven't complained in a while. It might be because summer makes me lazier than usual, or perhaps because nothing has agitated me enough to get the drivel flowing. The lack of complaining is also, undoubtedly, directly related to Parliament's summer break. But it was only a matter of time.

A lot has happened since I last posted. Gulf Air got themselves a new chief, Bahrain beat Saudi at the kicking competition and Swine flu is the new black. Come to think of it, not much has happened at all. Ramadan arrived with a whimper and will disappear with a sigh of indifference. More on Ramadan later. For now, I'll complain about the mundane.

Radio Bahrain. The sunshine sound. The gulf's 'number one'. The worthless exercise in public media who's shameless profiteering has turned it into a veritable parody of a real radio station. The headache inducing pointlessness that suffers from a cavernous deficit of vision, ambition or logic.

Despite being government funded, Radio Bahrain have sold every last nugget of air time to anybody and everybody. Advertising on Radio is necessary, particularly in a country like Bahrain where it is essentially the only public media that is ever actually entertained by the populace.

I don't mind ads, but when the news bulletins are sponsored by something I couldn't care about, and when the weather is brought to me by something I don't know what is, and best of all, when the TIME is sponsored, I get annoyed. It's silly. And pointless. And clearly, demonstrably over-saturated with constantly repetitive drivel.

Furthermore, has anyone ever noticed how a fair chunk of the ads broadcast feature the voices of Radio Bahrain's very own 'DJs'? If Krazy bloody Kevin provides the voice for an ad during his torturous show, shouldn't it be considered an endorsement? If so, does the Ministry of Information and Culturification not mind that the people that it is paying to annoy us are also blatantly recommending a whole host of products, services and events to Bahrain's impressionable public? Probably not. It was probably their idea.

Fire some people. Hire some new people. Figure out how to develop some local talent who can a.) read, and b.)speak. Preferably someone who does not play house music at 3pm. Put Ian Fisher on a plane and send him far, far away. I don't care what they do or how they do it, but they've got to do something.

Why does Radio Bahrain even have news bulletins? They must be aware that if we need news, we've got BBC radio. I might not like BBC all that much, but they're a Bentley next to Radio Bahrain's beat-up Skoda. Old Skoda, before they were owned by VW. The news we hear on 96.5 is regurgitated tripe. There is no local news, save for the occasional message informing us of some 'cable' of good wishes sent to somewhere by someone. Surely email would be more efficient? How does one go about sending a 'cable'? Is it like a telegram or something?

They don't entertain. They certainly don't inform. So what do they do? They exploit their captive audience. They milk us by assaulting our senses with a barrage of useless, ill conceived, amateur adverts. They annoy us by employing the least qualified, most irritating, verbally challenged DJs'.

They're building a new studio, or something to that effect. A new studio wont fix the problem. It's beyond institutional. Radio Bahrain is a problem. It creates the closest thing Bahrain has to celebrity, which in turns stifles innovation. Krazy Kevin is your example. I know Kevin. He's a nice guy. But he belongs in a bar in middle England or some holiday resort or cruise ship. He was brought here by JJ's back in the day and stayed, because the tacky appeal that is lost on those with taste somehow worked on Bahrain. And now we cant go a day without hearing his wheeze, listening to his latest annoyance of choice or pretending to ignore today's mildly racist remark. But he'll stay, as long as he wants to stay. And he'll hum the same old tune, because that's what seems to work. It gets him a nice villa, a sponsored car, a host of personal appearance events and countless pseudo-endorsements. All because the powers that be that lurk somewhere in a ministry building just don't care.

And compared to Ian Fisher, Krazy Kevin is awesome. The 'Fish' is a personality free hack who seems to be in radio by virtue of being able to speak in English. With no charm, nothing interesting to say and the most repetitive show in the history of existence, nowhere else in the world would even consider employing him as a DJ for the one and only national radio station. Yet here he is a veteran. A (god help us all) trendsetter. A regular presence on our airwaves with whom a generation of Bahrain has grown up. It's just plain wrong.

The only way it could be worse is if Roy (the racist) Silverthorne were to return.

Yes, this is nothing more that an unstructured rant and for that I apologise. Now I'm going to bang my head against the wall for entertainment. It's better than listening to the radio.