Shout too loud and nobody listens

Behind the cycle of panic/relief over changes at Radio 4, a quiet decline is under way

Radio 4 listeners are essentially Pavlovian creatures. Pavlov, as every schoolchild knows, trained dogs to expect meat every time a bell was rung; after a while, ringing the bell set the dogs salivating even when no meat was produced. Something similar happens with Radio 4's audiences every time they hear the word "change" - except that they don't salivate so much as foam at the mouth.

What got them foaming last week was a report in Monday's Guardian that James Boyle, the station's new controller, was planning a "radical three- year overhaul" in which "Nothing is off limits. Every programme will have to earn its place in the schedule." Among the programmes under scrutiny, it reported, were such long-runners as Today, PM, Woman's Hour, Breakaway and the two disability strands, In Touch and Does He Take Sugar? Other papers picked up on the story, as did listener pressure groups: Rachel Mawhood of Radio 4 Watch was quoted as saying of Mr Boyle "I suspect he has to prove his oath of fidelity to John Birt" - in his previous job, running Radio Scotland, Mr Boyle was supposedly known as McBirt because he shared the Director General's reformist zeal.

You have to have some sympathy for Mr Boyle, whose speech to a conference of the Radio Academy was rather more innocuous than the newspapers made out - there was no mention of "radical overhauls", just talk of "reviewing" and "refreshing" Radio 4's output, the sort of thing that any new controller might be expected to do. In any case, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for programmes to justify their output - beloved of the nation Today may be, but it could certainly afford to give us a little less Westminster and a little more international news. And Woman's Hour, which used to shock with its frank discussions of gynaecological issues and its no-nonsense espousal of women's rights, these days spends a numbingly large proportion of its time chatting with obscure and uninteresting people with no other claim to airtime than the fact that they are women.

While you're at it, you might even try to summon up some sympathy for John Birt, though the Armani-wearing, tax-avoiding, jargon-spouting persona he projects doesn't make this easy. Like Mr Boyle, he has been trying to do something entirely reasonable - in his case, imposing budgetary controls and a streamlined management structure on a 75-year-old bureaucracy sclerotic with archaic working practices and too bound up with a sense of its own history to respond to a changing environment. Yet at every turn he has been greeted with cries of disgust and horror, from within the BBC and from outside.

The difficulty for the observer is to sort out how much of the horror is justified. Every panic is followed by sighs of relief that things aren't going to be as bad as people feared. There was outcry a couple of years ago with the introduction of "producer choice" - the system under which producers had notionally to buy in services that had previously been provided for free by the BBC. Not much more than a year later, though, one Radio 4 producer of my acquaintance was bragging that the new system had enabled him to save enough money to pay for a trip to make a programme in America. Likewise, last summer, when Birt announced a radical restructuring which included bringing the hitherto autonomous World Service into the main body of the Corporation, there was uproar. One producer at Bush House wrote to me in despairing terms of the imminent demise of his department. When I phoned him this week to find out how things stood, he was cheerfully contemplating getting his hands on the larger budgets available to the new, combined radio and television department of which he is going to be a part. Another producer who holds some strong opinions about the Birtist reforms admitted that while he resented the imposition of some new working practices, the introduction of new technology that they facilitated has given him a degree of editorial control over his programmes he would never have dreamed of.

Not everybody is so happy: for every producer who has taken himself off to America, there's another having to buy his presenter lunch out of his own pocket because budgets no longer make provision for that sort of thing. There are great differences, too, between the BBC in London, where years of low morale seem to be lifting as people decide that things aren't so bad after all, and the BBC in the regions, where departmental closures and redundancies have engendered a sense of defeat and fear.

And there have been bitter complaints about the new system of selling programmes to the networks - producers were given one day last June to present a year's worth of programme ideas; they were finally told which programmes would be made last week; some of them won't be broadcast until April 1998. So out go spontaneity, flexibility and any idea that takes more than 30 seconds to explain.

Perhaps none of this matters: the bureaucratic details, some would argue, have no real impact on creative programme-makers. But behind the cycle of panic/relief, panic/relief, and the hysterics of audience pressure groups, the careful listener to Radio 4 can hear signs of a genuine, slow decline - not in the flagship programmes, such as Desert Island Discs and Today, but in less obvious corners of the schedule - in the replacement of considered features and documentaries by chatty sequence programming such as The Afternoon Shift; in the curtailment of drama serials from six parts to four, three or even two; in the destruction of Saturday Night Theatre and the mooted trimming of the Monday Play, destined to be cut to 60 minutes or got rid of altogether.

All of these reflect a sense that the BBC has lost faith in its audiences - it no longer expects them to follow anything of any length or sophistication, and it no longer tries to persuade them to do so. The real worry is not that Radio 4 is going to be swallowed up by an earthquake, but that it is suffering from gradual erosion of the intellectual principles it stands on. Earthquakes make for better headlines; erosion will just as surely bring your house down.