Inventive

BBC Controller of Radio and Music Bob Shennan finally made it into the Radio 4 Feedback studios yesterday - last week he was detained by 'unavoidable operational issues'.

Mr Shennan was unrepentant about reinventing radio. (Former BBC executive Peter Horrocks has just lost his job after trying to reinvent the Open University). He was asked: How much money is the BBC putting into podcasts, and therefore not putting into what you might call traditional broadcasting ?

 "Well, I mean, we're still reconciling the budgets of exactly the amounts that we'll be investing; what I would say that a lot of that investment will go via the existing networks and overall it'll be a very small fraction of the spend that we spend on linear radio."

Mr Shennan estimated that there are about 250,000 podcasts currently available, and the BBC was talking about "offering maybe some dozens".