As I said, I’m a professional journalist – presently at the Guardian as a sub-editor, formerly at the Telegraph as an associate editor – who writes a music blog.
http://theglamourcave.blogspot.co.uk/
Two years ago I met someone who was a judge for the BBC folk awards and, thinking this might be interesting as there is usually a chorus of moaning about the nominees (the same names seem to come up every year, is the gist of it), did an off-the-record interview with them about it. The reason the interview was off the record was that the judge I met was under the impression that the names of the awards judges were supposed to be a secret. There was some confusion around this. Mike Harding, who presented the BBC Radio 2 folk show at the time, said the names weren’t a secret.
http://theglamourcave.blogspot.com/2011/11/bbc-folk-awards-raising-blood-pressure.html
But then John Leonard, who runs Smooth Operations, the production company that produces the folk show and the folk awards for the BBC, waded in and not only said that, yes, they were a secret, but also came up with an elaborate justification for this.
http://theglamourcave.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/smooth-operations-and-bbc-compliance-on.html
It turned out that the BBC has guidelines for running awards that specify transparency as one of the criteria
http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/page/guidance-interactivity-awards
so I submitted a freedom of information request to the relevant department at the BBC
http://theglamourcave.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/freedom-of-information-request-for.html
only to be told that the request for the names of the judges had been denied because the BBC folk awards are “journalism” and therefore excluded from the necessity to submit to FoI rules. Since I’m the journalist in this scenario, that was ridiculous. It made me wonder why go to all this trouble instead of simply supplying the names? By this stage there was so much interest that one would assume it would simply have been easier to supply the names.
Roy Greenslade at the Guardian had picked up the story
http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/dec/13/radio-2-awards-and-prizes
as did The Independent
But nothing occurred until the next year, when a month or so before the nominations were announced I received a phone call from Fergus Dudley, head of compliance at Radio 2, saying that there were going to be some changes to the folk awards to make them more transparent
http://theglamourcave.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/change-at-bbc-radio-two-folk-awards.html
I was invited by Fraser Nelson at the Spectator to write a piece at this stage about why it was important
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/01/bbc-radio-2-folk-awards-bottom-of-the-class/
And that was basically where it lay until this year, when the awards nominations were announced in November and it became clear that Dudley’s hints and suggestions about naming the judges this year were only that, and had apparently been designed to get me off his back. In response to my inquiries directly to Fergus Dudley and John Leonard I got an email from a junior press office person who was unaware of the history of the request.
This all sounds a bit specific and of interest only to folkies. But the BBC Radio 2 folk awards is the best marketing platform the UK acoustic and roots music industry has, although it does not appear to see itself in this way. There are, I understand, over 180 anonymous judges for these awards, all of whom by Smooth Operations’ own admission, have a financial stake in the industry. This is the qualification for the job and many of them know each other. In fact they are laughingly referred to as the “folk mafia” (see my latest post, an interview with Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span, for an example of this). When I started writing about the awards the first thing John Leonard did was try to co-opt me by inviting me to become a judge.
Mumford & Sons are the biggest band in the world right now and to the rest of the world they are an English folk band. But no other English folk bands have benefited from this surge in international interest, despite there being a folk scene in the UK that is full to overflowing with young talent struggling to get by, because the industry’s biggest marketing platform – the BBC Radio 2 folk awards – has never invited Mumford & Sons to take part, nor have they ever nominated them for an award for reasons explored in the Spectator piece. Instead, and despite a constant throughput of new young bands that need a boost in a difficult environment, the same bands run by the same handful of middle men and women get nominated every year, as if folk were a niche thing. Indeed, John Leonard argues that it is, which in his case is self-fulfilling. For instance, Laura Marling has had three unsuccessful Mercury nominations now, as if she were the only young British folk musician the industry-wide Mercury judges have heard of.
I would be enormously grateful if you were able to pass this to the people at the committee who regularly deal with the BBC, to see if anything can be done: if any questions could be asked of Fergus Dudley about his intransigence on a matter that seems so cut and dried even by the standards of the BBC’s own guidelines? I believe naming the folk awards judges would eventually have a knock-on effect for the music industry in this country that would be wildly disproportionate to the effort involved.