The station’s editor John Clayton felt there were some inaccuracies in the article ‘Howzat? Cricket run out of BBC Lancs as wider cutbacks loom’ that appeared on 26 February.

The piece detailed changes to the schedule, staff cuts across numerous posts at the station and the loss of BBC Lancashire’s ‘BBC Bus’ and Open Centre.

Here is John Clayton’s statement in full:

“We are NOT dropping cricket coverage at all.

“We are making a few changes to our coverage of local league cricket, but our coverage of Lancashire County Cricket Club will be as extensive as ever.

“We will be reporting from all games, home and away, in all competitions. We will be offering ball-by-ball commentary...on MW and DAB...on many of the one-day games.

“We will no longer carry live reports from selected fixtures in the Lancashire, Northern Premier and Ribblesdale Leagues, and the Saturday and Sunday evening Cricket Extra programmes will no longer be part of our schedule, but we will still be previewing all the weekend's fixtures in our Friday evening 'Talking Cricket' hour and reporting on the action on Monday evenings.

“I think that is still a hell of a lot more cricket than just about any other station in the region is offering and I don't think your story conveys the real picture whatsoever.

“For the record, I have not spoken to the Lancashire Telegraph about this at all. I gave the full details of our changes to the editor of the Lancashire League's website, and that's the only communication and correspondence I've had with any other on the subject.

“I'd also like to point out that our pioneering Open Centre is still very much 'Open'.

“Although we are no longer offering a free cyber café facility, listeners and licence fee payers are more than welcome to come in and take a look at our various exhibitions…at the moment we have a fully hands-on display of retro computer games (Pac-Man anyone?)…or they can be part of the live audience for our brilliant Ladies@Lunch programme, presented by Sally Naden and Carole Turner, which goes out live from our new radio theatre daily (Mon-Fri) between 1100 and 1300. (You can see what our friends at the LEP say about it at http://www.lep.co.uk/what-women-want/Ladies-who-lunch.3835046.jp).”

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Comments (4)

3  By Mr_Osato , on 12-03-2008 07:39 Hmm, fair swap - insipid femmi-chat of the kind you can get on every magazine shelf and daytime TV channel replaces the kind of cricket coverage you can find exactly nowhere else. Seems like a fair swap. Report