For this first episode I am going to concentrate on just one subject, because I think it's important - and I hope it may be helpful. I am going to talk about the painful, wasteful and needlessly cumbersome process of applying to Ofcom for a local radio licence in the light of my decades of involvement with commercial radio. And in the light of my own recent experience and observation.

Celtica Radio has given me the opportunity to talk to people like myself who want to get themselves involved with local radio because they are passionate - really passionate - about it. I am going to set out several things you should not be doing, to help you to avoid some of the traps. By the way, if you are not chasing a radio licence, I hope you find this interesting anyway, because, as a member of the British public, you ought to know something about a process being employed in your name.

Let me make something crystal clear right from the off. I am not some English gent, brought up to believe that taking part is more important than winning. I have tried very hard throughout my life to avoid going into competitions I knew I could not win. That just wastes time, effort and money. When I lost the Cornwall licence earlier this year, I did so under circumstances which left me very, very angry because Ofcom made a decision which was and is unfair, unreasonable and perverse. Ofcom will say it did not - and it now has the backing of a High Court judgement to rely on. That changes nothing in my mind, and I will explain that later.

Let me make something else plain. I am not trying to make a case for getting rid of regulation of the radio spectrum altogether - there has always been a need for some form of rationing to avoid a free-for-all. But that's another matter for another time.

I want to talk to people who still have the energy, the personal commitment and the sheer determination to try for local commercial radio licences in the face of almost overwhelming odds. I am not interested in what the large radio conglomerates think. They have little to lose, no matter how much money or time they pour into new licence applications. They bounce from application round to application round, and if they lose, they simply move on to the next one, write off the costs against tax, and that's that.

No. I am interested in what you, the committed and passionate individual and your local colleagues might be thinking, because your thoughts might be taking you in the wrong direction. Equally, I am not very interested in what does or does not happen in what Ofcom calls the larger markets. I mean the cities or big towns, or the regional licences. Those licences will always go directly to one of the big groups. My thoughts apply mainly to the smaller, local licence areas, where properly local radio belongs and has a job to do. So here goes.

First, if you feel the urge to write a letter of intent to Ofcom, because you want to stake the first claim - by all means do it. But don't specify to much. Make it very, very vague, because if you do go in any particular direction in terms of programming content or general policy, you will be painting yourself into a corner. More about that a little later. And remember that getting what you know is the first such letter into Ofcom will not help you at all when it comes to the competitive application process. Even if you were not the first, but you do all the real work to get the regulator to consider a new licence for your area, that won't help you either. So don't expect it.

Next, do not bother with RSL's. There is no requirement for RSL's to be run, and if you do them, Ofcom will take not much, if any note, of what you may have achieved. Certainly, don't bother with researching your audience to any RSL's you run, if you do insist on running them. And while on the subject of RSL's don't assume that there is any need to link what you have been doing with your RSL's, to the application you eventually make. If you run say four RSL's targeting a youth audience, but then decide at the last minute that applying for a youth-orientated station will be a dead duck, don't worry about it too much. Change horses immediately. Ofcom won't care.

Next, don't get into this race for the licence too soon. It will do you absolutely no good to spend years drumming up local support, doing presentations and holding meetings, sending out leaflets - go easy on all that. Ofcom is not seriously interested because the only kind of evidence they want to see has to come from research - and by that they mean large-sample attitudinal and similar surveys, conducted as close as possible to the application deadline. Do you think that you can depend on support from the local area because Ofcom says it will take that into account? Forget it. When Ofcom says support, or evidence of support, they mean evidence from research. Forget that at your peril.

When it comes to research, there must be someone in your area who has some experience in radio or audience research or possibly both and provided you give him or her a decent piece of the shareholding in your company, you can save a lot of that money. But hang on, you say, such a person would then be part of your application team, and surely it would surely not look right to have your own survey managed by your own people? Looks a bit suspect, and not really credible? Does not matter. Press ahead. Where does it say that research has to be independently managed and designed?

As long as it supports your proposals, and seems to have been put together by someone with at least some knowledge, you will be OK. Oh, and by the way. Quantity is much more important than quality when it comes to research. Make sure you do that one big survey - at least 850 respondents - and design the questionnaire so that the answers can do nothing other than support your proposals - but then do all sorts of other local stuff as cheaply as possible - like a couple of focus groups, a handful of approaches to very carefully selected potential advertisers, and anything else you can dream up. As I mentioned earlier, don't bother with spending money and time drumming up support from people by talking to them and listening to them - make up for that by lots of little exercises which you then describe as research. Ofcom will lap it up.

What about your consortium? Avoid appointing as chairman of your board someone who Ofcom has never heard of. It is absolutely vital that you remember the British tradition of the great and the good being recognised and given the nod way ahead of anyone else - and if the person you appoint to head your Board of directors has at some time been a media high-flyer, that's perfect. You will have a head start. Ofcom knows them, and they know Ofcom.

As to the rest of the board: gather as many people as you like, but be careful. Ofcom does not like to see over-large boards of directors because they think that makes your applicant company unwieldy and incapable of making decisions. So appoint no more than, say, half a dozen people to the board of the applicant company itself, and put all the rest into a Limited Liability Partnership or even another Limited Company which lives alongside the main company. That company can have as many directors as you like. You end up with about fourteen people all of whom have a de facto stake in the management and finances of the operation? Does not matter. Ofcom will buy that.

What about shareholding? If there are too many individual shareholders - and this is a common situation with small companies looking for radio licences - so if there are too many, put most of them into that separate company I mentioned earlier. That separate company then holds a combined share in the licence application company itself. Same number of people, same amount of investment overall, and same spread of responsibilities. Does Ofcom object to this kind of tricky device? Not in the least. They will applaud you for it.

And before I leave the question of the shape and size of your company, here's another tip. Once you have decided who is going to serve on your application company board and on the company off to the side if you have one, do not go to the bother of registering them at Companies House before the application goes to Ofcom. Just claim that they will be the directors of your outfit. If you win the licence, then you can register them. But surely the application advertisement actually asks who the directors of the company are? Not who they will be. Who they are. Does not matter. And you don't have to take my word for that - a High Court judge has said so. You can claim whomever you like as a director. Register them after you have won the licence. Or don't. Makes no difference. You will have dressed the window perfectly. Sounds like something out of Ripley's believe it or not? Believe it. Ridiculous but true.

You have to say things which will leave Ofcom feeling that you have the best chance of being commercially successful. That is their main focus. Now, you and all of your competitors will be saying and doing roughly the same thing because there is just so much you can say and promise. Your trick is to persuade Ofcom that your combination of promises is bigger, better and more plausible than any of the others, so pull out all the stops here. And by this I mean take great care with how you make those promises - the style is going to be much more important that the substance. Get some really smart marketing person to come up with a USP for you - and remember what USP actually stands for. Unique Selling Proposition. It does not mean Unique Product Property. It means that the way you sell your product has to be better than the way the competition sells theirs - and just like toothpaste or washing powder or petrol, where the products are 99% identical. It's how you say it that really matters.

Several people have asked me a simple question: if I felt so strongly about the way the Cornwall licence was awarded in the first place, why did I not push the legal channels open to me as far as possible? Why did I take Ofcom on Judicial Review to the High Court, ask permission for a full Judicial Review, have that refused, and then drop the whole matter? Why did I not appeal and keep on appealing until I had exhausted every legal avenue? Easy enough to answer. Halfway through the day-long hearing in London, I passed a note to my wife. By the way, she and I, with some help from one of my sons - that was our entire legal team. We had no support from the company I had formed five years previously - they took fright at the possibility of losing a court case and what that might cost them, and I can't blame them for that, not really. Ofcom and the other party to the court action had herds of solicitors and barristers.

What made the position very difficult for me was the fact that our Big Brother backer immediately put large amounts of distance between themselves and any suggestion of challenging Ofcom, and that did not help my local directors to take matters further. Again, I can't blame either of them for that. The Big Crocs have to keep Ofcom sweet and taking the regulator to court is considered dangerous. The Big Crocs have more fish to catch. So I took on the Judicial Review challenge by myself. It was either a matter of accepting the atrociously perverse decision made by Ofcom in Cornwall - or fight it. I felt that I had no choice - I had to fight it. And I had no financial resources with which to buy lawyers. Lawyers only come in two price brackets - expensive and massively expensive. I could not afford either, so I went into the case as a litigant in person.

But back to that note I passed to my wife. It said "I think this judge has already made up his mind - he does not give any impression that he is listening to what I have to say". And so it turned out. Permission to proceed to a full and proper Judicial Review was refused by this judge without his taking even five minutes at the end of the hearing to think about it. He even went so far as to say, and this was both ridiculous and unjust, that the permission hearing had been as good as a full Judicial Review, and that I would not be able to produce anything more in a full Judicial Review. Summary judgement - end of story.

He behaved as though he had a pressing engagement elsewhere and he had devoted enough of his time to this case. And I left that courtroom wondering whether perhaps the English Establishment had closed ranks when faced with the possibility of their bright shiny new regulator, Ofcom, being trounced in court by a mere litigant in person. Not even a proper lawyer. That could not be allowed to happen. Am I suggesting that in our democracy where the judiciary is independent that a judge could be "got at" to influence his decision? Good heavens, of course not. All I am saying is that I had presented the judge with several reasons why this award in Cornwall was an unreasonable one and a perverse one, but when his written his judgement was handed down, it could be summed up as follows. "Ofcom is the statutorily appointed regulator and it can do whatever it pleases, unreasonable or not. Now go away. And here's a shed-load of legal costs for you as well. If you want to appeal - go ahead." The bottom line is this: in Judicial Review cases in particular, judges say that are reluctant to interfere with the workings and decision-making processes of a regulator appointed by Parliament. My view is that reluctance should not mean the same thing as refusal, and asking a court to asses whether a Government body has acted reasonably is not the same thing as asking it to interfere. I said so, in court. Was anyone listening? It did not seem like it to me.

Do you think I would, on the strength of that, have stood the slightest chance of success on appeal? Did I want to put myself and my family through months and months more of this utterly awful and soul-destroying business of dealing with slimy lawyers and judges and courts - and having to do so by myself again because having started out with no financial resources, I still had none? No. Enough was enough. But what about legal Aid?

Sorry - not available in cases like this. So very reluctantly I dropped the case. No-one can beat The Establishment when The Establishment decides it is not going to be beaten.

Frankly, commercial radio in the UK cannot even compete as it ought to with the BBC. Despite three decades-plus of existence and many more stations that the mighty BBC can manage, commercial radio still cannot get on even terms with the BBC, never mind overtaking it. Overall listening numbers to commercial radio still lag well behind the BBC. And at least part of the reason for that is sad but clear. British Commercial radio, with a few exceptions, is bland, boring, repetitive, and for the most part in the hands of people whose interest is in money and more money. These radio barons keep telling everyone that most of the money they make, when they do make it, goes back into improving the programming of the stations they control. Noble, very noble. Unfortunately, very seldom true in terms of operational profit. But what the hell - If they can't make money out of operational profit, they look upon radio licences as assets they can sell for stupidly massive capital gains, so they look to make their money that way, eventually.

Some people who are not sympathetic to my views have thrown another simple question at me. Ofcom has awarded 17 commercial radio licences since it started in December 2004, so why has it only been myself and Francis Wildman in Kent who have made such a fuss about losing and have taken Ofcom to court? Surely almost everyone is happy with the new regime? The answer is equally simple. The Big Radio Crocodiles in the swamp are happy enough. They are not especially upset about losing. And remember that almost every commercial radio licence application is backed by a Big Radio Croc. So even if the local consortium members are absolutely furious at having lost a licence they think they should have won, they will be held back from taking things further by their Big Brother backers. That's what happened in Cornwall. But there are people like Francis and me, motivated by other things. When we lose to applicants who should never have won, we are heartbroken, despairing and furious.

Aside from Francis Wildman and myself, I know of at least two other applicants in small-licence areas to whom I have spoken, and one in a large market - all of them disgusted and very, very angry. That makes five out of seventeen, or nearly a third of their awards where they have left very angry people behind. Not just disappointed - there have to be winners and losers - I am talking about seriously angry. There may be more. Those I have spoken to feel as I do and as Francis does, but they lack just that last bit of fury which gives them the courage to challenge the regulator. The fact that I was brushed aside by the High Court does not help, either. Who is ever going to challenge Ofcom unless they are very, very rich and very, very courageous? Which is sad, because if there were enough challenges, even The Establishment would have to take note, and force a re-think about the legislation and the regulator charged with implementing it. A good start, incidentally, would be to legislate a proper appeals procedure whereby failed applicants who believe that there has been a serious miscarriage of justice and mal-administration by Ofcom can apply to have the decision reviewed by an independent panel of acknowledged radio experts, without the terrible and expensive business of having to go to the High Court.

Competition for a radio licence is sometimes described as a beauty contest, and the way you are supposed to demonstrate your beauty is to have better responses to the regulator's questions and be more thorough in answering them. But sadly, in too many cases, the ugly entrant is winning the prize. So, be warned. Ofcom does not assess applications by any consistent series of objective tests. It says it does, but in fact the evidence suggests that it is influenced by who-knows-whom, who has lunched whom, who has the bigger pockets, who can do the better job of blinding this regulator with purple prose, fancy illustrations and research, research, research.

And one final thought: local commercial radio is not the place to be if you want to make a lot of money. It has to be a business, yes, and it has to be viable, but the people who are attracted to this unique medium are those who are in love with it, truly passionate about it. Unfortunately, Ofcom does not see things that way. They are focused on the financial aspects of local radio to an extent which will stultify and sanitise the industry even beyond where it is now. They are getting the balance wrong and they are treating radio as if it were a series of factories producing furniture or electrical goods. Radio just isn't like that.
Here's a core problem: when people have a new business idea, especially if it is going to be a small business, generally they do not have to put themselves up for judgement by others to whom they would not give the time of day. They have to comply with planning and health and safety requirements and that sort of stuff of course, but for the most part they don't need a licence from a regulator in order to get their business going. They make a success of it by just doing it, taking the normal commercial risks - and taking the consequences if they fail. But in my case, and in the case of many like me who have not merely worked in commercial radio all our lives, but have lived it, breathed it, eaten it, drunk it, slept it and loved it, we have always had to bang our heads against the deadly wall of regulation. We just don't have the luxury of starting a business without having to go on bended knees before some very arrogant and not terribly expert bureaucrats who have the power of business life or death in their hands.

There are some wise words from one of the ancients. "Select with care those by whom you would be judged". Sadly, there is no choice open to you when you decide you want to create a new local commercial radio licence. You have to deal with Ofcom. And now you know how I feel about that.

If you missed the actual show, click here to listen again.

Thank you for listening.

Go ahead, e-mail me at john@celticaradio.com.