There is a soft-centred, spiritual-lite show on Radio 2 today called Good Morning Sunday. Or, rather, there was, for it has now been renamed Aled Jones with Good Morning Sunday. Melodies for You, another long-running programme on the same network, has also changed its name, and is now called Alan Titchmarsh. Radio 3 used to spurn such vulgarity, but it, too, has partly succumbed. Thus, the weekday breakfast slot, which used to be Morning Concert, then On Air, is now Sara Mohr-Pietsch. You would think a woman with such a distinctive name, and such a luscious, peachy voice, would need no further elevation, but there we are.

Why the change on Britain’s most popular radio station, which has boosted the boy from Bangor yet further? Those who love modish claptrap should study the explanation given to the BBC’s weekly newspaper, Ariel, by Christine Morgan, executive producer of the radio output of the Religion and Ethics department: “I’m thrilled because it feels a natural move. Now Aled can really own the programme. You want your most recognised name upfront.”

I am willing to bet Morgan a year’s subscription to Church Times that, on the whole, she is not at all thrilled, but has simply come to accept the creeping cult of ego in a broadcasting system ever more driven by ratings, competition and pushy agents seeking better and better deals for their clients. She may describe it as “a natural move”, but actually, when you think about it, it’s a rather unnatural and undesirable one. Good Morning Sunday is short, simple and civil. Aled Jones with Good Morning Sunday places the presenter’s name ahead of the Sabbath, which is vanity rather than humility, and thus the very antithesis of religion.

As for Jones now owning the programme, Radio 2 must know that is piffle. He may well have become a millionaire from Walking in the Air before he was out of his teens, but on this programme, Jones is simply the chief labourer in the vineyard. Unlike another Sunday show, Desert Island Discs, which really was owned by Roy Plomley because he created it, Good Morning Sunday was invented by the BBC, decades ago, and thus it owns it. And why should the name of the talent always be upfront? In the centenary of a certain broadcaster’s birth, it is worth remembering that his weekly dispatch was never (thankfully) renamed Letter from America with Alistair Cooke.

Forty years ago today, which was a Saturday, 16% of the programme titles on Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4 were the names of the presenters of those shows. Twenty years ago today, a Wednesday, the proportion had risen to 27%. Today, a Sunday, it is 29%. This does not even count 5 Live and all those digital and commercial stations where names litter the schedules like confetti. Let’s hear it for some of those evocative titles, long gone and only distantly remembered: Dancing Round Europe, Follow the Stars and Indian Summer, adorning a series for the glad-to-be-greys.

Well, you might be saying, hasn’t it ever worked in the opposite direction? Has a name never been subtracted? I can find only one example. In 1988, the 9am show on Wednesdays was called Midweek with Libby Purves. It was billed “The pith of the week”. Now it is called simply Midweek, and the subtitle has been removed. That is what is called taking the pith.

paul.donovan@sunday-times.co.uk

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