Radio listening is at an all-time record high. DAB is up 20.8 per cent year on year; but listening to the radio via telly and the internet grew faster than listening on a DAB receiver. Year on year, the digital slice of the pie grew from 21.1 per cent of listening hours in Q3 2009 to 24.8 per cent from June to September. The target set by the previous government, and adopted by the current coalition government, is 50 per cent by 2015. The rate of growth still suggests this will not be achieved in time, as we suggested back in August.

Now for the quarterly change. The promotion ran for a month and ended on 26 June. RAJAR’s quarter began on 1 July – and ought to have reflected an audience uptick. Despite the promotion, however, DAB listener hours remained exactly where they were in Q2, at 162 million. So the plummy tones of Fry appear have been overshadowed by other factors, such as wider adoption of the BBC’s iPlayer, or people enjoying radio through their spanking new TVs, bought for the World Cup.

There may be other reasons why the promotion didn’t reflect in an audience uptake. Perhaps the discounts were not attractive enough. Perhaps it didn’t receive enough retail support – DSG’s Dixons and Currys outlets declined to participate. Or maybe they should have hired Hugh Grant.

You’d think the radio industry should be celebrating: the appetite for radio is tremendous, and people are seeking out new media devices with which to hear it. The fact that people are listening to radio on a TV should be particularly welcome, since it’s a linear format, where advert-skipping isn’t possible. But the radio industry has yoked its fortunes to DAB.

More from RAJAR here.

Then there’s the quiz shows. When it comes to reading out infonuggets from pieces of card prepared for him by TV researchers, Fry is the master. And more recently, his pioneering new media work on Twitter has put him at the forefront of an elite group of British comedy talents (including Graham Linehan and Peter Serafinowicz) who have found fame by telling us when they’re stuck in a lift, or about to have lunch. Once upon a time, comedy writers and performers had to be funny, as a minimum requirement. Now, the Twittering comics have now smashed that glass ceiling.

But Fry risks throwing away this incomparable legacy, built up over a lifetime, because of a weakness. And it’s a weakness every bit as reckless as Oscar’s love for Bosie.

This month Fry is the face and voice of the digital radio scrappage scheme. This is not, as you might imagine, the opportunity to trade in some piece of digital junk in exchange for a more modern audio gadget. Many of us have at least one unloved and unused DAB radio somewhere in the household – and perhaps your heart (like mine) soared at the prospect of a trade-in. Perhaps for one of these, which is very nice indeed. Or one of these.

Alas, the scrappage scheme is a retrograde step – the product of backdoor arm-twisting by a handful of desperate men. We’re being asked to trade in an FM radio for a DAB radio – rather like trading in a perfectly useful Mini Cooper runaround for a mule with an attitude problem.

The deficiencies of DAB are well known enough not to need reiterating. Over 90 per cent of the UK listens to radio and declares the current arrangement satisfactory. DAB is yesterday’s technology, devised in the 1980s, it’s been rammed driven through by ‘platform owners’ such as the big commercial radio players. It has terrible power consumption (worse than modern IP chipsets), and the sound quality hasn’t lived up to the promises made.

DAB is also a top-down technology, as opposed to internet radio, which requires only a home PC to crank a station into life, and thanks to open internet standards, has global reach. No proprietary chipsets, or government licenses are required to make yourself heard. Your WinAmp receiver is as good in Mozambique as it is in Manhattan. DAB radios, on the other hand, stop working once you cross the Channel.

And as for the viability, it’s desperate. One operator recently told us he may as well put the broadcasts on a CD and mail them out in an envelope – it would be as cost-effective as a DAB license.

DAB, in short, is one of the great technology car crashes of modern times. Now it’s a car crash with Stephen Fry telling us there’s room for one more car at the back.

Now if this ludicrous campaign was fronted by say, Rula Lenska or Alan Hansen or the Krankies, or some other technology-illiterate, hand-me-the-cheque B- or C-list celeb, we wouldn’t be too surprised. But for Fry, a man who enjoys a reputation for being discerning about technology, to endorse this campaign is wrong and damaging on so many levels.

What on earth is he doing propping this up?

For someone supposedly tech-savvy, let alone a ‘National Treasure’, Fry could be using his influence to cajole and enlighten – campaigning for internet radio, or even more modern digital radio broadcast technology, such as DVB-H or DAB+. At the very least he could warn the British public about the pitfalls of investing in DAB today, rather than leading them down a dead end.

How could this happen?

It’s simple. It’s Stephen Fry’s indiscriminate love of a voiceover cheque. And it’s the ruin of his reputation.

For the first time, a top BBC executive admitted that DAB radio isn’t inevitable. The Director of BBC Audio and Music told Radio 4′s Feedback programme that “since I have arrived at the BBC, I certainly haven’t seen it as inevitable that we move to DAB.”

Davie continued:

“We do believe that, if radio doesn’t have a digital broadcast platform, it will be disadvantaged. I’m pretty convinced of that logic. What I’m not saying is that we have to move at 2015 if we haven’t delivered the thresholds – the right levels of listening to digital radio and to DAB. I don’t think we are on a course that is unstoppable to 2015, although we are pretty committed to a DAB switchover over time.”

Davie was responding to a deluge of negative responses unleashed by Carter’s Digital Britain report. The report, the nation’s Media Correspondents told us, would order analog radio to be switched off in 2015. Incorrectly, as it turned out. Emboldened by this, it was suddenly open season on DAB. The Tories have sniffed a vote winner, although shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt shows the same reluctance to grasp the underlying problems.

Radio 4′s Today programme sent its radio car to the remote location of er, BBC Television Centre, and discovered DAB reception “is more irritating than Norman Collier’s broken mic routine”. That is, if they could get it at all. Back in the studio, former TalkSport owner Kelvin McKenzie listed more DAB closures and concluded: “There are no advertisers out there, no listeners out there. DAB is a technology whose day is done.”

Davie was merely trying to defang the backlash. Listeners don’t like to feel bullied, and especially not bullied onto a technology that is perceived to offer only disadvantages. No one talks about the much-vaunted crystal clear reception any more, or choice, or whizzy new features.

“What we might be seeing is the opening salvo of an action folder marked ‘Possible DAB Downgrade/Exit Strategy’”, mused the radio analyst Grant Goddard. “The nuclear button might never have to be pressed, but it’s always useful to know where the exit doors are and how you are going to reach them, however little you might want to think about the DAB plane going down in flames.”

I’m not so sure.

Carter’s report failed radio by ducking two serious areas. DAB’s problems are both technological and financial, and the two are interlinked. More modern codecs offered by DMB (the DAB technologists’ preferred route) or DVB-H could cut the transmission costs, lead to cheaper sets, and give us better and more complete reception. This required something stronger than what Carter proposed – an airy desire that sets should be forward compatible somehow.

As for the financial issues which beset commercial radio, it’s hard to see how anything short of a compulsory nationalisation of Arqiva and chopping up the spectrum could help. (Arqiva is where the BBC and the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s transmission facilities, along with DTELs, the Home Office’s radio network for defence and emergency services, have ended up).

The BBC doesn’t want half of its audience to disappear overnight, either (one of the two switchover criteria is 50 per cent of listeners), so here we see Davie steering it away from backing any kind of commitment. But nor does the BBC want a fragmented world where the audience wanders off to discover more engaging material, as they have since the very beginning of radio. That’s what Davie means by “a digital broadcast platform” – he means one single, nationwide, one-to-many broadcast standard, with presets in all the receivers. The sheep must not stray from the fold.

So we’re muddling along as before, without the carriage costs being addressed, and without a firm roadmap for DAB’s successors. One thought ought to keep radio executives awake at night. By 2015, IP networks will be fully capable of IPv6 multicast, as we’ll be well into 4G (LTE) deployment by then. If half of the terrestrial radio is audience is disenfranchised overnight, the mobile operators will only be too happy to offer them – and advertisers – a home from home.

OFCOM’s Peter Davies made the comments in front of a critical audience at the Radio Academy’s Radio At The Edge conference today. Davies was put on the spot by moderator James Ashton. After years of trying to put a brave face on DAB, the OFCOM man all but admitted the British radio industry now needed drastic action.

“Yes, it will require legislation,” he said, in order to restructure the industry, and lower costs, so that commercial operators could survive.

Davies acknowledged he’d have no choice if the commercial operators all decided to revolt en masse.

OFCOM effectively forces national operators onto DAB by making it a mandatory condition of a new 12 year analog license. But DAB is nothing but a millstone – costing about 10 times as much as analog to broadcast, and with very few listeners. If all the commercial operators handed in their DAB licenses back to OFCOM at once, what would the regulator do? Davies said that may be the cue for action. But he did warn that legislation took a year to pass through Parliament, so even if the broadcasters revolted tomorrow, it would be 2010 before

Asked if Britain hadn’t leapt into digital radio too early – the rest of the world is introducing more advanced and efficient standards – Davies said it didn’t really matter, as radios using a common profile would be technology-neutral. Which is too bad for those of us with plain old DAB.

So how low is DAB listenership?

One radio exec, Daniel Nathan of Brighton-based Juice, even went as far as suggesting that listenership was so low on the new digital stations, it might as well not go out over broadcast radio at all. Nathan pointed out that most get around 10,000 to 15,000 per half hour, and big hitters like BBC Radio 6 barely topped 50,000, with peaks of 61,000 on Saturday mornings.

“We might as well move them to IP,” he pointed out.

“Five years ago DAB looked like the future – but the world has moved on,” he said.

That was one one of the nicer things said about digital radio yesterday at yesterday’s Academy event.

The elephant in the room, internet radio, was represented by Darryl Pomicter of Radeo – a very tidy aggregator.

Pomicter was diplomatic. Internet radio would always be complementary to broadcast, he said, but let’s not delude ourselves that most consumer electronics media formats are not successful: Polavision and Betamax to name just two. There’s little justification for making radios that only pick up local broadcasts. So why not build in Wi-Fi, analog and DAB into new radios?

The Guardian Media Group’s Paul Fairburn wasn’t impressed by the argument (from the DAB lobby’s Tony Moretta) that radio operators should build visuals and other gimmicks into their DAB broadcasts to make DAB more multimediatastic.

“Don’t propose to us that we add to our costs by adding expensive bits now,” he responded.

BBC: Crisis? What crisis?

We should say that half of the audience was critical. The other half, drawn from various corners of the BBC, sat there very quietly, looking pretty pleased with how things are going – as well they might. The commercial radio disaster is the best thing to happen to BBC radio since the 1960′s, when the state sailed in on its behalf to capsize the pirates. Daniel Nathan probably summed up the mood of the other, commercial, half of the room by echoing Fru Hazlett’s view that the DAB business model is now “fucked”.

The BBC’s ‘Controller, Multi-platform and Interactive’, Mark Friend reflected the somersaults of logic one must go through to justify satisfaction at the radio landscape today. It goes something like this: do we want radio to go digital or not in the next ten years?

(Don’t all put your hands up at once.)

If we stall on DAB, the argument goes, then we’re saying we don’t want radio to go digital. Outside Broadcasting House management meetings, I can’t see that cart-before-the-horse proposition winning many hearts and minds. Digital and analog are, at the end of the day, just conduits.

Mark Friend said he couldn’t anticipate a “FreeView moment” for DAB, or see why one was necessary. That refers to acknowledgement that digital terrestrial TV had failed, and the main interests had to pool their interests to ensure a wider adoption of the technology. That day might come for digital radio pretty soon: as early as next year.

DAB has been a very British failure. While the specification is almost 20 years old, and (just about) adequate, bureaucracy and regulatory greed left British listeners with an experience far short of the “CD quality” sound they were promised.

Digital radio has been expensively promoted by both the BBC and Ofcom – both of whom have deeply vested interests in the digital switchover. And the vested interests range far and wide, too – media companies have digital stations of their own, and prefer cross-promoting their investments in their publications to reporting the subject frankly. Meanwhile, analogue radio remains Briton’s best-loved and most popular medium, a survey confirmed this week, with 100m analogue sets in use – compared to 6.5m DAB receivers.

Finally, GCap blew the whistle on the charade two weeks ago, when it announced that it was canning two of its DAB stations.

“We do not believe that – with its current cost structure and infrastructure – [DAB] is an economically viable platform,” the commercial broadcaster said.

The FT reports that secret crisis talks are taking place in Manchester today to try and make digital radio more attractive to commercial broadcasters. Coercion of one form or another seems high on the agenda, however.

One idea is to make the analogue receivers obsolete overnight, by withdrawing BBC broadcasts from analogue radio. Want the Beeb? Go out and buy a new set.

Running down analogue has also spawned dozens of thriving community FM stations, which provide a stark contrast to government-backed “community empowerment” programs based on web technologies such as social networking. These stations also embarrass the BBC, whose own lacklustre local radio stations too often appear to serve as a home for washed-up Alan Partridges. When given the choice, people prefer listening to real people, rather than the patronising “local” voice of the BBC.

Another idea cited is to use our own money for more digital propaganda. The FT reports that the BBC has a £250m spare license payers’ cash, in the kitty handed to it for digital radio:

“Another radical idea would be to use public money to support a huge switchover advertising campaign – and subsidies for elderly and low-income families to buy new radios – in the same way that as has happened in aiding the switch-over to digital television.”