'Marketing jazz was like marketing Guinness'

TRANSFORMING a radio station teetering on the brink of collapse into the most listened to jazz broadcaster in the world is no mean feat.

Even more remarkably, Richard Wheatly turned round Jazz fm while doing a four-hour stint as disc jockey on the station's graveyard shift. Now his success has attracted a potential suitor in Guardian Media Group, the private company that owns The Guardian newspaper.

GMG has offered the equivalent of £41m. If Jazz fm receives no better offer by Tuesday, GMG will have the support of more than half the radio station's shareholders.

So far, Wheatly has made no response, but he is clearly playing a waiting game. He says: 'I do not have a problem with Jazz fm being acquired, because it is an independent radio company that at some point could benefit by being part of a bigger group. But with Jazz fm I do not feel we lack resources, which is the classic argument applied to smaller businesses in this situation. We have found ways of using our creativity to punch above our weight.'

Wheatly, 55, obviously enjoys running the business, including his weekly 1am-5am Monday stint on the Smooth Jazz In The Night programme, which, he notes proudly, gets a bigger audience than Radio 3 at the same hour. 'I do the show because I thought it would be a bit wet not to, and I wanted to know what the DJs go through,' he says.

The station, which broadcasts in London and the North West, is on the rise. Latest figures show total weekly listening hours reached 6.7m in the first quarter of this year - an 86% jump on the previous quarter. It is also the biggest internet radio station of any kind, with 800,000 unique visitors a month.

Things were not always so rosy. Jazz fm took ten years to make a profit, and it lost £181,000 in digital radio in the six months to December. But Wheatly's defence is that owning digital licences potentially gives his station virtually national reach, and ensures that it retains its analogue licences without having to bid again for them.

Jazz fm was launched in 1990 with an Ella Fitzgerald concert at London's Royal Festival Hall. The aim was serious, straight jazz, but when Wheatly arrived five years later the format was in trouble. 'Too few people wanted to listen to seven-minute drum solos over their breakfast,' he recalls. 'Even jazz enthusiasts were not listening for long enough.'

Wheatly spent 15 years in advertising, ten of them running the London arm of agency Leo Burnett. He was appointed Jazz fm chief executive after leading a failed bid for the first National Lottery licence. He worked on it with Denise Kingsmill, deputy chairman of the Competition Commission, and now they live together.

'I would come home from the lottery bid, switch on Jazz fm and feel human again,' he says. 'So when we lost, which was devastating because it's such hard work you have to believe you'll win, it seemed like pure luck when they asked if I'd like to run it.'

By then, the station was calling itself JFM and played more Sting than Satchmo, but listeners were still deserting it in droves. Wheatly says: 'I realised we were going to run out of money - then a miracle happened. We had another station called Viva aimed at women, which was losing £120,000 a month. Mohamed Al Fayed bought it for £4m. We were saved.'

Wheatly returned Jazz fm to its roots, but with a twist. He introduced 'smooth jazz', more melodic and easy to listen to, alongside the more esoteric music. 'Marketing jazz was like marketing Guinness,' he says. 'People said they hadn't tried it but didn't think they'd like it. We had to make it accessible, and introducing smooth jazz into daytime programming worked.' But he needed other ways to tap his affluent listeners for revenue. In 1996, Jazz fm was the first UK station to launch its own record label and it now promotes concerts worldwide. These enterprises account for just over half of group revenue.

But a deal with US radio group Clear Channel was still crucial. It took a 30% stake in Jazz fm and took over sales, and it is backing the GMG bid unless a better offer comes along. Wheatly says: 'We changed from a near-bankrupt radio station into a mini-entertainment business. You can't make people like jazz if they don't, but Jazz fm is seen as cool, stylish and sexy because we managed to articulate a format for it and market it very successfully.'

As the parody jazz presenter on the Fast Show used to say...Nice.