Over at Global Radio the view on how to save money is mostly on closing down local stations and centralising output in London. However another radio company has taken a different approach to reducing costs.

From Wales Town and Country Broadcasting operates eight radio stations, mostly clustered along the south of the country, Many of its stations share presenters. Notably they're generally not networking, but several of its presenters do shows on different stations, sometimes at the same time.

Most of Town and Country's stations are your average local radio stations however in June 2008 the company took over Xfm South Wales and relaunched it under the name Nation Radio, and in September 2010 relaunched NME Radio whose previous operator had pulled the plug on the station.

Nation and NME Radio are both indie/alternative stations and running the two together is a rather sensible fit. The obvious assumption would be that the two stations would end up with some shared programming, however instead the two stations get different output with two presenters being shared.

Now getting an understanding of the exact situation is difficult as frankly Nation Radio's website is frankly hopeless and doesn't even provide a schedule. However based a little research we can find out that Ben Evans (who was the only person to transfer from Xfm to Nation Radio, and who made the move from programming to presenting) presents drivetime. He's also on NME Radio Drivetime between 3 and 8pm at the same time.

That kind of works - the two stations at least share a similar format. But the real gem, and a prime example of the kind of presenting sharing that can happen in local radio, can be found with Chris Blumer.

Chris is a hard working presenter, and broadcasts from 6am on the Nation Radio breakfast show until 11am at which point he heads off for a four hour stint with NME Radio until 3pm.

Ah but that's not all Chris does because he's also on Bridge FM at exactly the same time broadcasting to Bridgend and the Vale of Glamorgan, also 11-3pm.

Wow is this man hard working you must be thinking. Oh well you haven't heard the best of it yet as Chris gets an hour off before broadcasting to Swansea as the drivetime presenter of Bay Radio!

Presumably Chris can't be working 12 hours on air every day pretty much non stop, however presenting four different radio shows, including two shows at the same time on two completely different station formats, well clearly that takes some doing.

Listening to his Nation breakfast show there's a lot of back to back records, and few links (although usually with a time check thrown in just for good measure). No doubt Chris is making the best use of his time whilst the records are playing and pre-recording links for other shows. But either way, it begs the question - can there be many over people who can boast that they broadcast 16 hours of radio shows on a normal weekday? And is Chris the hardest working radio presenter in Britain? Either way, and no matter what you think of the output, the man must deserve a medal.

Update: turns out Chris isn't chained to the mixing desk and doesn't actually produce 16 hours a day of radio...