They say love blossoms in unlikely places, so perhaps the Valentine's Day launch will make all the difference.

The trouble is, how can anyone be seduced when nobody seems to have heard of Talk 107?

"What's the first thing you do when you hear about a new station? Switch it on. You start marketing a station just before it goes on air, " says the station's managing director Peter Gillespie, promising a big marketing blitz from this weekend.

Others might not agree with this strategy. UTV certainly seems to have given him the budget to make plenty of noise about what is just the second local commercial speech station to launch in the UK.

Talk 107 will spend almost £250,000 in the first few weeks on advertising, reaching everything from the insides of taxi cabs to primetime television.

This is one of several things happening at the last minute.

The studios have only just arrived, luckily a week earlier than expected. This means a test broadcast is going ahead; five minutes into our conversation, loud cheers break out around the office as the station goes on air for the first time.

Details like these seem trifling compared to the big question: if there is money in speech radio, why is nobody else doing it? The only other local British talk station, LBC, has struggled under different owners since it launched in the 1970s; talkSPORT is still said to be unprofitable when you count contributions to group costs.

Gillespie says talkSPORT is profitable, but concedes that talk is a bit more expensive than commercial music radio because you need highend presenters and a team of researchers. Although he could have added that talk audiences also tend to listen for less time, he says the main reason commercial stations steer clear is because they do not understand it.

"Actually, speech is a pretty proven format. In Australia and New Zealand, what's called progressive or talkback radio is a dominant format, " he says.

Gillespie points out that BBC speech stations plus talkSPORT and LBC make up about 30% of all UK radio listening. Not only that, 130 commercial music stations have launched in the past 10 years as BBC speech stations' audience share has grown.

In other words, commercial radio is just fighting itself.

Talk 107's overall first-year target is 11% weekly reach . . .over 100,000 listeners . . . with each listening for about eight hours. This would take it to within touching distance of Forth 2, the lowest ranking major station in the area.

By year three, Gillespie is looking for a weekly reach in the mid-teens. "If we are there, then we are definitely a profitable station, " he says.

These figures are considerably lower than the appeal indicated in UTV's research, he argues.

But with LBC and talkSPORT nowhere near double figures in their target markets, there is certainly no guarantee that Edinburgh's fling with talk radio will become permanent.