Who needs pictures?

You have to feel a little sympathy for the members of the Radio Five Live team who, having been assigned to cover the passion and excitement of the World Cup, will find themselves heading down the M4 to spend an afternoon in Gloucestershire in the company of a group of American airmen.

But recording the USAF's perspective on - and probable bafflement over - the performances of the American team in Germany is part of station controller Bob Shennan's plan for using football's greatest showcase to demonstrate the international composition of the British population and, by extension, his station's audience. Hence, Italy's game with Ghana will be covered from a park in Bedford, which has a large Italian community, and Spain's meeting with Ukraine will be screened on a farm in Herefordshire that employs a small army of Ukrainian fruit-pickers.

The 18th World Cup marks the most significant opportunity in the 12-year history of the BBC's sport and news radio network, and Shennan will spread the word around the country with the aid of a travelling circus not deployed by the corporation since the days of the Radio 1 roadshow.

"I don't think we are going to get quite the numbers that Smiley Miley managed to attract but there's a sense of trying to get the message about Five Live around the country," says Shennan. "We're starting from the basis that our entire World Cup isn't built on the assumption England get beyond the second or third phase. It's going to be built on this being a global event and we in this country have got people with a vested interest in pretty much every team taking part."

Furthermore, the popular Five Live phone-in show 606 will traverse Britain during the World Cup and allow local BBC radio stations to share in one of the most cherished brands on the network by allowing them to simulcast.

From Germany, Five Live and its sister station Five Live Sports Extra will offer commentary on every one of the tournament's 64 games. "We are doing every game because our audience now would expect us to do so," says Shennan. "If I think back to a couple of World Cups ago we probably did 35 or 36 matches, which felt like a big commitment to the competition. But the game has got bigger and bigger and the stakes have got higher and higher."

Dressed in varying shades of grey and black, Shennan, with his long sideburns, has a bit of a Johnny Cash look going on although, having devoted much of his working life to sport, he is less Walk the Line than run the line. After starting his career as a journalist on Hereward Radio in Peterborough, he rose to become head of sport across the entire BBC in 1998. Such is his pedigree that he can decorate his office walls with posters of all the major football tournaments he has covered from Italia 90 to South Korea/Japan 2002. Two battered footballs are on the floor and in a frame hangs a photograph of the Punjab Army, a group of Sikh Sunderland supporters. It's a picture that neatly bridges Five Live's sporting obsession and Shennan's other responsibility, the BBC's Asian Network.

He will have been at the helm of Five Live for six years come August and, in spite of feeling so under the weather that he initially declines to have his photograph taken, he has the manner of someone who is comfortable in his skin. When television news breaks details of shots being heard inside the Capitol building in Washington, Shennan comes out of his office to alert his team. He is not above answering a ringing phone in the newsroom but also has to negotiate with a roster of on-air talent that includes such heavyweights as Nicky Campbell, Eamonn Holmes, Jeff Randall and Adrian Chiles.

Talking above the Hammersmith and City line tube trains that rattle past his open window, he admits his station will have to go some to achieve the impact it enjoyed during the last World Cup, where time differences ensured that many games kicked off as British audiences were having their breakfasts - a gift to radio. Germany 2006 will be much kinder to the television schedules: who wouldn't want to watch a game rather than just listen to commentary?

Shennan concedes this point but claims that many television viewers will be listening to Five Live. Games shown on the BBC will offer, via the interactive red button, the chance to mute the likes of John Motson and replace his commentary with a Five Live alternative, such as Alan Green or Mike Ingham.

"That was the sports department's decision to allow people the choice. Of course a lot of people will love to listen to Motty but we are expecting that when it's an ITV game everyone will want to listen to Alan Green."

ITV Sport will not, of course, be offering a red button link to Five Live.

The opinionated and excitable Green, Shennan, accepts, does not meet every listener's idea of the measured football analyst. "I know he sometimes alienates people because he's got a very, very distinctive style of broadcasting. He's an incredibly experienced football watcher, the one football commentator on the radio whom football followers throughout the land instantly recognise. They don't always agree with him but they unanimously respect him."

Shennan stood up for Green in January when Bolton Wanderers manager Sam Allardyce refused to appear on the network after the commentator accused his team of "ugly football". "Alan doesn't always get it right and we've had times, he'd tell you himself, when we've had words and I've thought he's called something wrong," says Shennan, who like Green is a big Liverpool fan. "In the Allardyce moment I supported him because I thought he was doing what our audience would have expected of him, which was to call a game as he saw it. He has previously been very generous about Allardyce's teams. The day Alan starts to couch his words for fear of offending people would be a sad day."

Shennan is a skilled media diplomat and even Kelvin MacKenzie, during an otherwise scathing attack on Five Live in these pages, described him as "an amiable cove, if not the sharpest tack in the carpet". Two years later, with MacKenzie having left Five Live's commercial rival TalkSPORT, the former editor of The Sun last month made his BBC radio debut on Shennan's network, presenting a two programme series called World Cup Scandals.

When Shennan was last interviewed in The Independent he rejected the perceived male bias of the station and claimed that Five Live had developed a "fantastic roster of female presentation talent". Nevertheless, in spite of the efforts of Shelagh Fogarty, Victoria Derbyshire and Jane Garvey, the network is still dominated by male voices.

Shennan praises Weekend News journalist Lesley Ashmaal as "one of the most talented reporters" on the station. He says her co-presenter, the Westminster stalwart John Pienaar, will "give that programme an ambitious political flavour" and help it to break the kind of agenda-setting stories that have become a hallmark of Randall's The Weekend Business.

Five Live's last official audience figures showed an improvement of nearly half a million to 6.17 million. Shennan can't rest, however. "Even though it feels often that things are nicely settled and established, when you have a radio station that's all-speech, 24-7 and 365 days a year, you need an awful lot of talent."

The presenters he wants are those that provide "light not heat", adding to the listener's sum of knowledge rather than simply seeking the drama of confrontation.

His most recent acquisitions include the new host of Saturday morning's Fighting Talk, Radio 1 star Colin Murray ("a very smart articulate presenter") and Stephen Nolan, who has won an unprecedented seven Sony gold awards for his broadcasting. Nolan, Shennan says, "is a very singular individual. He has the great ability to be on radio very much the man he is off air".

Like Murray, Green and Holmes, Nolan is an Ulsterman. "It's pure coincidence, just one of those things," says Shennan. "The reason those guys are all there is that they're quite brilliant broadcasters in their own areas." In Germany, Shennan's new voices will also include the football managers Martin Jol of Tottenham Hotspur and Paul Jewell of Wigan Athletic. "They're great natural communicators. They've got wit and are very charismatic talkers and are both on the back of phenomenally successful seasons."

Derbyshire and Campbell will both present shows from one of eight outside broadcast locations in town halls and bars in German cities. Simon Mayo, the star of Five Live's afternoon schedule, will also do some presenting from Germany. "One of the advantages of Germany as opposed to South Korea and Japan is that it's quite close and it's possible for us to get people in and out quite quickly," says Shennan. "People don't have to be committed for the entire tournament."

During this same period, Mayo will also co-present with Clare Balding Five Live's coverage of Wimbledon. "They make a great partnership. The idea is that Simon has a very popular afternoon show for the other weeks of the year. What we want to say to that audience when the tennis lands on that airtime is that it's part of the Five Live tapestry. For those people who come to us for the tennis we are saying to them that Simon Mayo is on in the afternoons these days and maybe you'd like to stay around when the tennis is gone."

Shennan himself will fleetingly head out to Germany but he has work to do at home. He knows Five Live could up its game in Celtic parts of the British Isles - "we would like to perform a bit better outside of England" - and he is aware of potential competition in the offing, perhaps from Channel 4's planned radio output. "I imagine they will do some talk radio and they certainly have a reputation for stimulating broadcasting," he says.

Five Live's own USP is to be the BBC's provider of live news and sport and the World Cup, says Shennan, will fulfil both, providing the station's lead news story for much of the tournament. "Although the commentary is the key thing I think a lot of people will be using Five Live as a one-stop shop for news and information, whether it's about Wayne Rooney's metatarsal or the latest selection issue," says the controller. "We are going to try to be the single, most obvious World Cup channel of all broadcasters during this tournament."