Last Saturday afternoon, I happened to tune to 107 The Bee, a Darwen, Lancashire based commercial radio station. Doing a one-off cover programme was Roy Martin.
I’ve no idea how the normal presenter sounds or what features are usually in the show, but Roy’s show seemed to consist of a stream of dedications and texts from people requesting particular songs. I was shocked and amazed to not hear the usual expected stuff from commercial radio on a Saturday afternoon. It was so pleasant to realise that he was live, too.
It’s commercial radio, so I am used to blandly voicetracked shows recorded weeks in advance, but Roy was live and able to give so much more than can be given in a pre-recorded mode. Not only was he live but also he wasn’t sticking to the usual strict policy you expect on commercial radio to speak just a few times an hour (ahead of the commercials). He even spoke after jingles at the end of commercial breaks. Shock horror. He’d speak up the songs and down the songs. There was no obvious pattern to when he spoke. And, when he spoke he wasn’t just reading out sponsored competition details or trailing the ever so hilarious breakfast show (assuming The Bee’s breakfast shows are ever so hilarious like every commercial station’s are supposed to be), but, get this, Roy was talking with his listeners!
I know this is a trait normally reserved for BBC radio, killed off in commercial radio over 20 years ago, but Roy was talking entertainingly inbetween the songs. He wasn’t obtrusive or dominating or distracting or over-the-top or up his own backside, but he was interacting with the songs and with the requests that were coming in thick and fast. He was even managing to get football info across without it boring me. He was interacting with the people making the song requests, not over the phone live on air or anything, but just by nattering to them over the radio one to one.
And, get this, he was playing what people asked for, not just letting the pre-programmed computer adhere to whatever The Bee’s music format normally churns out.
All in all, for the two hours I was able to listen I was thoroughly entertained and despite there not being a lot of my personal favourite kind of music (and no appearance of my Rolf Harris request either! Hurumph!), I found the range of what was being played very huge and, because of Roy’s presentation carefully knitting it all together so well, very acceptable.
Most importantly, I was entertained by Roy.
He didn’t do anything special, he was just there being human like radio presenters once were. I feel that this breaking away from strict presentation formats will be the future of radio and it will build new audiences tired of being forgotten by standard commercial radio presentation styles which are not too dissimilar to railway station announcements – cold, characterless, factual but boring and certainly not entertaining.
Listening to Roy Martin gave me hope for the future of local commercial radio.
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