Why does commercial radio do everything so boringly? What are they afraid of? Here’s an example of some programming elements and how they are put together by the BBC or how they’d be put together by the commercial sector.
Ok, let’s have: A 15 minute news bulletin, followed by 3 records as good as segued back-to-back. Before that let’s have a presenter coming to the end of their show and a new presenter taking over after the news.
So then, how would Radio 1 do this? Aha, let’s look at the 12:30pm to 1:15pm sweep on a weekday.
Fearne Cotton’s show is coming to the end, and Greg James will be taking over.
At around 12:30pm Fearne has a short ‘handover style’ chat with Greg, obviously talking briefly about how awesome something that happened in Fearne’s show was (usually this is the ‘live’ artist who was singing for them) and forward promoting any features or guests in Greg’s show. Then a song plays. After the song, Fearne says a quick goodbye forward promoting tomorrow’s show, and plays a song. This song finishes at 12:45pm and Greg appears, talking for 4 or 5 seconds to thank Fearne and forward promote features in his show, and the 15 minute “Newsbeat” starts. Mid-way through this, inbetween stories, Greg pops up again with a forward promotion for his show, usually the first few songs to be played, ending with (say) “but first there’s more on school meals in Lancashire”, which then goes straight into the next news story.
When, at approximately 1pm, the 15 minute “Newsbeat” has finished a jingle or two play and the first song starts. This segues to the second and then the third song. Inbetween the songs Greg will link with no more than 2 seconds of voice over the top of the ‘intro’ of each, before doing his first ‘full’ link at the end of the three songs.
The net result is that the listener feels that the presenter is there for them, is interested and enthusiastic about what’s coming out of the radio and is slickly and unobtrusively ‘jocking’ the whole output to make it tight and fun. I always refer to this as the stitching that firmly holds the squares of the patchwork quilt together. The changeover between the presenters is interesting and plausible and the human sounding ‘team’ atmosphere of the station is maintained for the listener to be part of. In other words, it works and it sounds good.
But, how would the commerical sector handle this? Well, obviously compared to the BBC, there would also be as many commercials to put in as possible, but it would be probably something like this:
At 12:30pm for no obvious reason songs would be segued. At 12:40, the outgoing presenter wouldn’t say goodbye, because some mad person from madland has decided that saying goodbye is negative and might make people switch off. Instead, the outgoing presenter might vaguely refer in an abstract guarded and careful way to ‘tomorrow’ and would then play the adverts, with no goodbye. The stream of tedious jarring adverts would play one after the other and then the news programme would start at 12:45pm. The news programme may contain unannounced commercial breaks ahead of any weather forecast, and it would end and further commercials would play. At 1:03pm after the obligatory trailer for tomorrow’s breakfast show (a trailer that includes those hilarious spontaneous clips from this morning’s breakfast show that must be repeated every 20 minutes during the rest of the day’s output) and a jingle, the three segued songs would play. At the junction of each song a pre-recorded male or maybe female voice shouting in a strange style as if they are severely constipated and recorded whilst sitting on a toilet, will say station liners with maybe some pointless spacey zappy sound effects underscoring their words.
At 1:15pm the new presenter would not say hello because he, according to the mad people from madland, might remind people that things had changed, but he’d speak his first link maybe forward promoting what was to be in his show especailly if it was a sponsored feature, he’d mention how wonderful the morning’s breakfast show (from hours ago) was and tease about the next song, which of course telegraphs the next 3 minutes of commercials before said song.
The net result of this is that there is no stitching holding the patchwork together. Material is just laid out next to each other with nothing giving it continuity or holding it together or giving it a commonality or overall impact. The listener is left alone and lonely as they are barraged by the different elements without an explanation or any overlording personality and humour to make them feel part of something. They feel abused and left out in the cold.
Why does commercial radio have to behave like this and then moan about the lack of people listening for more than 15 minutes? It can’t be difficult to make commercial radio entertaining and to give it a hook for listeners to enjoy hanging from, surely?
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