Why radio enthusiasts mustn’t design radio output

It became very obvious to me some time ago that the older radio ‘anoraks’ (enthusiasts) of yesteryear who live for the return of offshore pirate radio ships are barking mad.

They constantly angrily harp on about the good old days, and in voices that echo their fathers’ voices, they moan about the younger generations and the modern day approach to music radio as if it is the work of the anti-Christ.

Their parents, of course, hated the radio ships and that awful pop music they played, not to mention the brash in-your-face voices of the radio disc-jockeys inbetween the pop music, as if it was the work of the anti-Christ.

Nearly 50 years on and today’s older fathers or grandfathers, having learned absolutely nothing from their own childhood experience, moan in almost identical dismissive tones and will sternly tell you to your face that all radio is dead apart from any radio that is identical to the radio of 50 years ago.

Trying to work out what kind of radio format should be designed to appease these people is impossible.  No format will actually satisfy them.  Even a format absolutely identical to an offshore radio station format wouldn’t work.  It wouldn’t be an offshore radio station or from a radioship, it wouldn’t be 1967, and so it wouldn’t be a proper radio station, end of.

These crazy people decided in 1967 that the BBC was some kind of enemy.  They refused to listen to Radio 1 when it emerged, and nearly 50 years later they still spit acid when forced to mention the station.  They didn’t listen to Radio 2 either on some mad principle based on thinking they were punishing the BBC for the demise of offshore radio, yet they will anxiously shout their opinion about how the world is about to end because Radio 2 has repositioned itself from targeting an age-group that is predominantly dead or near dead, and shuffled back to targeting the 35 – 55 age group as it targeted in 1967.

As for their contempt for Radio 1, they, along with most Daily Mail readers see it as the Devil incarnate, and can’t understand why any decent 15 – 25 year old could possibly find anything good about it (Just as their fathers thought about the pirate stations).

The next set of radio anoraks that really should shut the feck up when it comes to radio formats are the younger generation who have been lucky enough to have recorded a few voicetracks or sat in a studio reading out what they’ve been told to read out in a monotone voice followed by pressing the ‘Next’ button on the main star of the radio station, the pre-programmed, never to be altered, playout computer.

To these gentlemen (as it remains predominantly a male occupation – maybe because women are far more sensible?), radio is measured by the success of talking in the space before the lyrics start on one of the 30 or 40 songs that the station plays one after the other. They are not often allowed to do this ‘talking up a song’ in the modern restrictive format, but when they are, man they go for it!  They assume listeners are hanging on for their oddly affected unnatural constipated sounding (why do radio broadcasters assume they have speak so stupidly?) voices and they dream of the days when radio disc-jockeys’ names were known by the public, wishing that somebody listening might know their name.

Because they believe that today’s radio still has some kind of echo from the past associated with it, they are unaware that unless a listener has been strapped to a chair, the listener will hit the button to change station the moment they hear the constipated whine start.  They, wrongly, assume people today are actually listening to them.  They clearly aren’t.  Because of the stupid ill-designed formats, ‘presenter talking’ equals a telegraph to the listener that a load of ads are coming, so they instantly tune away without paying attention to all but the first few words of a ‘link’.  Well, all tune away apart from those poor ones we mentioned that have been strapped to the chair.

These poor misguided radio fellows don’t even ‘get it’ when they attend the exciting outside broadcast roadshow with the radio station’s logo plastered everywhere that they have promoted every other ‘link’ for the last three weeks, only to discover that only ten people have turned up.  They assume it must be the football on TV or something.  Ah, yes, maybe it’s the bad weather, or the very hot weather, or something.  It can’t possibly be that nobody’s listening and nobody cares, can it?

So, despite the fact that nobody is listening to them, and nobody cares were they to crash a vocal, nobody cares how smoothly they managed to get all their listed promo points across in the allocated 7.5 seconds of link time they were given, they carefully practice their links 15 times before actually speaking them, having read all the advice that people just like them have given in forums and on-line discussion areas for people that make announcements over radio stations.

To feel even more important they will collect together in large back-slapping events where they will listen to ‘experts’ either telling them about the good old days before they were born, or how dropping the ‘g’ at the end of the word ‘morning’ will guarantee them a thousand more listeners.

At the height of removing themselves from reality, they will attend and award each other medals and golden awards for producing radio that other radio people thought was really good (especially since dropping the ‘g’ from ‘morning’).  The ever despondent and decreasing listeners take no part in this back-slapping version of fiddling whilst Rome burns, they are actually unimportant.  Radio is not about them, it’s about impressing fellow radio people.  None of these types of radio anoraks are in touch with the actual listeners, mainly because there aren’t any.

This is also why these people, along with the angry old people I first mentioned, should be kept away from designing radio output for the listeners to actually listen to rather than to just have on when the songs are playing.  Once radio is out of the hands of radio anoraks, then it might have a chance to progress and grow and build actual listeners rather than people who disappear as soon as the song stops, or those that are only leaving it on in the background because they are still strapped to that chair.