‘Showreels’ are quick 2 to 5 minute long edited highlights of a person’s talent.
A great ballet dancer’s showreel will be edited highlights of her greatest moments or examples of her dexterity. An actor will show clips of their most famous characters or the range of accents or emotions they are capable of portraying.
So, what should a radio presenter’s showreel contain?
Logically it is an audio file of 2 or 3 minutes of different clips of ‘links’ (the talking bits radio presenter do inbetween songs) showing the patter, style and originality of the presenter concerned.
Ah. Now then, here starts the problem. Whilst the great ballet dancer or esteemed actor can show their range of abilities, there’s not much a commercial radio presenter can demonstrate.
Commercial radio presenters are not allowed to be anything beyond corporate announcers.
The playout computer instructs them when they can speak and how long they can speak for, and what the subject and style of their talkie bit has to be. In many cases they have to more or less paraphrase or read directly from a script, and are very mindful of trying to get all the info out, along with the stock phrases they have to say to begin and end almost every sentence.
In other words, they have absolutely no opportunity to sound human. And somehow this has to be all edited together into a two minute example of, erm, ‘their work’.
A pal of mine, having been in radio from the days when presenters were employed for their humanity, knowledge and technical ability to craft a radio show as an artist might craft a masterpiece of a painting, recently faced the horror of putting together his showreel. In his latter years in radio all his humanity and creativity had been sucked out of him and he had turned into something not far off an announcer at a railway station. All of this was in order to comply with the corporate requirements of commercial radio presentation.
So, he looked at his immediate work and pulled up a recording of his last show on, well, let’s call it Radio Borg.
As he put it, “So it should be easy to get a decent 2 minutes of presenting skills from a three hour show, right?“
Wrong.
“It was so difficult to find anything usable at all in this entire three hour programme. My links were fine, and technically proficient, but it’s just that . . . A> there were so few of them, and B> they were almost identical.“
“I managed to go through an entire hour of the show and find only three spoken links . . .and in the three hours, I only managed to find enough links which were different from each other to bring me up to 1:45 of my 2 minute demo reel.”
“It’s funny, looking back on it, it really does bear out what you say about radio . . . that a three hour show could produce so little actual content.“
Reminiscing about the original days of commercial radio, he recalled that “a great deal of freedom and choice was given so that you could put your own personality and passion onto the airwaves, within the broader overall music format. The station basically ran on a system of employing people who knew what they were doing, and who had a passion for either the music, or the culture of the station, of preferably both, and letting them get on with the job.”
Meanwhile, of course, the BBC still manages to employ personalities and ‘talent’ and generate creative radio for which the audience is rising whilst commercial radio’s audience for its corporate boring and bizarre presentation style is declining.
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