Essential Radio Skills

How to present a radio show

Peter Stewart

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781408130889
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Radio

" One of the few books we'd recommend " BBC Training
" The perfect guide for anyone who wants to get on in this ever-changing and challenging media " Controller BBC Radio 5 Live
" A rich repository of real, practical experience " Director - BBC Nations & Regions
" An invaluable guide " Director - The Radio Academy
This is a practical, how-to guide to producing and presenting radio to a professional standard. Packed with day-to-day advice that captures the essence and buzz of live broadcasting; from preparing your show before it goes out, last minute changes to running orders, deciding what to drop in over a track, how to sell a feature or promote a programme, setting up competitions, thinking fast in a phone in - this book will help you do all that and more. It covers network and commercial, music and talk radio skills and is particularly suited to the independent local or community radio.
It features advice from professionals, covers industry-wide best practice with enough 'need-to-know' technical information to get you up and running. This edition has been updated throughout and has more than 500 weblinks to downloads and audio and video examples, as well as cross-references to the official National Occupational Standards for Radio Content.

Part One
OFF AIR

What’s in this part:

There’s a quick overview of the UK radio landscape and the different broadcasting platforms and the stations which don’t actually broadcast.

An outline of the ups and downs, the qualities and qualifications of good presenters and producers, and an explanation of what they do and how much they earn.

Then I take a look at the station as a whole: the other people you’ll be working with, the importance of the station’s name and branding, how it makes its money and who we do all this for.

1 The structure of
UK radio

Radio is everywhere. Despite its premature death knell being sounded with the increased popularity of multi-channel television, CDs and iPods, almost everyone in the UK listens to radio every day. It may be on in the factory, on a personal stereo as you walk to the station, a recorded and downloaded programme that you listen to on an MP3 player as you work out, a digital station playing in your car or even through the TV. It may be a music station playing chart hits, rock, easy listening or gold music. It may be a speech station with a diet of news and sport, book-readings or phone-ins. Or possibly it is a station with a combination of speech and music, perhaps targeted towards a certain age-group, people with a certain income, interest, culture or sexual orientation. Whatever the medium, the message or the music, radio is becoming more popular rather than less, despite the competition.

This is mainly because radio is cheap to provide and consume, the cheapest ‘tranny’ is just a few pounds, and because there’s so much radio to choose from. Even if you don’t become a presenter on ‘Bedroom FM’ and compile, record and upload your own programme on to the internet for others to hear, there are hundreds of other choices available to work for or listen to.

As well as the five national analogue BBC stations (on FM, MW and LW), there are three national commercial stations (INR – Independent National Radio) which can be heard across the UK. Then there are 46 BBC local and regional stations, 282 (at the last count and increasing) local and regional commercial ones (ILR – Independent Local Radio), community stations and short-term RSLs. If you add the UK’s national analogue commercial stations, the UK has more national stations than any other country in the world. Add to these the dozens of stations run by volunteers at hospitals and on university campuses and the hundreds more on digital radio and thousands ‘broadcasting’ on the internet – you can see that the world of radio is growing very quickly.

The BBC

You’ll no doubt be familiar with the BBC national services Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4 and Radio Five Live, but there are also local stations and others available on digital services.

Programmes in network radio (the national stations BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, 4, Five Live, 1 Xtra, BBC 6 Music, BBC 7 and the Asian Network) have programme teams to help put the shows together. There may well be a studio manager, producer and other staff to book guests, answer calls or even appear on the show itself as other characters (such as Steve Wright’s programme on Radio 2 or with Chris Moyles on Radio 1). Most presenters will still be driving the show themselves, but with more back-up staff to help them both on and off-air.

BBC local stations usually broadcast local output from 5am until 7pm, with ‘regionally shared’ programmes usually transmitted from 7pm until midnight, with a simulcast of Radio Five Live or the BBC World Service from then until 5am. A ‘regional share’ is when five or six nearby stations join together and broadcast the same programme. This is particularly cost effective at a time of day when few people are listening.

Elsewhere in the day, BBC local breakfast programmes are speech-only featuring lots of news, interviews and packages (pre-recorded interviews or features). The afternoon drive programme may also be quite speech heavy with other programmes more balanced between music and talk.

A BBC local presenter is likely to have a BA (Broadcast Assistant or producer) to help them put their programme together and to be with them as they broadcast. This may seem staff-heavy when compared to commercial radio, indeed those who move from commercial radio to the BBC see it as a luxury, but the extra pair of hands is often for practical reasons: as BBC local programmes have a higher speech content, the presenter can’t be doing an interview and answering calls at the same time.

The BBC is in a bit of a cleft stick. On one hand it has a public service remit to provide programmes to those who would otherwise not be catered for by the commercial sector. In other words, it should be broadcasting programmes for minority audiences – the ones commercial stations don’t want to target because smaller audiences may mean less income. On the other hand there’s the universal licence fee. This argument says that because everyone in the UK with a television pays a licence fee (some of which goes to BBC radio), the BBC has a duty to broadcast programmes that everyone will want to hear.

You can see how these two factors are largely at odds with each other, and this is why the BBC has to tread a careful line. If the BBC broadcasts programmes that are said (by its commercial competitors) to be too popular then it is accused of abusing its remit and providing programmes that they could make money from. If the BBC programmes are not popular the cry goes up that it is poor value for money and why should people pay for a service that they don’t use?

Commercial stations

Started in 1973, there are now at least 282 local and regional commercial stations (and three national ones), which sell airtime to advertisers to generate their income. To put it simply, the more popular a programme or station, the higher the cost of advertising on it and the greater the amount of money made by the station’s owners.

But the opposite is also true: a station that loses an audience has to charge less for its airtime (it’s offering fewer listeners to its clients), and so has a lower income. That’s less money to spend on presenters, so arguably they’re not as good. They may attract fewer listeners, which means less money for competitions and prizes, and less money to market the station. It’s a difficult spiral to get out of.

Some stations turn over a good profit even with a small audience because they’re ‘super-local’. The percentage of people listening within the transmission area is high, even though the actual number is low, and that means that advertisers have less ‘wastage’. Similarly specialist music stations charge a premium because of the specific kind of person (the demographic) attracted to its output.

Commercial stations are, understandably, always looking for ways to cut costs without cutting corners. That’s why some of the most-heard words are ‘automation’, ‘syndication’ and ‘consolidation’.

‘Automation’, is where live presenters are replaced by computers playing out pre-recorded programmes; ‘syndication’ where one show is broadcast on several stations at once; ‘consolidation’ where individual stations are bought by larger groups to reduce overheads.

‘Commercial radio players need to get bigger if they are to compete more effectively with the BBC for listeners.’ Paul Brown, Chief Executive, Commercial Radio Companies Association, The Radio Magazine, 18 December 2004

A larger group usually means job losses in areas of the business where consolidation can be effectively achieved, but can also have benefits. There’s more expertise available and more opportunity to move from one of its stations to another. Some complain it leads to a more homogenised sound (shared formats and some shared programmes), but audience figures stand up well – larger groups still seem to give audiences what they want to hear.

The station management may decide which group of people in the area is the biggest and has the most spending power as the one they want to attract as listeners, and ‘sell’ them to the advertisers as the people who’ll be able to hear their commercials.

Alternatively, a new station may decide to target a different kind of listener who is currently underserved by existing stations. Instead of going head-to-head with three chart-based stations, a new company may decide to play dance music to siphon off a small group of young people from each station which combined would make a large and well-defined core audience. Another new station may target older people from each existing station. Put simply, commercial stations sell advertisers ‘pairs of ears’.

Most commercial stations target a very similar audience: the biggest and richest. That’s usually 25–34 year olds, described as ‘the age that younger ones want to be and the older ones wish they still were’! News bulletins, travel news, what’s ons and even adverts all inform the audience what’s happening in the area. Add requests, roadshows and charity appeals and you’ll see that commercial stations may not have a strict public service remit, but they still serve the public.

Commercial stations have to put forward a proposal to run a radio station when the regulatory body Ofcom advertises a licence. It considers which of several plans, often put forward by small local groups as well as by large multi-station groups, is likely to be of most benefit to the people of the area, and actually do what it promises.

The winning station provides a one-page Format to Ofcom describing their output (types of music and speech), target audience and how much will be presented locally. Every Format is different as it caters for the needs of the specific audience in each area, and the different conditions each station faces.

The 12-year licence can be sold by the winner (it’s immediately worth a potential fortune), but the promised format of the station has to remain. If a station breaks broadcasting regulations Ofcom can impose a fine, shorten the licence period if it’s a serious transgression, or take the licence away completely.

Ofcom charges a fee to national, regional and local commercial stations for the right to broadcast. In 2005 this was 0.627% of the qualifying revenue of that station.

Most local radio presenters will do everything in the studio themselves: playing in the songs and the commercials, answ...