The Radio Handbook

John Collins, Arran Bee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000359718
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Radio

Updated and revised, the fourth edition of The Radio Handbook is a comprehensive guide to the medium of radio and the radio industry in the UK.

Featuring new chapters on social media and podcasting, this book offers a thorough breakdown of the knowledge and skills needed to work within the contemporary radio industry. Using examples, case studies and transcripts, it examines the various building blocks that make radio, from music scheduling to news values and from phone-ins to sports commentaries. The latest trends in contemporary audio practice are referenced throughout, including the increased adoption of smartphone technology, further consolidation within commercial radio, and the ongoing debate about the future funding of the BBC against the backdrop of an accelerated move towards remote working, the rise in popularity of podcasting and an ever more crowded media landscape.

Combining theory and practice, this textbook is ideally suited for students of radio, media, communications and journalism. It equips readers with the skills they need to not only produce good radio themselves, but to have the knowledge they need to become a critical friend of the medium.

CHAPTER 1

Radio style

by John Collins and Arran Bee

Nearly every decision that the management of a radio station makes is with a view to carving out its own particular place in what is an ever more crowded marketplace. Radio in the UK is now characterised by powerful brands and nationwide networks, but the individual stations within those arrangements will still hope to create a unique offering that makes them stand out from all of their competitors.

Musically, there will be a great deal of uniformity, particularly amongst stations that operate under one of the big, national commercial brands such as Heart, Capital, Smooth or Hits Radio. This will never be more obvious than within the tight confines of the centrally issued music playlist. BBC Local Radio stations have more flexibility, but they too begin with a playlist of songs that is issued to them from the top of the organisation. Around these prescribed schedules of music, each station will attempt to forge its own identity through the use of particular presenters, its provision of local news and information, its use of jingles, the competitions it runs, the promotions with which it is involved, the campaigns it organises and the events at which it is present. Each of these aspects of how a radio station operates will be looked at in more detail later in this chapter, but our analysis of radio style begins from this observation that a radio station is much more than the sum of its output with any measurement of its worth also resting upon the set of attitude and values that make up its brand.

The growing importance of brands within the radio industry is testament to the way in which radio has become a commodity. Beginning as a source of information and entertainment, the introduction of commercial radio in the early 1970s ensured that radio became a product which audiences would consume. Any station that wishes to succeed has to find an audience, and that means meeting the basic requirements of a critical mass of consumers.

When we choose with which airline we want to travel, our basic requirement is that it must fly to our chosen destination. That same basic requirement for radio is that it provides information and entertainment in which we’re already interested. Beyond this basic requirement, our choice of brand says much about what is important to us; someone who flies on Ryanair is more likely to be interested in how much they paid for their ticket than someone who flies British Airways where the price point is perhaps less important than the perceived quality of the service. Similarly, listeners to talkSPORT are much more likely to be interested in the latest goings-on in the world of sport than Scala Radio listeners who have a penchant for accessible classical music. Just as airline customers can be won or lost by a series of features which bear little relevance to a safe journey to your destination – reward points, leg-room, lounge access – so too can listeners be gained or lost by details such as the personality of a certain presenter or the frequency with which a station cuts to an ad break.

Branding, then, is a way of achieving a consistent offering, a reassuring identity, that runs through every aspect of a station’s programming. On an ever more crowded dial, the importance of having a distinct and attractive brand becomes ever more crucial to success. As recently as the late 1990s, the number of radio stations easily available to most people in the UK was limited to a handful of national stations and two or three local stations. Taking Birmingham as an example, in 1999, listeners in the city were able to pick up eight national stations and four locals. The spread of DAB and the emergence of newer, internet-based platforms had seen that figure rise to 52 national stations. That means that 54% of the total radio listening options in the UK are available to listeners in a single city. (Cridland, 2020) This means that now, more than ever, it’s important to create an aspirational brand in order to maintain a station everyone wants to be part of and ensure listener loyalty.

Perhaps the importance of a brand image can be seen most clearly by looking at how a station changes following a take-over. The Guardian Media Group (GMG) has now been swallowed up by Global Radio, but when it purchased the Saga radio stations in the spring of 2007, it quickly relaunched them under the name Smooth radio. Saga was a well-established brand providing holidays, insurance and other services to those over the age of 50. Initially, the Saga name was of benefit to the radio stations with plenty of over-50s who already identified with the brand delivering an instant audience. When GMG decided to pursue a target audience of those aged 40 plus, one of the first things they knew they had to do was to change the name. This allowed them to put some distance between the image of ‘a Saga listener’ and allow them to attract ‘a Smooth listener’.

Later in this chapter we will see how all radio stations are aware of the importance of their brand and look at the time and money they invest into market research to ensure that they get it right. Prior to this, it is crucial to consider the canvas upon which all radio stations design their output – the radio day.

THE RADIO DAY: THE BREAKFAST SHOW

The most important programme on most radio stations is its breakfast show. This is almost always the time when most people are listening. Research suggests “the radio audience peaks in the morning between 7am and 9.30am, and steadily tails off throughout the day before climbing again around drive-time (4pm to 6.00pm)” (Ofcom, 2016). As the station’s flagship programme, the breakfast show is used for a number of different purposes, the most obvious being to hook listeners into the station, hopefully for the rest of the day. Former BBC Radio 1 controller, Andy Parfitt,¹ says the breakfast show formula is partly functional and partly about the bond between listener and presenter:

Firstly, there’s this utility of helping people through the metronome of the clock and delivering them to their destination; school, college, work. Secondly, there’s this question of character or personality, which is, in one way, to empathise and to reflect and mirror that you understand what people are going through first-thing on a wet Wednesday morning in January – and secondly to entertain or help people pause to reflect.

On the ‘functional’ side, breakfast shows have regular time checks as listeners get ready to leave the house, travel updates to help them plan their journey plus regular news and weather bulletins. All of these could be repeated in some form as breakfast shows tend to be made on the basis that people listen for an average of 20 minutes at a time.

The functional elements of the breakfast show feed into what programmers call ‘sense of day’. An important part of a breakfast show, Virgin Radio’s Chris Evans characterises it as a desire to “reflect the day … and the world”, adding “we wake up, we turn on the radio, we immediately have a sense of the world that awaits us” (Evans, 2019). ‘Sense of day’ involves the show, especially its presenters, reflecting the shared thoughts, feelings and conversations of its audience, on the very morning that the show is on air. News, sport and showbiz stories all feed into ‘sense of day’ but it could also include the big show on TV the night before, an upcoming film or plans for the weekend.

Looking at the ‘personality’ element, mentioned by Andy Parfitt, breakfast shows tend to feature a team of people, or ‘cast of characters’, on air. Whether music or speech-based, each person has a distinctive personality and role within the show. This is still true on a news programme. When Martha Kearney started on the Today programme in 2018, her editor told her to “let your personality shine through” (Hodges, 2018). Kearney adds “I’m very much aware that people are having their breakfast, so there should be a friendly tone to the programme as well”. BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show presenter Zoe Ball has been called “chatty, chummy, self-deprecating [and] inclusive” (Nicol, 2019).

Whether BBC or commercial and regardless of format, the breakfast show is the station’s ‘shop window’. It establishes the station’s identity. This is done, not only through the content of the show itself, but also by trailing programmes scheduled for later in the day, which – it is hoped – listeners will sample. See ‘Jingles’ for more on the function of trails.

Gem at breakfast with Jo and Sparky

Jo Russell and Mark ‘Sparky’ Colerangle present the breakfast show on Gem 106 in the East Midlands, alongside their producer, Paul Iliffe, and newsreader, Katy White (Figure 1.1). The pair previously worked together at Free Radio West Midlands. Other past stations include Absolute Radio and Trent FM for Jo and Galaxy South Coast and Ocean FM for Sparky. Jo has won four Sony Radio Awards and, in 2014, was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Radio Academy.

FIGURE 1.1 Gem at breakfast presenters, Jo and Sparky

Jo² says the show’s audience is primarily “fun-loving, easy-going, light-hearted, ‘entertain-me’ women”. Sparky³ adds that their listeners are “making changes in their lives where they’re evolving from late 20s into 30s, settling down, getting a house – going down that route”. Jo says having a clear idea of the audience gives the team a ‘filter’ to put ideas through:

Any content that we do, we’ve got to put it through that filter. We’ve got to make sure that if they have got small kids, which we assume they have, that we make sure that our content can be heard by those kids as well. Also, we’ve got to really think about an age range. Reference points are a key thing. We’re light-hearted, too. We never get too serious. Once you’ve put everything through that filter, we’re good to go.

Jo and Sparky use what they judge to be big talking points for their audience as the starting point for their links and wider story arcs. This could be as light and relatable as the end of the Argos catalogue to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Jo says, in that case, “it’s turning that into a bit of entertainment whilst not going over the line”. Executive Producer Paul Iliffe⁴ says they took an angle on the Government’s handwashing advice:

The handwashing one is a good one because you have to talk about what’s going on in people’s lives. As soon as Boris Johnson says you’ve got to wash your hands and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice, we’re like ‘woah – if you’ve got to sing it twice, it’s the wrong song!’ So we had a debate about what is the correct song to last 20 seconds. I think we came up with the chorus to ‘500 Miles’ by The Proclaimers.

With decades of breakfast radio experience between the four of them, what do they think makes a great breakfast show? Paul Iliffe says creativity is vital:

It’s got to be pacy. You’ve got to have ‘too many’ ideas, almost. My favourite kind of show is when it feels like we’ve got too much to get in the show. It’s like we’re packing things in because we’ve got the next thing that we’re excited about to move on to. I love to hear that. On TFI Friday, you used to hear them talk about things that they didn’t have time to do – and I used to love that.

Ideas are the lifeblood of breakfast radio, especially for shows on five days a week. Sparky says he has an online document that he constantly updates with ideas, while the team have a WhatsApp group, too. He adds:

It is a pressure because what’s funny or entertaining is subjective. Trying to appeal to everyone is hard. Keeping that filter that Jo described is our rule so that we can keep inside the boundaries of where our show goes. The pressure of coming up with stuff every day, which one of us might find funnier or more entertaining than the other, that’s where the pressure comes from.

Jo Russell says it is crucial to get the team dynamic right:

Acknowledging that we’re all quite different [is important for a great breakfast show]. There’s a real weirdness because you spend so much time together as a team of people, there are times when you’re really tired and think ‘do we ever agree?’ But that’s the point. If we always did agree then one of us is redundant, essentially. I think appreciating that we’re all different is a good thing, not a bad thing. I think not being precious about who gets the air time [is also important], not being precious about who gets the laugh – at the end of the day, the show gets the credit.

Sparky agrees, saying a breakfast show is like a university project where “you have someone who writes, someone who comes up with the witty words” and that each member of the team brings something that the others do not. He adds that “being ready to change” is a big factor in the success of a show:

I woke up on the morning when Michael Jackson died and suddenly, it’s like ‘you’re doing a whole show where you’re just talking about Michael Jackson and you’re just playing Michael Jackson songs’. You’ve got no time to think about it, no time to stress, you just do it. Similarly, if a big news story breaks, like when we went into ‘lockdown’, you need to be ready to change, knowing that everyone’s on-side when you get in in the morning.

For Katy White,⁵ it is about “having strong personalities and not necessarily ones that are typical”. She adds this:

I’ve always made it my mission not to be [a giggling female character, just there to laugh at jokes]. If it’s patronising to women, it’s not something that I would enjoy listening to. I used to love Jo’s breakfast show [with Andy Twigge on Trent FM] when I was at university because she was the strong, female character.

DAYTIME SHOWS

The direction taken by daytime programming varies hugely d...