Programme Making for Radio

Jim Beaman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134214587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Programme Making for Radio offers trainee radio broadcasters and their instructors focused practical guidelines to the professional techniques applied to the making of radio shows, explaining how specific radio programmes are made and the conventions and techniques required to produce them. This book describes how and why these methods are applied through the use of a behind-the-scenes glimpse at working practices and procedures used in the industry. It considers the constraints and incentives that limit or stimulate creativity and innovation within programme production.

Programme Making for Radio examines the individual roles and responsibilities of the whole production team and the importance of team-working skills. Chapters focus on the specific requirements of specialist programmes and offer advice from a range of programme makers working in local and national broadcasting. There is a case study example that follows the progress of a feature programme from pitching the original idea, through assembling material to final transmission.

Programme Making for Radio includes:

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• a clear description of the role of each member of the programme making team, their duties and responsibilities

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• practical tips on interviewing, mixing and presenting

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• explanations of the key elements that make up a radio programme such as clips, wraps, packages, features and interviews with a full glossary of technical terms.

This book is informative, accessible and comprehensive, covering the whole range of skills needed by the radio professional in the studio and on location.

1
Broadcasting programmes

In those formative listening years that I mention in the Introduction to this book my family tuned into their favourite programmes on a colourful transistor radio. My grandparents by contrast never progressed beyond their gigantic valve-operated wooden piece of furniture called the wireless. Once it had been switched on and given time to warm up it was permanently tuned to the portentous voices on the Home Service from the BBC. The output of the networks that we chose to listen to seemed to be reflected in our choice of receiving equipment. Our listening routines were also coloured and shaped by the portability of the modern radio that was taken from room to room, into the garden and on days out. The plugged-in valve wireless determined that listening was a sedentary activity.

Although the BBC was at this time the sole UK provider of radio programmes it didn’t mean that listeners tuned into their services alone. Disgruntled with the lack of choice that comes with a monopoly and the dull nature of some of the output, especially on Sundays, radio owners were encouraged to tune across the dial in search of more lively English language and music programmes provided particularly by European stations. However, other listeners, afraid that they would never be able to find their original station frequency again, would stay tuned to that station and never touch the retuning dial.

It is worth bearing in mind that any programmes you produce will be heard in the context of the station that broadcasts them and the rest of its output. Programmes combine to form a consistent station identity and style to its schedule that will appeal to a particular audience profile. This identity is reflected in its choice of presenters of the programmes, station name, station jingle package and music choice. Listening to a station or network becomes part of the daily routine and lifestyle choice for some and an audience will make a special effort to tune in regularly attracted by the style of the presenter, the music choice or the content of the programmes. A station’s programming policy needs to be established in the mind of the listener as soon as they turn on and everything it broadcasts should match up with that listener’s expectations every time they tune in. If they know what they can expect to hear they will come back for more and leave their radios tuned to you when they switch off for the day so that your station will be the one their radio is tuned to when they switch on next morning.

However, there is a danger that consistent format, structure and content can end up being acceptably formulaic and taken up by other stations in a group. The result is a somewhat sanitised and indistinguishable-sounding output when they should be aiming for diversity. Stations need to be able to introduce surprises for their listeners, though not so often or with so strong a surprise that they tune away, and they need to develop strategies to encourage new listeners without alienating their current devotees.

All broadcasters have a picture in their mind of who is their audience. They know their age, have ideas about what they do for a living and in their spare time, what they care about and what they talk about so everything that is broadcast, advertised and marketed is targeted at and angled for them.

Knowing your audience is vital to good programme making, says Katy McDonald of Metro FM:

If you can provide something that deliberately appeals to them they will stay with you and even forgive one or two minor imperfections. Your programme could be excellent with quality content, stylish presentation, humour, good music but it will be a flop if it is wrongly targeted.

Stations that include music therefore need to make sure they are playing tracks that will appeal to that target audience. The music that is seen as the soundtrack to your life will be positioned during your late teens or early twenties. A station in 2006 playing music from the 1970s will see their audience as being in their 40s and 50s. They may also feature contemporary music that has the same appeal and speech content would reflect that audience’s interests.

In their bid to establish an identity with their listeners stations will insist on a set way for presenters to identify the station, its frequencies, its address, phone-in number and email details. There will also be set routines and scripts leading up to and out of news bulletins, advert breaks, traffic news and weather. The promotion of the station, its logo and presenters has become more sophisticated over the years with stations producing magazines, web sites and being involved in joint promotions with record companies and event promoters. However, you can still buy station mugs, pens and car stickers or get a free publicity photograph of your favourite presenter.

Listening to radio rather than listening to the radio is even more applicable today because radio stations and their programmes can be accessed via a number of means, not just using a specifically designed device called a radio. I have six radios operating in various rooms of my home, one in my car, one at work and one in my jacket pocket. I can also listen via my cellphone, on the Web via my computer or by selecting a station on cable and satellite TV. Radio is no longer as ephemeral as it once was. We no longer need to listen to programmes in real time as they are broadcast: we can record on-air or access a listen again archive on a web site when it is more convenient for us. It is the continued act of listening that is important because the listener is an essential part of the broadcasting equation.

Ed Shane was worried that there would be no listeners to radio in the future, but puts his faith in the Internet generation – he calls them ‘screenagers’ – who experience radio by listening via their computers (Keith 2002: 187–8). This means that they will be lucky enough to be able to access radio from all over the world and interact with the stations and their presenters, giving them a fuller and more satisfying relationship with the medium than any previous generation of listeners. Technology has changed and will continue to change the way we listen to radio and also the way it is produced. Don’t get the impression all radio stations have the latest high-tech equipment at their disposal: some are a long way from tapeless production. Not all studios are working digitally and lack scheduling and playout systems, digital editing software or memory card recorders. As the BBC in-house newspaper reported, the daily consumer programme You and Yours on Radio 4 only became the first factual programme to broadcast 100 per cent digitally in December 2004.

There are still radio departments who are recording programmes, interviews and the like on quarter-inch tape and editing with chinagraph pencils, razor blades and splicing tape. Acquire as many skills as you can with new and not so up-to-date equipment – you never know where you might end up working.

You don’t even have to be a professional broadcaster with state of the art studio facilities and transmitters at your disposal to get listeners. Podcasting (named after the popular MP3 player the Ipod made by Apple) enables amateur broadcasters based at home and armed with a computer and microphone to speak to their listeners via downloadable audio files, avoiding the accepted industry method of programme making and transmitting. They are beginning to reach audiences who don’t listen to conventional radio because they personally find what is on offer, whether it is music or speech content, unacceptable or not to their taste. Material can be targeted directly for this specialist taste audience. Wise podcasters will also appreciate the potential advertising opportunities designed for and directed at the individual listener. The system is also open to abuse because, unlike the broadcast professionals, the podcasters are not regulated or bound by codes of practice. Professional broadcasters in the UK including the BBC are now starting to experiment with providing certain programmes and programme extracts from their output for downloading to MP3 players. According to Simon Nelson, Controller, BBC Radio and Music Interactive, the BBC’s top five monthly downloads for 2005 were the 08.10 interview on Radio 4’s Today programme, the best of Chris Moyles on Radio 1, the documentary archive on World Service, From Our Own Correspondent and In Our Time on Radio 4. All these programmes are produced by the BBC in-house programme makers and are all factual speech-based material. This is because the BBC needs to avoid clearance and copyright problems if they made available fictional work, work produced by an independent production company or included music. Another popular download from the BBC was Radio 3’s Beethoven season (2005 The Beethoven Experience) when the network broadcast all of the composer’s works. They were able to make this available for download because the music was out of copyright and all the musicians performing were part of BBC orchestras recorded by BBC staff.

Interactivity between the listener and a programme, broadcaster or station has changed dramatically. Back in the 1960s and earlier the best you could hope for was to send a postcard requesting a record to be played on your favourite show or ask for a dedication to be read out for a birthday, wedding or exam success. Postcards were also the preferred form of contact when entering competitions organised by the station. If you wrote in to a DJ you might be sent a signed photograph to stick on the refrigerator. Later technology enabled phone calls from the listener to be heard on air. Now we are encouraged, if we have the technology, to respond immediately to what we hear in the form of emails or message boards. The number and range of stations available to us in the UK has increased and the Web allows us access to stations all over the world. The listener has always been an extra resource for broadcasters by eliciting contributions from them in the form of information and eye-witness accounts and there has been a move recently to encourage more ‘citizen journalism’ via mobile phones to feed the immediacy and 24/7 nature of radio news. Broadcasters in the UK are regulated. Whether you are running an RSL station on a twenty-eight-day licence, broadcasting on a national or local commercial station or are part of the BBC system there is an organisation of people making sure you do it right and making sure you are answerable if you break the law, offend anyone or don’t provide what you promised to the listener.

BBC radio, including its national and local services, is funded by a contribution from the TV licence fee. Independent or commercial radio, including national and local stations, is paid for by the advertising and sponsorship they carry. In the USA subscription revenues and sponsorship to radio via satellite services means there is no need for advertisements. Some of the larger BBC regions will split their output during the course of a programme so that more locally focused news and information can be broadcast to smaller audiences, so for example during a breakfast show heard across a large county at certain set times staff in local studios dotted about the area will opt-out of the programme and broadcast a news, travel and information bulletin for their specific audience.

It is possible to access the output of radio stations across the world via the Internet, and this is particularly useful if you want to hear, for example, their particular spin or angle on world news stories. Many listeners like to listen to the radio from their computer at the same time as they surf the net, especially in the evening, using it as a soundtrack and to keep them company. Having access to a station’s output, particularly one where you are out of range of their transmitters, is useful should you decide to apply for a post with them – at least you will be able to check out their sound. Prior to this service being available candidates would either have to spend a day in a hotel on the patch monitoring the station on a portable radio or ask someone already working there to send them a recording of some of the programmes and bulletins.

In the UK there has never been as much choice in the range of stations as there has been in other countries, but there is quite a selection of programming choice for general audiences. The gaps show in the poor range of available programmes or services for specialist or minority interests usually broadcast during off-peak listening times and which are more and more being served by web radio stations.

The main BBC services are:

• BBC Radio 1 – New music for a younger audience
• BBC Radio 2 – Popular music, specialist music and light entertainment for amature audience
• BBC Radio 3 – Classical music plus jazz, world music, arts, drama and experimental features
• BBC Radio 4 – Speech-based new and current affairs, drama, comedy, documentaries and features
• BBC Five Live – 24-hour news and sport
• BBC World Service – Broadcasts music and English-language speech and about 40 other languages aimed at audiences overseas. Note this service is not funded by the UK licence fee but by a grant from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government.

The BBC’s digital audio broadcasting (DAB) services:

• 1Xtra – Contemporary urban UK music
• BBC Five Live Extra – Live coverage of sports events
• BBC 6 Music – Popular music outside the mainstream
• BBC 7 – Archive comedy, drama and children’s programmes
• BBC Asian Network – Music and speech for British Asians.

The BBC also has regional and local services:

• BBC Radio Scotland
• BBC Radio Wales (English language service)
• BBC Radio Ulster
• BBC Radio Cymru (Welsh language service)
• BBC Radio nan Gaidheal (Gaelic language service)
• There are also 30-plus county-wide local stations in England offering local speech and music for local audiences. Examples are BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio Leeds etc.

Commercial radio in the UK:

• Independent National Radio (INR)
• Classic FM – Popular classical music
• talkSPORT – Sports coverage and analysis and topical debate
• Virgin Radio – Popular and contemporary music.

DAB services

A wide range available around the country depending on your location but include:

• OneWord – Drama, readings and discussion about books
• Planet Rock – Classic and contemporary rock music
• Prime Time Radio – Melodic music from 1940s and 50s to the present day.

Independent Local Radio (ILR)

Over 200 music and local news stations around the UK, but with usually smaller coverage areas than BBC stations, some are owned by radio groups like GCap and Emap and Guardian Media Group.

The numbers will vary from year to year as stations change hands and new contracts are awarded by Ofcom. The stations will have names like 96.4, The Eagle, Spirit FM, Fox FM etc. Ofcom is obliged under a section of the 1990 Broadcasting Act ‘to do all it can to secure the provision within the UK of a range and diversity of local radio services’. There is usually plenty of competition for these licences. In 2005, for example, Ofcom’s new licence for Manchester attracted 19 bids for a service that has the potential for a million-and-a-half adult listeners. It was won by Xfm (owned by the group Gcap), who will provide a format aimed at a male audience in the age range 15–34 years. Of the thirteen applications for a new licence in the north-east of England advertised in 2005 four offer a diet of rock music, five want to provide easy listening or melodic music and speech mix, one all-speech, one children’s programming and two alternative music-based formats. Ten of the bids target older audiences and just three aim to serve younger listeners.

You may also find local community stations covering local news and events. These stations are also authorised by Ofcom licences, are non-profit-making and owned and run mostly by volunteers from the local area. They enable these communities to use radio to develop cultural, education, regeneration, employment and creative projects in their area. Community radio, like hospital radio and student radio, is a great training ground for programme makers. You can listen to RSL and Event radio stations broadcasting for a limited period for example during Freshers’ week, an arts festival or agricultural show. They may carry paid advertisements and sponsorship of content such as weather reports and travel news. Some of these stations go on to apply for and win full licences if they experience a good trial period and can find financial backing.

Pirate radio stations have been with us since the mid-1960s. These days rather than transmitting from ships anchored outside UK territorial waters the illegal broadcasts tend to be based on the tops of tower blocks. One of the duties of Ofcom is to investigate and try to clamp down on these stations, whose signals can interfere with those of emergency services and of course licensed broadcasters.

Instead of simply playing background muzak to their customers some of the nationwide chains have taken the idea of radio programme formats and ‘broadcast’ hosted music programmes into their stores. This obviously helps customers identify with the store branding and the DJs can create an atmosphere conducive to shopping. As well as playing music suitable for their customer profile (just like a radio station has a target listenership) there is the opportunity for product placement, information about special offers and focused advertising campaigns.

As well as listening to live broadcasts of programmes you can access many web sites posted by stations which allow you to listen again within a week of the original transmission; others offer longer-term archives of part or whole programmes.

The days of a radio station being only about the single service that comes out of the speaker are long gone. Radio is already a multimedia industry and the importance of multimedia in building and retaining audiences and in providing new revenue streams can only grow in importance in the future.

(Ofcom 2005a)

While radio is evolving, the majority of listening, even in digital homes is still done via the analogue radio sets (82%).

(BBC Audience Research. FACT issue 7 p. 23 September 2005)

So how do radio stations find out who is listening to their programmes, how many listeners they have, when they listen and for how long? In the UK the National Radio Listening Survey or RAJAR conduct the research on their behalf. Listening diaries are issued to members of the public in the form of booklets in which they record details of which stations they have listened to, where they listened and for how long every time they listen for five minutes or more over the course of a week. The results are then passed on to stations to help them in planning their programming. As you can imagine, there is a great deal of anticipation and tension amongst broadcasters when the RAJAR figures are due to be published and they will be concerned if their station or programme has lost listeners to the competition.

It can be a useful exercise to keep your own listening diary for a week. It could help you decide if you listen to enough radio and if you need to broaden your listening range. Are you one of the growing number of listeners who access radio via the Web and does this offer you more choice of listening? Do you feel that the stations you listen to are serving your needs as a listener? If not, why not? Do you actively seek out stations that will provide you with music and speech that will be of interest to you? If you are interested in a particular kind of music, for example folk music, do you search the listing by genre to find out on which stations you can hear your favourite sounds? Compare your findings with others.

Before you start to think about programme ideas for your station make sure you are aware and up to date with the regulations, legislation and codes of practice that form the regulating of broadcasts and broadcasters. It takes a long time to understand the laws and regulations that control what we can and can’t say over the airwaves. These are the must-knows and it is not an exhaustive list. Some are based around law and must be adhered to, others are based around best practice and are accepted and understood by the industry. They are not there to take the enjoyment out of production, but to ensure that programme makers get it right and avoid problems for themselves, their contributors and their station. That essential source of reference and good practice produced by the BBC and based on law and the extensive experience of its staff – Editorial Guidelines, formerly known as Producers’ Guidelines – says that we need this sort of info...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Broadcasting programmes
• 2 The programme-making team
• 3 The programme
• 4 Making programmes
• 5 The production line
• 6 A case study: A programme from idea to transmission
• Glossary of radio programme-making terms
• References