Bloody hell. Daytime CityTalk here in Liverpool is now a complete joke. They’ve sacked all the talking presenters and a typical daytime now looks like this:
Roughly top of each hour o’clock – it’s never exact top of the hour because it’s slowly getting longer because nobody is actually running anything to clock time – so, at :00 you get a 4 minute news then 4 minutes of sport tailed with weather, but no travel anywhere. At around :08 the bulletin finishes and there’s a pause and then a random song starts. That segues into another song, and then a 1 minute package called The Fix which is all entertainment gossip. Then a pause and a song. None of the songs are ever ‘announced’. There’s nobody there to tell you what’s been played. The songs are just interlude music really. Then some commercials and at roughly :20 everything that happened from :00 for 8 minutes happens all over again. It’s exactly the same recording. Different songs to the ones previously played follow, there’s the same Fix package, song and then the recording of what happened at :00 starts all over again once more at approximately :40.
Again, since the songs are not the exact length needed to hit exactly 20 minutes, the news start time gradually shifts forward. So, what was :00 in the first hour is :02 the next hour and, say, :04 the third hour. How embarrassing is that?
The 4 minute news and 4 minute sport and weather is re-recorded every hour, although the packages/interviews within it don’t seem to be changed. And The Fix package being played 3 times an hour every hour remains exactly the same all day.
I don’t get it. How on earth, or why on earth would anybody want to tune to this?
Surely Bauer should just hand back the licence to Ofcom, or give somebody else an opportunity to run a proper talking radio station.
Here’s an interesting idea. A radio station actually controlled by listeners.
Not just a few button presses by random website visitors (dabbl?) but a live situation where all users log-in and push for which songs they want to keep or bin off next.
The website is a little bit clunky, and it seems very Australian at the moment, but who knows, maybe the start of something big?
One of many blogs about the new Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2
Blooger James Cridland took a selection of Manchester radio websites and found out which ones covered the heavy snow situation, and which ones totally ignored it.
Nik Goodman’s first blog of the year and provides some handy hints on programming!
A shake-up at the specialist DJ department of Bauer’s dance, hip-hop and R&B station is provoking anxiety.
Radio Car FAIL
