BBC Radio 4 – reaching out
Posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 5:58pm. #
Over at BBC Radio 4, some odd things are happening. The station is reaching out to its audience.
More exactly, the clever and charming Mark Damazer, Controller of the radio station, has caught the blogging bug. And how.
Why does Radio 4 repeat a fair bit of their schedule? He tells us frankly:
We simply can’t make more programmes with the money we have. We have several ideas for new programmes/formats – but I can’t afford to take out repeats and replace them with these news ideas. We’d go broke.
More fascinating are the comments – discussing only the way the Radio 4 audience would be expected to. “Mr Damazer sir, would you be in the marketplace for a suggestion for an afternoon play repeat?” asks one correspondent, while another says: “To paraphrase; good programmes should: make most people smile some of the time, some people smile most of the time and on no account should anyone never smile once at all throughout a whole programme/series.”
The Radio 4 blog is a fascinating glimpse into a rather different audience for a rather different radio station, expertly hosted by my colleague Jem Stone. Read it.
(Brings into sharp relief a letter that my department at Hallam FM got one day, complaining about a particularly energetic ad. “There’s enough shouting and crap about without you starting”, it said.)
Photo: David Jones (no, not that one) (unless it is that one you were thinking of). Used under licence: thank you.
Mrs Rivington Lomax said at February 19th, 2009 at 10:29am 
