Radio

V

Radio Formats

Music radio—often the most unobtrusive output of all—is now the dominant form of programming across the world, but it is not the only one and it has not always been thus. When the BBC began broadcasting in Britain in the 1920s it established a pattern of mixed programming. The output of a single station or service embraced a wide range of music, comedy, features, talks, drama, religion, sport, and news.

Even when the BBC first offered listeners a choice between two networks (the National Programme and the Regional Programme), both carried mixed programming, with very little difference in content or tone. The range of programmes offered over the course of each day and week catered for different social needs (education, information, or entertainment) and for different sectional interests (such as children, workers, or women), all within one network.

A

The Reithian Ideal

This mixed format owed much to the vision of the BBC’s first director-general, John Reith. His approach, often described as paternalistic , was to offer listeners “something a little better” than they thought they wanted, and a varied output was seen as a way of introducing listeners to a subject they had not previously sought. Radio, Reith believed, had the power, and therefore the responsibility in a democratic society, to lead opinion and tastes rather than merely reflecting them. Even in the United States, some early figures in radio, such as David Sarnoff, argued that broadcasting represented a “job of entertaining, informing, and educating the nation, and should therefore be distinctly regarded as a public service”.

B

Post-War BBC Radio Stations

Nevertheless, the pattern of mixed programming slowly gave way to a more segregated one, responding to the demands of listeners. In 1940 the BBC introduced a Forces Programme to entertain the troops of the British Expeditionary Force with dance music, sport, and variety. Its tone was overwhelmingly light, and it soon attracted a larger share of listeners than the more traditional Home Service.

After the war a tripartite system was introduced: the Forces Programme was replaced by the very similar Light Programme, the Home Service continued with its mixed fare, and the Third Programme was introduced as an unashamedly highbrow network of serious music and discussion. The programming was still mixed, but the range of programmes was narrowed to create a uniformity of tone.

The scheme rested on a conception of the listening public as a broadly based pyramid slowly aspiring upward: the largest number of people might start with the Light Programme, but since it overlapped with the slightly more demanding Home Service, they might be induced over the years to choose more worthwhile programmes, and move up the pyramid.

In fact, the continued lack of identity of the two most popular networks proved difficult to sustain in the face of competition for audiences from television and from pirate radio stations broadcasting (illegally from ships operating in international waters) the sort of popular and youthful music the BBC was slow to embrace. In 1967 the BBC replaced its three services with four new ones, one of which, Radio 1, broadcast pop and rock music. Of the other three, one concentrated on light music; another on speech; the third, on classical music.

By the 1970s it was recognized that listeners expected radio to be based not on the Reithian concept of mixed programmes inviting serious attention, but on the principle of the specialized network, offering a continuous stream of one particular type of programme. This evolving concept of radio programming coincided with the spread of FM transmission, which created much more room on the broadcasting spectrum. For the first time a multitude of stations, each offering its own specialized output, became technically possible.

C

Popular Music

The new pop music stations that formed such a large proportion of these specialized networks often looked across the Atlantic for inspiration. In the United States, despite the early attempts to argue for public service broadcasting, the dominant pattern rapidly became a commercial one, with manufacturers and amateurs resisting the idea of a government monopoly of broadcasting. The US radio boom produced 530 radio stations by the end of 1924, with music dominating the output from the very beginning.

In the years before World War II much of the music broadcast, like that abroad, consisted of live concerts as much as gramophone recordings. After the war, when television threatened radio audiences and removed many star performers as well as drama, variety, and quiz shows from the radio stations, the output became dominated by cheaper and more readily available recorded music as never before.

The new musical culture of rock and roll in the 1950s entrenched this pattern: the short duration of the new 45-rpm single record fitted neatly into the requirement of commercial stations to provide short but frequent advertising breaks. By the start of the 1960s, radio audiences were being built up again by the growth in top-40 programming: disc jockeys were rigidly limited to a prescribed playlist of current best-selling records.

Establishing the music policy of a radio station has since become a much more precise task, aimed at creating a clear format to distinguish each station from its competitors. There are countless variations, but among the most widespread in the Western world are adult contemporary, which uses a broad array of popular music and “golden oldies” to appeal to a broad range of adult listeners; contemporary hit radio, which concentrates on the most recent chart hits to appeal to teenagers and young adults; and album-orientated rock, which mixes rock classics with less familiar album tracks from well-known artists.

In many ways music has always been the ideal output for radio, since it can be so easily enjoyed on the medium with little sense on the part of the listener of being disadvantaged by the lack of vision. With pop music, this natural advantage has become embodied in a dominant pattern of segmented radio, with output consisting of an ongoing succession of acoustic parcels, such as a single or album track, an advertising break, news bulletin, or phone-in quiz—each of just a few minutes’ duration, and skilfully blended together to create a smooth and homogenized whole.

Programming has become a more precise science, blending showmanship with audience research and marketing, each station seeking to build its own brand. Continuous pop music, combined with warm and relatively unchallenging disc-jockey chatter, emerged as the ideal format for the transistor age, when radio has slipped ever more into the background of daily life.

D

News Broadcasting

Two other widespread genres of radio programming are the news and talk formats. In Britain the BBC had been obliged in the 1920s and 1930s to avoid any sense of competition with a suspicious press, so its news coverage was negligible. World War II marked a crucial change. A desire by listeners to be kept informed about the progress of the war, combined with the increasing technical ability of broadcasters to provide recorded reportage from the front, led to a dramatic increase in news coverage. Towards the end of the war the BBC’s main evening news bulletin was reaching nearly half of the available audience, and a spokesman for the corporation remarked that news had “swept culture into the background”. Journalists were recruited to join the writers, intellectuals, and entertainers as core members of the broadcasting profession.

By the post-war period, listeners had come to expect topicality from their radio sets, and broadcasters were finding new ways to weave news and current affairs into the output just as skilfully as music. In Britain the mixed programming of the BBC’s Home Service continued to make use of separate programmes, punctuated by regular bulletins of news, usually hourly. In America, the major broadcasters were quicker to develop a rolling news format, with news and information repeated and gradually updated in continuous cycles of 20 minutes or so. The assumption was that busy listeners could be tuning in at any time—possibly only for periods of about 20 minutes—in order to catch the news. This format has now become a global phenomenon.