Champagne and Roses wrote:I listened to ten minutes purely out of technical interest. One thing that struck me was the three of them were talking as if they were unaware that anyone else was listening, it was like overhearing a particularly boring conversation on a train. Proper radio presenters (DK, even Saggs) always convey the impression they know the audience is there even if they don't explicitly engage with them, they are more inclusive. .
It's a good point.
I think lots of people in radio have been bewitched by the popularity of podcasts. This partly explains why people like Luke Warm are hired - people with poor voices and diction, and personalities, for radio, but who, supposedly, bring their large podcast audience with them.
And I think it also partly explains why some shows these days sound like they're (mediocre) podcasts, in the sense that, as you say, there's a lack of nous when it comes to engaging with an unseen audience. There are some excellent podcasters out there, but lots of the others don't really have the expertise or experience to truly draw in an audience; they rely on a 'take me as you find me' attitude and see what happens. Nothing wrong with that for podcasts; a lot wrong with it if you act the same way on radio.
They're two different media, requiring two different skills. Yes, there's overlap, of course, but it's foolish to assume, like Clayton seems to do, that they're interchangeable experiences with interchangeable 'talent'.
It's a bit like vloggers. TV people see, say, Joe Suggs amass a huge online audience and start to dream about simply importing that audience, with him, to TV formats (zero effort, zero thought, maximum results). But Suggs has zero presenting skills, and once you ask him to deal with autocue and a programme format, rather than have him to do his inane online 'look at me being me' crap, he flounders, to the surprise of no one other than TV executives.
Publishers are currently in the grip of the same delusion. They sign up podcasters and vloggers in the belief that thusands or even millions of online subscribers will buy a book by their favourite. So they hire ghostwriters and publish the book, and again, to no one's surprise except publishers, only a minority of the fans of online shows also want to (or in some cases even can) read a book.
Instead of really thinking hard about a specific medium as a specific medium, with specific arts and skills, too many of these characters are looking for lazy shortcuts by quick and easy importation. So we get more and more of this stuff that suits no one. First Clayton seemed to want to make a radio station more like a newspaper. Now he seems to want it to be more like a jumble of podcasts.
If only he would try to make a radio station a better radio station.
