WORK: Bath FM - Day 5

I sat in on Paul’s show again, this time I spent more time analysing the show and it’s running order and asked a few more questions. He obviously really enjoys presenting the show and when the question came up of whether he would ever leave the show to focus on managing the stations he said it was unlikely, unless of course Pat Sharp offered to take over!

At around 6:30 Paul reads the headlines of national papers. Luckily there is a website that has this information for him to read out which saves him from having to buy ten newspapers every morning and leaf through them.

Every hour of his show he reads the local news, a traffic update and reads from the local diary, which are some local events that have been emailed to the station. I think the local diary is vital for the stations community-friendly image.

The national news is read during peak hours like 8am-9am where the listenership is highest because of people driving to work or dropping their kids to school.

As part of their programming policy Paul’s show contains a local themed feature every hour. These features are:-

Where am I? – A location in Bath is described and the listeners have to guess where the location is.

Bath’s Big Vote – A topic that affects the local community is open for listeners to call in and share their thoughts. An example of this was when there was a possibility of the Bath rugby grounds to relocate; there was a huge response to this.

Bath FM Coffee Break – 15 minutes of back-to-back music with features from local sponsors.

Paul also uploaded the Marmaduke’s track onto the companies’ FTP site so that the track could be added to the companies playlist. While uploading the song he had to quickly run from Studio 2 to Studio 1 as the song playing on air was finishing.

After that I spent time watching Paul record the Vinyl Countdown idents by editing the background song with the pre-record presenter voice over. This was done so that it was available in time for the Vinyl Countdown show on the weekend.

I was extremely happy with my experience at Bath FM, the work environment is good, everyone who works there is very friendly and I would love if I had the chance to work with any of the people I met there again. I am now more interested in management either in a business setting or potentially utilising the skills I have observed and using them as a producer for television or film, which is another role I'm interested in. I think it's a shame I'm not more interested in actually managing for radio. I am very passionate about music however I listen to wealth of different styles of music and bands that usually aren't commercially successful. I think from this experience I have learnt that Radio is a business and having commercially listenable music that appeals to people is what drives the business. I think that there isn't really a place for more underground types of music to be as successful as a company like Bath FM, however I would be very interested in the programming and content management side of a radio station that caters to a more niche market, if this oppurtunity ever arises I think what I've learnt from Paul will definitely come in handy.