During my work placement at Signal 107 Tom sat down and did a coaching session with me on one of my shows. From here we are going to try and do them every couple of weeks.
Tom sat and listened to my links between each song; he asked me my thoughts on the content and my delivery and then gave feedback from a professional point of view regarding improvements and what was good.
For this particular session, my first with Tom, he listened to the first ever show I had done on my own. He told me that I had a nice style and a good conversational tone, which can be hard for some people to come across with when on radio and the ideas of the show were of good quality, as well as this, he said that I don’t really use “radioey” words which was a plus.
Listening to links overall, he noticed sometimes there isn’t a clear structure. They will open well and have a story to the middle but then they will kind of tail off towards the ending. We established that this could be due to me trying to fulfill the maximum link time, where instead I should be using it as a guideline; therefore in future I must not try and drag my content out to a maximum of two minutes, instead I should use the 2 minutes as a guide, deliver my content well and then if it is under 2 minutes then there is no worry.
The second link we listened to was a link from a specialist hour in the breakfast show called the flashback, whereby music from a specific year in the 2000’s are played and we talk about what happened in that year. Tom said he liked the feature and the ideas and delivery of it was good and pretty spot on. However he picked up on the fact that we gave away a lot of our facts and information from that year in one go. This makes it hard for the listener to digest and understand and also uses up all our content very quickly making for not very effective delivery. We discussed on how we could solve this problem and decided that the links during this hour shouldn’t be as long or as often and the purpose of this hour is to focus on the music and then every so often mention stuff that went on that would be of importance to the listener.
Tom listened to a link where I did a live read. He immediately picked up that I was just reading because of how my deliverance and tone changed. He gave me tips on doing live reads and how I should try and make them part of my show. He suggested using the script as a guide but dancing around it so it was never always the same; he also mentioned if I could figure out ways of making it part of my show because that way people tend to pay more attention and take on board the information more than if I just read the script out word for word.
The final pointer Tom made was towards my planning – or lack of it in the instance of the show he heard. The back story to this is a prepped show had to be changed last minute due to Calum not being in for the show. I had only prepped for one case of me and Calum, however if I had over prepped and had a back up then I wouldn’t have had to panic and rush around for 3 hours worth of show content. This was a huge learning curve for me and I have since learnt from, and never made that mistake again.
Tom also taught me that I should never be afraid to script things, even banter! Not word for word though of course. If something funny or of value is said off air or not in the studio then there I no shame in writing it down to use later. Radio isn’t always spontaneous and sometimes the best bit of content is that which is slightly pre planned and anticipated. As well as this, if something happens, like if Calum isn’t in for the show then playing on that for content can work to my advantage and make something good for the show. It can generate good content such as “Where is Calum today? Text in if you know where he is or what he is doing” or questions along those lines that keep the listener engaged and involved in the content.
For my next coaching session I am going to try and work on ensuring all of my links have a clear and confident structure. I am going to make sure I have spare prep available as a contingency and I am also going to practice my live reads and work on ways in which I can incorporate them into my show so they don’t stand out.
Abiey Humphries 