Radio Analysis Part 1

Ferne Cotton – Radio 1: 10am – 12:45pm weekdays

Listened Live

Feature: Live lounge – This is a ‘competition’ to see which live lounge song is voted the best off 2010. Ferne plays 3 clips of different acoustic songs (not the whole song) so people can get an idea of it, then the audience can vote for there favourite song by texting the name of the artist to the studio, later on in the show the Live Lounge cover with the most votes gets ‘put through to round 2’ and the full song is played. EXAMPLE: 30 Seconds To Mars’ acoustic cover of Lady GaGa’s Bad Romance, Dianna Vickers’ acoustic cover of her own single Once and Jason Derulo’s acoustic version of his song Ridin’ Solo. The feature is introduced and clips are played regularly throughout the show for 15 minuets. After 15 minuets the full version today’s winner’ song is played this example’s winner was 30 Seconds to Mars – Bad Romance.

Song choice: Radio 1’s target audience is mainly teenagers and young adults, we can tell this primarily through the song choices made on Ferne Cotton’s mid-morning show. The show plays current pop and indie music such as Katy on a Mission – Katy B, Firework - Katy Perry and I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor – The Arctic Monkeys both well known up beat songs. Other that ‘current music’ Ferne Cotton’s show doesn’t have a set theme for music unlike Elaine Page’s Radio 2 show where all of the playlist are songs from musicals. The radio 1 show plays a mix of current ant popular tracks ranging from pop, dance, rock, indie and new music.

Presenter: Ferne Cotton is a well known TV presenter who has presented a wide variety of shows, because of this we, as an audience, recognise her voice and already know what she looks like. Ferne Cotton is very chatty and talks directly at the audience as she is the only presenter; she tries to inject humour into what she is saying and how she is saying it by changing the pitch and tone of her voice, the audience can relate to how she is doing this, this engages the audience and keeps their attention throughout the show. Ferne also laughs to herself when she says something funny, she sometimes stops to think or ‘ums’ through her presentations, this makes her seem informal and accessible because she is not just talking at the audiences with a well rehearsed script. An audience can recognise a rehearsed script compared to a presenter with notes to follow, the latter is more comfortable to listen to and the target audience prefers informal communication.

Layout: Ferne presents over a very quiet sound bed so that the audience can hear her clearly but this is also because when she does pause the audience hears the sound bed instead of silence which can sometimes be uncomfortable for the audience. Some of the songs are seqwayed by an indent usually saying ‘Ferne Cotton on radio 1’. Idents are used when going to the news and returning from the news (half past the hour). Idents are also used over the opening of a song a good example of this would be when I Bet That You Look Good on the Dance Floor was played an ident with information about the show was played over the songs well known introduction. This is also done at the end of the song: the audience can hear both the ident and the end of the song. Also the show promotes different radio 1 shows in-between the songs, for example between 2 songs on the Ferne Cotton show was a clip from Chris Moyles’ Radio 1 breakfast show, the clip uses one of the shows idents, a soundbed and had the presenters laughing and joking with each other. At the end of the clip we hear ‘our’ presenter Ferne in the clip commenting on the jokes – this makes a link between the two shows.

Guests: Ferne has a ‘guest’ with her at midday. A woman who presents the celebrity news, through this Ferne and the other presenter discuss the celebrity news and listen to clips of quotes from celebrities for example Russell Brand for the awards and Dermot O’Leary for the X-Factor. The news presenter very formal when discussing the news and becomes chatty when discussing the news with Ferne, this keeps the news room feel to the discussion because it is till news and should be taken seriously, also by keeping the news part of the feature formal the woman does not show her opinion and cannot seem bias. As it is Radio 1 and a public service broadcast the BBC have a responsibility to share any news with the audience and cannot be bias towards any type of news – celebrity or otherwise. The celebrity news is broken up by a song, on this show it was The Black Eyed Peas – Time of my life, and uses a different sound bed to establish that it is different from just Ferne presenting.

End of the show: The presenter discuses the schedule for the rest of the day and what will be in some if the other presenters show, mentions a competition and talks about the TV show that she will be presenting at the weekend.