Darren Lee – Mercia (local radio station for Coventry): 4pm – 7pm weekdays
Listened Live 14/12/2010
Radio Station: Mercia is a local commercial radio station sponsored by West Orchards shopping centre – Coventry. The sponsor is made very clear throughout the show with a soundbite with a short jingle about the sponsor and a message about their free parking. Because this is a commercial radio station they play radio adverts at regular intervals, this adverts include OLAY, The television channel GOLD which is playing Christmas specials every night, Safe Styles windows and doors and Signatures Restaurant at the bell grade theatre. Mercia also plays an infomercial about A&E and what not to go to A&E for. This campaign has been highly promoted in Coventry because of the raise in patients that did not need emergency help but went to A&E. I think that the advertising contradicts the type of audience that the music style attracts, however this could appeal to the secondary audience of either peoples parents that may be listening to the radio with their children or the older adults that enjoy popular current music. There are also many Christmas themed adverts because of the time of the year.
Feature: They play local news every half a hour on the hour and at half past the hour, this news piece I listened to talked about how the west midlands was deemed ‘the fattest county’ Mercia played voxpox of the public in the west midlands to get their opinion of the subject. Then they spoke about how facebook has been monitoring status updates recently and can say that a lot of people are talking about x-factor and the football. These two news stories relate to young people because young people are renowned to think that they are overweight. Facebook plays a huge role in young people’s lives and the majority of the audience would have an interest in either the football or the x-factor, this news story would interest them as they are subjects that they are interested in and more than likely going to listen to. Local travel news is played every 15 minuets because this show is aired at ‘drive time’. Darren Lee talks about the Mercia advent calendar competition that will be announced at 5:20pm this is a competition that lets people who have phoned in a chance to win meals out, tickets and many different prizes, at this point the presenter plugs the website and informs the audience what they need to do to get information about entering the competition. The news is repeated half an hour later repeating the same news piece however they play different voxpox of the public’s opinion on the obesity piece.
Song choice: Mercia mainly plays pop songs including Katy Perry and Nicole Sherzingher, this is because similarly to Radio 1 Mercia has a young audience (about 14-26) and chooses to play popular music as most young people like to ‘keep up with the trend’ and enjoy listening to the latest music. After the news Mercia played WHAM – Last Christmas, this song is very well known and, even though it isn’t a recent popular song, would still be able to maintain the young audience because of the time of year, the audience would be able to recognize the song. Later in the show Lee plays Take That – The Flood, this song is popular both with a young audience and an older audience because take that was a 90s band any many fans from the 90s are still fans today, this opens out the age range of the target audience. , I initially assumed that this show was primarily targeting young a young audience because of its first 4 song choices but as the show has progressed I feel that if I would be listening to it on my way home I would of turned it off, the different genres of music are not systematically ordered, because of this there seems to be 3-4 recent pop songs then a few ‘older songs’.
Presenter: From what I have heard of Darren Lee’s show I can only imagine that his shows are very music based (much alike our project needs to be) however I think that Darren Lee takes this concept too far as we only hear him saying what time it is and hat songs are coming up next. However I think that his technique of announcing what songs will be on next is quite effective, for example he said up next is Nicole Sherzingher with Poison after WHAM with last Christmas, this means that audience members who want to listen to Poison but not to Last Christmas would be more than likely to stay tuned to listen to the next song, we hear a lot of clips from other presenters to advertise their shows. If any of the songs are segued there was an advert, mainly for the popular breakfast show The JD Show. Darren Lee is very well spoken and clear, unlike Elaine Page and Ferne Cotton he does not have a practically memorable voice this means that if you where to tune into his show unless you are a regular listener you might struggle to recognize the show that you are listening too. I think this point is backed up by the wide mix of music chosen for this show, there doesn’t seem to be a set theme for the show.
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