Tea and Toast Evaluation

Tea and Toast evaluation

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10348021

Our Tea and Toast show was an hour-long breakfast show aimed at 16-24 year olds. I think that the show came together nicely and worked well.

For this show I took the role of producer. As our group was quite large I delegated tasks to other team members so that everyone had the chance to contribute. For example, Ollie created the playlist and Amy wrote the script.

Once the playlist, script, idents and features were done I checked them over and then created the running order. I created it in a way that I felt my team would understand best. The different colours representing different content ie. tracks, idents, links. This helped the team easily identify different parts of the show.

We decided to have three presenters as this creates a relaxed and conversational mood to the show. This is similar to the popular Chris Moyles show on BBC Radio 1 and therefore is a proven effective technique for breakfast radio.

By having a ‘coming up’ menu in the first link keeps the audience interested and hopefully wanting to listen to the rest of the show. I would have liked to have done a longer show as unfortunately it took a bit of time for everyone to settle down and for the show to run smoother.

I think that our features were suitable for our audience as they involve the audience and are humorous.

Our Know Your Lyrics feature worked well with Millie presenting, as it was another voice and allowed all three presenters to participate in the game. To add comedy to this feature the contestants ‘buzzers’ were animal noises. We decided to have a quiz type feature as they work well by including the audience and allowing them to play along. During our live show we had audience participation via facebook with listeners getting involved and guessing the answers. This showed that the feature was interesting and enjoyable to listen to. If we were to do this feature again then we could improve it by having small audio clips of the songs after the contestants have guessed the correct answer (similar to Never Mind The Buzzcocks).

Something that worked well on our show was our request for people to send in photos of what they had for breakfast. As our audience are familiar with technology such as picture phones this allowed us to receive instant photographs via email. We received many photos that our presenters commented on and that went up on the visual on Ustream for all our audience to see. However, as we couldn’t control this in the radio room we didn’t know when these were going up and couldn’t really talk about them whilst they were on the screen. This feature worked well by involving the audience and adding to the cross media content for the show.

Our prank call feature was good however could have been broken up and each prank played separately throughout the show as the listeners could have become uninterested throughout the 8 minutes and this would have given the presenters a chance to talk about each prank separately. However, given the time scale of our show this might not have been possible, as it could have dominated the programme.

I think that our playlist was suitable for the audience as the songs are well known and upbeat. This is appropriate for a breakfast show as it creates an positive mood to wake up and get ready for the day in. Only 3 of our songs (Barbara Streisand- Duck Sauce, Just The Way You Are- Bruno Mars and Rollerblades- Eliza Doolittle) were current and in the charts however the other tracks we played are all popular and suitable for our audience. This is similar to the Chris Moyles show that plays Radio 1 playlist songs but also play old hits. For example on Monday 22^nd October they played Take That- Greatest Day.

Millie and Esme created an image of the logo and email address for Ustream so that our audience could easily know the name of the show and the email address when watching on Ustream. This was effective as we received a lot of emails throughout the show.

I believe that our idents suited the upbeat style of our show however didn’t need so much of the fancy sounds at the beginning of them as it was it dragged them out too long before the voice kicked in.

Something that could have been improved on our show was the transition between songs and idents. Sometimes the song had completely faded out before the ident was played. This is most likely down to too much silence end of the song that we should have edited out or the pace that James was working through the myriad schedule.

Sometimes Amy got a bit excited and the levels distorted. If we were to do this again we would have to warn her to be careful and try to predict it so Ollie could bring her microphone down.

When Sam was introducing the song over the intro the fader wasn’t brought down so his voice couldn’t be clearly heard over the track. To improve this Ollie would just have to be more aware of it and bring the track fader down.

Also I believe the soundbed wasn’t 100% suitable for the time and style of the show. If we were to do this again then I would prefer to use a more cheery soundbed with less repetitive beats.

Another thing that could have been improved is that fact that some of the time it sounded like the presenters were reading from the script. With more rehearsal time and confidence then this could be improved.

Overall I think that our show suited our audience and fulfilled the purpose of entertaining them. Our playlist, features and presenters were a success and all worked well together to engage our intended audience of 16 to 24 year olds.