Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Vaughan gets an extra hour

Johnny Vaughan's Capital Radio breakfast show is being extended by an hour, to end at 10am instead of 9. Rather than make him work harder, the plan is to fill the first hour of the show, between six and seven, with the best bits of the previous day's programmes.

It doesn't say how they intend to stretch three minutes' worth of material to fill an hour, but we're sure they've got plans.

Is it just us, or is Capital basically giving up? After removing all DJs from XFM, it's now fighting the most competitive breakfast show market in London by padding the show out with repeats. Surely breakfast is the time where you want your radio to be at its most up-to-date and timely? Who is actually going to want to hear Vaughan being fairly witty about, erm, yesterday's papers? And will Mondays start with an hour of stuff nearly three days old?


3 comments:

Richard Havers said...

This is the end of Capitol Radio in London. Your comments nail it.

Anonymous said...

I've never understood the idea of radio stations broadcasting 'best bits'. LBC do it a lot too, with some presenters making entire shows of their week's 'highlights'. Really, how good is a radio show that it's worth repeating? Podcasts are one thing (they're optional, and handy if you miss a show altogether). But this idea of a highlights hour is effectively reducing the station's output to 23 hours a day.

And is Vaughan's show really so good that a cheap Broadcast Assistant can plunder an hour's worth of 'highlights' per day?

Chris Brown said...

On a show like a breakfast show, even the good bits are usually spur-of-the-moment things that aren't as funny out of context. So how you're going to stitch all that together and entertain people who've already heard it I don't know.

Mind you, I presume they won't actually require an hour's highlights, assuming they're going to play records and ads inbetween. Just as well.

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