Each member of a morning radio show should have a unique attitude to bring to the mix.
One might be the health nut, another the intellectual, another the party animal. The trick is to deliberately balance your program so that at any given moment the audience has someone with whom to identify.
Consider the characters on Cheers, one of the most successful TV sitcoms ever produced. Every major character differs from the others both physically and behaviorally.
Notice how easy it is to identify each from a quick physical description:
• Tall, handsome man
• Thin, perky blonde
• Fat slob
• Young, handsome farm boy
• Short, dark woman
• Middle-aged guy in postal uniform
Just one glance at the screen and you can spot each of them immediately.
And it’s just as easy to identify each from a thumbnail behavioral description:
• Womanizer
•Pretentious, flaky blonde. (Now we’re using blonde as the sociological stereotype, not as a physical description.)
•Lazy beer guzzler
•Dumb and good-natured
• Acerbic
• Boor, always trying to impress others
Think about your morning show. Can the listener identify each team member in “just one glance”— i.e., by hearing just a couple of words spoken?
Or are the voices (pitch, cadence, accent) so similar that the listener often isn’t sure just who is talking at any given moment?
Notice what your team members say. If you reviewed a transcript of a particular break, would you be able to identify each character by his or her dialogue? Or is what they’re saying interchangeable?
Too many morning shows feature three, four or five voices…but they’re all saying the same thing. They all have the same point of view, which leads to the audience hearing a lot of:
“You got that right.”
“You can say that again.”
“You said it.”
Someone once pointed out that if you and I agree on everything, then one of us is superfluous. That definitely applies to a radio morning show.
