Illustration © 2010 by Bobby Ocean
The very great Sid Caesar (R).
This was before my time, but Sid Caesar’s reactions just kill me.
Notice how totally committed he is to playing the “innocent bystander” in the audience…until he realizes….
April, 1996 (continued):
After dinner enjoying my first dinner inside a Swedish home, Mats Elg drove me to the Ostersund airport . I flew to Stockholm, checked into a hotel at the airport, went to bed, and arose Friday morning early enough to catch a 6:45AM (!) flight to Belgium, where I would be conducting four seminars in two days.
The first was that very morning — an air talent seminar for BRTN’s Radio 2.
A taxi driver had been dispatched to pick me up at the airport in Brussels and drive me the 40 minutes or so to Antwerp.
My plane arrived on time, the driver was waiting for me, the traffic flowed smoothly on the road to Antwerp; everything went according to plan.
Until we reached Antwerp.
The driver had been instructed to take me first to my hotel to drop off my bags and then on to BRTN. He wasn’t familiar with the hotel, but he had been given the address.
He managed to find the street (Karel Oomsstraat) with a minimum of trouble, but he turned left when he should have turned right. Soon enough he realized his error…and corrected it by backing up half a mile until we were in front of the Kirean Hotel.
Thankful still to be alive, I jumped out, deposited my bags with the hotel manager (who promised to put them in my room for me), and rushed back to the taxi. The morning’s seminar was only minutes away, but I knew BRTN was close by.
In fact, as I climbed back in the driver even said to me, “Don’t worry, it is very close.”
I was reassured by his remark, because I (naively) assumed it meant the driver knew where we were going. But although he had the address with him, the driver could not find the BRTN building.
He located the street quickly enough, but not the address. Somehow he had missed the number the first time around, so he went in a huge circle and, muttering to himself, returned to the general area where he thought it should be.
He still couldn’t find it. So he completed the circle again and muttered more loudly.
We made four complete circles like this, with equal results and increased muttering.
As the driver began to circle for a fifth time, I finally spoke up:
“Look, this isn’t working. We can’t just keep going in circles. You need to stop and ask somewhere where the address is.”
(It occurred to me that perhaps he can find addresses only when he’s driving backward, but I had experienced enough motion sickness for one morning.)
Grudgingly, he stopped and asked someone, who explained where BRTN was located. (It was located pretty much exactly where the address indicated it should be.)
We pulled up to the building and I ran inside, found the seminar room, pulled out my notes, cued my DAT tape (1996, remember), and began the seminar.
At the beginning of my radio career, I had three milestones that I dreamed of achieving.
The one that seemed the most unreachable, ironically, is the one that most people probably would see as the easiest:
To earn at least $200 per week.
I don’t know why that was so important or seemed, at times, unreachable; in order to pursue a radio career I had left a job that paid $734 per month. (I remember the figure because at the time, that was pretty darn good money.)
The second: To work in a major market.
The third: To have radio stations offer me jobs, rather than my seeking them out.
Luckily, I did reach all three milestones.
But man, for a while that $200 per week seemed so far off….
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.
