February: Guest Lectures, Documentaries and Illness

First of all, I must apologise for my lack of broadcast last night. I was ill last weekend, and although I’ve been going to lectures during the week, I still wasn’t feeling up to much last night. All better now though, so I’ll be back on air as normal next week.

Now… moving on to something less dreary.

This month we’ve had two guest lectures at uni as part of the RAP103 Radio Texts & Contexts module. Last week we had Marcus Langreiter of Heart Gloucestershire to talk about commercial radio, which was very interesting. Marcus’ lecture put in to context what the commercial sector is all about, how it works and where it makes its money. I have a much clearer idea now where Heart sits within the commercial radio sector and within the Global group of stations.

Most recently, this Monday our guest lecture came from Roger Thorne of Forest Community Media. He spoke about community radio. Coming from a community radio background, I knew a little bit more here, and found it useful to learn about the history of community radio in the UK.

Another of the modules I’m studying this term is RAP120 Feature Documentaries for Radio. As the title suggests, this module is about feature documentaries. The brief we’ve all been set is ‘Sounds of Gloucestershire’, with our documentaries being 6-8 minutes long. We’re hoping that some of our work will be broadcast by BBC Radio Gloucestershire in a couple of months time.

I’m hoping to produce a documentary about the Cirencester Charter Market, which could be interesting. That said, Johnny and I are still in the early stages of planning this; we have yet to work out who we’re going to speak to, and we may still go for one of our backup ideas.

That should keep you up to date for a while. I’m off to see Yes, Prime Minister at the Everyman Theater on Tuesday, which should be interesting. I’ll be back with you on Tone Radio on Thursday night at 8.

FH.

Fred Hart

Stock Controller and Radio Presenter/Producer

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *