Hospital Radio

There Could be Somebody Out There - If we are out to criticise the audience figures of hospital radio stations, then could we state the numbers gathered around the radio for the Bob Ellis Music Show? No matter which way we look at it, it wasn’t a lot.

The Ratings Game is radio’s black art. The figure given for any presenter will be an average, not the simple averages we learned in school but averages biased by time of day and demographics - groups broken down by age and sex, to use the old gag - into which the listening millions fall. They play a weighting game.

For us to set an average for my fan club, I’ll need maximum and minimum figures to play with. Setting the minimum is easy. Zero. In the early days at my station, we “took over” Channel One on the headsets by switching us on and Radio 1 off. This meant we used the hospital’s headphone system and, as we had decided the best level to send was when the PPM pinged against the end-stop, we blew the thing up at regular intervals.

Consider now the plight of the maintenance electrician. Given the choice of a emergency kidney machine repair in Dialysis or resetting the trip for the hospital radio, which do you think he goes for? As a charity group, he won’t feel bound to let the station know when they are on-air again. So, our best efforts, including mine, went no further than the techie's reset button. If the system was ever damaged by a careless hospital station, the local PCT (Primary Care Trust - I'm sure you have heard of yours) rightly never saw funding for repairs as a priority.

Requesting a reset gave the bloke on duty the editorial powers of Michael Grade. If he wanted to carry on listening to Radio 1, he would do. We are agreed, then. My minimum audience figure was zero, zippo, zilch. Nowt.

What of the maximum? Our publicity said we could reach 3,000 bedsides. A more realistic figure came when we went request collecting. So many factors conspire to keep patients, or are they clients now, away from the radio. Health, faulty headsets, faulty programming as in they simply not liking you, the TV, the iPod, catching up on reading, endless visitors turning up as the hours become more flexible, leering at nurses and nurses getting their revenge; “We always keep our bedpans in the freezer, Mr Ellis, as it discourages MRSA”.

BBC Audience Research suggests you can get an idea of your audience figures by the correspondence you get weighted by the area demographic and previous experience of their likelihood to write. At least you can be sure that those who are down for a request that night will be listening. At least until Eastenders starts...

No, in the end you send out people with clipboards to do an actual headcount. I had to be pressured to do this by the station boss. Pure protectionism on my part. I really felt we were not getting back what we were putting in terms of reaction. I was right. Local students did the count. They came back with 42, then used all sorts of excuses to run back into the hills of Derbyshire. Forty-two?

Could it have been 42% of the 3,000 beds? If it was and the result rolled out over the UK, we would be “the most listened to” in the country. After all, Radio 1 was only getting 23% in its quandam days.

If it was 42%, even of those in our hospitals we would have nearly twice the audience for the local brand leader, BBC Radio Derby. In any event, it would be one hell of a result to take to the Trust managers.

If it was 42% of the people available to listen, then we still have reason to be proud. After all, those stations that are public service providers are not looking for a mass audience, are they?

Even it was a total of only 42 souls, it would still be worth doing. A little expensive, perhaps, compared to the activities of the League of Friends. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, 42 was seen as the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. You don’t think our student friends found the results of the listener survey so inconclusive, they just said “Forty-two” knowing we’d see the joke and buggered off?

No surely not. Another survey I completely failed with was The Great Music Debate. Ask as many patients, listeners or not, to name their favourite artist or composer. The results could be a benchmark for producers who are not otherwise guided by requests. When my results came up with a music mix closer to Radio 2/Classic FM/Radio Derby, the younger presenters ignored it on the “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he” basis and compounded their indifference by voting me out at the next AGM. My campaign for standards was rewarded by The Order of The Boot the following September. Funny old world, isn’t it?

The last word must go to Sir Terry Wogan when he suggested that a hospital radio audience only consists of those poor folk too weak to reach up and switch the thing off...