The 1Radio Awards, 2011
The awards were an attempt to to celebrate and applaud all the presenters that had been a part of 1Radio during the previous twelve months.
It started off with an online poll where listeners and presenters could nominate their favourite DJs in a range of categories. The categories reflected the entire cross-section of our output. The poll lasted a few weeks and few hundred votes were cast in the build up to the award show.
My plan for the show was that it would be like a virtual award ceremony with each category announced and clips played of each nominee.
All 1Radio presenters were asked to contribute some sound bites that I would play out if they won a category. They would record a piece that introduced the concept of their show and their experience of being on 1Radio. Next, they would record a short acceptance speech and lastly, provide some general soundbites about who they enjoyed listening to. Virtually everyone got into the spirit and submitted clips as requested. Of course, no one knew whether or not they would actually win, but they played along nonetheless.
After the voting was complete, I tallied the results and ended up with three or four nominations in each category as well as an outright winner. I then used the clips provided to create the usual award style nomination reels and acceptance speeches, with a liberal sprinkling of FX and music throughout.
To pad out the show even further, I used the soundbites to create a bunch of generic promos called 1Radio Love, with various DJs name checking each other and saying what they liked about 1Radio and its shows.
Lastly I wrote a few little sketches to build on the idea that the event was taking place live in the 1Radio Ballroom. Interviews from the red carpet, soundbites from presenters at their tables and some acoustic tracks played as if the performer was live on stage all added to the atmosphere and gave it an air of realism. The event was closed off with a piece by Paladinleeds getting caught up in a bit of bother in the auditorium and eventually getting beaten up by crowds of rioters.
All the pieces were linked together in a live two hour show with me adding extra commentary, links and observations from the shoutbox as it went along. It was hard to distinguish what was live and what was pre-recorded. It sounded like a real awards ceremony with everyone present in the flesh.
Big audio events such as these, whilst lengthy and time consuming to produce, were fun to make and certainly worth the effort. It helped create a real sense of community and interest and I think was hugely appreciated. On the night, everyone seemed to be present in the shoutbox and for a while, it remained one of the most talked about and most listened to shows on the station.
Posted by Tim on Sun 30 Jan 2022 at 09:44 and viewed 1,347 times.
Ryan Dunlop and HitzRadioUK
What’s in a name?
