RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

listening to the morning programme? We have certainly counted on this factor in our morning broadcast estimates, and it has won us a considerable number of points, but we feel that nevertheless this factor should not be overestimated. I shall explain this on the basis of the experience of Radio Zagreb’s morning programme. Up to three years ago, the ill-tempered morning listener to Radio Zagreb would encounter an equally ill-tempered programme in which, apart from the main information broadcast and newscast, the human voice, cold and businesslike, made announcements like a substitute for a large wall clock. Everything else went on m its established order, the musical items succeeded one another and it was known exactly when the news would be broadcast, that is, when someone would, in fact, speak over thet radio. But even such a programme had its listeners; most on Mondays, and least on the last day of the working week. The average number of listeners of Jutarnje kronike (Morning Chronicle) fluctuated around 4.8 per cent, and of the music programme around 5 per cent: in absolute figures - about 150,000 listeners. We feel that this figure must be enough to worry the supporters ot the thesis that radio, without making апу efforts at all to improve its morning cosmetics, can make sovereign use of these rnommg hours. It can, to a certain level, but who dares to satisfy that level?! Although we do not wish to imply that we аге completely satisfied with what the morning programme of Radio Zagreb represents today, satisfaction still remains because of the increasingly frequent proofs that the effort to pull the morning programme out ot its »off-peak period« and give it a dynamic function has mdeed paid off. How? It could be said quite simply: by humanizing its relations. Smce we аге concerned here with Yugoslav radio, it should be addeđ. of self-management relations, which, however improbable it may look, аге uttered, tested and developed in one segment in the very morning hours, as the relationship of increasingly equal subjects, our editors and listeners. The introduction of announcers to the programme was the first, though not especially original, move. Then listeners were given the morning telephone number, which they used to turn the morning programme - in the estimation of some local politicians - into a »morning spitting-match«; that was the judgment of those with rather sensitive ears to the numerous criticisms of listeners to »the little things« of little environments - from the streets of the city suburbs, from crowded trams and cold buses.