Dear Editor,
Radio Demerara, the Voice of Guyana, needs to do a number of simple things to improve itself and give a better service to listeners:
(1) Programme schedules should be published and should be strictly followed – this is standard procedure in all proper radio stations. Radio Demerara changes its regular programes without notice to the inconvenience and disgust of listeners.
(2) Recently, the station stopped rebroadcasting the BBC at midnight and replaced it with a never-ending tape of low-grade music. The BBC’s programmes are always international, enlightening, educative, and high-grade, and to substitute low-grade music tapes for the BBC is doing both the station and its listeners a great disservice. Restoration of the BBC would return the station to deserved class and to unique distinctiveness in the broadcasting milieu. This should be done immediately.
(3) In the past the station aired a fair amount of time for classical music. Now they have four 30-minute or less, classical programmes per week which are aired at ten o’clock in the day when people are at work. The Sunday Concert Hall programme which comes over erratically at 9pm has no presenter and the person playing the tapes sometimes openly admits that he has no idea of classical music. Very often, the tape is merely played anonymously. The station should have a proper presenter, or if they can’t then the announcer/technician should at least read the title of the tape in full so that listeners would know the composer, the name of the piece played and the orchestra. By so doing, the station would continue to bring the world’s cultural treasures to Guyanese.
(4) If there can be no proper presenter, the station may well consider rebroadcasting the Proms. Even the older editions would be welcome and these could be obtained from the BBC.
(5) The station identifies itself as broadcasting from the “Garden City” of Georgetown. It would be better to merely identify it as ‘Georgetown,’ for obvious reasons.
I would humbly implore Dr Roger Luncheon, as head of the Presidential Secretariat, a gentleman who knows about high cultural standards, the Broadcast Authority and the management of the station to correct these deficiencies and begin to restore Guyana to cultural standards.
Yours faithfully,
Victoria Giles
