THE Voice of Guyana (VOG) needs to do several 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 a standard procedure by all proper radio stations. VOG changes its regular programmes without notice to the inconvenience and disgust of listeners.
(2) Recently, the station stopped rebroadcasting BBC at midnight and has replaced it with a never-ending tape of low-grade music, Indian ones included.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 dis-service. Restoration of the BBC would be restoring 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 each day. Now they have four 30-minute or less classical programmes per week and these are aired at 10 O’clock in the day when people are at work. The Sunday Concert Hall programme which comes over erratically at 9:00 pm has no presenter and the person playing the music sometimes openly admits that he has no idea of classical music. Very often, the music 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 music 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 could be no proper presenter, the station may well consider rebroadcasting the ‘Proms’. Even the older editions would be welcomed and these could be obtained from the BBC.
(5) The station identifies itself as broadcasting from “the Georgetown City” of Georgetown. It would be better to merely identify as ‘Georgetown’ for obvious reasons.
I would humbly implore Dr Roger Luncheon, as Head of the Presidential Secretariat, and 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.

VICTORIA GILES