ABSTRACT
This chapter1•2 attempts to characterise some features of the discourse produced by D-Js between playing records on BBC Radio One. Because of legal restrictions on the amount of broadcast time that can be devoted purely to playing music, various strategies have evolved for 'filling the spaces' between records - including quizzes, phone-ins, interviews, jingles, and so on. None of these, of course, remains pure and simply a 'space-filler'; each performs a determinate range of functions such as including the audience or dramatising the station's broadcast identity, each having its own special interest. This paper, however, focuses on a particular sub-variety of talk between records on Radio One - that spoken by the D-J as extempore (and sometimes less than extempore) monologue. Monologues, where speech is produced and controlled exclusively by a single speaker - in this case the D-J, comprise a substantial component of talk on this channel, and yet they raise particular challenges both for the study of broadcast talk and for the study of talk in general.
