WEATHER REPORTS
126. Weather reports from the Royal Observatory normally take the form of a general situation report for shipping and a forecast, and are broadcast regularly throughout the day in both English and Chinese.
127. Special arrangements come into force in the event of a typhoon affecting the Colony, with regular information being broadcast every hour. The English Service stays on the air all day under such con- ditions, and broadcasting of weather information continues throughout the night, the responsibility for the hourly announcements being trans- ferred from midnight to 7 a.m. to the Royal Observatory staff who have the necessary equipment to allow them to broadcast direct over the trans- mitters at Hung Hom.
AUDIENCE RESEARCH
128. A major undertaking in December was the holding of a full scale audience research survey. The University of Hong Kong was instrumental in providing a supervisor and interviewers for the survey, which was undertaken jointly by the B.B.C. and Radio Hong Kong.
129. Its purpose was to determine the listening habits, conditions and tastes of the radio audience in the Colony, with particular reference to the English and Chinese programmes of Radio Hong Kong, the English programmes of the B.B.C. Overseas Service, and the English and Chinese programmes of the B.B.C. Far Eastern Service.
130. The survey was based on a sample of one thousand radio licence holders, each one of whom was interviewed by a student from the University with a questionnaire prepared by Radio Hong Kong and the B.B.C. Listeners were extremely co-operative, and out of the total sample selected, less than 2% refused to be interviewed. In nearly every interview the answers given were frank, and comprehensive, and many people interviewed gave very valuable comments and suggestions. The report on the survey was in the final stages of preparation at the end of the year.
131. The survey did not set out to discover if one programme was more 'popular' than another-indeed this type of survey is quite incapable of this--but rather it set out to collect certain fundamental information, to fix the daily pattern of listening and the peak listening hours, to determine the average size and composition, in terms of age, sex, occupation, etc., of the audience, the average number of listeners
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