Video didn't kill the radio star....

I have just had great fun choosing my playlists for my Friday and Saturday shows this weekend on Ridge Radio (www.ridgeradio.co.uk)

Tune in on Friday at 5pm for the Friday Footlights show when I’ll have Flo O’Mahoney and Libby Bliss as my guests talking about their Young Oxted Players production of ‘The Herd’ which premiered at the Southern Counties Drama Festival a few weeks ago to critical acclaim, and which is showing again at the Barn Theatre, Oxted on 27^th April.

If you can’t manage that, why not listen to the Saturday Morning Breakfast show from 7am to 9am this coming Saturday for news, views, the best in popular music and classic golden oldies as well as a chart run down and information about what’s on locally.

I must say this radio lark is great fun. I get to choose my own music and talk without anyone telling me to shut up for two hours on the trot, which is a real treat. The pleasurable hour spent in front of the computer picking out the music for the week is even more fun. I’ve rediscovered songs and artists I had totally forgotten about and the lists I’ve put together have certainly been eclectic if nothing else.

The downside is that I’ve spent a fortune on i-tunes, which I have decided is a wonderful resource. Thank goodness we bought a new computer just after Christmas so I have plenty of memory left to download stuff. I’ve also made good use of Wikipedia to get background information on shows I know very little about, or on singers and songwriters. Wikipedia gets a bad press due to its inaccuracies, but for my purposes it’s great.

It’s just a shame that I can’t make my living doing the DJ thing. Maybe someone from Radio 2 would like to retire and the Beeb would consider me instead? Apparently, according to the radio station trainer, I’ve taken to it like a duck to water. I don’t know why, I’ve never done it before. Must be the performer in me!

Amazingly, I’d never heard of Ridge Radio before I started doing this and that says something about their PR. They are an incredible little local station, broadcasting for 18 hours a day, seven days a week when most community stations manage just two or three hours a day only. Run solely by volunteers, it’s a small but quite professional set up which deserves to be successful, but is apparently always in a perilous financial state as it depends entirely on fundraising. Being a radio station, it is not eligible to register as a charity. They really need to improve their own publicity; more people need to know about them.

However I am determined not to get involved in the running of the thing because if there’s one thing my involvement in am-dram has taught me, it’s that if you get caught up in the running or the administration of something it ceases to become a pleasure and becomes a chore. I’m just going to go along and do the bit I enjoy and maybe participate in a bit of fundraising from time to time (such as bag packing in Morrisons), but I’m not organising anything and no way am I doing anything official. I’d love the place to carry on for years, but if that means I have to become an organiser then it will have to go to the wall. Let someone else do that for a change.  

But in the meantime, tune in and support. With increased listeners comes improved reputation and hopefully more funding as advertisers begin to feel it’s worthwhile spending their cash. And you get to listen to my dulcet tones for four hours each week! What more could you want?

Too much to do and not enough time!

You may have noticed that I haven’t blogged lately. That isn’t a product of a stagnant creative urge, but more a lack of time with not enough hours in the day. Much of that busyness is self imposed, but not all.

Work is just ridiculous at the moment. We are going through a complicated restructure to make savings (although the official message is to create efficiencies) which I am leading as many of my teams are affected. It is taking up an inordinate amount of time and effort to dot ‘I’s’ and cross ‘T’s’ to make sure that it is not only thought through but ‘union proof’ as well, and immune to challenge. Couple that with a bunch of senior colleagues who do not want to listen to my advice (of course me being the only one qualified in general management as well as project and programme management means I am not worth listening to) and it makes for a very frustrating and demotivating experience.

On the more positive side, I have just started DJ’ing for a local community radio station, which I am thoroughly enjoying. That is something which I didn’t anticipate doing when I said in January “Now, I’m going to have a rest for a few months”, but it is an opportunity which has just presented itself and is proving to be great fun. So tune in to www.ridgeradio.co.uk (it’s a web based broadcast, not over the conventional airwaves) from 5pm to 7pm every Friday evening for ‘Friday Footlights’ or from 7am until 9am alternate Saturdays (starting this Saturday, 9^th) for the Breakfast show with news, views, popular music and classic golden oldies to hear my dulcet tones where ever you happen to be. You’ll enjoy it, I promise! You can even send in a request or dedication and I’ll try and play it for you.

All this is running alongside the fact that we are making sterling efforts to get the house sorted out the way we want it to be, after many years of compromise to accommodate our tribe of children. We have tidied the hallway to make it more welcoming and moved all the admin stuff and the computer upstairs to create a proper study. Next up is to tidy the outside lobby and have a massive chuck out (hopefully over Easter if the weather is fine as we will have to put everything outside overnight before we can sort it and put it back in a more sensible order) and then the loft (which we will do instead at Easter if it is horrid weather) which has stuff in it we haven’t touched for ten years and therefore probably don’t need or want. After that, we will move the lounge round to face the garden again and use the ‘front room’ as the dining room, which it is much more suited for.

I’m also making efforts with my health, trying to sort out all the medical issues which have plagued me for the last few years and trying to get slimmer, fitter and basically with more zest for life. I am tired of being tired all the time (forgive the pun). I want to put myself in good shape to have a long and fulfilling old age, ideally in the Mediterranean sun, and so need to be healthy enough not to have to rely on the Greek medical system (not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just not the NHS [maybe that’s a good thing] and it’s expensive!).

Finally, I have all these creative ideas flowing for children’s books, a TV cookery series and goodness knows what else. Despite now having had almost two months off from doing shows, I’ve done nothing about any of it, and it’s about time I did; I’m sick of what I currently do for a living.

So I’ve been busy. But I like blogging, and I know that quite a few people read it, so they must enjoy them. So I’ll make more of an effort in future, I promise! Now, back to work…..

Did video kill the radio star? I think not...

Friday. At last!

It seems like it’s been a long week and gosh, hasn’t it been cold? Even today, when the sun has been shining and there’s been enough blue in the sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers (an old saying of my mother’s) the wind has cut through you like a knife.

Most of the day, of course, I have been indoors slaving away over a hot keyboard, apart from the time when I nipped out to officially put my name down for a spot of volunteering.

Yes, you did read aright. Volunteering, but possibly not in the way that you think.

I am not going to work in an Oxfam shop sorting out rancid clothes from black sacks. I am not going to clean out animal cages at the RSPCA. I am not going to work at the local day centre serving up cabbage and gravy to toothless old ladies. No, I have volunteered to be a DJ at the local community radio station from 7am until 9am on a Saturday morning.

I got involved in this only recently through a friend (the lovely Alex) who already DJ’s this slot and wants someone to alternate with him, as getting up at some unearthly hour every Saturday morning as well as doing it in the week has got a little too much. The plan is that we share the slot for a few weeks until I feel confident and they trust me, then we do alternate weeks so we each get a week off and a lie in.

So today, I went over and met the head honcho, who is an ex BBC radio producer, to fill in the official forms and be initially approved. I seem to have passed the test, and tomorrow bright and early I will be broadcasting alongside Alex for the very first time.

I’m really quite excited about this, the 6.15 alarm call aside. It’s something I’ve always fancied having a go at and now I have the chance, although I have no idea whether I’ll be any good or not. Two hours is quite a long time to fill with popular music and chatter, and I have no idea whether I’ll cope. But it’s got to be worth a shot!

So if you’re up and about bright and early tomorrow tune in to Ridge Radio on the internet (www.ridgeradio.co.uk) and click on ‘Listen Live’ and you’ll hear Alex and me exchanging banal chatter and amusing anecdotes.

Apparently, they get an average of 10,000 listeners to the show, based upon the number of hits they get on their web pages. I had no idea so many people listened to web based stations, but they are growing all the time. Ridge do work experience for schools, training for kids that want to go and do media at university and loads of fund raising events and other stuff as well as broadcasting from 7am until 1am seven days a week, quite an achievement when you consider that most community radio just does a few hours on a Saturday only.

It’ll be fun, and although I’ll be knackered because of the early start (mornings are not my optimum time of day) I will thoroughly enjoy it. I went along with Alex last week just to see how it all worked and have a look at the equipment and this week I get to have a little go myself under his supervision! So if there are any nasty silences, that’s my fault.

Go on, tune in and see what you think. In a few weeks hopefully, I’ll be going solo, and then you can e-mail me with your messages, requests and dedications. Only nice ones, mind!