A Year on the Airwaves

I’ve always enjoyed listening to the radio. As I child I spent a long time in the car for various reasons so I was soon introduced to the likes of Terry Wogan on a weekday morning. I soon came to love the mix music, conversation and relaxed nature that you don’t find on many other mediums.

This is especially important in today’s environment; with the saturation of constant information it’s nice to sit back and switch off to to the dulcet tones of Ken Bruce. I also discovered a lot of music I would never have done through other social channels, the ‘Non-Stop Oldies’ on an afternoon driving my attention to the Talking Heads, Paul Simon and the Pretenders.

This is sounding very Radio 2 centric, but it’s just what was on in the car, aside from when my grandad would switch over to Classic FM when Steve Wright became too much for him.

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This lead into what has taken up a large proportion of this year at university. With gentle curiosity i was lead into an open evening for Trident Media, the on campus organisation for news, television and radio. Before I knew it, me and three of my housemates had put ourselves up for a morning slot, 9–11am every Thursday. We characterised it as ‘The Hangover Breakfast Show’, a show produced the morning after the big student night out. We thought it would be brilliant, we would be hungover, and we would help our listeners out of their hangover (if they were awake).

And it was brilliant. Though we didn’t quite understand how hard rolling out of bed at that time with a head like a malfunctioning sewing machine would be, we soon became naturals and provided hilarious features and a solid engagement with our listenership, on top of quality music, (once we figured out how to use the system).

In that first semester we had the highest consistent amount of people tuning in. This was down to features such as ‘Can You Spell That?’ where we would get co-presenter Joe Chadwick to try and spell simple words such as Cote D’Ivoire. This was complimented nicely with a range of hangover cures we would try on air, resulting in me gagging on a pickled herring that did not in fact cure my hangover and only resulted in making the studio smell like an industrial explosion in the Mariana Trench.

A part of what made the show so popular was our constant involvement with listeners which defied the conventional traditions of radio being a one way conversation. Whether they had song requests, or just wanted to chat over the airways with us, we had a constant twitter stream updating on our feed. Outside involvement was one of the most appreciated aspects of the morning. This didn’t change when we had to move to Monday mornings after christmas due to timetable changes and our overall ratings dropped.

Nor this did impact our chances in the Trident Media Awards. This was a Friday night gala hosted at the uni, a formal affair which brought together all disciplines. As a show we were nominated for four awards: Best Crush Radio Show, Best Specialist Show, Best Newcomers and Best Radio Team. We were absolutely honoured to even be nominated for these, we were overjoyed to have explicit recognition for our efforts. We ended up winning Best Radio Team and couldn’t be more grateful. Whilst we thought we would thank everybody who listened, those who really made the team, we ended up just donning sunglasses, accepting the award and walking off. That was far cooler.

This year has been an immensely enjoyable experience and something I aim to continue doing. It helps that we spent a couple of days with an experienced Radio Director who helped us produce some radio plays (more on that later). I’m pleased that by sheer accident I’ve ended up co-presenting an award winning radio show.

Cheers-