I'm still trawling through the month of November and I'm only just starting to remember the quirks that most of the station members used to have on air. Phil Harris's being how he always read out the text number as "83252" which never really made sense and was one of those tiny little things that did my head in for no apparent reason.
Apart from those who felt the need to play jingles in the middle of songs which for me is unacceptable. That and playing 2-3 jingles back to back in a row.
And this is coming from someone who's more obsessed about the subject than anyone else but you have to know how and when to use them at the right times.
Even stations such as Solar and Starpoint have presenters who do the same which to an extent has put me off listening to them as much as I used to about two years ago.
Moving back to what should be higher in the paragraph, Paul and Ross on the Live Variety Show around this time made a habit of finishing their show with the theme from He-Man after discovering it on HotKeys when Tudor started using it for his show. Probably one of my favourite double acts on the station although most of it is because of Paul and his humour and passion for the music itself whilst just being himself at the same time. I'll have to upload one of their links sometime to help back up a few points.
Around this time towards the end of the month a few further changes came in after one Tuesday night when Ricky asked Josie and Ross T to have a chat about the Punk show which I thought was rather long overdue. Basically it was because Ricky wanted to seperate specialist shows from daytime shows and wanted the specialist shows to be more music focused whereas the Punk Show was essentially the "brummie" and the "newsie" wittering on and Ricky wasn't too keen on that for what he had in mind.
From the following week onwards Josie started presenting the show on her own and personally I thought it was an improvement as she now had overall control of the desk and managed to add more of her personality whilst balancing it well with the music. I even managed to finally get her to play the ska cover of A-Ha's "Take On Me"!
The tricky and debatable question is what should be the priority in student radio? Having fun, or sounding professional? In this case it was a Punk Show with a co-presenter who admitted on air many times that he knew nothing about the genre.
Then again I'm probably eating my own words as whenever I've had someone co-presenting with me on the Soul Show they don't pretend to know about the music but at the same time it sounds as if they're enjoying themselves and are open in wanting to know more about the unfamiliar and sometimes unpronounceable artists. It's just a case of getting the balance right.
Once again, if this blog post was "Just A Minute", someone would have buzzed for "deviation".
From my point of view I wasn't too sure about introducing an on air brand for evening and specialist shows on the station "Smoke Specialist".
Although it was a good way to brand the evening shows it did make things sound rather disjointed with sudden changes, and little cross promotion within the daytime shows apart from my own show and Tudor Rock.
In short the transition on air wasn't seamless enough.
Thankfully by S(4)S we ironed out this problem through the use of "Still To Come" promos which went out every hour after the news and I really hope that these continue during Freshers Week.
Then again it probably proves a point that if you liase and socialise with the rest of the team at the station, then you're more likely to get you programme promoted throughout the schedule and that goes for any radio station.
On the plus side the specialist branding will definitely be included in our entry for the catergory in the SRAs and Hannah who recorded the voicers had the perfect delivery for my rather dreadful lines; "For all musical tastes (FX), Smoke keeps it delicious".
The long break we had in between the second and third semester was really useful and it was good to have a rest from presenting and the station overall as when we came back we were fresh full of new ideas.
There was recently a comment in the Guardian suggesting that British soaps especially Eastenders should take a similar move in the same way as those in the US and Australia by having a 6 week break once a year to achieve similar results.
In an ideal world eh?
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