Learning From Mistakes

Well my radio reminiscing is almost reaching it's end as I'm now in April or to be more specific the first week of April.
That week half the station staff including the three main editors were in York for the
Student Radio Conference which I'm not too gutted about missing now to be honest.

This gave us the excuse to muck about really and it's probably the only week that all the shows were specialist shows which included the Live Variety boys who used their last show of the semester to tie up a few loose ends. Later on in the clip, although I haven't included the song itself they played Ray Lamontagne's stunning cover of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy".

The reasoning for this was because a few weeks earlier they recorded a show for the 24 hour broadcast with all the songs aiming to be on a comedy theme.
Halfway through however, Ross decided to slip in a cover of "Crazy" by The Kooks as done on Jo Whiley's Live Lounge on Radio 1 and myself and Paul agreed that it didn't fit the mood of the show alongside the other tracks by Bill Bailey and Tom Lehrer.
However that particular incident reinforced my understanding of why songs are programmed in a particular way on radio for specific shows and it was really useful to learn overall.

Around this time most of us were getting our podcasts done and having a gander through the selection of music that we could use for them and myself Paul and Ross were having a bit of a laugh at a CD that contained some very dodgy synthesizer pieces.
What Paul described as "80s music gone wrong" and when Tudor arrived to do his show that evening I immediately asked him to play one of the tracks during his first link and
here's the result!
Not a rant as such, but that taught me that you should never use such music seriously!
I can remember when first listening to the station and Ali on the Sports Show,
where instead of the guitar theme that's become synomynous with the sports show there was a Casio version of the Match Of The Day theme and I knew that we had to make a few changes! I was just too nervous to admit it.
Unfortunately that's even more toe curling for me to upload here.

This week also saw the departure of Smoke International after nearly two years and it was rather sad partly because Fabian and the guys hadn't found anyone to take over the show from them from in Autumn next year.
Once again here's the well produced chronology of the show, for which one of the beds happened to be used for Thames Television's 21st anniversary in 1989!

That was such a great night followed by glasses of wine whilst I presented my final soul show of the semester playing a selection of soulful ballads. This happened to be the final show overall on Smoke Radio that week bringing it to a nice, relaxed and forward looking end with "People Get Ready" by the Impressions.
I think everyone by now had reached the point that they really cared about their shows and making them meaningful and that's a great way of how we progressed throughout the year whilst having a good laugh at the same time.