The 2008 Student Radio Awards took place last night at London's Indigo-go-g02 as Radio 1's Huw Stephen's put it. Rather bizarrely I was rather quiet for most of the night although this was down to two reasons, the fact that I was starting to get nervous before the awards themselves, and that the drinks in the Indig02 were very expensive with Smirnoff Ices being sold for £4 each.
For the pre-awards meal I was sat on a table mainly consisting of alumni such as Goodlass and Marshall, Ross T, Tudor, James Poulter as well as Matthew Linfoot and Dave Sharp. We also had a fella called Sam Taylor sat with us who took all our publicity photos last year and looks set to do more this year.
The meal itself was absolute rubbish, especially when comparing it to that served at the Connaught Rooms in previous years. The first course which I avoided completely were some rather umpleasant looking crutons with lettace. This was followed by an equally unpleasant looking chicken breast covered in what looked like unused potato skins, served with sweet potato and what could have been guacomole but was acutally mushy peas for christ's sake.
The desert was a bit better, that being a chocalate cheesecake but for the amount of money paid I think the meal really was a raw deal. Literally.
The awards themselves went off as planned and were superb pretty much throughout. Scott Mills and Fearne Cotton were on top form as hosts despite Chappers and Dave referring to them as our answer to Mick Fleetwood and Samantha Fox. That comment was immediately followed by Fearne Cotton uttering "Sam fucking Fox!".
Others presenting awards included Des Paul from 95.8 Capital FM who got a lot of stick for the constantly changing straplines and station names that they've gone through, as well as Melvin and Charlie from Kiss 100, Melvin who I recognised from when he used to make appearances on CBBC's Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow.
Other highlights included Mistajam from 1Xtra presenting the award for best Specialist Music where URN who won a lot of awards tonight including Best Station came second, resulting in Mistajam shouting "Aaah! You Lost!" although that's mainly because he went to University at Nottingham Trent and presented for their station Fly FM who also had quite a few nominations.
Also when the nice looking Tulip from Radio 1 Newsbeat came on to present the award for best journalism Scott and Fearne told us in the audience that if we saw her later on to go up to her and start singing "Derrr Derr Der Der!" or to give a better description
the tune from the Newsbeat jingle.
Or in my case I would probably provide a rendition of the one used more around my time.
There was also the inaugaration of the Kevin Greening award for creativity introduced in memory of the great broadcaster and we even got to hear some audio from the man himself which included plenty of JAM jingles for Radio 1 or 1FM as they were known back in the 90s . There was also audio of Raymond Sinclair one of the many characters featured on Kevin's show played by Andrew Paresi and rather amusingly a rendition of the ITN News theme from the 1950s/60s with the word "blowjob" being constantly sung over it.
The recipient of the award itself which I didn't get was URY in York for "Technical Difficulties" and it would have made more sense to actually hear the audio of why they got it.
As for Smoke Radio, we managed to get gold in the category of Best Newcomer won by Dan Roberts who was a very deserving winner but kept his speech pretty short and to the point.
One of the more questionable speeches came from CUR 1350 in Cambridge who won the award for best Student Radio Chart Show, with the recipient demanding people to listen to them on Sunday to "hear how it should be done" which resulted in a few jeers from the audience.
Back to our award nominations, and we managed to recieve the bronze prize for best interview for when Goodlass and Marshall interviewed Danny Wallace and for a second year running we managed to win Silver in Best Station which proves that we're definitely doing something right and that it was worth helping out to put the best bits of audio from the year into our station entry.
I know I've been negative in the past on how I felt about the station last year but the above audio really shows the wide range of shows that went on and now that this year we've got an even bigger selection of shows, we may possibly get Gold next year.
I should also remember that the stuff that was rubbish didn't even get put into our entry (apart from probably my own shows), so next year those compiling the awards should have their work cut out.
Immediately after the awards I went upstairs for a few drinks (well A drink) and to meet a few of the later arrivals which included first years Matt, Rob, Mannish and Matty I.D, Keeley and Joe, Matt And Rupert and their Producer James who I reckon does all the funny bits on their show, Maz and her husband Gab who I haven't seen for a long time Troy, Rich, Spikey G, Jake, Nicola, Alice and Jade from the first year, Denis and Barry, and Aoife, Pete's girlfriend Siobhan and Phil Harris's girlfriend Annabelle.
There were also a lot of big radio people in there including Mark Goodier stood very near me, Alex Zane from XFM, and of course Scott Mills. Fearne seemed to be hiding however although she did mention at the beginning of the awards that she was annoyed at having to travel all the way to Greenwich from her home in West London.
Bearing in mind that there were people travelling to the awards from Manchester, Nottingham and as far as Glasgow.
The after party hosted by Galaxy consisted of a performance from a band called Esser followed by DJ sets from Ant Payne and Radio 1's Huw Stephens which I pretty much enjoyed despite the lack of drink. It was rather embarassing to see certain individuals getting a bit too carried away, namely Danny our Head of Events who decided to undo his shirt. Even worse however was Tudor who kept bumping into things and rather randomly kissed Charlotte Bracey.
Then came the dreaded journey back after closing time to which no one knew what the hell they were doing in deciding on whether to take the nightbus or ask for a taxi back.
I ended up getting on a nightbus heading up to Central with quite a lot of people with everyone hassling Tudor as to where we were and rather unpleasantly, Nick one of the second year radio students ended up vomiting into a bag as provided by Global Radio. Although in all honesty I'd see that as a statement.
As we got into Central we ended up losing a lot of people with some getting off before us and others getting taxis back to Harrow. I was left with the likes of Spike, Dan Roberts, Smith and Bracey, Will, Troy and Rich where we headed up to wait for the N18 on Regents Street. About 5 minutes after we had got on, Denis and Barry rejoined us and we were pretty certain that they might have got a taxi to where we had picked them up which in Denis's case wouldn't surprise me.
However despite the long journey back, and the disapointing meal, last night went really well and I can leave this University knowing that we're still the second best student radio station in the UK.
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