Once again, I'm up pretty early and still have a bloody cold. Although it doesn't feel too good, at least it's given me an excuse to have listen to Tony Blackburn on Smooth due to his absence from the Kentish airwaves this afternoon and it's even better as he's live.
The jingles haven't really had much effort in terms of being seasonal as they've just gone for the old trick of adding sleighbells to their existing Bespoke jingles. And considering they're so cheap to make (or sound that way anyway) you'd think they'd make the effort.
Ex-station employee Len Groat on the news the Tony was joining the station suggested that he should invest in a resing of the legendary PAMS "Smooth Sailing" jingle from series 17 as used on Radio London in the 1960s and brought by Len for GEM AM in 1988 amongst several other "cherry picked" PAMS classics.
It would just have the last line changed to "with Tony Blackburn, On Smooth Radioooooo!".
I may consider getting that cut down myself towards the end of my tenure on Smoke if I have enough money.
Len seems to have an obsession of wanting UK stations to bring back Dallas jingles regardless of how dated they sound.
One example being his ex-colleague David Lloyd when he was at LBC and they had a stunning package from IQ Beats in Seattle which musically sounded great, although Len desperately tried to convince him into buying JAM's "Top News" package for WABC in New York.
If you look at his post on Jinglemad I'm not sure if the lyrics would work and the reason the package works for WABC is because it has a heritage of using JAM jingles for over
30 years, most of the presenters have been there for a long time and it's still very succesfull.
LBC on the other hand aim to reflect the views of London and living there overall and the IDs on the station have to be the best I know of on any radio station in the city.
Credit of course to Chris Lowrie AKA "Heather Jingles" for having the vision.
Back to Tony and he's definitely got a few things to say about last night's SCD and believes that Tom Chambers wasn't good enough to make it into the final of the show next week. Tony doesn't think the outcome was fair and was a "disaster" but if they had gone ahead with a dance off it would have been a riot in the BBC press office with viewers complaints, even though it did take me a while to work out why it wasn't possible for the Holby City star to avoid the dance off.
As for the X Factor Steven will probably agree with his opinions of Alexandra winning as he described her as "like Leona Lewis, but with more personality".
He also took the mickey out of the overly dramatic taglines at the start as read by Peter Dixon,
"IT'S THE ONE YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR", "No it's not".
Immediately after I posted my thought's on last night's final, Steven didn't hesitate to make comments and we had a bit of a chat on Windows Live Messenger where I got quite a ribbing for describing Alexandra's duet with Beyonce as a "dull ballad" as Steven said that the song performed was one of the most emotional soul songs of our generation.
Then again I could say the same about Patti Austin's "First Time Love" from 1990 which is my favourite soul ballad ever in terms of both words and music but I doubt Steven would agree for obvious reasons. It's weird though as the song started off as a delightful instrumental on composer Dave Grusin's album "Migration" in 1989 and Patti added her lyrics to the song which are just magical such as "It's so hard to remember my sad yesterdays, but from now till December it's Christmas always".
In fact I'll say it's the best love song ever, period.
Anyway, back to the X Factor and whilst I got a bit of stick for condeming probably the best performance of the night, I still have no shame in saying that enjoyed Eggnog's duet with Boyzone as at least it wasn't one of their crap ballads i.e. "No Matter What" and I won't complain if people give me stick for liking their rendition of "Picture Of You".
I can remember exactly two years ago where myself and Tim Pryor were chatting on MSN when Leona won and I was actually in awe of her victory as her song really sounded like a classic early 90s soul ballad. However in the last two years she's just grown to be annoying with her constant note changes although I still think "Bleeding Love" is one of the more catchier songs released by a winner of the competition.
Before heading off to bed Steven said that he'd be definitely chatting to me more about this later today when I head up to SADiE, although that's probably not going to be the case until this afternoon as there's no way I can miss Robbie Vincent's "Sunday Morning Soul" on Jazz FM.
I may also continue writing my critical report where I plan to analyse what has to be one of my favourite radio features I've heard since being on the radio course.
That being an episode of Radio 3's "Between The Ears" called "A House Is Not A Home" which features interviews with people who have had to sell their houses or have them reposessed and in the cases of some having to live on the streets.
The stories are interspersed with a song about the luxuries of living under a roof by the delightfully silly Lorraine Bowen who Matthew used to work with at GLR in the early 90s.
It was Chris Evans who gave her the exposure on his show "Round At Chris's (And His Missus) so we've all got him to thank overall.
Basically her act consisted of novelty songs performed by her on a portable keyboard with such examples including "The Crumble Song", "Julie Christie", and "Space".
Vastly underrated and she even appeared on programmes such as The Big Breakfast
on Channel 4 and The O-Zone on CBBC around the early to mid 90s.
Speaking of which I've managed to find the titles to the show from 1993-1994 with a theme tune composed by Gary Barlow.
According to the programme's TX File that was released alongside plenty of other BBC shows in a "Fun Fax-esque" folder in the mid 90s, the title of the tune was "Banoffee Pie" as Gary happened to be making one when taking a break from recording the tune.
There were two versions of the theme although I preferred the second version which I hope will be uploaded to Youtube in the not too distant future.
This particular edition features the vastly underrated Pauline Henry who was originally in the Chimes who in 1990 did a stunning soulful cover of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" although as a solo artist she became a bit more rockier and is still one of my favourite female vocalists of the decade.
Anyway, if I do head up to the radio rooms this afternoon it probably won't be for too long as I only really need to sort out the volume levels which is quite a task, and also because I plan to spend the afternoon watching the film that I've brought Kate as a birthday present in order to see if I can watch it in full without falling asleep.
I won't say what it is but I'm pretty certain you know already.
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