Terry In Need

Last night's desperate attempts at fundraising managed to keep me up until midnight at least, which despite the rather dreadfull attempts at entertainment such as the BBC newsreaders taking on "Mamma Mia" did contain a few highlights.
One of them rather predictably would be the Strictly Come Dancing special where Terry didn't take it well losing to Tess in the special dance-off despite getting plenty of "seVEN!'s" from the judges. It's difficult not to laugh at that catchphrase now and rather interesting as it comes from Len Goodman and not Bruce himself.

I was impressed that with regards to the show's presentation they had revived the CIN theme tune used from around 1995 to replace the slightly less memorable one from last year that the guys at TV-Ark have uploaded. The rather odd thing is that both of them and the one from the early 90s were composed by David Arnold (the TV/radio composer, not the Bond composer).

It was also worth staying in Canterbury as the regional opt-out had South East Today's
Caroline Feraday (a definite eyesore) alongside the legend that is Tony Blackburn coming from DickensWorld in Chatham, a museum devoted to the author despite the fact he lived in Broadstairs.

McFly also performed what will be the single for this year's appeal and it's a lot more livelier than those that have been released in the past, especially last year's dreadful comeback by the Spice Girls which Mel C admitted was rubbish on Buzzcocks earlier this week. On that same subject, the song the boys performed was "Stay With Me" originally by the Faces and had been featured on Buzzcocks itself on Sean Hughes' final show.
For some reason however both Sean and guest Bruce Dickinson ended up making it sound like the theme from Grandstand which it bares absolutley no resemblance to.

With regards to McFly, it's difficult to keep a straight face whenever I see band member Tom performing as he bears a resemblance to Liam, one of the third year TV students, and a halls residential assistant/wannabe stud.

There was also a performance from Leon Jackson which I was rather impressed with as the tune he performed sounded very much like it was written for Matt Bianco.
I may give his album a listen as it's had quite a lot of positive comments and he's taken his own direction on the style of songs on there.

One of the other highlights was the Qi special on BBC2 where they revealed how Tarzan's famous call came about. That reminds me of a Waner Bros animation with Sylvester and Tweety called "Sandy Claws" where they're on a beach and Sylvester gets quite a lot of his fur bitten off by pirhanas and what's left of it makes him look like Tarzan.
This results in Sylvester trying to imitate the call but he ends up
sounding like Jimmy Savile instead.

I ended up going to bed after the cast of Hairspray gave a performance as it looked as if they didn't have much worth staying up for from then onwards.
The grand total turned out to be £20 million but they are hoping that overall they raise up to £37 million overall.
That's ridiculous because in the last few years Comic Relief have managed to achieve over £37 million pounds on the night itself which probably proves a few points.

As for today I'm heading back to London where myself, Mum and Dad are meeting up with their friends Celia and Alan who live in East London, and later on their friend Pauline will be meeting us at the Pizza Express jazz club in Soho to see saxophonist David Sanchezz.

Overall it should be a very enjoyable night.

"I Want A New Drug, One That Won't Make Me Sick"

I went for my appointment at Laurel House where they decided that I should reduce my dosage of Sodium Valproate to 250mg. However when I went to the chemists they told me that they were unable to make any tablets at that size so I had to go back and get the prescription changed so that I'm now on 250mg of Depakote which according the doctor who prescribed them, said that I should have been on them all along.

I went into town and managed to buy two packs of four 240 VHS's which will come in really useful over the next few months and also went to Morrisons to buy a few other things.

As Mum and Dad are going over to one of their friend's houses tonight, I plan to watch Terry and the gang attempt to raise money for this year's Children In Need appeal whilst enjoying a lamb stew with pasta. I'm not normally one for eating meals in front of the television although I'm only really referring to eating as a family in that sort of situation as opposed to having a proper dining room meal.

I seem to remember Vernon Kay saying the same thing in an interview about not eating meals in front of the television, although the irony is that his wife Tess Daly will be co-presenting with Terry along with Fearne Cotton.
And it more or less fits into the topic of my dissertation as a couple of years ago they were one of the many programmes that lead to the BBC phone competions scandal.

Then again in terms of "entertainment" I doubt they have made many changes although the ironic part is that their catchphrase is "Do Something Different".
It makes you question why they don't take their own advice as there's only so many times you can get the BBC newsreaders to make fools of themselves.

"Moon On A Stick"

Following the appearance on Buzzcocks last night, Richard Herring has announced the tour dates of "The Headmaster's Son" as performed at Edinburgh last year.
There's actually a performance taking place in nearby Whitstable kicking off the tour but I'm probably more likely to order tickets for the one in Leicester Square. Although at this rate it's impossible for me to order any tickets at all due to currently not having a credit card.

I doubt it will be selling out at the speed of a Take That concert however so I can be rest assured there.

I managed to find a couple of classic countdowns on Youtube last night from Saturday mornings of past, including a Dance Chart from July 1992 featuring the stunning Dina Carroll with "Ain't No Man". I haven't seen that video for so long although it's stuck in my mind for a long time as you'll probably understand.
And from a year earlier, The Top Ten with the stunning fairground graphics featuring Incognito and Jocelyn Brown with "Always There".
I bet Bluey wouldn't want to know that much about Michael Jackson now.

Here's hoping they come back to do another gig in London later in the year.

Thursday Mirthday

Tonight's Buzzcocks was definitely one of the best of the current series with no silly gimmicks or desperate plugging. Frank Skinner was the guest captain who whilst not the most spectacular of the series, still did a good job. On his team was a reasonably pregnant Mel C and a fella from the band "Does It Offend You, Yeah!" who was in for plenty of ribbing.

Richard Herring was on Phill's team along with Lil' Chris who Mum was pleased about as he's from Lowestoft. Richard didn't really get the chance to shine as much as he could have done although he seemed to be enjoying himself throughout the show, and Lil' Chris was pretty good as well and willing to take any stick thrown at him unlike Lisa Maffia on last week's show.
One of my favourite bits of the episode was when Frank's team had to identify one of the members of The Hollies where I was convinced one of them looked like Kid Jensen although there was also a rather lanky one with grey hair and glasses prompting Frank to ask "if he used to do Blockbusters".

This was followed by watching The Daily Show on More 4 which since getting Freesat in our house has become regular viewing with Dad and Olly. Tonight's show had Jon Stewart interviewing a guest who had a rather strong Texan accent which made the interview rather amusing for unintentional reasons.

After that it was this week's 8 Out Of 10 Cats with Louis Walsh as one of the guests, getting a lot of ribbing for getting rid of Laura on last Saturday's X Factor. They also had the fella off of Fonejacker which is a rather bizarre programme and probably too quirky to have me laughing out loud, despite the concept.
The highlight of the show was a joke about one of Gary Glitter's songs being banned from GCSE music exams. Once again, I won't mention the punchline just in case anyone hasn't seen it but any joke about Gary Glitter is bound have me in stitches.

Finally was Russell Brand's Ponderland which is basically just Russell showing a load of clips and mimicking the silly things said by the people in them. It's still a good laugh though and I'd say he's still one of the funniest people in the world regardless of the mess he's always getting himself into.

A Decade Of Nostalgic Effort

Ten years ago, and a very long time before sites like Youtube were around I had discovered a new use for the internet and one of that has became pretty much stable ever since.
I'd imagine anyone reading this may have an idea on where that sentence could go.

Anyway, several sites started up showcasing TV idents and jingles such as The Tyne Tees Logo Page, TV World, ABC-TV.net and TV Home which gave us the very succesfull TV Forum. I even had a go at one myself once but it was pretty weak in design and original content. Original as in captured by myself and not web-snatched.

One site however has managed to stay there for 10 years and has gone through many changes throughout, that being TV-Ark.org.uk which I have been impressed with since the beginning.
Back in the days when Steve Hackett used to upload idents and title sequences in AVI format it used to be a treat every week to see what was uploaded there, especially as at the time we didn't have internet access at home.

Now with a very big team looking after the site, they've uploaded a video of various figures in national and regional television such as Tom Edwards from Thames, the seductive Trish Bertram who was an announcer at LWT, Harry Gration and Ian White from Look North, Paul Lavers from Anglia, Sian Lloyd, and Bruce Hammal the voice of Sky Sports and Trans World Sport, who oddly enough I've never seen a photo of before.

This is a superb set of messages showing support for the website, which is probably my favourite website, that overall has kept traditional regional television in the minds of it's many visitors.
And long may it continue.

Permanently Below Zero

It turns out that Hugo our Spanish visitor has returned to Spain possibly returning in December so it means that I can sleep in my room after all. It's absolutely freezing in there however and the radiator doesn't seem to be working which makes things pretty incovenient.

There's quite a lot of things I want to take back to London including my "Dead Man's Shoes" poster, my box full of mini discs, and a photo of myself and Hannah, a helper from college when we were at the NBC studios in New York 3 years ago.

I've spent most of the time watching television in the front room where on tonight's edition of the One Show they had Whoopi Goldberg via satellite from New York and in the studio they had James Blunt. There was a feature about how a man attempted to cure his phobia of the dentist, and they revealed that Whoopi Goldberg has a fear of flying alongside other celebrities such as Gladys Knight.
Apparently the song "Midnight Train To Georgia" was originally called "Midnight Plane To Georgia" but they changed it because of Glady's flying phobia.

I'm probably one of many people who wishes that James Blunt had a fear of performing, but he revealed that he was more or less a very thick skinned man having spent time in the army or in his own words "the beating and buggery" which had the studio in stitches.

As for the rest of tonight I'm looking forward to this week's Never Mind The Buzzcocks with Frank Skinner as the guest captain alongside guests Lil' Chris who I'd imagine has got a bit older, and of course Richard Herring who I hope they'll show quite a bit of.

Even More Proposals

This morning consisted of a dissertation lecture looking at how to write a dissertation proposal which is pretty much straightforward as all that's needed is a summary of what the dissertation is aiming to look at, an explanation of the methodlogy, and an indicative biography as far as I remember.

Most of us were rather daunted about the idea of having 50 titles in a dissertation bibliography although we were told that they don't all necessarily have to be books as such and can be newspaper, and online articles relating to the topic.
I'm certain there's at least 10 books in the library looking at the sort of things I want to cover and I'm hoping that I still have a copy of "Interpreting Television" which I bought at the same time as "Essential Radio Skills" that has analysis of such programmes as the Millennium coverage on the BBC and a well written section on "Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway".

We're not being marked for the proposal itself although a well written one will make it easier to determine a relevant supervisor for a chosen topic.

I left for Canterbury at around 1pm arriving at 3:45 although I was asleep for most of the train journey which made it speed by.
Just after I arrived I went into town to buy a much needed CD wallet from HMV although now I've now realised I need more than one as I like to keep all my Smoke Radio audio in a seperate wallet from my internet downloads.

The bedroom that I stayed in last time has had all my stuff removed for some reason and the bed has been rolled up which I don't understand. Hopefully I'll be able to sort this out when Mum and Dad arrive home in about an hour or so.

Are Lecturers Really Evil?

A rather moderate night although I kept waking up at rather inapropriate hours after having rather unsettling dreams of one of the senior lecturers in the Media department attacking me and banging my head against the ground. I won't say who it is on this site although it is rather surprising.
However, it's definitely not Maria Way.

This has resulting in me being up slightly earlier than normal so I decided to give Moyles a listen where he was going on about people complaining about their favourite X-Factor contestants getting voted out, despite the fact they haven't bothered to phone in and vote for them.
It didn't stop him however from urging more people to support Daniel Evans who he has been backing throughout the series. I guess that's why he's getting all the votes.

I'd definitely say that the current series is the one I've been attached to the most although not as obssesed with as I was with the first series of Pop Idol in 2001/2002.
I even went to the extent of going to the live tour at the Docklands which was actually rather amazing, and Will Young's diary which was published under the title "Anything Is Possible" which is an interesting account of the contestant's time spent on the series.

I'll need to make sure I set the VCR to tape this week's show as there's a 90% chance I won't be back in London until Saturday when I go to the David Sanchez gig at the Pizza Express in Soho.

Hopefully I'll get a few more ideas whilst in Canterbury, to send in my next feature proposal as a back up plan.

It's more or less ironic that around this time last year I went back to Harrow for the night and was put into pressure into coming up with an idea for a dissertation topic. Now it's completely the reverse although I do need to make a start on actually writing the proposal and finding the right books.

There's really not long to go.

"There's Not A Vampire Zanier Than Spankulaaaa!"

The rest of the afternoon was spent in the SADiE room where there was quite a lot of mucking about going on with Phil Harris and Stoobie Faceraping Alice by changing her Facebook profile to make her look as if she was interested in lesbianism and having her control panel in a foreign language.
Alice wasn't too happy but rather ironically Phil had left his profile open after he had left so we decided (although I didn't take part in this practically) to get our own back on him by setting up a relationship with Oli P who was in the room with us, and even Sirin the palm tree got in on the act by suggesting even more cutting things to put in his profile.

Phil wasn't too pleased judging by the wall posts left on Oli P's wall shortly after but it was very funny and well deserved.

Just about all the second years, especially Lottie were stressing over their critical reports that need to be handed in tomorrow for their feature module although the way it appears to have been taught is an absolute shambles as I've probably mentioned before. Hopefully that issue was brought up at the course comittee meeting.

My show tonight went a lot better than last week having grasped which faders did what function although Adam and Zo who were on before me with the Shuffle Show made a few more digs about Studio 4 fitting in the theme of all the songs this week being linked to the Credit Crunch.

After the show I headed down to the Undercroft to see how Stoobie was getting on behind the bar and spent the night chatting to fellow bar staff Sarah and J.C. about random stuff about how good Count Duckula was and the noise a Samsung mobile makes when it switches on sounds very similar to the RDS tones before and after a traffic report on a commercial radio station.

J.C. was also on about creating a fantasy superhero called "Tequila Man" and writing a song about it and messing about with a spatula which he had labled "Spankula" which in turn inspired the short discussion on Count Duckula.
Rather fitting considering Sarah's also a vegetarian.

As for tomorrow it will be the second to last dissertation lecture and then I will be making my way back to Canterbury to stay for a couple of nights as I have an appointment at the psychiatrists on Friday. Also as it's Children in Need night it may be worth staying to see that with Terry Wogan at the helm.
He kind of resembles my Dad to an extent as he always seems rather reluctant introducing the many pop acts who appear on the show as I doubt he even knows who they are, adding to the fun of it all.

If Bruce Forsyth ever decides to retire from Strictly Come Dancing then Terry would be the ideal replacement considering he's presented the original series before.

Scoop Distorter

RP1 is currently rammed with MAJI students so most of us have come into the rather warm SADiE room and have spent time watching Youtube videos and so on. Stewart's currently in there planning for his movie soundtrack show where this week he's featuring the Back To The Future trilogy which I still haven't seen although it is an aim. Luckily Stewart's got them on his computer at his place so I may give them a viewing when I get some spare time.

Today's also been the course comittee meeting where the reps for each year have put their concerns to all the senior staff in the Media Department including Maria Way and Geoffrey Davies.
Rather controversially Geoffrey Davies said that Scoop constantly failing was not an issue which I am a bit peeved about.
I'd honestly like to Geoffrey come into the studio and work with it himself and maybe that would change his opinion.

I know that our year won't have to use it again but it really isn't fair on those who are about to do the magazine module and will be taking the Advanced Radio module next year as people make effort into going on location and it's not fair they should be let down by equipment that's very unreliable.
I reckon I've lost count of the times I have referred to that device as a "piece of shit".

I'm hoping they'll e-mail the minutes of the meeting to the rest of us so I can find more things to get uptight about, as it is my final year and some things really have to be said.

As for the rest of today I need to get some stuff from Sainsbury's as there's nothing in my fridge to do cooking with tonight, and get the CDs burnt for my soul show where I plan to feature Jamiroquai as this weeks "Positive Pairing".
It will be some of their earlier material obviously.

I'm rather gutted tonight as over at Regent's, David Gauntlett is peforming (being the operative word) his inaugaral lecture on The Internet which I would have liked to have gone to although it finishes at 8pm when my show starts.
I don't like the idea pre-recording my show however even if I do get to record it in a bigger studio.

Here's hoping the right buttons get pushed this week.

"See You In The Morning"

The celebrity jungle line up has been annouced and this year it's quite a good one.
Amongst those taking part in this year's I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here according to the BBC News website are George Takei AKA Mr Sulu from the original Star Trek, Martina Navratilova, Esther Rantzen who's no stranger to the reality genre having appeared on Strictly Come Dancing four years ago, Dani Behr who used to present "The Word" on Channel 4 and the first series of CBBC's "The Saturday Show", and Simon Webbe who was in the boy band Blue and had one or two solo hits.
Not the first member of the band to appear on the show of course as they had Antony Costa a few years earlier.

There's also a couple of token models in the line up but the most interesting choice that they've got to go in this year in my opinion has to be the infamous Robert Kilroy Silk who I'm certain the public will be voting in their droves for him to undertake a Bushtucker Trial.
Of course it's not the first time he's been made to look stupid on television having made an idiot of himself on Have I Got News For You, and in 2001 when he hosted the short lived ITV1 quiz show "Shafted" with a catchphrase complete with hand movements.
However I reckon the closest he's ever got to "Celebrity" was an appearance on the final episode of series 2 of Noel's House Party getting a well deserved gunging (and brilliantly recieved by the studio audience) proving that he's a really good sport overall despite being an idiot.

I just hope that he doesn't end up doing what Malcolm McLaren did at the start of the last series by being an arrogant whiny so and so and refuse to leave his hotel room.
On the plus side Ant and Dec did a good job taking the mickey out of the whole thing.

General (Or Juvenile) Stupidity

I've just e-mailed to Matthew my first proposal over for the features module which is for a feature on how spending a lot of time on your own doesn't necessarily mean that it's antisocial and how individuals enjoy activities like doodling and puzzles.
The audio angle would be looking into how an interviewee's long term comforters from an early age and what they enjoy doing when they are on their own and how the idea doesn't have to be negative at all.

I hope to get an idea for a second proposal which will probably be a series of podcasts but I'm not exactly what to base mine around on. Fellow student Steven McIntosh suggested yesterday for his idea to be a series of student aimed cooking podcasts, and there's already the meditation and relaxtion podcasts from Chill so I would like to come with something original but not impossible to do. Well, probably not original but an idea that's different from what everyone else is doing.

Before heading back to the flat I was up in RP1 where Spike was telling me about going to see Hot Club De Paris tomorrow night who's song "Shipwreck" has been one of the tunes I have been listening to a lot in the last couple of weeks despite it being nearly two years old.
He also managed to discover the video for their song "Hey Housebrick" which is basically a spoof of You've Been Framed that had me cackling quite a lot.

I've also found out via his website that Richard Herring will be one of the guests on this weeks Never Mind The Buzzcocks, probably not as the guest captain but I doubt
Simon Amstell will be saying "What about Richard Herring on the show!" and getting him to plug his new record or TV series.

This would probably be a good excuse to show one of the funniest moments of live television from This Morning With Richard Not Judy where both Richard, and Stewart Lee have to deal with The False Rod Hull trying to pass himself off as The Curious Orange as played by Paul Putner who I'm sure you'll recognise from many other comedy sketch shows.

Kevin Eldon is superb in this sketch and it has to be the funniest utterance of the word "twat" I have heard on television which I'm surprised they got away with being on live at midday on a Sunday afternoon.
When they did that sketch on tour he used the C-word and managed to let "fucking" come out, which if I was in the audience really would result in tears of hilarity.

I doubt I'd be able to concentrate on the rest of the performance as it's one of those pause button moments.

The Long Awaited Discussion

I didn't feel at all good this morning but luckily I had time to recover before this afternoon's lecture going through the features module.

We had a listen to a few more examples of radio features or creative audio so to say including a feature from CBC in Canada called "The Change In Farming".
Whilst it's not really about the subject itself, it focuses on musician Adam Goddard taking audio of an interview with his grandfather and setting it to music, inevitably making it sound like a dodgy Art Of Noise song.
It was interesting however after listening when quite a few people asked what the point of the feature was.

We also listened to the audio of the prank phone calls done by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross and had quite a lengthy discussion about the issue where Matthew revealed about how the whole thing went to air and how he thought the whole idea was planned as Russell knew that Andrew Sachs wouldn't answer his phone. It also turned out that the reason the show's producer wasn't sacked as part of the debacle was because he was part of the Union and could have potentially gone on strike .

As for now we've been given until Monday to e-mail Matthew with proposals for feature or podcast ideas and I may send one tonight based around the idea I talked about with Sara Parker yesterday.

The good news is that for this module each of us gets a £50 budget to pay for travel expenses as such but we've been told not to spend it anything irrelevant to the module as a couple of years ago someone spent their's on drugs and someone else last year who did there's on S&M actually spent there money paying for a dominatrix.
I wasn't too sure as to what one was but Matthew suggested not to get Georgina Baillie for an interview.

Public Service Entertainment

It's more bad news for Daily Mail readers as after Children in Need this week,
the slot usually occupied by Jonathan Ross will be filled by another series of the superb "Live At The Apollo" with comedians such as Michael McIntyre and the not so PC but the ever so side-splitting Frankie Boyle taking turns to perform their acts at the popular London venue.

It will definitley bring back an excuse to stay up beyond 10pm on Friday nights and with the way things will probably be going with the feature assignment, it will be much needed amusement/escapism.

We don't need to be in until 2pm for a lecture with Matthew about the features assignment but I felt very dreadful when waking up as a result of last nights antics. Some of the other third years who were there still hadn't finished their critical reports and I imagine are still working on them as I type.

However it could be quite a sad day as it's probably the last time all of us will actually be together in the same lecture room as radio students due to the way the module is organised which means next week will consist of more informal SADiE refreshers and individual tutorials.
Even worse for me it's almost close to the time where I will be in my last lecture ever as I don't have any more theory modules to do.

Most of the class are doing a maximum of two theory modules this year although one member of our year has ended up doing twice the amount due to failing a few of them last year.
That person being Phil Landers and I know it's a very tired saying but it couldn't have happened to a nicer fella.

I also need to sort out my dissertation proposal which I more or less have a rough idea, wanting to base it around entertainment programming on television (and possibly radio) and how the public get involved. Examples would probably include the first ever National Lottery draw back in 1994 presented by Noel Edmonds and the recent row over phone calls at the BBC and quite possibly the fuss over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, as they made jokes at someone's expense.

It could probably turn into a rant about the public overeacting to certain things and jumping on bandwagons but then again the angle of the dissertation can change over the time period for completing it.

I guess it's now a task of finding the relevant literature although I'll try my best to avoid any of what have become known as poncey theories.

A Night At Potty Lottie's

Tonight really has been chaotic as far as I've been concerned with all the events that have been taking part at Lottie's house in celebration of her 21st birthday.

I headed down at around 9pm with the majority of the first years including Matt, Rob, Matty I.D., Jade, Nicola and Alice B.
I had equipped with me a crate of 4 Mango flavoured Baccardi Breezers although I accidentally smashed one of the bottles on the floor whilst putting them into the fridge at their house which I was a bit gutted about but didn't ruin the night.

We arrived just in time for the revealing of Lottie's birthday cake and her presents which included a so-called MP3 player bought from a pound shop that played LCD arrangements of tunes such as "Hush Little Baby" and "Twinkle Twinkle" and it even had a headphones socket to add insult to injury. One of the other presents she got was a board book of "The Very Hungry Catterpilar" which happens to be President George Bush's favourite book. I personally prefer "The Bad Tempered Ladybird" by the same author Eric Carle but it was still an amusing present.

Chris, Stoobie and Denis arrived shortly after and because I was running short of booze, we headed to the nearby Nisa to get some extra supplies despite having to use a cash machine that charged me over £1.50 to make a deposit.
When we got back the music was in full flow ranging from Disney tunes such as "Under The Sea" and "The Bare Necessities" to tracks I didn't really know from the likes of All American Rejects and The Foo Fighters.

Around about midnight most of the Undercroft Staff arrived including Sarah, J.C. and Mattie who had been DJing there earlier on and as expected took over control of the music being played by plugging his laptop into Lottie's speaker and playing gems such as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and The Smith's "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" which in my drunken state sounded superb. I spent a lot of time on the staircase talking to Chris about football chants and Spike about my obsessive knowledge of associating Doctor Who in the Sylvester McCoy era with Terry Wogan on a Wednesday night.

By 3am Mattie had left us as he had to be up the next day to go to work at the Sainsbury's in Finchley Road and it was just myself, Dean, Alice, Spike, Lottie and Phil Landers in the front room. Myself, Alice and Spike decided to head off home around this time although as I as walking back I had a load of scary thoughts in my head such as the Devonair news jingle from the late 80s and other nonsensical ideas.

However in the drunken state I am in it hasn't stopped me from wanting to heat up chicken with rigatoni pasta which for me is the ideal drink cure. Here's hoping it all pays off considering I'm writing this post under the influence of a large bottle of Blueberry flavoured VK and a few other concoptions.

Aural Drawings

This mornings lecture with Sara wasn't that exiciting to start with which involved listening to some rather old examples of radio features and interviews. It didn't help that the room we were in was on the ground floor in M Block right next the equipment booking store.

However it quietened down about halfway through and conincidentally the features we were listening to became more interesting as Sara played us one she had produced for 1Xtra about speed presented by (Tim) Westwood. Not the drug of course but the passion of watching it at a racing track and driving.
It also looked at the consequences of speeding as it had a 17 year old who as the result of a driving accident was unable to talk properly and added depth to what could happen if things went too far.

The afternoon consisted of each of us talking to the class about our ideas and there were quite a lot of interesting ones. Phil Harris told us of his idea of turds although Sara suggested that it could be turned into one about toilets on their own and looking at ones found in service stations and on public transport. It immediately reminded me of one of Frankie Boyle's jokes about toilets on trains and how the door opens as if it's revealing a car on a game show.

Stewart's idea was about looking at geeks and the possible idea of following one although we discussed how it could be adapted to a lot more as the word "geek" has been taken into different meanings and used positively.

My idea (or work in progess) was about the idea of people enjoying themselves on their own with their own personal activities such as doodling or other. Sara said it could be taken even further by actually recording atmos and asking people about their own personal perceptions of things around them from an early age. One example being when Sara was little she lived near a church and thought there was actually a man inside the tower ringing the bell every hour inside the clock.

Phil Landers told us about his idea of doing a feature on the North-South divide which could be a good listen especially as it could give the chance of investigating the term "North Of Watford" as we're not too far from the city.
That concept gave Chris an idea of looking at the supposed hate between Scottish and English people that didn't go down too well with Steven for obvious reasons.

Overall it was good to have Sara coming in and giving us plenty of help in our feature ideas which I reckon was much needed.

Before we went however, Steven held a meeting to discuss what short go in the course comittee meeting for this semester and oh my, everyone had something to get off their chest.
These included the flaws of how the Advanced Radio Module is organised such as the requirement of having an Outside Broadcast in every show. This was mainly because two of our O/B's failed and that we have such a shit piece of equipment supposedly designed for O/B's that's very unreliable.

We were also irritated with the technicians in the radio department who whenever asked to deal with a problem in the department start moaning at us despite the fact that it's part of their fucking job.
Not to mention the pettiness of the security guards who are very reluctant to let visitors in, regardless of what evidence we have, to the point of having to phone up the lecturers and get them to tell them that they've allowed the people to visit.
And not to mention the problem of the radio studios being locked up at weekends which they'll have to compromise over as we really will be needing the SADiE rooms to edit our features towards the end of the year.

The only positive comments I can remember that came out of the meeting was having Dave Sharp as our lecturer.

I'm now up in the RP1 where for some reason our Gold winner Dan Roberts is going around talking to everyone in an Australian accent. I've also found out that Amy is going to Canada next year on study abroad which I'm quite sad about because it means I won't be seeing her again after December, unless I come back for the Student Radio Awards in 2009.
I guess the question now is who will take over the running of the Smoke Radio website after Christmas?

However she's having a birthday do in December for her 21st which should be an idea send off and it quite likely means that someone will be coming over abroad to do radio which judging by those who have done so in the past should be exciting.

I'm actually heading over to her house tonight as Lottie's having a glitter party to celebrate her birthday with a lot of people present from all years.
This could be the first time at Uni where I've not attended Happy Mondaze at the Undercroft for two weeks running as next Monday I'm going to Broadcasting House to see Ivan Brackenbury record a show for BBC Radio 2 which features Justin Moorhouse who appeared in Phoenix Nights and happens to be a DJ himself on Manchester's Key 103.
He happens to have quite a lot of his own podcasts which I may have a listen to when I have a few extra minutes.

I'd best get over to Sainsbury's and stock up on Bacardi Breezers.

The Long Ideas Search

Today we are making a start on the individual features part of the Advanced Radio module and it's arrived rather quickly. Oddly enough I'm not too daunted about it as I thought I would be although when it comes to actual ideas, I'm still struggling slightly.
This morning we've got Sara Parker from the BBC coming in to play us some examples of her own features that she's produced and later on we'll be discussing our own ideas for features which should be interesting although as is always the case it will always make me ask "why didn't I think of that?".

I'm sure something will come about however like it did in the dissertation ideas lecture last week and then it will be a case of making sure it can work practically.
We need to submit at least to proposals next week so it's quite a big deal although I'm certain that those doing the module last year were finding it difficult to come up with ideas as such.

Overall it's safe to say that this will be the last time I produce an extended piece of audio as such as I didn't come on this course to produce features on location.

Jingle Generosity

I've spent most of the afternoon listening back to last week's shows from Smoke and a few new ones as well.
One of them being "Dumpster Punk" bringing a long awaited return of the genre to the station and presented by Matt Cooper (not the keyboard player from Incognito) and fellow commerical music student Silas who plays the drums in local band Kid Champion who were one of the acts taking part in our Battle Of The Bands earlier this year.

Anyway, the show itself consisted of current punk tracks blended in with a few classics with my favourite being "Halloween" by The Misfits. They also spoke about how they felt the Ramones were better than the Sex Pistols which I don't disagree with, although Matt spoke about how fed up he was about people's ignorance of the band, e.g. when asked to name a Ramones song they would always say "Ay, Oh, Let's Go" instead of
"Blitzkrieg Bop".
Matt then mentioned that if he came across anyone fitting into that category he would spit in their face and kick them in the groin although I doubt that would really happen.

Other shows included Stewart starting his new show Smoke Screen focusing on film soundtracks. This week one of those featured was that of the Coen Brothers "O Brother Where Art Though" which I must get round to watching sometime having enjoyed some of the other films made by the duo.

It's also worth mentioning the Request Show with Matt and Manish where Manish gets a bit of stick of introducing every song with "here we go!" already made famous by both Nintendo's Mario, and Roy Walker. There was a very amusing montage of Manish's utterances that I may get round to uploading later.

As for the rest of tonight I watched tonight's dance-off on Strictly Come Dancing where John Sargeant was kept on once again, and it was between Heather Small and Rachel Stevens where inevitably Rachel got the judges vote.

Over the last few days Jinglemad.com has recieved some stunning audio from a member called "OldiesGuy" who's appeared out of nowhere and uploaded several demos mainly from the Alfasound tapes released back in the 1980s and 90s with packages recorded in the UK and US for BBC and ILR stations.

However the best upload had to be a demo from Century 21 back in 1988 called
"The Magic Of New Orleans" which marked a turning point for the company with
Ben Freedman as the company director and the legendary Bruce Upchurch as the senior composer.

The station's programme controller Nick Ferreira makes a valid point about how other jingle company's Adult Contemporary jingles at the time sounded very downtempo and dated, and I reckon the jingles that Century 21 produced definitely redefined AC jingles making them sound more uptempo with the aim of taking the format into the 1990s.

The package later went on to be demoed as "Miami's WAXY" and was used on quite a few stations in the UK including Invicta FM in 1989.
Having heard the package several times, I'd say the Magic 102 version is better than that done for WAXY-FM especially with cut 8 on the original demo.

With regards to Invicta FM, whilst the package itself sounded stunning, it didn't really get used on air that much and a year later was replaced by the more powerful "Steamroller" resings from the same company that stayed on the station for 5 years.

20 years on they're all still up there in my all time favourite jingles.

Audio "Bugs"

The SD card on my Bug is being an absolute pain, or to be more specific the fact that the audio recorded is in MP2 format which Audition won't read in order to convert into MP3.
I'm currently waiting for a new credit card to arrive which is much needed to order things from the internet such as software packages that would help solve the problem and buying tunes of Traxsource for my soul show.
Hopefully it will have been sorted by next week.

As for today I listened to Robbie Vincent on Jazz FM as always where one of the tracks played in this week's "Sunday Long One" was David Sanborn performing at the Montreaux Jazz festival.
I was going to play that track on my show this week although I guess it wouldn't hurt to do so as it's definitley one of the best live jazz tracks I've ever heard which despite being lengthy doesn't rely on incomprehensible jamming.

This weeks show included the two minutes silence from the cenotaph but thankfully didn't include The Last Post. Instead it was followed by a later news bulletin from IRN and then by "People Get Ready" from the Impressions.

I really should have bought an external sound card to record from my laptop as the built in sound card isn't any to record any audio at all which I've found annoying since recieving the laptop. It's not exactly radio friendly.

The Final Cutdown

There's a lot of confusion as to how long the critical report for the live part of the Advanced Radio module should be as I had mine at 6000 words whilst Chris, Phil and Denis have been certain it should be around 3000 words. The details of the word count in total aren't clear enough in the course handbook although it suggests that it should be written in a 40:60 ratio in terms of covering both the live part and the individual part of the module.

It would make a fuck of a lot more sense if it said that both critical reports should be around 3000-4000 words each as we have to hand in a seperate one for each part, even though this is one very big module.

However I've cut down my one to just over 3000 words by taking out some of the analysis from the listening exercises and turning the factual report into bullet points.
Hopefully it manages to cover everything required, i.e. not just my own contribution but how I felt we worked as a team.

I managed to edit it down whilst watching tonight's X Factor which was devoted to Mariah Carey songs or more specifically songs performed by Mariah Carey as there were a few of her covers as well.
These included Rachel performing "Against All Odds" which Mariah absolutley ruined alongside Westlife resulting in people telling the joke which started off with the line "What do you call a dog with five dicks?".
There was also Alexandra who performed the ever dreadful "Without You" which Mariah reached number one with back in 1994, the same year that it's original performer Harry Nillson passed away which may suggest a few things. To be honest it's a dreadful song overall, regardless of who sings it.

JLS went for the obvious choice of "One Sweet Day" Mariah's duet with Boyz II Men but I was disapointed that no one chose to sing any of her more livelier songs such as "Emotion", "Dreamlover" or "Fantasy".

Diana however was unable to perform due to having laryngitis but the producers of the show have allowed her to return next week. Although I'm not a fan of Diana I think it is a fair decision as it's a dreadful illness to have for someone who lives for performing.
It's not the first time however that something like this has happened as in the first series of Pop Idol, Rik Waller had to pull out of the first live show for the same reasons dropping out of the contest a week after, although by this time he had started to believe the hype around him.

The vote-off at the end was between Laura and Ruth with Daniel managing to get the public vote for yet another week. I thought Laura gave a really good performance earlier on in the show and playing the piano too although I wasn't too sure if it was genuine after standing up towards the end of her song.
Inevitably she was voted off by the judges although I didn't think the songs that were sung in the vote-off were executed that well.

Hopefully next week will be more enjoyable with a few more uptempo performances which they really seem to be shying away from this series.

Keeping Track Of It All

My blog is becoming rather useful for those writing the factual part of the critical reports as there's so much that happened over the last few weeks, it's difficult to remember what took place when.
I can imagine people who have done this module previously would be in a similar situation struggling to remember what happened rather than writing the report as the module went along although in all fairness you really do get caught up with all the practical stuff.

The Jazz FM website has now been updated with presenter profiles and playlists as well which is really good news and ideal content for shows such as PY and Robbie Vincent. I've also signed up to the mailing list although I'm hoping they'll release more compilations on their record label as the ones from the earlier incarnation of Jazz FM were really varied and superb.

As for tonight I plan to enjoy a relaxing spag bol in between the offerings on viewing tonight, starting off with the infamous "Hole In The Wall". Apparently there have been rumours that the show will be axed as they're having problems finding celebrities who want to take part and don't want to end up including reality rejects.
Although in all fairness tonight's line up includes Neil and Christine Hamilton.
All this fame because of fuss over money in brown envelopes.

Following on will be Strictly Come Dancing which I tend to watch solely for the catchphrases such as "You're My Favourites!" and "seVEN!" although at the start of the show whenever Bruce says "It's time to meet the stars of our show" I'm always waiting for him to say "whoever you are" like he did on The Price Is Right.
Although that would probably be appropriate considering most of the celebrities who take part.

There's also the X-Factor where the theme this week is Mariah Carey which could be rather unpleasant, and later on BBC 2 there's a selection of shows broadcast in tribute to the late Geoffrey Perkins who produced and commissioned several comedy series and appeared on programmes such as Radio 4's Radio Active and the TV spin off KYTV.

Ideal for staying in overall.

Halfway Through

I've managed to finish my critical report for the live part of the Advanced Radio module which is exactly 6000 words long, the maximum amount of words required so it's been rather difficult cutting it down to that length whilst getting in there everything I think is relevant.
There have been questions as to whether we should include quotes from related books in the report and being me I've ended up using one from Essential Radio Skills.
However I used a few previous students Critical Reports as guidelines with Dan Peay's being one of them that didn't include any quotes and still got him a first.

Prior to that, last night I watched this week's Never Mind The Buzzcocks on iPlayer which despite Simon Amstell appearing in a rabbit costume was one of the better shows of the series. Jack Dee was the guest captain this week who was rather unusually enthusiastic throughout the show, alongside the other guests including Alexei Sayle who was on good form and Lisa Maffia who didn't take well all the stick she got for winning ITV2's "CelebAir" beating the likes of Chico, and Lisa Scott Lee.

The funniest parts were some of the jokes told by Amstell at the end of the intros round including one about Keane where their latest album included songs about the war in Iraq and "the traumas of being a skinny man with a chubby toddler's head".
There was also an even funnier one about Ringo Starr's recent video asking people not to send fan mail which was even funnier although I won't give away the punchline.

I've managed to get and SD card for my Bug and a USB lead to transfer the audio to my laptop although the way my room's arranged it will be a bit of a task in moving the Bug to my computer.
I've never really gotten into the habit of recording radio from my Bug as when I got it four years ago the reception was very distorted.
However it's calmed down a bit back at home now and in London the reception's always been up to standard.
Rather interestingly enough Wayne Hemingway who designed the Bug and was for many years the fashion expert on The Big Breakfast came to the Marylebone campus a couple of months ago to open the new halls of residence.

I haven't been there since a few of the then first years went to try and put posters up for the first "Smoke's Out 4 Summer".

Topical Amusement

I've probably spent the night irritating the other occupants of Flat 16D with my constant guffawing.
Starting off with this weeks Have I Got News For You which had Jo Brand making a return as the guest host and another welcome return for Reginald D Hunter as one of the panellists.
His voice reminds me a bit of Denis as it sounds rather slurred at times but he can definitely come out with some of the wittiest lines whenever he appears on the show with one example being when he thought Richard Hammond was a paedophile.

The main talking point this week was of course Barack Obama's victory in the US elections where they showed some of the slip ups from the BBC's coverage including an embarrassing interview with Gore Vidal. They also showed a photo from the London Evening Standard which was a picture showing a white Obama and a brown John McCain where Paul suggested he looked like Uncle Ben, although when I saw the photo earlier this week I thought that Obama looked rather like Leslie Crowther.

Later on I caught up with last night's 8 Out Of 10 Cats which had a superb guest line up consisting of Michael McIntyre, Russell Howard and Rich Hall who I haven't seen on television for a long while. And to a lesser extent Jodie Kidd in an attempt to boost her publicity on Strictly Come Dancing.

They made some equally if not, even funnier jokes about the elections including Russell Howard's description of what John McCain bared a resemblance to. It was probably the first time they had ever got all five news stories correct in the first round with the final one being about two OAPs who broke into a shop with a very amusing observation about the photo from Rich Hall.

Team captain Jason Manford also came in with a very good line in the final round where he suggested that Britain's biggest waste of time was ringing up to complain about something they hadn't seen.

In between watching the shows I had a chat on Facebook to Mike Davies, not the Radio 1 punk DJ but one of the guys at our own station who presents a show called "The UK Sound".
For the third week running the show has been unable to go out due to the server being out of space which has been a pain for a long time despite us deleting lots of old jingles off the system that we don't need anymore.

It also doesn't help that the techies have locked up the stack which means that we can't access it to delete large files and that they've been very rude to the point of threatening to shut us down as a station over such issues.

Mike mentioned that the techies down in commercial music are the complete reverse which reminds me of when my year were doing the Music Radio module and had to include a live performance within the show. The technician we had was a really lovely woman who was incredibly capable with the equipment and very patient with us as well in getting the link to the studio sorted which was rather complicated.

I'd love it if we could use their facilities more often and get actual live bands performing as opposed to rather bland acoustic performances that also seem to piss off the technicians up in radio due to the messing about with the microphones.

I'm definitely going to have a rant or at least a little dig at the technicians on my final show at the station as they've definitely been very rude and unsupportive to an extent, with the arrangement in Studio 4 being one of my big bugbears. I've also mentioned before that it doesn't match health and safety criteria due to the tight spaces and having things postioned so far away from each other.

It's not our intention to irritate them but they, or one in particular could be a bit more polite and not just have a go at us all for no good reason.

Luckily, Amy's been kind enough to put the first show up on the Smoke website as a temporary measure but this issue really isn't fair for those who put all the effort in to making shows only for them not to go out because of server space.
If I was still pre-recording my show I would be taking serious action.

Awards Recovery

A lot of people have been recovering from the excitement of last nights awards but a few people have been more than energised to come in and celebrate it all by presenting their shows as usual. These included Matt and Rob who managed to get some superb audio of Dan collecting his award last night played out on their show, and Dean, Rich and Troy who presented their Smoke Review show.
Even more suprising were Jamie and the Show 25 boys who I heard had turned up at 10am to record this Sunday's show which I was impressed with considering they got back at the same time as me travelling on the same nightbus together.

Overall it's been a rather quiet day spent up there turning WAV files into MP3s and finding out a few more stories of what happened at last night's awards.
One of them apparently involved Phil Landers insulting one of the big bosses from Global Radio which I was rather stunned about but it appears to be true judging by Phil's current Facebook status.

Also when the nominations for best station were annouced the stations were accompanied by one of their own produced idents and I could barely tell the difference in style between each one, especially those with male voices.
It definitely explains why Marketing and Branding is a tough category to win although it's made me realise that our current station idents with Fiz and Sophie Clamp voicing them probably aren't so bad after all as their voices stand out even if they are a bit "street" or so to say.

However, with regards to an earlier post here are a few examples of current tunes from the last year or so blended in with jingles by TM Century for KIIS FM Los Angeles back in the 90s that I reckon really work well together, especially the one with Estelle.
Although student radio has tighter budgets, many of the bigger commercial stations in the UK would definitely benefit and sound better if they took on a similar move.

As for tonight I plan to enjoy a rather nice chicken stew with penne pasta after the rather rotten meal we had at the awards yesterday. As well as that I may spend the rest of the night watching tonight's Have I Got News For You, and catching up with the comedy that was on last night such as Buzzcocks and Ponderland.

I hope to get my critical report done this weekend although I also need to sort out my washing and buy an SD card for my Bug as I really should make use of it to record shows off the radio.

Superb Results, Not So Superb Venue

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.

Awaiting The Gongs

On last night's show I played two back to back tracks by Kool and The Gang which were "Open Sesame" from 1978 and "Stepping Out" from 1981. Both very good tunes of course, but on going back to the flat I managed to find two other songs by them on my laptop that would have sounded just as good together, them being "Funky Stuff" from around the same time they did "Jungle Boogie" and from about 10 years later "In The Heart" which would have also sounded good back to back.
That's not to say that they'll be played on the show this year, especially "Funky Stuff" which I know is an old soulboys favourite.

I was one of not too many radio students present at this mornings dissertation lecture as well as Denis, Stewart and Sirin the palm tree. This week it was about archival research which is an area of research I'll probably be making a lot of use of. Especially as I've found out about getting acess to the BFI archives which contain a lot of television programmes for viewing from over the years. It's £10 an hour to hire a viewing room but apparently students get a 50% discount so I may use the opportunity to my advantage.

The lecture was followed by another ideas workshop but this time we were in a smaller room allowing us to have more of a class discussion sharing out our ideas and a lot of interesting ones as well. One student wanted to do her's on how musicals have been influenced by reality television with programmes like "Maria" and the lesser succesfull "Grease Is The Word", to the point of lesser succesfull X-Factor contestants taking lead roles and Andrew Lloyd Webber appearing in Hollyoaks to meet the character who was going to take over the role of Maria in the stage play of The Sound Of Music.

Maz talked about her idea of looking at how local is local radio where she plans to compare the output of her former station Herts Mercury 96.6 with BBC Three Counties Radio. Anthony our lecturer also mentioned about the debate of commercial radio vs community radio and if local comemcial radio really is serving the community with some arguing that commercial radio does serve the community through it's local adverts but others wouldn't agree.

My idea was the possiblity of looking at the obstacles that have changed the shape of entertainment on television over the years, ranging from the motorbike accident killing a man on Noel Edmond's Late Late Breakfast Show, to the many faked competions on the BBC more recently resulting on tougher guidelines and possibly a decline in creativity.
Anthony suggested that with the Brand/Ross debacle I could turn the subject into how all these incidents have affected the public and thinking about it now I could possibly use focus groups to discuss what people enjoy in entertainment.

There were definitely lots of interesting and varied ideas in that lecture.

I've recived an e-mail giving details and a very well laid out brief for the features module that's made me feel a bit more relaxed as to what is required. Matthew's taking the module although unfortunately he's unable to be present at the first lecture but we have got a producer called Sara Parker who my year had two years ago at the start of our second year radio features so judging by what we heard last time it should be interesting.

The only downside is that I've got to be prepared with at least one idea for a feature or complicated piece of audio as such so in all honesty I'm stuffed. Well short of ideas anyway.
Having not made an extended individual feature for over two years it will be even more difficult for me but the good news is many people are in the same boat.

One possible exception however is Phil Harris, as apparently I've heard that he wants to do his feature on excrement to give it a better description, and what happens to it after disposal.
I personally think that's a great idea for a feature and I actually hope that gets mentioned next week.

I'm sure I'll come up with something in the end and regardless of the obstacles, the end result will surely be worthwhile as I don't want to produce something comes across as boring as I've in the past I've had to sit through a few dull radio features in lectures.

More important however are the 2008 Student Radio Awards taking place at the Indig02 all the way in East London.
Just to reiterate the 5 catergories we've been nominated for our

Best Journalistic Programming - Election Coverage

Best Marketing And Branding

Best Newcomer - Dan Roberts

Best Interview - Goodlass And Marshall interview Danny Wallace

and Best Station

Getting the gold for the above really would be good in terms of progression as we came second last year.
It should be good fun tonight overall although the big problem will be getting back from the venue to Harrow, going right across London, possibly via three nightbuses. Oohh dear.

The nightbus journeys back from the awards in the past have been very memorable as in the first year Ross Tilley and Ricky Marshall got into a big argument about podcasting and the amount of music you could include on them, with fellow radio student Andy B telling Ross T to be quiet or along those lines.

The following year I was explaining to Ross Goodlass that in order to have a better chance of being nominated for the entertainment category, it required a lot more than playing the theme from Baywatch each week. He then responded to me by acting like Grant Mitchell saying "You listen to me!" constantly throughout the journey which Chris Chilvers seemed to find hilarious.

This was actually the first time I'd properly met him and both the Phils as part of the station and it really has been rather chaotic since.

Knowing (Or Not Knowing) Where To Draw The Line

It really has been a rather dreadful day, not terribly bad but rather uncomfortable. I made a lot of mistakes during my show as a result of being in a bad excuse for a studio with CD players arranged in a confusing manner that won't stop after the track has finished. I've managed to find a way round it however, finding a way round the complicated, dare I say bullshit set up of the desk and hopefully with a tinkering of the levels, next week shouldn't be too bad.

I'm hoping to get back in the bigger studios sooner or later however, especially when the time comes to make my long awaited bow from the station.

Those who were in RP1 were editing their features that need to be handed in tomorrow although they've been given a lot more to do than my year was. In addition to the feature itself they've got to write out release forms for interviews, risk assesments and to make things worse they haven't even been given templates to work from .

I'm hoping that this isn't the case with our final year features module starting next week as it will make the module even more daunting. Although then again we don't necessarily have to do bog-standard radio features as such and try to do our own experimental piece of audio so to say.
Ideally I'd like to make mine feel personal and one to one but make it interesting at the same time. Something along the lines of the podcasts from Chill but with my own individual angle.

One of my big problems I have is that I'm critical about everything as it seems, even to the point of making humourous but snide comments whenever I get the chance sometimes unintentionally upsetting others.
It's happened a lot in the radio rooms but I would like to try my hardest not to do it too much tomorrow night but with the amount of very big personalities from Smoke, it will be tough.
Especially as I've heard that the table arrangements are apparently to be rearranged as a result of certain senior members having a whinge.
The most important thing however will be not to embarass myself in front of those from other Universities who in the past have been really nice when approaching us, asking us what station we're from and so on.

It will be difficult though to avoid embarrassing myself when having a bit of a boogie at the after party and mingling with the big radio people as such under the influence of a few drinks.
That is if they've actually got anything decent to drink.

As for tonight I'll try and brighten myself by watching last week's episode of Russell Brand's Ponderland on Channel 4 Catch Up. If it offended 70 viewers then it's definitely worth viewing.

No Sleep=No Smiles

It really wasn't a good idea not to get any shut eye this morning. It may be what's resulted in me being in a bit of a negative mood over certain issues regarding the station and being just really down overall.
The biggest fear is having to present tonight's Soul Show from the smaller studio in order to avoid the risk of the petty techies taking us off the air because people keep pissing about with equipment in the bigger studios, i.e. microphones being repostioned etc.

I know we should be grateful for having a studio built specially for us but with a CD player that's on the same fader as Hotkeys, I'm not happy. The only way around it for me would be to schedule my jingles on Master Control although I won't go into too much detail to avoid boring anyone reading who isn't as familar with radio playouts. I'll try and work my way round it although if worse comes to worse, I'll bring my laptop with me and play all the music via the mini-jack and it would save quite a bit of bob on CDs too.

Computers really have ruined the individuality of radio as back in the days of cart machines, presenters would have the choice of choosing jingles that would work well into a song melodically, especially as they're sung jingles.
I was having a play about earlier with some TM Century KIIS FM jingles from the early 90s mixing them with current hits such as Pink and Estelle and they really worked well together.
I may upload a few examples later.

But overall this is really not the sort of motivation, in fact it's not motivation full stop, ahead of tomorrow night's Student Radio Awards.
It's supposed to be a celabratory night for goodness sake but if I get fed up with those I'm sharing a table with, then the after party with our late arrivals should lift things up.

Then again that's always been the case at University over the years.

Higher Ground

It's been a very interesting night. After failing to get to sleep by 3am I decided to give in, switch the radio off and watch the coverage of the elections on BBC 1 and it was definitely the right thing to do to see Barack Obama win the elections and begin his journey to becoming the most powerful man in the world or so to say.

Even before Obama's victory was annouced there were some interesting moments such as a live link up to Colarado where Rajesh Mirchandani "interviewed" a spokesman for the Republicans who was still optimistic about things but Rajesh just kept on saying "you're still gonna lose though" and things along those lines.
One of David Dimbleby's studio guests immediatley criticised the interview afterwards but bear in mind that Rajesh's previous reporting background consists of BBC 2's music magazine show "The O Zone" and as the newsreader on Sara Cox's Radio 1 breakfast show around 2000.

When Obama's victory was annouced it even resulted in a few people in halls running out in their dressing gowns and screaming out his name. I'm guessing that more towards Central there was an even bigger reaction.
I was impressed that they managed to get a phone interview with Tracy Chapman as well who sounded really positive and whilst it was an unexpected appearance, you can't fault that her music is reflective of what people would want from Barack Obama.

The speech itself was really good and honest, looking forward but explaining that it would take more than a year and possibly a term to completley transform America. However that certainly didn't deter anyone listening and overall was very promising.

Stephen who's been paying attention to CNN's coverage told me about this technique used to "beam" guests from Chicago into their studios via a hologram with one of the guests being Will. I. Am.
A more detailed explanation on how the hologram works can be found below although Stephen suggested it was something we may be laughing at in 10 years time although personally I think the idea itself is rather bizzare today.
Looking at it it reminds me of the original "hi tech" studio used to launch ITV's National Weather Forecasts in 1989.
I always used to give ex TV student Alex Hill a lot of stick of sharing his name with the weather forecaster in that clip who I believe is now head of the Met Office.

Maybe it's the studio lighting in that photo but CNN really look as they want to be using HDTV to it's full advantage.

The Almost Ideal Final Project Drinking Do

We've made it, we've managed to finish the live part of our advanced radio module and it really has shot by. Today's show for me was the best out of all three we've done and everything managed to flow really well with a large amount of items and features.
One of which involved sending out Eric into Central London to play the part of James Bond searching for clues that would lead to a lucky caller winning tickets to see The Quantum Of Solace.

I happened to be the only one in our class actually wearing a G Radio t-shirt which I think aren't too bad looking, especially as the G in our logo is the same font as that used in the logo for the final series of the BBC's Saturday morning show "Going Live!" in around 1992/93.
This was when Phillip Schofield would always arrive halfway through the show due to being in Joseph, and guest presenter Kristian Schmid from Neighbours gave away his tonsils in a competition and got sacked for not having a work permit.

Anyhow, Simon Blaxland turned up as planned to analyse this weeks programme paying specific attention to the advertisements as expected but I was impressed that he had listened to the previous two shows that are on the website to listen to and he managed to give good constructive comments.
There were also good words for the features which included a package by Steven about the US election with rather suitable contemporary music such as "American Boy" and "Girls" by the Sugababes playing under when he spoke about Sarah Palin.
He did get a bit of stick for mentioning in a light hearted manner that "John McCain would be likely to die" if getting into power but I can understand what was Steven was trying to get across.

We were really pleased at the end when Dave Sharp summed it up by saying how we'd all come a long way from when we were in the Kodak lecture theatre being told about "how to produce creative radio" to actually being able to do so ourselves and it's been really enjoyable working with a very good group of people.

This was followed by a few drinks at the Undercroft and some stories from Dave's past such as when he was working as a technical assistant for Radio 1's coverage of the 1991 Smash Hits Poll Winners party where presenter Phillip Schofield was attacked by Fruitbat off of Carter USM.
He also told us how at the same event that a lot of young girls mistook him for his namesake Pat Sharp as he had rather long hair at the time.

Quite a few of the boys including Chris, Phil Harris, Stoobie and Denis decided to head off at around half 5 leaving myself Steven, Caroline, Sirin and laterly Emma who had got back from her Propoganda seminar.
We decided to go to the Nandos in Harrow where we spent a lot of the time being honest about the organising of the course in terms of how much the fees our costing in comparision to how little time we are actually in lectures. Most of us also agreed on how moving onto the individual features module next week will be a quite a comedown in comparison to the rather vibrant teamwork of the live module.
I on the other hand literally filled myself up and feel pretty knackered now although really I should be celebrating at the Junction nearby where it's pound a pint night.

I'm well knackered however and I need to be up tomorrow pretty early to go into Primark and buy some new trousers and a tie for the awards on Thursday as I was stupid enough not to bring them back from Canterbury last time I was there.
I may also spend tonight in bed listening to the US election coverage on 5 Live although before that I may have a listen to one of my Special EFX albums I downloaded after hearing one of their tracks played by Robbie Vincent on Jazz FM a couple of weeks ago.

And when I mentioned the band to those in Nandos they thought I really meant "Special Effects" as such which wouldn't too surprising considering the sort of areas I'd like to work in radio.

Hitting The G Spot One Last Time

Well this is it, the final day of the live part of the Advanced Radio module and I'm more or less ready to go. I'm hoping everything will flow well and I'm confident about this week's outside broadcast from the Imperial War Museum after going out to test Scoop outside there yesterday with Denis.
It will be sad to see G Radio make a departure from the airwaves but we're hoping to let it live on as hopefully Stewart's well produced website will be added to the Westminster Radio site and according to Dave Sharp it's the best website we've had on the Advanced Radio module.

One thing I'm looking forward to is our guest who will be analysing the show for the debriefing this afternoon which happens to be Simon Blaxland who my year had around 18 months ago for a lecture explaining how to produced radio adverts and he did the same for this year as well back in January.

I'm hoping that after the debriefing I'll get a chance to play some audio from his past which I've kept safely, from his time at Radio 210 in Reading in the early 80s which happens to include the rather corny Alfasound jingles used at the time.
I guess it proves we've all had to start somewhere.

Turning The Tables (Well Arranging Them)

The first half of tonight was spent up in RP1 where Phil Landers, Lottie, Sophie and Alice with the help of Eric were sorting out who would be sitting on what table at the SRAs this coming Thursday. We managed to sort out a plan which we all seemed to be happy with so we wouldn't be sitting next to people that "irritated us" to an extent, and I'm hoping they'll stick to that towards the night itself. Phil seemed pretty confident we would as he's sorted all the payment for the night itself.

Chris, Phil Harris and Stoobie decided to spend the night at Kenton Spoons which I was invited to join in with but politely declined as I had spent a lot of time already today outside in rather unpleasant conditions and didn't want to spend more of tonight walking through Kenton in the rather damp and wet weather.

After around 9pm I headed down to the Undercroft where amongst those present were first years Jade and Alice, and Matt and Rob. Mattie with his new hair do (or in his opinion "don't") was DJing sharing the duties with his housemat Mike who played more dancy stuff in comparison to Mattie's indie/rock anthems, one of the tracks being the theme tune to his show "The UK Sound" by Chunk And Twist which I really like. It wouldn't sound out of place on my show to be honest as it sounds a bit like an early 90s house tune that would be featured on my "Bubblegum Soul" section.

Anyway, other people there including Bracey and Lucy, first year TV students Chas and Dave (not thee Chas and Dave) who as well as presenting a show on Smoke also have a few amusing videos on Youtube such as this example, not for the easily offended but very funny. Sort of like a rude version of TV Burp. There were also a few people from my flat there who I ended up having a boogie with to the last tune of the night "Dancing Queen" by ABBA which I was drunk enough to want to join in with.

As I headed back with Jade, Matt and Rob we talked about our positive hopes for the SRAs in terms of "celebrity photos" and a fellow first year student not with us who could be "The Bernard Manning of the Radio Course". I won't mention his name but we both share a similar sort of humour in terms of TV shows i.e. Mock The Week and so on.

Tomorrow however is a really important day with regards to it being our final live show for G Radio. I'm starting to tire of the module overall but I won't let that get in the way of producing what I hope will be a stunning show and the good news is that our critical reports won't have to be handed in until next Tuesday.

I'd imagine that means I can spend tomorrow night celebrating.

Stranded Near Southwark

It had been a rather quiet day in the radio rooms despite it being one day before our final live show as G Radio due to take place tomorrow. I'd spent most of it putting together or attempting to put together the request packages until I was asked to go and help Denis to test the Scoop at the Imperial War Museum, quite a way down from the Harrow campus.

It took quite a while to get it working due to the batteries being misplaced and confusion on operating the LCD panel, but despite us not being able to get a signal in the museum itself we managed to stay on the line a few metres outside and are more or less confident that we can proceed with the O/B tomorrow that the ever reliable Stewart will be looking after with Sarah presenting. This will be for an item based on a James Bond exhibition at the museum although how it will adapt a gay angle I don't know.

I'm back safely in Harrow now where it's more or less very busy with people trying to get features done ahead of the show and a lot of people trying to get into the studios to record things. There's also a bit of general messing about with the likes of Lottie and Sophie pushing people around and carrying them around RP1.

However despite the distractions I've got all my pre-recorded packages sorted and plan to spend tonight at the Undercroft where Mattie from "You Heard It Here First" will be DJing.
I'd imagine that "Hey Boy Hey Girl" will be one of the tunes played.

B-Side Is The Right Side

As planned I watch tonight's dance-off where luckily John Seargant managed to survive the public vote despite getting the lowest score from the judges on last night's show.
It was a contest between Heather Small and Andrew Castle who's fate was in the hands of the judges and it turned out to be the GMTV presenter hanging up his dancing shoes although with the exception of his headbanging earlier on in the contest, I didn't really think he was that spectacular.

Listening to all the specialist shows from last week on Smoke there's an interesting selection including "Show 25" so called because the presenters live in Flat 25 in Harrow halls.
Lead by first year radio student Jamie, the show starts off with records connected within a theme although in a less peculiar manner than the Shuffle boys for obvious reasons. This week it was B-sides and there were some odd choices that I didn't know were originally B-sides including "How Soon Is Now" by The Smiths and The Jam's "Going Underground" which was a double A-side as a result of the record company pressing the singles the wrong way round.

Other tunes that I liked included a ska influenced band Hot Club De Paris with a song called "Shipwreck" although I was convinced they shouted out the word "shit" in the chorus.
There was also a section where they would play a record by an unsigned band resulting in one of the presenters saying "maybe there's a reason they're unsigned" which had me laughing and is very true considering the amount of unsigned acts played on the station, with a few exceptions.

Another show of a similar vein I listened to was "Saturday Superhouse" presented by commercial music student JP and a few others who's names I can't remember, where this week it was literally recorded in their house with the links done in one of the presenters bedrooms. They could have given less detail about the rather unpleasant conditions they were in however.

Moving on to a show of a different nature, "Jesus Jams" a show that features primarily contemporary gospel music such as Kirk Franklin, Virtue and Marvin Sapp, although there were one or two rock based tunes of that context, similar to the sort of stuff James Poulter used to play on his Crossway show.
Whilst there's quite a lot of voices in the studio during the links, I reckon the show itself definitely fills the gap left by Carl who used to present "The Upliftment" on Sunday afternoons during the first and second year and I'm really hoping they'll continue to do the show and keep the really good stuff coming although I'm more interested in the music than the messages themselves.

It happens to be Carl's birthday today according to Facebook and I hope he's getting on well after leaving University. I'd imagine most of those in the year I should have been in will be graduating in the next couple of weeks so it will be call for celebration.
If I was in their postion however I doubt I could be even in the position to afford a gown.

Cutting Down Criticism

Just a normal Sunday so far, the morning was spent listening to Robbie Vincent on
Jazz FM which has definitely inspired more record purchases/downloads, and part of the afternoon has been spent writing the factual diary part of my critical report.

I'm pretty certain that it will be a case of cutting it down to fit in with the word limit of between 5000 and 6000 words although I really want to give an honest and critical account of what happened without being too brief which is surprising considering my role has only really involved creating idents and pushing buttons.
I spoke to Chris about writing it on Friday and he said that he would probably have 20,000 words written as he's the editor. However on the plus side I'm not too daunted overall but I hope the deadline issue will be sorted tomorrow morning.

I've spent the rest of the day listening back to the shows that have gone out on Smoke this week, lifted from the student drives and there really is some good stuff from the likes of new boys Matt and Rob and the ever witty "Apple Bites Back" getting Oli P to do a song about "licking a love pump".
I hope to listen to some of the specialist shows as well although it's a shame that a lot of the pre-recorded ones aren't going out due to there not being enough server space on RCS despite several clear outs. I really don't understand why this is the case and something really needs to be done. On the plus side the techies aren't so petty about locking up the stack in RP1 so whenever we need to we can go into the folder and delete the really large files containing shows that have already been aired.

There's also tonight's dance-off on Strictly Come Dancing which I may comment about in the following post although to be fair it's never really that much of an exciting finish. I much preferred it when it was all done on the Saturday but then again I would be stumped between that or the X Factor results.
I'm definitely not in the camp of either liking one or the other as they are both different sorts of shows, although as I'm more interested in music than dance routines,
The X Factor would probably be better by just 10%.

"Boogie Wonderland" (Or Thereabouts)

Tonight's X Factor was pretty good consisting mainly of disco performances.
My personal favourite once again was Laura performing the song she sang in the auditions "Somebody Else's Guy" by Jocelyn Brown allowing her to keep her place in the competition.

There were two songs by Donna Summer in tonight's show which were "Enough Is Enough" as performed by Ruth, and "On The Radio" by Alexandra who looked rather like a mermaid in that scaly dress she was wearing. JLS came up on top form with their version of "Working My Way Back To You" by the Detroit Spinners and oddly enough their mentor Louis Walsh actually had that song released in Ireland by Boyzone before they made it big with their cover of "Love Me For A Reason".

I'm hoping the boys from JLS do well enough to get into the final or hopefully get a record deal as they've got the potential to become a modern day equivalent of British soul vocal groups such as The Pasadenas or Damage.

My least favourite performance of the night was Diana's rendition of "Call Me" by Blondie which isn't even a disco song for goodness sake, and it didn't help that she just did the song sitting down with a load of rollerskaters stealing the limelight and quite rightly so.

In the vote off was Rachel and Austin who both gave really good performances to save their places but in the end the majority of the judges decided to vote off Austin who in all fairness has been a really good sport throughout the series. I'm also surprised how Daniel has managed to last so long into the series and whilst I've nothing against him it will be difficult to imagine him winning.
Will Young wasn't too bad either, the new single whilst not being perfect is slightly better than his last one and it was good to see him working with the contestants on the songs they had chosen.

Next week doesn't look too good though as they'll be performing songs by Mariah Carey for goodness sake. As if their cover of "Hero" wasn't bad enough. Then again there are one or two decent tunes she's done such as "Anytime You Need A Friend" and more recently "Touch My Body".

In between the main show and the vote off I decided to have a listen to Alex Lester now in Russell Brand's old slot on Radio 2 explaining he was in that slot partly because he "had similar hair".
It's difficult to imagine him with long hair even though it shows on his Radio 2 homepage, but I've always got an image of him from back in the late 80s as shown here.

At least he's not afraid to show his face unlike Steve Wright recently who really has let himself go. I'd imagine it's not called "The Big Show" for nothing.

Far From "Idle"

It really is below zero in my flat to the point I have to wear an extra layer and have the radiator switched on even though it takes a lot of time to warm up. I was up at around 10am and it turned out to be Richard Allinson standing in for Jonathan Ross where as expected things really did sound different.

I didn't listen for too long as I wanted to make a start continuing my critical report which involved listening to both BBC London's breakfast show normally hosted by JoAnne Good and Paul Ross except Paul was away filming a Most Haunted special for Halloween so they got Adrian Mills, one of Esther's many co-hosts on "That's Life" to step in.
They still played out idents mentioning Paul Ross however which shows that they don't really go that far in terms of getting things produced when it comes to presentation.

I also analysed Max on 1Xtra who presents in the slot previously occupied by TX although it's still predominatly a mixture of news and entertainment based stories. The main discussion was about Ross/Brand being suspended and they managed to have phone calls from listeners with opinions from all sides.

Tomorrow I plan to start writing the factual report which is going to be quite a big deal although I probably won't have to worry too much about areas such as the budget and the website as I didn't really have any input in those areas.
It may be a good idea to make a few notes on this post on what to look at in case I forget such as going out into Soho to do market research, producing the idents themselves and getting the right voices and our night at the Ku Bar.
And there's also the chance to be honest about certain things which I thought could have been avoided but at least it will make the report more interesting.

As for tonight it will be a case of both Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor where on the latter they will be performing disco tunes and Will Young will be making an appearance later on.
I can remember seeing him for the first time on Pop Idol in November 2001 at the part of the series where each contestant had to perform to the judges accompanied by a piano and Will did an absolutely stunning version of "Light My Fire" which was different to the version he released as a single.

It definitely stood out amongst the other performances on the show and possibly the series at that stage, and his comments towards Simon Cowell dismissing his performance as "distinctly average" and defending the other contestants he had insulted were enough to make me want to phone in and vote for him which saw him winning that show and laterly the series.

To be honest most of his releases haven't been as good with the exception of tunes such as "Your Game" and a really stunning track on his first album called "Cruel To Be Kind" co-written by Cathy Dennis. It's evident that he's never really got on with Simon Cowell which is good to an extent as it's allowed him to progress and become more individual.

However it's good that he's more or less returning to the show that started him off in his career and I'm hoping that the tune he's performing will be more uptempo than his last single "Changes".

Once again, it will definitely be worth the watch.