Patience
More than a year ago, I signed up for a radio announcer’s course at the local station. Notice that I said ’signed up’, as the course was never finished. As a class we completed three or four weeks of classroom theory and were sent our separate ways to pitch for a show and request panel training with announcers.
My pitch for an hour of accessible Australian music (The Local Sound – original, hey?) with a different theme each week got up and I started devoting an insane number of hours to making playlists along themes of ‘Songs to make you cry into your beer’, ‘The magnificent influence of Vanda and Young’ and ‘A little bit of bogan rock never killed anyone’ and planned to allocate more time to help out around the station with admin and housekeeping. I submitted a list of announcers I respected so it would be dead easy to schedule the scary hands-on training.
And then the air waves of communication turned into dead space. I heard nothing and followed up with phone calls to ask what the bloody hell was going on. More nothing. Because I’m a sane, rational person with no sense of revenge, I decided to wait a year until my subscription renewal notice arrived before making a point. The Dutch half of my genetic structure is painfully stubborn at times and almost impossible to contain when it’s on the loose.
ha!
I received phone calls to my home and mobile phones within 48 hours of mailing my subscription notice. The station administrator asked on the spot for me to nominate five or six shows to sit in on and he’d line up the panel training and re-start the process for requesting a time slot. He could not have been more responsive or helpful. The thing is that I’ve filled my ‘radio time’ with other activities and I’m not sure I want to do it now. Be careful what I wish for.
Crank-o-meter: we already know i’m not a people person
December 13th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Oh go on! You can be the next Helen Razor. Can you start publishing those playlists please? I think “A little bit of bogan rock never hurt anyone” should be on my ipod. I assume it features Run to Paradise, and Throw your arms around me for the lighters in the air moment?
December 14th, 2009 at 9:24 am
You know, I’ve got a degree in Media Studies. I majored in (3 years of) Radio Production. But I’ve never been on-air since; couldn’t be bothered. Figured it would take too much time in preparation and I had other more private but equally stupid hobbies to pursue.
Go on, do what I could never bring myself to do and have a little themed music show. My ideas were mostly set around 20 minute prog rock and ambient pieces, but I never had a large enough collection to make it more than hald a dozen shows.
December 14th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Oh gosh, Foodycat, you have unleashed a dilemma of gargantuan proportions! I was going to start with the booming chords of ‘Jailbreak’, tone it down into classic pub bogan of the Choirboys, Spy v Spy, Mark of Cain etc and end with Angry Anderson and Sarah McLeod’s cover of ‘Highway to Hell’ from the RockWiz disc. ‘The Slab’ by H&C would have snuck in there, but yeahhhhhhh, you make a very, very good point for the sentimental bogans out there.
I’ll see in the new year, comradeharps. There was a prog rocker doing the graveyard on RRR the other morning and he was great fun to listen to.
December 17th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Man it annoys me that people don’t bother following through with things until you get snarky about it. It makes me wonder how businesses can be successful, the crap I see makes me shudder!
December 18th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
It’s often not the best that succeeds, but the most insistent and persistent :-(. Am currently thinking of a disco playlist — are the Bee Gees still considered Australian?