The Training Zone
-
Twits – The Darker Side of Social Media
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I was once fired from a voluntary organisation. It was a curious experience. I disagreed about the way certain things were being run, but the guy running things took exception to this and decided to boot me out. It was probably my fault. And disagreeing with people’s…
-
News, views, music and more…
Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. Looking at a past world through rose tinted specs will usually, at best, distort history as it actually happened. But for today’s blog, I hope you’ll indulge me. Because it’s exactly fifteen years to the day that I helped launch the East Midlands’ first regional radio station. Radio 106FM was…
-
Bell Rings BBC Changes
It’s been a significant week for the BBC so far, and it’s still only Wednesday. But whilst most of the attention has been on the new Director General George Entwistle starting his new role, there’s been an equally significant shift at a local level. Local Radio was the focus of the Corporation’s programme of cuts,…
-
Back To The Future
This week I picked up a brilliantly funny email from the inbox at work. A listener who’d been interviewed on the radio wanted to know if we could help him with a copy of the broadcast. In April. 1993. Now I’m used to this type of request, often from contributors who’ve appeared last week, or…
-
Devon Sent – A Cornish Nasty?
At the beginning of my career I was lucky enough to work in the South West. Gemini Radio, serving Exeter, East Devon and Torbay was a dream station to work at. Live and local (apart from an automated overnight show), Gemini excelled at what was everything good about Independent Radio. We had a daily…
-
English (and Scottish) Heritage
It’s the silly season, when many people with “normal” jobs are away on holiday, and most of the movers and shakers at Westminster are enjoying a few weeks of respite from the close scrutiny of those pesky journalists. We all accept it. August is a time when there is no news, apart from the huge success…
-
The Joy Of Text
Don’t get me wrong. I love our listeners. I really do. And, in the main, they love their radio station. The latest audience figures may show some fluctuations across the country, but in the main, radio ratings are healthy. But there’s an awkward moment when, after putting hours of work into a programme, you receive what…
-
The All England Club
If you’re a radio presenter or a production company and somebody offered you the chance to develop a brand new national show, with pretty much a blank canvas, you might jump at the chance. But I reckon the reality is there’ll be relatively few people queuing at the door to pitch for the new BBC…
-
Trenty Twelve
“It’s Len Groat – radio like it used to be!” sings the retro jingle into another hour of seventies music. When I was growing up, Len was one the voices on what I considered to be the mutt’s nuts of broadcasting. You see, in the Seventies, Radio Trent was still fresh. It was breaking new…
-
BBC Dorset – A Hardy Perennial
It boasts the Jurassic Coast, a sizeable urban population and, in just a few weeks, the attention of the world on Weymouth by way of the Olympics. Yet Dorset doesn’t have its own BBC Local Radio Station. This anomaly is part of a historic dilemma for the BBC which has come to the fore…
TravelCaster 