Recreating Radio Bedroom

A nice young man called Jannik Giesekam e-mailed me a couple of weeks ago and invited me to speak to members of the student radio association in Scotland. Today's a big day for the SRA - it's when they hand out awards to the various campus radio stations. They also combine that with a day of talks and training up at Glasgow University.

"unfortunately I cannot offer you any payment for this," Jannik had added and he didn't even try to entice me with chocolate biscuits.

Well, I like that kind of brutal honesty and, besides, I'm not allowed to take any payment for my licence fee-funded utterances. I agreed to turn up and talk about myself for half an hour. Regular blog readers will know what a trial that is for me.

I spent three hours in a hotel bedroom last night, perfecting my spiel and digging out some photographs for my PowerPoint presentation. Thinking that Jannik was a Polish name, I even dusted off my ancestral vocabulary so that I could greet him in the appropriate lingo.

"Dzien dobry!", I cried, shaking his hand as led me to a waiting laptop.

"Jannik is actually a Dutch name," he said, "not that I speak that language either."

So we moved right along. The students filed in to the room and I began my talk with a little story about the very first radio station I ever tried to manage.

"It was Radio Jeff. I ran it from my bedroom when I was a teenager. Look, here's a photo of me in a natty zip-up cardigan that Mum knitted for me."

Of course I had no actual clips of archive audio to play them, so I went to the microphone and, in a squeaky voice, tried to recreate the experience for them.

"and now...one of my favourites...it's the Bay City Rollers and they're saying Bye, Bye, Baby!"

As I said to the students, every time I look at that photograph, I go down on bended knee and give thanks that podcasting was not invented when I was broadcasting to my own four walls. I could have been a danger to the public, or public eardrums at least.

Mind you, also in the audience today was Stuart Barrie who runs Galaxy Radio in Glasgow. Now he's a man who knows talent when he hears it.

I expect he'll make me that job offer tomorrow. Or the day after.

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