That little thing called real life seems to mean that I don’t write things for this website as often as I’d like to.
So as it’s a rainy Sunday, I’ve popped my free sample of Starbucks Blonde Roast coffee in the percolator and thought I would try and collect together a few items that have caught me eye recently, with the aim to do this on a regular basis every week or two.
Let’s start with a few bits of audio I’ve been listening to:
Radio 4 Media Show Podcast on local TV one of the most interesting episodes of recent times. All the applications for these are over on the Ofcom site, some nice bedside reading for those interested. This makes me think back to the not that long ago times of Commercial Radio Applications being lodged in local reference libraries for “public inspection” – I wonder if anyone other than the competing applicants actually went into view them?
Seconding listening highlight is catching up with the July edition of the Earshot Creative Review – looking at the new Radio 2 jingle package, which is a fascinating listen to some of the background. Was interesting to contrast against my first listen of the new jingles on the morning of the Olympic opening ceremony, sat in the Frankley Services carpark on the M5, my first reaction was the news jingle sounded very much the same as the old one – never noticed the ramp on the start. Now it’s rather late in the day to comment now, but as a non regular Chris Evans listener what I heard of his breakfast show that morning from the Olympic Park was some excellent broadcasting.
A few things I’ve been viewing:
The latest series of Channel 5’s The Hotel Inspector is well into it’s current run, and while Alex’s ‘tried and tested’ formula of, do up a room or two, organise some PR for the hotel and end with an event where the local great and good, journos and/or tourist board reps are invited to, gets a little predictable, it’s still been entertaining. For radio fans we’ve even had visits to local radio stations in the ‘PR’ bit of this cycle. Free Radio (or as Steve Hewlett said in the Media Show I pointed to above – BRMB as we used to know) and Wish FM have featured. Not sure if I should really admit to using the TiVo slow motion function to play a game of “spot the studio kit”. I’m sure that Wish FM studio had the control surface panels of a Soundcraft RM1D sunk into a cut out on the wooden desktop, making me think what they’d done with the “rest of it”.
I’ve also recently been catching the re-runs of the BBC 4 documentary The Secret Life of the Motorway. A fascinating little series which I missed first time round, though had read good reviews on-line at the time. Episode three looked at some of the protests against new motorways. Which leads me nicely to the not quite a motorway, but the Newbury By-pass has it’s own protests when it was built in the 1990’s. The protesters even had their own pirate radio station Tree FM, which is referenced in this Guardian article of the time. When I started this website I did say I’d try and share various bits of audio I’ve collected over the years, so for your enjoyment here is some Tree FM jingles:
For the record I’d no connection with the station, other than acquiring a dub of a mini-disc of these some many years later down the line.
Finally the coffee – it is quite nice.
More along these lines in a week or two.
