Pop Shield

It’s Thursday morning at The Nations Favourite. We are about to start recording. “Have you got all the hideous enhancement in?” asks Dave. “Yes! I reply.” And I have.

“By and large this kit is pretty good, isn’t it?” says Dave, pointing to the desk and the playout system. “It very rarely goes wrong.” “By and large, yes” I reply. Oh. This comment is akin to saying ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Good luck’ inside a theatre. Like any good showbizzer I really should exit, spin around three times, spit, curse, and then knock to be allowed back in the studio.

Jim reads out a Fictoid. Dave suggests he could make it more interesting by starting his sentence with the phrase DID YOU KNOW.

The next thing, we are recording a series of celebrity interviews. There’s a junket down at some posh hotel. There have been some questions raised over the operational nature of the ISDN gear they are going down there with. To the point that a couple of my colleagues have shied away from the job. Not so Mad Dog. Always game, he has gone down there with Starbooker to get an interview out of top fashionista footballer Steve Spice.

They dial up nice and early from their hotel room. I pick up the line via Control, put it onto my OS3 fader and say hello to Mad Dog on the talkback. There is a bad fuzzy peak-distortion to the reply. Hmm. Looks like there’s a fault on the line. I buzz Control and ask them to listen across to confirm.

“Sounds alright to me.” says the guy. “Well, I mean it’s got your normal muffley edgy ISDN quality, if that’s what you mean?” “No, I’m talking about a horrendous unbroadcastable quality” I reply. I switch my current desk output to a check speaker and route the prefade to the main, to rule out any fault on my PFL speaker. It sounds horrible. I hold the phone up to the loudspeakers and turn it up. “Sorry” I mouth to The Face who is trying his best to listen across the current output. “Does it sound like THIS?” I say. “Oh no”, comes the guy’s reply. “That DOES sound wrong”.

And so, I reselect the circuit onto my OS1 fader. Weirdly, it is clean. “Don’t worry Mad Dog!” I call out on the talkback. “It’s a fault at this end. You sound fine now. How is it down there anyway? Have you had a nice cup of tea yet?”

“Yes, it’s very pleasant! Nice and quiet.” he replies. The calm before the storm? Possibly.

The usual junket pantomime unfolds where the interview is always a few minutes away, everyone overruns, the turns all have fun and all the PR folk look at clocks and get antsy. Starbooker keeps us posted. Our slot materialises. The machine fires up. We get a good interview.

After that, we’re back to the normal show prep. “You must ALWAYS check any new songs all the way through.” Dave impresses upon The Face. “In case they turn out to be a bit y’know. A bit bucketmouthy.’

At 2pm we go on air with the sizeable show. Dave cracks on with getting as many trails and playlist tracks out the way as possible in the first hour. The test material coming over the talkback is pretty good.

“So, I went down the hairdressers to sort out a haircut and they said, ‘What do you want?’ and I said, ‘I’ll have a Kim Jong-il.’”

“… sounds like a cartoon grub is singing this bit….”

At 3pm I take some level from Gina Titchy and go across to the news bulletin as normal. After this, Dave plays older records non-stop, followed by an interview featuring lots of clapping.

At 4pm we go over to the news again. Except this is a bulletin with a difference. Gina’s voice sounds like a gagged Dalek playing the comb in a hollow tube full of wasps. What’s going on?

I give it a chance, then do a slow fade to give Dave the opportunity to react and he plays a record. We call the newsreader in to the studio pronto to read out her copy. Later on Dave says “I could have quite happily listened to three minutes of that but someone faded it out.” “Yes, that was me, Dave, your operative. I thought the nation might like to listen to something a bit more intelligible.”

It then gets quite hectic in the studio. Bulletins are conducted from musical chairs by Gina and Shouty Guy and Suzy Travel. Meanwhile I’m trying to work out what’s occurring with the news booth line.  I have to do this without leaving my chair via the talkback with Gina and Ian. Sounds clean to them in the booth. Ok. Ian, would you kindly go down to the Dinnertime studio and check if it’s clean into there please? It is. Wonderful. Looks like our studio is broken.

So, I pick up some ABC1 test material on my Outside Sources. On OS1 and OS2 I find its fine, but it’s badly affected on OS3. Similarly, the news booth output is clean when I drop it onto OS1 or OS2 but not on its hardwired default channel OS4. It’s a good job I was mad keen on those Logic Problems books as a kid. Clue 1: Dick lives at a higher house number than Mr. Green but neither of these own Bob the dog.

I’ve got two working OSs, but I need three of them to get into Arthur Tartar. One for beeps, one for news and one for Arthur. I speak with Mike and set out a plan. He will take network early from me, maintaining our network light, I’ll inject beeps, but he will handle the news and the start of his own show. Dave is not happy to work his voice against the network distribution lag, so I warn him that he won’t hear the news bulletin at the end of the show unless he flicks over. I ask Mike to let Arthur’s team know that I’m relying on them picking up if the news fails as Dave won’t hear the junction. It feels watertight. I happily give away the network.

Of course, by this stage there are lots of worried people gathering in the corridor. Everyone loves a crisis round here! Except the management, of course. People know better than to bother us in the studio while we are on air. There’s nothing that irritates Dave more than operatives advancing into the studio in pairs scratching their mutual heads.

“What people have to realise is that none of this really matters” says Dave. “It’s not brain surgery.”

At 5pm it’s beeps, news, next show. Hurrah! Maintenance engineers fly into our studio, two by two.

Back to the logic problem. Sources OS1 and OS2 sit on different DSP cards to OS3 and OS4. It all points to a crate fault that has worsened throughout the afternoon. As a starter for ten, Stephen reseats a cable.  Annoyingly, it comes good.  For good measure, he turns the desk crate off and back on again. Classic move. All returns to normal. I stick around until I am convinced we’re back in business, then I head home.

A few days later I am riding in The Mothership lift with Mad Dog on our secret mission involving the mech workshop. “How was Steve Spice?” I ask. “He was charming, he was really nice” he said. And – out of earshot of the cross-looking bearded Bamber Baxter who has just stepped in – he whispers, “he did pick his nose though”. Gotta love Mad Dog.