Pop Shield

It’s Friday afternoon.  I receive an internal corporation email entitled ‘Table of Love’ from somebody called Julia.  It reads.

“Few bits of food on the table of love from Markson’s Family Butchers in Belper. Sausages, Faggots and Black Pudding.”

Well, that’s very nice.  I wonder where these delightful food stuffs are. I double-click on the sender’s name to see who Julia is.  She is a broadcast assistant in Derby.  Hmm, ok.  I reckon she probably didn’t mean to send this email to me.  I look at the recipient address to see that it reads “Radio – All Staff”.  Seeing as there’s a good 20,000 people working for the corporation, I’m guessing this email has gone to a few other inboxes as well as mine.

The replies-to-all start rolling in thick and fast.

From Stephen, a producer in London: Subject: Table Of Love. “Fabulous – I hope there’s enough to go round.”

From Nigel, a supervisor in Bristol: Subject: Table Of Love. “And to satisfy Bristol as well….?”

From Sarah, a coordinator in Salford: Subject: Table Of Love. “And Salford :-). “

From Sadiq, an assistant in Birmingham: Subject: Table Of Love. Hi. I don’t understand why this is a Radio-All Staff email? However, are these sausages Halal? Please do not reply.

Then an email arrives from our leader.  It has a red exclamation mark on it.  It must be very important.  I read it. Subject:  All Radio Email. “On no account should you respond to the email that has recently been sent to ‘Radio – All Staff’ by a lady named Julia. It has clearly been sent in error and all replies go to all staff right across Radio. This is potentially hurtful for the person who has made the error and it doesn’t reflect well on anybody who makes the situation worse.”

Right, that’s put the barbecue out. Back to work everyone.

I’m sitting in a Little Sister workshop doing some work. I become aware of a pounding thump above my head. I am sitting directly below one of the Nations Favourite’s studios. I look at the Little Sister workshop clock. Looks like it didn’t survive the hour change again. Instead of getting itself in the usual perpetual 4pm pickle, it’s stuck on old time, one hour fast. Some simple arithmetic leads me to conclude that Zen Hoots is on air above me.

Zen Hoots is a drummer in his spare time. The thumping overhead is at a reasonable meter. I select Nations Favourite to an outside source fader and fade it up on my desk. Aha, it’s gibberish classic ‘Do Da Do Da Ron Ron Ron Ron’ from The Decanters. The thump fits perfectly. A familiar voice starts back announcing the record. Thump stops.

Jerry Wobegon used to do the same except his foot never stopped tapping after he had opened the mic. Causing the ducking unit to go quackers.

“Hear you’ve got a blog, Pop.” says Jack Daniel to me in the nation’s favourite green room this evening. “And I hear I’m in it, but I’m called Jim Beame.” “Yes, that’s right, Jack. Jim Beame you are.”

“What is it on? Does it have photos, or what is it?” Jack asks.

“It’s on a blogging platform. Mostly text, with some photos. Links to my website Popshield.co.uk and squirts new posts onto Twaddle. I write mostly stories. You’re in it. Lots of people are in it. I try and keep it on the funny side.”

“And can you leave comments? If so, then I’m going to find myself and leave a comment. Sign it Jim Beame” says Jack.

“I have a dilemma, Pop” says Mark. “On the one hand I want to get mentioned in your blog, but on the other hand I really don’t want anything to go wrong this evening if at all possible.”

“Hmm, it is true, Sherlock. There do seem to have been lots of posts about things going wrong recently. And furthermore, there are some recent disasters in the buffer that I haven’t even posted yet. Incidents like *eek* where I’m still waiting for the trauma to subside and mutate into hilarity.”

We go into the studio. Jack asks for a couple of bits. “Please can I have a proper pop shield, Pops? And can you turn the TV off if you can find the relevant controller.”

Fortunately, I keep just such a useful controller in my pocket. It’s called a finger. It’s digital and everything!

“Those are my only demands!” declares Jack. “Unless you count harrumble carrumble frobisher. THAT will give you something to blog about!” Laughter.

We record the show and have a thoroughly nice evening of it. The aforementioned harrumble carrumble frobisher does not materialise.

But here I am blogging anyway just so Mark gets his mention without the equipment falling to bits. And so does Sara. Merry Christmas dudes.

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.

One of those days today. One of which days? Well, you’ll see…

The day starts with my nearest and dearest missing their wake-up call. That never happens. The weather is dreadful, and the traffic isn’t good. That often happens. I catch my train and upon exiting the station I realise I have missed a message saying my start time has moved earlier and I’m due to start, well, now. I am officially late. That never happens. I call the studio, ask if they are ok to start without me, divert my walk to the nearest tube and arrive at Dave Wrong’s studio to find that they haven’t started yet, so I’ve missed nothing. I put on some of the house DT100s and get cracking on editing the Chatties and Fictoids. Once that’s done, I set about editing five short telephone interviews about various pantos going on around the country. Oh no I don’t…

After that I edit an interview with fake northerner Clive Orange. It’s full of unbroadcastable material. I’m supposed to be de-umming but while I’m at it I de-chauvinise it too. Take that, Orange! ‘Thanks’ says Dave afterwards ‘nice job on the editing’. Contrary to what you might think, that often happens.

What happens next? Well, I give Ian a toilet break and then set about joining our team meeting to catch up with Mate. They are in the club. I arrive and to my amazement I find Guy holding court. That never happens 🙂 Then I head off to the mech workshop on important business which I’ll tell you about soon. Then I go back to Nations Favourite and put a whole load of Christmas CDs in staff pigeonholes for a man from Fatal Refraction. That never happens. Then Jack Daniel comes and asks me about my new piece of portable technology. That always happens.

Before I know it it’s time to go and do Arthur Tartar. There’s a broken lamp and a broken producer that need fixing, plus a text from my window cleaner (‘too stormy to risk going up the ladder’) and a warning about the Auto Robot from Jon, a note left from Jill and a phone call from the office to deal with. The trains are broken, Gareth’s son is sick, his wife’s stuck at Victoria, can you do a double shift from Dinnertime straight into Jane Smiley’s show? Well, no choice but to say yes. It’s going to be a long night.

If truth be told, my major concern through all of this is what about my stomach. How am I to get through the sumptuous smells of the on-air cooking feature? I am thankfully given a sample of said food but alas with no fork it’s a bit of a non-starter.

At the end of Dinnertime, the Auto Robot fails so we miss the first second of the news before I crossfade like the clappers to the reserve line. I have no time to recover from any of this as I’m back on air within an hour and have a band to rig and soundcheck for in the meantime. I run about collecting mics and chairs and cables and stands. Plugger Joe takes pity on me (no one likes a hungry engineer) and very kindly pops out to get me some food. But again, no utensils. This time it’s serious. Finger food it is then.

Luckily, I have a reasonably good idea about what the session will entail as I was down to do it before Beef came off his bike and my shifts all changed around. However, no amount of emails prepare me for the haphazard energy around these musicians this evening. They’re very unfocused and we are short on time. Oh, this is all over the place. Because of all this I haven’t finished laying out the desk nor had time for a sensible preview of any material before show time. Unfortunately, I have to unpick some historical processing on Jane’s play out sources as we go along. She always changes her fader order, but it stays the same layout on the control room desk. Without a desk reset, this can have dangerous implications. Nobody likes the sound of that Lazor Right record at the best of times and not least if it is played through the extreme EQ of Shouty Man’s mic channel.

Anyroad. All of this pales into insignificance when we realise from the newsreader that they are getting reports that Nissan Maindealer may have died. That never happens. We have been preparing for this moment in broadcasting for so long it feels just plain odd that it is happening now. The protocols are all there. It’s just a case of following them – if anyone can quite remember what they are. No time to dig out that email, luckily the duty exec is on the end of a mobile phone to assist Ellie in a refresher crash course.

We carry on with the normal show pretty much before the news breaks. At some point the next song scheduled to be played is a track called ‘Holding On To Life’. Eek. We drop it. And so, we tone down the show, and when the newsreader is ready and armed, we fade to a ‘news flash’. Jane is the model broadcaster in this situation. Her delivery tasteful and respectful. The newsreader is really on it too. At times like this you see the professionalism in people shine through.

Years ago, I was working on Dave Wrong when DJ Reel died. I was younger and more naïve then. I found it really hard that day to just become part of the broadcasting machine and I felt shocked by my colleagues appearing to be so detached from it all. Now I see it’s a protection mechanism. I am more that way inclined too these days. That said, as the newsreader opens the bulletin with the words ‘Nissan Maindealer has died’ we all are shaken out of our broadcasting bubble into a moment of true sadness.

Then into a planning whirl again. How to get out of the news and back into the longer news bulletin? We play two more low key songs. I decide against fading up the flaky Auto Robot and take the news studio in direct. It’s a good job as the line fails again. I’ve been crossing all my fader fingers that the newsreader will read to time. Otherwise, the next pre-recorded show has to be played out manually and it will be another two long hours until I can leave the building. Luckily, he does, despite ‘other news’ starting with about 20 seconds to go. The next show starts. I hand over network control to the Reserve Robot, derig the studio and walk to the station, pondering to myself. What did just happen?

You see, that sort of day.

A pleasant Theresa Yarwood programme where she trawls listeners to text in their habitual domestic compulsions. The skeleton staff all actually genuinely nodding in agreement about how toilet paper must be hung like a waterfall, not facing the wall.

The final record and news jingle are smugly back-timed to the nanosecond.

And in the infrequent event that is one female presenter handing over the studio to another female presenter, a note is left complaining about the dandruff on the desk and denying any responsibility for it.

Perhaps Zen Hoots is to blame?

This kind of inter-presenter behaviour is displayed from time to time.  Like the occasion when Rusty Claypole left a goldfish behind for Jerry Wobegon.  Or the time where Wrongy sealed his lockers with tamperproof labels and Pop Pickering wrote on them:

Locker 1: I’ve been in your locker, Dave

Locker 2: I’ve been in this one too!

Rusty Claypole is a guest in Dave Wrong’s studio yesterday. He’s very late. This time he is accompanied by a massive white German Shepherd who technically isn’t allowed in the studio, but Rusty ‘accidentally’ lets him run straight in. Dave thinks Rusty has got the dog to deflect attention, but I suspect it might equally be the opposite case. As predicted, Rusty takes one look at my face then says, “Don’t I know you?” Then adds “Oh yeah, I always say that don’t I!” “Yes, indeed you do!”