Pop Shield

It’s six o’clock in the morning and I’m standing blinking at myself in the full-length mirror of a disabled toilet at Eastern House. This action serves as an antidote to the harshly lit House Of Horrors mirror wall in the guest lift. But whichever way you look at it, I look tired.

It’s the day after Mini Pop’s second birthday. Ronald Flump has just been elected as USA President. I have a busy day ahead involving a heady mix of Greetings God Squad, sixties songstress Petunia Quark, live music from eighties new wave combo XYZ, a Remembrance Sunday Outside Broadcast from the Cenotaph, the mid-morning show with Dickie Maybe standing in for Mickie Junction, and to finish (me) off, a wee rock‘n’roll session with the one-and-only Sir Clough Rushard. But first things first, a cup of tea.

Next, I put Greetings God Squad on air. Kate Gelding trawls the public for Petunia Quark-related anecdotes.  Somebody asks for a shout out for their pet duck Petunia Quack.

Between God Squad and Dickie Maybe I prepare the lines for the Remembrance Sunday OB and iron things out with the newsreader before heading downstairs to grab breakfast. The main door at Eastern House reception is closed due to some redecoration work at the front of the building. I’m instructed to go out of the side entrance and ‘bang on the door’ for readmission.  A plan which does not fill me with confidence. Sure enough, I’m standing outside in the drizzle with sore knuckles some five minutes later.

Once back inside I stop off at Little Sister to borrow a saxophone-friendly microphone from Ian. I return to the studio, say hi to Dickie, Babyface and Little Fox. Then we fly straight into a prerecord of the pacey punter quiz Up The Junction.  After the quiz recording I soundcheck XYZ, take control of the network, and put the live OB from the Cenotaph to air. A little tension. You just don’t want to get two minutes silence wrong.

Talking of quizzes and tension and dead air and things going wrong I am reminded of a little incident last time I worked on this show.

With a needle scratch across the vinyl, we rewind a few weeks.  We are prerecording the Up The Junction quiz with Mickie when a fly lands in the ointment.  Player 2’s team-mates are missing, and the backup caller is not picking up the phone. While Babyface stabs buttons on the tele balance handset, Mickie makes a funny double entendre about Player 2’s name, a joke that he tells when we have no option to enter her into the quiz solo. They laugh a lot.  I fire the bed and we enter the bonus round question about Tim Hart. “Name the recent sequel that Tim Fart acted in.  Tim HART acted in” Mickie chuckles, Player number 2 giggles. At the end of the quiz, I fade up Player 1 again. “That was the funniest thing I ever heard” she says.

After the prerecord there are various discussions between Mickie and Babyface about editing the fart reference out.  “You’ve got to leave it in!” says Mickie, “it was hilarious!!” Babyface has a chat with the editor and after some discussion the slightly unusual choice is made to leave the accidental gaffe in on humour grounds.

Little Fox comes back from a tea round and gets cracking on the edit.  It’s busy up to transmission.  Little Fox asks me to dub some bed music through the wall to help with the edit.  It’s not long before it’s one record before the quiz is due to be aired and Little Fox still hasn’t scheduled the final edit.  Mickie looks expectantly. Below Little Fox’s swivel chair I can see his foot paddling like a duck. Finally, the audio is scheduled, and Mickie hits the jingle, but the audio still hasn’t cached.  The jingle ends.  Mickie presses play on the twenty-minute quiz package.  It plays. Sigh of relief. Babyface and Little Fox have a chat about the edit, and it becomes apparent that Little Fox had missed the discussion about leaving the toilet humour in and, completely understandably, took out all the hilarity and references around the F word.  Mickie comes out into the control room to put his feet up and chat. Babyface breaks it to him that the final version was not how he had wanted it. “Oh no!” says Mickie! “How did that happen?  Why?  You should have told Foxy to leave it in. It was brilliant!  Can’t you change it?”  “It’s too late”  I say.  “The tape is playing”.

Somehow, Babyface and Little Fox get talked into revising the edit.  Babyface edits the joke, and the back-reference to the joke, back in and saves a new version in the schedule.  They ask me to cross fade to a new version at the end of the song that divides the two contestants.  Reluctantly I do this, and it the transition is smooth.

Suddenly Little Fox pipes up “Oh no! NO! There’s a ten second gap in the second edit!”  “We need to crossfade back to Michael’s original tape which is still playing on a closed fader”  I say.  “They are still in sync up to the joke section”. “No, it’s fine” says Babyface.  “What you need to do is load up another copy of edit two, shuffle to the start of speech following the gap and fire that in as soon as we hit the gap.”  I’m not happy with this plan, but there’s no time for arguing. I get on the scrub wheel as fast as I can.  This all feels very unhinged. I reach the required In Point and go to make a Cue Point.  But in my haste, I hit “Go To Start” instead of “Mark Start” and the audio resets so I have to start scrubbing again.  With all this speech scrubbing going on, it’s impossible to focus on the output going to air. The editor pops his head through the door and says he thought he heard an overlap of speech on air during Mickie’s explanation of how the quiz works. He looks slightly accusingly at my desk. “All fine in my world” I say. But from experience we all know that where there’s a gap there’s often an overlap. “Stop what you’re doing Pop, I need to hear the output” says Babyface.  “Mickie, you need to get back in there and when everything goes quiet, fade yourself up and start laughing to cover the gap”.  Oh my word, this getting truly insane.

So, the gap comes.  Mickie starts laughing on mic.  It doesn’t sound great but then again Dave Wrong gets away with applauding over his own pre-recorded clapping on a daily basis and listeners don’t tend to notice. But ten seconds later the audio doesn’t kick back in.  “What’s happening Foxy?” says Babyface.  Little Fox scrutinises his edit screen.  “Oh no!  NO!  It’s THIRTY seconds long.”  Mickie glares through the glass wondering what on earth to do but is powerless to do anything except continue chuckling like a madman, interspersed with the odd “Oh dear! I can’t go on!” etcetera.  This carries on for an eternity. Babyface is on the verge of instructing Mickie to go to music when his edited voice crashes in, live Mickie promptly fades himself out and the whole sorry episode comes to an end.  By which time we are all utterly exhausted.

Babyface waits for the complaints to flood in but strangely nothing but praise hits the virtual postbag.  “Funniest thing ever! Nearly crashed the car!” and so on.  Strangely nobody seemed to notice the overlap – but then again quiz instructions go over most peoples heads I suppose.   Unbelievable, and a wonderful demonstration of HOW NOT TO DO IT.

So, with a ripple and a harp glissando we are back to the present day. All set for show number two. I anticipate Dickie’s trademark request for more/less ‘foldback’ on the studio speakers, which is nearly always couched in percentage terms. For some reason I find this entertaining. Dickie can never ever remember my name and so generally plucks for a pet name. Safe. It must be a right old confusion when him and Mate work together.

During a record, Dickie comments via talkback “it’s so strange to think Jerry was doing the show this time last year”. Babyface reminisces about the Remembrance Sunday show 2015.  “We had El Divas and Alexandria in session. Lady Jane Wobegon sat in on the show. They were going for lunch after. Jerry complained of a backache then he left the studio and we never saw him again.“  My mouth falls open. My goodness! I was WORKING on that show. I never realised it was his last one. I do of course clearly remember I was on the very same shift some twelve weeks later when the news of Jerry’s passing hit.  A day I wrote about. What an extraordinary ride we have had.

So on to Sir Clough Rushard and his bantering band of merry men, a joy in every way.  By which point it is truly time to go home. I leave Eastern House by the side door and, on passing, look up to the renovation work where some new signage has been erected and covered up. Faintly through the white plastic I can make out the letters “W O B E G O N   H O U S E“. It would appear that a name change is in the post.  It’s a fitting tribute. I surreptitiously take a quick photo, but I keep schtum until the big reveal some three days later.

Incidentally, I like to take photos. Photos pose interesting questions. However, being your average resolution-orientated super-sleuthing problem-solver, I find the greater satisfaction is to be found in the written word.  That’s where the answer generally lies.

Meanwhile music and nature and hugs from my nearest and dearest provide me with the comfort of knowing that none of this really matters anyway.

Looking up at the name above the door I reflect on how nice it is to be reminded. And these days I seem to forget so much. I live in a permanent state of post-Wikipedia post-baby brain fog. There never seems to be any opportunity to take stock and consolidate one memory before laying down the next. Writing things down helps me to both reflect and remember. And that is why I blog.

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to work with Sir Pete McCarthy.  I’ve had a couple of brushes with him in the past – namely the episode with the fire alarm and the one with the poor quality phone line. With that track record, I have a slight feeling of trepidation about the whole thing.  On arrival at Maid Of Orleans you can imagine how delighted we all were to discover a strong smell of burning in the studio.

The smell has been reported, and since nothing is obviously on fire, we get on with the task of scene-setting and staging: rigging PA, audience mics, play-out, talkback and so on.  The job description for this gig is somewhat hedge-y; set up for a filmed interview between Don and Pete, and strew expensive instruments around the studio in a way that it looks good for cameras, and might tempt Pete to play them, but on the other hand whose presence isn’t too blatant or too obviously mic’ed up just incase Pete decides he doesn’t want to play them and we don’t want to make Sir Pete McCarthy look stupid.  

It is the last part of the remit which is in jeopardy when Ted sets up two stools for interviewer and interviewee.  Unfortunately in a mismatched hotchpotchy Maid Of Orleans kind of way, one stool is a foot higher than the other.  This might not be so much a problem excepting for the fact that Don the interviewer is very tall and Sir Pete is very short. This poses an issue either way you look at it.  Either you are set to ridicule Pete by making him look tinier than he really is, or it looks like you are trying to compensate for his diminutive height by putting him on a tall stool. In the end, we ask Ted to have another look for two the same height. 

Once Pete has arrived and we are setting up for soundcheck he sits on his stool and I move in to adjust the microphone up towards his mouth.  “Moving the mic up” he says.  “Yes Sir! That old chestnut!” I reply idiotically.  Somehow implying what with his great actual height this kind of wild over-compensation must happen all the time. 

You can read more awkward height-related celebrity capers here.

And so (oy-la-li) life goes on, with the technical to-do list getting somewhat cluttered as we approach the arrival of the studio audience.  In the ritual MOO scramble from A to B to C, I start tripping over some obscenely famous VIPs.  Prioritisation becomes fierce when we are faced with four wildly differing but parallel requests. 1. Find a left instead of right generic in-ear mould for Don 2. Put reverb on the safety announcement and mix some background music underneath to make it sound more important (really?) 3. Find some vibes for the green room, as the frontman of The Jelly, two members of Squish and a bunch of executives are in there eating crudités and it’s all a tad awkward 4. Blitz the dimmer-induced hum that has suddenly appeared over all our mics.  Its as much as we can do to dial up a Feathers playlist on Guy’s phone and stick it into a tannoy and focus on fixing the all-important task number 4, and it’s then it’s time to rock and roll again.

And so, Sir Pete tackles the interview in a most charming and candid manner.  The only remaining magical mystery come home time is the unexplained burning smell, which has now left the building.