Pop Shield

February can be a tricky and sticky month. God only knows why. And now, everything has gone awry with our trusty studio equipment.  Reliability is a very important quality in man, animal and machine alike.

In the last twenty-four hours my colleagues and I have been involved in a head-spinning, plate-spinning stress-inducing performance of fault-finding, fault-reporting and confusion-diffusion. And of course, nothing is ever allowed to stand in the way of getting the Nations Favourite radio shows made.

Here is a summary of the various faults:

Failure of playout server – faulty hard disk and cache disk replaced.

Distorted cue send on telephone balance unit via talkback panel.

Telephone balance unit silent owing to fault at exchange.

Telephone balance unit failing to divert to desk.

Corrupted desk aux causing the reverb unit to be routed to itself.

Fault 5 was nasty. It produced a horrible howl-round every time the reverb was faded up during soundcheck for country queen Peggy Lou. The fault rendered the reverb unit unusable, but this sadly wasn’t an option due to the material.  So, I was left with no other option but to reset the entire desk and start again. Not good. Times like these it would be useful to be able to snapshot desk settings rather than the usual situation.  Which is generally a piece of camera tape that someone has drawn a button on and hilariously written the word ‘Snapshot’ under it. Not the first time I’ve been here and it’s stressful. At least we weren’t live to the airwaves.

Amongst the madness of the day, Max Marbles, a 1980’s TV presenter (also the father of charismatic radio presenter Mavis Marbles) arrives for an interview. Lovely chap. In fact, my partner was a participant on one of his kids shows back in the day, owing to owning up about owning a sizeable collection of vintage light bulbs. We had a little chat and a laugh about it. Max asked if the collection still exists. “Yes, it is cluttering up the garage”, I replied. “Well hang onto it, it will probably be worth a few bob soon” he says.

Well, that’s all fine then.  I can relax in the knowledge we’ve got a nest egg to fall back on.