Monday, August 24, 2009

That's Life



At the risk of boring you with far too much talk of Radio shows ....
- the phone was the first one to turn, losing all my numbers, including Drama queen's and leaving me trying to guess who was who by their texts. Eventually I called her and she was on her way, and I wasn't panicking at all at all.
She arrived with her genius sound engineer who informed me that what I was planning was technologically unsound and I couldn't actually play music straight off of youtube (the wavs would interfere with something and all online listeners would be deafened or cut off). She tried to soothe my hyperventilations while he went to download the music and put it in another file, plan B. Herself and myself then picked some emergency songs from the failsafe book that has the list of all the music that is playable straight off the desk - which I'd been using in training all week, plan C. The damn clock wouldn't stop moving.
The sound engineer called us, "You can go in now, you're on" me hopping up with such a start that my lucofizzy went everywhere, "Not right this second..." the news was still playing, then my theme song, I derived a strange comfort from resting my forehead on the soft fuzz of the mike. (an object, not a person).
Then we took a deep breath and dived in. Me shaky at the start, Drama Queen making minutes at a time of entertaining radio from the few cues and questions I had for her. Then she began to read...
She has a great reading voice, fairytale-esque, that makes you feel all wrapped up and warm, and I found it hard to feel uncomfortable even when plan B, and C both failed on a couple of occasions, (we eventually had to use plan D for the last song - a cd hurriedly provided for us by the presenter of the next show) the music eventually flowed and it was ok, apart from the odd few seconds of dead air now and again (I like to think of them now as opportunities for reflection). The questions bit was probably the most fun for me, and it was a big thrill having texts to read out - even if the most gushing one was from my ma.
I'm on a bit of a learning cliff, so hopefully my mistakes won't be enough to turn entire generations of listeners away from the radio.
Absolutely wrecked for the rest of the day, with only the restorative effects of a full hour of fair city eventually reviving me.

2 comments:

swiss said...

her own sound engineer!!?

anyway it all sounded very good but what's this, no listen again facility. in these pampered days that's like a human rights violation!

you'll need to make recordings and send them to me. no really, you will...

Niamh B said...

Thanks Swiss, yes hopefully will get podcasts up - think it'd be nice to have em on public record, me talking to these folks - before they were famous...