September is a month that always sticks in my mind because, as a youngster, it marked the end of the laziness of the summer holidays and the start of the school year. However as an adult September is significant to me because it’s the month where my radio career started. In retrospect it was one of the first steps in my journey towards being a voice over artist.
It was on a September day that I first walked into an Independent Local Radio station to start work in a job where I was recording interviews with community groups, producing packages for general programming and also providing the content of a weekly community show. In time I moved on to becoming a full time presenter – 10-2 six days a week for some years. Later I did weekend shows and lots of swing (holiday) cover. Ironically for a job I initially took to “tide me over” until I worked out what to do with my life it led to me, somehow, managing to be a regular presenter on the station for 22 years.
I generally try to avoid dwelling in the past but these radio memories were prompted by hearing the voice of Jim Lee reading the news on BBC Radio 4 the other day. Jim was my first boss in radio when I started work on the Mercia Action at Mercia Sound in Coventry. I learnt a great deal from him about effective interviews, presentation and how to be a generally approachable “nice guy”.
If you know about the history of local radio in the UK you won’t be surprised to learn that the ILR station in those days was a “full service” one – there were regular interviews in most daytime shows – including cooking segments, sessions with a local vet, health issues, local politics, lost cats and dogs etc plus specialist shows at night providing a rock show, big band music show, folk show, reggae show, asian music show and an Irish show.
Music was played off vinyl discs on the “gram decks”, the commercials were on cartridges and the interviews and packages were all on reel to reel tape that was edited with a chinagraph pencil, aluminium editing block and a razor blade. It’s a world detailed in the John Myer’s book “Team it’s only radio” which I reviewed a couple of years ago. Its a world away from the radio studios of today with everything controlled from a computer touch screen and all the content (music files etc) delivered digitally.
If you know your radio history you’ll also realise, from the radio station I’ve described, that my Beatles reference in the title of this post is incorrect – it wasn’t 20 years ago today…. it was 28 years ago today. Wow! How did that happen? That sounds like a long time ago! I think that’s why I don’t like to look back to often – too scarey!