Radio Radio

Broadcasting a nightly evening show On BBC West Region for the past two weeks has put a crimp in the blog. Sorry. One more week to go and I should be back to normal.

The kind of radio shows I like to do are stream of consciousness, go anywhere programmes that you hear so seldom. To be given the freedom to broadcast this kind of show seldom happens. Everything is tightly formatted, all the music is pre chosen by a computer programme, every link timed, every piece of the jigsaw's edges smoothed so the listening will be lulled into believing what they are listening to is 'great radio'. That, of course, is bollocks.

I won't retread my arguments about this again, I've written about this subject before. What I will say is that sitting there for the past two weeks with 'nothing' is for me the most freeing experience a broadcaster can have. Some hate it. Like the writer scared of the blank page. I love it. A colleague said to me the other night, who gets the programme ready for you? I told her no-one, I fly by the seat of my pants.

She said, "How do you know what to say?".

If you work in radio and have to ask that question you wouldn't understand my answer.

I don't know what I'm going to say until I open the mic. No idea. The record ends and I start to speak....hopefully it is amusing, entertaining, bizarre, surreal, informative and worth listening to. I arrive ten minutes before the show, with a few notions scribbled on a scrap of paper and off we go. I go where the listener takes me and I lead them where I think they might like to go. It's a fool who expects the listen to come up with comedy gold but I've been doing this, on and off, for enough years to know how to create the smoke and mirrors necessary to make it work. It helps if you know your listeners and they know you. I'm in that lucky position.

Comedy on this kind of show works in a different way to the kind of thing we'd recognise on TV or the stage or film. Here the atmosphere is more intimate. You are talking to ONE PERSON. The text machine gives me access to comments and stories - but here's the mistake I hear so many young broadcasters make:

They read what is in front of them.

Not enough.

You need to play around with it, read ahead, comment, go off at a tangent, speak directly to the writer, speak to the listener, get conspiratorial about things, 'we are all in this together', it's you and me versus THEM, whoever they may be. It's those atmospheres that create the tone of the show.

I know I'm swimming against the tide of received management wisdom - they believe everything must be the same. I believe in constant surprise and innovation.

But then if I didn't believe that I wouldn't be a writer.