12th October 2018
Dear diary,

Today we were given our respective groups for music radio and drew two genres out of a hat. I drew a sigh of relief when we drew out Rock n Roll, although this caused a riff in the group from the get go, we couldn’t have our first group discussion without it ending in tears. I took on the rolls of OB Producer alongside Harri and Advert Producer alongside Callum.

26th October 2018
Dear diary,

Harri wasn’t in today, so I put together a mock show schedule which featured preparation time for our guest Marky Dawson. I also spent the afternoon looking at ways that would could decorate the OB room, as we had decided to stream the live session on social media. I looked at ways that we could make the room look more like a diner, with cardboard cut outs of the king of rock n roll himself, Elvis, as well as jukeboxes and old a cut out of a 50’s Cadillac. Although these options were proving to be expensive.

9th November 2018
Dear Diary,

With the practice OB’s looming, it was quite hard to know what was going on as my other OB producer still hadn’t been around to help and contact over Whatsapp broke down in mis-communication, leaving both of us unsure of what was going on. This lead to me falling behind in making the adverts. While in the midst of figuring out what was happening I was on the search for an artist for the practice OB in a couple of weeks. I also helped out with Providential with the logo and the setting up of the social media pages as she needed a hand.

16th November 2018
Dear Diary,

OB Practice day – today was essentially the day to get rid of all the studio niggles. We soon figured out that talkback was only working one way as Studio 4 wasn’t picking up Studio 6, which we sorted out by using the tieline that Connor had been using for Smoke Radio the night before. In the end we stuck to this resolution and let Tim and Tom know about the issues for them to be fixed for the next week. I had also started to email people about voicing adverts, I had initially voiced a couple of them myself, but then realised that we were only allowed to voice one of the adverts ourselves. I had contacted my brother, who is a drama student in Vienna as well as Jack Wood from Radio X, who both provided the voices for the Lidl Christmas ad and the Gladstone Brooks advert.

23rd November 2018
Dear Diary,

It’s first pilot day and we don’t have an artist to practice with, but that’s alright, we have a CD player with a Beatles CD ready to go and a microphone, while I filled in the role as the interviewee. We had initially started 10 minutes behind due to a miscommunication between ourselves and the other team, who left everything up in the studios. The first pilot ran well and a lot better than all of us had expected considering how far behind we thought we were compared to the schedule and the other team, so this proved to be a massive morale boost for all of us, even if the OB wasn’t the final product and we were a little bit messy on the schedule, this was what we needed to start tightening our show up.

26th November 2018
Due to a scheduled pilot being cancelled, I had put together a few more adverts and started writing scripts for others. I got in contact with a friend of mine called Myrick, who I know had a studio and would be able to do a voice over for us. I also got in contact with a few other people in radio, including Andy Bush from Absolute Radio and Fenella Fudge who is ex-BBC Radio 2, the latter of which very gracefully voiced an advert for us.

29th November 2018

The final pilot day and what started out as being rather calm and peaceful turned into all out chaos, due to the lack of a presenter until very close to show time. The OB guest Andy Dawson (no relation to Marky) had come along to play a few notes on the bass for the OB and was interviewed by Adam. The room was set up with small records on string dangling down on the boards that were in the OB room which worked really well, although I would have still loved to have had a cardboard cut out of Elvis in there. Although we had a guest for the OB, the final pilot didn’t go as smoothly as the first as the stress affected certain members of the group.

30th November 2018
Game Day…I mean, assessment day.

In the morning I added the final touches to the adverts, just to make sure that the sounded slick and well produced. The Otex advert and the Sunlife advert were both given beds which I felt suited the relevant advert, although I wanted to find a soft piano for the Otex advert, the first thing I thought of was the introduction to Robert Mile’s ‘Children’. I also gave the Sunlife advert a bed of a forest sound effect, which included rain and birds chirping to make it sound like a garden.

Our Guest Marky came in at 1pm as myself and Harri got everything sorted for the OB, Harri took charge of the desk in the OB studio and I took control of the live desk feeding to studio 6 during the live performance and the interviews. Before the broadcast I helped Providential set up the social media live stream as she couldn’t find where she needed to stream from.

As the OB started, myself and Harri kept an eye on the clock to make sure that the show was running on time and adapted the clock as the show very quickly ran ahead of schedule, with the features not taking anywhere near as long as we had on the running order. At one point during the first hour we were around 8 minutes ahead of schedule, which we had made back by telling Studio 6 to play a few more songs. We also had a issue with the talkback which was the same as the reoccuring issue we had earlier this month when talkback from studio 6 to studio 4 failed to work, so we used the studio phones to stay in contact with each other. Overall I felt that the Live show went smoothly and I’m really proud of everyone in the group who put the show together.