Things I Wasn’t Allowed To Do On The Radio

Some of you know that I have a background in radio.  Up until five years ago, I was a radio dj on a music station in the city in which I live.  It was a fun job at times, but looked a lot more glamourous from the outside than it actually was.  I loved the act of talking on the radio to hundreds of thousands of people at a time, and the often interesting interviews and events that would crop up; not to mention all the free stuff.  People would recognise me by name or voice, and sometimes ask me for my autograph, which always weirded me out, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a little thrill from the recognition. 

The truth about being a radio announcer however, is that for the most part, it can become quite mind numbingly dull sitting alone in a room, waiting for the music to end so you can get to the good bit.   The challenge was to not sink into the pit of tedium.  Believe me, it really was a challenge at times.  Same songs day in and out, weather that hardly changes, traffic, station ids etc etc.

So, I made things interesting for myself by getting in trouble a lot.  I was forever being told off by management for some errant deed or for being too opinionated off air.  Every year at the office Christmas party I would win an award for some apparently outrageous exploit.

My friend Tommy wrote a blog some time ago, which he recently reposted, titled, Things I Wasn’t Allowed To Do In The Navy .  Tommy is a self confessed smartarse, and it’s a very funny and cheeky list, which makes me giggle in silly ways every time I look at it.  After re-reading his list the other day, it occurred to me that I could probably put together a list of my own, “Things I Wasn’t Allowed To Do On The Radio”.  So, I sat down with a pen and paper, and within an hour, this is what I came up with:

Oh, before I start, I did actually do, and get in trouble for doing all of these things.  I am a very naughty girl.

THINGS I WASN’T ALLOWED TO DO ON THE RADIO

1.   I am not allowed  to “talk faster” on the radio in the hope that I can finish my shift in time to beat peak hour traffic.

2.   I am not allowed to implore passers-by from the second story window to “rescue me because I’ve been taken hostage by religious fundamentalists with really bad taste in music.”

3.   I am not allowed to sing ‘My Heart Will Go On’ over the office intercom, to prove my point that nobody wants to hear that song ever again in their lifetime.

4.   I am not allowed to make effigys, voodoo dolls or sock puppets out of microphone socks (y’know, the spongy bit on the end..).

5.   I am allowed to refer to ‘The Rack’ (internal transmitter set up) as the radio station’s brain, but I am not allowed to tell tour groups that it has an inoperable tumour.

6.   I am not allowed to write a detailed critique of the music on the printout of the updated playlist that is posted weekly in the on air studio.  Footnotes are also not acceptable.

7.   I am not allowed to fling mashed potato or birthday cake from the second story window, at vehicles in the carpark. 

8.   I am not allowed to develop a scoring system for flinging mashed potato and birthday cake at vehicles from the second story window, with highest points awarded for a direct hit on the Music Director’s car.

9.   I am not allowed to refer to my job as “talking to a stick in a padded cell” to any tour group, no matter how accurate the statement may be.

10. I must not be seen to be making a noose out of headphone cable in view of tour groups.

11. I am not allowed to make faces and hand movements like a goldfish at members of the general public, who are watching me do my job through the internal window.

12. “Because someone might think I like this shit”, is not an acceptable excuse for removing songs by Michael Bolton, Boys II Men, or Celine Dion from my allocated playlist. 

13. “It’s my surrealist phase”, is not an acceptable reason to hang every picture in the building upside down.

14. I am not allowed to terrorise or “haunt” the telephone helpline counsellors when in charge of running the station after hours.

15. I am not allowed to use the logo of a rival radio station as my PC screensaver, when my desk is in view of tour groups.

16.  I am not allowed to build a “House Of CD’s” in the record library.

17. Neither, “I have council approval”, nor “It’s a damn sight sturdier than this bloody building” are acceptable reasons to build a “House Of CD’s” in the record library.

18. “Because Lance did a smelly in the studio”, is not an acceptable reason to neglect to pre-record the midnight-to-dawn shift in Studio 2.   Even if he did.

19. I am not allowed to pretend to be a recorded message to visitors on the after-hours front door intercom.

20. I am not allowed to use unravelled cassette tape and sticky tape, to add “hair” to the pictures of people hanging in the foyer.

21. I am not allowed to toss empty water cooler bottles or lemons at the dj on duty, when he/she has the microphone open.

22. During my airshift, I am not allowed to cut short Michael Jackson’s ‘Heal The World’ during the talking part, with the words “That’s enough of that”.

23. I am not allowed to invent my own station positioning statements on air, to “jazz things up a bit”.

24. I am not allowed to stand outside the voice-over booth and perform an imitation of a kookaburra or any other bird or animal whilst recording is in session. 

25. I am not allowed to swap 85% of the music in any given hour during my shift, to better suit my taste.

26. I am not allowed to “deface” publically displayed photographs of my colleagues with drawings of spectacles, facial hair, warts, horns, daggers or arrows in the head, silly hats, captions or thought bubbles, because I think they are a tosser.  Even if they are a tosser.

27. I am not allowed to rearrange the songs within any given hour of my shift, because I really, really feel like saying on air, “This set was brought to you by the letter ‘B’”.

28. “I’ve locked myself inside my house and I can’t get out”, is not an acceptable excuse to get out of an air shift. 

29. I am not allowed to cartwheel in the office (especially in a skirt), or challenge the news staff to running races in the corridor during business hours.

30. “I’m the best you’ve got”, is not a good enough reason not to have to work on Sundays.

31. “I was meditating and needed quiet” is not an acceptable excuse for dead air.

32. “It just looked so much more interesting than our weather” is not an acceptable reason to broadcast another city’s weather report, which includes cyclone warnings, on Perth radio.

33. I am not allowed to suggest in the promotions meeting that setting off a bomb in the building during office hours would make an excellent publicity stunt and improve the structure of the building, thereby killing two birds with one stone.

34. I am not allowed to suggest we use station funds to send our technical staff to Afghanistan or East Timor to act as human shields.

35. I am not allowed to say “fuck” on the radio.  Not even by accident.

I know there is much, much more, but that’s all I could come up with from memory, at short notice, and it pretty much sums up my experience in radio.  I hope it made you smile.  Now go and check out Tommy’s list.  It’s bloody funny.

Song Of The Day – T-Rex – The Slider
 

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