Crikey, a month since my last post? Okay, let's talk radio.

Well, as the title suggests, I immediately clicked the new post button as soon as I saw the date of the posting of my previous post and posited that I should post a new post.

I'm currently presenting a new drive-time show on a community station which has been going incredibly well. At first, it was a slow start and it was like powering up the Amstrad - I had to give it about 10 minutes (in this case I wasn't playing Daley Thompson or Bomb Jack). But after a while, it started to flourish and all my shows since have been some of my best. So what sparked my interest in radio?

Well, there are a number of reasons. I had always been a fan of movies but never enough to call myself a movie buff. I loved and still love computer games, though perhaps not as much as I used to. But that was all a very passive, hypodermic-needle model, do-whatever-the-telly-tells-me existence. The very beginning of my foray into working in media was the Media Studies course at the college up the road. I had a great teacher and I found it much more interesting than the other courses. I took the course in my 2nd year and thus, I felt like I was more dominant than my classmates. I had a year on them at the college and to them, I was a guru, a sage, a master of mise-en-scene analysis; the progeny of media itself. The aura about me as I entered the classroom in an old hoodie and baggy jeans was always momentous; you could hear a pin drop. No-one really carried pins and I don't know anyone who does to this day, but should there have been a pin present in the classroom and pushed over from a place that would constitute the pin being in a dropworthy position, then yes, that pin would have made an absolute racket in the environment I created.

My love for the media, in it's broader sense, was strong enough for me to pick it as a subject at university, imagining that I would one day be a reporter like they used to have in the old days (see Boardwalk Empire reporters for reference to cool cliché) with one of those hats they used to wear with a label on it. Mine would say 'Entertainment Reporter' as I would approach someone noteworthy enough for taking notes in my little flippy notebook. I'd go there in a suit, which would be covered in a trench coat, buttoned enough to see the lapels, shirt and tie of the beautiful attire underneath. Sadly, these delusions of grandeur dissipated into the air they came from after one lesson of 'Journalism'. What a complete bore. One activity given in this lesson was: 'Write any news story you want. It can be about anything. Absolutely anything. It's got to be interesting and get my attention with the headline and well-written afterwards. Oh, and it has to be a breaking news story'. I'm para-phrasing but that was mainly it. So I thought for about 15 seconds, after which I had a 'Eureka!' moment. My article was as good as written. The opening lines of it would be something like: 'The Prince of Wales was attacked in a hit-and-run last night'. Now, I've got nothing against him; in fact, he seems like a good chap, but the whole point was to be interesting. After finishing the article and handing to the lecturer, she said 'No, not possible. You'd need to await confirmation from the royal family'. So she had technically lied. We couldn't write about anything. My lecturer couldn't even let down the wall of ennui long enough for her to crack a smile or even go 'Okay yeah, that's pretty big news. Well done'. But no, it wasn't. I slumped back into the chair which had probably been slumped into more than once by my predecessors.

So I eventually got round to radio and I loved it. The live dynamic and small team meant that I didn't have to rely on too many people to get it right. I was in my element again. Presenting, producing, editing; you name it, I did it. And successfully. I even got great feedback from the Creative Producer of Global Radio for my advert, which was an advert to sell a radio. To sell a radio on a radio advert was tough but this man said that my idea would be good enough for their stations. And I have since worked on a more freelance basis and it's certainly picking up.

But now it's just getting it to a full-time job. And I tell you, it's blummin' hard.

Mohammed Adnan's '2047'

I told you. I told you I'd add 36 years. Just an example of the psychic power I'm going to be employing in this post. If you've got a bit of a phobia about all things ghostly and supernatural, then I'd recommend you keep reading as there's nothing of the sort anyway.

It was a bit of a crap day in June and clocks were broken. William Churchill was tapping the beat of a song called 'Same' by The Unchangeables, a band of identical quadruplets who all played instruments manufactured by Simple. After a little while and a lot of boredom, William got out of his room, running past the newspapers strewn across the floor like someone had used the Daily Paper as confetti in some sort of extravagantly plain wedding. The words 'Cloning is the way forward, exclaims clone' was on every page of each paper. William got out of his cubic flat, only to see more cubic flats line across the way, each flat spaced equally apart.

Rain pattered on the ground outside. It did not pitter. Just another example of the many changes that had occurred in recent years. The pavement outside had become uniform to reflect the homogenised society we now lived in. The bell would be ringing soon and people would be walking out of their houses and towards the work factory where all administrative duties and computer-related business took place which kept the cog of society grinding slowly to churn out the little meaning given to the lives of the people inhabiting the town. All the stores around were either delapidated or on their way to being so. The work routine was organised by the mayor's Work Policing Unit, who ushered the people towards the factory and stormed into the houses of those had not left and fished them out.

William looked at his calculator watch, which had now been termed 'retro' in 3 different generations. It read 2.20pm. He looked up and saw the train station he had been running towards. As he got in and approached the platform, stopping before the 'Mind The Gap' warning, his train pulled in, scraping the rusted metal and letting out a screech which mirrored his yearning to leave. He got on the train and as he did so, he could see others doing the same; eagerly hurling themselves onto the train to escape the grimness. Ennui lived in splendour here and William had had enough of his company. As he bustled his way past the crowded train, many of whom were looking towards the heavens as if salvation had engulfed them, the train began to move. William found a nice floor spot where he could sit and see a window. As Slough passed him by, he'd return to normality. Nothing had really changed in the last 36 years anywhere else. But Slough just got worse.


I bet you were thinking that this was a glimpse into some washed-out future. However, everywhere is pretty much the same or more vibrant, except a few towns here and there. They're just stagnant. Let's be honest; things aren't gonna change that much in 36 years... are they?

Would you like anything else with your oxygen canister and chicken pizza?

This was a great article and a topic of discussion on the drive time show I present on local radio: http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/Pizza_restaurant_to_open_on_Moon (article courtesy of Orange News and the Daily Telegraph). Weird news and odd tidbits I can get my grubby mitts on usually slot themselves firmly into my show, otherwise I'd be blabbering in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way which would make listeners switch off and to listen to the sound of lawnmowers as that would probably make more sense.

So, after broadcasting the news on radio and leaving the station, I sent an email to the PR department at Dominos pizza with the following:


To whom it may concern,
 
As a fan of your glorious pizzeria, it concerned me that you may be opening a store on the moon:http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/Pizza_restaurant_to_open_on_Moon?pg=2#newscomments

With the current economic climate, it might be a bad move to build this store on the moon due to lack of customers and no financial return. That no oxygen thing might be a problem too. Plus, I'm no mathmatician but £13.4billion sounds like a lot of money. I could buy lots of pizzas with that.... oh, and solve a big chunk of an economic crisis.



However, if this is true, do you do home deliveries? I'm craving a nice margherita pizza. And as I am currently looking for employment, is there a job application I can fill out?


Thank you for your time.




Yours faithfully,


Mohammed Adnan


Thinking that I wouldn't get a reply, I still refreshed the page, hoping that I'd get a response of some sort to answer some of the, quite frankly, pertinent questions regarding a home delivery from the moon and if I could work in outer space as a pizza-selling assistant.


And I did. And kudos to Dominos, they humoured me and replied with the following:

Hi Mohammed

Thank you for your email.

We’re over the moon you liked the idea but I’m afraid we can’t take credit for this story as it came from Domino’s Pizza in Japan.

Please could you tell us if you are based in the UK?

Kind Regards

Tanya

What a great reply. Great pizza and great staff. And I think this news story has sparked my next story because to eat on the Moon is perhaps a future pursuit, should we run out of space to build more restaurant here on this green and blue planet. I understand that George Orwell wrote '1984' in 1948. Whether that number came from him swapping the latter 2 digits and setting his heart on that, I have no idea. However, if I did it in this year, 2011, it'd be pointless, because my depiction of the crumbling future under the scope of an oligarchical dictatorship would be of me writing this blog. Instead, I'm going to add 36 years, just like Orwell did to portray the society under the control of 'Big Brother'. I could be a sort of Winston Smith character who rebels. So my next post is storytelling? Great.

My old radio

Hello all, I'm back again. I was getting all nostalgic from listening to some of my old radio pieces I did at University and thought I should upload some of the best bits on here. Even now, this makes me laugh. I was at doing my breakfast show stint on the university radio station, which went by the name of Cheeky Rainbow. We produced 3 pieces like this every day and it took the best of 5-6 hours to do all 3 pieces. All in all, including a 3 hour breakfast show, it took an entire week to do a really good show, and it still remains the best week of radio I've ever been a part of. Enjoy!
(All rights of 'The Godfather' images and 'The Godfather' audio belong to Paramount Pictures)

Technological diarrhoea

The world is at our fingertips, technologically speaking. It's technological diarrhoea. It runs and it's everywhere. There are now millions of rooms in the world occupied by electronics. On the bus, a person is either listening to their mp3 player, browsing the internet on some new phone that predicts the future or is looking at electronics shops pass them by as they head towards a gadget store (with The Metro newspaper and a handbag on the seat next to them, occupying an entire seat on the bus so you can’t sit down. What bullshit. You loaned some money from a bank for a seat on the extravagantly-priced bus; that handbag and crap should be moved so you can sit down. I hate it when people leave their bags on the seat next to them. Did they pay another ticket price for their bag? No! So move it out of the way or I will sit down on the bag and who knows what sort of relationship will be explored between the contents of your bag and my backside... maybe this is something for another post).

We have so much now. I am the proud owner of an iPhone as well as a laptop and yet, when my laptop takes five minutes from pressing the power button to a fully funtioning operating system, I go insane. I enter this incredible fit of rage where I start shaking and like some sort of fucked-up clairvoyant, I can see myself breaking my laptop in half like something out of a Record Breaker’s feat; where people would be applauding me and I would look on, smiling and waving, throwing bits of laptop into the crowd for people to fight over as I strut off stage with the unmistakeable swagger of someone tearing up a computer. Do I not realise the miracle occurring? Silicon, metal, wires, electric and some other unidentifiable stuff is allowing me to find out what’s happening everywhere in the world and I can’t wait five minutes before having psychotic visions of a broken computer. With this foldaway bit of tech, I can find out if a bunch of gormless gorillas are prancing around in an open field anytime soon or when the next Rolling Stones concert at Hyde Park will be (same thing).

‘My BlackBerry is shit’ is a perfectly valid statement and when the soundwaves of those inevitable words bounce off the walls inside my ear canal, I nod in gleeful agreement, with an expression reading ‘You should have got an iPhone, but you tried to be different in the hope of looking cool and you ended up with a phone that looks like someone pounded an old phone into a metallic waffle’. A difficult expression to read, I’m sure you’ll agree. But you are now capable of speaking to someone through airwaves and hear them clearly. Before mobile technology, if you dialled from the landline and said ‘Meet me in the town centre in half an hour’ and you went at that time; if they didn’t show up, you just had to go home. Out of breath, you’d ring that person back and say ‘why didn’t you meet me in the town centre?’ ‘Oh I got sidetracked, I tried ringing you back but you’d left at that point’. An entire day wasted. Nowadays, you can ask people 'what the hell is going on?' through a bit of metal. And that bit where people say ‘Ok, I’ll send him a message. Argh, I can’t get any reception. Why? Why can’t I get reception? Come on, come on, come on. There we go. Bloody hell, that took the piss.’ What did? The whole five seconds you had to wait before you could beam an entire piece of text to someone in another place? What would you have been doing instead? Saving someone’s life from a burning building? What else would you have done that has angered you so much in that small space of time? I’m sure you understand what I’m getting at now, so next time you use a bit of technology, be a little patient. It’s unbelievable.

‘WHY ISN’T MY PHONE CONNECTING TO THIS WIFI?! THIS NORTH POLE IS SHIT!’ is the next line I’m waiting to hear (when I'm in the North Pole next).

If I was to choose a format, I would put English in technicolour over black and white. ‘Cos then, like, it’s nicer.

I am just one of many that take great joy in being able to have a respectable command of the English language (I know, how arrogant). Decades and centuries have passed with evocative poetry, eloquent writers and articulate speakers, all with the aim of being able to describe a situation so completely true that the reader is immediately able to make an instant connection without the faintest flicker of ennui; a student immersed and convinced that each following word unlocks the mystery of the sentence and eventually, the entire magnum opus. So, if that’s what you were looking for, you’ll be a bit disappointed. I don’t do all that ‘meaning of life’ stuff, I'll leave that to some cheesy poet who just wants to sound profound. Rather, this piece intends to pick apart the things that stealthily frequent our lives. And no, it’s not the toilet paper that inexplicably finds its way onto the spool hanging in my bathroom. Someone from my family does it. I solved that a few weeks ago. Ha! And they say Columbo was a good detective. Twat.

I’m going to keep this post short (not entirely true). I have a healthy obsession with trying to incorporate new words into my lexicon, without those words sounding particularly alien when they exit my mouth in an orderly fashion. See, I think that as a nation, we have a strong tendency to stick with the familiar, which I suppose is only natural considering our habitual instincts. In a country nestling comfortably in a schedule of work, 9 to 5’s, food diaries, gym routines, sock drawers, correct alignment of coasters on the dining table, carrying your phone in a particular pocket, sleepy time, meeting friends, Sky planners and the regular intake of breath mints, it’s no wonder our lives are plagued by repetition. Inevitably, ‘routine’ is bound to spread its languid wings to also encompass our diction and ‘keep it simple’. Consequently, it results in staccato pronunciation of seemingly difficult words that could have comfortably exited our mouths had our tongues been able to form some sort of muscle memory in the early stages of our lives.

I’ll structure a scenario with words for you. Imagine the following sentence being uttered from a toothless urchin on a street corner: ‘Oh, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s... it’s...’ . And the sentence ends on this predictable cliffhanger (how prejudiced; maybe this toothless urchin is actually some sort of linguistic professor... but in this case he's really not. He's a stupid toothless urchin. Deal with it). Can you guess what this person was trying to explain? Yep, it was someone trying to illustrate what heroin is. My conclusion is that these substances aren’t as popular because druggies find them difficult to describe. Their PR is all over the place; they don’t know whether they’re coming or going (probably because that person is on heroin). For example, I love a Starbucks every now and then but that’s largely down to the foamy green and white advertising. And they tell me that the beans help some people in another country so by buying this stuff, I’m actually helping someone by sending my brain into a caffeine-induced frenzy, and who doesn’t want that? So if the rotting, walking, illegal-substance-selling junkies put on a suit, brushed their teeth and either spoke beautifully or sang ‘Golden Brown’ when selling, I might just say ‘Oh, tell me more; the grubby spoon and needle looks interesting. Do they come in other quantities? Or is it just a teaspoon? No thank you, I might come back later ‘cos I wanna see if anyone has a tablespoon or something, ‘cos usually if you buy in larger quantities then stores sell products cheaper due to the whole bulk-buying system which has probably revolutionised shopping as a whole. You know, like a Costco for smack’. Not that I'm condoning this sort of alleyway business, it's just mere observation.

However, I think this rant will remain pointless as I don’t believe that a complete command of English will ever seem cool. Unless I tell you that it is incredibly sexy. ‘Cos erm... it is.

08 April 2010 - 'Yep, you guessed it. Another post' - I'll social network you in a minute if you're not careful

I’ve never understood why, when there is a world crisis, someone goes ‘Quick, to the BBC!’ and they all march there, as if this was the best solution possible. As if they’d gone into a meeting and after much contemplation, graph-drawing, diagrams, mind-maps, video conferences and in-depth briefings, they thought ‘the BBC must be vehicle behind such widespread turmoil’ and ran out. What nonsense. I can imagine them there now. ‘Oi! Cameron! Get out of there! What, you scared? Just ‘cos you own the BBC and that house in London an’ that?! Yeah? Well, let me tell you, my son, you ain’t the boss of me!’ It doesn’t work (by the way, Cameron doesn’t own the BBC and all these people sound like Ray Winstone, in case you were wondering). Pointless protest is not a protest. It has to mean something. ‘Oh, summat’s up with the plumbing. Er, quick, everyone go to Sky! Oi, Murdoch, I got a toilet leak and I don’t like it one bit. Fix it before the urine touches my bath mat, you ponce!’ It’s just mindless and will not solve anything. We need to conduct ourselves properly and gain a better understanding of the circumstances in front of us, before throwing ourselves in whole-heartedly. Protests have probably been around since caveman, although I’m assuming the John Lennon ‘lying down’ revolt hadn’t even been imagined by our grunting predecessors. They were probably more violent in their protests, beginning with a Captain Caveman yelp before diving into battle, clubbing people, plants, rocks, birds, oxygen, the meaning of life, hair; basically, hitting anything in their wake. Now we’ve developed as a people and are able to do things in petition form, the content of which can range from ‘Get a new government in!’ to ‘I want the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand to change his hairstyle’.

Another recent development is the advent of social networking. ‘Is my mate biting his nails? Let’s check Facebook, he always posts that sort of humdrum trivia’. This constant need for telling ‘friends’ (I use the term so loosely, it is highly likely to slip through my fingers) about each action through a status update is something which I have not quite got to grips with. Before I launch into a verbal gladiatorial attack on these sites, I too am a member of some of these. But my rant is not a case of ‘people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’, it’s more of a ‘let’s make this glass house bulletproof’. So, onwards and upwards. What are the flaws of social networking?

Setting up parties on Facebook is pretty much always going to end in disappointment. Most people leave RSVP’s on ‘maybe’ for the sake of sympathy, a ‘throw the dog a bone’ gesture which leaves little to the imagination; you have no intention of attending such a gathering. So my first idea here is that all the RSVP’s should be hidden, there should be no choice; and until half the people are going to the advertised event, that figure also remains hidden so you don’t look so lonely. Plus, you don’t want some random bloke you used to go to school with turning up, being all loutish and cantankerous, as if his sole purpose was to taint the party with barbaric antics and vomit. So make sure you don’t fall into the trap of inviting everyone your Facebook list. I also mentioned earlier about how it refers the people linked to your profile as ‘friends’. They should change this to ‘acquaintances’. They’re not really friends, are they? You met ‘em once, and you haven’t uttered another word to them since. Remove them from your list. Unless they’re useful to know. In which case, you may want to return to sycophantic ways and make sure that the imprints made by your lips are firmly stuck to the derriere of your target.

I recently joined Twitter which is nice. Because all you can properly do is status updates, and you want to make each one count because people will stop ‘following’ you on there if you’re a boring old sod. But I’m thinking of setting up a fake profile and doing a load of crazy stuff whilst following celebrities and documenting it for some radio show. My idea is that I set up a profile as a snarky critic, just asking them negative questions and getting reactions from people in the spotlight. There’s no real point to it; it’s a virtual Dennis Pennis. With Twitter, your insignificance is magnified when you realise the gulf between you and celebrity is much bigger than you could have dreamed of. You’re there, sitting all meekly, constantly checking how many followers you have so your mundane life can be projected to more disinterested people. ’I have 6 followers, that’s like a gang’, I exclaimed. Until I saw Sylvester Stallone’s. And then I wondered: ‘when Sylvester tweets, do Looney Tunes file a lawsuit against him?’ It’s definitely worth thinking about.

This particular post has been inspired by James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, in that the above rant is more of a stream-of-consciousness rather than anything else. I just typed what I thought and put it in a blog, although to some extent, there was a bit of pausing just to see what I’d written wasn’t complete garbage. Half-garbage, I can deal with. Three quarters garbage is a lot, but manageable. But complete garbage? No-one wants that. Not even garbage men, ‘cos that’s forced overtime. You see, fresh blog ideas are hard to come by. Everyone else is doing topical posts, which is just laborious and only repeats what others have said, conveying news for the masses but nonetheless, it is news that has already been broadcast in a similar fashion. I suppose in that way, I’m quite selfish. I just write what I feel like. But I always have you in mind; you can always contribute. I’m actually going to write a post about your comments as soon as I have amassed enough of your thoughts in the hope that I can perhaps fashion another blog out of your deep and insightful contemplation.