That first year was enough of a success to see Hughesy trying to get the rest of the schools around town involved, but Year Two of Radiokids soon showed there was no such beast as a consistent form line.
For a start, instead of having a group that were self-starters and would act on their own initiative, I found that every year if there was going to be someone producing a script for each week’s show, the someone was going to be Hughesy.
Second, while from time to time you could get your cub reporters out to report on what was going on around the school they were not interested in doing so in their own time. In school time, fine. In their time, forget about it.
Guess who ended up writing most of the script material?
As time I was spending on Radiokids escalated, something had to give, and the first something was my Tuesday night time slot. In itself, two shows a week hadn’t been too time-consuming - take out a few CDs and some reference material and spend two hours playing and talking about music. Fine.
And there were ways to make things easy for yourself. For a start, with a computer and a CD burner you could assemble the show at your leisure, burn it to disk and cut out that tricky fiddling with disks and finding track numbers.
Shortly after the station went on the air I found myself looking at a new computer, and it seemed logical enough to buy a laptop since I could use it in the classroom as well as at home. Given the presence of iTunes on the machine, I was quite happy to sit in my classroom during breaks listening to music while I did whatever preparation and correction was staring me in the face.
It didn’t take too long for the penny to drop.
If I was carrying a substantial chunk of my CD collection in the hard drive, why not use it to do the radio show? Put the playlist together, plug the machine right into the desk at the station and Bob’s your uncle. At the same time, if I was baby-sitting someone learning to drive the station once I’d finished my show, I could use the time to do school work.