Unfortunately in some ways, things became a little too easy.
From the time I got up on Sunday morning I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time tinkering with the running order for the afternoon’s show. I usually ended up with more than I needed, but that was fine - the surplus went into the mix for Tuesday night - and by the time I hit the studio around one-forty-five I’d have around two hours of material broken into twelve- to fifteen-minute brackets with the individual tracks crossfading nicely from one to the next.
Personally, I thought that it worked rather well, and so did other people on the committee because I was repeatedly told that if I felt inclined the station could probably pick up some extra income by selling the show to other stations over the community radio satellite network.
There were several problems with that little scenario.
First, I was quite happy with the Sunday afternoon time-slot and had a nasty sneaking suspicion that if I volunteered the show for wider distribution I’d be looking at some other time to record the show for later consumption.
Second, I was spending quite enough time on the show as it was, thank you very much. As indicated it occupied most of Sunday and. I wasn’t interested in adding to the workload.
Third, although I was getting encouraging feedback from some quarters, almost none of it came from the listening public, and after a couple of years putting together a show that was meant to draw people with similar musical interests out of the woodwork it hadn’t happened.
It wasn’t as if people weren’t listening.
One old acquaintance informed me that he heard the show every Sunday since his neighbour seemed to have lost the volume control. That was Radio Norm. There was The Brisk Bay Phantom, though his identity was a closely-guarded secret until his daughter spilled the beans, and Wilko, the well-known disruptive influence down at the local music outlet, regularly reported that someone had come in to order something I’d played on air.