Once we’d talked the aspirants through those topics it was, I reckoned, a matter of getting them into the studio as soon as possible and baby-sitting while they learned to drive the thing. We started out with three or four presenters who had some idea of what they were doing from the trial broadcasts, and figured they’d be right to do the baby-sitting.
Unfortunately, just about all of them found Sunday was the best day for them, and we found that we had a succession of live presenters from around nine on Sunday morning till four on Sunday afternoon, and not much beyond that.
Figuring that we’d soon have a fairly full roster and you didn’t want to seem greedy I’d put myself down for two shows a week - Fools’ Gold on a Tuesday night and Just Another Sunday at the end of the live presenter parade.
Unfortunately those two time slots were about the only ones that could be used to baby-sit aspiring presenters.
Not that I minded greatly. I did my show, sat around in the studio while whoever it was learned how to work things and once they seemed reasonably close to competent it was time to give them their own time-slot and away they went.
Since it was a community radio station I thought that it might be a good idea to get community groups involved, so before too long I’d kicked off the school Radiokids program.
Again, with hindsight, I should have known better, but the process of working with the first bunch of Radiokids proved to be deceptively simple and totally non-time-consuming.
At first, I managed to wangle some school time to do the show, and once I’d set up a basic script format it was a fairly simple matter of having a quick chat to the three or four kids on a Friday lunchtime and again on Tuesday afternoon to make sure that everything was under control.
Gertrude and her pals, in other words, looked after everything, put it all together and even produced a script.