Joker Of The Airwaves
Chris re-connects with his favourite station at a critical moment
Do you remember the West Country radio station I’ve mentioned here occasionally? The one that seems to never be more than minutes away from a monumental blunder?
Well, I’d lately given up hope of hearing them any time soon – just to check how things were going, of course – when during the last lockdown, my wife Lorraine asked if they were available on digital radio.
“I don’t know, I haven’t got a digital radio,” I replied, mistakenly believing this to be an intelligent answer.
“Alexa!” shouted Lorraine straight into my face. “Play Radio Cock-Up FM.”
This isn’t of course its real name, so not exactly what Lorraine shouted, but our Amazon Echo immediately began playing one of the most disaster-prone radio stations known to humankind.
“There!” beamed Lorraine. “Digital radio! Who knew?”
You can see this station and I were made for each other.
I honestly never believed that during my many months’ absence they could actually have got worse, but it’s amazing what broadcasting from home can do. It was as if circumstances opened a whole new field of calamity for them to explore. They were up and running from almost the moment I started listening.
After a thrash-metal compilation that seemed a little unusual for first thing on a Sunday, there came what I supposed was a jingle based on Mission: Impossible.
“This radio station will self-destruct in five seconds!” came the dramatic shout. And then… it did. It went off air for 10 minutes, at which point a presenter apologised for the loss of service, stating that he’d no idea what had happened because, “Gordon’s not answering his phone. If you’re listening, Gordon, thanks a lot, this was my day off. Not yours, my day off.”
At first I thought he was kidding but the next song was Your Selfish Heart and then, if anyone was in doubt that he was a bit upset… Gordon Is A Moron by Jilted John. I was listening to a live-on-air domestic dispute.
The broadcast continued quite normally for half an hour, though the presenter seemed annoyed throughout, before becoming positively angry when a caller to the show asked if she could say hello to all her friends.
“No, you can’t!” came his abrupt reply, but he then seemed to fade his own volume rather than the caller’s, because she proceeded to shout “hi” to about 100 people.
For the next few minutes all I could hear was a constant list of names at full volume while the presenter shouted in the background things like,
“Would you like it if I rang your flipping place of work and started dedicating things to all my friends?” Considering she’d earlier said she was a florist, I reasoned she might.
Towards the end of his show, a dog could be heard barking and the presenter shouted, “Somebody get the cat!” Either he really didn’t know animals, or the cat was required to sort the dog out. I wonder if Bodmin has family in the West Country…
“This station will self destruct in five seconds!” came a shout