Week Nineteen – Wherein I just Did An Hour On The Wireless

The upbringing I had was damn strange. I was thirteen and my brother was even younger that afternoon we came home to find a collection of transsexuals and transvestites getting ‘changed’ in our rooms, so we couldn’t get out of our school clothes for a while. It was no big deal, we simply had some toast while we waited, before a few ladies came downstairs to be interviewed by Mama. (S’welp me, I DO have a Little Britain image in my head but it was a woman growing a beard through hormone treatment.)
It was nothing odd. It took me some time to work out that not everybody’s auntie and mummy worked on the TV. Pat Coombs was an old friend of the family. She was the straight one on a very popular TV sketch show by a bloke called Dick Emery and was just my aunty Patty. And from the earliest age, when asking mummy why she was going out without me (I was a tiny tot at the time) I was told that ‘Mummy’s doing talking on the wireless.’ Meaning she was off to do some radio. It became a family joke, to the point that if any broadcast job, usually TV got mentioned, it was always ‘doing talking on the wireless.’

Regular listeners to BBC Radio 2 at lunchtime may catch me from time to time as a guest on the Jeremy Vine show as I get called to contribute sometimes as ‘Adam Rayner motoring journalist’ and my local BBC service fro Beds, Herts and Bucks is BBC 3CR or Three Counties Radio. Based in Luton. I have been there, ironically to make radio for Vine for Radio 2 with perfect broadcast-line clarity, (as it is an outpost of the BBC network – like the trees on Avatar’s planet Pandora) on the same day when I was asked to do a bit actually for 3CR and had done it down the landline from home! So, while I would turn out for BBC Radio 2 and a wee fee, I wouldn’t for 3CR as local don’t pay, it’s ‘bread on the waters’ and counts for general BBC brownie points, I reckon.

Which is why when asked to take part in an hour’s drivetime show from the 3CR studios this last week, I said ‘yes’ and did my level best. I confessed to terrible recidivism on air and told the listeners about the new tougher regime on the M25 speed cameras.

I have just had, while taking too long to get this typed, a really exciting invitation come in. I am to go to the west end of London and listen to a set of £200,000 Wilson loudspeakers made to be cost-no-object as good as they can make them. I am chuffed rotten to be on the list of the golden eared. Fact is, as a surround sound reviewer, I will be looked deeply down upon by some present as an oik&;.

I have also had a slew of heavy duty meetings and stirrings going on with MAJOR players right now which has eaten some key bashing time and on the bank holidaywell, I went fishing and since our allotted time on Earth does not count that time spent in fishing, I felt no guilt at all!

But I’ll go get on, as I owe you a report on the CAS weekend and EMMA first round sound off, which was wicked.

Adam Rayner On Line Editor