Tuesday 3 January 2012

My Appearance on BBC Radio Devon

Well today was certainly an interesting day. Today, I sang live on the BBC for Radio Devon as a solo artist!


The day started off for me at 6:30am. I deliberately had no breakfast to keep my throat clear for singing later, and paid for it all the way until lunch time, but it did work so it was worth it.

I have found in the past that the main culprits for spoiling a perfectly good voice for singing are things like milk, bread, (too much) beer, and a dark horse: water. People have always said drink plenty of water, but I think sometimes people overthink it and drink too much cold water to prepare, but it just freezes your voice and you can't sing any load notes.

I poked my head out the door at 6:45 and it was blowing an absolute gale and pouring with rain. What a wonderful start to the day, I thought. So after swiftly wolfing doing my breakfast of air, I exited the building to head to the bus stop. I caught the X80 bus in the wind and rain all the way through to plymouth, which is where the Radio Station is based.

I had originally intended to play my new game on the Nintendo DS, Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, on the bus. However, I soon realised this was going to be impossible, as the sheer force of the wind and weather was giving the driver a lot of trouble when we were going at speed. It felt like we were just being being pummelled in a destruction derby on the motorway.

The game itself gives you the option of marking your quest map with the stylus to aid you in remembering things like which stairs lead where, where not to go, where you have already been, and where the chests are. What you see below on the left is a screenshot of how useful that can be. On the right, what it was like trying to do that on the bus...


Aside from that, I got to BBC Radio Devon and settled down nicely. We had a few mad minutes of errors and technical hitches, (mostly things that should have been simple but turned out that they weren't) but amazingly the producer and JG kept the listeners blissfully unaware. One such surprising error was the toll the weather seemed to be taking on the poor old Radio Devon building...

If only I had got a picture or something. While the engineer was trying to fix a technical problem with the producers computer, we heard what sounded like someone emptying a bucket of water in the next room.. We peered through the door, and the ceiling in the adjacent room was literally pouring with water. This is basically what it looked like.


The producer was like 'That better not be a toilet', but (fortunately?!) it turned out that the rain was coming in. Fair play to them though, maintenance was on the case in about 10 seconds.

After all that, the weather died down and the whole show went smoothly, including my live performances (I hope/ think). Everyone at Radio Devon seemed pretty cool and I look forward to seeing them again.

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