This Is Glasgow
Back at the desk today and I had a bit of trouble getting my brain into gear. I also forgot that I had scheduled the meeting of Glasgow radio staff for the afternoon and had to pull together some rough notes. It was not a triumph! I had hoped to unveil the new TV animations that we'll be running as part of our campaign to promote the summer season of music programmes. I was told it was still locked in a computer being "rendered" and I'm afraid my attempts to mime the thing were ill-judged.
On the way to the meeting I met Peter Gourd, the Head of Presentation, and I was telling him about a book I'd bought in a huge second-hand market in Alnwick. It was called This Is London and was written in 1949 by Stuart Hibberd one of the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½'s original .
There are some lovely stories in the book, which is drawn from Stuart's diaries before and after the second world war. Even then the Continuity Announcers would complain if a producer let a programme run beyond the alloted time and there was a feeling that the announcers maintained the standards of the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ while the programme producers lived in a dreamy world of self-indulgence.
"So nothing has changed really, " I told Peter, who smiled and pointed out that the laws of time and physics have not changed and so the issue of over-running programmes persists.
I also loved the notion that early radio news bulletins were cancelled if there was not enough news to fill them. In that event the announcer would choose a nice piece of music and play that instead. My last meeting of the afternoon was with Blair Jenkins, our Head of News, but I didn't mention the idea to him. I was tempted to mime it, though.
