The morning I posted the publicity for The Sunday Alternative, something I deliberately kept back so not to take away from the final edition of The Sound of Nottingham UK. The extended podcast version of TSONUK also went online featuring songs that couldn’t fit on the main show including Sleaford Mods, a band I haven’t been able to play for obvious reasons if you’ve heard them. It might have been noted that during a show containing my favourites I didn’t play Captain Dangerous, perhaps Nottingham’s best band. Apart from the fact that I have probably played them more than any other band (I haven’t checked), I wanted to play ‘Heather & Tommy’. As far as I am aware, neither Heather Locklear nor Tommy Lee has acknowledged the song, which is a shame because an endorsement might have been a way into America for the band.

With those two shows set free on the Internet it was time to reflect on my temporary ‘gardening leave’ from the world of radio. I now have no excuse for shilly-shallying on other projects so am now hard at work on the development of new projects. Craig and Gary have enlisted my involvement in a new comedy idea that has legs. We haven’t moved forward on the idea of doing a freeform podcast, and to be honest I’m not sure that’s the correct route given how many of them there are now. Not that all of my ideas are one hundred percent original of course, it is virtually impossible to have a new idea these days, but to add to a crowded market isn’t a productive use of our time. The new idea (Craig’s) is an idea I am very optimistic about as it gives us a chance to write comedy together. Between us we have bounced enough ideas around using Facebook messenger to be able to knock together a workable half hour pilot. Once we’ve done the writing and got it down to exactly thirty minutes in length we will be ready to record. Friday night will be our first writing and idea sharing session (some people call it ‘work shopping’, these people are ‘cunts’) so we’ll see how far we progress from there. Between the three of us we have weird schedules; we’ll see each other quite a lot for a period of time and then don’t see each other for a few weeks. To my mind this means that time is of the essence and it shouldn’t be a long process.

I’m also laying the foundations for another music podcast series, The Shoebox Demos, which has been postponed since last year. My groundwork basically involves going through a load of shoeboxes containing demo CDs and getting them in some kind of order along with the boxes of ‘single sheet’ press releases I have. It amazes me that these aren’t in better order than just randomly piled in boxes. My dilemma is of course buying fancy filing boxes for the discs, would I have to change the name?

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