Picture from The Independent

The television coverage of this year's Glastonbury Festival has got off to a piss poor start with BBC3 hardly bothering and BBC2 giving us arbitrary highlights. Red button coverage basically just gave me the option to select either BBC2 or BBC3, bloody hell. I watched a lot of episodes of Family Guy and American Dad, the only real reason why BBC3 is worth keeping. When it comes to television presentation, the BBC have a weird idea of suitability and still insist on employing inappropriate people from the world of children's television. Lauren Laverne of course is suitable of course, as are Mark Radcliffe and Jo Wiley, but this is when we realise we miss John Peel (not that we needed reminding) and Mark Lamarr (whatever happened to him?). I know it isn't an 'indie' festival or something specific for BBC 6 Music listeners, but I think that the television coverage needs people who are known for taking music seriously. Incidentally, I have offered my services for the last few years but they have obviously not taken me up on this, perhaps they just want to eventually do away with music savvy people; Danny Baker got shown the door and Mark Lamarr quit his Radio 2 show because of the station's lack of interest in non-mainstream music. John Peel was shifted from pillar to post until he eventually just had a couple of hours a week to educate the true music lover. 

Although I channel surfed between sets by Hot Chip, Super Furry Animals, and out of a morbid curiosity I even watched a bit of Florence and the Machine. Only a bit.

BBC4 showed a film about Motorhead which I watched and this coincided with one of the channels showing their afternoon set. Lemmy is nearly 70 and could teach a lot of today's rock starts how to do it, and I am always interested in the audience when they have the older acts on. There was a good cross section of ages as there always seems to be and they weren't just there to sneer they were genuinely into it. The biggest relief of the night of course was that Florence Machine didn't join them on stage for a duet of 'You Got The Love', isn't that what Glastonbury is all about?

The Sunday Alternative Podcast #43 (Saturday edition) is available from here.

The Sunday Alternative Podcast #44 is available from here.

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June housekeeping

The audio book of Bowie Day (a short story inspired by A Christmas Carol) will be released on August 31st. In the meantime the book can be downloaded to your Kindle from here.

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steveEoliver@gmail.com

@SteveOliver76

I have just returned from Bulwell where I was a guest co-presenter on the radio show Castle Rock on Trent Sound. Lee Beaumont invited me on a while ago and having worked with him before I was keen to get behind the microphone for the first time since I left Trent Sound earlier this year. Since the end of NottinghamLIVE and The Sunday Alternative I haven’t actually worked in radio for most of the year, having also brought The Sound of Nottingham UK to an end on June 1^st. although the podcast is doing better than I could have imagined and I have expansion plans for the name, the buzz of presenting a live show is like the most addictive drug you can think of. I often found that being live on air was a wonderful help with my depression, and presented some of my best shows when I had travelled to the studio wishing I was dead. Live radio is something I really miss and have been looking for a way back in. as great as the new Trent Sound studio is, it isn’t big enough to accommodate live music performances, which was behind the decisions to end the two shows I was doing for the station.

To begin with I was a little nervous and didn’t really give a lot for the first half hour, but once I had warmed up it was as if I had never stopped. The three hours flew by and I had a brilliant time. Lee is a great host and we have a good comedy chemistry, (his show isn’t a serious one and conversation can flow quite well), resulting in a show that was hopefully as much fun to listen to as it was to present. Some of the best ‘lighter’ radio presenters have the ability to make a conversation between themselves entertaining to listen to; Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie on BBC 6Music are a good example, as was Danny Baker’s afternoon show on BBC London. Topics tonight snowballed from the death of Raphael Ravenscroft, the saxophone player on the song ‘Baker Street’, to the fact that it wasn’t Bob Holness who played on the song but it is true that Holness was the first James Bond. This was my chance to pull out two of my bank of unlikely but true facts; the first person to use a cash point machine in the UK was Reg Varney from On The Buses (from Barclays Bank in Enfield on June 27^th 1967), and Ernie Wise made the first ever call from a mobile phone (on New Year’s Day 1985). By the end of the show I was a little bit frightened by the amount of factual knowledge I have in my head about On The Buses, even managing to link with another subject of ‘the first person to…’; Reg Cox was the first person to be seen on screen on Eastenders, one of the people who discovered his body was Arthur Fowler, the part of Arthur Fowler was originally offered to Reg Varney. This could be how I get to appear on Mastermind.

While I type this there are four cheeseburgers cooking in the oven for my tea, and adrenalin is pumping through me once again. The live radio bug is back with me now, and I am determined to get back on air. Mandi warned/advised me not to take on too much work as she knows how stressed I get, but a live microphone beats any prescribed medication hands down.

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