Reluctantly Leading a Radio Show

I’ve been helping out on this community radio show in my home town for donkey’s years, since I was about 13 or 14. And although that sounds nifty on my CV, I’ve always figured it’s fairly simple. I just turn up and talk on the show with the co-presenters, people I already know and I do a few extra things like News and Weather… When I was younger I was even more awkward than I can be (on bad days) now, but the others could spin anything like that into humour, so it wasn’t a big deal.

Not having the responsibilities of being in charge of the show helps.

The only problem is that the main guy goes on holiday every August, and every summer since I turned 18 likes to try and talk me into standing in as the main presenter. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to be on holiday at the same time and be unable to do it. Other times I just find an excuse. I led a show last year with two of the others. It worked out well; I’d maybe rate it 6/10. Having to lead it makes me quite anxious because this means that it’s my responsibility to come up with conversation starters and sound charismatic about it on air (and it’s one thing to start conversations, quite another to simultaneously be charismatic, in my case!)

In short, I had to lead last night, but it went well!

It was just me and one of the other girls. The other co-presenter mysteriously didn’t turn up! We don’t know her very well because we’re away at uni most of the time when she’s on the show. So I wondered if she just got awkward last minute, but maybe that’s because that’s what I would’ve been like in her position.

I personally found it a bit awkward that one or two of the guys from an earlier show were hovering outside the studio door for the first hour, but I did my best to block that out.

We put on long songs sometimes, we made the news stories last a bit longer than usual, but even so, we both managed to do the conversation thing without any silences or general struggles. I’m really glad that the other girl is a chatty sort of person because if we both were like me it probably wouldn’t have worked.

We even got a really encouraging text to the radio’s phone. We did check our contact lists to see if it was just someone we knew being sarcastic but found no evidence in support of that idea.

We did actually enjoy it, despite the intimidation of airing our trivia to the world without the main guy.