Working with Auntie @ Greenbelt

Last weekend I was at the Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham. Greenbelt is a wonderful thing and I encourage you to check out the website here. While there, I lent my meagre talents to the festival radio station Greenbelt FM.

Well it was really hard work, but I had an amazing time and I ended up gettting the opportunity to do some really cool stuff! I pre-produced and then live produced a daily morning show called Greenbelt Today, live produced an insanely busy one-off lunchtime show and then presented my own daily evening music show. It was a bit strange flying solo from regular radio partner in crime Fat Roland who was also working for the station, but still very good.

The BBC help Greenbelt with the radio station and provide equipment (mmmm nice toys!) and professional staff (mmmm professional BBC... sorry, I'll stop that now) to work alongside a team of volunteers. I think they try and run the station as close as they can to a real BBC station, but encourage us volunteers to do as much ourselves while being available to help us when we need it. This is often! I'd never had the chance to do any radio producing before, and it was a eye-opener into how professional radio stations work. For your delectation I will run through a day in my life as a Greenbelt FMer.

7am. In the studio to finish my pre-production for Greenbelt Today, this would entail writing all the cues and information for all the pre-recorded items I'd ventured out to record the previous day as well as tweaking the show's running order to make sure there was enough to fill the show. If we had any live guests, I would finish sorting information and questions for the presenter. I'd collect the music playlist and cds from the music team and then make sure everything we needed was together. This would normally take till...

9am. Live producing the show. This meant making sure the show ran to the schedule and that the presenter had all the information and music he needed. I'd liase with guests when they arrived, checking through what they were there to be talking about and introducing them to the presenter. I'd also liase with Super Charlie the Engineer about what we needed when we had live musicians on the show. I would also run round like a headless chicken from time to time. This, I am assured by professionals, is a key and regular part of the job...

10am. Once the show had finished I would probably mainline some coffee then take part in production meetings for the next day's shows. This would then lead to me spending a few hours sorting out guests and interviews with the press team and then bobbing off with a groovy BBC recorder to interview some lovely people. Including over the weekend: Martyn Joseph, Dr Simon Mordern - a genuine rocket scientist , very affable author Nick Thorpe and festival bigwig and ex Eden Burning legend Paul Northrup. I'd then come back to the studio and get the editing geniuses to help me turn the rather rough interviews into something useful (they really are amazing, they managed through the editing process, to take my patented 'stuttering moron' interview style and turn it into something approaching normal! I'd normally be pretty busy till about...

2pm. Escape with Fat Roland for some lunch and try and catch something around the festival before nipping back to the studio at 4ish to do some pre-booked interviews and then get ready for my show at..

6pm. Ha Ha Ha Ha (Evil laugh) Unleashed upon a microphone at last! In my evening music show I played lots of music obviously and had a selection of excellent guests live in the studio. Often they would have come straight from playing mainstage or stage 2. I had yFriday, LZ7, Stop! Thief! and my personal favourites, Fire Fly along over the weekend. I'd just like to say here that yFriday were absolutely lovely, particularly as they had literally just come off mainstage and staggered up to the studio to talk to me. LZ7 were a tad chaotic (Lindz was riding a chopper around the studio man! )and I entered into a contest to improve Daniel Bedingfield's (festival headliner!) Gotta Get Thru This with heavy-metal roaring with Fire Fly. Predictably, I lost horribly. After my show at...

7pm. I would start pre-production for the following day's Greenbelt Today and also finish off any items I'd done for the Breakfast show. I'd normally do this till about...

10pm-10.30pm. At which point I would either check out something alternative worshippy and then head to the organic beer tent or cut out the middleman and then go straight to the organic beer tent. Once at the tent I would catch up with friends I'd not seen for ages, talk with my fellow radio bods or randomly talk to complete strangers (a greenbelt tradition) and generally consume far too much strong organic beer and have a great time till about 3am. I would then stagger back to my tent to catch a few hours sleep before starting again in the morning.

It may sound like just hard work, but I had more fun than I have in ages. Highlights not mentioned include watching Fat Roland chase an escaped goat at the petting farm in an attempt to secure an interview (not with the goat of course!), drinking unusual tea in the legendary Tiny Tea Tent at some silly time in the morning talking nonsense with great people and many others too numerous to mention.

I have learnt loads about radio which I can take into my Refresh FM shows at Easter 2007, I met loads of cool people and had a ridiculously good time into the bargain. Big up to Mary Corfield and the BBC team. Look out for Fat's & Lee's Greenbelt podcast that pulls together some of the stuff we both did over the weekend in next month or so.

Roll on Greenbelt 2007!