Play Misty for Me

Today marked the end of nearly three years of sitting in a creaky chair in a darkened radio studio for three hours every Wednesday morning. I'll miss it, I'm sure -- not just the time spent crafting playlists the night before and hunting down amazing obscurities to piss off the hipsters with shows later in the day, and not just the opportunities to speak to some of the most amazing people on the planet. But also all the fuckups and mad adrenaline of live radio, inventing questions on the hop for nobel laureates, philosophers, UN envoys and former leaders of countries, interviewing people who can't speak English (including one person who could only answer questions by repeating her own name back at me), having people say live on radio "I'm sorry, I can't hear your questions, I'm deaf", asking listeners to invent the news when the real stuff didn't show up, and most of all just getting to sit in a room, shut away from the world, having wonderful conversations and playing your record collection. I'll miss that. I've spoken to many of my heroes and many of my enemies, and I figure with an average of six interviews a week, for 156 weeks, or thereabout, I would have been pushing the thousand interviewee mark. You're never really sure if anybody's listening on community radio, but hopefully somewhere along the way I've passed on a new idea to somebody, or at least pissed somebody off enough to instigate some sort of action, even if it was just bitching to a friend and starting a conversation.

As I knew when I left student media so many years ago that I would no longer have the opportunity to write and publish whatever the fuck I wanted, at whatever length I wanted it to be, and that there was a death of something in that, I know now too that I'll probably never again have the opportunity to let a live radio conversation meander in unexpected directions for half an hour, journeying to places that any other station on the dial wouldn't now how to reach (without a reverb effect and Bazzo, Dr Mickey and Shaz as tour guides, at any rate). But this little adventure has excited me about the possibilities of the radio medium, one I'd not really thought about before (other than a brief obsession with wanting to be a DJ at age 9, when my neighbour Euan and I would record fake sets into a walkman in the garage). Now I've got myself some nice audio gear and want to teach myself to do this stuff better, to see if we can't produce something with the spoken word in this country as beautiful, mind boggling, and unlike anything else on the planet as these guys manage to do every week stateside (Ira Glass is the nerdiest man to have ever made me cry).

That sort of thing, though, would require a real public radio community in this country, one which I am certain doesn't exist, where we have talented freelance producers of radio content shared amongst the community stations city to city. Syndication of awesome shows. Nurturing and developing of talent. I wonder how we'd build such a thing (and no, I'm not talking about the stuff on the community radio satellite, I know about that -- I mean something built with passion and fire). A position in where public radio as an outlet is an endpoint, a worthwhile medium in itself, not just a stop along the way for journos who only want to be on the ABC (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course). It's a nice dream.

I had a long conversation for today's show with a journo with very strong ABC links, David Marr, about the latest Quarterly Essay, His Master's Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard. Which explains the eyebrows at the top of this post. Sorry about those. Despite the title, the important point of the essay, and one that is necessary to keep in mind to take its message beyond mere partisan politics, is that the masterful manipulation of the Australian public sphere by Howard over the last decade comes about not just because he is a wonderful politician, but because we so willingly mislead ourselves about who we are. Listen, if you like:

Technorati Tags: david marr, john howard, radio, quarterly essay