I'd rather be a hammer than a nail...that is unless we're talking MC Hammer and Jimmy Nail...

‘Radio is a sound salvation, Radio is cleaning up the nation…’

I sometimes think I was never happier working than when I coordinated a local community radio station broadcasting from a west of Scotland housing scheme. The station was manned mostly by local young guys who didn’t work and were looking to do something constructive - or at least something that they could enjoy. The efforts of all the volunteers and other support staff were full on, professional and committed. Everyone believed they were providing a community service and the wider community responded very positively.

So there we were - broadcasting to the world (well, a five mile radius) from a renovated cupboard in the local community centre. It was fantastic. School children, elderly groups, local hard core DJ’s, grannies singing karaoke (one of whom had a mesmerizing glass eye) – all were welcome and everyone came to the cupboard we had imaginatively named ‘Studio 1’. Getting in my car, driving home at night waiting for the signal to drift out of range and sometimes reappear as the road lifted over the Kingston Bridge was quite emotional.

We did long shifts and sometimes the TV would be on in the studio to alleviate the boredom of having to play Kylie or Cher again for the nineteenth time in the last couple of hours… One day there was a football match on involving a Scottish team and some random (Icelandic? Norwegian?) European minnow. I was chatting to the local DJ who was working the wheels of steel that day. He had named himself ‘Daftie’… possibly to avoid others doing it for him. So DJ Daftie was spinning some killer stuff and keeping one eye on the game. I knew that Daftie was a hardcore St. Mirren fan. ‘I could never support wan ae thae Auld Firm teams Tex, I hate aw that secretarial pish…’ Yes I knew what he meant and I agreed with him. Never corrected him though.

We had some very inventive people working in the station and I wasn’t surprised the day I found a full sized pub fruit machine sitting in the middle of Studio 1. ‘What the…?’ I said to no one in particular. ‘Oh we thought it would be good for the breakfast show’ announced James who was lining up his next tune for the listeners. It turns out they had decided that an on air competition – ‘Spin the Paisley Puggy’ – was required to spice up the morning merriment. The fruit machine (or Puggy as they are known in this part of the world) would have a microphone placed closed to it – close enough so you could pick up the sound of the reels spinning. Listeners would then be invited to spin the ‘Paisley Puggy’ in an attempt to win a crap prize. And of course let’s not kid ourselves eventually some lucky listener was going to be asked if they wanted to hold their ‘plums’…


Tex - in a haze of melancholy and Strepsils…