Some people dream about forgetting their lines in the school play. Or doing a speech and realising you're naked halfway through. Or taking a course and realising right at the end, while everybody else is ready to graduate, that there's one essential class you've never attended. (I have that last one myself, from time to time.)
However, my two most common anxiety dreams both have their roots back in my radio days.
In the first, I'm driving a taped show and desperately trying to back-time the tape so it'll finish in time for the news. Then I realise I've missed out a whole section of the show, or I'm going to have five minutes of dead air and there's nothing I can use to fill, or the tape snaps and there's no way to get it going again (which would be annoying, but not impossible to remedy).
In the second, and by far the most common of the two, I'm playing in songs from a stack of CDs when I realise there are no even remotely appropriate tunes left on any of the CDs I have out and that I'm going to have to run all the way down to the record library to get something else to play... but I only have 30 seconds left on the song that's currently playing. 29. 28. 27. And I can't even get out of the chair. 26. 25. 24. And there's not even any ads or promos I can play. 23. 22. 21. And I can't even open the mic, because I'm not the presenter of this show: but the presenter isn't actually here!
I doubt any of these dreams trouble present-day DJs or "technical operators" since everything they need is stored in one computer and so much of it can be automated. Their biggest fear is probably that computer going down, which you do occasionally hear happening on live radio shows, forcing the presenters to go old school.
Here's an actual radio song to go along with this week's post... remember when I actually used songs about the radio, not just something tenuously linked to whatever I was babbling on about? It just occurred to me that there's still hundreds of great radio songs I haven't got around to playing yet, so here's an Irish indie band from the early 90s that somebody on youtube calls "Morrissey sings Steeleye Span". Well, you've got to give that a listen, haven't you...?
