Greetings,
Well last night I made my commercial and national radio debut with THE Big Show on the fabulous Triple M network. Due to delays, it went to air almost simultaneously in Adelaide and Sydney around 10:45EST (10:15CST). Melbourne didn’t start until after midnight. Not sure about Brisbane. Anyone hear it in Brisbane? If you missed it, the podcast is now up on the Triple M websites, the Semi-Pro Radio website, and the mp3 is right here.
So that’s it. We did the show and now it’s over. Special thanks to Triple M, to whoever came up with this Semi-Pro Radio idea, to Alan Miller Fast Voice-overs (the agency we represented), to Miles and Sam “on the pots and pans” and their fabulous recording and editing work and to Tim Lordan, APD at Triple M Adelaide for tolerating us. Overall we’re all pretty happy with the show. For a once-off pre-recorded show recorded and produced with the limited time and resources available to us, it’s pretty good. Good. Not great, in my opinion. Although what do you expect? It was only by the end of the recording session we were getting into it. I hadn’t done radio with Matty B in over 2 years and we’re used to sitting in chairs around a panel, not standing “Nova-style” in a 4 metre squared voice-over booth. Funnily enough, we initially wrote in the show’s description “with David M. Green and Matty B in the hot seat, or seats, depending on budget restraints…” Ironically there were no seats.
I think it’ll be obvious to anyone listening with a basic understanding of radio that some of the talk breaks were quite edited. 2 whole talk breaks weren’t recorded simply because we ran out of studio time. Another sketch we recorded wasn’t edited because we ran out of production time, and other things that were recorded, edited and ready to go were then cut due to their content and further time concerns. I can now personally appreciate why Tony Martin demanded 7 production hours for every 1 hour of “Get This.” For a comedy show, you need a lot of time, even if just to listen back and redo little things (which we didn’t really have a chance to do, although hindsight is 20/20 and with a pre-recorded show there’s always the temptation to go back and “fix” EVERYTHING. In a way it’s easier to do it live…).
Most disappointing for me personally was the loss of an entire minute from the Smiddy soundboard prank call. I feel like a bit of a jerk now, as on the show I introduced it as “the greatest prank call in the history of the world,” a wild and totally unjustified claim I know. The original was 4 and a half minutes and that version was legitimately too long and dragged a little, so I cut it down to 3 minutes. The 3-minute version is very funny. Certainly a lot funnier than the 2-minute version that went to air. But thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can hear the 3-minute Smiddy soundboard prank call right here. Hazaa!
I guess a big problem for THE Big Show was the fact that we simply had too many ideas. We really packed the maximum amount we thought we could get away with into each 3-minute talk break (evidently more than the maximum as it turned out). If we were doing 5 shows a week we’d probably spread the ideas we had over a whole month. We didn’t leave ourselves any time to potter along with some laid-back banter. We didn’t want to take the risk and waste a talk break. We only have 1 show, only the BEST. The end result is a very fast-paced show (probably too fast, even for Alan Miller’s Fast Voice-overs!). I felt we needed a little more time to introduce and explain and just chat. We could have spent another whole talk break doing impressions of those clips from The Lawnmower Man. I love the quotes “His mind is like a clean hungry sponge!” and “You gonna do some, uh night-mowing?” They’re hilarious! We should have made a bigger deal about those, instead of brushing over them so quickly. Not to mention the incredible coincidence that Pierce Brosnan’s character in that film is named “Larry” and we mashed it together with clips from Channel 7’s “Larry The Lawnmower.” Can you believe that? I couldn’t believe it when I noticed that, AFTER I’d already started writing the sketch.
But all in all a truly incredible, amazing, RARE priviledge. We made a comedy show for Triple M! And there’s plenty more where that came from. We’ll be back on-air somewhere in some form eventually. No doubt about that.
Kind regards,
David M. Green
Mind like a clean hungry sponge.
