Preparation, Preparation, Preparation (Parts 1 & 2)

I think a good way to start this blog will be by posting the first two Radio Gagster columns I had published in the Radio Magazine. These were all about the daily show prep service of topical gags which I have been supplying to commercial radio presenters for fourteen years. The only real change since this two-part article appeared is that the material is now delivered by email from home or Blackberry when I am out at a speaking engagement rather than leaving gags on a presenter's voicemail.

Part 1

Every day, a shortish, balding man goes to a café and sits leafing through a pile of newspapers, occasionally stopping to scribble the odd hurried note. From time to time, over the past twelve years, intrigued fellow diners have asked him ‘What exactly are you doing?’

So I tell them: ‘Writing jokes for independent local radio presenters’.

That was one of the first things I learnt. Commercial radio disc jockeys are presenters. (Unless, of course, a club owner calls and says ‘I need a DJ tonight – it’s good money!’ Then they temporarily become jocks again).

But whatever you call my clients, or my service (Prep? Programme Support? Link-writing?), it’s what I’ve done since August 1 1994.

It wasn’t planned. I’d spent years working on national topical shows like ‘Week Ending’ and ‘News Huddlines’ and I’d seen some of my BBC colleagues get head-hunted to write for Simon Mayo on Radio 1 (very lucrative!) but I hadn’t considered presenters as an additional market for me. Instead, I was advertising in the ‘Stage’ to write speeches for weddings, routines for comics, etc.

Then, one Friday night, I got a call from a presenter on a tiny station I’d never heard of. Between rushing his tea before hurrying off to one of those club gigs (busy lives, presenters, second thing I learnt) he told me that he wanted eight daily topical gags or observations. He was using another writer but I could supply him on alternate days.

I faxed him the first selection the following Monday. A week later, he asked me to write for him every day. He was livid because his other writer’s entire quota had been about mass-murderer Fred West – totally unbroadcastable!

Since then, he’s gone from graveyard to primetime (the presenter, I mean, not Fred West), and from that small station to one of the majors, always using my material as well as his own original ideas. But he needn’t have a seizure reading this because I’m not going to identify him. That’s the important thing about this service: confidentiality. No-one has ever known that he uses my writing, we’ve never even met (in fact, I have never met any presenters I’ve written for).

It’s been pretty cloak and dagger at times. Nowadays, I mostly send material by voice or email but for many years it was a case of waiting for a phone call with the loudly whispered ‘The fax is clear, put it through now!’

And not just from him but from others because the service grew, due in no small part to an ad in the ‘Radio Magazine’. Within eighteen months, I had four clients in different parts of the country, so I was able to syndicate material without any overlap (digital/internet radio makes such total exclusivity impossible nowadays but it’s still assumed that most listeners only tune in to local stations in their own regions). And when additional presenters contacted me in areas where I already had a client using daily topical humour, I was able to provide them with alternatives, such as Birthday and Anniversary or Golden Hour/Hits and Headlines gags.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve learnt a great deal over these past twelve years; I used to think that ‘reach’ was a toothbrush, ‘demographic’ was a diagram of a protest march and ‘swing presenters’ only played Count Basie tracks (the jokes I write for radio are much better than those, honestly). In the next article I’ll tell you about the highs, lows and funny side of being one of radio’s hidden humorists.

Part 2

Last time, I wrote about how I came to supply comedy for ILR stations. But what sort of life is it?

Precarious, certainly. Presenters who use my service tend to stay with me for years but it’s still possible to lose them, not through a decline in the quality of the material but because shows are never static. The introduction of phone-ins, requests or banter between on-air crews may leave no room for scripted links.

Cash flow is also problematic. As I’ve mentioned, presenters lead hectic lives. Invoices must go out well in advance as cheques may take weeks to arrive. It’s much worse when I’m paid by stations themselves and have to deal with infuriating, centralised accounts departments who say they’ve had nothing from Programming while Programming say it went off weeks ago…paperwork ping-pong. I actually once had some accounting minion making typing noises down the phone as he pretended to send off a furious email to a station.

Some presenters can’t really afford the service. I wrote for years for a lovely chap who had taken a massive pay cut from a top industry job to work in radio. We had payment problems for months before parting company, with me having to write off hundreds. The last I heard, he was a Programme Controller!

I’m not always kept informed. I was dictating daily gags on a presenter’s voicemail before he rather sheepishly called to say he’d actually been on holiday for ten days. He paid up anyway.

Writing for breakfast shows is tricky as we don’t get the papers early enough here in Bournemouth but I have found that items from the previous day’s ‘Evening Standard’ and news programmes become national stories the next morning.

Then there are stations who only want jokes about their own areas. It’s amazing how ingenious I can be at crow-barring in the relevance of a story from the Orkneys to city life hundreds of miles away!

Slow news days are easier now we have many sources in addition to the papers, particularly the web. At one time, if there was no inspiration in the press, it was a case of desperately searching for something from Welsh Headlines on Ceefax! And if the news is full of tragedy (e.g. 9/11), my services are not needed as stations cut back on humour.

What do I write about? It helps to know demographics, but generally, topical gags about current events/personalities, inventions, surveys, trends, pop culture (for a heterosexual man in his forties I have a surprisingly detailed knowledge of boy bands) and timeless, observational humour about everyday life.

Subjects to avoid are politics, the politically incorrect, drugs, anything too risqué (although I wrote for years for one breakfast presenter before finally hearing his remarkably rude show. The material he could have had if I’d known…) and gags about a station’s advertisers.

And what do I get from this, besides payment? Well, since the demise of ‘Week Ending’ and ‘News Huddlines’, it means my material continues on the radio. No audience laughter, no mention in the credits, but still the knowledge that a six-figure audience is hearing my jokes.

It’s become an unbreakable habit. I write on holiday, I even wrote for a show one Christmas Day.

One last thing. Dictating gags in public is hideously embarrassing.

So if you see a shortish, balding man getting odd looks from elderly ladies while bellowing something about ‘Chantelle’ into his mobile in the only part of the street outside the cafe with a signal, well, in the words of that song by Sting and Eric Clapton: ‘It’s Probably Me’.

(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 728, 29 March 2006 and Issue 730, 12 April 2006)

Over time, I came to discover just how frowned-upon radio show prep services are in some quarters - despite the fact that all I'm really doing is augmenting a programme in an 'additional material by...' capacity, just as I did for BBC shows for twelve years. In the end, I wrote an article in defence of show prep services. You can read it here.