Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Radio - the early days in Sydney


It was the early 70's and my radio career was just starting. I was about to make the big move from production in my home town Gold Coast to panel operator at 2KY in Sydney.




I can remember my parents being so concerned that they booked me into a hostel type place at Cremorne Point. The owners had described it as a beautiful place overlooking the harbour with lovely residents and home cooked meals. They omitted the bit about the mean old people, itinerant foreign railway workers and rat infestation.




A great start, but nothing compared to the shock of 2KY. A station steeped in all the great traditions of the trade union movement. It's the only place I've worked where the manager inherited the job from his dad and there were more technicians than announcers and panel ops put together. But strangely, you never actually saw one. It was very odd because you would have thought that these technicians would have noticed the dirty faders and general state of disrepair in the control room.




One of the strangest things was that there was only one output for the 3 cart machines. There were individual pre-set buttons for each cart player, so you had to wait for the ad to end, hit the button and then hit the next cart machine. This, I was told, was so operators couldn't crash over the ends of ads. But what it did do was leave huge gaps bewtween the ads. The sales manager, who I think also inherited his job, thought this was great as it made is clients ads stand out. Did I mention that the average scheduled 30 seconder ran about 50 - 70 seconds?




What to do? Unlike the other operators, I had been a trainee technician, so I had a few clues (very few) when it came to patch bays. Cart One, direct to desk, cart two via Gosford dogs OB line, cart three via Dapto dogs OB line - me fired for being too tight. It was 10 years before I built up the nerve to work in Sydney again.