On Monday morning at around 8:40 (although possibly from around 8:20), I’ll be appearing on BBC Radio Nottingham‘s Breakfast Show, talking to presenter Karl Cooper about this site, its nomination for the Best Gay Bacon Lettuce & Tomato category in the Bloggies, and probably about blogging in general.
Have you ANY IDEA what an inarticulate grouchbag I am in the mornings? Particularly on Monday mornings, when I have to get up two hours earlier than usual, in order to make it back from the cottage to central Nottingham before the traffic gets bad? Short of sprinkling amphetamine on my cornflakes, I am at a loss as to how to address this. Christ, I’m going to have to be PERKY! And full of CHAT!
Maybe K and I can do some interactive role-play on the journey over.
K: Good morning Nottingham! Today, we look at the latest craze on the World Wide Web: blogging! And to tell us all about it, here’s Mike “I’ve Said They Can Use My Real Surname On Air Because Google Doesn’t Index Radio Waves YET” Diva! Good morning Mike! So, what is blogging?Mike: Mnuh.
(Pause.)
(I believe the technical term for this is “dead air”.)
Mike: WHAT? What do you want NOW? JEE-sus. In case you hadn’t NOTICED, I am TRYING to get some SLEEP.
Oh, this is going to be Quality Radio all right. Chris Moyles, are you quaking in your boots?
Update (1): I was also interviewed on Friday – standing outside the office in my shirtsleeves, pacing up and down in the drizzle while burbling free-form into my mobile – for the BBC Nottingham website. Here’s the finished article, which does a nice job of converting my free-form burble into coherent joined-up sentences.
Would that the same could have happened with this (Saturday) morning’s taped telephone interview with Radio Nottingham, which they’re going to edit down into a couple of bite-sized chunks in order to trail the Monday morning feature. Free-form burble? That would have been nice. Cold-start splutter and stutter, more like.
“Erbidi-burbidi-blogging is like it’s you know weblogs which are written by erbidi-burbidi-we call them bloggers and there’s stuff at the top of the page and then it goes down the page and then it disappears off the bottom and it’s like personal diaries except when it’s not like personal diaries and that’s when it’s erbidi-burbidi-something else, like it could be anything really and then people read them and that’s nice…”
I am taking this as a good omen. If you get the crap version out of the way now, then it frees you up to be smooth and debonair and sparkling on Monday morning. I am now practising dropping an octave, and replacing my customary breathless breakneck jabber with a kind of low, intimate, sexy rumble (think Gerald Harper meets Alexis Korner) that will have them all swooning over their cornflakes. Oh yes. With my newly acquired basso profundo, I’ll be blowing out woofers all over town; just you wait and see.
Update (2): Owing to a sudden and unexpected outbreak of Actual Serious Proper News in the Nottingham region, my radio interview has been “bumped” (to use another technical term; I’m learning fast) until Tuesday morning (probably).
My primary emotion on receiving this news was intense relief; there simply isn’t a worse time to get sense out of me than first thing on a Monday morning.
My secondary emotion: raging paranoia. Oh God I KNEW I was crap down the phone on Saturday morning and now they’ve SEEN THROUGH MY HOLLOW FACADE and they’ve realised that I would be a UTTER DISASTER and they’re just LETTING ME DOWN GENTLY which means that I’ll NEVER HEAR from them AGAIN and Oh God what about the singles reviews I’ve just sent in to Stylus magazine I bet they were crap as well and they’ll never see the light of day and there’s NO WAY I’ll be getting that Bloggie tomorrow and OH GOD it is all CRASHING DOWN AROUND MY EARS before it has even begun and and and…
As Peter is so fond of saying: I can deal with anything except success. Unless that success is vicarious, of course. I am more than comfortable with vicarious success.
Ooh! Crufts Best In Show just starting! Must dash!
troubled diva 