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The question was “Should I?”  Well, I did… 

I just finished two weeks of ‘guest hosting’ a local morning show while the regulars were on vacation. It was an interesting experience/experiment. The question I’ve been asked most was “Did you have fun?”…well, I’m not sure. 

It was tough ‘plugging back in’, but at least I had someone else as the resident quidnunc/co-host.  Getting up at 4 AM wasn’t so bad, but I am not sure I would want to go back to that lifestyle full time. It was an excuse to eat PopTarts for breakfast. 

The first thing that comes to mind was how much work it was and how little time I actually had to do the work. The ‘work’ I am speaking of was the preparation. 

I found that if I didn’t get the music for the next day before 4 PM, I was pressed for the time I needed to complete at least a good outline for the following days show.  I easily spent as much time preparing as I did actually being on the air… and that is barely enough time.

It is relatively easy to compile and write for the topical content and any ‘bits’ that it might inspire, as well as the current station activity and promotion that should be included in the show, but I prefer to build the show around the music. 

For a music format, music is essentially the ‘bones’ of the show and I like to give every song a reason for being there or at least tie the other content into the music that I play and vise versa. 

Injecting a news story or bit out of nowhere, gives the show a disjointed feeling and lack of continuity - one thing leads to another. Even though there is plenty of material, finding a way to weave it all together is the challenge. 

Getting to know who is listening is another challenge. I knew the target audience (demographics, psychographics, etc), but it’s not the same as meeting someone face to face or talking to them on the phone. By the time the two weeks were up I was just starting to get a feel for who I was talking to and what they responded to. Keep in mind that, in this case, I was dealing with an audience that was accustomed a different ‘personality soup’ than what I was serving up. 

Knowing the audience is one thing, getting to know the co-host and operator is another. The operator is conditioned to the behavior of the regular hosts as far as things like timing and cues. Although my operator was very good at what he did, two weeks was not enough to be come acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of yours truly. At least I was afforded the freedom to concentrate on creativity and performance and not what button to push and when.

The other key ingredient was the news person/entertainment anchor/co-host. She is very professional and the one I would have chosen had I been given a choice of who to work with from those available. However, as we all know, when you have co-hosts chemistry is everything and in this case we just had to hope for the best… God bless her. For the first couple of days she must have been looking at me and wondering where the hell did this guy come from? Again, she is used to filling a certain role and doing things a certain way and as ‘vacation relief’, it wasn’t my job to re-educate her and teach a new way of doing things. Hopefully, she did get a new perspective that may serve her in some fashion as she continues with her broadcasting career. 

Since the time when having a ‘team’ show was accepted as a must for mornings, the only other time in my career I have ‘co-hosted’ a morning show, or any other, was with a friend that I had known for years, Chuck Chandler. The chemistry was natural. Oh, and there was one year with the lovely Jodi Hughes and one Sunday morning Billy Williams and I decided to do the ‘April Fools’ Show, but thats another story… otherwise, I am used to interacting with the audience exclusively; just putting my head down and going; not waiting for an ‘in-studio’ reaction; conversing with the audience instead of having them listen in on someone else’s conversation. 

One interesting thing I realized was, how difficult being a ‘coach’ and, at the same time, a ‘player’ was. Maintaining perspective wasn’t easy. At times, once in performance mode, I am somewhat oblivious to some of the obvious detail. I was reminded about things like giving the phone number when doing a contest so you just don’t get the prize pigs that have it tattooed to their arm and making sure everyone is reminded of it in case they are inspired to participate in the show in some fashion. That kind of thing may just be something someone in my position might do when focusing more on the big picture. In recent years, my attentions have been on the bigger issues that radio faces in terms of being a compelling form of entertainment. 

It must also be noted that I was blessed to have a team of ‘consultants’ like Bob McCord, Don Kay, Len Thuesen, Marty Forbes and others, who weighed in with tips and insight relative to what I was trying to achieve with my two week ‘experiment’. Don Kay went so far as to actually aircheck my show and hand me a cassette and a page of notes!  Every morning show should be so lucky as to have a team like that behind them. 

I wasn’t trying to be the guys I was filling in for. Never forgetting that it wasn’t my show, still, I was hired to do what I do. Thankfully the management of the station subscribes to the philosophy of ‘when you hire a dog to bark, you let him bark’ and, of course, I certainly don’t mind being told if I happen to be barking up the wrong tree, but from the beginning I have been treated royally. Thanks to Pat Cardinal for having the confidence to put a guy like me in a radio station control room unsupervised. Will he do it again? The ‘de-briefing’ isn’t for another couple of days… 

How did it go overall? Well, the audience would be the best judge of that, but the feed back from listeners was positive. Thank you. 

After being parachuted in for a two week stint, in the final analysis I would have to say it was more work than play. All I could hope for was that I at least sounded like I was having fun.

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