On Friday The Big Show was invited to speak to a group of radio and broadcast journalism students at Fanshawe College. Derek “Rock” Botten, Blair and I offered our takes on the business of broadcasting and hoped to impart a bit of our best advice to them.
I don’t know if they know it yet but about 1 in 4 of them will actually stay in the business. Fewer than that will be successful. It’s a tough, competitive industry and only the ambitious who have radio in their blood, survive.
Derek and I have both been in the biz since the big bang but Blair is just five years out from the radio program at Fanshawe so we offered varying perspectives on what it’s like to work together and in radio as a whole. We handed off to each other like we do on air – making sure everybody gets a turn in the spotlight. It’s always a good sign when students come down to meet you afterward and ask one-on-one questions and they did – and this is where I was wowed by them.
This crop of students is so much smarter than we were at their age. They asked such intelligent questions. Should I set up a website with a blog like I’ve been thinking of doing? What coping skills do you need to put up with terrible hours and low pay at the start? How do you balance a family life with a demanding career? How do you three work it out if you disagree about the way something should be done? Smart, practical things that I wouldn’t have given a thought to when I was in college.
Another thing I took away from the session is that Derek, Blair and I truly all are on the same page when it comes to how we produce our show. We see it and live it every day without it ever having been spoken but to hear us all just naturally sing from the same songbook about cooperation and setting egos aside and all of that – it was really cool.
Derek and I have done our tours of duty in radio and we’re settled and happy where we are now. If Free-FM disintegrated tomorrow it’s doubtful that we would move across the province or the country for another radio job. London is our home. Blair is at a different stage in his career and while he’s quite content to settle in and grow this thing we call The Big Show with us for now, one day he will want to move on. So that tells me to savour and enjoy what we have going on right now because, like everything else in work and life, it won’t last forever.