URY 1350AM: Autumn 2004 - Seven Days, Seven Diseases

Welcome to my seventh compilation of archive University Radio York output.  Yes, seventh!  Haven't I got anything better to do?  I often ask myself this question.  It turns out the answer over the past 18 months was an emphatic yes, with a pandemic, a new daughter and moving house 200 miles across the country meaning this got pushed down the priority list somewhat.  

We've reached Autumn 2004 and the start of my final year as a student at York.  Although this would inevitably signal the countdown to departure this period was probably my favourite time as a student.  If you followed the painful courtship last time you'll be glad to hear Kate and I had finally got together over the summer.  This led to a vast improvement to my social life (goodbye student loan), some of which you'll hear below.  YSTV was going well, and I was really enjoying presenting on URY, particularly solo.  The amazing Fresh Meat featured a scene where JP stated university life has three distinct stages.  I think I crammed them all into my last year...

URY stand next to YSTV at Freshers' Fair (16/10/04)

The usual disclaimer applies: this audio is mostly from the medium wave transmitter output of the station which, let's not forget, was still how the vast majority of listeners heard URY at this point.  Most of it is from the URY AM audio logger, with only the especially crappy-sounding clips being sourced from off-air cassette recordings.  And please don't think this is in any way a "best of" compilation (far from it) - whilst there's a variety of clips from Freshers' Week most of the rest of the term is yours truly cos that's all I've got.  History is written by those who kept cassettes and MP3s.  

Time to flick the band to AM and tune to 1350!

No, that's Virgin.  Try a bit more to the right.

00:17 The Source at 6 (10/10/04)

On 10th October 2004 the station and transmitter sprung back into life after the long summer off air with a special Freshers' Week schedule, including a special Sunday edition of URY's news flagship reporting on the first students arriving on campus.  Presented by Richard Hubbert and Louise Wheeler.

01:58 Jonathan Bufton (10/10/04)

Earlier yours truly had filled two hours, seemingly combining as much enthusiasm as I could muster with the cynicism that a third year would inevitably provide.  There's talk here of the era-defining lineup for Freshers' Bash (including Radio 1's Edith Bowman, Shapeshifters and Mylo), the promo for The Ultimate Student Chart and subsequent attempt to rig it and what to look forward to this week on URY.  Listen out for me going full Partridge when promoting Electroplastic.  Followed by Simon Taghioff voicing a commercial message for Premier Sport.

09:21 James Haigh (10/10/04)

Also on day 1, future Station Manager James does the big sell for University Radio York.

Front page of the (rather wordy) 2004 Freshers booklet

11:11 URY On The Road: Live from Vanbrugh (11/10/04)

Matt Wareham helms the first day of URY's ambitious "7 Venues 7 Days" roadshow from Vanbrugh Paradise; followed by one of the week's special pre-recorded What's On Guides voiced expertly by Tom Hughes.

12:11 The Nation's Favourite with Michael and Jonathan (12/10/04)

Somewhat incredibly after how much trouble we got into the previous term Michael and I were asked to do two shows during Freshers' Week in the afternoon "comedy" slot, sharing the week with Thomas Scott's Technical Difficulties.  After months off air we were full of ideas and these two shows are probably the things I'm most proud of in all my time on the station.  

In our first show, a parody of the long-running Nightline advert takes aim at the Second & Third Year Contact Scheme (or STYCS) that Freshers could take advantage of, mainly because a lot of male second and third years seemed to be part of it in order to take advantage of Freshers.  After our regular stooge Teflon Pillock provides the first part of his Alternative Guide to Student Life, we provide the eighth venue of the week with a very bitchy link "live from the Quiet Place".

17:05 URY On The Road: Live from Halifax (13/10/04)

Matt Wareham and Mark Fenton are (genuinely) live from Halifax College with prizes to give away to anyone unfortunate to be that far away from campus.

18:08 URY Breakfast with Owen and Tom (15/10/04)

It's nearing the end of Freshers' Week and our Friday breakfast duo have some home truths for new students about what York is really like.

18:52 The Nation's Favourite (15/10/04)

Our second show of the week starts with a shout out to Thomas Scott in Studio 2, then achieving early notoriety thanks to an online parody of the government's terrorism warning leaflet that had been sent to every household.  Next up is our parody of URY's slogan of the week "7 Days, 7 Diseases", promoting the STDs you could catch during Freshers' Week (which amusingly prompted someone to email in pointing out that genital warts isn't a disease).

Over the summer the Student Broadcast Network had finally gone bust leaving URY without a sustaining service until a non-stop playout system was hastily assembled to fill the gaps between the shows.  Whilst an amazing technical achievement the playlist was a bit iffy in those early days, as touched upon here.  After the second part of The Alternative Guide we play Colin and Edith's review of Freshers' Bash, then our airtime is taken over by university admin for a Public Service Announcement, and finally our old favourite Newsbeat provides an update on the week's events.

27:26 The Source at 6 (15/10/04)

A few minutes later and it's the actual news, presented by Thomas Scott and Louise Wheeler.  This lengthy excerpt covers a hugely controversial story about the students' union blocking publication of some student papers for reporting an ongoing court case involving students at the university.

James Brookes and Owen Murphy interview Kate Rushworth at Freshers' Fair (16/10/04)

32:30 The Nation's Favourite (19/10/04)

Opening a solo show by referencing my hard-earned status as URY's least well-known presenter...

33:08 The Weekender with Jonathan Bufton (23/10/04)

Having not done a regular solo show since the previous Autumn the fill-in slots of the previous term had filled me with confidence and left me itching to get back on air alone, so I stuck my neck out and applied for the Saturday lunchtime slot between Breakfast and The Score.  I'd always thought this was the perfect time to be on air, both for avoiding lectures and leaving the weekend still mostly clear to catch up on work, but also with the station building deserted meaning you didn't get the useful gawping through the windows that I always found so off-putting. 

The Weekender ran in this slot for the whole of my final year.  Having spent Summer 2003 providing warmup for James Brookes, now he was doing the same for me, something that provided numerous handover gags on air.  Also today, filed under "dispatches from prehistoric Britain", the lost art of setting the video for EastEnders and recording something else entirely (here thanks to competition from ITV schedulers that a year later would provide me with employment).

34:27 The Nation's Favourite (26/10/04)

This week kicking off with a URY Schedule Rundown promo which we fact check meticulously, then we welcome TV's Tim Kash to the studio for the first time.  The wafer-thin concept was we'd signed up TV's Tim Kash (recently fired from All New Top of the Pops) to act as an agony uncle, but in the end my awful impersonation reduced us to hysterics so I managed to say very little other than "I'm TV's Tim Kash" as the TOTP theme played in the background.

Finally to fill a link I did my (somewhat better) John Peel impression with the usual running gag that he couldn't manage to play any of his music.  Unfortunately, with rotten timing, just 25 minutes later our show closed with the announcement via IRN that Peel had died at the age of 65.  

Centre pages of the 2004 Freshers booklet.  

38:30 The Weekender (30/10/04)

This show starts with a tale of a mad dash into the studio, arriving with seconds to spare and finding everything broken - it's amazing how less punctual you are when you spend your Saturday mornings in bed with your girlfriend.  This show makes me sound more studenty than I'd managed in two years, with tales of visiting a random house party and two of York's nightclubs.  

42:16 The Nation's Favourite (02/11/04)

This week sees the debut of "URY Is Rubbish", the conceit being that we had tired of our station's output (always listing our own shows as examples - see, we weren't that mean) and had ventured further afield for quality student radio.  Where else to start but Bailrigg FM, who fell for a message from "Jonathan Brothwell from York".  

Next another new feature "The Distraction Game", where we further trash our reputation by attempting to put off URY's finest DJs by ringing them up whilst on air and subjecting them to the flashing studio phone.  First up is Matt Wareham on URY Breakfast.   Finally a promo for URY's American Breakfast, covering the results of the 2004 US Presidential election.  I'm guessing we'd forgotten to play this during the show, hence cramming it into the outro of my backtimed "Round Round" by the Sugababes.

49:35 The Weekender (06/11/04)

I start the show by apologising for killing a track whilst it was playing with far far too much technical information about how we operated our MiniDisc players at this point, but it's a nice little snapshot into what we had to do during the songs...

50:43 The Guide (07/11/04)

Another edition of URY's Sunday afternoon arts show is wrapped up, but after the news - cringe - they're still on air.  Following the demise of SBN (and indeed to this day) if no-one was on air after your show, you would take the news via one fader and then switch to the "jukebox" feed afterwards.  I suspect what happened here is they remained on the IRN feed expecting it to be the old continuous sustainer, and somehow in the process kept their mics up. 

53:45 Early Breakfast with Matt Cornock (November 2004)

A brief link from the latest presenter to follow in my footsteps in the Early Breakfast slot, now more popular after the weekday 8am hour was vacated by SBN.

54:13 The Nation's Favourite (09/11/04 & 16/11/04)

The second and final outing for "URY Is Rubbish" mainly because it was quite time consuming to a) find a station actually on air which b) broadcast online and c) had a webform allowing me to assume a fake identify then d) record the output on MiniDisc and wait for them to read it out before e) editing it all down.  I wish I'd persisted though as I came up with quite a punchline for this excursion to University Radio Nottingham.  The following week, news of a new version of Do They Know It's Christmas, which would come to dominate the station in the coming weeks.  

56:18 URY Closedown (09/11/04)

In between the two shows is a rare example of URY ceasing output mid-term, for unspecified technical work on the transmitter.  Matt Wareham is the man audibly flicking the switch.

Back page of the 2004 Freshers booklet

57:45 The Weekender (20/11/04)

I went out a lot this term it seems.  This time it's a particularly icky tale from the previous night's RAG bash.  Then a commercial break - starting with a plea to Get Involved with URY, then a promo for The Score and an advert for studentoptions.com.

01:00:35 The Nation's Favourite (23/11/04)

Uhoh - "URY Is Rubbish" has caught up with us, but credit to Bailrigg for rumbling us.  Then the first outing for Twinkle FM, the commercial answer to BBC Radio Heslington. A barely disguised parody of Galaxy 105 (which seemed to be full of shouting about going out and 'avin it large at this point in time), I particularly like Michael's can't-be-arsed slogan "We're Commercial". 

Next is another promo with an error in it, this time for URY Breakfast, which we helpfully correct.  Then another of our new features this term, "Sad Story" which was basically Our Tune with a hugely inappropriate dedication, and they don't get much more inappropriate than this.  Finally Newsbeat is back with a roundup from this year's Student Radio Awards.

01:09:21 The Weekender (27/11/04)

Guess who's been out again!  More studenty tales of going to nightclubs with a bag full of lecture notes.  How on earth did we not keel from never stopping?!  And did people really used to sell roses in clubs?  

01:10:49 The Weekdayer with Jonathan Bufton (30/11/04)

Covering a solo Nation's Favourite with a Tuesday version of my weekend show complete with nonsensical title (which amusingly still has its own unique entry on URY's website) I talk about the planned recording of URY's own version of Do They Know It's Christmas the following day.

01:12:06 The Weekender (04/12/04)

After an off the cuff mention of a can of spam sitting on the shelf in front of my, I find out it was actually won by my girlfriend in a competition a few days earlier.  Reader, I married her.  But enough of that, the university has a new Chancellor in the form of TV legend Greg Dyke, and yours truly was lucky enough to chat to him the previous day about it (as seen here on YSTV).  Finally a report from the recording of URY Band Aid, which I was at too.  I definitely did some work this term, but I'm not sure when.  

01:14:51 URY Breakfast (06/12/04)

And here it is - the full track, featuring the great and good of URY and YUSU visualising the notes.  I'm on there too somewhere in the chorus.  It's not a patch on 1984, but it's still better than 1989.  My colleagues at YSTV were present at the recording and you can see it here from 06:18, somewhat amazingly still online in 2021.  There are interviews with all the campus "celebrities" involved and some bloke who looks a bit like me too.

01:19:02 The Nation's Favourite (07/12/04)

The following day the Headliners are back and covering, you guessed it, URY Band Aid.  Then it's our final "Distraction Game" of the term and, our reputation now proceeding us, some presenters are now aware of the rules of the game.  Well done Owen Murphy and Tom Hughes, hard luck Sean Allen-Moy.

01:21:39 The Weekender (11/12/04)

A promo for a Tribal Gathering competition with the voice of a thousand promos Simon Taghioff, promptly taken apart by Sarah Leese emailing in.

01:22:27 The Nation's Favourite (14/12/04)

The Tribal Gathering competition continues which we promote in the only way we know how, followed by our final link of the year.  I loved dropping the pips in before the news like this but we had no "live" time signal, so it was always slightly naughtily from MiniDisc.

01:27:03 URY Breakfast with James Brookes (18/12/04)

Taken from the crappiest cassette in history (possibly the one Friendly Fires found), James takes the station off air for 2004.

Coming soon (perhaps) - watch out Dirty Den, it's Spring 2005!

The £25 Argos Desk

This blog is a tribute to a long-serving colleague of mine that I have worked with on-and-off for 16 years and is now entering semi-retirement.  Yes, it's my £25 Argos desk.  It was bought as a short-term solution but is somehow still in use many moves later.  It's not quite as self-indulgent as a 9-part series on my student radio years, but if you like hearing about cheap furniture lasting for a very long time this is for you. It is, objectively, terrible, but through its longevity I’ve somehow become fond of it.

In October 2005, as I relocated to the capital, Kate and I moved into a shared flat in Chalk Farm in north west London.  We had a pokey room to call our own and shared the rest of the flat with a rather strange couple.  We felt we could do with something to plonk our (still fairly hefty) laptops on so we caught the 168 bus down to Camden High Street, consulted the laminated book of dreams and bought a desk from Argos for the princely sum of £25 - no doubt paying £12.50 each.  We chose it literally because it was the cheapest, smallest one available.  Even so it came in an enormous box and weighed an absolute ton. Bringing it home on the bus was a very London thing to do.  We later did the same thing with a huge CRT TV, praying no one would need the wheelchair space.  I don't have many pics from this flat but here it is in the bottom of shot just as we were moving out..  

Whilst it is fairly sturdy standing on its own, when you pick it up it feels as if it is about to snap into two.  The desk endured its first move the following May when we got our own place in Highgate  We moved from the 5th floor of a block of flats to a basement flat, and it survived.  Here is yours truly hard at work in the summer of 2006 doing...something.  

Our next move was in 2007 to Archway and again the desk survived the move.  Here it is with our new tower PC that we'd bought from PC World on Tottenham Court Road and, you guessed it, brought it home on the bus.  Silver was really "in" during the noughties wasn't it?  Incidentally if you're wondering why we moved so much, this should fill you in.

Next came Crouch End in 2008 and the desk happily fitted in a nice little slot by the window in the bedroom.  Quite how it hadn't fallen apart by now from being lifted in and out of vans I'm not sure.  Something of a landmark moment occurred in this flat when I worked from home for the first time - initially on call out of office hours then for a full working day during extremely heavy snow in February 2009, when 24 hours' worth of ITV1 was sent to transmission whilst sat at it.  Also in Crouch End we got laptops again and the desktop PC was binned, but the desk survived because why not?

The biggest threat to The Desk came when we bought our own place in Crystal Palace in 2014.  We now had three bedrooms so it ended up in the "spare" (the third being for general crap, later becoming the nursery).  Obviously we wanted to have nicer furniture than the shite that we'd bought 9 years earlier as broke graduates, but we were now broke thirty year-olds having used every penny to our name stumping up the deposit.  The desk survived for now, though Kate did add some new drawer handles to give the impression it wasn't a cheap piece of tat.  But over time, we realised that there wasn't really much space for anything bigger, and we hardly ever used it so why waste money on something new?

Famous last words.  On Friday 13th March 2020 it was confirmed we'd be working from home "for a while", and Desk 2005 became my home for (at least) 37 hours a week.  Kate's postgraduate course also switched online so it was home to education as well as work.  It is objectively far too small to work at.  It is extremely shallow so your eyes are far too close to the monitor.  I hate to think how my eyesight has deteriorated sitting at it.  A couple of months in we bought a new chair that required some serious research to locate one that actually fitted in the gap underneath, but there was no room for a bigger desk so on it plodded.  Here are me and a co-worker a couple of days into the new regime.

So the cheapo desk became something I spent hours and hours every day sat at.  Then we had the biggest move of all: we bought a house in Leeds, meaning we could finally have room for a better desk (apparently there were other reasons for the move too).  Our tortuous purchase meant we had to move briefly back into with my parents, so the indestructible desk as well as being moved across the country spent a few weeks in storage.  So this was the end, right?  Wrong.  I have spent another two months sat at the ruddy thing.  This pic taken from Kate's Instagram demonstrates not only how thin the thing is, but also how life has changed since we bought it...

Eventually the new desk arrived and then I finally found time to actually construct the thing.  But last week I finally sat at it for the first time, in my new actually-quite-cool attic office.  So it's crunch time for the desk.  A candidate for my next trip to the tip?  Maybe, except...we don't have much furniture in the spare room yet.  So it can stay there for now.  It's better than nothing right?  If you fancy setting yourself up for the next 16+ years the desk is still available from Argos for (chokes on coffee) £65! It is hilariously now branded as part of the Habitat range, showing if nothing else how meaningless that label is. There is actually still a £25 desk too which looks even sadder than ours.  

Thanks Argos.  £25 well spent.

JUNE 2023 UPDATE

The desk that cost £25 in 2005 and £65 in 2021 has now risen to an astonishing £90.  Even the sad replacement in that price band that I highlighted retails at £45, an 80% price rise in two years.  

And the desk itself? It lives on with a new owner...