Halton Youth Media Forum (At Large) - 17/01/09

Warning, this'll be a long one because it's for all 4 hours. I'll try and keep it as brief as possible.

First Hour - Soup, sweets & rock 'n' roll

Today, we all dove in for the long haul. We were a bit thin on the ground today which happens sometimes. We had Adam, Becca, Chloe, Chris, Heather, India, Sam, Shanice, Ste, Ryan and me in the studio for the first hour, which we spent discussing the relative merits of drinking soup/eating soup out of a cup/bowl. I appealed for a soupologist to no avail so s/he could correct us in our terminology. I think we argued about Girls Aloud too - a running thing between most of the forum and Sam.

Oh, the picture of Bane that I promised:

Second Hour - Debate/Discussion

For the second hour, we went all serious and started talking about Prince Harry of Wales' comments about his Asian comrade. I'd say we came to the conclusion that this is being massively overstated and whilst we agreed that the term "paki" is offensive, we differed on whether it was offensive in this context. We had a caller on the subject, Lynn, who brought up the issue of political correctness and said our discussion was perhaps hampered by our (obvious) unwillingness to use the terms. I disagreed with her yet her call is greatly appreciated as it was a very measured point of view with many reasonable points. She equated Harry's usage of the term with "going for an Indian". Again, I disagreed but all of us in the studio thought she'd brought up a few good points.

We were fraught with technical issues as always - this week Christopher Hitchens nearly found himself unwittingly on our show, several songs misbehaved and stuck where they shouldn't've and just general little snags. Run-of-the-mill stuff. Certainly nowhere near as bad as having all the songs Myriad possesses playing out in one massive belch of sound. Though, a belch was heard from the ever-ladylike Shanice (see what I did there?). Sadly this was on air, whilst not one of our technical difficulties, so it made for strange listening.

Third Hour - Rock 'n' Roll

I think I sat out for most of the third hour, having been exhausted from trying to keep the discussion on topic - which is harder than it sounds when discussions that were trailing off everywhere from the Monarchy's relative merits to bringing up the fact I was drinking soup during the conversation (for those who were interested and disagreed when I said it was immaterial, it was tomato) - and going in the right way as well as keeping track of everything else that comes with trying to present a show. So there might be another blog post about what happened then from the people in there. I think they just had another music hour to be honest, I could be wrong.

Fourth Hour - Much ado about... something.

So, we find ourselves in the last hour. Truly the funniest hour I've ever spent on radio. I do sympathise with the parties involved yet no-one can deny that it was excellent. Off-mic, we were talking about the fact that Adam's mum works in the school that he goes to (and the one that I go to too). We were discussing whether or not it was awkward or not, fairly he said that it is quite awkward to have your mum working in your school because you can't really have freedom and so on. So, I suggest that we talk about this on air thinking it'd be a nice perspective on life (as it was something I've always wondered about). To both of our horrors (Carl and I were the only people there at this point other than Adam), he launches into a tirade about his mum and how horrible she is. Massively cringe-worthy for me, I try to get Adam to moderate himself and stick up for his poor mother. Just as I joke about how his mum is going to phone in - she does. Can't divulge the details of the call though I think you can all imagine how that phone call went.

Hilarity ensued.

Oh, as a side note, tune in throughout the week for a few surprises. All will be revealed later.