Monumental

I had another FATN recording today. I covered for another presenter who couldn’t do it, otherwise I wouldn’t generally have them two weeks in a row. It was the Alton one again, worst luck. Still, it was (sort of) fun.

The readers before us consisted of one of my readers from last week who told me that his wife, on hearing me read last week commented that I could make anything sound interesting. I know I love making people laugh and my shallow nature dictates that this is more than enough…this really made my day. I’m not sure which section she was listening to (either the What’s On or Sport, I imagine) but, whichever, it was a wonderful compliment.

Judge for yourselves: here are the two tracks from last week.

What’s On
Sport

The problem with my session, slight though it was, happened for one of two reasons. Either I did something wrong or one of my readers did. Naturally I took the blame but I’m not so sure. The facts of the matter are these:

When presenters prepare the newspaper, they have two copies. The first one has all the odd pages marked ‘O’ in the top right hand corner and the second copy has the even pages marked ‘E’. The papers are then cut in half and stacked so only marked pages are uppermost. This is to prevent stories being repeated and/or missed in a particular edition.

The Alton paper, unusually, has two papers and so the whole thing needs to be done twice. Annoyingly, a lot of the same news stories appear in both papers. But, as long as you’re aware of it, it’s not that big a problem.

Anyway, last week, I managed to get into a big mess with the odds and evens and had to call on my reserve copy (which we get just for such accidents) and so this week, I was extra careful. I went through the piles of stories a few times, just to make sure there wasn’t any duplicates.

Halfway through editing, two of the readers spotted identical stories in their piles. We then had to go through all the stories and filter out these doubles. It wasn’t a huge problem and we sorted it all out without much to do. Except I think the two readers figured I was a moron for getting it wrong.

However, I’m not so sure it was me because if a reader turns a page over, the flip side of the page will have the identical stories of another reader. For this reason it is drummed into us NOT to turn the pages over. And this is what I think happened.

Not to worry, though. We went into the studio and read and all was fine.

Something I read about reading the newspaper is how it is important to make sound as if you are talking to someone you know. Make it sound personal; as if they are sitting in front of you. I think this is excellent advice and I try and do it each week. It’s annoying how the stories still sound read to me but I think I’m getting better. Anyway, it’s still great fun and I’d miss it if I didn’t do it.

I was a tad early for the recording so I stopped off in Farnham cemetery (it’s just across the road) and took a few photographs. Here are a couple:

Farnham cemetery, West Street

Farnham cemetery, West Street

It doesn’t look very pretty and, to be fair, it’s not really! But it is a huge area and maybe I didn’t get to the pretty bit. It’s also on a very busy road. Not that you can hear that.

Then, on my way home, the light was lovely so I took a couple of photographs off West Street.

The first one is a private road. You can always tell a private road because it’s not surfaced. This one looks quite sweet. Though big hedges always start alarm bells in my head. They are usually planted because of the noise!

West End Grove, Farnham

And, finally, our lovely Georgian museum. Actually, the building is Georgian…the museum stretches right across known time.

Farnham Museum, West Street

You can see from that shot what a lovely day it was today.