It’s 10 years today since my last show as a full-time professional radio presenter (I was Ryan from Fully Charged with Ryan & Tracy on Spin1038). For a long time after that final broadcast, the question I was most often asked was, “Do you miss it?” Or actually, more specifically, “Do you not miss it?”, the assumption being that how could anyone not miss being a full-time professional radio presenter? (As if stepping away from a microphone was akin to voluntarily giving up chocolate for life…weirdo!)
The Story I Told Myself
For years, my stock answer was carefully crafted: “I miss the people, but I don’t miss the job.” I would say. I’d explain that by the end, I was spending as much time doing things I didn’t really enjoy as things I did. I’d gotten into the management side of radio, drowning in meetings instead of being on air. I was wasting precious hours trying to record videos and create viral multimedia content, rather than doing what I truly loved, just, you know, actually being a radio presenter.
That pure form of radio was what I fell in love with back in 1997, when I started in the industry. There was no internet then. I didn’t have a mobile phone, let alone TikTok or any pressure to create viral video content. I started my career in radio answering the phones for Aidan Power and Keith Cunningham in a shed out a back garden in Templeogue for goodness sake. And I would literally not hang up the phone, I would just put my finger on the hang up button (whatever that was technically called) and it would ring again, and I would talk to the people, take their requests and repeat. Hard to believe now, really.
What’s weird, I now realise, is that I genuinely believed I didn’t miss it. I’m quite a forward-looking person, you see. Once I’ve made my mind up about something, that’s it. I don’t really dwell on the past, or at least I didn’t historically. So when I decided to leave radio and go back to law, I committed completely. That became my narrative, my version of events, my reality.
I threw myself into being a lawyer again. I did maintain some token connection to radio – a small bit of work on Radio Nova over Christmas one year, and Christmas FM most years for the last decade (five or six two-hour shows annually) and more recently I did some work for Freedom FM on their FM runs and online (now also available on DAB in Leinster by the way. But that was it.
And I honestly thought I was fine with it. Yes, it was fun, but it was in the past. Onwards and upwards. Tally Ho!
The Truth I Can Finally Admit
Now, ten years later, I can take a step back and look at everything through a slightly different lens. I guess it’s the lens of having perspective on my experience, my life, and my career trajectory.
I find myself finally ready to admit, to myself as much as anyone else, that I really do miss being on air as a radio presenter. There, I said it. Are you happy now?
I’ve struggled to accept this truth because for a long time, I was terrified that if I admitted I missed radio, I would have to consider whether I’d made a huge mistake leaving that profession to go back to law. Whether I should have stayed. Whether I could have been or would have been “happier” (LOL, like any of us know what that really means) if I’d just remained a radio presenter.
I wasn’t ready to face the possibility that I’d made a mistake. But now that I do look at it, I still think I made the right decision for where I was at that time. Missing radio doesn’t change that or prove it was a bad decision.
I recently read a fascinating book “How to Decide” by Annie Duke (she’s an ex-professional poker player). One of her key points is that it’s human nature to correlate outcomes with decisions: something went well = I made a good decision; something went badly = I made a bad decision. But that’s not really an appropriate or accurate way of evaluating decisions, because good decisions can lead to bad outcomes and vice versa.
Why I Left Radio
So why did I leave radio in the first place? Seems like an odd decision for someone who claims that radio was their passion and their love, right?
Let me take a step back. I’d been juggling being a radio presenter with my life for a long time. From doing a show after school on a Wednesday afternoon from 2-4pm when I was 17, pirate radio 5 days a week through college and as presenter of the Zoo Crew on Spin1038 when I was a trainee solicitor. At one point I was a fully qualified solicitor working a day job in McCann Fitzgerald then doing 9pm-12pm on Spin.
When I left my career as a full-time solicitor initially, I was at a crossroads in my legal career. I was a general commercial litigation lawyer but wanted to be an intellectual property lawyer. I wasn’t able to make that shift in the firm I was in, and I was thinking about leaving to find a job in IP law. Then the breakfast show on SPIN 103.8 was offered to me. This was what I’d wanted my whole adult life to that point. I had no wife, no mortgage, no loans, no responsibilities. I knew I had to take it…so I did.
Looking back, I said that I was going to be a professional radio presenter for three years and then return to law (I ended up being gone for 6). When I examine that claim now, it’s fascinating to try and identify with the younger version of myself. If I’m being honest, my “plan” wasn’t necessarily to return to law, it was always to have a Plan B in case radio didn’t work out. But the reality is, if my radio career had been more successful, if I’d gone from SPIN 1038 to Today FM or 2FM or some bigger, high-profile job, or if it had led to TV work, I don’t know if I would have gone back to law. I’ll never know, because the decision was made at a point in time with things being the way they were. Tracy has gone on to have an incredibly successful 10 year career (and counting) on 2fm, would I have? Who knows…but probably not everybody I worked with seemed to get way more successful once they stopped hanging around with me. Odd. Rude.
Face The Fear….then.
No, not “do it anyway”. Run away, you silly goose. Face the fear then RUN AWAY! The real reason I left radio was fear. We had one small child, who was maybe seven months old. I had seen many friends being let go from their radio shows and scrambling to find new gigs to make ends meet. That terrified me. The thought of not being able to provide for my family, the nightmare scenario (in my head, at least) of being 40 or 50 and suddenly finding myself without a job, without a career. What would I do then? My law career would be long gone.
The Radio I Loved vs. The Radio I Feared
I always loved radio, but I loved doing my version of radio. My version was breakfast show-type radio, more listener-led engagement, longer pieces, genuine interaction.
In very broad strokes, there are perhaps three basic types of radio:
1. Talk radio (like Newstalk); Just conversation with very little music, if any
2. “That-was-this-is” radio – where the presenter talks for maybe 30 seconds each time, mostly announcing songs and what’s coming up (I quite enjoyed this, but it wasn’t my passion)
3. The “zoo format” – typically breakfast show style with listener calls, chats, laughs, banter. This was my JAM!
My fear was that I would end up becoming what I (disrespectfully, with the benefit of hindsight) called a “journeyman radio presenter” You see this quite often in the industry; you’re the hot property for a while, the big presenter on a big radio station. Then tastes change, or preferences shift, or you get “too old” (or too expensive!) and you’re no longer a fit for your station. You move to another, usually smaller radio station with a lesser/lower profile.
There’s plenty of very successful, very happy, very content people who take that path. But I never wanted to end up being a “that-was-this-is” radio presenter on a smaller local radio station, not because there’s anything wrong with it, just because that was never what I was into.
The Power Structure I Couldn’t Control
Another difficulty with a career in radio in Ireland, then and now, is the consolidation of the sector. A lot of radio stations are owned by just a handful of companies, with a management structure where there’s often one person in charge of the direction of multiple stations, their creative output, and ultimately the presenters.
At the time (and to an extent now) there were probably only four or five people who held the power over all the jobs at all the radio stations I would ever have wanted to work for. Really, there were two radio groups that owned all the major Dublin stations and some national ones, with two or three people who had the power to decide the fate of your career.
If they really liked you, they might fast-track you to one of the bigger or national stations. If they didn’t rate you, you might never progress in the way you wanted.
When I decided to leave, one of those people who was in charge of all the radio stations I wanted to work at didn’t seem to rate me (at least that was my perception, and I’m pretty perceptive!). There were a couple of conversations that strongly suggested that as long as this person was in his job, I wouldn’t progress on air the way I wanted. I wouldn’t get a national gig or move on to significantly bigger things.
What struck me most was how out of my hands it all felt. That might not be fair, it might have been me throwing up my hands in defeat rather than acknowledging my own limitations. But it did feel like I could do everything right and still not progress.
That’s true in life generally, of course. It’s almost never fair. Putting in effort or being very good doesn’t naturally lead to success, fame, and riches. But in a career like law, which is where I returned, there isn’t that level of power consolidation. It’s not a case of two, three, or four people having a disproportionate say in whether you get a job or a promotion or end up a successful lawyer. In radio, you are to a far greater extent at the mercy of the tastes of a (very) small number of key decision makers.
The Roller Coaster of Ratings
Every three months in radio, you get a set of listenership figures called the Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR). It tells you, based on surveys, how many people are listening to your radio show.
At the time, the breakfast show on SPIN1038 (the radio station I was on) was really struggling to make a dent in the listenership figures of our main competitor, the Strawberry Alarm Clock at FM104. After six years of working our asses off and putting out what we thought was a great radio show every morning, it just didn’t feel like we were ever going to close that gap or get the listenership that I felt we deserved, the numbers that matched the effort and quality of the content we created. Honestly, we thought we were better than them. Don’t worry, the feeling was very much mutual. I don’t think you can really be successful in an industry like radio unless you think you’re better than everybody else!
Ironically, in my role as a manager of aspiring radio presenters, I would regularly tell them: “If the reason you’re working in radio is to have a certain number of people listening to you, you’re in it for the wrong reason. You should be doing your best whether you have a hundred people listening or a hundred thousand.“
I remember conversations with Tracy after disappointing listenership figures would come in. I’d say, “Look, this is our ego talking. If you had 50,000 more listeners tomorrow, would you do a different radio show? Or is it just that your ego would feel better because you knew more people were listening?”
It’s a complicated issue. The competitive part of you believes in basic fairness, if you’re putting in your best effort, producing good content, doing good work, then you deserve the results or rewards. But that’s not how radio works. There are many factors determining who listens to a radio show, most entirely out of the presenters’ control.
The analogy they often use is the “toothpaste test” (at least before discount supermarkets and own label brands). Everyone always bought the same toothpaste. If you were a Colgate person or a Sensodyne person, you stuck with it. People are like that with radio. It’s extremely difficult to change listening habits because they’re part of people’s routines. For a station like SPIN, which only launched in 2002, we were up against juggernauts like FM104 and 98FM in the Dublin market and trying to get people to change ingrained behaviors. That’s what makes building listenership so difficult.
The Ambition That Became My Downfall
There’s one other truth worth mentioning: I was too ambitious for my own good (still am, if we’re being honest).
That’s one of my fundamental flaws or character defects, I’m never satisfied. I was a radio presenter, but I also wanted to be the person in charge of the radio station. I wanted to be the programme director making all the decisions, or the CEO of the radio company. I wanted to be more important, paid more money. I wanted the big jobs.
When I was young, I always thought I was going to be rich and famous. Many of my decisions were based on how to achieve wealth, fame, prestige, power, or importance. So I started on a path into management, getting involved behind the scenes as well as being on air. Looking back now, I can see that this took me away from the thing I loved (being a radio presenter) and brought me into areas I didn’t really love, because I thought that’s what I wanted and what success looked like.
My radio career started to become just a job. By the end, with all my admin and management responsibilities, it felt like work (ugghhhh). And I remember thinking, “Well, if this is now just a job, it doesn’t really matter whether I’m working in radio, law, or anywhere else. A job is a job. I might as well work as a lawyer where I can make more money and have more job security.“
If I’m no longer spending my time doing something I love and am passionate about, what’s the point?
Looking back after 10 years (and a lot of therapy), I can see that I could have just pulled back from the roles and responsibilities I didn’t enjoy. But at the time, I was too wrapped up in chasing success, approval, and being seen as successful. I couldn’t see that I was ruining the thing I loved by trying to be “successful” as I defined it then.
Look at me!! HEY, EVERYBODY LOOK AT ME!!
What I can now admit is that losing radio was a big deal for me. For a long time, I struggled with acknowledging how much I loved the attention, loved that people openly enjoyed what Tracy and I did, that they listened every day and were genuinely invested in our show.
I loved that feeling of approval and validation, that sense of achievement and “being someone.” (It was ego. It was massively ego).
I used to pretend I hated it, but I secretly loved people knowing I was a radio presenter and being impressed. “Wow, that’s incredible! Who’s the most famous person you’ve interviewed?” they would say. There’s something very intoxicating about having a job that makes you feel special.
I imagine pilots must get this when kids come up to them, or anyone who’s somewhat famous. I can see how social media influencers get hooked on it. That sense of validation and importance is powerful stuff.
I lied and pretended I didn’t like talking about it. In taxis, when asked what I did, I’d say “I work in the media industry” because part of me felt embarrassed. But another part loved it: “Look at me, I’m amazing! I’m a radio presenter! I’ve talked to all these famous people! I have a cool job!“
That struggle lasted my entire radio career. I’ve never liked that attention-seeking element of myself, the part that wants to be seen a certain way. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I was (and still am) a nerd. I’ve never been cool. Not once in my entire life. But being a radio presenter made me feel cool. Even though I knew I wasn’t, and anyone who worked with me knew I wasn’t. (Spoiler alert: many radio presenters are awful geeks and nerds. They call them “radio anoraks“)
But insofar as I’ve ever been cool, the breakfast show on SPIN 1038 was my peak. It was as cool as I’m ever going to be.
Two Versions of Myself
When I look back, I had almost two separate personalities. There was the radio version of myself and the non-radio version. Being on the radio and in that environment was like being taken off the leash. I could say and do anything.
To this day, the most outrageous conversations I have are with my radio friends. We say the most wildly inappropriate things. There was a freedom there that was uncensored. I could say whatever I wanted, and most of the time, no matter how crazy or ridiculous it was, it got a laugh (again, very intoxicating).
Now I realize that when I stopped having that outlet, that freedom, that uncensored expression, it was a huge loss. It was a major disconnect from a vital part of myself, something I didn’t recognize or appreciate at the time.
The other thing I now admit I miss is the adrenaline rush, the power of performing and entertaining people daily. That feeling of being live, whether on radio or TV, is unpredictable and uncontrollable. There’s nowhere to hide. The mic goes on, you’re on. Whatever you say, you say. You can’t take it back. Like that time a caller said on air on our show at 8am “Come on will you beep, you c**nts” (true story!)
I imagine it feels like being a stand-up comedian, musician, or performer. Again, I was very reluctant at the time to think of myself that way. I wouldn’t have considered myself a performer or entertainer. I was “just a radio presenter” doing what I’d done for years.
I didn’t place much value in it as a service or as something valuable to other people. But from age 17 to 34, I was getting that fix regularly. For those last six years, I was doing a three-hour radio show five days a week, experiencing a rush or high that I didn’t fully recognize.
Looking back, my wife says that after I’d had a good radio show, I was buzzing. She could tell immediately from talking to me, within a couple of sentences, whether I’d had a good show or a bad one. Having a good radio show is like having a good performance. It’s like a gig going well for a musician or comedian. When it all connects, it feels electric. I’m struggling to describe it in words now, what it feels like to have a great show.
The Boring Life
I think there’s a (very imperfect and somewhat indulgent and self-aggrandising) comparison to be made with elite athletes and the struggle they go through when they retire. You regularly hear from those who’ve retired that living life without those extreme highs and lows of competition is challenging. It’s a bit similar to that, I’m guessing.
The timing of my radio career was also significant. When I started “Fully Charged” 16 years ago in 2009, SPIN had only been on air for seven years. We were the plucky underdogs, the challengers, the disruptors, pretenders to the radio throne. There was a mentality of “us against them“. We desperately wanted to show everyone what we were capable of.
This created a real sense of purpose, camaraderie, and togetherness. It felt like a team sport; us against 98FM, against FM104, against the incumbents and the establishment (Boo Urns). That feeling was palpable in everything we did, from our nights out to the conversations we had and the fun we shared. We always wanted to be (to quote Daft Punk) “harder, better, faster, stronger” than them. There was a real unity of vision, purpose, and passion. Many of us were paid peanuts at the time, but we didn’t care!
It felt somewhere between a football team fighting for promotion and a new startup company – that energy, zest, passion, and sense of purpose. Everyone loved it.
It’s possibly strange for people who’ve never worked in a place like that to understand just how powerful it is. Imagine working in a company of (typically) 20-somethings who all absolutely love their jobs, love where they work, can’t believe how lucky they are, and everyone feeling that way simultaneously. Everyone feeling they were part of something almost like a mission, with an almost missionary zealousness.
When I left, I lost all of that. And I never acknowledged it or accepted it or really even thought about it. I just parked it: decision made, that was something I used to do, I don’t do it anymore, let’s move on.
Living on Borrowed Glory
For probably the first two or three years after leaving, I managed (not consciously) to live on the coattails of my radio career. In my new jobs, people would introduce me: “He used to be a radio presenter.” I would get to talk about it as if I was still doing it.
For those years, there was a sort of reflected glory. I was still seen as this exotic creature who used to be a radio presenter and was now a lawyer. It was a point of interest and conversation, and I got to still feel special or part of something special.
In later years, when I experienced some mental health difficulties and did quite a lot of therapeutic work, the team I was under coined the phrase “chasing special” as an underlying driver of my behavior. During that process, probably in the last year, I came to see how big a deal it was to lose what I’ve just described.
Going from an adrenaline rush every day for years, having a creative outlet, a job I loved, experiencing genuine roars of laughter at something hilarious at least once a day, every day, for years… I didn’t appreciate it. I didn’t value it. I didn’t realize what I’d lost.
Life got busy – my first son was born in 2014, my daughter in 2017, and my third child in 2020. I was rebuilding a career in law. We bought a house, got a dog. I just looked forward and never back.
For the first four years, I would write a blog post on the anniversary of our last show. I remember maybe on year six or seven, it was the first time I forgot – the 29th of May came and went without me noticing. That made me really sad. I thought, “Oh, it’s over.”
The Identity Crisis
Now that I’ve had more time, and as part of the therapy process involving retrospection and understanding what makes you who you are, I’ve explored why I became a radio presenter and what I loved about it. That naturally made me face what I lost or miss about it.
There’s a strange cultural dimension to how we talk about our lives, jobs, and satisfaction levels. I worry that saying I miss radio somehow undermines my current career, that employers might think I don’t really love law or don’t really want to be there.
It feels like admitting you sometimes miss your ex while in a new relationship. There’s a reason people don’t do that! It’s a difficult balancing act to maintain, to be honest in a public arena without fear of doing yourself harm. Do I love being a lawyer as much as I loved being a radio presenter? No, I don’t. Do I like my job? Am I happy, committed, and good at it? Yes. Does the fact that I don’t feel the same way about it undermine that? No, but I can see how it could be perceived that way.
In job interviews over the last decade, I’ve had to convince people that I’m as committed to law as I was to radio. There was always that question mark, particularly at the start: “Is this guy going to stay? Will he miss radio and go back? Is he going to realize he’s made a mistake?“
I’ve been very fortunate with bosses who have embraced my personality and creativity. But I still feel uncomfortable being honest about what I get from my jobs. It feels like betrayal of your current role to say you miss your old one, even though it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your current life.
There’s a saying I often think about: “You think what you think and you feel what you feel whether you want to or not” It’s not wrong to have these feelings. But we’re encouraged through societal pressures to pretend that whatever we’re doing right now is the best thing ever, that we’re the happiest we’ve ever been. That sets an unrealistic expectation.
Even the most lawyerly of lawyers would struggle to convince me that drafting contracts is as exciting as interviewing Tom Cruise on the red carpet of a London Premier or sharing a bed with Ed Sheeran (again, true story….ish).
Looking at the Past Without Staring
There’s an expression I hear a lot in therapeutic settings: “Look at the past but don’t stare“.
I find it fascinating how much I’ve lived in the past without being aware of it. It’s like when I broke up with my first long-term girlfriend, after we’d been apart longer than we’d been together, it skewed my perception of time.
I presented the breakfast show “Fully Charged” with Tracy for six years, but it’s now been 10 years since I did that. When I left radio at 34, I’d been a presenter for half my life, starting at 17. Now I’ve been a radio presenter for 17 out of 44 years, far less than half (38.64%). And so it can have the affect of feeling less important, because it’s less of your time as a percentage, and the older I get, the less of my life I will have been a radio presenter.
I’ve realized how much of my identity was wrapped up in certain things. One way I’ve noticed this is how often I use the expression “I used to be” in conversation now. I used to be a radio presenter. I used to be a hypnotherapist. I used to be a life coach. I used to be a public speaking coach. I used to be athletic. I used to be on the Leinster squad for badminton.
I very rarely talk about what I am now.
In therapy, there’s a concept about being careful with identity labels. If I say “I’m a lawyer” it suggests my identity is built around being a lawyer. But if I say “I work as a lawyer” it means being a lawyer is my job, not my identity.
When your whole identity is built around being a radio presenter, and then you’re not anymore, what are you? That’s what I found, I had constructed my personality around being a radio presenter from age 17 onward. It was a powerful identity because it made me feel cool or special when I was actually a nerd and a goody-two-shoes.
For years, I’ve held onto “I used to be a radio presenter” like a life raft. A journalist once called me out for this in Hot Press, saying I was desperate for people to know that when I was a radio presenter, I used to be a lawyer. I was upset and offended by it at the time, but it was true.
When I was a radio presenter, I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a radio presenter. I was also a former lawyer. And when I went back to law, I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a lawyer, I also used to be a radio presenter. I thought it made me seem interesting and exotic.
The reactions were always interesting. People couldn’t believe I’d left law to be a radio presenter, and later, they couldn’t believe I’d left radio to return to law. It made me seem interesting. “Why did you leave? Why did you come back? What’s it like?“
People in radio cared far less about my legal background. But people in law were blown away that I used to be a radio presenter. That probably tells its own story.
Where To Now?
I don’t know is the honest answer. I did a job interview a few years ago and they asked that clichéd question, “Where do you see yourself five years from now?” I gave an honest answer (which my HR-professional wife thought was ridiculous): “I have no idea” (spoiler alert, I didn’t get the job).
Why are we all pretending? Why, when someone asks where you see yourself in five years, isn’t the answer for 99% of people: “I don’t know. I can’t think five years ahead. I could be dead. I could win the lottery. Who knows?“
I find it absurd that we force people into lying. What’s the purpose of that question other than to get you to say: “I see myself here, having progressed through the ranks, built up a client base, etc.” The purpose is for you to tell them what they want to hear.
I’m at a place where I now realize the importance of that creative outlet. I know I need to get some of that back into my life. All the reasons I left radio are still there, I couldn’t see myself going back to being a full-time radio presenter.
There would also be a danger in trying to recapture former glory or a moment in time. As I said, it wasn’t just being a radio presenter that I loved. It was being that radio presenter at that stage of my life with those people at that stage of the radio station’s evolution. It was a perfect storm that I don’t think could be recreated.
But I do miss doing something I love purely for the joy of doing it. When I started in radio, it was purely for the love of it. It had nothing to do with listener numbers, money, or impressing people. I just loved being on the radio, and for a long time, I couldn’t believe anyone would pay me to do it. I used to say “some people play squash, I present radio shows”
Finding Joy Again
I’ve been thinking about doing a podcast. I started a podcast before that was quite successful (it was briefly the #1 podcast in Ireland in its niche). But I was doing it to be successful at it, not for the joy of it.
What I want now is to do something just for fun. When I consider potential projects, I ask myself: “Would I want to do this even if I knew no one was going to hear it?” Like people who paint in their spare time, not to sell their work or even show it, just for the pleasure of painting. I often wonder if you paint paintings but never show them to anybody, are you an artist?
That’s what interests me now, doing something because it’s fun, because I’ll have a laugh, because I’ll love doing it. If others enjoy it too, great, but that’s not the reason.
However, I find it very hard to turn off that success-oriented mindset. In today’s culture, we (or I, at least) start by thinking: “How am I going to make this successful? How will I get listeners/engagement/publicity?” rather than “Wouldn’t this be fun?”
If all you do is spend an hour each week laughing with friends and having fun, that’s amazing! That would be a success! Our definition of success has made doing things purely for enjoyment nearly impossible. I’m open to bringing that back into my life.
No Regrets, They Don’t Work (Robbie Williams)
There’s also an element of regret about how I treated my time as a radio presenter, that I didn’t enjoy it to its fullest potential and wasn’t always the best version of myself. The desire to achieve a certain outcome or level of success tainted my experience.
I now understand that some of the mental health struggles I’m dealing with today were factors then too, affecting my approach to life and work. If I’m being kind to myself, I wasn’t always the best version of myself. I wasn’t always a great friend, colleague, or person. Part of me would love to go back and do it again with the knowledge, insight, and self-awareness I have now. I think I would enjoy it even more and get more out of it.
These thoughts can be intrusive. I definitely regret some things I did or didn’t do, some ways I acted. I think that’s natural, everyone looks back at previous jobs or versions of themselves and thinks they could have done things differently.
But because this was almost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a golden ticket, not making the most of it leaves a tinge of sadness over the whole experience.
I think I finally ‘get’ it
One thing I really struggled with in my career as a radio presenter was acknowledging the value of even being a radio presenter. I always downplayed its importance and relevance.
I clearly remember a conversation with Tracy in the studio when she mentioned her dad (also named Brian) had called her out for diminishing what she did. We typically described our job as “talking shite on the radio“, just having a bit of craic, nothing serious, not brain surgery or rocket science. No big deal.
Her dad had said (I’m paraphrasing, despite putting it in quotes): “You’re underselling yourself and the value of what you do. Providing entertainment, light relief, or distraction to people is valuable. It’s important. People need that in their lives.“
I never really appreciated that at the time. I didn’t want to seem cocky or self-important, to think that what I did mattered or was making a contribution.
I see it differently now. Particularly post-COVID, people talk about the importance of feeling good, whether through Netflix binges or funny cat videos or TikTok dances. People need distraction from the difficulties of everyday life.
I’ve seen it through therapy too, where people are encouraged to find something; a podcast, a funny video, a comedy that makes them feel good (or to “activate their sooth system” to use the therapy lingo). I knew then, but didn’t appreciate, that there were mornings people were listening to our radio show and laughing or being engaged in a way that helped them escape whatever they were dealing with.
I know this now because it happens to me when I listen to something or watch stand-up comedy. That was part of what we did, part of our role, and I didn’t place enough importance on that outlet.
There was always a connection with listeners. We had regulars like at a bar (NORM!); people who came to events we organized, people who jumped out of planes with us. We had a tribe. But I didn’t appreciate the value of it.
Bizarrely, I still discover its impact. One of the mums from my son’s class a few years ago approached me after her daughter mentioned I used to be on radio (my son had told his class I was on Christmas FM). She Googled me and said, “Oh my God, I used to listen to you and Tracy every morning! I remember your last show – I was late for work because I stayed listening to it.”
Our show (and indeed many radio shows then and now) was important to people, not life-changing perhaps, but it mattered. On our last show, we received incredible messages. I vividly remember one from a mother who said she and her teenage daughter had been fighting almost non-stop for the last few years and couldn’t agree on anything. The only time they got along was in the car on the way to school, listening to us and laughing together. She said it was crucial for their relationship.
Those realizations mostly came on the last day of the show when we got messages like that. If I’d been more aware of that impact, I might have valued what we did differently. But now I can accept that I wasn’t “just talking shite on the radio“. What we did had value. It entertained people, and there’s nothing wrong with being proud of adding some levity to people’s lives.
Making someone laugh is life-affirming and soul-affirming. There’s science behind the saying “laughter is the best medicine“. That genuine laugh-out-loud moment has power. Often, in truth, it was our listeners on the phone who created those laughs rather than us. But we facilitated it. We were the conduits. That was worth doing, worth being proud of, worth celebrating.
And finally, ten years later, I can accept all that. I can be glad I did it and be proud of it, not undersell it as “just a bit of fun“. It was that, but it was much more too.
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