Alex Owens, a TY student at Blackrock College, Dublin, on the success of the school's radio station, BCR
THE HIGHLIGHT of Transition Year in my school is definitely Blackrock College Radio. It broadcasts on 92.1FM in a seven-mile radius of the school and online at www.blackrockcollege.com. This year it ran for one week in November.
It involves most of the year, split up into different teams: news, sports, guests and requests, technical, The Noon Show, Showcase, and advertising.
As we quickly found out, one week of broadcasting means at least three of preparation, and in the weeks leading up to it, the BCR room was a hive of activity - every aspect of running the station had to be taken care of.
I was on the news team. We were told that we were the nerve centre of the station, as we opened and closed the station live, as well as giving a live news report in the afternoon.
Such was the gravity of our new role that we would have to be in school by 6.30am. But we didn't care. We were the news team, and we got to say things such as "News team, assemble" and "Thanks for stopping by, Blackrock". For that week, we were anchormen.
But coming up with an hour's news involves the hard work of everyone involved. The jobs were varied. There was the producer, charged with keeping the newsroom quiet and communicating with the sound desk through double-glazed glass using hand gestures. The news headlines team had to scour the internet for the top stories, understand them, change the wording and read them out live on air. "It says in the papers" was possibly the hardest job of all. This team had to analyse the papers, figure out the main stories and show the differences and similarities of opinion between them. Finding a legitimate reason to say "on page three of the Startoday . . . " was something nobody managed to pull off.
Sports was much the same as news headlines, while the traffic and weather segments produced some of the best lines (with one presenter warning people in Cork to be on "skirt alert" due to windy weather).
Our entertainment bulletin earned something of a cult following, with the "(Kanye) Westwatch" feature producing some of the biggest laughs.
Overall, BCR 2008 was a huge success. Guests from the political, sporting and celebrity arenas were interviewed, among the highlights Neil Flynn (who plays the janitor in US television comedy Scrubs), Des Bishop, Risteárd Cooper, Joe Duffy,
Enda Kenny, Mary Hanafin, Ruairi Quinn, Chris de Burgh and many more.
In a year when everything that could have gone wrong did (including a pirate radio station broadcasting on the same frequency and a persistent leak in the roof), it was down to the professionalism and hard work of our studio managers - John Hughes and John Sills - that nobody listening really noticed. Our dedicated and hard-working managers, Fred Gilligan, Ed OFarrell, Gary Sullivan and Christina Nulty, were the other key ingredients - with a few nuts thrown in.
