Community Radio Awards

By now everyone has heard that the Saturday Sport and 21st Century Women programmes won certificates in the award ceremony held in the Birmingham City University on Saturday 10th September – sadly on the same night as our Friends of HCR104fm held their fundraising Variety Show in the Performing Art Centre.

Isaac and his finance and Steward Lunn and his wife travelled up to Brum for the evening to represent the Saturday Sports team. Josh Donolon was going to join them but had to pull out at the last moment. Bobby Jones and Linda Ness for the 21st Century Women team also went up for awards presentation.

The venue was a really lovely, bright and airy room with plenty of space and finalists were seated at large circular tables of 10, so I guess there were around 100 people present. We had to be patient for quite a long time before the first of our categories came up which was the Saturday Sports team in the ‘Sports Show of the Year’ and we were incredibly pleased when they won Bronze medal place out of the 5 finalists. Then we had an even longer wait for “Community Show of Year” category to be announced. Unusually for the awards ceremony, the MC invited one of the judges to speak about the entries in this category as, all community radio stations, consider that all their programmes are community shows and indeed they are. He highlighted the fact that all of the 5 finalists could have won the Gold place as there was so little to choose between the entries. Our 21st Century Women programme gained the Silver Award losing out by a hair’s breadth to East Coast FM programme “The School Bell” which the winner in his acceptance speech told us that it was a show which was mainly put together with adult assistance by 11 to 16 year olds.

But whichever way you look at it our two teams did incredibly well in their sections. As Bill Hensley said in a congratulatory message “this really puts us on the map”. So there’s next year’s Awards and everyone needs to be thinking about their own shows and whether they would be able to put together a good collage of sounds depicting the essence of their programmes which just might, win Gold next year.