Radio Curry Challenge

Curry.

A bit of an obsession of mine. Pretty much the only thing I can cook besides pasta. It's something that gives me a vague pride in living in Tooting. "You know, Tooting is where you can get the most authentic Pakistani curry in all of London" is what I said to my flatmate when I was first showing her around the flat.

So, when I became the editor of the last episode of the Round 1 project, I knew that it had to end with a curry cook-off!

Malaysian Chicken Curry, Indian Paneer Curry and Jamaican Curried Goat.
All next to a gleeful Rashmi 

However, since we were an Olympics show I put a international spin on it. We had a slim team of three people: Shamara - a Jamaican, Rashmi - an Indian, Me - a Malaysian. Three great curry nations. So, we battled it out for the honour of  being taking home the Gold medal for curry excellence. To be precise, we were battling it out to win 'The Round 1 Spatula'.

I decided that on top of the tasting of the curry we would have each do a small report on the curry we were making - so, several pieces of curry goodness sprinkled throughout the show. Incidentally, when I emailed our supervisor the plan for the show on the night before he was a bit concerned, replying with "it's the last day of the Paralympics, why are you spending half the show on curry?!?". I justified it noting that it was in the spirit of international competition and the curry chimed well with being in East London. I think he bought it.

Shamara made a delicious goat curry. It was actually the first time she had ever cooked a curry, so she took careful instructions from her mother on how to prepare an authentic Jamaican dish. This curry genuinely blew me away. I remember saying with a measure of surprise, "Wow, this is ACTUALLY really good". Succulent, herbal and really tender.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Rashmi prepared a Tamil paneer curry (Paneer is a type of cheese, though it has a consistency similar to a tough tofu) . We were all a bit apprehensive, because less than a week before Rashmi became violently ill as a result of a dodgy curry she cooked for herself. Her curry was decent, though as our judge said, it had a Heinz tomato soup element to it as a result of the cream she added.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

I myself prepared a Malaysian 'Kari Ayam'. Essentially I cooked a normal chicken curry, but threw in some Malaysian curry powder. I actually hadn't cooked a chicken curry in a while, so asked my cousin Kenneth for some advice since he is generally an expert at all things food related. He has actually been a vegetarian for several years, so he was going on some old memories. I was somewhat pleased with curry, though I held back on the spice (I usually really go to town with the chilli) since I was unsure about how much our guest could take. This turned out be my downfall, since the curry ended up being a bit too mild.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

For our judge, I enlisted the expertise of Lily Rae, who was also coming on our show to perform a 'Canal Sessions' song for us. She is a fantastic songwriter, plus she also writes on a food blog called http://badsalad.wordpress.com/, so I figured she would be a perfect candidate to judge the curry. Her friend Lawrence (who is her guitarist) also had gave his opinion on the curry.

Lily Rae and Lawrence

Shamara, the Round 1 Curry Champion!

She gave a great analysis of our curry and rightly awarded Sharama the award as Round 1 Curry Champion, bestowing on her the Round 1 Spatula. To hear the important curry tasting stuff, skip to 20 min 50 secs in of the soundcloud post (remember you can download it too!):

Shaun Tey's Swedish Adventure!

Well… I've been neglecting this blog for quite a while, as I've been preoccupied with the Round 1 project with Roundhouse Radio, which is keeping me occupied until the end of the Paralympics. I thought I’d post some of the packages I've been making and photos I've been taking on the blog.

So, each week on the show we investigate a foreign community and their presence in London.

As part of this series, in Show 9 I investigated the presence Sweden in the Capital. Recording the package sent me on a little Swedish adventure across London.

Here’s the package:

First I found Swedish blogger Stephanie Dellner (who explained that she didn’t have a particularly Swedish accent on account of her moving away from Sweden when she was very young). She has a lovely blog which is full of articles about food, with lots gorgeous photos of both Sweden and the food she has cooked.

Check out her blog: http://www.alwayssohungry.com/

She suggested that I check out the Swedish church near Marble Arch, since it acts as a cultural hub for the Swedish expat community. She also said that I had to sample some cinnamon buns, which seem to epitomise Swedish baking.

Anders

Anders is the chaplain of the Swedish church in London. I had a long conversation with him, where he talked about his attraction to England from an early age due to his love of English football. Plus, he told me that loads of Swedes loved London because the people were really friendly and open, which was a sharp contrast to most Swedes who are usually very reserved. So, it appears that there is a nation which is even more quiet and stiff-upper-lipped than us in England!

Sarah was working in the café and gave me two cinnamon buns for the price of one!

Round 1! Live On Air!

I’ve been working on this for more than a month with about 13 other young Londoners. We’ve been deciding the structure of the show and we’re going to have a good mix of pre-recorded packages, outside broadcasts and music.

It’s going to be live and coming from a radio barge based on the Regent’s Canal. We’ll be able to get the buzz off the crowd and sounds from the waterways.

Here is a clip giving you a taster about what our project is going to be all about:

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Check out our first show, which went out on the 25th July (and was of course awesome).

This had provides a bit of an intro to the Round One team. This broadcast live from Camden, though tomorrow will be the first broadcast from the lush surroundings of Victoria Park during the build up to the Olympic opening ceremony.

It will be going out 3 times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 6.30pm. Listen to the show live at: http://www.roundhouse.org.uk/listen or simply load the direct stream at (which I find easier to use):  http://roundhouse.org.uk/sites/all/themes/roundhouse/radio_player/RHRadio_Livestream.mov

Check out our blog: http://round1radio.wordpress.com/

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/events/398544756870861/

Twitter hash tag is:  #round1pirates

The Olympic Torch Comes To Tooting!

Okay, so it’s been quite a while since the typed word has graced the screen of the Thoughtfully Tooting blog. So, what a better way to return than with something that is actually thoughtfully Tooting. 

Yesterday on the 25th July, I arrived back in Tooting after another weary day at work, only to find the streets lined with people all rather mysteriously facing in the same direction. I remembered that this was to be the day the Olympic Torch came to Tooting, something that I had thought I couldn’t really care less about.

It’s fire. Something that I will generally come across everyday, so I thought it was rather odd to wait patiently in the street to see some flame go pass for less than a minute.

I sat in my bedroom, wondering if I could be bothered, though then realised I didn’t really have any excuse to not walk 5 minutes down my road to witness the embodiment of the Olympic Spirit. 

And I have to say it was rather nice. It was cool to have something create a buzz in my hometown and see loads of people in the turn out for something that was unambiguously good natured. It was warm and happy – something that could only be good for the community. It works because we want it to work. We turn out to see the torch because we do want to enjoy ourselves and we all feed of the communal joy surrounding us.

What people don’t realise when it is on the TV is that the Torch is preceded by a procession of commercialism. First there was Samsung in their blue party bus, full of attractive young people jumping up and down, saying things like “make some noise!” – the crowd responded in kind with yelps and huzzahs. Then there was the Coke bus, which did more or less the same thing, though with a slightly swankier vehicle (plus they gave out coke on occasion) – again, crass commercialism was not going to bring down the warmth and love of this once in a time community event. 

Then the Lloyd’s TSB bus went pass. The crowd went dead.

“Come you can do better then that!” said the poor man tasked with whipping the crowd into an Olympic fervour at the sight of a moving bank. I could see him force a smile as he reflected on the impossibility of drumming up a party atmosphere at the sight of the most boring (and at times shameful) aspect of British life. Samsung makes smartphones! Who doesn’t like those? And Coke makes drinks that you can mix with booze! Banks just remind you of debt, mortgages, credit crunch, obligations, evictions, bailouts, bankruptcy, etc… 

Well… at least it wasn’t a Barclay’s bus.

Radio in Review: The Truth

“The Truth… movies for your ears” goes the tagline of this radio project, which has managed the impressive feat of creating radio dramas that don’t bore the shit out of me.

Please... no! Not an omnibus!

I have long abhorred radio dramas, with the main focus of my hatred being Radio 4’s ‘The Archers’ and the quarter hour crime against my ears which is the Woman’s Hour’s ‘15 minute drama’. Both of which are basically 15 minutes of middleclass white people sighing and moaning over a kitchen sink. This aversion could be down to my dislike of soaps as a format, but I believe I am frustrated with the way these two programmes completely fail to utilise the creative potential of the radio medium. Both dramas reduce the radio drama to a cheap man’s TV series, whilst trying to compensate for the lack of visuals by destroying any sense of subtlety.

David Tennant... a radio star!

Of course, radio dramas do not have to be painful. The BBC’s World Service has produced a number of wonderful plays. Also, Radio 4’s ‘Love Virtually’, which was voiced by David Tennant and Emilia Fox in March 2012, was a brilliant drama revolving around the romantic correspondence between two individuals who never meet.

This work played to radio’s strengths as a non-visual medium, since the drama unfolds purely through a series of emails and letters. The radio drama was captivating since the characters had no knowledge of what each other looked-like, a facet which was an essential ingredient to the story. It rose beyond poor-man’s TV and created something that was meant to be appreciated as a unique audio experience. ‘Love Virtually’ can be downloaded at this link (incidentally, I have absolutely no connection to the site that is hosting the mp3):  http://www.david-tennant.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/lovevirtually.mp3

But I digress, so let us head to ‘The Truth’ of the matter. In the same way that ‘Love Virtually’ utilised the purely auditory aspect of radio to present an epistolary novel effectively, ‘The Truth’ finds inventive ways of presenting stories for a listening audience.

For example, in ‘Tape Delay’, an episode that was my introduction to the series, the drama revolved almost entirely around phone conversations, placing the listener in the same shoes as the protagonist. It starts off with a phone conversation between a male protagonist and his would-be-date. However it soon goes beyond this original phone conversation, as the protagonist listens back to the original phone conversation (which he accidentally recorded). Then in an act which could only ever work on radio, he decides to load the recording onto his computer and edits it to produce his own fictional radio mini-dramas using his would-be-date’s voice. This piece fully utilises the way audio is open to manipulation in a way that video is not. Do give it a listen: 

Again, in ‘Eat Cake’ they are able to use telephone conversations in order to produce a sweet romantic comedy, which like ‘Love Virtually’, embraces the fact that the appearance of the characters is mystery. This probably my favourite episode.

‘People Beat’ indicates that ‘The Truth’ (and possibly radio drama as a whole) excels best at short stories, which cover small individual situations. This piece works by having a humorous setup as the female protagonist stresses in anticipation of a potentially embarrassing family catastrophe.

'Making It' with the Roundhouse

Here’s the project that took up most of April 2012 – a documentary for Roundhouse Radio on how to get a career in the radio industry.

We got advice from Mike Anthony (the owner of Bang FM and one part of BBC 1xtra’s ‘Rampage’), Amy Redmond (BBC Radio 1 Producer), Ruth Barnes (BBC 6music contributor, Amazing Radio presenter and creator of the Other Woman podcast -  http://theotherwomanpodcast.podbean.com/ ),  Julie Adenuga (Rinse FM drive-time presenter) and Sacha Brooks (Capital FM Birmingham). In the end I think we made a great show, which is genuinely informative (there was loads of great advice, plus there was loads of good stuff that didn't make the final cut).

We actually had a whole range of ideas for our radio show. In the end we had two show ideas, a documentary on cassettes (‘The last Cassette Generation”) and a show about breaking into creative industries with a primary focus on radio.

After much deliberation we decided to go for the Radio documentary, since our mentor, Ray Paul, said that it would be more straightforward to make, given the contacts we had through the Roundhouse, and suggested that it would be more suited to the young creative types that listen to Roundhouse Radio. Also, later on in the month I heard a FANTASTIC series on Resonance FM by Naomi Christie http://cassetteradio.wordpress.com/ (I intend to write a more detailed ‘Radio in Review’ in the coming weeks) - so a part of me is glad we didn't make something that was too similar to another project.

We quickly realised the sheer amount of work that goes into making a documentary! It was originally going to be recorded as live, with us trying to book guests to come into the studio, but we figured that it would be too difficult to get loads of people find the time to come in. The ten point structure idea was given to us by our mentor, since it would be more straightforward and easier for the audience to follow it the show was broken up into segments that were under 3 minutes.

The topics we chose to do were:

Be a Pain

Be Ambitious

Make Your Mark

Be Wise

Make Mistakes

If in Doubt… Blag

Go Viral

Get Stuck In

Do It Yourself

Take Action

Me with Emma

It was pretty difficult to get interviewees at first, though eventually we were able to get quite a few contributors on board by simply asking them to record their questions from home and email them to us. After a disastrous attempt to edit it together on Protools (more because we were completely incapable of using a Mac), I did a rough cut of the show on Audacity, which I emailed to Ally (our team’s tech person) to put all the music and effects under the interviews. The girl doing the topic idents is Emma, the producer.

We all got loads of experience, plus we realised that making radio was easy to do by ourselves. We hardly used any of the professional Roundhouse Radio software or equipment (however I did borrow an Olympus Dictaphone to do the Amy Redmond interview). We used Audacity on our laptops and I recorded the script at home with a Tascam dictaphone in my room. Plus, big tip for anyone working in a team making DIY shows, wetransfer.com is a godsend – since it lets you transfer massive files online, meaning that you can transfer Audacity project wholesale to others. Producing this proved that, technology wise, everyone has access to the tools they need. It certainly helped that the contributors we used were technology savvy, but anyone who has access to a smart phone could easily record answers to questions using a voice recorder app (as I suspect Julie from Rinse did) and send it to you via the web.

Hackney Marshes, Football and Adventures with BBC Radio 1

Over the last few months I’ve been putting together a radio documentary for the Roundhouse about breaking into the radio industry. Making the documentary involved hassling lots of radio professionals to do interviews with us. After emailing Amy Redmond (the Radio 1 producer who tutored me in the ‘Penniless Podcaster’ class) about helping us out, she emailed back saying:

  

Amy Redmond!

“Hey Shaun,

Nice one, totally, and you're bbc too yay!

Well, can I set you a lil fun challenge in return?!  I am making lots of short video/audio clips about east London in the run up to radio 1's hackney weekend. I want to get down to hackney marshes either this or next Sunday to do some voxes with some local footballers about 'their hackney' to clip together and make a short podcast. Maybe to take a few pics too.

It will be going on the radio 1 academy page, so it’s a good thing to have done in terms of experience and it'll be fun too!”

Well, I thought it sounded like a fun day out… and it was!

Here’s a recording of Amy talking about the podcast and why we are making it about the marshes. It was recorded whilst walking along a canal in Hackney on a beautifully scenic day, so you can hear the sound of Amy’s bike rolling along as well as the sound of other cyclists who are out for a ride.



 For those of you who are curious about the process behind preparing for interviews, this is a recording of us discussing how we are going to go about getting the material we need for the podcast:

 

Here’s the podcast me and Amy put together:

For those of you who don’t know, the Hackney Weekend is a this huge daylong music festival organised by the BBC that is descending down on the Hackney Marshes. There’re some big names, like Rihanna and Jay Z – and the tickets are more or less given away for free to kids in and around London, with a substantial bulk of them being set aside for the young people of Hackney. Amy is the 'social media content producer' for the Hackney Weekend, hence why she was making the podcast. She's also a Hackney resident, so she was really keen to make something that celebrated her area.

The Hackney Marshes are massive. You'll find it laden with football pitches and hundreds of footballers. There are probably over a dozen matches going on simultaneously on a Sunday morning. It’s loud and lively – so you can pick up some great sounds for radio. Plus, it didn’t make it into the final piece, but there’s always lots of foul language coming from the sides of the pitches.

However, all the footballers were really friendly and willing to go on the record about how much they loved the marshes. A recurring theme was how it’s like one big family at the marshes and there’s a deep sense of community.

After we recorded the voxes, I interviewed Amy and asked her a few questions about getting a job in the industry for my radio documentary. You'll be able to hear her responses, along with advice from 4 other radio professionals in 'Making It' - a 30 minute guide to a career in radio - coming soon to this blog! Actually Amy Redmond has already posted up on her blog! See it at: http://amyredmond.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/making-it-in-radio-industry.html

You can find out more about the Hackney Weekend at: 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/events/e9wmxj