In The Wee Small Hours...
We launch Radio Scotland's new overnight service tonight. Rob Matheson will be on air through the wee small hours with a collection of music and archive programmes. It also means we add another fifty programmes a week to the 91Èȱ¬ Radio Player, which is growing in popularity every month.
I'm very enthusiastic about night-time radio. There's something wonderful about lying in a darkened room listening to great music or a compelling story. You can lose yourself in the voices and the sounds. Unless, of course, you're working the night-shift and expected to operate heavy machinery.
As a former shift-worker myself, I remember the strange pattern of a nocturnal existence. I worked alone in an office from eleven at night until seven the next morning, seven nights a week. This was followed by four Rest days. The working nights were fine if you were busy. Time flew. Otherwise, time strolled. It sauntered. It ground to a halt. I'd find myself doing strange chores at four o'clock in the morning. Suddenly it would seem like a good idea to arrange telephone directories into north-south geographical order. Or write blistering letters of complaint to confectionery companies in the hope of securing some free chocolate. The Rest days could be equally strange. It took at least two days to get your body-clock back into order. You'd be off work during the week when everyone else was toiling. Gradually you came to live a weird half-life. You'd arrange trips to the cinema with friends and then fall asleep before the Kia-Ora advert. You'd wander through the supermarket forgetting what you wanted to buy and emerge with yet another six tins of cat food. Trying to rationalise your mistake you would head off to the pet shop to buy a cat. Of course, you'd emerge from that shop with a fish tank.
Yet being a creature of the night does have its advantages and listening to the radio overnight was something I discovered as a teenager. In those days very few domestic radio stations ran 24 hours a day. I'd tune, instead, to Short Wave services such as 91Èȱ¬ World Service with the wonderfully dramatic "This is London" and the muffled strains of Lilliburlero. There was also Radio Moscow, Radio Prague and the Voice of America. In fact, I once won a quiz on Radio Prague. This was the era of Soviet rule so the quiz question was probably along the lines of "What is the name of the river that runs through Glasgow and can you supply details of any local military installations?" Anyway, I won a vinyl recording of Czechoslovakian folk music which I still treasure.
But they never did return my aerial photographs.
