Children on the radio, and China

One of the first feature programmes I made was in China Radio International, on Children's Day. Incidentally, in China June 1st is referred to as International Children's Day – while most non-communist countries use that to refer to the UN Children's day, on November 20th.

I went off to one of the international schools outside Beijing – what a school! It was only my second or third interview, and I wasn't to great – I didn't write down their names, and so kept forgetting them. Oops. And it was a little bit difficult to mic me and three children – one with a very quiet voice.

Anyway. They managers in CRI weren't terribly impressed with the content of the interview. I'm deeply ashamed of the utterly awful studio intro and closing I added – gaaaa! I'm not a presenter, no way!

Being a good new producer, I asked one of the bosses what I should have done to make a better show for Children's Day. "I would have interviewed one of their teachers".
So who would I interview on Teacher's Day, I thought. Frankly, I wasn't too impressed. I knew as much then as I do now, that Children need to be heard, and need to be listened to. We can learn a huge amount from children, about growing up, about living, about how adult prejudices are carried on down to younger people.

Later, on the webite of Glenn Hauser's World OF Radio, I saw a report that that week, the CRI engineers had been testing a new DRM capable transmitter, relaying that day's news & feature hour something like 8 times. That resulted in co-channel interference of a regular transmission from another country. But that report finished with something like "a good journalistic job on the interview with foreign kids". I was unsure it wasn't tongue in cheek, but my was it rewarding!

Incidentally, after a few weeks of DRM test transmissions, that transmitter out in Kashi (Kashgar), was more than likely used for jamming, of Chinese language shortwave transmissions from abroad, such as my current employer!

But that'll not change anytime soon. We can hope to get more young people on the radio though

We simply have to get children and teenagers on the radio more!

Maybe if teens and younger are on the radio more, there would be less acceptance of doing something as "far out there" as having a 12 year old host of BBC World Service's The Interview. Not sure on that…
And teenagers may seem to have the digital technology and society to simply go and "Broadcast themselves" (to paraphrase YouTube). Not everywhere they don't.And compare the people who listen to the World Service with those who use MySpace…

Finally, Auckland's 95bFM has children's programmes: I've only listened once though, so I'll have to tune in again this weekend and publish on that later.