A friend of mine, the rising star of UK talk radio, and host of the new Sunday Night UK internet radio show “No Holts Barred” Mr Michael Holt, asked me if I had any of now defunct Play Radio UK’s old Sunday Roast podcasts left. The answer is I do have a couple lying around on my hard drive, and since they are now a rarity (for reasons that may become clear when you listen) I will share them here with him and with you. The Sunday Roast is a Sunday night programme that took over in the Autumn of 2008 from the more popular Not The Tommy Boyd Show. It was not streamed in the way the NTTBS was, and so I did not make a point of collecting it for YouTube and in due course all the extant NTTBS will be in this blog also in its own section.

Hopefully the upgrade I purchased will enable me to host the 5 shows that I have. I thought they were being archived elsewhere, but it seems that that other archive has gone the proverbial journey…

(Later edit) The audio players may not be locating the files, as they are rather large, but Mikey tells me he has been able to download them from the library location by looking at the source, if that helps anyone else who wants to hear these and cannot get at them.

This is Sunday 12th October 2008. One of the earliest Roasts, with Jo McCafferty still on the team.

This is the following week, Sunday 19th October 2008.

I will give a little history that you, Mikey, probably know a lot – if not all – of, although you came in a bit later. It may be of use to others who are new to the UK internet talk radio microcosm and who happen to find their way here.

Following these two weeks the listenership of the Roast suffered as there was a rival Sunday night show, called Totally Chappers, http://www.totallychappers.com for the podcasts, and this was run by Peter Chapman and Eduardo Paris, who basically rallied the community of talk radio listeners and capitalised on dissatisfaction with the perceived reduction of attention to the listenership given by PRUK. They had switched off the official PRUK skype chats, resulting in a series of listener-hosted skype chats going on both in and out of show times, and the consequent fragmentation of the UK talk radio community.

After Tommy Boyd’s return to Play Radio UK in August 2008, his refusal to allow the continuation of studio-linked skype chatting, the failure of PRUK to re-establish video streaming after the close of the servebeer server, the alienation of Stuart Heron who was a strong technical as well as content providing team member, as well as shortness with a number of loyal contributors, together with the determination to disallow any more zoo-format broadcasting, and the dismissing of zoo format by its own author as no longer relevant, and the promotion of the more controversial Matthew Hollick caused Peter and Eduardo to decide to go head to head against the Sunday Roast, which they did from September 2008 for 23 shows, with a few missing weeks which went through till February 2009 and those podcasts are all available at http://www.totallychappers.com/podcast.html .

By the time the impetus had gone out of the Totally Chappers programme, other less successful “bedroom radio” shows, as PRUK described the competing listener-controlled shows, including the Gary Show by Gary Redrup, Christopher Painter’s Falmer University Radio show, and the semi-professional Big Cigarette by Fat Steve, available on http://www.youcanshutup.com were already up and running, continuing the stream of alternative internet talk radio competition. LBC and Absolute Radio, and to a degree Mansfield FM with Ian Watkins show on Friday evenings (when PRUK didn’t have a talk schedule anyway) were also taking larger amounts of listeners, as you would expect from studios. Allan Caddick’s radio creativity had been diverted into his non-podcasted hospital radio show. This in fact meant that the contributor’s energies had gone in all directions. The existence of talk throughout the week instead of only on Sundays as in the time of the Not-The-Tommy-Boyd-Show meant that both live listening and also contributing to any single show was well down on the previous year’s quality.

For PRUK the gradual introduction by Tommy Boyd of such controversial presenters as Simon Darby, the Hermann Goering of the BNP and Catherine Cat, an Australian prostitute claiming to be an expert on culture but in fact not being aware of more than a small few specialist areas she liked in particular, and Chris Reardon, claiming to be an expert on podcasting but not knowing as much about it as the average of his PRUK listeners, although other than that an affable presenter, but not challenging enough for the given audience, also led to waning dissatisfaction with the whole PRUK output, although certain shows such as Fevzi the Gadget Detective, Joypod and Richard Cartridge were well received.

This means that by the time we get to April 2009, the Roast has already lost one presenter, Jo McCafferty, who resigned in protest at Simon Darby’s involvement, and Arron Weedall also seems to have lost heart also. The initial pzazz, such as it was, is therefore reduced in these April shows, and the number of callers has also diminished with comparison to the above shows.

This is Sunday 5th April 2009.

This is Sunday 19th April 2009.

This is Sunday 26th April 2009.

I’ll add the last one I have as soon as I can get it to upload here. I’ve tried in vain about a dozen times, and I can see that wordpress is far from ideal for hosting full length radio shows. Smaller audio it handles pefectly well, like my song here, the Shade of the White Plum Tree – which you can play without fear of “PMS for Mooses”, btw:-