*blink, blink* Hello? is this still on?

So it's been 8 years since I started this and nary a post in over 7. So what happened?

Well, my son will be 8 next month, yesterday (Thu 19th May 2016) was my 8th anniversary at work, we aren't in Australia, I don't blog about wine, (I just drink it), I still do the same job and I'm slightly less grumpy.

I got very fed up with spending all day in front of a PC and slowly stopped using them at home. My wife has the laptop out nearly ever night, doing one thing or another. I stopped using Twitter, I kept an eye on Facebook but never posted. Worst of all, I did completely forget about this place.

But something has changed recently.

I was speaking to my good friend SteveB at the beginning of the year, over alcohol, as we do now and again, and we got talking about 80s music, as per usual, and how I had noticed, inadvertently, that he seemed to spend a lot of time tweeting about old episodes of Top of the Pops. *sigh* Yes, I had gone back on Twitter for a look see one day and sort of hung about lurking for a week or two on and off, just like when trying to get back in to being part of h2g2, back in the day.

So anyway, he said, "Yes, I do enjoy tweeting about TotP, as do many others, just like during Eurovision, and we rip the carp* out of the old DJs and the styling and sometimes we tweet about how good the music is, or isn't in certain cases. But mostly I moan about the schedule BBC4 are running to show these old shows."
"Whaddayamean?", slurs I. It was quite late by this time.
"Well, what with Yewtree, the BBC have refused to play any episodes hosted, or even co-hosted by anyone being investigated, which is quite frustrating, and also they just don't show, or change the schedule for anything else, like the Proms, or anything more high-brow then old episodes of Top of the Pops"
So, we ruminated on that for a bit longer before calling it a night and heading home, or rather we didn't and drank more which resulted in us devolving into our usual silly inane chatter that amuses us, but not our wives, which did end up with us heading home. And my wife calling me an @rse. And my son saying "Yeah daddy, you and Uncle Steve are just too silly and shouldn't drink so much, that's why you are fat"

So how has this brought about a change? Did I realize my family were right, I am an @rse and drink too much? No, but it did get me thinking. And what a thought I came up with. It was genius! And so simple and the world would thank me for my 'Eureka' moment one day!

The thought was this: What SteveB needed was to fill the void of the missing episodes by doing a podcast about them. Simple. Genius. Everybody wins!...Until I mentioned it to him.

We bumped into them outside Asda one evening and I told him about this great idea he could have, about doing a podcast based on the old TotP show of that week in history, and how we could resurrect some of the more obscure songs none of the commercial 80 stations played!

Don't get me wrong, he didn't out and out dismiss it, but there was a definite hint of "Stop talking carp*, man", so I said no more and left feeling a little deflated as the light dimmed a little in the brightness of the future.

A week later, over dinner, and SteveB said "You know, I've been thinking about this podcast thing, but I don't want to do a direct replication of the TotP chart of any given week. There are loads of things like that out there already, and I agree that there are a lot more interesting tracks out there than those we hear daily on other 80s shows, so I was thinking of this...we could do a rundown of the chart, the full chart, pick a few songs, play the top 5 and maybe have a record of the week? What do you think and do you want in?"
"Er...yeah!", says I, and that's how we started.
It took us a couple of weeks to get the time right to get together and attempt to record something, but on Thursday 31st March 2016, we had 90 minutes of free time to attempt to record something.

In one hour we managed to record.... 100 up to number 85, go off on about 15 different tangents, dissolve into fits of laughter about 5 times and generally muck about. We were running out of time, as I had to leave and pick my wife up, and SteveB had wanted to get this done and out for Saturday, so I said "Look don't worry, call this our pilot and throw it in the archive and we can try again next week. We'll be better organised. It'll go smoother, I'm sure. I've never done this sort of thing before, it'll work out".
SteveB's shoulder sort of slumped a little and he mumbled, "I suppose so", and I gathered up my stuff and headed off, thinking no more about it, apart from wondering what we could do to be better organised and make the next attempt a better one. "Maybe we don't need to go through the whole chart, maybe we just do a quick recap in batches of 15, play a track, next batch, play a track, track from the album and repeat until we get to the top 5", and I think SteveB was having the same, if not very similar thoughts to this as well, but I didn't think too much more about it until Saturday morning, when I got a text from SteveB saying "Podcast is up" and a link.

"What?", I thought, "How?" Turns out with a bit of clever editing and a quick re-record of virtually everything, he made it sound like we had both contributed to the whole podcast. It actually sounded quite good, although there was a definite issue with mic quality versus track quality. My wife was mildly impressed at both the obscurity of the tracks chosen and the knowledge going with it, plus it was funny. "So what's next week's, then?", she asked "and are you going to actually manage to get it all done in 90 minutes this time?"
"Darn tooting, we are!" and with that said, that was it, there was no going back now, we just had to get good at this thing, or give up trying.

Our first podcast is 2nd April 1988, is hosted on SteveB's website and can be found on Mixcloud here

*edited from the original in case young people read this