freeform fill-in - "Happy hour (+ change)"

Did a quick fill-in for what used to be the program The Great Canadian Way, which had recently fallen off the schedule. In between the news programming and special sports programming (semi-final AAA high school basketball action), an hour need to be filled on Friday afternoon, so I stepped in, in one of my last days with ample time to spare. (The big news in the background is personal; after months of searching, I finally landed a job.)

As per last Monday's regular radio free gak, I had gutted one of my running themes, so I resurrected part of it and fleshed it out with a handful of other songs I could find on the subject of happiness, which fit topically (for me anyways). Every song either had "happy" or "happiness" in the title, though one had "joy" and one act had "happy" in their name. Other possibilities would've been; "robots", "burning", the moon, best songs from my shows, clips from my dreadful demo, and uh, good songs I guess.

I was told that the show could have run anywhere from 50-75 minutes, so flexibility was required. Naturally, the more obvious and well-known songs were left off, though unintentionally since I found out I didn't have any Partridge Family in my collection as of airtime (which remain like that for a while). I was hoping to close with Boards of Canada with Happy Cycling but it turned out I only needed 55 minutes.

One technical problem: the news team moved all the microphones around, so I initially was talking into Mic 2 thinking it was Mic 1. I didn't realize what was going on until the next song started playing, though I really cranked the levels thinking there was a technical problem that suddenly popped up. The sports host came in later with an update about the start time of the first basketball game and apologized for leaving the studio in a different configuration. I really have to take a bit more time to cursorily check to see what state things are before going on-air. But hey, campus radio and production values have always had a tenuous relationship.

Nothing ground-shaking but there was enough diversity for listeners. I normally loathe shows that hinge upon a titular theme, but I've done similar mixes in the past for friends, involving concepts for "space" or "monkeys". I could tackle another topic for future sets, but I would leave themes for desperate times.

Update: you know, for someone who finally found an MP3 of Cheech & Chong's Basketball Jones, you would've thought that it would be the perfect setup for the high school tournament broadcast. Me too, after the fact. I'm not sure when I'll lead for another game again, so I guess I can place that idea in the vault for a while. Dammit...

Playlist follows: