One of Channel Nine’s few decent rugby league commentators has reportedly “stormed out” mere hours before he was going to join the commentary team for tonight’s State of Origin clash in Melbourne.
FORMER Queensland State of Origin star Ben Ikin has stormed out of Channel Nine only hours before he was supposed to be commentating on tonight’s showdown in Melbourne.
A furious Ikin phoned Nine’s director of sport Steve Crawley early this afternoon to resign from all his commentary duties.
[..]
Ikin, who is the son-in-law of super coach Wayne Bennett, is angry that Channel Nine’s A Current Affair is doing an investigation tonight into a business owned by his father on the Gold Coast.
[..]
Steve Crawley confirmed Ikin had quit but refused to comment, other than saying, “”At this stage I’m just concentrating on getting the telecast right for tonight.’’
Ah well, it just makes the already superior coverage on 2GB that little bit better. Best wishes to Ben, I hope he pops up on Foxtel or radio in the near future.
I just noticed today’s schedule on the 2GB website. Alan Jones is away again, and has been since Monday. Drive presenter Jason Morrison has been filling in for him, and Andrew Moore has been filling in for Jason, however Andrew is in Melbourne today as he is calling the State of Origin match tonight…which leaves 2GB with this:
If accurate (and one can assume that 7pm-10pm is not, as it fails to mention tonight’s State of Origin match), Jason Morrison is going to be very very tired by the end of the day, and will be facing an early start once again tomorrow. Sydney-siders who only listen on their drives to and from work may also be wondering if they’re stuck in a time warp.
As much as I’m sure that Jason can handle the extra workload, I do hope that 2GB move Luke Bona from the evening slot to Drive for the day. I will be tuning in at 3pm to see what happens.
All of this reminds me, I owe Jason some chocolate biscuits.
Update 2:30pm: The schedule has been updated with tonight’s rugby league coverage, however Jason is still doing a double shift.
3pm here we come. End Update
Update 3:11pm: It’s Jason…and he didn’t get any sleep as he explained at the start of the show!
[audio:https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/2GBJasonMorrisonNoSleep.mp3] Download MP3 End Update
Further Update 4:20pmAlan Jones is back tomorrow, so Jason gets to sleep in tomorrow. I think he’ll need it! End Update
The mighty Bulldogs had a wonderful second quarter and blitzed the Swans by 40 at Manuka Oval. I’m very very happy about this.
I would have loved to be there, but didn’t buy tickets as I knew that I would be too tired to get there in time. As it happened, I was right, and slept until 1:30pm and ended up watching the game on Southern Cross Ten whilst listening to the other match, North Melbourne V Brisbane, on 3AW Football. It’s the first time (as far as I can recall) that Rex Hunt has sent the fat lady around the grounds to sing for a match which they aren’t covering…mid-way through the second quarter, and again near half time.
Now listening to the Friday edition of the The Rush Limbaugh Show (not a typo), and later tonight The Bill is on ABC1.
I wrote the following at 5am…apparently I then hit “save” rather than “publish”.
Thank you Fairfax. It seems that pulses during the night caused a heap of the music log to be skipped, so rather than finishing at 6am it finished at 4:45am.
I just wasted fifteen minutes of my news preparation time inventing a new music log for the remainder of the morning.
The point which Media Watch seem to have missed here is that the interview was about Cronulla’s financial issues, not about Mr. Zappia accidentally hitting an employee some time ago.
Perhaps Alan could have asked the question, but it wasn’t what the interview was about, and it’s entirely possible that Alan ran out of time…after all, the interview did go for five minutes, which is fairly standard for an interview during a breakfast show.
The analogy here is that if I was interviewing the manager of the local supermarket about their new checkouts, I wouldn’t ask him about the price of frozen peas…unless of course I needed to fill half a minute and wanted to buy frozen peas after work.
Anyway, go and check out the first link. The report in to the media management and manipulation of the Rudd government is quite excellent. I was watching ABC news on Sunday night and was wondering why they took a pot shot at Kevin Rudd asking himself questions…now I know.
Got in to work just after 4:30am. Spent most of the day babysitting Fairfax’s mess. Now babysitting (panelling) Sports Today off a webstream until 7pm when Fairfax reckon the sound quality on the satellite will go back to normal.
Back tomorrow at 4:30am to actually do some of my work…aka prepare some news. I’m glad it rained today…instant story and a grab from Weatherzone. I have some sport left over from the weekend and a few useful press releases to recycle. It won’t be the best news ever tomorrow, but it’s going to air which, under the circumstances, I think is pretty good.
Most services are now restored. However, live news on w’end aft, nghts, and M-F Drive will have faults. Repairs should be completed by 2/6/2009. Prefed and Rural News are also on DC.
Uh huh, so fixed means that you were feeding Neil Mitchell on the Auxillary channel earlier, and Leon Byner from Adelaide now? Yep, having to manually download news from Digital Courier because you send the wrong program on the auxillary channel is what I call fixed!
*sigh*
Oh, and tell Neil Mitchell that he is a break behind will you…
Update 2:48pm: Apparently having Leon Byner on the aux channel is intentional due to a lack of circuits until a part arrives from Israel. It would have been nice to have been told in advance. End Update
I’m going to take tomorrow off from the blog and see about getting stuff ready for Sunday instead. Probably won’t be much, just Aircheck Sunday, Musician(s) Of The Week and maybe one or two other things…I’m pretty tired and looking forward to just taking tomorrow off from everything as on Sunday afternoon I’ve got news and sport for AIR News and then it’s on to the local news for 2QN and Classic Rock bright and early on Monday morning. I’m also on 2QN and 3NE on Sunday morning from 6am until Midday, but that’s all voicetracked.
Anyhoo, seeing as tomorrow is my only real day off, I intend on taking the opportunity to get out of town for a while. Bryan from Classic Rock has lent his car to me for the weekend (he has somebody else’s car…I’m not sure why) so I’ll make use of it tomorrow.
I hope you all have a good weekend. I’ll have 2QN/Classic Rock headlines for you next week.
Quick question…how long until Fairfax Syndication implodes completely. The satellite issues are still going on, we’ve been having no end of trouble in Deni (missing pulses, audio glitches, mistimed pulses, news cut off, random wrong programs, Neil Mitchell coming through on both channels instead of just one causing automated recording of pre-feed and rural news to fail…which in turn requires us to download the stuff from Digital Courier and insert it manually, oh and a heap of dead air).
I can almost understand Neil Mitchell coming through on both channels…it could be an acceptable error, but to send Tim Webster (a show which we don’t even take) on the auxiliary channel in place of the 3pm pre-feed news??? It could just be me, but Tim Webster giving away a prize to some woman who has to be fed answers to competition questions is not exactly what I consider to be news.
[audio:https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/2qn3pmNewsMay21.mp3] Download MP3
And with all the errors that Fairfax are making at the moment, it must make the listeners of the network stations think that the people working at the stations are incompetent twats…I mean what else would a listener, who has no idea about how it all works, think when a fifteen minute old Neil Mitchell rant goes to air instead of the news on an FM station, followed by an ad and the weather? They’d think we’re complete numbskulls.
[audio:https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/ClassicRock10amNews20May2009.mp3] Download MP3
Around this time last night they managed to send Stuart Bocking in place of 3AW’s Nightline. As much as I like stations to take Stuart, he shouldn’t be force-fed to stations who are taking other programs with completely different break schedules. As I write this they’re managing to send Nightline on both channels rather than just the main channel.
It amazes me that people pay Fairfax Syndication sometimes…surely it can’t be that hard to get things right.
Update late Friday night: Issues seem to be fixed now (at last). Whilst AW programming was still coming through on both channels today, it was only coming through on the primary channel tonight. I dropped in to the 2QN studios to listen to the AFL off the satellite after a Deni Business Chamber event…and drat, Murphy kicked a behind instead of a goal after the siren, so the doggies didn’t win. It was a good game though. End Update
I’m glad that I stayed back late at the station today because while I was sitting down doing some audio editing I heard a song start playing on the air which I recognised at once as “the Mike Jeffreys cowboy music”, which was also used for a little while for the “Friday yee-hah”.
Blood, sweat and tears’ “When I Die”
By the way, I’m considering breaking with my standard “three month policy” for Aircheck Sunday of only putting airchecks online once they’re three months or more old, and putting a 2QN Breakfast aircheck online for Aircheck Sunday this weekend…if I do, it’ll be breakfast from Wednesday which I have already spent an inordinate amount of time uploading for the reference of certain people.
And on the subject of 2QN breakfast, it has been a fun week so far, and I’m looking forward to another busy morning tomorrow. I must say a big thank you to 2GB’s Jason Morrison, a thoroughly decent bloke, as he has agreed to come on the show tomorrow morning to have a bit of a chinwag about the issues (serious or otherwise) of the week. Jason has been very supportive of me while I have tried to build a career in the radio industry, and I doubt that I can express how much I appreciate his support and advice, and his willingness to volunteer his time tomorrow morning.
Anyhoo, back to dinner for me. I should try to get some sleep at some stage I suppose.
