The Monday Get Cereal Team: Erin, Mark and Rachel
What’s the most fun you can have at 6am in the morning? Breakfast radio! I applied to be on the SYN flagship show ‘Get Cereal’ because (and this will sound cheesy) but I always wanted to have my own radio show. My little brother and I used to tape ourselves making up our own show, singing jingles and putting on voices for the different characters. Radio is a place where talking and feeling no shame are skills required for creating entertainment, and it’s incredible to think that as a breakfast host you are speaking right into people’s bedrooms and cars, cheering up their morning.
So the 4.30am wakeup in order to get ready and travel into the SYN studios at RMIT aren’t too bad. I was thought it would be a struggle at first, but it’s amazing what you’re capable of when you put your mind to it. I’ve learnt about the team behind a good breakfast radio show, it’s not just the hosts with the personality bouncing off the walls and each other. There’s a talks manager who organises the interviews for the shows and sends out the brief, a (mostly) silent producer who sits in the studio with you and will signal to you when you should wrap up or extend your “talk break”. He has the ability to step away from the immediacy of what you’re talking about to the show’s success as a whole, so it’s a vital role and someone worth listening to. He can also tell you the passwords to the studio when you get locked out in the freezing pre-dawn cold. He’s not the only producer – the overall guidance for the show comes from the Executive Producer, a girl with superhuman ability for enthusiasm in the wee hours.
Together they figure out the structure of the show, with the producer writing out a run sheet which lays out how the morning will run. From 6-7am we keep it light, play a of music and warm up out talk breaks, from 7-8am we do more talk breaks, our producer has a segment , “Getting Nerdy with Dave” where we chat about “nerdy” things, we do our own segment called, “The good, the bad and the covers” where we play a good cover, a bad cover and a wild card cover (this is especially effective in eliciting response from our audience – especially when we did a segment about ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ covers which included Miley Cyrus, Tori Amos and the Muppets), we also do a phone interview with a regular contributor representing the SYN TV show 1700. From 8-9am it’s our “Aussie Music Hour” so we swap our cds that we’re playing from to one that includes only Australian made music. This is the more “prime time” hour with the most listeners, so it includes our interviews. We usually have one “Arts” interview, which can include anyone from The Pajama Men (a comedy duo) to the director of the St. Kilda Film Festival and a music interview. If we’re lucky the interviews are done in the studio (as opposed to the phone, which isn’t as fun and the interview isn’t as interesting), and if we’re really lucky the band will even perform live in the studio, all we have to do is place the mikes and feel quiet.
Read Part 2 for more in depth discussion about the finer details of a breakfast host’s life…and/or watch this behind the scenes video:
Erin Lancaster 
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