Well well well, the transformation of the trolley cart has gone down an absolute storm, so thank you all for the lovely comments and also massive thanks to my good friend Phil Bayliss of PA Carpentry he is such a lovely chap and his talent is clearly not recognised enough...If he can help you with any carpentry needs do give me a shout. Here's another picture, just in case you missed it!!!!
This week's blog is about Radio Woking , how I managed to get that first interview and how the station helped with my Christmas foodbank campaign.
Many of you didn't even realise that we had a local radio station and to be fair I didn't even know it was there until I was contacted by Zahir Ahmed who presents The We Love Woking Show, Wednesday evenings, but once my Foodbank Christmas Campaign started many more tuned in to hear the interviews so hopefully Radio Woking now have a few more listeners......
Radio Woking is situated within Winston Church School, St Johns and is a radio station within the community. It started out as a student radio called "Yay Radio" I believe for a number of years and in the words of Justin Coll - Radio Station and IT manager for the school that hosts the Radio Station, "5 years ago we were really lucky to get some money for the school to create some recording studios and the radio station was brought into the same facility" and bang the community radio station was born..........In that time it was started as an internet station and Ofcom did a small DAB trial which Radio Woking was lucky enough to be part of with British Forces Broadcasting who are running the transmitter at the school and in Aldershot, it has given the Radio Station such a great opportunity to get lots of coverage.
They have lots of presenters and most of them are volunteers covering lots of time slots and some of them have been asked to present BBC Surrey sports. The guys are amazing in my view and cover so much stuff about the local area, you should tune in you never know where it may lead you!!!!
So I mentioned above that I was contacted by Zahir Ahmed back in 2016 asking whether I would like to attend the studio for a live interview, Zahir presents The We Love Woking show on Wednesday evenings with his co-host Jackie Witney between the hours 6-8pm, but back in 2016 Zahir was co-hosting with Tanya Isaiah again on Wednesday evenings, but between the hours of 8-10pm. Zahir is now in his fourth year of presenting at Radio Woking.
 |
| Yep that's all of us in the studio |
Now again some of you may know this, but to others this may be a surprise, but I am part of a local Bellydance troupe called BellyTricks Bellydance based in Brookwood Village and during the summer we are extremely busy with gigs getting out and about and showing the local community some of our Bellydance moves. 9 of the 20+ strong troupe attended the studio at Winston Churchill School to talk about being part of the local community and also talking about Bellydance and yes we did a few shimmies on air as did the presenters!!!! it was a squeeze to get 9 of us in the studio, plus two presenters, but such good fun and yes we do get about a lot in the summer, so if you would like to invite us anywhere get in quick because we get booked really fast in the summer. We are regulars at Knaphill Fete.
 |
| Zahir & Tanya doing their thing!!! |
Anyway I am digressing, back to the interviews for the Christmas Foodbank Campaign. Jon Andrews joined Radio Woking around 18 months ago to celebrate everything that is good about Woking and he is passionate about sharing that with the listeners.
A bit like Zahir, Jon picked up on one of my tweets, you may have guessed by now that I do a lot of twittering, you can keep up with me if you like on Twitter on @trudimfletcher - so that tweet mentioned that I was intending on doing a Christmas Collection on behalf of Woking Foodbank although they didn't know it at the time. I hadn't even discussed it with them, I just thought I would put it together, at the end of the day anybody can do it, but sometimes people just need someone to organise it for them, that's one thing that I am absolutely fab at, organising, just ask anyone that knows me, trust me they would agree. I realised that I could help some of these people that are struggling, but how was I going to go about getting the word out there for all to see or in this case hear? Well what better way other than Radio......So Jon contacted me via Twitter, saying "this sounds really good what you are doing, how would you like to do an interview about it on live Radio?" well to be honest it frightened the life out of me, but hey what a great opportunity, live radio...so I took the plunge and the following week I was on air albeit it over the telephone. I am not gunna lie, I was surrounded with my papers at home and of course I didn't have a clue what Jon was going to ask me, but I think its fair to say that Jon and I have struck a great friendship (Jon if you are reading this, you had better agree, hopefully at this point you are nodding!!!). I have just re-listened to that first interview and it wasnt too bad even if I do say so myself. 1 interview led to weekly interviews throughout the campaign and as the weeks passed I grew in confidence and the campaign was getting bigger by the day, there was always something new to bring each week, ranging from wheelbarrows to The Welsh Guards, yes I had the army involved.
 |
| Jon Andrews doing his interview with me
at Brookwood Club
|
Jon also did interviews at Brookwood Bakers/Post Office where he interviewed some of the staff, Mandi Parish/Penny Collyer and a few of the customers that were dropping off bags. On a separate occasion Jon came to Brookwood Club for a swift coca cola as I recall, I managed to get a few people revved up to do interviews, including Lee Orriss the bar steward, Liam Brennan, Lou Bayliss Stubbington, Andy Gilday and a few others and a few people dropped off food parcels that night, so we collared them too, that made great interview material as well. You can catch all of the podcasts here: Jon Andrews - Podbean
 |
| From left to right Jon Andrews, Trudi Fletcher, Penny Collyer Keri Riches, Mandi Parish and Shaun Roker |
I think Jon found our last interview a little strange as a few of us went to Radio Woking including Jon to be interviewed by Zahir and Jackie on the final closure of the campaign for 2017. So Jon became the interviewee instead of the interviewer and talked about his experience being involved in the campaign. Again, what a great night and a great way to close the Christmas campaign, think you can tell from the pictures below we had a blast. We even had cakes supplied by Brookwood Bakers/Post Office.
So what can I say about Radio Woking, they have been absolute troupers helping out, to all of you at Radio Woking, keep doing what you are doing you are doing a fantastic job by helping local people on a local radio spread the word around the community.
 |
| The We Love Woking presenters, Zahir & Jackie with Lisa, Liam, Ellie and I |
 |
| Christmas Foodbank Gang with Zahir & Jackie our last interview for the year. |
No comments:
Post a Comment