Sunday, February 26, 2006

URE Reunion - 30th Birthday of the radio station

URE Reunion was this weekend - with a meal on evening of Sat 25th February then a takeover of the shows by the old DJs. A fun night was had at the pretty posh at a function room in the Thistle Hotel (opposite Exeter Central Station). A pretty good turnout and was good to see everyone again (James McNally, Will Garner, Danny Lawrence, Tommy Dyer, Harry Harris, Strange Martin, Oli Adams, James Beatie, Nick & Lou, Russ Blandamer, Chris Homewood etc), it hardly seemed like any time had passed really.

There was a posh sit down meal followed by a couple of speeches (mostly Harris praising Frog who basically is the station) and a photo slideshow of " 30 years of memories". The memories seemed to be of either the current crop of DJs or lifted from my website (so slightly skewed in the direction of me and Tom Davies). Very bizarre seeing my photos blown up onto a huge projection screen though.

The night continued with much drinking and dancing. Was supposed to stay at Will's house in Bradninch but that seemed too much like hard work and we ended up sleeping on the floor at Russ' place. The next day my knees ached from my over enthusiastic Cossack style dancing, and was a little sleep deprived thanks to Will's snoring.

The schedule on Sunday:
9 - 10am Simon Petrie & Oli afams
10 - 11am Adrian Hobart
11 - 12pm Becky Gilchrist & Russell Blandamer
12 - 1pm Chris Homewood (The Chris Homewood Talk Show)
1 - 2pm Mark Seddon
2 - 3pm Harry Harris
3 - 4pm Jane Danser
4 - 6pm James McNally

A podcast of my show is here:
http://seddonism.podomatic.com/entry/eg/2007-04-07T08_44_30-07_00

Doing the show was cool, though it took a little while to get warmed up and get used to the new-fangled computer jingles then before I knew it, the hour was up. Tom Davies spent most of the show as my virtual sidekick down the phone, revisiting items such as "Smack my Pitch Up" (Brokeback mountain & Lucky Number Slevin), advice from Rabbi Williams, and Stressbusting. I wanted to fit in more, but there's only so much you can do in an hour.

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Russ, James, Gron, Oli, Simon, Frog, Harry

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Oli, Tim, Simon, Ben

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More of my photos are online here.

Someone else's photos of the weekend were posted here:http://www.angelfire.com/id/kdp100/ure_30.html

And for more nostalgia:
The old URE website is available here: http://dev.durrans.com/ure/members/39.html
Nice group photo from 2000-ish: http://www.studentradioalumni.com/images/29.jpg

My old radio photos are here:
http://www.geocities.com/seddonism/UREphotos.html
http://www.photoaccess.com/share/guest.jsp?Gallery=A3ABE438732&cb=PA
History of me at URE:
http://www.geocities.com/seddonism/mark.html

2 comments:

jLo said...

This looks like it was very fun indeed - I can't believe I missed it...!

Anonymous said...

I've got loads of photos on colour-slide (remember them) from 1976-79, as I was Studio Manager from 1977-9 in the egg-box days. Gimme an e-mail address for the site webmaster and I'll send some scanned-in ones.

There's a URE network on LinkedIn.

Best wishes,

Nick Ridgway
smugglers.barn@btinternet.com