Imagine your first day on air and there’s a blackout!
They are Snow FM’s brand new breakfast team, Sam Blacker and Emily Goddard. making a name for themselves as Blacker and Ems. As it turned out, their debut was much blacker than they expected.
Emily Goddard walks us through her darkest hour…
About 700 homes in Jindabyne lost power this morning including the station, just before 7am, which was a great way to start off the new Breakfast show “Blacker and Ems” on Snow FM. For a moment I thought this might have been some first day initiation phase but turned out not to be, haha.
At first the lights starting flicking on and off then all of a sudden it was darkness (not a sunny morning in Jindy, basically in pitch black). Lights, computers, on air systems were black! So trying to communicate with each other was on one handed written notes haha.
We were in the dark for about 45 mins until we got our back up generator fully going and swapped some cables around to switch power sources.
We were doing the show live and as there was a stop after the song, the system wasn’t in automation mode so it stopped after the song and as the hot keys were dead we couldn’t fade and go or move onto the next event. So once the song finished it was mics on and go from there!
Sam came up with the idea to just play music from his phone into the mic so there wasn’t just dead air. We wanted to give our listeners at least something to wake them up on Monday morning!
We each played a few songs that we thought were appropriate. Sam went for mood lifting songs to make the best of the situation and played:
Smash Mouth – walking on the sun
Paolo Nutini – new shoes
I went with the songs relating to the situation which were:
Owl City- fire flies
Five – baby when the lights go out.
We spoke in between the songs to give our listeners an update.
Personally, I thought it was a great way to start off a new Breakfast show. We now know we can trust each other in emergency situations!