This blog is to celebrate the success of Sunshine Radio after we walked away with Silver in the Best Speech Package at the National Hospital Broadcasting Association awards! The entry, The Largest Helicopter Museum in the World, was put together by myself and Marcus Tripp.
For those of you that are not aware of the Hospital Radio Awards, they are an annual celebration of the excellent standards found in hospital radio stations across the country. There are more than 200 individual member stations, and each entry is subjected to a rigorous judging process by a national panel of industry experts and NHS staff.
Last year was the first year I entered, in the Female Presenter of the Year category. The awards ceremony was held in Blackpool, and I won Gold, which was amazing. I felt so inspired after that I vowed to enter again this year. I decided to go for another category, and along with Marcus went along to the Helicopter museum to put together a programme on it.
The museum is the world's largest dedicated helicopter museum, and brings huge numbers of tourists to Weston every year. To some it may sound a bit boring, who wants to go and stare at bits of helicopters?! Well, I thought the same until I visited, and then I was pretty impressed! It is really interesting to see all the different types, and some of them are massive!
The Helicopter Museum dates back to 1958, when the founder, aviation writer and historian Elfan ap Rees, began to build up a private collection of rotorcraft documentation and artifacts. Over the years his collection has grown so much that the museum was relocated to an aircraft hanger big enough to accommodate them. As Elfan said in his interview with us ‘Don’t start collecting things, as you never know where it could end up!’
So Marcus and I went along to the museum, and interview Elfan, along with two lovely volunteers Rod and Stacey, (if you are reading this, thanks for talking to us!) Then came the hard work, editing more than an hours worth of material into a five minute clip for the judges. This was so hard, as we wanted to get the feel of the piece across, but only five minutes to do it in. It ended up taking us around six hours to put the clip together!
For every category there are 10 finalists, who go along to the awards ceremony where bronze, silver and gold are announced. This year the ceremony took place in Bristol, which was handy for us! To be honest, I really didn’t think we would make the top three. The speech category in particular is very tough, so just to be in the top 10 pleased me!
The awards ceremony was great. It was held at the Marriott Hotel, and we were given a three course meal, consisting of vegetable soup (which surprisingly I didn’t drop down myself), lamb shank, and a chocolate and orange sponge. I was sat next to Richard Smith, though only people who do hospital radio will know the name! He records shows from home which are broadcast to most of the hospital stations in the UK. I play his one minute trivia clips a lot on my show, so it was exciting to finally put a face to a voice!
Then came the awards. I had drank quite a bit of wine by then (typical! lol!), and when they announced that we had won silver it took a few minutes to sink in! Sunshine chair Jo and I went up on stage to collect the award, and I was chuffed that I didn’t trip over my dress and didn’t drop the glass trophy! The judges comments on our entry were: “We found this entry amusing, informative and entertaining. We thought there was good interaction by all involved, bringing to life this most unusual of museums.”Funny that, as my presenter of the year entry last year was also described as amusing!
So yay for Sunshine! And bring on the 2015 awards in Newcastle. Now I just have to decide what category to enter!
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