"It opened in November 1967, and the glass roof was added 20 years later..."

I'm working for the Pulse of West Yorkshire for a month, doing the daytime five-hour slot. It's a station I've always wanted to work for, having lived in its target area for five years of my younger life.

Today, I was sent on an outside broadcast. I've done a fair few over the years but as a freelancer it's one of the things you miss about having a regular, nailed-down, six days a week gig. Still, off I was packed to Keighley, on the far edge of West Yorkshire, where the radio station had been doing its Proud To Be Local campaign all week.

I was in the Airedale Shopping Centre, and having been seated at a desk at the front of an empty shop with branding all around me, I looked a bit of a sitting duck. People who notice OBs react in one of a few different ways; they gawp like hell for ages and assume you haven't noticed, they come over and chat and take whatever merchandise is on offer; they ignore you entirely or, regrettably, they try to put you off when you're doing a link.

Plenty of the first three and, fortunately, only one solitary example of the latter; a teenage girl with a Croydon facelift who thought it would be kerrrrrrr-azy, and ever so cool to all her gang, to shout something obscene, followed by the name of a rival station, in my direction. The daft lass hadn't accounted for me not being on air at the time though, as a song was playing on the speakers and I was not wearing any cans and, indeed, not actually speaking into the microphone.

The official stuff consisted of brief interviews with a woman who owned one of the cafeterias in the shopping centre, plus a local councillor who used his couple of minutes to sell Keighley and sell it again. He was very impressive. Otherwise, I was required to present the show in the same way as I would have done if sitting at the controls in the Pulse's nerve centre in the centre of Bradford. I did also have my photo taken with the mascot of the Keighley Cougars rugby league club - a cougar that goes by the name of Freddie. The best mascot-related act of punnery ever. And, last but by no means least, the much-revered Ben Baker, resident and proud of the place, turned up to say hello - wearing an Atari T shirt.

Great fun, and over the next month I'll be doing a couple more, I think.

He wakes and says hello, turns on the breakfast show

An odd little incident occurred on Monday.

I had a free day marked on my calendar until a 5pm call came in on the Sunday evening asking me to cover a breakfast show as the regular host had been taken ill. Dutifully, I said yes and immediately prepared for an early night which, with the busy weekend I'd already had, would be easy to have anyway.

The show started at 6am, as ever, and it went well. One of those days where you think you've performed to a good standard, entertained and informed, without necessarily cooking on gas. It's quite hard to be at your absolute peak when you're in as a last minute stand-in but I was happy.

Before the show started, I advertised it on Facebook, as I often do. The regular host is a friend and colleague and so I linked to him in the status update I posted. Later, I randomly clicked on his name to look at his wall, expecting to see a stack of get well messages from his public.

I didn't get beyond the first thread, which made me smile and think at once. Someone had said good morning to him, clearly before they'd even turned on the radio. A second fan of his then said he wasn't there. Between the two of them they chatted on his wall bemoaning his absence - and then said they were going to retune.

They weren't critical of me, I should add immediately. And I was amused. So I posted a comment saying I wasn't offended by their decision to go elsewhere, complete with ample smilies to make it clear that was the case. There then followed any number of backtracking, grovelling, embarrassed messages from these two saying they wouldn't re-tune after all and they were sorry, and do I have a spade they could borrow to dig a hole for them to crawl into, etc.

Local radio gives you something of a profile but you are very much an anonymous minor figure, even when hosting a successful breakfast show. Trouble is, as these two proved, there is an assumption that you're not normal, not regular, not the same as them. Breakfast show hosts, or any local radio hosts for that matter, apparently don't feel knackered in the morning, have issues with family and finances and, of course, they never read Facebook. It never occurred to these two that the regular host and I would be Facebook friends, nor that I would therefore have the time or inclination to read their comments. It was as if they knew I existed, but not really. Not in their world, anyway.

How very strange it all was. But it did make me laugh.

Talking of local radio, that organ of esteem the Guardian has been reviewing breakfast shows recently in an effort to find what they would deem the best. Naturally, they've done exactly the thing that hacks me off more than anything else about the press attitude to radio, which is just look at stations based in London and then end the series there.

Most of the national stations, rightly, got reviewed (they didn't do the two classical stations), but then there was absolutely no justification in then reviewing (and, therefore, hugely plugging) Capital (London) and Heart (London), putting their breakfast gigs in the same category as the national shows, and then not doing likewise with the other Capital and Heart stations up and down the country, as well as the hundreds of other worthy local breakfast shows on offer.

I suspect they sussed this at the very last minute, and quickly they threw it open to their readership to "suggest" to them "unsung heroes" (God I hate that phrase) of local radio breakfast time. By "unsung hero" they mean "person on air outside of London whom I'm never going to hear". That rankles, especially as I could name a dozen and more breakfast presenters on non-southern brands that make Vaughan and Theakston look like shoddy beginners. Some breakfast show presenters on local stations are major, major stars of their patch and would attract a bigger crowd at appearances and events than a lot of equivalents on national stations.

Anyway, it seems that some of these great shows are going to be reviewed by the Guardian, which is at least something. It's just a pity that they didn't have the intelligence or decency to discover the worthiness of these programmes themselves and had to be shamed by their public into doing so.

When Savage Garden brought down our emails

I heard a Savage Garden song on the radio this morning. They were unusually popular in the 1990s and their new releases regularly made radio station playlists and yet not too many people - within the industry, at least - ever seemed to rate them.

Firs time I heard their debut single, I Want You, was when I played it on the weekend graveyard shift at Hallam FM in 1997 and instantly I assumed it was the bloke from Roxette with a new band. And sounding like Per Gessle shouldn't exactly be a great career breaker.

But anyway, they succeeded and developed a fan base. I'm not sure who their target audience really was. A clean-cut Aussie duo, they weren't a teen idol band for screamers, despite youth and looks, but more of a lite-pop outfit that young mums and equivalent social demographics could warm to. Blokes didn't seem to like them very much. When Truly Madly Deeply, their big ballad, was released, women went eternally gooey for it. It still gets requested now. Then there was Affirmation, the philosophy of life anthem that was mercilessly parodied by breakfast show presenters but, again, was seen as some great lyrical masterpiece by the fans. And as that fanbase really grew, radio began to know about it.

Savage Garden fans in the UK were potty - or, at least, the ringleaders around one of the first online forums about the band were so. In the late 1990s, radio wasn't playing "enough" Savage Garden for their liking. I remember at Viking FM we only had two of their songs on recurrent play (three times a day maximum - Truly Madly Deeply and the Almighty remix of To The Moon And Back) and the rest simply didn't "test" well, as the famed expression of the industry goes. Brand new singles would go on, but maybe not for very long. Some of the sloppier stuff - I Knew I Loved You, for example - got on to the late night love shows but that was pretty much it. Generally, this was replicated by most commercial stations as ultimately you had to play the stuff your core audience seemed to like the most.

And these fans didn't like it. So, one day, somebody on these forums spent a whole day researching the name of every radio station in the UK and then, from within, making a list of all the presenters on that site. This long list was then sent out to other fanatics, who all typed their own "Play Savage Garden!" begging letter with equally restricted levels of sophistication and literacy and, with the press of one button, sent it to every radio presenter in the country.

They didn't try to hide the fact that it was a bulk email, which took out any personalisation and proof of actual listenership which might, if anything, have been the one thing to sway a jock into doing as they asked. DJs didn't then - and don't now - choose the records they play but always made suggestions and contributions to the programmers who did compile the playlists.

I got my email and was staggered to see hundreds and hundreds of addresses thereon. It had gone to everyone from Chris Moyles and Ken Bruce to invisible overnight jocks like me. They had also, interestingly, sent it to presenters whose role perhaps involved playing less music, no music or just different music - presenters on Radio 4, for example. And Classic FM. This email campaign was all about awareness and obsession, and little to do with impact.

Moyles took the piss completely on the afternoon show he was hosting at the time, reading verbatim from the forums that had instigated this campaign about how much they knew and loved and admired Darren Hayes. My abiding memory of it was getting a reply through from a presenter at a station in Leeds who, accidentally or not, had clicked Reply To All instead of just Reply, and so hundreds of radio presenters, as well as the Savage Garden crazies, got his one word response: No.

This caused further problems, as we started to get daytime email from irate BBC local radio presenters saying that this email had bust the system and they were now unable to get online. A few internal mails were then sent out, asking us to ignore and delete any bulk correspondence from these fans as it was making trouble for other presenters elsewhere. It wasn't a rivalry thing - the email from Leeds put out a BBC intranet system in Cambridgeshire, I think it was. Pot luck. Or pot lack of luck, if you prefer.

The campaign continued for a while longer and the effect remained entirely nil. Savage Garden performed Affirmation at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics - introduced by Barry Davies, who clearly had to consult a grand-daughter or great-niece to get his stats on them - and then split up. Darren Hayes' brief solo career was essentially Savage Garden under a new name (though he had a hit with a song called Strange Relationship that I really liked).

When the September 11th attacks happened, I was at Imagine FM in Stockport, having already been on air with breakfast, and my colleague noticed just in time that his first song after the extended, mournful, serious news bulletin was a Savage Garden song called Crash And Burn. His mouse-clicking fingers were quick enough to save the day.

You've noticed I've not included an embed of any of these songs. Yes, that's deliberate. I wouldn't want the online fan club to think I'm on their side.