Owen McKern, Former Program Manager
We created a program called Live at the Convent where we negotiated with the four main music teaching institutions that every Tuesday in the school term, we would have students come into the station and perform and do some live interviews as well. In most cases that would be their first experience of being live-to-air. Dame Elisabeth Murdoch wanted to support young musicians so the very fact that we were doing these broadcasts was good for philanthropy.
I became the 3MBS program manager between 2008 and 2011. I loved my time at 3MBS. At the end of my time, there was a rapid change in management and board membership, which wasn’t so good. 3MBS is not dissimilar to where I am now at 3PBS, as the volunteers are all so passionate about music.
I spent my entire time at 3MBS with all the volunteers calling me ‘young Owen.’
Another initiative that we introduced was 3MBS stopped at 12pm in terms of real voices, after that there was just a CD stacker playing music. Sometimes the CD would skip, and you had problems. We opened up the midnight to 2am slot for people to broadcast. This was a really good way of getting young people on air as this time suited them. We did this seven days a week and most of the broadcasters were practicing musicians under 30.
We were at the Young Performer Award final at Melba Hall, and the final performer, a pianist, was being broadcast who we were broadcasting live to air. One of the volunteers in a backstage room had bought a pie warmer and the thing set off the fire alarm. The pianist kept playing and the alarm kept going until eventually the voice came over saying ‘This is not a drill’. The pianist came back to play after it was all sorted out and he won the competition! We were able to write a media release saying he ‘set the stage on fire’.
We had a wonderful Australian performer come into the station to be interviewed by a presenter. Admittedly the questions he was asked were not great like 'How much are the tickets for your show?', 'Where do you buy the tickets?' etc. He said ‘I don’t know the answer to any of these questions I think this interview would go better without me’ so he physically climbed under the desk live on air. The announcer was saying ‘Are you coming out?’ and he said, ‘I can’t answer any questions I am not coming out.’