(Casey Hribar.)

 

The Archiving Process.

Within days of realising the show was on the air, I solved the problem of how I could record the show every day without fail (fingers crossed and alright in theory) by simply setting my VCR to record for two hours a day, with my radio plugged into it. It's not brilliance but it did the job. In the end this was how the station were recording their shows as they went to air themselves, the quality of video cassettes is higher. Tony Martin's compiled collection of the show now exists in the National Library where it's not readily accessibly to someone who doesn't live in Canberra and copies are not allowed. In the end it seems that Mick has ended up with the whole copies of the shows on VHS as they went to air.

Neither Mick or Tone can release them of course.

 

The recordings are of varying quality unfortunately because of a number of factors. I mixed down to cassette and most of those are fine but some of them were recorded with equipment that meant that the volume was variable and they have suffered from this in terms of high-fidelity. They are all listenable, but due to a number of months in hospital on two occasions, a death in the family, and SAFM destroying the last hour of the show so they could throw to Ugly Phil directly from the east coast broadcast, there are things missing.

 

Additionally, I was editing on VHS, it was a grind doing it. Eventually by 1997, I stopped recording the callers as it meant one less big thing for me to deal with. Those who called in in 1997 and 1998 will of course be able to hear the set ups for the competitions but only on some episodes will there be the actual callers. I'm sorry, it just meant that I didn't have to go through the excruciating process of editing as much, and believe me this was analog; I could feel my soul slipping away as the heads on the VHS rolled back to edit out terrible music, bad news reporting, and promotions that would make any person sick with boredom. At least there was underneath all of that Tony and Mick, and the world they created, reflected on and made me laugh about, an entire world away from the promotions department and management - for the most part.

 

 Thank yous.

 

I just want to thank the following individuals for their help. There are many to mention for their encouragement and enthusiasm for the vast project, but there are also pivotal people like Mason-HellCat who provided me with the very first 2 episodes (and possibly the 3rd to come), PetetheClown, who helped me with a big gap in 1997 he happened to record as well and from whose tapes the caller segments will be coming from, ontos for getting the ball rolling on the site and his enthusiasm for helping get the Master List of the episodes together (which we still need help with if you're keen), l00p who did a lot of initial graphic design work on the site while I ummed, and ahhed about how the site should look, and Snatto who has helped me start from scratch so that I could kind of get the feeling and look for the site a bit more how I had it in mind, and of course has paid the server costs while I've wasted a year trying to get myself together digitising tapes but not yet releasing anything unfortunately.