Radio One More Time: Bird or bloke?

Is it a bird? Is it a bloke?
Haven't a clue, mate
Sorry I spoke
Is it a bloke? Is it a bird?
No idea, pal
How absurd

It's not just Radio One where the management value the big, sweeping competitions while the presenters (and usually audiences) would rather have the offer of lots chances to win small, rather than the occasional opportunity to win big. I once came across a memo while working in, shall we say, a large commercial radio station which banned any competition offering anything smaller than a holiday. The management believed that audiences were built by the big bang, thereby reversing the prevailing wisdom in broadcasting that what counted was lots of contact between station and listener. The memo was especially disdainful about giving away CDs. The station felt that sending out hundreds of envelopes with gifts of music in was, in some way, a bad thing for its image, rather than a great way of making a large number of people get a small but significant 'thanks for listening'. It's kind of the way men believe that what counts is the enormous , sweat-drenched, non-stop shagnight, whereas relationships are really built just as much on the holding hands in the supermarket and little kisses when you're heading to the toilet.

Radio One sometimes goes mad for its competitions - Thirty One Days In May being a case in point, where the entire arsenal of the network would be put on standby for what was a giveaway Olympics. Simon Bates voiceovers, all presenters having to do at least one part, prizes that "money can't buy". All presenters - even John Peel was roped in, admitting he felt "nervous as a kitten" seconds before playing his "trigger record" (Teenage Kicks, of course) and then asking some sort of questions which won a caller the chance to go to a European football match with him.

It was all very impressive, but - really - nowhere near as much fun for listening to as something as simple as Mark and Lard's Bird Or Bloke. This was a list of people with ambigendered names - Lesleys or Joes - with an invitation to identify them as a bird or a bloke. (When Lindsey Corkhill came up, I think they needed the third umpire.)

The idea was adapted for Dobbins or Bobbins, where the names may or may not have been horses running that day. The different rules required, of course, a different jingle:

Is it a dobbin?
Really a horse
Or is a bobbin?
Made-up, of course
Will you be stealing
A prize on the spot
Or will you be sobbing
Thick Jack (or Jill) Clot

[Part of Radio One More Time]