The Sandgrounder Radio Scoop
By Andrew Hilbert and Sammi Rudge
It’s been a weird couple of months for everyone, including the team here at Sandgrounder Radio.
As your local, commercial radio station we’re always keen to adapt to provide programming and features that are going to be helpful as well as entertaining. With this in mind, and in light of how this pandemic has affected our lives, jobs and health, we ran a month long feature in January called New Year New Start. We focused on physical and mental health, careers and financial security – all topics close to our hearts at the moment.
We were lucky enough to secure a fantastic national sponsor in Mental Health Matters, whose local project ‘Talking Matters Sefton’ delivers valuable help and advice to adults with mental health concerns. We also had lots of super contributors including personal trainers, colleges, driving schools, NLP experts and even a hypnotherapist! All of the information including a selection of helpful podcasts are still available on our website.
New Year New Start was really popular and it gave us a few more ideas… what if we could provide longer programming so that instead of the usual back-to-back ‘non-stop music’, we could offer a friendly voice into the night? And so … the midweek Lockdown Late Show with John Isherwood from 10pm – 1am was born! Once again our friends at Talking Matters Sefton were happy to come on board as a sponsor and within a month our online listening figures doubled!
‘Why stop there?’ we asked ourselves. Folks are up later or can’t sleep or they’re key workers on night shifts and a great many people are living alone and finding it hard to cope. We decided to go for it and Jo Mills has been hosting The Early Hours Show for a couple of weeks now from 1am in the morning (midweek) until Brent Williams takes over the reins at 6am. Her light touch has proved to be really popular with our early birds and her 4.30am Club and other features punctuate a long, lonely day for lots of people.
24-hour midweek shows with good chat, great company and lots of super music means that we’re here for you whenever you want us. There really is no need to feel alone, Sandgrounder has you covered.
We love a good competition on Sandgrounder Radio, there’s a great deal of excitement across the team whenever we have one running. For Christmas, we gave away a prize a day during our Advent Competition – the prizes were worth over £2.5k! For Valentine’s we ran the Ultimate Lockdown Valentine’s Night and one lucky winner walked away with almost £300 worth of prizes including roses, wine, chocolates, deli hamper, gin and a superb meal at home – phew! Keep your eyes and ears open for our Marvellous Mother’s Day Draw coming up next week – six superb prizes to be given away over six days from Sunday 7th March – the top prize is absolutely amazing and worth a staggering £110.
We’ve welcomed a few new members to the team over the past six months and because of lockdown we’ve not been able to meet face to face, so we’ve recently set-up a WhatsApp group. This allows the team to get to know one another informally, although if truth be told, the conversation generally focuses around food! I’m not sure what that says about us but there’s some really yummy looking meals being created behind closed doors. They say that desperation is the mother of invention, but Brent’s abstract concoctions will never make it on a restaurant menu …. much to Claire Simmo’s relief!!
As we now head into March, the lighter nights are approaching and (hopefully) the better weather too. It’s been so nice to see some spectacular pictures of Southport, in the sunshine and it reminds us all that better days lie ahead. We’re certainly looking forward to seeing Southport and the businesses within it benefiting from day trippers and holidaymakers as the current restrictions start to ease.
Whether that be a trip down Southport Pier to play on the old penny arcade machines or an ice cream while walking along Lord Street, Southport certainly will assist in making some amazing memories for us all once again…we can’t wait!
Would you like to write a Guest Blog for Stand Up For Southport? Please message Andrew Brown via Facebook here or email me at: mediaandrewbrown@gmail.com
