A minor hiccup: When radio news goes pear shaped

There are some things in life over which we have no control.

The weather. Our in-laws. A sudden attack of the hiccups.

It was over a decade ago now that 3AW’s Kate Wilson experienced every newsreader’s worst nightmare: A mega bout of the hiccups just one minute before she was due to read the news.

There was no time to grab a glass of water, and there was literally nobody else around to jump in.

So – for possibly the longest four minutes of her life – a fiercely determined Kate ploughed on through everything from the Libyan armed conflict to the latest sport, never once giving up.

One concerned listener who’d heard that 3am news bulletin asked Kate straight out via Twitter if she had the hiccups.

“Unfortunately, yes.” Kate tweeted back “And they arrived at the convenient time of 2:59am.”

The next day, Kate herself became the news. Media organisations were falling over themselves to speak to her.

Able to see the funny side, Kate was a great sport.

Kate’s bulletin made news around the world, and has since gone down in history as one of Melbourne’s most well-remembered and unintentionally entertaining pieces of radio.

Radio Today caught up with Kate, who says even thirteen years on, the incident still occasionally crops up.

“I had a bit of anonymity after I got married, so it didn’t come up all that regularly,” Kate says.

“I moved to South Australia two years ago. My brother was visiting my work and told my new colleagues and now it gets brought up at work.”

Kate recalls having a good laugh about it at the time with then-Overnights presenter Keith McGowan.

“In terms of the immediate aftermath, I thought it was hilarious,” she says.

“Even after the media attention, I still thought it was pretty funny.”

“I honestly thought as it was 3am, no-one would ever make anything of it.”

“I’m glad it makes people laugh!”

Kate recently recounted the whole experience on Christian Hull’s Complete Drivel podcast.

Involuntary spasms of the diaphragm aside, technology is often the thing that fails us.

Just recently, my heart went out to a radio newsreader who had to navigate her way through the bulletin from hell when her audio grabs and stings simply failed to fire. An experienced journo, she carried on as best she could, still managing to time out to the second.

It reminded me of my early days at Triple M Melbourne when we first switched from printed paper copy to reading news from a screen.

We were all in awe of this you-beaut piece of technology called the prompter.

The newsroom collectively decided on a nice, mellow yellow as our preferred background colour (much easier on the eye than bright, stark white) with a bold black font.

The simplicity of gliding through a bulletin with just the occasional click of a forward arrow key instead of killing trees for the cause seemed terribly appealing.

Of course, the first time I used the prompter for an actual on-air bulletin, everything went to hell in a handbasket.

I had got no further than “Triple M news at 4, I’m Sarah Patterson” when the screen froze. No amount of jabbing that wretched bloody forward arrow key would make it budge.

For a split second, I considered ad-libbing my way through the bulletin, but in my panicked state, I couldn’t remember my own name, let alone my lead story.

So I did the next best thing. I bailed.

To my eternal shame, I made up the weather, took a wild stab at what the forecast temperature might be, cobbled together some ridiculous outro on the fly and stormed out of the booth, hollering about my hatred of technology to anyone who’d listen.

The looks on my colleagues’ faces made it clear they were all thinking the same thing: I’m so glad it wasn’t me.

As much as I carried on like a pork chop about it, it later occurred to me that I did have some control over that particular situation and I could have at least minimised the risk.

And that’s when I remembered the sage advice of recently retired radio news legend John Bowden:

“PRINT OUT YOUR COPY!”

Had I bothered to make sure I’d had a hard copy of the bulletin with me in the booth, I’d at least have been able to pick up where I left off.

Whilst we now live in a largely paperless society, I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a printed copy of your news bulletin with you in the booth. Just in case.

Money can’t buy that kind of reassurance.

The simple lesson here is – when something happens  that you can’t control, focus the things you can control.

*Sarah Patterson is a radio journalist of more than 30 years’ experience, a former Air News Director and WIN Television Bureau Chief. She has a BA in Media Studies.