Virgin Radio

Wednesday 11th September 2002

I worked at Virgin Radio from September 2002 until August 2003. I had a great year there. I made lots of friends, heard lots of great bands and met a fair share of celebrities. The one memory that stands out the most, is rather oddly, Badly Drawn Boy calling me a ‘clever fuck’ for explaining why helicopters can’t fly upside down. Well, at least that’s the story I always tell… The other memory that comes to mind is vomiting through a 2” wide window on the side of a minibus at about 2am coming back from V2002, but we won’t go in to that…

I learnt more about new media at Virgin Radio that I ever did at University. It was the ideal company to work for at a time when the web-boom had started fizzling and the web was slowly changing course. Working in a small in-house team, with the rather special James Cridland at the helm, we’d work primarily on www.virginradio.co.uk. Producing content for the website (image galleries, gig write ups and artist information pages) and work with the Sales & Marketing team to product promotional micro sites, which normally worked alongside on-air campaigns. The micro sites kept us busy most of the time, working in HTML and sometimes Flash. It was great working for such a wide range of clients, including: Nescafe, Miller Genuine Draft, Microsoft, McDonalds, The Australian Tourist Board, DVD promotions such as Fargo and The Royal Tenenbaums. As well as producing in-house micro sites for The Pete & Geoff Breakfast show and Ben Jones’ Rock Trumps.

There was room at times to work with other technologies and at Virgin Radio I first started writing my own Javascript and taught myself PHP. I designed and built Virgin Radios’ first chat room, which was used for the V2003 festival for people to discuss the things they were presumably missing, by being sat at home in front of their computer and not at the gig itself.
Other projects included producing a duplicate version of the Virgin Radio website, accessible only by Freeserve customers. An interactive CD for the Sales department, promoting the Pete & Geoff Breakfast show. The CD was sent out to potential sponsors of the show. HTML newsletters and online banners were also basic tasks but ones which I needed to learn.

One of my most satisfying projects was Liquid Radio. A flash site for a smaller online radio station that Virgin Radio ran. The site was built entirely in Flash, but was fully editable via XML. All its content was all updated externally and loaded in from a content management system. This was my first experience of XML in Flash and the skills I learnt were ones I went on to use again and again.