The Afternoon Show - Mike And Arda

Taken from the RAM FM Internet site that showed the on air presenter at a certain time.







After Hayat Alami went to work in Ramallah, I presented the Afternoon Show alone for a week or so. At the end of September/beginning of October Arda Aghazarian joined me instead of Hayat. The Afternoon Show became known as the Afternoon Show with Mike and Arda.

Some minor changes were made, like the Lunchbreak (between 12-1pm) became a competition, and listeners had to guess what year we were playing the songs from, along with clues that we were giving every 10 minutes or so.

As I said last time, the 12-3pm spot is not one of the best daytimes spots to have on radio, and at first we were told to only ask people to e-mail us the answers. The response was low - only 4-6 e-mails per day. Then one day the computer was down, and we got permission to tell people to call. Again the response was only marginally better - about 10 calls per day. We were told not to worry, the more the people hear about the show, calls will grow.

This is exactly what happened, and by the time the raid happened, we were getting between 20-50 calls in the Lunchbreak hour. We had a golden rule at RAM FM, whoever won a competition, couldn't enter again for 30 days - to give others a chance of winning. But this didn't deter our faithful listeners - and we had many. People just called us for the fun of it, they said, "I know I cannot win, but the answer is ......"

The show was getting bigger everyday, and more and more people were calling and e-mailing us outside of the competition hour. We continued to have the magazine format, and each day Arda and I concentrated on a different theme. We began interviewing experts here and there instead of talking about the subjects ourselves, and listeners who were experts at what we were talking about, called or wrote in giving their knowledge.

Everything was perfect, it couldn't be better. Our audience, as well as RAM FM's was growing by the day. I heard RAM FM in cars, taxis, bakeries, flower shops and my barber! We were getting e-mails from all over the world. People were listening to us online, so it wasn't afternoon in a lot of places. But they say all good things come to an end, and so they did on April 7th 2008, and fittingly, it was during our show - at about 2.25pm. I won't go into the details of the raid again, I have already written about it in a previous post.

After the raid, Arda went to Ramallah to present the show, but I as an Israeli couldn't go there. Arda continued to present the show alone until RAM FM's closure on August 7th 2008 - exactly four months after the raid.

I think we (Hayat, Arda and myself) proved that it doesn't matter WHAT time a show is broadcast, if it is interesting to the listener, they will listen.