This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Media
Resonance apologise for tardy Tundra dropping
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 7 October 2010
London-based community radio service Resonance FM has apologised over the way it handled the ‘resting’ of a show hosted by Max Tundra, and for accusing the musician and producer of being a “prima donna” when he complained about it.
In a posting on his own website, Tundra explained this week how he was contacted in August by the station’s Content Manager Richard Thomas who explained his weekly show – Rotogravure – would be taken off Resonance’s weekend schedule from November, but with plans to relaunch it in the spring of 2011. Thomas also proposed making some changes to the show’s format, in particular adding some ‘journalistic’ features into the mix.
Tundra then published the polite email he sent back in response, asking for confirmation of the exact date of his last show and for a meeting to discuss the programme’s future, expressing some concern for Thomas’ plans to make the show more journalistic – Tundra is, after all, a producer and music fan, not a journalist. Thomas failed to respond. Then last Saturday a friend of Tundra, who also works at the community station, called the producer to tell him he’d just received an email saying ‘Rotogravure’ had been axed with immediate effect.
Tundra remarks: “I took great offence at the fact that a radio station Content Manager would send an email informing [me] of plans to alter a long-running radio show, then fail to respond to a perfectly polite reply sent that same day, eschewing any further discussion in favour of dropping the show from the schedule without warning – a whole month before the original date suggested – and failing to let me know that this was happening, despite having five weeks in which to do so. For this reason, among others, I decided to call it a day, telling Resonance FM that I no longer wished [them] to broadcast my show”.
On Monday, presumably after receiving Tundra’s resignation, someone posted on the Resonance FM Twitter feed: “The old chestnut of too many prima donna’s and not enough Maradonas seems to chime particularly nauseatingly today. A glut of ego gymnastics from Max Tundra, the author of ‘Masturbated By A Guy For Small Change’, doesn’t help either”. The last sentence alludes, of course, to Tundra’s 2002 album ‘Mastered By Guy At The Exchange’.
Tundra’s blog on the whole issue understandably sparked a little bit of outrage among Resonance fans, resulting in a public climb down from the station. An open letter from the service’s directors published yesterday reads: “Resonance104.4fm would like to apologise unreservedly to Max Tundra and to all our listeners and friends for the way in which the resting of Max’s programme ‘Rotogravure’ was handled. The station accepts that this incident was managed inappropriately and that the comments about this matter on Twitter were both improper and offensive”.
It continues: “The station would like to clearly restate that it highly values Max Tundra’s unique work, alongside the work of all its programme makers who give their time and extraordinary talent so generously and make Resonance104.4fm what it is. Everyone at the station is mortified by this awful mistake. We have deleted the Twitter comments and are currently undergoing a review of our scheduling, show-rotation and programming policies so that these are transparent to all programme makers and staff, and to ensure that such a mistake does not happen again”.
Of course, as much as we all love the Resonance FM ethos and most of its output, it is worth noting this tardy treatment of on-air talent isn’t new. The hosts of one of Team CMU’s favourite former Resonance shows – ‘Mr Trick And Wrongtom (On Your Radio)’ – also found out their show had been axed on the grapevine having received no official notification from station staff.
Stressing that he understands and respects Resonance’s policy of resting shows from time to time, to free up airtime for others, Mr Trick wrote on his blog yesterday: “It feels like more and more programme makers have been left feeling upset by the way in which they have been dropped. Sadly it appears it took this episode rippling around the social web and generating a lot of negative press to bring that to light”.
He adds: “I love Resonance. Like Max Tundra, I love that it is one beacon of independence in a desperately dull radio landscape. However the treatment of various programme makers has been a real black spot on the station’s name and left a lot of people feeling disgruntled at the way in which they were treated. I can’t speak for others but I loved my involvement with the station but now feel like that passion has been replaced by simple resentment. To me, that’s a real shame. Let’s hope this episode ensures that such negative events never happen again”.
Resonance’s directors stress that a lot of their off-air staff, like their on-air talent, work for free, but says it is reviewing the way it trains its volunteers.
Max Tundras blog
Resonance’s apology
Mr Trick’s blog
