INNFIELD

This episode tells of my years as a radio host and something of what it's like to work in that very special milieu.

There's a very special level of contact that a presenter, especially a long-running one, has with a radio audience that you don't get in television.

Radio audiences, for the most part, are loyal - and generally a bit brighter than TV ones, if the truth be told. In radio you don't have a picture to help you.

In this episode we look at the early days of radio and its influence, and then we check out a modern presenter's day, and what happens behind the scenes.

The first of several stand-alone Podcasts dealing with this much-misunderstood and fabulous country down at the bottom of the world deals with Cape Town, since that was where it all began.

South Africa gets a lot of undeservedly bad press. Much of it is the legacy of the pre-democracy political system, and those days are long since over.

Certainly there's some crime, yes. But where in the world isn't that the case? If you avoid known trouble spots and don't walk around at night dripping with gold Rolexes and expensive cameras, you'll be absolutely fine.

Go with someone local the first time, if you want to avoid problems.

But, that said, there's a high, wide and handsome welcome awaiting you in this beautiful country.

After a long career at the leading edge of National Network Radio with a popular daily three-hour music and talk show, I thought (rather naively, it turned out) that I'd launch an Internet radio station much along the lines of what I'd always been doing, and the world would flock to my door.

This podcast is for all those hopefuls who're planning the same thing.

The pitfalls are many, and the drain on your wallet spectacular, especially when it comes to music licensing.

Here's a rough guide to how to go about it, the resources you'll need, and the many questions you'll need to ask yourself before going on air for the first time:

Who are my audience? Where do they live? What sort of work do they do? What's their level of education? What do they do with their spare time? What kind of music do they like? Will I have competitions, interviews, requests and the like on my new station? Do I know what equipment and software I'm likely to need?

And can I afford the music licensing costs?

Last week's episode, London for Beginners, provoked a small storm of emails from people who seemed to like it.

Although I hadn't intended it to span two episodes, here for those listeners is more about my introduction at the callow age of 15 to London, that centre of the teenage Universe, when I first travelled there from sunny Cape Town, South Africa, which had been home until then.

It took me by the hand, even then, and led me down avenues of discovery I'll never forget.

My love for London is undiminished, even now. Come and discover it with me.

Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, in the sunshine, I never understood why my solidly British parents always referred to the UK, and London in particular, as 'home'.

Inevitably, I learned as much about the place as I could, and, when I first saw it at the age of 15 on a family holiday, I was astonished at just how much like my imaginings it actually was.

I've been in love with London ever since.

In the June of 2015, my German wife returned to the Fatherland from our home in Cape Town, South Africa, because that country's woefully incompetent Department of Home Affairs, which deals with immigration and such things, decided in its less than infinite wisdom that it would not renew her two-year residence and work permit and thereby forced the issue.

I followed two months later, with our two cats (whose tickets cost substantially more than ours did), and she was saddled with the business of finding somewhere to live, finding a new job and all the other things implicit in international relocation, which she did with her usual good grace.

Although I had been to Germany several times before on short visits, I wasn't sure what living there was going to be like, and approached the prospect with some degree of trepidation.

I needn't have worried. I found the Germans friendly, almost embarrassingly polite, inhumanly efficient, wonderfully well-organised and fluent in English, which made my floundering attempts at speaking their language even more humiliating than I had thought they would be.

It's green, beautiful, and everything works.