What a manic few weeks it's been since the last newsletter and hopefully you've caught most of it on the Breakfast Show!  | | Andy finally gets a laugh! |
The big personal challenge for me has been to attempt stand up comedy for Comic Relief. Anyone who knows me will tell you that this challenge was not taken lightly. I can never remember jokes, I'm clueless with timing punch lines and I'm generally an un-funny person! Never the less, I realised that with the help of people listening to the show, I might be able to do it. The whole thing culminated on Red Nose Day with two performances in public places and an evening gig at a Derby pub in front of a paying audience. You can see the video of the daytime acts via the links below and check out the exclusive breakfast photos to see me in front of the pub crowd.  | | View from the top of the Cathedral |
I also had a whale of a time recently climbing to the top of Derby Cathedral's tower to see the new cameras that have been installed to keep an eye on the peregrine falcons. You can read more and hear my report via the links below, but have a look also at the exclusive gallery of photos of Derby that I took from the top of the tower. Don't forget we're currently asking you to choose which day should be Derbyshire Day after the idea was discussed on the Breakfast Show. We revealed the short listed 3 dates the other day on the show and now we want you to decide which one it should be. You can expect an announcement on how the vote has gone in the next couple of weeks but in the meantime, make sure you make your choice! Have you got one of "C'mon you Rams" car stickers yet? We're still giving away exclusive prizes on the Breakfast Show each Friday morning, so if you haven't got your sticker yet, pick one up for free from Shop DCFC at Pride Park, the BBC Bus or from BBC Radio Derby. Nominations close at the end of the month for our Community Champions awards. If you've been meaning to nominate someone you know, please do it soon! Here are some links to try... With Breakfast Show travel presenter Simon Masters  | | Simon Masters |
"I've been the regular voice of traffic and travel on the show since the beginning of March, but if you're a regular listener to the station you'll have probably heard me helping keep Derbyshire and East Staffordshire moving through Shane and Aleena's shows. "My day usually starts at around 5.45am, where I'll check all the websites and make the calls to the police and the Highways Agency in preparation for the first bulletin at about 10 past 6, of course the most important preparation is a nice cup of tea, how else can I cope with queues around the Markeaton Island? "After six, I'm essentially rooted to my chair as we watch the cameras on the M1 and the M42; check the speed sensors which monitor traffic flow through Derby, Burton and Uttoxeter and field calls from listeners right across the patch, ringing us with invaluable travel information. "Once it gets to nine o'clock there's just about enough time to grab a cup of tea and a piece toast, before it all starts again with Shane from 10, no doubt making me sing Happy Birthday to some unsuspecting soul!" More extracts from BBC Radio Derby's Andy Potter. Wednesday 7 March | | Andy Potter ready for his next job |
We're looking at manners today, and whether people are still polite to each other. Obviously it's time to set Potter another of Andy's infamous challenges and so I'm dispatched to Ripley Market Place with instructions to follow. My mission is to approach as many people as I can in the space of a minute and wish them good morning, I will receive a monetary prize (by sound effects only-this is the BBC!) for every person who responds to my comment. As the clock starts, I smile at the bus driver waiting for his passengers offer him a hearty good morning and receive a look that can only be described as threatening! I move on. Luckily not everyone had got up on the wrong side of the bed and as I ran dementedly around the heart of Ripley, microphone, headphones, cables and a radio car with an enormous mast sticking out the top in tow, I notched up a healthy tally of “mornings.” Derbyshire and East Staffordshire is a friendly place and I think that we proved today that we live in one of the most polite areas of the country. Wednesday 14 MarchImagine deciding to clear out your garden to make way for an extended conservatory and patio and finding that you've got a second world war bomb shelter in your garden. That's todays destination for the Radio Car as I head out to Alvaston armed with an ARP helmet and a torch! I wasn't prepared for what I was to find at Paul and Sally Pinkstone's house, quite literally a brick built room that had been hiding itself under a rockery. The bomb shelter is perfectly large enough for six foot Paul to stand in and something of a coup for son Joe and his friends, who have found the whole discovery “cool.” Sister Charlotte isn't as impressed, because of the quantity of “creepy crawlies in the dark.” I suggest on air that it would actually make quite a good den for dad and he ought to fit it out with a selection of tele-visual home entertainment to which Paul adds that a bar in the corner would be good as well. So will Sally get her garden changed or will the shelter be a feature, only time will tell and who knows, perhaps I'll be back with the radio car. This is one of our studio "desks" in crisis. Simon the engineer is currently going through the process of taking apart, cleaning, and re-building this broadcast desk after a coffee spilling incident. Coffee and technology are not good together and for the time being the Breakfast Show is being presented from our reserve studio. Don't ask me what he's doing with the piece of wood because I have no idea! | 
