DOG POO AND VOMIT

Clint Rendall is forced to listen to The Edge. This is the result.

Where would we be without commercial radio stations like The Edge? In a better country probably.

NOT SO MANY YEARS AGO Neil Finn of Crowded House and Split Enz fame was, along with many others, calling for the creation of a non commercial youth radio network.

One of the principal reasons the YRN never got off the drawing board was because of the considerable lobbying commercial radio did to discourage the government giving the green light to a project that would have added more creative resources to public broadcasting in this country - but would have impacted negatively on the audience figures of youth-orientated stations like The Edge and The Rock.

Given the increasingly fragmented nature of the media today and the declining fortunes of conventional forms of broadcasting, the YRN will now most likely never be heard on the airwaves. It flickered briefly as an idea but was snubbed out by political forces that were not sympathetic to what Neil Finn described as a youth network that would treat young people as citizens rather than consumers. The YRN would of been a network that would have taken youth issues seriously and talked about them.

But in the absence of such a socially-committed network how lucky we all are to have a commercial radio station like The Edge looking after the interests of our youth.

This morning  listeners were treated to breakfast DJ Dom sticking his hand in box filled with dog poo.

Dom naturally wasn't terribly happy about it but everyone had a laugh at his expense. Dom muttered something about "having to raise the bar higher than this" but clearly this was just sour grapes - which would have been preferable to the pong of sticky dog poo.

But the fun was only just starting. Proving once again that The Edge has its pulse on the crucial issues that young folk are talking about, someone called Clint Randell did a "yardie" and vomited into a bucket.

On The Edge's Facebook page we read:

"We made Clint Randell do his first ever yardie today. It was filled with milk and he power chucked 4 times! Solid effort!"

Solid effort indeed! And you can watch the video too..

As Elvis Costello sings in "Radio, Radio":

Some of my friends sit around every evening

and they worry about the times ahead

But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference

and the promise of an early bed

You either shut up or get cut up;

they don't wanna hear about it.

It's only inches on the reel-to-reel.

And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools

tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel.