One of the consistent themes of the summer is that everyone needs air conditioning, which means HVAC guys are in high demand. Partner up with a bunch of HVAC repairmen who have stories to tell of things they’ve seen or encountered as they’ve gone to homes to fix units. Have one on each week to tell that great story in a seasonal feature you can call “Holy HVAC!”
Want an edgy character development idea? Everyone is sitting with a computer or smart phone in front of them while on-the-air. Unannounced and unexpectedly, the anchor calls an audible and makes the cast members trade places (or phones) where the new person gets to rifle through the browser history of another cast member and quiz them about any site they’ve been to!
Take another listen to Jeff Session’s testimony last week in front of the Senate, close your eyes, and he sounds exactly like Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies. Time to get audio of Granny from the internet and compare the two of them.
With Father’s Day approaching, go gather audio of kids describing what their father does for a living. Start with your kids, then make a bulk of it average, normal kids with fathers who have average, normal jobs to hear how cute they are struggling telling you.
A cast member of a show mentioned to our team on a call that he was the world’s worst book reader. He said he had bought three books in the last six months and not read one of them. Which led to this idea: let’s “hire” three kids once school is out and “pay” them (tickets, prizes) to each read one of the books for the cast member. We’ll give them a week then they come back, read their book report to the cast member on-the-air, and it’ll be like he read them!
Lots of high school students are taking finals exams now. Get a teacher to come on to give you their subject’s final exam. Whoever passes in the cast is a genius. Whoever fails in the cast is a Cledus.
Each cast member should bring in their high school yearbooks. Have the station voice read something written in each person’s yearbook and play that for the audience, who must guess from whose it came. Once correctly guessed, the cast member can tell a story about the person and why it was written in their yearbook.
Offer up a short, one sentence synopsis of something that may or may not have happened to you. The listener must guess if it’s a Lie or a Confession. For instance: when I was in school, I once jumped naked into the university fountain at the student center. If they guess right they win. Even better, if it’s a confession, you then tell the story and do some character development content. Thanks to Tess and Heather at WKFR, Kalamazoo, MI for this idea.
With Cinco de Mayo this week (Friday), do the Hot Pepper Challenge. Get every kind of pepper from your grocery store and set them up most mild to set-your-mouth-on-fire hot. Invite someone to conduct a trivia contest amongst the show cast around Cinco de Mayo or Mexican trivia. Get the question right, and the cast member endures no pepper. Get the question wrong, and they must eat a pepper (start mild, work to hot to build tension).
If your market has not yet gotten to weather nice enough to mow lawns for the first time this season, set every guy on your show in competition with each other to see who has to pull the cord on their mower the most times to get it started. Audio of it helps the bit. Thanks to JJ and Tiny, KFDI, Wichita for this idea.