Days like this bring out the old me. The one who worked in commercial radio and desperately searched for stories with headlines such as Man Wins Bet, Loses Penis , because everybody knows the Middle East isn't funny, and the only other thing any of the listeners want to talk about is the fact that cars are piled up on the South Eastern and someone just cut them off in the stopping lane.

It's alarming how, two years later, I read a story like that and feel a flood of relief. There's the backbone, right there, of a two hour show. Thank God.

I reckon I could write down a dozen jokes off the back of that faster than I could name the continents.

And can I remember a single thing about Australian Constitutional Law or, say, the key battles in the Second World War that I spent all that time studying at university?

Nooooo.

I'm sure they weren't nearly as highlarious as the above story though. Nor as worthy of airtime.

Tune into FM radio tomorrow. If they're not taking calls on "The Stupidest Thing You've Done For a Bet" and discussing the potential reasons why someone would chop their dick off in a bar: "Further investigations found the man had just been propositioned by (insert unfortunate celebrity here)", I will be extremely disappointed.

I went back to my old work today (Tough Love on Triple M) to talk on radio about the two comedy shows I'm directing. For those of you who don't know Tough Love, click here.

It was so fun to be back there, actually. Someone should write a book about radio. It is just such a funny universe. You know how sometimes you listen to the radio and you wonder what sort of people actually take time out of their days to call a radio station?

Well, turns out, all kinds of people do exactly that. Part of my job used to be putting people on air for talkback. I used to get calls from (literally) brain surgeons (that happened twice), truck drivers (that happened more than twice) and one time I got a call from a guy who kept suddenly talking about stocks and shares so his boss wouldn't get suspicious that he was calling a national radio show. When we put him to air, he quite unashamedly put us on hold. A nation waited, listening to a couple of bars of Fur Elise, desperate to hear the end of his story.

So it was good to be back, and wasn't it quite the contrast to Radio National, where (as Mick correctly surmised) there aren't quite so many bomber jackets as one tends to find at Triple M.

Check out the show I was working on at the ABC (The Deep End) here. The eight hour day story mentioned below is available here.

It was interesting working there, although I have to admit that the ABC building at Southbank in Melbourne is very confusing for someone like myself. All the floors are identical. The studios, the bathrooms, the visitors' waiting rooms... Identical.

Which is why I accidentally walked in on a full orchestra rehearsing a quite reverent movement of something by Bach for ABC Classic FM. See? Not the sort of thing you walk in on at Triple M. More likely to walk in on a sales meeting where an executive is up on a table roleplaying his favourite animal (true story).

So, radio is unpredictable (see for example Judith Lucy's show in the Melbourne Comedy Festival) but then so is any job really. One time I worked at the Arts Faculty at Melbourne University and part of my job was processing applications for Special Consideration. One person wrote on his form that he needed an extension because he was "tired on account of being part of a medical experiment".

All in a day's work.