Upper 6 Pupil, Chris Doylend, Shares His Experience of Being Chair of the 'Close Conversations' Podcast
October 16, 2024
"Being chair of the Close Conversations podcast was by far the highlight of the Lower 6th Year. Taking over from the extremely successful year prior, the pressure was high to continue the standard, but I am glad to say that I believe we did this with resounding success. We began by recording shorter episodes, touching on events throughout the year, including foundation of different societies, such as the Wellington Geo-Politics Society, and Charitable events, such as Challenge 29, whereby participants would challenge themselves to 29 different things throughout the month of February. As a result, this saw many, both pupils and staff, choose to get more involved in these events throughout the year.
Moving Further into the term, we slowly extended the lengths of our episodes, to be more in depth and cover a range of both studio and in person interviews. Consequently, we expanded out topic areas into the wide range of sports and their fixtures played here at Norwich School, our first of which was covering the much-anticipated hocky block fixture against Gresham’s. However, this swiftly expanded, as we were lucky enough to interview members of the Dance team, surrounding the Senior Dance Festival, and members of the Cricket First Team, surrounding their Tour in South Africa.
As we entered the hight of the school year, there were a number of events to be covered. Most notably, both the Annual School Cup Run, and the Senior play: Clue, took place. Despite the obvious mixed feelings towards Cup Run, the rest of the of the Close Conversations team and I were able to get a plethora of interviews on the day, as well as previous winners Bea Wells and Nick Conway in the studio for a more in-depth discussion about the event and their feelings towards the event as a whole. As a result, we were able to put together what is my personal favourite episode of the year, as well as the longest.
Overall, as previously stated, being Chair of the Close Conversations podcast was by far the highlight of my Lower 6th year, having strongly influenced my university degree choice, of media and communications. Despite the challenges faced of organising interviews, tireless editing, and the radio room going under reconstruction in the Trinity Term, resulting in some creative solutions to keep the podcast up and running, I could not have asked for a greater experience, or a greater team. I am so thankful for the opportunity to have taken on such as role and would highly recommend it to anyone who has the chance."
- Chris Doylend, U6
