Interview with Box Of Neutrals. Part One.

Now this interview of the month with the Australian radio show Box of Neutrals is a little different then the others I have done before. 

Let me explain why.

Well firstly this is a joint interview. So me and Martijn from That Cars Blog collaborated on the questions. A first for FFF.

Secondly we haven't personally met Michael, Rob and Pete from Box Of Neutrals (Mainly because Australia is a long way from the UK and the Netherlands) but they have been very generous with their time to answer our insane and yet sometimes serious questions.

So generous that Box of Neutrals were. That we decided to reward them with a two parter interview special. Another first for FFF.

So check out the boys podcasts/radio show.

Online. http://boxofneutrals.com/

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/boxofneutrals

And on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BoxOfNeutrals

And enjoy part one of the Box of Neutrals interview. 

Please explain to our millions of readers, who you are, and what Box Of Neutrals is.

Michael: Box Of Neutrals is a controversial Australian News and Current Affairs programme, notorious for its sensationalist reporting, and is an example of tabloid television where stories rotate around community issues i.e. diet fads, miracle cures, welfare cheats, shonky builders, negligent doctors, poorly run businesses, and corrupt government officials. For this reason the programme is constantly under criticism and ridicule.

Rob: Michael’s pretty much covered that part, and plus I probably misread the question in my original response so I have a story/Wikipedia entry of how the show came to be, or be to came. Like an old wise tale.

Box Of Neutrals was born in the middle of 2010 when Michael and I were both at SYN Radio in Melbourne and realised we also went to the same university. And the same class - Australian Cinema.

Most of the meetings about what would eventually become Box Of Neutrals were born out of those lectures. I’ve been trying to find my notes where we scribbled down a list of potential names for the show, which I’m willing to say I lost, only to save myself from the disappointment of never finding them!

Michael and I each had separate shows, yet I found out when listening to Michael’s old show that he was into cars and Formula 1. Michael probably knew me first as a listener that would occasionally message into his show. Then we sort of crossed paths and worked out some weird co-incidences.

Speaking of weird co-incidences, Peter McGinley and I went to the same high school. Except Peter was a year level below myself, so I’ve technically known Peter since I was 13. Even though I only spoke to him last year when I joined SYN Radio. So just like most things that have happened on the show, Box Of Neutrals really came to be by accident.


Pete: I like Neil Mitchell.

Why did you decide to release the radio show as a podcast?

Michael: Mostly because we’re what some in the industry would describe as ‘attention whores’, although we prefer to think of ourselves as ‘multimedia producers’. The podcast mostly came about because we decided to do 2010 off-air to figure out exactly how the show would work - sort of like practice. Then people started to listening to that - I can only assume accidentally - so the podcast actually became our core product. Even though we love the on-air stuff we do today, I think that this is probably still the case - the podcast is still the central part of Box Of Neutrals.

Rob: Box Of Neutrals didn’t start off initially as a radio show. Last year was really supposed to be a really drawn out pilot for us. To use a Formula 1 analogy, like when Toyota spent the entire of 2001 testing before their debut in 2002.

Even though I’d occasionally bumped into Michael, we didn’t really know each other that well. He knew I was a font of knowledge with Formula 1, and he was keen to do a show about Formula 1. I seem to recall Michael become an even greater fan of Formula 1 due to Box Of Neutrals. I’d like to think now he’s surpassed me as the font of knowledge because of the show.

So we spent the remainder of 2010 just to find our feet quietly, build up a rapport and find out an identity for Box Of Neutrals.

I still remember the very first time myself, Michael and Peter got into the studio and recorded something. We had put off doing this show for weeks, I seem to remember. So we finally busted each other to find a time when we were all free and spend an hour in an off-air studio to record it.

That pilot is still available on iTunes and our website. It’s only 11 minutes long, but the recording itself was about an hour. Sadly, the remainder of that podcast went into ether due to a technical problem.

Towards the end of 2010, most of the legwork was done with the show. We actively put off having a radio show on SYN Radio until the first season of broadcasting in 2011, so we could start off as a “brand new” programme about Formula 1.

So by the time we had our first live episode on the radio, we had spent around 22 weeks together making Box Of Neutrals. We already hit the ground running by the time we got onto the radio, and it was really up to the listeners to determine whether they liked it or not.

Michael: It’s probably worth mentioning at this point how stupidly seriously we take the podcast. The way the radio station at SYN works is that we’ll do our thing in the broadcast studio, and it’ll be recorded to an audio log, which we’ll the scan through, find our show, edit it up and upload to the website. Sometimes, however, the audio log fails, and the recording is unusable. On the handful of occasions this has happened – and we normally discover this at about 10PM at night, some five hours after the show finished going to air – we trudge over to the station’s production studio, sit down, and do the whole show again. That’s some serious dedication – especially when you consider the fact we were probably all on the way out for a Friday night at that point. I’m usually tired because I’ve done something stupid like stay awake for 45 hours just to see if I can, and Peter has at least once been drunk. But, dammit, we soldier through just so we can punch out that episode.

Hire us, BBC.

Rob: I’m the one who edits them every week. My record is staying up until 3.30am the following morning. On average, I’m done by about 1-2am - depending how distracted I get. We actually remembered and used a lot of the same gags from our radio show earlier in the day, but at least we had a chance to refine it this time around!

Michael: Rob does edit the podcasts. We initially had an argument over who would do it, as we each edited the podcasts for our previous, separate radio shows. I’m kinda glad Rob won in the end - it mean I get to go out on Friday night, or go to bed. Then I wake up in the morning, see the podcast in my inbox tagged at 4AM, and do all the uploading based stuff - writing MP3 tags, formatting pages, writing those one-line quips attached to each episode that no-one reads - mostly because they aren’t that good anyway.

Pete: Vote Liberal.


You do an amazing job of delivering serious F1 related content with a comedic twist. How do you decide what makes funny F1?
Michael: If you analyse the show on a really deep level, you’ll discover that it’s mostly Peter McGinley trying to say something funny, then Rob playing a sound effect. Somehow, this works. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but then Two And A Half Men doesn’t really make any sense to me either – and that’s popular, apparently.

In all seriousness, I don’t really know. I think it’s just that we all get along pretty well, so the ‘comedy’ (if you can call it that) happens naturally. What you hear when you listen to the show isn’t far from what you’d hear if you eavesdropped on one of our regular conversations. Sometimes we even use sound effects in them, too. The soundboard is ultra-portable.

Rob: Joe Saward, who also features as one of the in-jokes of our show, does make a valid point about how the advent of Twitter and the internet have created so-called “arm chaired” journalists. We didn’t want to pretend we had any credibility. Instead, we embraced that we’re a little bit green and it helps that all three of us have a stupidly wicked sense of humour.

Formula 1 is a very funny sport. It features some brilliant personalities, moments and storylines, and to be honest we don’t think a lot of the mainstream broadcasters see this aspect of the sport. Because sport is supposed to be sport, humour isn’t the first thing you think of when talking about Formula 1.

When you see or hear other Formula 1/motorsport shows around the world, they all pretty much do the same thing. Talk about the latest news and happenings, and then cut to the race itself. We knew there was no point trying to be something we’re not, and for that matter doing the same thing as everyone else is doing.

For example, Mark Webber. Everybody else would say he’s Australian, is teammates with Sebastian Vettel and probably isn’t as good as Vettel. Whereas we see him as the guy that licks his face in the press conferences a lot, looks a bit like Don Draper from Mad Men and once vomited inside of his helmet. We also see him as a great racing driver, but who else could even imagine to come up with half of the crap that we come up with for these characters of the sport?

Michael: I think Peter Windsor sums it up pretty well. Like most things we do, Windsor seems to do it better. Like with his blog, he said he wasn’t going to write just another news blog because there are loads out there for fans to choose from. So, instead, he made a diary-style feature website, which I thought was really cool. IN that way, we didn’t make just an ordinary podcast, we made one that was a little more character-driven, based on what we found funny. I think it comes back to that ‘attention whore’ thing...

Rob: That isn’t to say other shows don’t do a good job, but we actively scour to find the bits in Formula 1 that other people/shows miss. I’d like to think we’ve single handedly bolstered the popularity of Olav Mol in Australia.

Pete: Lefties!


Do you have a plan/script for every show? If so, do you stick to it religiously or do you ad lib?
Michael: We do, actually. Or we do when we’re on live radio. When we’re podcast only, it’s far more relaxed and we only bring talking topics with us. On radio we have intrinsically planned running sheets that count our show out to the minute so finish bang on time. Then, when the show starts, we ignore it almost completely and lose track of time, which normally makes the show after us quite angry. But I have learnt that if I take them to the pub beforehand, they’re much nicer to us. True story.

Rob: When we first started, it was very ad-hoc. We just booked an hour in the studio, had a couple of dot points, maybe printed an Autosport article and off we went. To be honest, not a lot has changed since.

We’ve got some notes, a list of news headlines and the discussion is off the top of our heads - with prior research/knowledge obviously. We’ve got other stimulus material for the longer segment topics, the calendar, championship/race standings and track maps. I actually have the 2011 Formula 1 Sporting Regulations & 2014 Technical Regulations in the boot of my car, only because it’s too heavy to carry around in my bag everyday!

Michael: We don’t use scripts, I should say. The only scripted parts are our introduction lines and Kit Harvey’s alphamale reports. The rest is all us – which is probably why we make so many mistakes, and also why we keep accidentally disrespecting Sizzler. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have even brought it up, not since Sizzler closed down.

Pete: Show some bloody respect!

Rob: In terms of scripting, there is very little apart from the intro to the show where I say ‘we play Flavio’s mailbag’, for example. Michael actually does his intro off the top of his head, maybe referring to his notes to see what we’re talking about. But I have to come up with the absurd headlines, so I have to write them down! Ditto for the “I’m Peter McGinley and I got pulled over by the cops...[insert sound effect here]” bits of the show.

Apart from that, everything that happens on the show is spontaneous. Apart from the time we hired a stripper for our first episode back on the radio. At least Peter McGinley didn’t know that was going to happen!

In which countries is your podcast most popular? Do you get surprised by how international Box of Neutrals is getting?

Rob: Michael and Peter have more access to those statistics, but based on the conversations we’ve had, it’s a tie between Australia and Europe. We have a good following in the UK as I man the Twitter feed during the races through the #BBCF1 hashtag, and plus we speak English. I’m more surprised by our reach in places like the Netherlands and even Asia. Maybe less surprised by the Netherlands as we interviewed Olav Mol.

Michael: We don’t have much to tell us where our podcast is most popular, though Facebook tells us it’s in Australia that we have the most listeners. After that comes the UK, then a whole bunch of places like Belgium, the Netherlands, and even Malaysia for some reason.

Rob: If you go on Facebook and like the Olav Mol page, we actually created that! It has more likes than our own Facebook page oddly enough. A lot of Dutch people write on the Olav Mol page, none of them would dare think it’s run by a couple of Australians!

Michael: I distinctly remember creating this page as a joke, after Rob introduced me to the world of Olav Mol. For a long while it had only a handful of followers, but now there are loads of these Dutch people joining up and leaving comments - one of them even posted a picture of themselves with Olav! I feel a little bit guilty - maybe I should tell him next time we see him. I feel oddly powerful, though - I control his online image. The things I could do...

Rob: I am surprised, yet I’m not at the same time, by our overseas followers. We’ve been quietly chipping away at creating a fan base, and compared to this time last year, there’s been an astonishing increase. I do hope it continues to spiral out of control this time next year. I’m hoping to make Peter McGinley a cult celebrity in Estonia by mid-2013.

Michael: It still baffles me, and puts an incredible grin on my face, that the likes of yourself - and even Martijn from the Netherlands - sat down on your Saturday afternoon or whenever and coloured in a picture of Peter McGinley’s face. The frickin’ Netherlands, that’s just ridiculous. I could never have imagined that happening, ever. It’s like Peter’s face is some sort of trans-continental disease. In a nice way. We love it.

Pete: Go feck yourself to buggery!


You have spoken to some amazing F1 personalities for the show, including Peter Windsor, James Allen, and Olav Mol to name but a few. Who has been your favourite person to interview? Who's next for the Box of Neutrals grilling?

Michael: It’s difficult to play favourites, it’s a bit like trying to choose a favourite child - if none of your children really identified with you and were all somehow far superior in intellect and social standing compared to you. Peter Windsor is one of my favourites, if not just because he normally gives us so much time to talk to him. Craig Scarborough was also a great guy to chat to, I think we had a lot of fun talking to him. Olav Mol may just top the list, though - but I think that’s just because he was happy to catch up in person during the Australian Grand Prix. But I really can’t say I have an absolute favourite.

Rob: It’s hard to pinpoint one. I know it’s very cliché. We do interview Peter Windsor a lot, which we do purely out of self-indulgence as it’s hard not to be fascinated by his stories and wealth of experience. We’ve had some great chats with these F1 personalities, and an honour to do so. I never expected to have a conversation with someone like Peter Windsor, Craig Scarborough, Ben Edwards, Ross Stevenson from Ross and John on 3AW (that’s another story) or James Allen in my life.

Michael: Wait, I changed my mind! Ross Stevenson is my favourite!

Rob: Hands down, it has to be Olav Mol. Probably because he was the first, and only, one we’ve met face-to-face. We wrapped to talk to him, and his editor Eric, at the end of 2010 over the phone. Imagine how giddy we got when we had the chance to meet him!

His interview in Australia was quite easy to organise with. He liaised with us personally, so we didn’t have to wrangle through PR people like if we were to interview, say, Sebastian Vettel.

It almost didn’t happen because we realised we never had his mobile number while he was in Australia after we confirmed our interview with him via email. We knew when he would be arriving in Melbourne, and we knew the hotel he was staying at too.

Earlier that day, we had gone to pick up our own media accreditation, so we were hoping we could bump into him then. I remember I had to handle it because after we picked up our media passes, Michael had to retreat back to his civilian life for a few hours as a media studies teacher at a high school. Too long to explain that story though.

So Peter contacted Melbourne Airport to find out whether his flight had arrived, I contacted Olav’s hotel to see if he’d checked in. We ascertained by about 2pm that he had neither landed nor checked in. We planned to interview him later that evening, so we started to stress out a little.

I almost wrote off the interview, until we managed to find out he’d checked in to the hotel and was actually waiting for us for some time. Except, the hotel never bothered to call me back to tell me that Olav had actually arrived.

Michael: I would like to interrupt this monologue here and point out that it was up to me to get to Olav at this point. I arrived back at the station after teaching a bunch of kids who, while knowing nothing about Formula One, were mildly impressed with Olav Mol’s grasp of the more colourful parts of the English language to find that Rob had gone home.

He went home, I should say, because his house was rather close to the hotel Olav was staying at. But Rob had called the hotel something like three times, and ‘didn’t want to bother them anymore’.

The reception lady gave me the phone number to Olav’s room, which I read aloud to Peter so he could write it down on the computer. I hung up and asked for the number back so I could dial, but Pete had closed the window and erased the number. Genius.

Luckily, we remembered most of it. It took two wrong numbers, but we got him, and sorted for him to be picked up.

I now return you to your scheduled programming.

Rob: So I organised my brother-in-law who was nearby to play chauffeur in his swanky Range Rover to pick him up. We went to the wrong hotel, in peak-hour traffic on a Wednesday night in Melbourne.

Finally found his hotel, thankfully Olav was there. I tried to keep as calm and composed as I could, as I’m naturally a bit hyperactive, and I confirmed with Michael and Peter back at the studios that we were in fact on our way.

Even getting a studio to record in was an absolute pain! For whatever reason, another booking had taken time in the studio so we had no radio studio to record in. So we had to shuffle Olav, and three separate handheld recorders in our General Manager’s office to conduct this interview. It was Box Of Neutrals amateur hour at its finest!

We only had a limited window of time to speak with Olav before he had to go for another engagement, but he was keen on the interview and happily let us run late. He was an absolute joy to have interviewed and met, a very grounded individual.

When Michael and I ferried him back to his hotel, we gave each other a very eager high-five when Olav was out of sight! And just like the media moguls that we thought we were that day, we took the train back to the radio studio and then drove to see An Audience With Joe Saward.

We’re hoping to interview Olav once again, albeit in a far more organised manner. But the dream interviewee would have to be Murray Walker. That was, and still is, the original #1 mission for our show to achieve. So if Mr. Walker happens to read this, mail@boxofneutrals.com

That was a very long answer to your question. Peter Windsor-esque, if I dare say so.

After reading that, I think it’s worth saying that if Box Of Neutrals was some sort of dysfunctional family, I’d see Peter Windsor as our uncle – like the kind of uncle that talks a lot, mostly about the war. And Olav Mol would be like that wacky family friend you have who you call uncle even though you’re not related to him. And he swears a lot.

Pete: They should all be sent to French Island and made into compost.


To all three of you: Replace a GP on the current calendar with a race at a location of your choice (either existing circuit or new location).

Rob: I would lose the Chinese Grand Prix and stage a race at Imola. I think the Chinese Grand Prix has had its chance to make an impact, and considering China is fast becoming one of the powerhouses of the Western world, Formula 1 stuffed it up. There isn’t a motorsport culture there, and the circuit itself hardly has any redeeming qualities. It’s an expensive fad these kind of races, if I’m brutally honest. They’re not sustainable.

And I know Michael will say France.

Michael: That’s cheating! I wrote my answer to this first!

...Bahrain for France, easy. That way we get to race in Belgium annually, and we don’t have to go to Bahrain. There are literally no losers... except for Bahrain, I suppose.

Pete:

Who is, in your opinion, the worst driver in the current grid, or who would you most like to replace?

Michael: That’s tough one, really. When it comes down to it, all drivers are really closely matched. If you gave them all the same machinery to use, they’d be within less than a second of each other.

Rob: I wouldn’t say I see a particularly bad driver on the grid. There are some that don’t particularly inspire me, but if I had a one-on-one race with any driver on the grid, I think I know I’d have to bow down to any active Formula 1 driver. Plus Michael will just vomit.

Pastor Maldonado is one of those drivers that hasn’t particularly inspired me. He does remind me a bit of a new age Pedro Diniz. A lot of backing behind him, has some pace behind him, but hasn’t really shone through this year.

Michael: Agreed. The driver I see the least reason to keep is Pastor Maldonado. He hasn’t really sold himself that well this season, and I feel like that horribly impetuous move on Hamilton at Spa didn’t have the markings of a future star. But, having said that, I think he could be doing significantly better if the car beneath him was up to scratch.

Rob: If Nick Heidfeld were still kicking around, I would’ve said him hands down sadly. He’s had a myriad of chances, he’s been in the sport for a while and sadly I think that’s the last we’ll see of him. Then again, who would’ve thought Narain Karthikeyan would come back this year?

I think Formula 1 is quite lucky to have the calibre of drivers it enjoys this year. Even the ones that aren’t doing particularly well aren’t really disgracing themselves. We haven’t had a Yuji Ide in a long while.

Pete: I’ve got a new enema tool.


If you were to design your own track, what parts or corners of other circuits would you definitely put in it?
Michael: It’s going to be difficult to top Rob’s answer. But I’ll say Eau Rouge and Rivage are the first two that come to my head. I love Eau Rouge - cliché, I know - because it’s such a rare sort of part of a racetrack these days. Rivage is such a pain of a corner because of the way it’s cambered, and so purely just because it’s a bit irritating I’d include it. I’d probably throw the Lesmos in too, but just because it’s a bit funny to say ‘lesmos’.

Now do read on...

Rob: For all the shit we and others have given to Hermann Tilke, it’s a hard gig. This is my entry.

Circuit du McGinley

Michael: It is pretty tough to design a circuit. Our crazy voiceover man Adam sometimes sits in the studio with us. He had a crack at designing his own racetrack during one episode - it ended up looking suspiciously like a... phallic object. See the dishonourable mention from the Kolouring Kopmetition.

Pete: Nuuuurrrggghhh.

Would you rather host F1 on Australian national TV or co-commentate with Olav Mol in the Netherlands?

Rob: I’d love to tag team the Dutch commentary as an English commentator! I think hosting the Formula 1 coverage is the great dream of ours, especially if we could do it in the current format we do now. We’d certainly do things a little bit differently, which is probably what Formula 1 needs in Australia. It needs a bit more storytelling and personality like the BBC. Then again, the BBC have a monstrous budget. 2012 will be interesting for the BBC if they can maintain their high standards next year with a compromised budget and on-air cast, possibly.

Michael: I would love to commentate with Olav Mol, but I think there’d be a language barrier issue. I’d probably just say ‘fuck’ a lot, and I don’t even like to swear regularly, I just imagine he’d be that infectious.

Plus I’d really like to shake up the coverage currently provided by the Australian host broadcaster. I think Ten does very little with the rights granted to them by FOM, and would love to try to change it somehow. While totally appreciating that Ten isn’t willing to spend much money because the commercial return isn’t great, I’d still love to try to provide something a little more unique than the generic panel-style show we have now. Like incorporate more swearing, for example – it seems to work in the Netherlands.

Pete: [My pants] smell like vomit.


'Oh Mark Webber, What the fuck gebeurd daar nou zeg?'
Rob: Huld hulda..

Michael: Fucken-eh.

Pete: Cows are only good for eating, and nothin’ much else.

Don't forget to come back on read part two of the Box Of Neutrals interview, where we talk about HRT, Crazy Bernie and Pete talks about tolerance. 

So check out the boys podcasts/radio show because you should. It's amaze. 

Online. http://boxofneutrals.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/boxofneutrals

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BoxOfNeutrals 

You can also follow me at twitter @squiffany and Martijn @martijn_kosters