How Papa Jack keeps radio alive

Given all the advancement in technological gadgets for communication, we still rely on radio at its most basic.

I tune in to the car radio if I find myself on the road at 6:30 p.m. to check what the news is on 24 Oras, which is a simulcast over DZBB. Sniff, I don’t have one of those luxury vehicles with a TV set in it.

And since I don’t have wifi at home either, I turn on the radio whenever there is something big that is happening in the world that I have to know. When an earthquake struck parts of Luzon at 1:15 a.m. two weeks ago, I hurriedly put the radio on to verify if the earth really shook or if I was just having an attack of vertigo.

At that point I couldn’t even call up friends or wake up housemates because I may have survived that quake, but I knew I’d eventually get killed by sleepy heads if I started waking up people at that time of the night.

Monitoring AM stations, I managed to confirm that it wasn’t just me — radio anchors on board said they also felt the shaking. Was everyone okay? No one could give any assurance at that instant. I waited for half an hour and mercifully there were no broadcasts of emergency cases that came about as a result of the earthquake.

In fact, very few even made any attempt to do a follow-up. I went to sleep a bit bothered, but eventually let go of my worries. I just figured that if someone like me who stays on the 36th floor was alive and whole, then everyone else below would have been all right.

When there are no earth-shaking developments, however, I still find the radio useful to listen to music. Driving back home, I have to tune in to FM radio because when I purchased my vehicle six years ago, I was asked if I wanted to have a CD player installed in it. No, that would have set me back by P15,000 and so I have no choice but rely on radio.

That is not so bad, except that you are at the mercy of radio anchors and I tell you a lot of them don’t necessarily provide you with listening pleasure. 

I became a radio listener very late in life — as in only two years ago. I got hooked to the medium by accident. Trapped in EDSA traffic at midnight one time (incredibly enough that is still a regular occurrence, especially in Guadalupe on Friday nights), I turned on the radio to ward off boredom.

There was this anchor who was entertaining phone calls from listeners sharing their sexual experiences. Like I always say, sex sells and immediately I took the bait. Oh, so they have this at night. And so I prayed for another midnight traffic to give me an excuse to listen again to Wild Confessions the following night — and the nights thereafter.

The DJ was Papa Jack. I thought his radio voice sounded strange. It wasn’t mellow — far from soothing. In fact, it was a bit grating.

But the man made sense, was witty and quick on the uptake. He wasn’t academically authoritative, but definitely street-smart and very practical. Prior to Wild Confessions, he has another show, True Love Conversations, where listeners could ask advice regarding matters of the heart.

Papa Jack’s pieces of advice made a lot of sense. I was even more impressed when I found out he was only 27 — that time. It didn’t take long for me to discover he was popular with the masses because every time I made a withdrawal at the ATM the guards on duty would all be listening to him.

I became a Papa Jack addict for more than a year. But I gave up.

Why? Because I got tired of the rules he imposes on the air. For instance: No greetings from the callers — even if he himself does it. His reason for exempting himself? That’s his show.

On-air conversations also stray often and take various directions. There was a time when the caller turned out to be an amateur voice-talent. Papa Jack and the person on the line engaged in mimicking Sponge Bob characters for the entire duration of the call and no wild confession was ever uttered.

While I do agree that the voice talent was impressive and had the gift for impersonation, it ceased to be amusing after a while. Papa Jack apparently got a lot of positive feedback on that because that episode kept getting replayed whenever he couldn’t make it on board.

But really, it started to come out of my ears, not even during the second or third replay, but even during the first. Deviating from the program format perhaps could be disorienting and I guess that was what happened to some of the listeners and I was among them.

And what about those times when Papa Jack would go down memory lane and once spent precious radio time ticking off brands of candies and store-bought sweetmeats that were his favorite as a kid. I’m nostalgic, but he got some of these mundane facts wrong and I can be a stickler for accuracy.

Of course, there are also distortions of the King’s language — unintentional, but should be corrected before all the listeners who do not know any better begin to embrace those as correct English grammar.

What makes me hit the ceiling, however, is Papa Jack’s way of reprimanding callers who utter terms in the vernacular that are not appropriate for radio. The problem is that he eggs them on to get naughty and when they get all excited and bite, he panics and hushes them up by saying “Huy!” That is rude.

And then there is the matter of the quality of the callers’ stories. After almost two years of listening to this show, I think I’ve already heard them all.

I admire Papa Jack because I know he is extremely talented and can do more as a radio host. But I think a reformat is in order.

When that happens, trust that all his lost listeners will come back to Papa.