Straight from the Sky celebrates its 10th year!

Today is a milestone for our talkshow Straight from the Sky. This week we will be celebrating our 10th anniversary giving us the rare distinction of being the longest television talkshow in Cebu or outside of Manila besting the mainstream television networks. We had our premier showing on Mar. 27, 2000 with then newly appointed Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Sec. Manuel “Mar” Roxas. Being a neophyte, I had to fly to Manila to do the interview at the DTI office in Makati where Mar entered his office for the first time that day. It was to be my first and only interview in Manila.

Since then, straight from the Sky has done interviews in many places outside Cebu, including a shoot in Taipei and Macau. We’ve interviewed most of Cebu and the nation’s most influential personalities. What I thought would just be a fling on tv has become sort of mainstream in the sense that we were proudly awarded the Cebu Archdiocese Mass Media (CAMMA) Awards in 2005. To be honest, I never ever thought of doing a tv show.

But at the start of the new millennium, on January 2000, my good friend Angelo Verdan (he retired from PAL, worked with SkyCable and is now head of MARINA) invited me to his office for coffee with then SkyCable manager Boybo Villanueva to do a Public Affairs show in SkyCable. It was to be the 3rd talkshow, as my good friend Bunny Pages and the late Cerge Remonde had already started their respective shows. Unfortunately, they didn’t last.

Knowing that tv talkshows in Cebu never last long, I figured that I’d just go on for the ride and dabble into this opportunity in order to learn and experience this medium. After all, at that time, I was already a 14-year veteran journalist. I already experienced doing a radio show with Cerge Remonde on DyLA called the People’s Economic Council Hour. So when it was time to choose the title of the show, SkyCable wanted to put the name of Sky as part of it and since the title of my column was “Shooting Straight” we ended up with the title, “Straight from the Sky”.

It has been a long ride! Perhaps the question that comes to mind is, what did we do to achieve our longevity? I guess, I had the advantage of being a columnist of the Philippine Star and The FREEMAN. Asking people for an interview is our bread and butter. But more importantly, we found our niche in presenting only the good news. Having seen thousands of news headlines often depicting gory or brutal scenes apparently offended a lot of people. Yet, there are a lot of good stories out there just waiting to be told.

A collaboration with the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation (RAFI) brought me to appreciate a lot of good stories that would otherwise never make it in the front pages of our newspapers. Call them lucky if they would land in the inside pages at all. Balance it with Culture and the Arts plus some adventure or tourism shoots spices up our show and time merely zipped by.

Of course, not everything is a bed of roses on our road to success. We did have a lot of embarrassing moments or bloopers, as they would say.

Tonight’s show is our 525th show. However, we did have our replays, which is not bad for a talkshow that runs as long as we have. The first replay was a shoot we did at the Plantation Bay Resort, the very first time we did an outdoor taping. Much of the sound was garbled when we showed it; after we had it fixed, we played it again.

We did a replay of the show we had with Msgr. Chris Garcia on the topic of the Miracle of Fatima. Msgr. Chris requested that this show be replayed and we obliged him. Then we did a taping with his eminence Ricardo Cardinal Vidal at the chancery for his birthday. We just received our new Tricaster and after it was done, when our editor/director Albert Dajab started editing the show, we had no sound! Call it a technical glitch or snafu, but these things happen. Luckily Cardinal Vidal obliged us with another interview for his Sacerdotal anniversary and it went pretty well.

The last snafu we experienced was last January when we had already done taping our good friends, Joel Mari Yu and Ruben Almendras on the topic of the Philippine economy for the year 2010. The copy of that taping was accidentally erased before it could be edited. Quite embarrassing to inform our two friends that their show disappeared into thin air.

For tonight’s 10th anniversary show, we are presenting to you a first in Cebu television and a first on Straight from the Sky. We bring you “Cebu Straight from the Sky!” Our special guest is Capt. Joy Roa of the Air Safari show on ANC and Capt. Jessup Bahinting of AviaTours who provided the plane for this shoot. This was a joint effort as he also did his Air Safari show last week and I was his guest. After the aerial shoot, we did have a segment at the Imperial Palace Hotel with Hotel Manager Ed Tongco. Special thanks goes to all of you, our televiewers, for your patronage of our show and our sponsors. Above all, to the management and staff of SkyCable for having this wonderful show. We hope that we have served our televiewers with only the best shows!