The Dubbers are London for Easter weekend, visiting family, looking after baby nephew Shay, and catching up with a couple of expat-NZ friends. The visit tied in nicely with something else I wanted to do. I spent yesterday afternoon at the BBC, getting the grand tour and being interviewed for ‘A World In Your Ear’.

After arriving in London and promptly getting lost at White City, I finally located Rosie Goldsmith who took me on the scenic route through the facility before we settled down into a little editing booth to talk about student radio. She was particularly interested in the idea of Static, the radio station we set up at AUT – or rather, the classroom that broadcasts.

Static differs from most student radio in that it’s the environment within which most of the practical component of the radio degree is taught, and it’s broadcasting 24/7 as that happens.

But Rosie and I spoke for about an hour and a half, and the conversation was pretty wide-ranging. We happened to know some of the same people – and she’s spent a bit of time in New Zealand making radio. As it turns out, her husband’s a former jazz broadcaster and now teaches radio at a university in the UK. So… lots of connections there.

She played me a bunch of clips from student radio around the world. Some was great, some was dreadful. Most of it was desperately worthy, a little was satirical and a small fraction was genuinely hilarious.

Perhaps I’m biased, but happily, the best of it originated from New Zealand. I hate prank phone calls on radio with a passion, but there was a superb piece in which a student phoned up the electoral office after the general election last year, wanting to change his vote. The seriousness with which his call was taken was just beautiful – and the fact that they agreed to respect his wishes not to let his mother know he’d changed his mind about the guy with the moustache when they called back was actually quite touching.

Laura’s documentary in which her sister gives birth made the cut, as did the sound of Rachel jumping out of an aeroplane. Also something satirical about organic chickens. The one thing they had in common – apart from shocking microphone technique (note to self: institute a system of fines for mic pops) – was that these were genuinely adventurous and boundary-pushing bits of radio.

What Matt, Trevor and Peter are doing at AUT is streets ahead of most radio education I’ve come across, and the students there are coming out with some of the most interesting stuff I’ve heard from students at that level (but they spelled your name wrong, Rohani).

The idea that you can make radio by strapping a microphone to yourself and jumping out of a plane is exactly the kind of thing students should be encouraged to think.

Of course, we do pretty well at UCE too. But the luxury of having a teaching environment that’s also a live station that’s broadcasting to the CBD all year round is a real asset.

If there was one thing you could point to as a positive outcome of the deregulation of radio in New Zealand, it’s the fact that any citizen or group who wants to broadcast can just turn on a transmitter and go for it. New Zealand’s still the only place on the planet where that’s true.

We spoke a bit about bFM as well, because that’s an interesting story (40th anniversary rapidly approaching, incidentally), but it remains to be seen how much of what was actually recorded will make it to air.

The episode of A World In Your Ear about student radio will broadcast at 5.30pm on Radio 4 on Saturday the 22nd of April. You’ll be able to ‘Listen Again’ for a week after that from the website.