Miloš Kot

“It was all recorded using a simple tape recorder. Basically, they said, ‘Look, Armstrong and Fitzgerald were here recently. We have recordings of their concerts, so let’s create a story that Armstrong stopped by the U Pavouka wine bar.’ So, we picked the music and got hold of some Armstrong interview footage from television. We used only the audio, and Šebánek would ask him questions while an attendant occasionally ‘translated,’ pretending he knew English. He had it written down and had no idea what he was actually saying. That was the charm of it. Once these interviews were recorded, we added applause and other sound effects to make it come alive. We stretched it into at least an hour-long show, making it seem like Armstrong was chatting in the U Pavouka wine bar, sharing stories from TV, with songs playing in between. The same thing was done with Fitzgerald. It was put together so convincingly that people genuinely wanted to know where the place was so they could go there themselves.”

"We had a Russian to Czech translator on the radio, and the TV station had a woman, we had a man. And it was interesting, suddenly my microphone went off. So I immediately went to the TV, and there was a pause, and I put in the translator from the TV, and suddenly the lady was talking, translating, and everything else went on. Behind me at that time was Květoslav Fajk, a comrade who was the director of the programme at that time. He was the former editor-in-chief of Rudé právo and later moved to radio as a political reinforcement. He was in charge and he understood a little bit. There were very few of those comrades who knew enough about radio. And he stood behind me and started yelling, 'What's the mess here?' I was looking around, I said the place was tidy, the cleaners had cleaned up before we came. And he said, don't make a fool of him, I see a woman talking - and we have a man in the studio, how is that possible. I said, "Well, you see, the microphone in the studio stopped working, as you can see, but the guys are fixing it, and it’ll be fine in a moment. So, I handled it in a way that no one noticed. I waited for a pause in the TV broadcast, put a lady on, and she translated instead." And he said, "How come I didn’t hear that?" I replied, "Well, that’s the point. If you, as an expert, didn’t hear it, then neither could the audience. Because if you, who know how this works, didn’t notice, people who don’t know won’t realize whether the gentleman switched with the lady. It doesn’t matter." I didn’t want to tell him that nobody was listening. That was unspeakable. Then he asked, "And that went out live like that?" I answered, "Yes, it did." He left, came back with a slip of paper, and said, "Stop by the cashier later." Back then, it was 500 crowns, tax-free, and I was earning 720 a month, which was quite a decent amount. That was my first reward for a live broadcast. Probably also the last.