Furpile Radio

Furpile Radio was an internet-based radio show which features music, comedy, trivia, and, occasionally, studio guests. created and produced by Snack Raccoon and Ollie Pup.

History
The concept of Furpile started in 2005; the original plan was for it to be a magazine. What made it special was that it was going to be a magazine made by furs all over the UK, it was going to contain art work, stories and anything else of interest all piled into one furry magazine, hence the name, FurPile Magazine.

But once all the pages for the first issue were ready to be printed, the computer holding it all died and all the information was erased with it. Feeling crushed by this, Dark Racoon and Ollie Pup gave up on the project.

In 2006, FurPile was revived in the form of a radio show, with the help of Tryst, the first episode "Dave: The Pilot Episode" was recorded in Guildford, it was uploaded onto the internet, but with little to no hype surrounding it, a second episode was recorded, but the recording lost and never found.

After that the FurPile Crew disbanded and went their separate ways, but then in 2007, DarkRacoon and Ollie Pup got back together to bring FurPile Radio back, as a low quality podcast recorded in the "Ollie Pit" (Ollie's bedroom on his computer). As the episodes progressed, so did the sound quality, each episode getting better and better. They are currently on their 22nd episode as of 20th March 2007 and episode 23 is going to have new microphones and a new recording program and promises to sound much better than previous episodes.

Production
The show hailed from Swindon in the U.K., and was often recorded on the weekends, sometimes helped along by consumption of alcohol, other mental relaxants and food.

The show used to be hosted by Simbapaws at http://www.simbaspaws.org/snack/, where uncleaned and unprocessed versions of the show are still kept.

Furpile Radio has its own forum on the website, which allows users to post their comments for the show's hosts and listeners.

2008 saw the introduction of the back episodes to the internet.

Transmission
Normally recorded on Saturday for release Sunday or soon afterwards.

Content
The show had a structured format, starting off with the disclaimer and then a short opening song (or collection of bizarre sounds), then the first segment followed by a song, then another segment, then another song, continuing until the show was finished, usually ending with a song, sometimes with bonus material after the last song.

The show was comprised of several segments, some are every week and others are as and when they happen.

The most common segment that has been on every episode without fail is the "News" segment, introduced with the "news theme" played in with a different instrument each week, the instruments have been as varied as guitar to a bag of sweets to a spoon against a glass. The theme is a collection of da's followed by the word "news".

Another segment was "DarkRacoon's Interesting Fact", in which Dark Racooon gave the listeners a fact, usually a completely useless one (and sometimes not even a fact at all).

After the news there was more than often the "Sad News", a segment where the hosts mention the death of a famous person over the week, told the listeners a little bit about that person, how they died and how they were, on more than one occasion, they have never heard of the person in question.

"Reading The E-Mails" was a laughable segment that occasionally pops up in the show, in which DarkRacoon checked his e-mail inbox, often to find he has no new e-mails; when there is an e-mail, it was to great shock and the e-mail was then read out on the show, whether it be fan mail, or just spam.

"Assassination of The Sun/Tesco" was a fairly new segment; Dark Racoon and Ollie Pup disliked newspapers, but chose The Sun specifically and find one thing that the newspaper has done wrong in the week and talk about that. When The Sun has done nothing wrong, they 'assasinate' Tesco instead, which employed both Dark Racoon and Ollie Pup.

"Smash S**t Up!" was the newest segment where the hosts found something they dislike and then smashed it to pieces on air.

When the missing girl "Madeleine McCann" was mentioned in every single shows news story, guest host Kyotas introduced a rule called "No MIDI no Maddie", as he always requests that the Legend of Zelda soundtrack be played as background music, but the only files they have on computer for it are MIDI files, DarkRacoon banned MIDI files from being played on the show, so Kyotas said, as long as there is no MIDI files, there will be no mention of Madeleine. DarkRacoon and Ollie Pup often broke this rule when Kyotas was not on the show.

Stump was a stump of wood, DarkRacoon and Ollie Pup found him on a trip to Cardiff; he was a wise old stump who invented such things as the steam engine and light bulb and also wrote several songs which he got no credit for; he was literally a piece of wood with a face and always gave words of wisdom on the show.

Music on the show was varied - they mostly played rock music, but have also had hip-hop, rap, pop, dance, classical, heavy metal and just plain weird. The background music was comprised of ambient tracks from the likes of The Orb and Future Sound of London or remixes from video games.