In 1996 I became the Production Director / Manager at 88.7 WRSU FM in New Brunswick, NJ. Among my many duties were recording and arranging Promos, Legal IDs, Public Service Announcements, and of great interest to me... Production Shorts.
Productions Shorts are those little things they play in between the shows on a station; funny little bits of comedy that help transitions and keep the network "lively". After writing and recording dozens of shorts that were really funny, I became distressed on the lack of air-time these things got. Lots of DJs couldn't be bothered to play them, and there were no requirements for them to do so.
So I had an idea - Why not make an entire show that was composed of nothing but our production shorts? Great! Since we were the productions department, I thought "Nonproductive" made an excellent name. Interesting note: at one point the show was called "It's Nonproductive!"
We aired the show and it was a success. Eventually our production shorts got longer, and we had several minute long comedy bits. We did live material, we had guests, we had dance numbers (it's true), we rocked hard. With the success of our original show, we spun off and did several other series the details of which are located elsewhere on the site (check Recordings).
But through the years, the original radio show still survived, and is still be aired today. Check us out if you are in the New Brunswick area by tuning into 88.7 on your FM dial every Monday night from 7pm to 8pm. If you live elsewhere, tune in to the live streaming feed by going to www.wrsu.org and click "Listen".
The Following is the litany of Nonproductive Hosts:
Frank Hablawi... 1996 - 2000
Mark Zipkin... 2000 - 2001
Mark Ryan... 2001 - 2002
Sarita Perrot... 2002 - 2003
Eric Strain 2003 - 2006
and our current host... Sam Little 2006 - ?
