2020 was a bust, but we’re still here, thanks to our listeners

December 2019 at ACR foreshadowed what was to come in 2020. As the ARA team dealt with the news that Newsreader Mark was battling Leukaemia, they fought back by researching and finding information about bone marrow donation in Luxembourg.

The start of 2020 saw the team deal with the financial strains of the new year, and major scheduling issues….in the background hum of News production the city Wuhan started to surface and slowly the focus moved to northern Italy and the trials of the health system there….at the same time the team realised that Mark could not fight on, two days before Luxembourg locked down, he passed away.

As lockdown and darkness descended, the ACR team did all they could to embrace the philosophy of The Show Must go On…. and it did, we were live all the way through lockdown. Lisa on News and Sam on Brekky; his Big Fat Daily Lockdown Scavenger Hunt kept us all going. We added Local News in many languages, so that everyone was informed about what was going on and the sun kept rising. With money too tight to mention and ARA missing out on every bit of government support the team decided in September that they had to go public with their plea for support. Sam’s marathon show raised a marathon amount of over 30,000€ from crowdfunding. The Xavier Bettel and his government have promised support, but that has yet to appear anywhere in the bank account…Nevertheless sinceOctober the team has gone as all out as they can with Monthly Intimate Studio Gigs, they have collected and collated a Radio ARA Project called Sounds of Lockdown and for Christmas they have produced two songs and a pantomime.