Mining for radio news in an editorial black hole : 2004-2007 : Paul Boon, The Radio Magazine

 Magazine editors. What do they do? “They create editorial calendars, develop story ideas, manage writers, edit content and manage the production process…” according to Google. Makes perfect sense. Except sometimes…

Journalism started for me in 1976 when I volunteered for student newspaper ‘Palatinate’ and attended regular meetings under editor George Alagiah who managed a team of section editors, discussed ideas for stories and sub-edited our writing efforts. Subsequently I contributed articles to many publications, including ‘rpm Weekly’, ‘City Limits’, ‘For The Record’, ‘Jazz Express’, ‘Broadcast’, ‘Music Week’, ‘Jocks’, ‘NME’, ‘Now Radio’, ‘Music & Media’ and ‘Radio World’, whose editorial systems worked in much the same way. There was dialogue, there were meetings, story ideas were passed upwards and downwards, teamwork and editorial direction were de rigueur.

In late 2004, lifelong radio industry buddy Bob Tyler called to say he was relinquishing his job as news editor of ‘The Radio Magazine’ and asked if I wanted to take over. I was desperate for paying work, having just returned from a poorly paid freelance contract in Cambodia and then been hung out to dry by ‘BBC World Service Trust’ whose promise of further, more lucrative work never materialised. I had been applying for radio-related job vacancies but none had resulted in an offer. This was the second occasion that Tyler had passed on his editorial jobs to me, for which I remain eternally grateful.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fDcJlHbzJhcOhJ-GAkFhU_xFcNXmLaqQ/preview

I knew ‘The Radio Magazine’ as the only weekly publication for the UK radio broadcast industry, published as a colour A5 booklet. In May 1986, it had been launched as a scrappy paid-for fanzine named ‘Now Radio’ by Howard Rose, former pirate radio presenter under the aliases Crispian St John and Jay Jackson, filled with gossip and opinion for wireless ‘anoraks’. In October 1992, I had begun to write and publish a weekly four-page ‘Radio News’ newsletter which I photocopied and distributed for free by mail to a small group of people I thought would be interested, not as a competitor to Rose but complementary since my focus was hard news, information and statistical analysis of ratings.

Unexpectedly, within weeks of my newsletter’s debut, Rose relaunched his fanzine as ‘The Radio Magazine’ with a new layout and new features that looked remarkably similar to mine, such as an events calendar and analysis of ratings. This seemed somewhat coincidental, given his fanzine’s prior six-year, 177-issue history. Any ambition to eventually transform my tiny newsletter into a paid-for magazine had been effectively scuttled, so I persevered for twenty issues before ceasing publication. Unfortunately, ‘good ideas’ prove impossible to copyright and I had already learnt to my cost that the radio industry included people not averse to taking credit for my innovations.

Nevertheless, twelve years later, I was so desperate for income that the opportunity to write for ‘The Radio Magazine’ had to be accepted. Rose had tragically died in 2002 during routine surgery, bizarrely one week after selling his magazine business to Sir Ray Tindle, a local newspaper and radio station owner. Paul Boon had taken over as managing editor and had employed acquaintance Bob Tyler as news editor until now. Boon was asking me what payment I would require to do the job. I quoted him the National Union of Journalists’ rate per word for contributions to the very smallest publication. He responded by saying he would only pay half that rate. I was disappointed but reluctantly accepted his measly offer, reasoning that some income would prove better than none at all. After all, this job might not last long.

At the outset, I decided upon a financial survival strategy for myself. I would need to spend zero to gather news stories because my expenses were not to be reimbursed. This meant no phone calls, no interviews, no travel to meetings. I would have to depend upon second-hand sources I could cull from the internet, newspapers and magazines. In order to maximise my payments, I would submit as many news stories as I could write, since I was to be paid per word written. Doubtless, the magazine must be receiving dozens of press releases from every organisation connected with the UK radio industry. Naturally, as with my previous magazine work, I anticipated these would be regularly forwarded to me by the editor for a quick rewrite…

Except that they were not. I quickly learnt that no press releases, no news tips, no rumours, no nothing was forwarded to me by the magazine. There were no editorial discussions, no phone calls, no meetings, no guidance, no delegation of work. In fact, nothing at all except the odd emailed complaint about things I had written. I started work in December 2004 but, by New Year, Boon wrote a complaint to my predecessor Bob Tyler:

“I’ve just had David Bain of CFM on the phone complaining about an out-of-context story with the “wrong perspective” which was printed this week.  It was a local press story and as we all know local reporters do not understand radio and in this case printed a story which was not factually correct.  We then reprinted, courtesy of Grant the same errors. While I know it has been difficult to contact people at stations over the Christmas period I really think these types of story need to be checked out.  We are not in the market of producing overtly partisan stories which demoralise staff at stations. I had a similar call from another station before Christmas.” [sic]

Already, I was baffled as to why ‘The Radio Magazine’ functioned unlike any other publication for which I had worked previously. The managing editor was printing my stories mostly verbatim (fine), sometimes chopping their ends to fit a page (okay), changing my headlines (no problem), but otherwise was only communicating with me by forwarding complaints. Another one arrived in April 2005:

“We have been fending off an irate Simon Horne of Virgin Radio who says the article you wrote (Issue 681) was based upon a mis-quote published in the Scottish Daily Record (or similar paper). Furthermore he is upset that he was not contacted over the story to either check the facts or to give them an opportunity to respond.” [sic]

Surely, this sort of beef should have been with the journalist who had originally quoted the complainant’s words, not with me who had merely extracted the quote from a respected newspaper. Normally, you might expect a managing editor to defend their staff when they had evidently done nothing wrong, but Boon’s reaction in a further email to me was:

“We just cannot let this continue.  The Scottish press are notorious for getting facts wrong, heaven knows they have some big axes to grind up there. Time would have allowed for a quick call to the appropriate press officer, Collette [Hillier] can give you a list if you don’t have one. Even an email would have given us some support.  Virgin are advertisers as well as news fodder, so treating them fairly seems only reasonable.” [sic]

Editorial ‘dialogue’ continued in a similar vein for my entire time as under-resourced news editor of the magazine. Every Monday morning, I emailed as many stories as I could muster, receiving no feedback other than occasional complaints from radio industry personnel who did not approve of what had been published. However, I was submitting so many news stories to maximise my earnings that the magazine regularly added additional pages to print them all, week in, week out…

Except for four issues per year when Boon required no news stories from me because, despite my training in statistics, he insisted upon covering the radio industry’s quarterly audience ratings results. Having collated and analysed radio station data since 1980, I regularly attended the RAJAR organisation’s press conferences announcing its latest numbers at a central London lecture theatre. Boon was present too but did not acknowledge me or seek to collaborate.

Apart from Boon (and Tyler), nobody was aware of my role providing the bulk of ‘The Radio Magazine’s editorial content, as a result of its news stories being published without author bylines. At the time, I was content with this arrangement because I was busy applying for full-time jobs in the radio industry and believed that I was unlikely to be offered employment if it were evident that I was reporting everything that was happening within the sector. 

My somewhat distant relationship with the magazine continued until March 2007 when I received an unanticipated email from Boon:

“I am sorry to say I have been forced to bring to a close the freelance arrangement we have with you for news stories. I am sorry. […] On a personal note, I’d like to thank you for the detailed and analytical dimension you have brought to your stories covering the radio industry in these stormy times. My thanks once again.” [sic]

It was the first (and last) occasion I received positive feedback from Boon. By then, I had thankfully found better paid work as a media analyst so the resultant loss of earnings was less consequential. However, this apparent ‘warm glow’ of gratitude vanished almost immediately. Prior to my abrupt dismissal, I had registered for a free press pass to attend a forthcoming radio conference whose organisers then contacted ‘The Radio Magazine’ to rightly confirm my credentials. Boon responded to them bluntly:

“Grant Goddard does not work for this publication.”

I wrote to Boon accusing him of “rudeness” because, instead of simply explaining to the organisers truthfully that, since registration, I was no longer news editor, his words connoted I was a liar. Was he already seeking to erase my substantial and transformational involvement in his magazine during the previous two years? My suspicions were far from allayed by Boon’s response to me:

“I think rudeness is rich coming from you, but that is a separate issue. […] Just chill my friend – life is too short!” [sic]

On that sour note, our email correspondence ended once and for all.

In November 2008, Boon started a job with government regulator Ofcom’s radio licensing division in the same role I had held five years previously. Perhaps he was sat at my former desk. Given that I (and predecessor Bob Tyler) had written 90% of his magazine’s editorial, I pondered whether any number of anonymous “detailed and analytical” news stories published in ‘The Radio Magazine’ might have accidentally fallen into Boon’s journalism portfolio. Any number between zero and the 848 I had written? Those words ‘detailed’ and ‘analytical’ might even have figured in Ofcom’s job description for the role.

During Boon’s subsequent “nine-year stint” at Ofcom, his CV states he was:

“Chapter Editor of the radio & audio chapter of Ofcom’s Communications Market Report an annually published in-depth insight into UK radio and audio developments.” [sic]

My work had once again passed through Boon’s hands! In 2003, having been The Radio Authority’s staff member with a maths/analysis background, I had been ordered to undertake a mammoth project to create for Ofcom the new regulator’s first historical database combining commercial radio licence, audience and financial information in a group of interlocking Excel spreadsheets. My complex formulae were required to summarise the state of the UK commercial radio industry, for publication in Ofcom’s initial annual ‘Communications Market Report’. Naturally, uncredited once again.

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/HYdNRjEzCgpV8E?startSlide=1

[None of the hundreds of issues of ‘The Radio Magazine’ appear online. My news stories for the publication are available to read at https://www.scribd.com/lists/3527224/Radio-broadcasting-industry-news-stories-by-Grant-Goddard ]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/02/mining-for-radio-news-in-editorial.html ]

Some men see things as they are and ask “Why … change?” : 2003 : Neil Stock, Ofcom

 A colleague would arrive at my workplace some Mondays with evident cuts and bruises. A tragic case of domestic violence? No. He was a loyal fan of Millwall Football Club, a team characterised by its “historic association with football hooliganism” (Wikipedia). Did I overhear anyone comment that it might be considered inappropriate to work in a government quango when resembling the runner-up from five rounds with Mick McManus? No. Colleagues alleged that this young buck was untouchable because he held finance qualifications that his boss lacked, despite their requirement to legally sign off public accounts. That same boss was then promoted to personnel director, despite having demonstrated to me a similar skills deficit, and then to deputy chief executive of our organisation. Ho hum.

Relevant qualifications and experience appeared to be non-essential for appointment to the management class at The Radio Authority. If you possessed ‘the right stuff’, prior employment in a Norfolk chicken processing factory could prove appropriate for a job regulating Britain’s commercial radio industry. One woman in my small crowded office talked incessantly, inserting expletives into every other sentence. Did any colleague suggest this to be inappropriate behaviour, particularly when some of us were interrogating radio station managers by phone and recording our conversations? No. Once, an interviewee enquired if I was calling from home, having overheard swearing in our office. Er, no, I just work in a madhouse.

Arriving daily to cross the threshold of our office, I felt like one of those unsuspecting visitors knocking on the front door of ‘The Munsters’ home, only to be invited into a scary otherworld that was bafflingly grotesque. Why did I choose to stay there? Because it was the only job I had been offered after countless rejected applications during months of unemployment. And I knew that my private hell would end soon. In several months’ time, the government would be merging several small regulators, including ours, into one new huge one to which staff would be transferred en masse. Well, with the exception of our only two visible minority colleagues, one of whom was dumped in the new regulator’s basement call centre, the other who was told she would have to apply for advertised vacancies despite her lengthy loyal service to our organisation. Which decisionmaker in our midst did we suspect of having never torn up their dogeared ‘NF’ membership card?

In order to prepare us for employment in a modern state-of-the-art regulator, The Radio Authority’s workforce was sent to a government conference centre to watch our new leader, Stephen Carter, talk us through PowerPoint presentations promising us a bright new future. I left these events finally feeling ‘hope’, though some colleagues seemed to sense ‘tyranny’, preferring the security blanket of a dysfunctional abusive ‘family’ already tainted by a corruption scandal exposed on national television. Preferring paperwork to floppy discs, I suspect nobody in The Radio Authority had even needed to press the ‘PowerPoint’ function on their archaic desktop computers. Why should they bother?

Though I had never witnessed our department required to function as any kind of team, we were all sent on a ‘teambuilding’ awayday organised by one of those faceless global management consultancies. We were told to pull together to solve theoretical problems, to play childish games and express our feelings in ‘breakout’ groups. I was paired with a colleague from my office who admitted her early career objective was to work on ‘BBC Radio Four’s ‘Women’s Hour’ programme, though she had never sought training in radio production. My own ‘learning experience’ from that session was something I had observed before – our privately educated elite expect to succeed in their chosen shiny career without needing to put in any graft as practitioners.

I lacked acting abilities, having always volunteered to organise the sound for school plays, but at our awayday I was picked to roleplay a radio licence hopeful whose latest application had been refused, in dialogue with the officer who had turned me down. Having endured enough of that day’s preposterous exercises, I threw myself into this role, choosing to feign a nasal Northern accent and imitate a persistent applicant from Stoke who felt the Radio Authority was discriminating against him. My colleagues laughed loudly at my desperate attempts to win the argument against my posh counterpart. In fact, my performance was art imitating life. I had heard work colleagues often lampoon the speech of a licence applicant from Stoke, despite his experience in radio broadcasting. Naturally, my play-acting did not dent their snobbishness one iota.

I had not understood how convincing my role had been that day until, during The Radio Authority chairman’s monthly walkabouts round our office, he would greet me using the ‘Wayne’ name of the Stoke persona I had adopted … and neither was he being ironic or witty. I had been renamed. I corrected him each month, but he insisted on addressing me on the next occasion as ‘Wayne’. Though he transferred to the new regulator, the majority of our senior management either were not offered jobs there or decided to accept redundancy, I know not which. Given that some had never used a work computer, preferring to order underlings do the grunt work for them, it was difficult to imagine them integrating within a modern office environment.

Everyone in our department received an email requesting our thoughts on how the radio licence application process could be improved. It had been sent by our team deputy Neil Stock, who had surprisingly been promoted by somebody somewhere to lead the radio division within the new regulator a few months hence. I had lots of ‘thoughts’ on the subject so started banging them out on my desktop computer. I was 875 words into my spiel before suddenly halting, asking myself what the hell I was doing providing free insights from hard-bitten experience. Earlier in my working life, I had spent months writing a radio licence application. Stock had never. That application had won up against 39 competitors. I had started working in commercial radio two decades ago. Stock had never. I had launched a London commercial radio station that had attracted a million listeners per week within its first six months. Stock had never. Might he not be harvesting ideas from his ‘team’ to convince his new paymasters that he possessed some kind of grand plan?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RqssQZHe6_lm-Y_d9G1fF55dKhLEKjhG/preview

This suspicion was confirmed when, not having initially responded to his request, Stock reminded me repeatedly that he still required my contribution. He knew I considered the present application system deficient in almost every aspect because I had told him as much in previous conversations. However, I had nothing to gain from assisting his meteoric rise through the regulatory ranks without commercial radio experience. As is evident from the raw stream of consciousness I wrote then and reproduce (uncorrected) here, my verdict on my employer’s licensing system was damning as a result of having watched it contribute to an increasingly disastrous commercial radio sector in Britain. But criticising The Radio Authority meant criticising my new boss, so I never replied.

Months later, we had moved to the modern office environment of Ofcom. At last, it felt as if I was living in the present century. However, I sat at my desk day after day doing nothing, sidelined by Stock. Eventually he invited me to join his sub-committee tasked with updating the paper licence application form, which seemed like continued attrition to divine my insights. We met a couple of times, during which I retained my counsel about the disastrous system, since it was evident that Stock contemplated only minor amendments rather than a full-blown overhaul. At the end of our final meeting, Stock concluded our discussions by announcing that the application form would remain exactly as it already was, with only the old logo on the front page to be replaced by ‘Ofcom’. I was still working in a madhouse!

One day, everyone in the radio section received an email from Stock requiring their presence at a team meeting, a novelty as no such meetings had occurred at The Radio Authority. We all filed into the glass-walled room in the middle of our floor, waiting to be addressed. I wrote a header in my notebook and expected to jot some bullet points, but what followed left me open-mouthed and unable to note a single word. The sole topic of discussion was these former Radio Authority employees’ refusal to update their working methods to support Ofcom’s modernisation plan. Everyone in the room who spoke supported this strategy. I said nothing as my jaw had already hit the ground. My colleagues were a rabble of anti-revolutionaries. They wanted nothing to change. They were working in Ofcom’s office, drawing salaries from Ofcom, using Ofcom’s resources to hold this meeting … but they wanted to pretend they were still working at The Radio Authority. It was bizarre!

I was reminded of the ‘Luddites’ I had studied for economic history: textile workers in Nottingham who, between 1811 and 1817, had opposed factory owners replacing their labour with machinery. The government had sent 12,000 troops to quell their destruction of new equipment and violence against mill owners, after passing ‘The Frame Breaking Act’ that had made “machine breaking” a capital crime. Two centuries later, I was in the midst of a middle-class penpusher uprising where their disobedience was probably limited to not clearing their desks of papers before sneaking out to catch an early train home. Instead of armed troops, the most violent official response might be a polite e-mail etiquette reminder.

I returned to my desk in a state of disbelief. I must have attended hundreds of meetings during my working life, but that was the first where the consensus was to refuse to adapt to twenty-first century working methods. It felt like ‘Back to The Flintstones’. They would have been happier NOT to have computer terminals on their desks and a fast internet connection. I seemed to be in a minority of one, surrounded in our open-plan office by a couple of dozen paid-up members of the ‘Popular Front for the Liberation of Radio Regulation Reactionaries’. I was half-expecting a singsong of ‘Power to The People’ during our afternoon tea break.

I was SO disappointed. I had endured a miserable eighteen months’ employment at The Radio Authority, during which I had been shouted at repeatedly, told not to talk about ‘radio’, denied my yearend bonus and had failed my annual review on every criterion. Despite my successful track record in radio, I had been treated like a troublesome child. The only thing that had kept me arriving daily for work in Holborn was the hope that the situation at the merged regulator would prove different. Yet, within weeks of Ofcom’s launch, I was witnessing the same crazy behaviours that my colleagues had carried across the Thames with them to recreate their own private Transylvania. Like Harker, I needed to escape the clutches of these vampires if I were to retain my sanity. Could I tie together enough bedsheets?

[First published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/02/some-men-see-things-as-they-are-and-ask.html ]

My elderly mother, secret deregulated telecoms entrepreneur? : 2014 : Virgin Mobile

 “Just putting you through, dear.” Thousands of calls received each day demanding telephone numbers of businesses and individuals across the country. Shelves of phone directories and ‘Yellow Pages’ for every area of the UK. Banks of phones with operators wearing headsets sat at desks, staring into flickering screens. An impending deal with the Caribbean island of Nevis to ‘offshore’ customer service to a new call centre opened by the country’s premier where staff could be paid as little as £300 per month. My mother was doing all this?

From the early days of telephony, Britain’s ‘directory enquiries’ service had been a successful ‘public service’ available free by dialling ‘192’ to speak with a helpful human being until … Tory government dogma forced privatisation of the country’s phone system in 1984. You can tell Sid that Thatcher’s promise to Britain’s financially illiterate population that they could sit on their sofa and ‘get rich quick’ by merely purchasing a few shares in former public utilities was an outright lie. In 1991, users of ‘192’ started to be charged for the service, despite British taxpayers having contributed billions since 1912 to build the country’s public telegraphy system. Why were we now required to pay shareholders for the privilege of using a service that generations had already paid for?

A Labour government in 2003 opened up the previously singular ‘192’ service to ‘entrepreneurs’ who were permitted to charge an arm and a leg for a brief call to request a phone number. The government regulator did nothing to control this legalised extortion until 2015, by which time there were 200 competing private ‘directory enquiry’ services, all allocated phone numbers that started ‘118’. How on earth were the public expected to choose between so many companies charging varying prices for exactly the same information? What had once been a universal free ‘192’ service had been transformed into a costly logistical nightmare for consumers in the name of ‘market choice’. Unsurprisingly, the number of callers to directory services fell by 38% PER ANNUM after 2014.

Visiting my mother’s home, I saw no signs of a ‘directory enquiries’ start-up business in her tiny terraced house in the Home Counties. In fact, her landline phone rarely rang at all and quarterly bills I received listed few calls. Neither was there space in her postage-stamp back garden for a ’home office’ shed. No computer was visible in the house either because, in the 1980’s, her workplace accounts department’s upgrade from handwritten ledgers to huge concertinaed computer printouts had traumatised her, necessitating me to help interpret and reconcile them on our kitchen table. Despite this overwhelming lack of evidence, nothing could convince Virgin Mobile that my mother was not operating a ‘directory enquiries’ business on her phoneline … whose number happened to begin ‘0118’, as did all landlines in the Reading area. It started like this:

• 6 December 2014 @ 1600. I phoned my mother’s landline on my Virgin Mobile phone, its roaming function enabled, to let her know I had arrived safely in Spain. We spoke for 11 minutes.
• 7 December 2014 @ 2004. I phoned my mother again. We spoke for 3 minutes.
• 9 December 2014 @ 1841. I phoned my mother again. We spoke for 13 minutes.
• 14 December 2014 @ 1708. I phoned my mother again. We spoke for 16 minutes.

I tried to use my mobile phone later that week and found my account had been suspended. I logged in online and was surprised to find that Virgin Mobile believed my maximum monthly credit limit had already been exceeded. The four calls to my mother were bizarrely billed as “Roaming Directory Enquiries” with amounts of £30.15, £9.30, £36.90 and £44.76 respectively (plus VAT at 20%). I had regularly called my mother from abroad, where I often worked, and never encountered this problem previously. Her phone number had not changed. Evidently, a fault must recently have been introduced into Virgin Mobile’s billing system. I expected it to be quickly fixed once I explained the mistake. For heaven’s sake, who would call a ‘directory enquiries’ number and talk for 16 minutes?

I was so so wrong. I am sufficiently ancient to recall a long-gone era when ‘customer service’ meant listening to a client’s problem and then doing the utmost to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. I am evidently a dinosaur. Call a helpline now and you might speak with someone in the Philippines whose purpose is to never admit corporate liability for any mistake, to direct you to a non-existent web page and to read a lengthy on-screen script (pre-approved by lawyers) that has zero pertinence to your issue. Having been a customer of Virgin Media for more than a decade, I had already suffered pain trying to get the simplest problems fixed. On one occasion, my wife became so angry with its ‘customer service’ that she had demanded the mobile number of its departmental boss and, phoning it, he answered only to explain he was presently aboard his yacht. How the other half live!

I persevered anyway, phoning Virgin’s customer service to complain twice on 18 December and again on 5 January, calls for which I was charged £12.62 because I was abroad. I was attempting to avoid my impending 6 January invoice being mistakenly inflated. I was lied to, told that my query would be investigated and I would be called back within 24 hours. I was disbelieved, told that I must have forgotten that I had used ‘directory enquiries’ to call my mother, even though her landline is ex-directory. I was fobbed off, told that the issue could not be investigated until Virgin had dispatched my next monthly invoice. I was told I could pay the overcharged amounts immediately so as to restore my credit limit, enabling me to make further calls. I was even told that, because my mother’s UK phone number started with ‘0118’, she MUST be a ‘directory enquiries’ service. Remarkably, one customer services person admitted that a previous customer services person I had spoken to had lied to me when having promised to resolve the problem.

Virgin’s invoice arrived and included the overcharges, forcing me to submit an online complaint on 9 January. I received an automated confirmation but no response. I sent the same complaint by letter to Virgin’s complaints department in Swansea. I received no response. I was forced to let Virgin take the £145 overcharge from my bank account or my mobile service would never be resumed.

Now I was unable to call my mother for fear of incurring further crazy charges. Though she had a mobile phone my sister had bought for her, she habitually left it in a drawer uncharged. I added cash to my Skype account but 99% of attempts to call her landline failed as I was told her number did not exist, had been disconnected or was permanently ‘busy’, none of which were true. I had to resort to using phone booths in Spanish internet cafés or calling my sister’s mobile when I knew she was visiting my mother, neither of which enabled frequent communication. To my frail mother, it must have seemed like sudden ‘radio silence’ from her eldest son.

By March 2015, having received no response from Virgin, I registered a formal complaint with ‘CISAS’, the organisation arbitrating customer complaints against Virgin Mobile. In April, it responded that “we have received confirmation from the communications provider that they are settling your claim in full” and it “now has 20 working days to provide you with everything you claimed”. That should have been the end of the four-month affair … except that Virgin Mobile did not pay!

You might imagine CISAS would chase Virgin Mobile for payment on behalf of the customer. You would be wrong. My subsequent correspondence with CISAS to inform that Virgin had still not paid was met with indifference: “We note the points and concerns you have raised and will be contacting the company. We will revert back to you promptly…” Except it never did.

In June 2015, I wrote to CISAS again: “You have failed to “revert back to [me] promptly”, as stated in your correspondence below. It is more than a month since I sent my e-mail to you noting that Virgin Mobile had failed to execute any of the agreed remedies from April 2015. It is more than three months since I submitted my complaint about Virgin Mobile to CISAS. You have failed to address the questions raised in my e-mail of 13 May. I continue to be making expenditures as a direct result of Virgin Mobile failing to remedy the billing problem I initially raised with them in December 2014…”

By July 2015, having received no response, I lodged a complaint about CISAS’ inaction to a related organisation named ‘IDRS’. Although I had been informed in March by CISAS that Virgin Mobile had agreed to settle my claim in full, it appeared that, after refusing to pay, Virgin wished to open up a new attack front on my complaint which it suddenly wanted to pursue to the bitter end. There followed a completely bizarre, intense correspondence in which I had to provide a detailed ‘defence’ to Virgin’s accusations in correspondence with an IDRS employee named “Jean-Marie Sadio BA (Hons) Bsc ( Hons) ACIarb” [sic].

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lQjLAX94FhMbaRHWDvrtmi3gP07b4qsa/preview

Tellingly, Virgin Mobile now claimed to have sent me a letter dated 10 March 2015 in which it had mentioned the value of compensation I was seeking, a value I had not calculated until nine days later when my complaint to CISAS was submitted. Perhaps Virgin’s litigator had been dozing during Law School lectures, daydreaming that ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ was a reality movie. The reason I had never received Virgin’s letter was because it was evidently a work of post factum fiction.

Another of Virgin’s fictions in March was its assurance that it had “take[n] action to prevent future overcharges” when I called my mother’s landline. Strange because a short test call I made to my mother on 4 April 2015 was still charged at the exorbitant ‘directory enquiries’ rate. At any point during this gigantic waste of time, all it needed was for one of Virgin’s thousands of employees to have called my mother’s phone number in order to verify that it was not in fact a ‘directory enquiries’ service. I am certain my mother would have been happy to give the Virgin staffer a forthright piece of her mind, had they requested the phone number of the nearest pizza takeaway.

Happy ending? Not really. Later in 2015, I did eventually receive the compensation amount from Virgin Mobile I had been promised in March, but only after this ridiculously long and exhausting struggle. What a way to run a railroad!

However, what was not returned to me was the ability to call my mother’s home phone from my mobile without incurring further massive expenses. Skype was still rejecting 99% of my calls to her number, despite attempts every few days. In Spain, the waiting time to install a home landline was more than a year. As a result, between December 2014 and the tragic episode when my mother contracted COVID whilst waiting to be discharged from hospital after a successful minor operation then died at home in March 2021, my ability to communicate with her from overseas had been reduced to almost zero.

In my mind, Virgin Mobile looms large over memories of the final years of my mother’s life. In this brave new world where global communication is supposed to have been made so straightforward, nothing can replace the loss of personal contact I suffered during her last days. COVID travel restrictions conspired against my presence during her final months on Earth and at her funeral.

[Correspondence from Virgin, CISAS and IDRS not reproduced here due to long ‘confidentiality’ warning paragraphs]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/02/my-elderly-mother-secret-deregulated.html ]

My thwarted career as teenage reggae music journalist : 1972 : Jamaica

 I blame Jesse James. Though cowboys and westerns held zero interest for me, something about the record ‘Jesse James’ appealed, much as an Israeli novelty song ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ the previous year had possessed sufficient charm to become my first ever vinyl single purchase. Now, having heard this reggae tribute to the outlaw played on ‘BBC Radio One’ or ‘Radio Luxembourg’, I placed my order at the record counter on the first floor of ‘Harveys’ department store in Camberley and, within a fortnight, it arrived. There was no song, merely Laurel Aitken shouting ‘Jesse James rides again’ with gunshot effects over an incessant rhythm. Nevertheless, I had just purchased my first reggae record [Nu Beat NB 045] and I loved it. It was 1969.

After that, my reggae buying accelerated as fast as pocket money would permit. There was the intriguing instrumental single ‘Dynamic Pressure’ [London American HLJ 10309] recorded at Federal Studio, but so-named as the original had been cut by Byron Lee at his Dynamic Studio. I inexplicably bought the terrible cover version by Brit studio band The Mohawks of ‘Let It Be’ [Supreme SUP 204] for reasons I cannot recall. A recently opened second Camberley record shop in the High Street displayed a rotating stand of reggae albums from which I bought ‘The Wonderful World of Reggae’ [Music for Pleasure MFP 1355] because it cost only 14/6 for twelve tracks. I had been unaware it actually comprised (half-decent) cover versions by London session musicians of recent reggae songs heard on the radio.


In 1970, I bought several reggae singles that had reached the UK charts, including ‘Young Gifted and Black’ [Harry J HJ 6605], ‘Montego Bay’ [Trojan TR 7791] and ‘Black Pearl [Trojan TR 7790], all of which I was to discover later were cover versions of American songs. During this era prior to Jamaican sound engineers’ creation of ‘dub’, most B-sides were straight instrumental ‘versions’ of their A-sides. However, it was the occasional exceptions that offered my earliest insight into the remarkable creativity and fresh ideas issuing from Jamaica’s (and London’s) recording studios:

The B-side of ‘You Can Get If You Really Want It’ [Trojan TR 7777], a straight cover of Jimmy Cliff’s song, was a Desmond Dekker original ‘Perseverance’ with great lyrics over an amazingly fast rhythm track that came to unexpected abrupt halts. I still love it more than the A-side.

The B-side of ‘Leaving Rome’ [Trojan TR 7774], an exceptionally haunting instrumental laced with strings, was another instrumental ‘In the Nude’ with trumpet player Jo Jo Bennett double-tracked improvising over an urgent rhythm. This must have been the first ‘jazz’ recording I had heard and I loved it.

The B-side of ‘Rain’ [Trojan TR 7814], a cover of the Jose Feliciano song, had ‘Geronimo’ wrongly credited to singer Bruce Ruffin but consisted of a man shouting ‘Geronimo’ and ‘hit it’, echoed over a rhythm I later learned was by UK band The Pyramids. It was bizarre but fascinating.

Most significant was the B-side of ‘Love of The Common People’ [Trojan TR 7750], another cover version with a string arrangement overdubbed in the UK by ‘BBC Radio 2’ doyen Johnny Arthy’s orchestra. The instrumental ‘Compass’, credited to producer Joe Gibbs’ studio band ‘The Destroyers’, could not have been more different than the unrelated smooth A-side. It literally changed my life. Essentially it was a jazzy solo saxophone workout, but over an instrumental track drastically different from anything I had ever heard. The walking bass was turned up loud but had been deliberately dropped out of the mix on occasions. The continuous rhythm track had been filtered to leave only its high frequencies and then echo added, making the result impossible to determine which instruments were playing. The whole thing was bathed in enough reverb to sound as if was recorded in a bathroom.

For me, ‘Compass’ was a really radical production, emphasising the bassline and using studio effects to contort other instruments into sounds that were unrecognisable and ethereal. The sound engineer (likely Winston ‘Niney’ Holness at Gibbs’ studio in Duhaney Park, Kingston) had transformed a typical reggae rhythm track recorded (for an unrecognisable song) onto four-track tape into something completely different and incredibly creative, using only a standard mixing desk and some basic electronic effects. It was the first example I had heard of a ‘mix’ that had not tried to reproduce musical instruments as they sounded naturally, but to have deliberately distorted them into unnatural noises that created a whole new audio experience. It was the first track I had heard that stripped a recording down to so few elements: a pumping bass, a bizarre ultra-tinny ‘clop-clop’ rhythm and a booming saxophone. ‘Compass’ was a harbinger of ‘drum and bass’ mixes which reggae would soon pioneer (the first occasion I saw this term used was the B-side of Big Youth’s 1973 single ‘Dock of The Bay’ [Downtown DT 497]).

More than anything, it was ‘Compass’ that hooked me onto reggae at the age of twelve. I played that B-side at home hundreds of times but was desperate to hear more recordings like it. Not easy when you live thirty miles outside of London. Instead, my reggae research started in earnest. From the ‘Recordwise’ record shop owned by Adam Gibbs opposite my school in Egham, I collected weekly new singles release pamphlets distributed to retailers and stared longingly at the many titles of new reggae releases, more of which were issued in the UK during this period than all other music genres added together. I joined the shop’s ‘record library’ which loaned vinyl albums to customers for a fortnight for a small charge. I soon ‘worked’ in that shop during lunchtimes as my knowledge about popular music was becoming encyclopaedic. But, above all, I became obsessive about reggae.

I wrote to ‘Trojan Records’, one of London’s two major reggae distributors, requesting information and was invited to join the newly created ‘Trojan Appreciation Society’ run by two female fans. For my subscription fee, I received monthly Roneo-ed newsletters, some free records and a huge gold metal medallion imprinted with the company’s logo attached to an imitation gold chain, which I wore to school every day under my white school shirt and striped tie for the next five years … until the gold paint had worn off on my chest. I had a fold-out double-sided A2 sheet of all Trojan’s past releases, listed by each of its myriad of weird and wonderful record labels, which I would peruse in awe for hours. I so wanted to hear all this wonderful music, but how?

My luck was in. I was already an avid fan of ‘BBC Radio London’ when it launched Britain’s first ever reggae radio show, ‘Reggae Time’ hosted by Steve Barnard on Sunday lunchtimes. To the chagrin of my mother’s attempts to serve our family’s Sunday dinner, I would sit listening with headphones plugged into our hi-fi system, cataloguing a list of every record played each week from the very first show, recording songs onto cassettes. It was my much-needed window into the world of reggae and enabled me to enjoy almost two hours of new releases weekly, interviews with artists and dates of sound system events (inevitably all in London). Doing my homework on weekday nights, I would listen to my cassettes over and over again until I knew the songs by heart. From then, my pocket money was used to buy less well-known reggae records beyond those in the charts and played on mainstream radio. My personal reggae ‘wants list’ inevitably grew longer and longer.

Somehow, I discovered the existence of a music and entertainment magazine published in Jamaica named ‘Swing’. I may have finally identified its address in an international publishing directory in the local library, sending them cash for a subscription and henceforth received monthly copies by air mail. Along with interviews and features, it published advertisements for record shops and record labels in Jamaica, offering a first-hand insight into the island’s reggae industry. I devoured each A4 colour issue and treasured them like valuable artifacts.

My parents’ hands-off attitude to childrearing allowed me to pursue my interest in reggae without interference. From the Camberley High Street record shop, I bought another 1970 compilation ‘Tighten Up Volume 3’ [Trojan TTL 32] for 15/6, this time comprising twelve amazing original recordings. It became the first of many album purchases on ‘Trojan Records’. When I Blu-Tacked onto my bedroom wall its daring poster of a full-length naked woman daubed with the album’s song titles, my parents did not even blink. My mother even liked some of the reggae records I played loudly on the hi-fi system in our open-plan living room, particularly ‘Leaving Rome’.

In 1972, my father announced that he had booked a family winter holiday for the five of us to Jamaica, paid for with cash proceeds from dodgy property deals with his latest business partner Bill Beaver. He had shown no prior interest in my music and probably had no idea this was where reggae originated. It was just a lucky coincidence. Until then, the furthest our family had vacationed was Spain, making this our first long-haul destination. I was over the moon. While my family sunbathed on the beach, MY objective would be to travel to Kingston and explore the reggae music industry. I started to write out an address list of all the recording studios and record shops whose names I had found printed on record labels, album sleeves and in ‘Swing’ magazine.

As an avid reader of Charlie Gillett’s column in ‘Record Mirror’, I had ordered his 1970 book ‘The Sound of the City’ and been amazed to realise it was possible to write about popular music in a scholarly and meticulously researched format. Establishment voices then considered ‘pop music’ frivolous and worthless, condemning it as ephemeral, while their favoured classical music was deemed valuable and enduring. Gillett’s paperback opened my eyes, became my musical ‘bible’ for years to come and changed my life’s direction. I wanted to write about reggae in the same passionate yet factual way that Gillett had documented American black music so brilliantly. I already knew the names of reggae’s producers, recording studios, record labels and artists. A ‘research’ trip to Jamaica would complete the jigsaw puzzle.

I owned a Bush portable cassette recorder with microphone I would take with me to record interviews. I had a Kodak Instamatic camera and I might be able to borrow my father’s Canon Dial 35mm camera. Although I had no contacts in Jamaica, my plan was to find and hang out at the addresses I had researched. At that time, almost no journalist in Britain was writing about reggae music. Although I lacked formal training beyond my English GCE, I was already a competent writer and believed, on my return to Britain, I could approach music publications to interest them in my unique content. I could be a young reggae music journalist. I might have been a naïve fourteen-year-old, but it seemed an exciting prospect.

Then, weeks before we were due to fly to the Caribbean, my father suddenly told us he was leaving our home. I had observed my parents’ relationship recently dogged by shouting, arguments and violence, but he offered no explanation of where or why he was going. Only afterwards did we learn from our gobsmacked neighbour Mark Anthony that my father had run off with his recent teenage bride to set up house in a posh part of Weybridge. As suddenly as it had been announced, our family holiday to Jamaica was withdrawn. My father did take the vacation, but without his (former) family and instead accompanied by who knows. I was left with my list of Jamaican addresses and a working holiday plan that was in tatters.

In the years that followed, reggae was suddenly ‘discovered’ by the mainstream music press that sent journalists, sometimes knowing next to nothing about the music, to Jamaica to report on the industry there. Weeklies ‘NME’ and ‘Melody Maker’ splashed reggae artists on their front covers. More knowledgeably, Carl Gayle wrote excellently in the ground-breaking ‘Black Music’ magazine launched in December 1973. Dave Hendley started a ‘Reggae Scene’ column in fortnightly ‘Blues & Soul’ magazine. An amazing A5 fanzine ‘Pressure Drop’ was launched from Camden in 1975 by Nick Kimberley, Penny Reel and Chris Lane with a penchant I shared for lists, such as its original discography of Big Youth singles.

I read all these writers’ reggae articles avidly and was pleased to see my favourite music now exposed to a wider audience. However, my appreciation was tinged with sorrow that I had no involvement in this ‘movement’ despite the knowledge I had acquired since buying my first reggae record in 1969. It was hard not to occasionally entertain the jealous notion that ‘it should have been me’ (as the song goes). Instead, my time and resources were diverted by unexpectedly bearing the mantle of eldest of three siblings in a one-parent family while my mother held a full-time day job and cleaned offices during evenings. My ambition to write about reggae had to be put on hold until attending university in 1976 … by which time reggae music had suffered press overkill and ‘punk’ was the next big thing.

My passion for reggae continues to this day. Listening to ‘Compass’ now still makes me shiver. Four decades after buying that single and playing it to death, I accidentally discovered its original vocal version was ‘Honey’ by Slim Smith [Unity UN 542], a truly unremarkable song that had masked a remarkable rhythm track. For me, that remains one of the enduring wonders of discovering reggae’s multiple versions.

[Click on the record labels to hear their music. I curate several reggae playlists on Spotify.]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/01/my-thwarted-career-as-teenage-reggae.html ]

The media analyst in the cupboard : 2006-2009 : Claire Enders, Enders Analysis

 “CRUELLA DE VIL”, our teacher had chalked onto the blackboard at the front of our classroom hut. We had been reading aloud excerpts from the 1956 children’s novel ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ and were completing our lesson with content analysis for ten-year olds.

“What does her name sound like if you say it quickly?”, asked our teacher. I stuck my hand in the air.

“Cruel devil,” I blurted.

“Correct, Grant,” she replied, “and we have seen how that could be a description of the way she behaved in the story.”

Our teacher’s message for the adult lives ahead of us might have been: beware of wealthy women bearing gifts! They might end up bearing down on YOU before you know it … and skin you for their own ends. I vowed to file away that advice for the future. The year was 1968.

Four decades later, a work colleague returned to the office to recount what he considered an entertaining encounter earlier that day with a client:

“When I met her, she said ‘YOU must be Grant Goddard. I am so pleased to meet you at last’ and then she seemed disappointed when I told her that I wasn’t him.”

My young colleagues laughed aloud at this case of mistaken identity. I did not. This was not the first occasion that one of them had been dispatched to meet Carolyn McCall, the 45-year-old chief executive of ‘Guardian Media Group’ [GMG] that employed 7,200 staff with £700m turnover … and where a similar conversation had ensued. For me, it was another humiliation, not some kind of ‘Famous Five’ jape.

I had previously spent several weeks researching and designing a 48-page PowerPoint that analysed the state of the UK commercial radio industry for presentation to a conference hall of GMG’s radio staff organised by McCall in Manchester. My boss, Claire Enders, had asked me to accompany her by train there where she would present my work. Although I would not be on stage, nonetheless I was looking forward to meeting McCall and some of her radio team. One dark, cold November morning, wearing my best suit and tie, I caught the train to our central London office, sufficiently early for me and my boss to travel north together.

“I have decided to take the intern with me to Manchester instead of you,” Enders announced to me in front of my colleagues, before the two of them rushed out the door to an awaiting taxi. Evidently, the intern had known to arrive early that day.

No forewarning. No explanation. No apology. I was baffled … but not surprised. This was the latest in the succession of humiliations I had encountered since joining this, er, unusual workplace nineteen months ago. I decided to pass the rest of that day sat at my desk wearing headphones, listening to my music and purposefully doing absolutely no work, a silent (and wholly unacknowledged) protest at my treatment. I felt even more humiliated than usual because the office’s parade of ‘interns’ were, in reality, merely the pampered offspring of posh media bosses whom Enders had befriended. Sat at a spare desk in our office, their mere presence would look good on CV’s already boasting a private education, despite their evident disinterest in our work.

On a separate occasion, an initial meeting had been arranged with the new chief executive of the UK’s largest commercial radio group, Global Radio, whose wealthy father had financed its acquisition, following his offspring’s lack of success securing a significant role within the industry. I was to accompany Claire Enders to meet Ashley Tabor at his office and had prepared a list of questions to ask about his plans to resuscitate the sector’s recent dismal performance. We travelled together from our office by taxi and, only once our destination was reached, did Enders turn to me and say:

“I think this meeting should be millionaire-to-millionaire so you should return to the office.”

Not only was I humiliated to have to make the return journey back across London but I had to pay the bemused taxi driver for the privilege. Although I was employed as the analyst specialising in the radio sector, Enders never debriefed me on what had been discussed at this or her other meetings with senior radio industry personnel. There seemed to be no notion of teamwork in this workplace. I was forced to gather my own intelligence about the industry whilst not meeting its bosses. It was reminiscent of some kind of ‘gentlemen’s club’ where entry was denied to those of us without wealth or influence. Meetings of the privileged elite appeared as much social events and opportunities to propagate gossip as they were business discussions.

On another occasion, I was required to produce a company presentation for the management team of Disney whom I met, accompanying Claire Enders, in the boardroom of its Hammersmith office. Disney was considering launching a national sports radio station in Britain and seemed to believe it could achieve this objective without concern for Ofcom’s regulatory regime that prescribed every commercial radio station’s format and content. I was required to be the harbinger of disappointing news to Disney’s highly paid, but seemingly oblivious, managers that it would prove necessary to proceed within Britain’s media ownership regulations, regardless of how much cash might be on the table.

After the meeting closed, Claire Enders and I adjourned to a side office with the female Disney executive who had invited us to make the presentation. I anticipated that we would be discussing further the regulatory issues I had raised. How wrong I was! For the next half-hour, I sat there while Enders suggested multiple routes for the young woman to bag a wealthy man, proposing potential candidates. Not for the first time, I felt akin to a servant whose presence could be safely ignored because ‘the help’ were paid expressly to turn a blind eye to the intimacies of their masters and mistresses. Neither woman displayed the slightest embarrassment in discussing such personal matters in front of a silent middle-aged man who self-evidently was not of their breeding or status. I was as good as invisible. For me, it merely offered an insight into Enders’ modus operandi.

On a different occasion, I recall a weird taxi ride across London to a client meeting, accompanied by Claire Enders alone, during which she just kept repeating the phrases “I’m a self-made woman” and “I am, you know” to nobody in particular. I stared out the window and remained silent. I had no idea what had prompted this line of monologue. It felt somewhat like it might to be locked in a tiny room with a tragic escapee from a mental health facility.

During that journey, I was reminded of the occasion sixteen years prior when I had attended a public meeting concerning the award of the commercial television franchise for south and southeast England that had been operated by ‘TVS’ for the last decade. Contributions were made by a succession of those seated within the tiered lecture theatre, before an American woman in the back row behind me stood to unleash a loud stream of consciousness that seemed to leave the audience baffled. An audible gap followed, as might occur after an outburst by a wordy aunt on speed at a family Christmas dinner, before the debate resumed in earnest. Afterwards, I pondered whether I might cross paths with that woman again. TVS lost its franchise the following year.

Shortly before I discovered my time working at Enders Analysis was finally up, I was invited to make a presentation to the ‘2008 European Radio Symposium’ to be held in Portugal. I spent two months creating a 39-page PowerPoint and had booked my flights and accommodation when, a few days beforehand, Claire Enders insisted that I undertake an unrelated project, unconcerned with radio but with an immediate deadline. I was forced to explain to the conference organisers that I had become unexpectedly unavailable and then pass my work to a colleague who knew nothing about radio to travel to Portugal instead to make my presentation.

I have never understood how ‘humiliation’ could be perceived as a productive means of managing personnel within a business. Given how my colleagues at Enders Analysis appeared accepting of this situation, I can only guess that their experiences attending private schools might have conditioned them to regard such treatment as ‘normal’. For state-school-educated me, it was as abnormal as any workplace behaviour I had ever witnessed. There were times when I wondered if my own mental health might be damaged by the experience of working within that environment. It had been such a long, long time since my great grandparents had lived and worked as servants in a ‘big house’. I had no desire to emulate their lives.

Following my abrupt exit from Enders Analysis after almost three years, I applied for every ‘media analyst’ vacancy I found, for none of which I was called to interview. After rejection by one small analyst business beside Charing Cross station, I requested a meeting with its chief executive to explore freelance opportunities. I showed him my published work and the regular coverage it had attracted on radio, television and in the press. He listened and then told me:

“Even if we were to hire you, you would have to take a backroom position. We could not send you out to meet clients.”

After that damning verdict, I gave up applying for jobs as an analyst. Apparently, it was evident to employers that I lacked whatever was ‘the right stuff’ necessary to be in the presence of the posh masters commanding Britain’s media industry.

I never did get to meet Carolyn McCall.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-media-analyst-in-cupboard-2006-2009.html ]

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no regulation : 2003 : Dumfries & Galloway licence, The Radio Authority

 When my wife took a job at the United Biscuits factory in Harlesden, she understood she would be making ‘Digestives’ … and she was correct. When I took a job at The Radio Authority, I anticipated I would be regulating Britain’s commercial radio industry … but I was wrong! Although it was nowhere to be found in my job description, not even hidden in the fine print, my bosses regularly required me to ‘turn a blind eye’. Perhaps this was the underlying modus operandi of government regulators: to sit in cossetted London offices, execute as little ‘regulating’ as possible and await comfortable retirement.

Before taking this job, I was aware of The Radio Authority’s, ahem, ‘chequered’ history. Seven years after it had been demerged from its precursor the Independent Broadcasting Authority [IBA], I had watched open-mouthed a November 1998 BBC2 ‘Newsnight’ report in which The Radio Authority’s former Company Secretary, John Norrington, accused his ex-employer of misconduct in its award of new commercial radio licences to ‘Vibe FM’ and ‘Sunrise Radio’. It took until March 1999 for the Authority to respond publicly that “the independent assessment by Grant Thornton makes clear that there was no abuse of process, no improper conflict of interest, and no bias.” Of course!

Though this denial was deemed sufficient for ‘The Independent’ newspaper to headline its story ‘Quango “not corrupt”’, the article also noted casually that “Janet Lee, the Authority’s programming and advertising director, is on police bail …” following her arrest by the Fraud Squad in November 1998 on corruption charges. What a bam-bam! Having arrived for my new job in 2002, I found that the organisation’s prime objective seemed to have nothing at all to do with radio, but everything to do with avoidance of further public embarrassment at all costs. Janet Lee had kept her job and occupied a huge office, larger than the one opposite that I had to share with five colleagues, but which she shared only with a jungle of huge potted plants.

Having been given few tasks to perform, I had time to conduct my own industry research. One of my papers (‘Tools For Radio Content Regulation #1: Playlist Diversity Analysis’) studied the music played by competing commercial radio stations in the same market to determine whether their formats were truly complementary, as their licences required. I was unsurprised to find my analysis demonstrated that the most played records on London station ‘Heart 106.2’ were by (in descending order) these artists: Westlife, Nelly, Liberty X, Blue, Atomic Kitten, Atomic Kitten (again), Liberty X (again), Kylie Minogue, Darren Hayes and Anastacia. To my knowledge, its music policy had never squared with its licence which required:

“The music will be melodic or soft adult contemporary and will exclude the extremes of dance, rap, teenage pop, indie and heavy rock.”

I circulated my document to managers within The Radio Authority and, not for the first time, received no response. There were evident forces within that workplace which were way above my pay grade. I had apparently become a pesky nuisance by trying to remind the organisation what objective ‘regulation’ of commercial broadcasting in the public interest should have been about. As a result, I was marginalised and belittled, particularly when it came to my year-end appraisal … which I was told I had failed with flying colours. They’ll take your soul if you let them, but don’t you let them!

“That was a good meeting,” my colleague commented as we exited The Radio Authority’s meetings room. My immediate thought was that he was being unnecessarily sarcastic. Our meeting had barely lasted ten minutes and had been completely uncontentious. Then it dawned on me that I was an oddity here who had spent half his working life in meetings within commercial businesses, some of which had lasted six hours or ended in acrimony. However, since joining this governmental organisation, I had never been called to a team, departmental or work meeting. They simply did not exist here because tasks were allocated by bosses approaching their underlings and bellowing at them in the old-fashioned master/servant style. On reflection, I realised my colleague’s comment had been made in seriousness.

My boss had allocated me the task of assessing an application by an existing local radio licensee seeking its renewal, versus a competing bid. I had been instructed that, as a direct result of the auditor’s report concerning ‘the affair whose name was never spoken’, it was now deemed necessary to convene one meeting with two colleagues from other departments about every licence application and to minute it on paper. It did not seem to matter that such meetings served no recognisable purpose or objective, except for each to produce an A4 page that documented they had happened. That was the sole reason I had had to call the meeting. It was a direct outcome of “the auditors [having] recommended that the [Radio] Authority tighten up some of its procedures for awarding licences,” according to ‘The Independent’.

The licence for Dumfries had first been awarded in 1989 by the IBA to ‘South West Sound’ at a time when each geographical area was only permitted one commercial radio station. Since then, the regulator had probably never heard the station’s broadcasts as I found that it interpreted its role narrowly as the award of licences, rather than regularly checking that the terms of those licences were being fulfilled. Being me, I insisted on reviewing the station’s output in a period when almost no UK commercial radio stations streamed on the internet, requiring the Authority to identify someone within the transmission area who would record some of its output. It took a few attempts for me to receive recordings that were even audible.

These recordings were full of regulatory surprises. The breakfast show was being relayed from co-owned station ‘West AM’ in Ayr, complete with incorrect station and frequency identifications. Similarly, its evening show was relayed from co-owned ‘West FM’ in Ayr, complete with different again, but still wrong, station and frequency identifications. The music played in those evening shows also contravened the music styles specified in the licence. Three hours of local programmes required by the licence on both Saturday and Sunday were also absent.

To get to the bottom of these issues, I interviewed managers at the station and recorded our phone conversations. Those staff appeared entirely nonchalant about these breaches of their licence, could not explain how long such practices had been pursued, or promise when these programming errors would be rectified. I was made to feel as if my questions were an undesired intrusion into broadcasting systems that had existed there for years, regardless of the station’s licence, the details of which the staff claimed to be unaware. I felt like the big, bad regulator in London interfering in the running of a little local business that had retreated into its own parochial ways.

Reporting these findings to my manager, rather than being thanked for discovering multiple regulatory breaches, I was vilified for being pedantic. I had unexpectedly opened up a hornets’ nest and my bosses swung into action to ameliorate the ‘damage’ I was apparently doing by being over-scrupulous. Although one competing bid had been submitted for the licence, it quickly became evident that the decision had already been made internally to re-award the licence to the incumbent … regardless of its licence transgressions. I was suddenly thrust into the middle of an internal ‘damage control’ exercise as the result of me having believed my job was ‘to regulate’.

My 17-page report had to be repeatedly edited severely by management to remove what were considered to be my ‘accusations’ that the station had broken the rules, even though its staff had admitted their failures to me in recorded phone conversations. Management finally settled on a careful wording that implied the breaches I had discovered were irrelevant to the re-award of the incumbent’s licence:

“Staff have thus identified two apparent breaches of the station’s Format – too much chart music in the evening and only occasional local programming at weekends. These will be investigated separately by staff, but should not be considered by Members in the context of this licence award as they do not form part of the station’s proposals for the new licence period.”

I was instructed to write a script for pre-approval to present to the ‘Members Meeting’ of the ‘great and good’ that would consider my report and make a decision. I was not permitted to deviate from this script or to mention further details of the licence breaches I had discovered. Unsurprisingly, the Meeting willingly re-awarded the licence to the incumbent, despite a stinging criticism I had managed to sneak into my report:

“Not only has South West Sound failed to give direct answers to many of the questions required within the application process, but it has barely articulated a convincing argument for being re-awarded the licence, save for the obvious benefit that its ratings are extremely high.”

Immediately after the Meeting, it was my responsibility to contact the chairman of the winning applicant, Hal McGhie, by phone to officially confirm the outcome. My call was answered by a woman who told me he was too busy to come to the phone. I had to insist that I needed to converse with him personally, if only briefly, to relay that afternoon’s result of his re-application for the local commercial radio licence. She put me on hold and returned after a while to explain that, after speaking with him, he had insisted that he was far too busy to talk presently and that I would have to call back at some other time.

I suspect he had no need for my phone call to inform him of the result he already knew.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/01/see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no.html ]

Life in a Northern town … for a Southerner : 1982-1984 : Peterlee, County Durham

 My car would be going nowhere. All four of its tyres had been slashed during the night. It had been parked on the street below the block of flats where I lived. This was not the first occasion. The same act of vandalism had occurred a few months earlier. Why did someone hate me so? I had done nothing to antagonise anyone. My only crime was to be me. But it was enough merely to be a Southerner living in Northeast England. As soon as I opened my mouth, my accent gave me away. I was caught in the crossfire of a worsening class war between the London-based Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher and Northern working-class populations she and her cronies seemed determined to destroy.

I had already encountered similar antagonisms elsewhere in County Durham. A few years previously, sharing a student house in Sherburn Village, four of us ventured into the nearby ‘Cross Keys’ pub, ordered drinks and were told we would have to be served in the adjacent ‘saloon bar’. While the ‘public bar’ was filled with local men’s chatter and a jukebox, we were ushered into a bleak tiny side room where we had to sit in a line on a wooden bench affixed to a wall as there were no furniture or amenities … and no other customers. Although it was our ‘local’, I never returned.

Our miner’s cottage in Sherburn was within a long terrace backing onto an alleyway where coal would be delivered weekly into backyard bunkers. Coal supplies were essential to heat ‘back boilers’ behind living room fireplaces that warmed radiators and water. We soon found that residents would steal it from their neighbours’ yards during the night, despite the fuel’s cheapness. One night a thief even broke in and stole some small items from downstairs while we slept. After I described to the police the designs of several T-shirts I had lost, a constable knocked on the door of an adjacent house visible from our living room window, only for it to be answered by a teenager wearing a top matching my description. Rather than rob from the rich, the poor tended to rob other poor people … or incomers such as us.

Now I was living eight miles further east in Peterlee, a post-war ‘new town’ whose ‘masterplan’ had never been finished, so lacked basic amenities such as a national supermarket outlet. On my initial visits to pubs there, I had been ‘welcomed’ in one of two embarrassing ways: either a never-ending wait to place my order at the bar where I was apparently invisible to staff; or, after placing an order, my drinks were never served. The only place in Peterlee where I could complete a simple beverage transaction was the deserted bar in the town centre plaza that had to tolerate ‘outsiders’ like me because it was attached to the one hotel.

Why was I living in Peterlee? Having unsuccessfully applied for dozens of vacancies, it was the one job I had been offered, working for a mediocre salary at a mediocre community arts project funded by the Arts Council. In retrospect, I suspect I may have been the sole applicant. The post was accompanied by a council flat in Peterlee, not a particularly valuable perk as there was no waiting list for council accommodation in such a miserable town where few would choose to live. My top-floor two-bedroom flat appeared unoccupied since it had been built decades earlier … and I soon found out why. Winds blew so strongly off the North Sea, visible on the horizon, that the pilot light for the water heater was almost impossible to keep alight.

This was the first unfurnished property I had rented so, for the next two years, I lived in that cavernous flat without a chair, sofa, table or bed to my name. Initially I would sleep on the bedroom floor, but it proved so cold and uncomfortable that I had to order a mattress to be delivered. I still had to sleep in my clothes, a winter coat, hat and gloves because there was no central heating. I had hung my clothes in the tiny walk-in bedroom closet but belatedly found that mold spreading from the icy cold walls had ruined most of them, necessitating their disposal. I owned no kitchenware so I drove to the nearest A1(M) motorway service station and purloined some metal cutlery, some of which I still have with its engraved ‘Grenada’ logo.

The previous decade, my mother had given me a cube-shaped black & white portable television to use at university. This and a basic hi-fi system, my first (and last) acquisition on hire purchase, were my only forms of entertainment on that bleak housing estate. When I played music, the elderly woman living downstairs would bang on her ceiling for me to cease because the building’s construction was wafer-thin. I recall being sat alone cross-legged on the floor of my bitterly cold flat, watching the harrowing television drama ‘Boys From The Blackstuff’ and crying my eyes out during all five episodes. Was I feeling sorry for myself, forced to live in such austere conditions and working at a dismal job that barely kept my head above water? Was I upset by what the British Film Institute describes as the programme’s “tragic look at the way economics affect ordinary people”? A bit of both.

I may have been a Southerner but I was hardly the ‘enemy’. I had attended university only thanks to a ‘full grant’ received from Surrey County Council. I owned a tiny Datsun Cherry car, purchased with my grandfather’s help, only because it was the sole means of commuting to a summer job in 1977, taken to support my struggling one-parent family. Before I took this job in Peterlee, this car had been parked unused on a quiet side road as I could not afford its road tax and insurance. I had experienced austerity first hand. But working-class attitudes in Peterlee baffled me. Families would replace their three-piece suites with newer models every two or three years and dump their perfectly usable old ones on the grass verge outside their council house as a symbol to their neighbours of their supposed prosperity. Ostentatiousness was deemed positive, demonstrated by families’ living rooms I visited filled with gaudy tat but with sofas still wrapped in plastic. Compared to them, I had almost no material possessions. It was my accent alone that made me the enemy.

I was by no means the only target of local anger. Days before the start of the academic year, a school near my flat was burned to the ground by children. Graffiti and arson were commonplace. Coalmining was the dominant industry, even after nearby Blackhall Colliery had closed in 1981, having employed 2,000 at its peak. The adjacent Easington Colliery remained open for now but its 1,500 miners were under threat. At the industry’s peak in 1975, coalmining had employed 37,000 in Northeast England alone. However, in February 1981, the Thatcher government had announced the closure of 23 pits nationally. Over the following three years, the industry’s workforce was reduced by 41,000 across Britain. The National Union of Mineworkers balloted its members twice in 1982 and once in 1983 to consider a national strike. In Peterlee, the prospect of a confrontation between miners and the government elevated local tensions.

My eight slashed tyres were a tragic and costly consequence of these developments, having only afforded to insure my car for ‘third party, fire & theft’ incidents. To ameliorate my financial problems, I advertised rental of the vacant second bedroom in my council flat. A young woman agreed to take it but then used the room merely to occasionally sleep with a married man twice her age. After several months, she disappeared with rent arrears and without removing her few possessions. I was back to square one.

Watching the nightly news, it was evident that the moribund local economy would turn even more disastrous as the conflict between government and miners escalated further. It felt as if I might then be in even greater personal danger. After two years working for the town’s community arts project, I realised that this type of work was not my life’s ambition. I had recently enjoyed helping a tutor at Sunderland Polytechnic establish a pirate radio station transmitter on the building’s roof, a reminder how much I missed working in radio, the career I had desired since childhood. It had been three years since my last paying job in the radio industry and I began to appreciate that, if I did not persist in seeking such work, I might be considered too long away to re-enter the workforce. It was the hardest decision I faced to give up the Peterlee job, after having already been rejected for so many other jobs since 1980.

I decided to temporarily move back to my mother’s house 286 miles to the south. I was sad to leave the amazing young people with whom I had worked in Peterlee to establish the town’s first music venue, promote local bands and release music. I had also initiated and secured government funding for a community project that employed a dozen people at the town’s Community Centre. However, my two years’ work seemed unacknowledged by the project’s management committee, the local council or Peterlee Development Corporation. One morning, I crammed all my possessions into my car, but sadly had to dump my complete 1969-1976 collection of ‘Blues & Soul’ magazine outside the front door of my flat as there was insufficient room. To this day, I miss perusing their fascinating pages.

As I drove the long journey south, I reflected on my two largely wasted years in the badlands of Peterlee and recalled the lyrics to the 1978 recording by reggae band Aswad, expressing their experience living in the land of their birth: “I’m a foreigner … and a stranger”. Having spent a total of seven years living there, I harboured no desire to return to County Durham.

Postscript. Following the 1984-1985 miners’ strike, Easington Colliery finally closed in 1993 with the loss of 1,400 jobs. Presently Peterlee reportedly suffers the highest crime rate in County Durham.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/12/life-in-northern-town-for-southerner.html ]

Remember the days of the old schoolyard : 1963-1969 : Cordwalles Junior School, Camberley

 “I don’t wanna go,” I was shouting as I struggled to hang on to the car door for dear life. I was being kidnapped and forced into a vehicle outside my home that was wanting to carry me away … to my first day at infant school. My mother was trying her gentlest to push inside the family car her five-year-old son who was usually well behaved and never angry or upset. Passers-by on their way to work in town were gazing. Passengers were pointedly staring out of a passing double-decker bus. What was wrong with that belligerent child? My mother was equally horrified to witness my first tantrum.

I enjoyed being at home. I had plenty of activities to occupy myself there. I never found myself at a loose end. My parents had a remarkably hands-off attitude to my upbringing, letting me put on records, listen to the radio, watch television or play in the back garden whenever I wanted. There was no regime to follow. I was perfectly content organising my own life and did not require a school to instruct me what I should do and when. During the past year, my mother had been sending me to Mrs Potten’s ‘Gay Tree’ nursery school on Grand Avenue in order to mix with other children because I was an only child. I had found most of my peers there to be noisy and bossy, whereas I was quiet and calm. To seek acceptance, I must have adopted their rather posh accents, committed to immortality when my father recorded me on his Uher reel-to-reel tape machine reciting the two ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ books that I knew by heart.

My mother already harboured an aspiration for me to marry ‘above my station’. Whenever we walked into the town centre, on passing Bath Road, she would suggest I call on ‘Wooty’ who lived at the far end of that cul-de-sac in a large house backing onto the grounds of Sandhurst Royal Military Academy. I had met Alexandra Wooten at nursery school but had not developed a particularly close friendship with her, preferring the company of more down-to-earth Liam who lived only four doors away from our home … until his Irish parents moved away to Blackwater. Despite my mother’s persistence, I may have only visited Alexandra’s house once to ‘play’ because, unsurprisingly, I found we had no common interests.

My reluctance to attend primary school was due to anticipation that a new set of peers would be similar to Mrs Potten’s charges, the only children of my age I had so far encountered. I was mistaken! My fee-paying, town centre nursery school had been dominated by the offspring of Camberley’s middle class, whereas my state primary school was located on the peripheral council estate where I had been born, built to rehouse South Londoners whose homes had been destroyed by bombing during the War and subsequent slum clearance. Patronisingly, the council had named the estate’s streets ‘Kingston Road’, ‘Mitcham Road’, ‘Surbiton Road’, ‘Wimbledon Road’ and ‘Carshalton Road’, as if newcomers would feel more at home by eulogising their former hometowns some twenty miles away. Naturally, none of those roads led to the places after which they had been named.

I quickly discovered how wrong my expectations about school had been. My new classmates seemed perfectly normal. Unlike Mrs Potten, teachers did not require us to dress up in costumes and repeat archaic speeches for Biblical reenactments, or to watch violent ‘Punch & Judy’ puppet shows. Instead, we were given interesting creative activities to do and treated with respect and encouragement. Teachers addressed us by our first names. I loved school. I quickly retired my quasi-posh accent. I had already mastered the reading and writing skills with which some of my peers were struggling and was now teaching myself to type. One day at home, my mother had asked me to put away her electric iron and, without realising it was still plugged in, I picked it up by its plate and screamed, burning my right hand. She had to bandage my thumb and index finger for a while, so I continued to learn to type at home using my middle finger … the way I type to this day. I had wondered if my erased fingerprints would ever return, but they did eventually.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uNo9WWUnphY%3Fsi%3DCm23dvyOW_LSvI0E

After two years, we all moved to the adjoining primary school where teaching was more structured. I attended my first morning assembly in the main hall but was baffled when the principal instructed us to recite something called the ‘Lord’s Prayer’. Everyone around me bowed their heads and recited a kind of mantra I had never heard. It felt unnervingly as if I had mistakenly been invited into some kind of cult in which all the teachers and children had already been indoctrinated … except me. I had no understanding of what was going on around me, more so because next we were told to sing strange songs from a thick book of incomprehensible ancient lyrics I had never heard played on the radio. It was impossible to sing when you had no idea what the tune should be.

Afterwards, having observed my bafflement, a teacher asked why I had not participated in the religious part of our school assembly. She seemed shocked that I had never heard of ‘hymns’ or ‘prayers’, asking whether my family was ‘Christian’. I had no idea what that word meant, so I returned home and asked my mother, who replied that we were not religious. She wrote a brief note to my teacher explaining that simple fact and, thereafter, I was excused from the section of daily assembly devoted to hymns and the like. Every day for the next four years, I would sit in a nearby small side-room alongside several children including classmate Jacqueline Dixon, a Hindu who initially asked me what was my religion. I had to tell her and the other non-Christians sequestered there that I did not seem to have one. I was an oddity.

Although my aunt Sheila worked as a ‘dinner lady’ at the school, I always returned home to take lunch. I would stand alone at the bus stop at the top end of Upper College Road, staring across at the modernist St Martin’s church on the opposite side of the roundabout, puzzled as to what might go on inside. I had heard classmates talk about attending something called ‘Sunday School’ there, next door to the home of classmate Annette van Hartaan Veldt. This church must have been where almost everyone else at school had been indoctrinated into their cult. It seemed to take an age until Aldershot & District Traction Company Limited’s number 1, 2 or 3C bus arrived to carry me one mile home for a halfpenny fare. (Once I had grown to be amongst the tallest in my class, the bus conductor insisted I pay the adult one penny fare despite me still being a child.) Arrived home, I would have just enough time to snack something and then catch the bus back for afternoon classes.

After school finished at four, if it was not raining, I could save the bus fare by walking home alone the length of Upper College Ride. This downhill route passed through a 400-yard stretch of Ministry of Defence woodland, a natural barrier intended to isolate the council estate from private housing around the town centre. It was always a lonely journey bereft of fellow pedestrians and scary on dark winter afternoons, me worrying an escapee from Broadmoor might jump out from behind a tree. The money saved I would blow in the sweet shop near my school on ‘Batman’ bubble gum packets, ‘Flying Saucers’, ‘Swizzels Love Hearts’, ‘Lemon Sherberts’ or a ‘Lucky Bag’. I was obsessed with the ‘Batman’ TV show and, as well as requesting my mother fabricate the superhero’s ‘utility belt’ for me to wear, I saved enough sweet wrappers to send for a ‘Batman’ poster that would grace my bedroom wall.

My favourite school activities were summer days when the teacher would take our class outside, thirty of us sat cross-legged in the shade of a huge tree behind the main building, writing essays in exercise books balanced on our laps. Those remain some of the happiest days of my life, before homework and exams impinged on my childhood, and before my parents sent me to a faraway school stuffed with posh boys and requiring a bottle-green uniform.

My least favourite school activity was ‘swimming’ in the newly constructed, unheated rectangular above-ground pool on the playing field. Alongside were two tiny windowless wooden huts in which girls and boys were shepherded separately to change into their costumes, and where I hated my mates spying me naked. I was so rake-thin that the bottom of my rib cage protruded, making me imagine I had some kind of physical deformity not evident in my schoolmates. My acute embarrassment destroyed any enjoyment and inhibited my capacity to learn to swim … which sadly I never overcame.

In my final year at Cordwalles, teacher Mr Hales encouraged us to open savings accounts with Trustee Savings Bank [TSB]. Once a week after class registration, he would ask if we had coins to deposit, record their value in our individual bank books and update our balances. It was a great way to make us understand the value of money, particularly as the monetary system was about to convert to ‘new pence’ from shillings. Would a school today actively encourage ten-year-olds to manage their first bank accounts in class?

I made some really good friends – including Paul Rowell, Michael Heinrich and Martin Bell – who would invite me to their houses on the estate after school. I was surrounded by peers of both sexes, of various religions and diverse races. I feel very lucky to have been educated in such a safe, sympathetic and uncompetitive environment, full of stimulation and encouragement that immensely shaped my attitudes and life thereafter. Unfortunately, it made my subsequent education and career make me feel all the more like a fish out of water, forced to navigate pathways amongst privileged, entitled people who seemed to have had very different childhoods that had fostered their cold, cutthroat, self-centred outlook on life.

I was sad to leave my primary school in 1969, after which I no longer saw the classmates with whom I had spent the previous six years. My parents failed to appreciate that their decision to continue my education at a distant school tore me away from roots I had forged on Old Dean Estate and isolated my social life by forcing me to travel daily to the other end of the county. At Cordwalles, I had felt like a normal boy living a normal life. I was never again made to feel that I fitted in so comfortably.

Postscript. The first time I went to church was in 1967 to accompany my mother to the final service of St George’s, built by the local Middleton family in the 1890’s on St George’s Road at Knoll Road, prior to its demolition to create a car park adjacent to Herman Solomon’s Garage. Despite never having known my mother attend any church, she was annoyed that our nearest one had been sold off as part of Camberley town centre’s modernisation. 

More than two decades later, having recalled that I had once opened a savings account at school, I walked into the TSB Camberley branch in London Road and asked if I could withdraw the balance. It took several weeks for the staff to locate my details and obligingly add years of interest to my balance before I could withdraw a small sum that I had almost forgotten I had.

Virtual Tour of Cordwalles Classrooms

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/12/remember-days-of-old-schoolyard-1963.html]

Health & safety & death in the workplace : 2004 : BBC World Service Trust, Phnom Penh

 We were standing in a concert hall designed like a futuristic room on the ‘Discovery One’ spaceship in the film ‘2001’. Every feature was brilliant white. White plastic seats. White walls. White ceiling. When the house lights were switched on, it was a dazzling sight. In 1968, my father had accompanied me to watch that sci-fi movie at our local cinema because my school project concerned the American space race. Simultaneously, maybe an unknown architect somewhere had exited a theatre, sufficiently inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic vision to design their next project, this room, all-white.

The huge hall appeared little used and surprisingly intact, despite the sprawling two-story concrete headquarters of ‘Radio National Kampuchea’ [RNK] in which it was built exhibiting significant evidence of the raging civil war that had started with the overthrow of Cambodia leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk in March 1970. I wondered to myself whether this concert hall had served as a secret location for the Khmer Rouge leadership to enjoy a Friday night knees-up after a hard week’s work torturing and murdering fellow citizens. There might be ghosts here that would be best undisturbed.

“You will be training our staff here,” ordered Tan Yan, RNK director general, waving his hand around the cavernous hall. 

“Er …,” I replied, on the verge of telling him that this was no suitable venue to train a handful of his staff in radio production. But I managed to restrain myself from contradicting this Cambodia government appointee. I recalled that, only months prior, Chour Chetharith – deputy editor of an independent Phnom Penh radio station ‘Ta Prohm 90.5 FM’ critical of the country’s ruling party – had been shot dead by two gunmen on a motorbike on arrival at his workplace. Like anybody, I would like to live.

From his instruction to me, it was evident that our host likely had never made a radio programme, had scant idea how radio programmes were produced and had never needed to learn. His role, in charge of the government’s one national radio channel, was to ensure that its output caused no problems for his masters. We had just come from an initial meeting in his office, a cramped room awash with paper and lacking any twentieth century technology other than a telephone and an electric fan, but weirdly reminiscent of a North London taxi cab office. Then he had shepherded our delegation into a long narrow room, empty apart from two lines of chairs on opposing walls. Speeches were made in Khmer by government men sat opposite. My BBC colleague said something in English. We all stood up, uncomfortably close together in that small sweaty space, a photograph was taken and printed in the following day’s newspaper, trumpeting the first partnership between the Cambodia government and the BBC to produce radio programmes.

After the concert hall, our guided tour of the radio station took us to a large windowless office crammed with desks piled high with papers and occupied by scribbling staff. Our host explained that this was the nerve centre of his operation where everything had to be ‘checked’. Strangely, there were no signs of radio production equipment. The sign on the office door said ‘CENSORS’. This is where every script written by lowly radio employees was edited by important managers to ensure the words’ suitability for broadcast to the nation. Then it was recorded onto analogue tape in an unseen studio somewhere, to be returned here for checking that the announcer had not inserted any personal inflection or inference into their reading of the approved script. Every item within the station’s output was created this way. Not one minute of ‘live’ content had ever been transmitted. If aliens were to invade, this radio would inform Cambodians a week after their abduction to a distant galaxy.

We were then taken to a large darkened room in the bowels of the building, filled with standalone metal shelf units on which the station’s tape archives were stored. Thousands of items were evident, many in boxes, some not, much seemingly uncatalogued, some unspooling all over the floor. It was an unholy mess. No air conditioning. No organisation. But it was surprising it had survived at all the Khmer Rouge era. Right here, since the station’s launch in 1947 under the supervision of the Ministry of Propaganda, we were told there were priceless recordings of musicians, interviews and news reports spanning the country’s turbulent history … if you could ever find them amongst the chaos. I was awestruck.

Then it was down to work. The BBC had requested interviews with a dozen of RNK’s existing staff, from which we would choose a radio production team whom I would train to create (shock horror!) a live weekly phone-in programme, the first in the station’s history. We decamped to one of several unused rooms whose doors had been removed and that opened onto the compound, where we sat around a group of old desks pushed together in the middle. No air conditioning. Just a bare room and the three of us: the BBC’s radio manager in Cambodia, Chas Hamilton; BBC translator Keo Sothearith; and freelance me. We had a list of staff names and that was all. No CV’s. No idea who we were about to see.

One by one, our candidates arrived and what ensued was the most bizarre round of interviews I have ever encountered. Asked what their present job entailed, what skills they possessed and what they wanted to achieve in their career, most failed to answer anything at all. Some just stared at us as if we were mad. Several answered “I do what my boss tells me”. None appeared enthusiastic about their work or the potential of training with the BBC. Reluctance would be a gross understatement. I wondered to myself how they had secured their jobs in radio in the first place if their communication ‘skills’ were so poor. They seemed to consider our polite enquiries as interrogation, as if we might incarcerate them for any incorrect answer … or worse. Perhaps the government radio station staff were still being managed through ‘fear’, just as the Khmer Rouge had terrorised the population not so long ago.

By the time we reached our last interviewee, we had noticed that all our candidates had been dressed in black. We asked why. Our last man explained that one of their female colleagues at the station had recently been killed by falling masonry from the crumbling war-torn building, so the staff would be attending the funeral that afternoon. We looked at each other open-mouthed. We were sitting in a death trap. Oh dear! What were we doing there? Despite me having interviewed potential candidates for radio jobs in many countries, this selection proved the most difficult to assess because we had elicited almost no relevant information. We remained there a while afterwards to discuss our preferences, deciding to select the marginally least reticent six staff and hope for the best. I felt anxious about how I could train people who appeared so disinterested.

Our morning’s work done, we left the room and headed to the director’s office to thank him and say goodbye. It was empty. We walked out to the front gates of the compound and were astonished to find them locked from the outside. We walked back to the building and wandered around offices on the two floors, shouting ‘hello’. It was completely deserted. Like their former colonial masters, the staff must have left en masse at precisely midday and would not return for two hours. We had been locked in without anyone anticipating that their morning visitors might still be present.

All the three of us could do was walk through foliage around the inside of the high perimeter zinc fence and look for a gap to escape. Eventually we did find a small hole where the metal had suffered damage, we prised it open and, bending down, could just about crawl through. By then, we had been outdoors in the midday sun for a while and, once returned to the BBC office, we desperately needed refreshment. It was a bizarre end to a bizarre morning of meetings at the government radio station.

That afternoon, after reflecting upon our experience, I told my local line manager, Chas Hamilton, and the BBC Cambodia project manager, Giselle Portenier, that I considered the RNK premises a wholly unsuitable venue for me to train staff. Was there a room in the BBC building I could use instead? The local staff showed me a conference room with a boardroom table that seemed ideal. I almost fainted when I realised I had seen this exact space, with its large circular motif embedded in the marble floor, during a dream five years earlier. Not for the first time, ‘déjà vu’ sneaks up out of nowhere to surprise you in the strangest situations.

To me, it seemed self-evident that this room – in a secure, air-conditioned environment with access to a kitchen and toilet facilities – was the perfect solution to hold my training sessions two full days each week for the next few months. I was taken aback to be told that neither Hamilton (who had visited RNK with me) nor Portenier (who had not) agreed. Apparently, the BBC’s contract with the government insisted the training would take place on-site at RNK and that was considered the end of it. Before making that agreement, had anyone from the BBC actually visited the RNK building? This stalemate lasted more than a month. Maddeningly, in January the BBC in London had sent me to Cambodia to start work with the utmost urgency and yet, by March, I was still unable to commence training one of my two radio production teams.

In desperation, I felt forced to send this formal email on 30 March to Hamilton and Portenier:

“I feel I should flag that no specific resolution has yet been agreed to the health and safety issue of the RNK building.

After my visit to RNK on 2 March 2004, I immediately expressed my concern (verbally) to Charles and Giselle about the health and safety risk of undertaking training work at the RNK premises. In subsequent conversations with Charles, Giselle and Lori [McDougall], possible remedies were discussed that involved training RNK staff off-site.

Paragraph 10(5)(a) of the WST [BBC World Service Trust] Freelance Terms Of Trade requires the Freelance to “make an assessment of all risks to health and safety reasonably foreseeable by him/her that may affect the WST or any others arising out of or in any way connected with the performance of the Contract” and to “promptly make and give effect to arrangements to eliminate or adequately control such risks.” The Freelance is made responsible for health and safety issues.

The Freelance is obliged to “notify the WST accordingly,” which I have done (verbally), and I will reiterate (in writing) my assessment: The RNK building is in a terrible state of repair and looks as though it has not been maintained for at least a decade, maybe longer. Most exterior windows have no glass and many of the rooms no longer have doors. Only a few rooms seem to have air conditioning. We learnt that a member of staff has recently been killed by masonry falling from the building. There is little or no visible security, and the large front reception area within the building is completely empty. When we went to leave the premises at noon, we found all exit gates were padlocked, and the building devoid of any staff to assist. We eventually found an exit through a gap in a zinc fence to the rear of the building. We have yet to see any kind of refreshment facility, or inspect the toilet facilities.

I do not feel that this is a safe environment in which to spend several days a week training RNK staff. Such training could be arranged off-site without any loss of relevant radio facilities (since RNK has no live studio/production environment relevant to the training). As you are aware, I suggested that training could instead be conducted at the BBC office and/or ‘FM 102’ (or elsewhere).

I am sure that we can work together to resolve this issue and commence the training of RNK staff.”

Still enduring no local approval, I then had to write a similar email to the BBC office in London which resulted in further queries, more correspondence but, eventually, grudging acceptance that my work could be undertaken in the conference room only metres away from my office desk. The outcome was that training sessions which should have started in January did not commence until April, by which time the plan had been for me to return home. However, having just won such a frustratingly minor victory, I felt it would have been irresponsible to leave immediately, so I offered to extend my time in Cambodia a further few months. Nonetheless, the RNK phone-in programme had still not launched by the time I eventually left, sadly as a direct result of these delays attributable to the BBC. This was the first time I had been employed by the BBC, as well as my first work for an international charity, and my experience with ex-pat managers had proven far from productive.

By contrast, my training sessions in the BBC conference office with the RNK staff, about whom we had harboured such initial doubts, proved to be amazingly positive. They were wonderful people who taught me as much about Cambodia as I hopefully taught them about radio. I was so sad to leave them without having seen through their phone-in programme, which finally launched on-air in October.

I never returned to the RNK building. However, I did run into the station’s director at the press launch of some health project in Phnom Penh that the BBC insisted I attend. We stood together in silence in the garden of the venue, a small high circular table between us on which we placed our free drinks. Conversation was impossible. My knowledge of French proved irrelevant because the language had been effectively extinguished by Khmer Rouge assassinations of anyone vaguely academic in the 1970’s. This middle-aged government man smiled at me friendlily, though I found myself wondering what ‘successes’ he might have achieved in Year Zero to have sufficiently impressed the ruling party.

Once back in London, I wrote an email to UNESCO explaining that I had viewed RNK’s broadcast archives and believed they should be preserved, catalogued and stored in an improved environment because of their historical significance not only to Cambodia, but globally. No reply. I tried my best!

I had had a job to do … flying to Cambodia.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/health-safety-death-in-workplace-2004.html]

One little indie music show : 1980-1981 : Saturday night 10 to midnight, Metro Radio

“You will present a weekly two-hour rock music show on Saturday night,” my manager informed me.

No if’s or but’s. No offer over which to mull. No demo tape to produce. No question asked about previous experience. Without warning, I was appointed as presenter on one of Britain’s largest commercial radio stations. I had just started a full-time backroom job at ‘Metro Radio’ but had never asked to present a show. This was my first paying job in radio and suddenly I was also to be put on-air. The start of my radio career seemed to be heading in a positive direction.

Some aspiring DJs spend their whole life trying to secure a presenting job on radio, often without success. I felt slightly guilty that this opportunity had fallen into my lap without effort. My employer did not even realise that I had started presenting for various London pirate stations seven years earlier, as such lawbreaking activities were not productive additions to a CV then. A decade into the future, employed as programme director of London’s ‘KISS FM’, one young hopeful desiring a DJ job would sit in the station’s reception area day after day, awaiting his opportunity to buttonhole me on my way to lunch at the ‘greasy spoon’ on Highbury Corner. Little did he know that we already had the largest DJ roster of any British radio station, or that management had just cut payments per show by half, or that several loyal presenters had been made redundant within months of launch. Oblivious, he was not so much ‘networking’ as ‘stalking’.

Management at Metro Radio seemed not to care one jot what was broadcast evenings and overnight because commercial stations then believed their advertisers were only interested in daytime shows and that their most significant audience was housewives. My small additional payment for the rock show was eaten into by the cost of driving twenty miles to the studio on Saturday night and then back again in the early hours of Sunday. Nevertheless, the station would jump at any chance to cut its minor expenses, such as the occasion excellent overnight presenter Tony Crosby was replaced in 1981 by a new DJ who offered to do the same show for free. Never mind the quality, feel the penny-pinching! (Tony went on to train as a solicitor.)

No direction was offered me as to what to do in my show. Whereas daytime presenters were required to wait outside programme controller Mic Johnson’s office for individual appointments to hear his critique whenever a JICRAR ratings book was published, management expressed zero interest in what I was doing on-air. There were already two other rock shows on the station. My line manager Malcolm Herdman played two hours of heavy metal and hard rock. Full-time producer John Coulson used his two hours to play an esoteric mix of mainstream rock and read passages from ‘beat generation’/‘new journalism’ authors. I decided to fill the evident gap for the ‘indie’ music that had emerged after several years of punk.

Music trade weekly ‘Record Business’ had published its first weekly ‘indie’ chart in January 1980, following a suggestion by Iain McNay, founder of London’s ‘Cherry Red Records’. I decided to use one hour of my show to run down this chart, playing the new entries and highest climbing singles. As far as I know, mine was the first ever British radio ‘indie’ chart show and was soon mentioned in the ‘indie’ columns of the music trade press. Most ‘indie’ releases were not supplied to commercial radio stations because there was zero possibility of them being playlisted, necessitating me to establish contact with the main ‘indie’ distributor, ‘Rough Trade’ in London, to receive copies. Each week, I would phone its very helpful director and head of promotions Scott Piering to request records that he would then mail to me (later that decade I worked in Scott’s office).

In the other hour of my show, I would play a selection of newly released album tracks, both indie and mainstream. Working full-time in the station’s record library, I had access to all major label releases that arrived either by post or from weekly visits by record company promotion staff. I would place interesting new albums in a holdall I carried back and forward to the show although, with only time to play around fifteen tracks within an hour, my hoard of unplayed recent releases grew heavier by the week. My running order ranged from ‘Steely Dan’ to ‘Joy Division’ to ‘Crass’, none of which were exposed elsewhere within the station’s output.

Although the Tyneside local band scene then was dominated by heavy metal bands and record labels such as ‘Neat’ and ‘Guardian’, there were a few ‘indie’ bands that were recording good quality demo’s or releasing their records independently. I received a nice letter from Paddy McAloon asking me to play his group ‘Prefab Sprout’s first self-published single. I had already been the lone person not walking straight past the stage when the band had performed at the Durham Miners’ Gala, so I was happy to oblige. There were some excellent local bands, including ‘Dire Straits’ and ‘The Police’ who were quickly signed by major labels, but also many that went largely unnoticed until ‘Kitchenware Records’ launch in Newcastle in 1982. I tried to play any local band recordings I found or received.

Because my two hours on-air were so precious, I talked minimally between records and rarely featured interviews. I recall receiving a telegram at home from the station one day asking me to phone it urgently. Our house had no phone so I had to walk to the one phone box in Sherburn Village and call in. Was I interested in recording an interview for my show with ‘Duran Duran’ who were promoting their first single release ‘Planet Earth’? I turned down this opportunity because the group was not local, were not ‘indie’ (having already signed to ‘EMI’) and their music was audibly more ‘pop’ than ‘rock’. However, I did interview local artists such as Pauline Murray from Ferryhill whose first solo album (after the punk group ‘Penetration’) sounded remarkably innovative and remains one of my favourite recordings.

I spent quite a lot of time each week compiling a local ‘gig guide’ from adverts in local newspapers (pre-internet newsprint) and flyers. I would update it each week, type it out myself, pin it on the radio station’s noticeboard and mail copies to all the local record shops. In my show, I would read out the following week’s concerts though I never heard any other presenter refer to my list because, beyond Malcolm and myself, the station seemed to be disconnected from the local music scene. On occasional visits to ‘Volume Records’, the only ‘indie’ record shop in Newcastle, I would secretly feel proud to see the latest A4 sheet of gigs I had mailed out pinned to its noticeboard. Like my show’s content, the reason for undertaking this research-intensive work was because nobody else seemed to be exposing this information at the time. There was no ‘what’s on’ publication for the region.

Although I had competently operated radio studio equipment myself since my days at school recording pirate radio shows, management at Metro Radio insisted I sat in a soundproofed studio in front of the microphone while a ‘technical operator’ facing me from an adjoining control room played the records, advertisements and mixed the audio. I was unfamiliar with this arrangement, which the station’s managers had brought with them from overstaffed BBC local radio stations at which they had worked previously. I was extremely lucky to have had John Oley assigned as my ‘T.O.’, one of the most professional and enthusiastic people I have had the pleasure to work with in radio. His contribution to my show was enormous and freed me to talk my rubbish on-air and answer the phone line when I occasionally held competitions.

Metro Radio showed no interest in promoting my show so it seemed a miracle when I started receiving letters from listeners who had discovered it. In the days before internet or community stations, each region of Britain was served by only one local BBC station and one commercial music station. Although my show was tucked away in the weekend schedule, it still felt groundbreaking to play music little heard outside of John Peel’s weeknight show on national ‘BBC Radio One’. There were quite a few records lasting only two or three minutes that each required several hours’ work transferring them to quarter-inch tape in order to edit out swear words with a razor blade and white editing tape on a metal block. If only those bands knew how much extra effort was necessary just for them to receive one radio play!

Living in a rural village, there were Saturday nights during winter snows when I was unable to drive to the station. Snowploughs would habitually clear the roads eastward from Durham City as far as the junction with the A1(M) motorway but, frustratingly, not the further one mile beyond to my home. I would have to trudge out in icy temperatures to the public phone box and call either Malcolm Herdman or John Coulson at home, asking if they could reach the studio to fill in for me on those days. Because they lived in Newcastle city, I think they found it hard to believe that I was literally ‘snowed in’. Unfortunately, my salary was insufficient to contemplate a relocation nearer my workplace, meaning I missed out on concerts and the city nightlife which I would have loved to explore.

All good things come to an end. Quickly in my case. Metro Radio made me redundant from my full-time job. I continued to present my Saturday night show for a while through 1981 but the expense of maintaining a car to drive to Newcastle was proving greater than my payments from the station, which had to be subtracted from my Unemployment Benefit. I was applying for any relevant vacancy in the radio and music industries but getting nowhere. In the end, I had to follow Tebbit’s advice and get on my bike (well, in my car to be accurate), leaving the region where I had lived the last five years in order to take a totally different job 218 miles down south. It was disappointing because I had acquired so much knowledge of indie music, the regional music scene and had built an audience for my unique radio show.

The start of my radio career now seemed to be heading in a negative direction. I was unable to secure work in the broadcast industry for a further four years and, only then, by taking a contract in Israel on a pirate radio ship that paid little more than expenses. However, I have always treasured the memories of my time working alongside John Oley and Tony Crosby late on Saturday nights when the only other person in the darkened Metro Radio building on a bleak industrial estate was the security guard downstairs. This was when innovative radio programmes were made … even though Metro Radio probably never realised it.

Postscript: Forty years later, I received a polite email from a member of a former local band enquiring if I still had their demo tape I had been sent and played on my Metro Radio show. Sadly, no.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/one-little-indie-music-show-1980-1981.html]