An elite academy for aspiring rent-a-gob politicians : 1976 : Durham Union Society

“I’m sorry but you must wear appropriate attire to attend,” the usher told me sternly.

I thought I had been dressed normally enough, but apparently not. I was waving my club membership card, having paid the annual subscription during Freshers’ Week. Only then did I learn that it was insufficient merely to be a paid-up member. Nobody had told me I needed additionally to wear an academic gown to be admitted, one of those flimsy black material things belonging to previous centuries or ghost movies. Since my arrival at university, I had spotted a few students wafting around the streets wearing such gowns and I had considered their fashion sense preposterous, particularly in the ‘Year of Punk’. Why would I waste £37 of my Surrey County Council student full grant on such an anachronistic garment? Now, to my frustration, I was being refused entry to the society’s first debate of the academic year and had to walk the mile back to my college in autumnal darkness.

I was unaware then that Durham University was so normalised to its elite status that it even labelled its relationship with the local population ‘town and gown’. Evidently it never had considered itself an integral part of Durham, one of Britain’s poorest working-class regions, because its students were not drawn from the locality but from some of Britain’s poshest families whose offspring had proven insufficiently academic to gain admission to Oxbridge. I recall my shock during a party at fellow student John Cummins’ town centre flat when I learnt that his parents had purchased that property for the duration of his studies. Whilst processing my astonishment, I rudely fell asleep on his sofa in the midst of the revelling. Only later did I discover that such investments by rich parents were commonplace. (Despite showing little interest in the pop music with which I was obsessed, later John landed a job at ‘The Tube’ music TV show and was then appointed Channel 4’s launch head of youth television.)

Clubs had never been for me. At school, the only one I had joined was ‘Strode’s Film Club’, a sixth-form wheeze by classmate and film buff Martin Nichols to legally screen in the main hall X-rated movies such as ‘Straw Dogs’, ‘Lord of The Flies’, ‘Canterbury Tales’, ‘North by Northwest’, ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating’ and ‘Closely Observed Trains’. Now, as a naïve fresher at university, I had been told it was essential to join numerous clubs, particularly the debating society, so I had paid my money, only to be turned away from its first event. A historian had written in 1952:

“When a young man comes into residence in Durham, in seven cases out of ten he decides to become a member of the Union Society. […] And he is then in the succession of many whose first experience in oratory and official administration, gained in the Union Debating Hall and clubrooms, has stood them in good stead for the rest of their lives.”

I was unable to benefit from this ‘experience in oratory’ until later in the year when I discovered the club held one annual debate where neither membership nor a gown were necessary to attend in the Great Hall of Durham Castle. It seemed bizarre that the town’s castle operated as neither a tourist attraction nor the home of some wealthy bigwig, but as a college of the university in which 150 students had lived and studied from 1837. Apparently, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, its oversized dining room had been renowned as Britain’s largest ‘Great Hall’. I sat at the back in my usual student-wear to quietly observe a debate dominated by white males wearing gowns.

What I witnessed stunned me. It was difficult to decide what impacted me the most. Adolescents of my age acting as if they were already middle-aged men, seemingly in imitation of their family’s upper-class characteristics. Boys confident enough to stand up and talk loudly and at length on global issues about which they displayed only the most basic understanding. Conversely, their peers not replying with factual corrections because they too were eagerly awaiting a chance to stand up and mouth their own ignorance. Overloud voices and theatrical flourishes as if the debater were the lead actor in a school play. Mob-like cheering and jeering at speakers as if it were some medieval tournament. Rude audience comments shouted out during speeches, eliciting rumbustious laughter. Loud banging of fists on tables and foot stomping like a mob of noisy yobo’s.

What proved most baffling were the moments when a participant whom I vaguely knew would stand up to argue a point of view that I had thought was the opposite of their personal beliefs. It appeared that, in this playground, moral certitude had to be sacrificed to the altar of argument purely for argument’s sake. It was an intellectual game whose purpose was to impress one’s peers with wit and verbosity rather than facts or evidence. The medium WAS the message, not the content that was being spoken … or more often bellowed. During an evening of insufferably posh accents, visions of fencing, guns at dawn and gloves smacked across opponents’ cheeks crossed my mind. It was evident that many of my fellow students must have already practised this parlour game for years in ‘debating societies’ at their private schools … while, in my parallel state school universe, I had been occupied presenting pop music programmes on London pirate radio stations.

At the event’s conclusion, I stumbled outside into the night air, reeling as if I had been returned to Earth after abduction by an alien civilisation. Perhaps you required blue blood to feel at home in there. I resolved not to renew my club membership nor to attend further debates. The academic Sir Walter Moberly had commented in 1950: “Undergraduate debates are not conducted at the deep level at which convictions are really formed.” This notion that an individual can lack personal conviction to debate or argue a point forcefully was a foreign land to me. I could frame an argument for my principles, but why would one propose a point of view that is not one’s own? Unless you never bother with ‘convictions’ and follow a path of merely blowing with the prevailing wind.

It was not until 1990 that Britain’s primary legislature, the House of Commons, allowed its proceedings to be permanently televised, following its eleventh vote on the issue during the preceding twenty-two years. The motion was opposed by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher because “my concern is for the good reputation of this House.” Initially, only close-up shots of the politician holding the floor were permitted because a wider view would have shown the public the faces of their elected representatives jeering, hectoring, desk banging and rabble-rousing during many speeches. This restriction was later relaxed, allowing the rest of the world to witness for the first time the childish habits of grown men who had never moved on from ‘bunfights’ in oak-panelled dining rooms during ‘High Tea’.

Watching those early televised broadcasts vividly recalled the one debate I had attended more than a decade earlier. I suddenly understood that Durham Union Society had been established in 1842 as ‘A Nursery of the [House of] Commons’, as noted a headline in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper. My privileged contemporaries had been in training to become politicians since an early age. Durham had merely been the latest stop on their route to the elevated roles to which they had forever been told they were entitled. Articulating this notion of ‘power’, Sir Winston Churchill had once observed at the Oxford Union: “If you can speak in this country, you can do anything.”

House of Commons rules strictly forbid members to call each other ‘a liar’ or to make an accusation of ‘lying’. As a result, just as I had witnessed in Durham, speakers are permitted to spout any old tosh that comes into their heads and get away with it. How can a critic ‘speak truth to power’ in a forum where the currency of ‘truth’ is not merely devalued but prohibited? Politicians know they can say whatever is expedient in the moment without any recourse, while the rest of us would be sacked from our jobs for what our world considers to be lying.

In my own field, the lack of, ahem, ‘conviction’ of politicians responsible for the British government’s media policy has been evident often. In March 2010 whilst in opposition, Ed Vaizey MP said “the government has set a provisional target date of 2015 [for digital radio switchover] and we are sceptical about whether that target can actually be met.” However, by July that same year and after an election had appointed him the new government’s culture minister, Vaizey conversely said that “2015 is an achievable target date and we will work to support that ambition.” Ho hum.

During the period when I seemed to be the only City analyst covering the radio broadcast industry, I would occasionally be contacted by the BBC to be interviewed for a programme. Before sunrise one day, a BBC car collected me from home to take me to the studios of the ‘Today’ programme on ‘Radio 4’ for a live item about digital radio switchover. On arrival, I was told that I would be answering the presenter’s questions and then the government minister would be introduced and quizzed. However, the minister had insisted that I not be permitted to follow up or respond to what he would be saying. It was obvious that my presence in the studio would suggest a semblance of ‘balance’ whilst not actually allowing genuine debate or argument.

I had arrived at the BBC early and spent an age waiting in the show’s ‘green room’. The minister arrived late, accompanied by a flunky, entered the room and said to me: “So you are the person they have brought here to tell me that everything I am about to say is wrong.”

Just as I had witnessed in Durham, patronising privileged toffs like him function in a world where they insist upon immunity from contradiction or correction to the drivel they shout. Despite my anger at his comment, I followed the instructions for that morning’s appearance, but have refused every BBC invitation since. Where there is purposefully no genuine debate, what would be the point?

Is this the “honourable tradition” maintained by graduates of debating societies like Durham Union Society, the phrase attributed to the club in 1952 by its historian who suggested it:

“… should always retain at least some its present rooms as a gentlemen’s club. There may it long offer to future generations those opportunities for the making of friendships, for argument, and for training in life and thinking …”?

‘Training’ for a ‘life’ as a conviction-free politician?

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/an-elite-academy-for-aspiring-rent-gob.html]

Things you say you love, you’re gonna lose : 1973 : the curse of The Blue Pool, Camberley

The couple put the huge dog in the back of their car and, before setting off down our driveway, smiled and waved at us. We did not smile. We did not wave back. My mother was weeping. Uncontrollably. I had never seen her so upset. She had just said goodbye to her beloved pet dog. For the last time. I hugged her. But that day’s heartbreak consumed her … for years to come.

It seemed like a lifetime ago that we had excitedly carried that dog home as a tiny puppy in a cardboard box. It had been smaller than a cat then. Now it had grown heavier than a human. One cold, dark winter’s afternoon years earlier, we had brought back our new pet on the train from Waterloo. Thick fog had enveloped our route, prolonging our usual one-hour journey home to more than two hours, and rendering the suburban landscape spookily invisible through the train windows. Stopped at Bagshot station, the guard walked down the carriages’ central corridor carrying a bright torchlight and explained that our train would be held there for quite a while. Because the double-track railway narrowed to a single line beyond Frimley, the British Rail timetable regularly disintegrated into chaos in both directions when even a single train was delayed. I pulled down the window of the carriage door, peered outside but could make out only a pinprick of the red stop light at the top of the westbound platform entirely masked by thick fog.

That day the scary darkness through which our train had clickety-clacked had been unable to spoil the delight of having collected our new puppy from London. Now, years later, we were having to fight a route through a different abstract kind of foggy darkness that was undeniably dampening our spirits. No longer able to afford to feed the dog who had been her loyal companion for years, my mother had become resigned to placing a ‘dog for sale’ advertisement in the ‘Camberley News’. It was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. It felt like selling a member of her tightly-knit family. But she had recently become a single mother with three children aged between two and fifteen to support and had to accept her budget could no longer stretch to the expense of the huge volume of meat our pet required.

That dog was the last in a line of Saint Bernard’s that had been our pets since I was small. The first had been named ‘Samantha’ after the lead character in the ‘Bewitched’ TV series. I had chosen the name ‘Suna’ for its successor. They had died of old age but, on each occasion, my mother had combatted her sadness by promising herself to buy a similar puppy and transfer her unconditional love to it, which she did. This occasion was very different. A lifetime of big shaggy dogs had been brought to an abrupt end, not by death but by austerity. As children, the three of us had grown up around a Saint Bernard that had been taller than us in our earliest years and, despite drooling over us and our furniture, had been as gentle and friendly as any family could want. Why did my mother have such an affinity for this particular breed of dog, which was so unconventional in that era?

Her trip to Switzerland in 1953 or 1954 had had a long-lasting impact. My mother had returned with three things: a large rusty metal cowbell, a love of Lindt chocolate and her first encounter with a Saint Bernard. For someone from her ‘modest’ background who had never before had an opportunity to travel abroad, the trip proved an eyeopener, particularly after her mother had vetoed her post-school ambition to study agriculture in Denmark. Back then, international travel remained the privilege of the elite and Switzerland was a destination reserved for those attending private ‘finishing schools’ or wealthy skiers.

My mother always claimed that she had made the trip with ‘work colleagues’, though I have always considered it more likely that she was accompanied by a manager (the manager?) in her workplace, Peter, who was providing her with a daily lift to her first workplace, the Elizabeth Shaw chocolate manufacturer recently relocated to Camberley. In earlier years’ annual roll photographs from Camberley Girls’ Grammar School, portraying long rows of its entire student and staff body, my mother was easily identifiable in the back row by her bouffant hair and radiant smile among a sea of rather dowdy girls who looked browbeaten by the War. She had the air of someone who aspired to a brighter future. Maybe it was during this trip to Switzerland, ostensibly to view how chocolate was manufactured at the Lindt factory, that Peter had made his marriage proposal … which she rejected.

A keen swimmer, my mother had managed to persuade her parents to buy her a season ticket during school summer holidays for the Blue Pool, a large outdoor lido-like pool on the London Road adjacent to Portesbery Hill Drive, a half-mile bike ride from her home. This was the only place in Camberley for young people to meet then, there being no youth club or coffee bar to fraternise. Boys and girls thronged to the pool during its summer season, unguarded by parents or chaperones, indulging in fizzy drinks and snacks of which their parents might not have approved. This is where my mother first met my father, who was almost two years older than her and had already left school to work as an apprentice. Like her, he looked more glamorous than his peers with his sleek jet-black hair and olive skin. She was rather reserved while he had the gift of the gab and a roving eye. It was a match made in …

My mother’s family refused to attend the couple’s Registry Office wedding because my grandfather knew the reputation for roughness of my father’s family and considered they and their youngest son no match for his smart youngest daughter with whom he had enjoyed such a close bond, particularly during wartime. He considered no good would come of their relationship … and he was eventually proven right! The day a few years later when I was born at home, my father was nowhere to be seen because, my mother alleged, he was with his ‘girlfriend’ who was simultaneously pregnant by him. Soon afterwards, instead of paying the rent on their council house, my father unilaterally purchased an unaffordable car, resulting in their eviction. My maternal grandfather was generous enough to help the couple buy the semi-detached house adjoined to his home (after evicting his tenants there!), an arrangement permitting my mother’s parents to assist with childcare, in which her husband showed no interest.

My father’s philandering continued until 1972 when he finally decided to walk out on our family and start a ‘new life’ elsewhere with a recently married teenage girl from our street. Not only did he remove his own possessions from our house when he left, but he would return unannounced while we were out and take whatever he wanted. My mother stubbornly hung on to the belief that her husband would one day return to her (as he had done previously) and so failed to safeguard her own future by changing the house locks or hiding our valuables. This immunity only encouraged him to return and take time picking and choosing what he desired.

What did he steal? My mother’s car, an American Motors ‘Gremlin’, one of Detroit’s first compact hatchbacks which we had only recently travelled to an M1 service station to collect new. My father then gifted this car to his new ‘girlfriend’ before discovering that she was too young to be insured to drive it. My mother’s extensive jewellery collection that she had built since the 1950’s and comprised unusual, artistic pieces. Thousands of pounds of cash in plastic bags stashed in the top right cupboard of our white, Hygena living room storage unit, my father’s cut of dodgy property deals with his newest business partner Bill Beaver. Artwork and paintings hung in our hallway and living room. Imported soul records I had bought with my pocket money. The list went on and on.

My mother took two jobs to try and make ends meet, daytimes as bookkeeper for British Car Auctions at their site opposite Frimley gravel pits, evenings cleaning offices in Yorktown. My aunt Pam generously paid for a coastal summer holiday for our diminished family of four. However, we returned home to find even more of our belongings had vanished while we had been enjoying the seaside. To add insult to injury, my mother later found photographic evidence that my father had even organised a party for his ‘friends’ at the house during our absence. It appeared that he had been informed about the dates we were to be away by my younger brother who was the only one of us to maintain a close relationship with his father … until the day he died.

As a result, aged fourteen, that was to be my final ever holiday with my family. Pam continued to fund UK summer vacations for my mother and siblings, during which I had to stay alone at home to guard what remained of our possessions. Occasional nights, I was awoken by noises outside and got up to see the inside door handle being turned in darkness. It was as scary as a horror film, even though I was now protected by interior door bolts and I would switch on the lights to show someone was at home. For many years afterwards, we lived in that house in perpetual fear of losing what little was left of our possessions to an embittered father who demonstrated only cruelty and vengefulness towards his former family.

That was why the necessary sale of our family’s dog proved the last straw for my mother. She would never again be the same optimistic person evident in her old school photos. It was not just that the family life she had nurtured since her Blue Pool days had finally crashed to the ground and burnt her fingers. It was not just that the warnings two decades earlier from her father about the unsuitability of her husband had proven correct. Moreso it was that her Saint Bernard dog had been a reminder of the ‘time of her life’ she had enjoyed in Switzerland and the possible future she might have enjoyed with Peter if she had only accepted his marriage proposal. It was too late now to turn back the clock. She had three children, for whom she had tried her hardest to provide a better life, but who were now growing up in much reduced circumstances with a mother who was forever at work. During the intervening period, Peter had married someone else.

Life for me became more difficult too. In 1969, my parents had promised to drive me every weekday two miles to Camberley station to catch the 8:10 train to the faraway grammar school they had selected for me. Now, the only replacement car my mother could afford was a tiny second-hand ‘NSU Prinz’ that we called ‘the sewing machine’ because of its engine noise and which regularly failed to start. My mother needed it to reach work so I was forced to make my own way to the station and back by infrequent bus or, more often, walking. To achieve this, on weekdays I was always the first to get up and leave home, but the last to go to bed, usually after midnight as I never returned home from school before six o’clock and had considerable homework to complete. Additionally, I had to look after my baby sister during school holidays while our mother was at work.

When our home’s central heating failed, local tradesmen came and looked blank as the gas air system my father had imported from America was then unknown in Britain. I wrote enquiry letters to dozens of heating specialists listed in the local library’s Yellow Pages directories, none of whom replied positively. I even wrote to the manufacturer in the United States but it had no agent in Europe. As each winter approached, I would once again dissemble the boiler mechanism myself and spend hours trying to discern the problem, to no avail. We were forced to live for years in that unheated, uninsulated house with its swathes of glass sliding doors, a factor that has forever made our bodies vulnerable to cold weather illnesses.

Somehow, we struggled through this terrible period in our lives and kept our family together with much practical and financial help from my maternal grandparents, my aunt Pam and my older cousin Lynn. Sadly, my father somehow poisoned my other aunt Sheila’s opinion of my mother so that the two sisters never spoke for decades afterwards. If this narrative appears one-sided, understand that my father’s parents, also resident in Camberley, were conspicuous by their complete absence from our family’s life. When I was young, my paternal grandfather pushed his wife down the staircase of their council house, resulting in her death. I had visited the couple only once previously with my father, purely because my mother refused to go. I visited the remaining widower only once after he was moved to a tiny old people’s flat on the London Road opposite Gibbet Lane. My father alone attended their funerals.

They say that ‘once is an accident, but twice …’ In the 1990’s, I returned to my mother’s house to retrieve several large cardboard boxes I had packed into the attic of my treasured childhood books, school projects, toys and personal items. When I climbed into the roof space, they appeared to have gone from where I had left them on the left side of the attic hatch. However, on the right side were many similar boxes. I opened them and was baffled to find they contained magazines and papers belonging to my younger brother. I could only presume that, when he had emigrated in the 1980’s, he must have taken with him MY boxed possessions but bizarrely left HIS behind. I now have almost nothing from my childhood, particularly the precious family photo album that I started in 1964 when I had been given my ‘Kodak Instamatic 25’ camera and which I had maintained religiously with dates, personnel and locations of each shot. Had my brother inherited from his father some kind of ‘cruelty to family’ gene?

During the winter of 1996, the central heating failed in the large Victorian house in Toronto where I was renting the top floor. I inspected the gas air system in the basement and was astounded to find it identical to the mechanism I had dismantled and tried to repair so many times in our Camberley house, installed three decades earlier. Bad memories came flooding back of our cold lives.

In her old age, my mother received a phone call from her former chocolate factory boss Peter informing her of his wife’s death, so she attended the funeral and visited him on the South Coast. Could have? Should have? In some kind of parallel universe, my mum might have enjoyed a longer lasting, more fulfilled married life … with somebody else.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/things-you-say-you-love-youre-gonna.html]

One good turn deserves a cold shoulder? : 2004 : BBC World Service Trust, Phnom Penh

“I understand you’re an expert in messaging,” said the woman sat behind the desk.

I looked blank. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. If she meant SMS text messaging, I did not even own a mobile phone!

“I was told you are experienced in capacity building,” continued the woman, undeterred.

I looked even more blank. What on earth was she talking about? I had just flown half way around the world. This was my first meeting with the boss of the project where I was to work. Yet I had zero understanding of what she had just said. I began to wonder if the office back in London had mistakenly sent the wrong person (me) to the wrong location (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). Did she think I was someone else? I had been sent here to do radio training. Had the international wires become crossed somewhere?

It took me several weeks to understand that Giselle Portenier, manager of Cambodia’s BBC World Service Trust project, had been addressing me in ‘NGO-speak’, an esoteric language I had never before encountered. People working in such ‘Non-Governmental Organisations’ (er, international charities) apparently use terminology that substitutes long words for concepts which the rest of the world refer to with short words. Some might call this professional obscurantism.

During my first week, Portenier insisted I attend a two-day workshop organised by the Centre for Disease Control concerning drama programmes created to communicate health issues to the population. My takeaways were that NGO staff love the sound of their own voices and try their utmost to turn simple tasks into overcomplicated diagrams and flow charts. I strained to stay awake in Cambodia’s oppressive daytime heat and quickly tired of hearing NGO people talk to each other in a language that was apparently English, but might as well have been Mongolian for all I could understand. Luckily, I managed to excuse myself from a similar two-day workshop about ‘messaging’ the following week.

Why was I in Cambodia? In July 2002, I had been unemployed and applied in desperation for an advertised role with the BBC World Service Trust in Ethiopia. The only thing I recall about that interview was sitting alongside dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah (born two days before me!) in the lobby of Bush House. Having neither attended Oxbridge nor benefited from a family member or acquaintance employed in the Corporation, I was hardly surprised to receive my thirty-seventh consecutive BBC rejection letter. The Holy Grail I had coveted since childhood was receding further over my horizon with every CV submitted.

Fast forward to December 2003. I was in a dead-end job at Ofcom where my line manager Neil Stock had met me on Christmas Eve to say “there is nothing for you to contribute to” the media regulator’s work schedule during the first quarter of the next year. I had just discovered a voicemail message on my work phone from the BBC, asking if I was the ‘Grant Goddard’ who had applied for a job the previous year. My contact details had proven a dead-end and it had resorted to contacting a referee in the United States I had listed who advised that I now worked for ‘The Radio Authority’ … which was found to have closed. I phoned back, confirmed it was me and explained that I had since changed address. Would I be interested in a consultancy role lasting two to three months? Though I had accrued eight weeks’ unused holiday at Ofcom, it refused me paid or unpaid leave to pursue this opportunity … so I resigned.

Roy Head, director of the BBC World Service Trust’s health division, explained by phone that a contract had recently been signed between the Cambodia government and the Corporation to train local staff at two radio stations to produce phone-in shows around health issues. A decade earlier, he had managed the United Nations’ radio station ‘UNTAC’ in Cambodia. Head confided that, only after signing this contract had he discovered that the BBC’s ‘executive producer, radio’ in Cambodia, despite having held numerous posts within the Corporation since 1987, apparently had no experience producing a live radio programme. Neither had the Cambodia project manager who had produced television documentaries for the BBC since 1986. I respected Head’s honesty when he admitted my involvement would help him out of a very large hole. The Cambodia government was becoming increasingly impatient for the training to start, necessitating my arrival as quickly as possible. Yes, the pay (£750 plus US$100 pocket money per week) was not great because it had had to be unexpectedly eked out of an existing budget, but Head promised me better paid similar BBC work afterwards if I would solve his pressing problem.

I nearly never made it to Cambodia. The nurse I was mandated to visit at BBC White City could not locate the required ‘BCG’ vaccination on my left arm and threatened to block my departure for several weeks to redo it. Was I born in Britain? Yes. Did I have paperwork proving I had received the vaccine? Er, I was a child. Where did I receive it? In a health clinic, long gone, at the corner of Upper College Ride and Saddleback Road on the Old Dean Estate in Camberley, 200 metres from the house in which I had been born. After an extended interrogation, as a last resort she inspected my right arm and found a faint tell-tale circular mark there, and expressed astonishment that I was the first person she had encountered with it on the ‘wrong’ arm. All I could presume was that some nurse in the 1960’s had decided it would never matter as council estate children were destined to go nowhere anyway.

On arrival in Phnom Penh, my line manager Chas Hamilton invited me to homemade dinner in his flat and filled my head with gossip about his BBC colleagues. He was particularly incensed that his boss Portenier, before her recent arrival, had allegedly demanded her flat be remodelled at considerable public expense to include, shock horror, a sunken bathtub. As a short-term consultant (given BBC contract number WST001), I preferred to avoid such office politicking. I chose to keep my burning question – how is a BBC employee promoted to a radio management role without having produced a live radio programme? – to myself. The Corporation evidently worked in mysterious ways.

After a morning visit to one of the radio stations in Phnom Penh at which I would be working, the Cambodian BBC driver was en route to the office when I requested he stop for me to buy a takeaway lunch.

“I will take you to a hotel for lunch, sir,” he kindly offered.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I can buy something at one of these roadside shacks and eat it at the office.”

“But they only serve noodles, sir,” he explained patiently.

“Yes, and that is what I want for lunch,” I insisted.

Despite his complete puzzlement, he parked the BBC four-wheel-drive alongside a random food stall, translated my order into Khmer and, minutes later, I left clutching a knotted transparent plastic bag containing my freshly stir-fried order for less than a dollar. At the BBC office, I went to the kitchen, requested a plate, emptied out my food and sat at the dining table to eat it, much to the amazement of the Cambodian staff. My new colleagues found it hard to believe that I ate noodles at home all the time.

From that day forward, I joined the local staff for lunch daily in the BBC kitchen, with between five and fifteen of us gathered around the large dining table for the mandatory two-hour break inherited from French colonialists. Each of us paid the BBC kitchen manager a dollar a day to take our preferences and venture out to numerous street stalls to fulfil our orders. The food was always fantastic and the company was excellent, though I could not understand the Khmer chatter. The project’s Cambodian receptionist sidled up to me and explained with awe:

“In all the time we have been here, not one of the foreigners working here has sat down and ate our food with us, except on special occasions such as Chinese New Year.”

So where did all the ‘foreigners’ go every day? On one occasion, sat at the kitchen table ready to eat lunch, Portenier approached me and insisted I accompany her and the other ex-pats ‘out’. We were driven in several cars to an international hotel that appeared completely devoid of guests, where we were offered menus and then waited over an hour in the lobby for our dishes to arrive. The food, the surroundings and the conversation were all mediocre, though I presume that the BBC was picking up the tab for its employees’ daily lunchtime jollies to various Phnom Penh hotels. Thankfully, I was never invited again.

The BBC had initially ordered my air ticket to return to London three months later. As my work was still far from complete, I had to spend three hours sat uncomfortably on a long wooden bench in a tiny Phnom Penh travel agency that attempted to change the date … unsuccessfully. I decided unilaterally to use the ticket (rather than waste it) to fly home for a quick visit, only to discover that Roy Head, having sent me to Cambodia, was no longer with the BBC, reportedly having become ill after a work trip to Brazil. Back in London, I was called to a meeting with his successor at Bush House, a brusque woman who demonstrated little interest in my work but asked me to spy on my line manager Chas Hamilton and report what he was or was not doing. I refused. I had been hired as a consultant solely to train people in radio, not indulge in espionage. The BBC booked my new ticket to return to Cambodia a week later and gave me boxes of radio equipment to transport in my heavily surcharged, overweight suitcases.

Returned to Phnom Penh, when one of my station projects was about to launch its new weekly live youth phone-in show, I drafted a press release and asked Portenier to approve it, transpose it onto BBC notepaper and circulate it through established PR channels. She refused. I was perplexed. Surely it was positive news to herald the successful completion of part of the BBC’s contract with the Cambodia government. Apparently not. In order not to disappoint the radio station’s production team with whom I had worked so closely for months, I was reduced to secretly commandeering a BBC car and driver when Portenier was absent from the office in order to hand deliver to each of Phnom Penh’s newspapers my press releases in Khmer and English that omitted mention of the BBC’s involvement.

This negative response was very dispiriting as it appeared that neither my local project manager, nor my local line manager, nor the replacement BBC manager in London seemed even vaguely appreciative of my success saving their bacon. My second radio station project was almost ready to launch too but I considered now was a good time to return home, having already spent twice as long in Cambodia as my contract had required. The local BBC staff organised a fantastic farewell party for me in the office and gave me presents. Neither Portenier nor Hamilton attended. To be accurate, Hamilton arrived at work after it had finished. At the airport, several of the wonderful Cambodian radio station staff I had trained arrived unexpectedly to see me off. They cried. I cried. They and the lovely local office staff had made my work worthwhile.

By the time I landed in London, my BBC e-mail account had already been cancelled, preventing continuing contact with my colleagues in Cambodia. I sent Portenier an email apologising (ahem!) for not having seen her before I left and thanking her for “all her help”. Her reply lacked a shred of gratitude:

“I know you were planning to do a handover report for David. Did that happen? I know he tried to get in touch in England, but failed.”

My BBC contract had not required me to write a report. Besides, in Cambodia I had been fully occupied each week spending four days from 8am to 5pm training two teams, one day in the radio studio and two days preparing materials for my next sessions, without any BBC input. Meanwhile, the project’s head of radio seemed to have spent most of his time sat in his cosy BBC office. Neither did I know who ‘David’ was. Nevertheless, I offered my services to help out for free in the BBC’s Bush House office, hoping to avail myself of future opportunities. I submitted six applications for advertised vacancies in the BBC World Service Trust during 2004 and 2005, for one of which I was interviewed, but without success. Nobody in the BBC thanked me for my work bailing it out in Cambodia or offered me the better paid, follow-on opportunities I had been promised. I had no idea how to contact Roy Head once he had left the BBC.

When I signed on for Unemployment Benefit, my most recent work in Phnom Penh was viewed suspiciously because, whilst I had been away, British tabloid newspaper front pages had splashed stories about 1970’s pop star ‘Gary Glitter’s exploits with underage boys in Cambodia. The young ‘JobCentre’ officer instructed me to apply for a radiology vacancy in a local hospital, not comprehending it was totally unrelated to radio production.

Giselle Portenier completed one year in charge of the Cambodia project before leaving the BBC and returning to Canada.

In 2006, Chas Hamilton lauded the youth phone-in radio show I and my trainees had created as the project’s “most popular”, noting that “all members of the production team … had no previous media experience before we plucked them from university and trained them.” His invisible ‘executive production’ role while I was there had apparently proven so successful that the BBC promoted him to manage their entire Cambodia project. I hope he enjoyed the accompanying apartment’s sunken bathtub he had seemed to envy so much.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/things-you-say-you-love-youre-gonna.html]

Knock me down with a mugger : 1986 : Share A Capital Christmas, Capital Radio, London

 Blam!! A sudden force on my back knocked me over in a second. No time to figure out what had just happened. I was sprawled front-down on the floor with a weight on my back. I shouted. People around me screamed. I could sense a struggle taking place overhead. The object on my back lifted and, from my ground level line of sight, I made out the feet of someone running ahead of me into the crowd.

“Are you alright?” asked one of the group of people standing around me, looking concerned.

“We saw that man push through the crowd,” explained another, “then knock you over and jump on top of you. We managed to pull him off but he ran away.”

They helped me to my feet and I realised that I was indeed alright and thanked them profusely for their swift action rescuing a complete stranger. I was wearing a thick winter coat that had broken my fall. I had been lucky not to have hit my head and to have landed on the soft bag I had been carrying in front of me. Nothing appeared broken. As I rejoined the throng of commuters journeying home, one of the Good Samaritans added:

“It looked as if he knew you were there amongst the crowd and targeted you. It was very strange.”

Indeed, it was. I had travelled this same journey every day and nothing untoward had happened. I always left work at the end of the afternoon, walked across Euston Road to Warren Street tube station, caught the southbound train and alighted four stops later at Charing Cross, one of London’s busiest hubs. I had been walking through the narrow, low-ceiling tunnel that led up from the Underground platform to the railway station concourse when I had been jumped. The train and tunnel had been more crowded than usual because it was Christmas Eve. It seemed bizarre to be jumped on not when I was alone in the winter darkness outside, but amongst a tightly packed crowd inside a well-lit underground travel conduit.

There was one significant difference between all the other days I had travelled home without incident and that day. Stuffed down the front of my underpants was a white envelope containing a substantial amount of cash representing payment for my last six weeks’ work. I had requested my employer’s accounts department pay me by bank transfer but, for reasons unknown, it had insisted on paying cash and only at the conclusion of my contract. If this money was the reason I had been attacked, then only the accounts department staff and the handful of people in my work team knew I had been paid that day. But the latter had just been paid that same day in the same way. So had I been merely a random victim of violence … or had something more sinister happened?

A few months previously, I had applied for a full-time job at ‘Capital Radio’. I was interviewed by Steve Billington, a social worker who had left his job in 1984 managing a social work team in Harrow to become the station’s head of community affairs. Although my application was unsuccessful, he contacted me weeks later to ask if I wanted to manage its Christmas charity appeal. I was soon to finish a non-renewable, twelve-month job creation role managing a team at ‘Radio Thamesmead’ so it was an ideal time for me to switch to a ‘proper’ job. I had dreamt of working at London’s only commercial music station since it had opened in 1973 and had even contemplated not going to university in order to take a programme production role there like Annie Challis on Tommy & Joan’s daily ‘Swop Shop’ show. Back then, I was innocent of the fact that to secure such a job in the media it was rarely, if ever, WHAT you knew about radio but WHO you knew.

Now, thirteen years after its launch, I was finally working at Capital Radio. My first two weeks were spent in the office, sat opposite the amiable charities manager Millie Dunne who helped me organise files of paperwork for the huge volume of goods she had persuaded businesses to donate, a task at which she was extremely proficient. During the subsequent four weeks leading up to Christmas, I worked in the station’s foyer, organising the receipt of donated goods and their delivery to London charities who would distribute them as gifts to needy families. I managed a small team that Steve had already appointed, all of whom were incredible and worked hard collecting and delivering goods as needed.

Steve had also appointed a ‘deputy’ to help me with the project’s management. His name was Pol. Never call him ‘Paul’! Unlike me, he was loud and extrovert, networking relentlessly with anyone remotely important who passed through the revolving door entrance to the foyer. He seemed to view the job as a sinecure that would permit him to further his ambition to be … something famous. While the rest of us worked long hours and weekends, Pol was AWOL for chunks of that time, claiming that he had had to attend appointments for this or that. In the pre-mobile-phone era, it was impossible to call someone to demand “where the hell are you?” I was regularly tempted to complain to Steve about this young man’s work ethic deficiency but I had no inkling if he had been recruited by some friend or relative within the company. He appeared to possess no relevant skillset for our work so I just had to grit my teeth and hold my tongue.

Despite this frustration, the job turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding I have done. Knowing that the radio station was making a practical difference to Londoners’ lives was incredibly heart-warming. The foyer – our ‘office’ – was enormous, more than 1000 square meters, with a ridiculously high ceiling and permanent home to three freestanding stalls: the ‘Capital Radio Shop’ sold station merchandise, ‘Capital Radio Jobspot’ offered job vacancy details and ‘Capital Radio Flatshare’ produced a printed sheet every Thursday afternoon listing rental accommodation available. The building’s ground floor full-length windows on a corner site enabled traffic passing on busy Euston Road and Hampstead Road to view the impressive Christmas decorations within, including a massive, illuminated pine tree. Pedestrians would stop and peer through the glass at us working inside.

Capital Radio’s decision prior to the station’s launch to rent the foyer and first floor was a brilliant marketing strategy, as its logo and name were emblazoned across the building at ground level around one of London’s busiest road junctions. To passers-by, it appeared that the station occupied the entire 36-storey tower, the capital’s tallest office block when completed in 1970. In reality, its upper floors were filled with unconnected businesses including the UK government’s military intelligence department intercepting mail. Capital Radio’s high-profile visibility was in stark contrast to its competitor ‘Radio One’ which had operated from an anonymous outbuilding (Egton House) since launch in 1967. BBC bigwigs had feared its youthful staff (including former pirate radio ship presenters) might scare the ‘serious’ broadcasters in Broadcasting House employed on its existing talk and classical music networks.

Another significant difference with its competitor was Capital’s open-door policy, permitting anyone to enter its impressive foyer through the revolving doors without a security check. Music fans would stand around hoping to get a glimpse of pop stars visiting for interviews. Radio presenters walked in and out and up the grand curved staircase to the first-floor studios. During the charity appeal, many generous listeners ventured in clutching their donations of toys which we added to the piles of presents. For amusement, we unboxed and put batteries in one state-of-the-art toy mouse that ran around on wheels with a movement sensor, enabling it to independently charge at speed across the polished floor towards anyone who entered through the revolving door and then chase them wherever they walked. Only on one occasion did we have to close and evacuate the foyer for several hours due to a bomb scare.

Christmas Eve was a sad day when the team had completed the charity appeal and parted ways for the final time. Following my mysterious attempted mugging, I reached home and found I was lucky to have escaped with mild bruising on my forearms. I packed a bag and headed to Deptford railway station, only to discover that the last train had already left. I had to return to my rented room, phone my mother and ask if she would come and collect me as there was no public transport during the next two days. Though she hated driving through London, she kindly drove fifty miles from Camberley to pick me up on Christmas morning so that I could spend the holidays with her and my sister.

In the New Year, I returned to the Capital Radio office to type up a report that catalogued, with Millie’s help, the volume of goods we had distributed during the Christmas appeal and the number of charities and families we had helped. Though no such post mortem had been requested, I considered it ‘good practice’ and I hoped to impress my boss with my thoroughness as a manager.

Much later that year, Steve Billington requested a further meeting in his office. Perhaps a full-time vacancy at the station had arisen? Sadly, it had not. I was asked if I would work on the next Christmas charity appeal. I was grateful for the opportunity. However, I was flummoxed to be told that I was to be demoted to the role of ‘deputy co-ordinator’ despite me having believed I had achieved a satisfactory job the previous year. Then I was gobsmacked to be told that the co-ordinator that year was to be … Pol. It seemed like some kind of voodoo that the person within our team who had demonstrated the least commitment last year should now be appointed to manage the rest of us.

Once activity started in December 1987, did Pol step up to his promotion and manage everything smoothly? No change of spots was evident. The only thing he seemed interested in managing was his own social calendar. It was Hobson’s choice: either the charity appeal would rapidly descend into chaos or I would have to manage it, just as I had the previous year. I took the reins informally, even though it proved frustrating when the most regularly spoken phrase by everyone involved was “Where’s Pol?” The charity appeal proved as successful as the previous year, though on this occasion Pol would take the credit. Did he write a report afterwards, as I had done? Er …

With the exception of the baffling change of co-ordinator, Steve Billington had been a fantastic boss and, in the New Year, he invited our whole team to reunite for a lunchtime meal at a restaurant in Tottenham Court Road to express his gratitude. I was appreciative of the start he had offered me at Capital Radio and the opportunity it presented to further develop my management experience. I had thoroughly enjoyed my time working there and, like my earlier job at ‘Metro Radio’, it taught me a lot about the problems that can befall a commercial radio station.

And so to ‘The Epilogue’:

• In 1988, Camilla ‘Millie’ Dunne (daughter of Sir Thomas Dunne) married The Honourable Rupert Soames (grandson of Sir Winston Churchill) at a society wedding attended by her friend Lady Diana, Princess of Wales.

• In 1989, I co-ordinated and wrote former pirate station ‘KISS FM’s successful second application for a London commercial radio FM licence, beating 39 competing bids.

• In 1990, Capital Radio closed its community department as a result of the new commercial radio regulator ‘The Radio Authority’s ‘light touch’ strategy no longer requiring commitments from licensees to community activities. Steve Billington left Capital Radio.

• In 1991, I attracted a weekly audience of more than one million listeners a week to black music station ‘KISS FM’ within six months of its successful launch, as its Programme Director, exceeding the Year One target.

• As for Pol …

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/knock-me-down-with-stalker-1986-share.html]

I can't dance to that music you're playin' : 1970 : Emperor Rosko, The Paris Theatre, London

 “Would you like to dance?” the girl asked.

I was dumbfounded. Nobody had ever asked me to dance. Particularly a girl!

“Er, no thanks,” I mumbled pathetically.

“Oh, go on, please,” she chivvied. Anyone else would have been flattered. But me? I was terrified. 

“Sorry, but I can’t dance,” I tried to explain. The girl looked disappointed but gave up and walked back to the stage. It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But I blew it.

It was true. I have never been able to dance. Too self-conscious. Too buttoned-up in that English way. The last occasion I recall dancing wildly was the 1977 Trevelyan College Summer Ball to which fellow student Zena Carter had generously invited me and whom I must have embarrassed immensely with my feeble attempt at ‘Saturday Night Fever’ moves I had just seen at Durham’s cinema. All the posh male students in attendance wore black tuxedos, while I looked completely out-of-place in a borrowed white suit, jigging around to the local live band ‘No Exit’ featuring a certain ‘Sting’. I still cringe. Three years later, my job would be adding hit songs by his next band ‘The Police’ to local station ‘Metro Radio’s playlist.

But that was in the future. Back in 1970, another reason I turned down the girl’s invitation to dance was that I had become terribly shy. At primary school I had considered myself no different from my classmates. Then, after moving to grammar school in 1969, I was developing a creeping sense of inferiority, not comprehending why my termly school reports criticised me for not being sufficiently vocal in class. Achieving classwork and exam results near the top of my year of sixty students was seemingly judged insufficient unless you flaunted your cleverness by regularly sticking up your hand in class and pushing yourself in front of teachers. In my new ‘streamed’ school, populated by many privately educated ‘prep school’ protegees, it appeared a boy might inexplicably be considered deficient for simply being ‘quiet’ and demonstrating no interest in blowing his own trumpet. I responded to my school’s reproaches by retreating into shyness in company … which dogged me for decades to come.

I might have felt less self-conscious about the girl walking up to me in the end seat of the fourth row on the left side of the centre aisle, had my mother not been sat right next to me. I was embarrassed. I was twelve years old, though I appeared older because of my height. I had written to the BBC Ticket Unit to request a pair of tickets to attend the live broadcast of Emperor Rosko’s Saturday lunchtime ‘BBC Radio One’ show at London’s Paris Theatre. None of my new schoolfriends appeared to be interested in the music I followed, so my mother had accompanied me on the train from Camberley.

The Paris Theatre had been an art-house cinema showing French films in Lower Regent Street until the BBC acquired it in 1946 and equipped it with a radio studio to record concerts and live comedy shows before a seated audience of around 400. From 1968, the weekday lunchtime ‘Radio One Club’ show had been broadcast live from the venue, hosted by a station DJ and showcasing a live band in front of an audience who had all sent to the BBC for their ‘Club’ membership cards. It was the station’s earliest attempt at outreach to its listeners and, by the 1970’s, was extended from London to cities around the country. In 1974, it was replaced by the touring ‘Radio One Roadshow’ whose format was similar to the large summer outdoor events Rosko had been organising independently since the 1960’s.

I was a huge fan of Rosko’s weekly radio show because he played reggae and new American soul records as yet unreleased in Britain. At that time, when around 100 new singles were released a week in the UK, record companies would wait to see which American singles proved successful in North American charts before committing to a British release date. This delay could be months, often allowing British pop artists to ‘cover’ American soul hits before the original was available in shops. My parents owned Julie Grant’s single of ‘Up On The Roof’ which had reached number 33 in 1962, but they had never heard the original by The Drifters which failed to chart in Britain. Grant successfully parlayed her chart success into several television appearances and a concert tour with The Rolling Stones, another British act recycling American black music at the time.

Each week I would record Rosko’s 90-minute Saturday show onto an audiocassette and listen to it repeatedly on headphones while I did my homework, before recording the next show over it the following weekend. This was the first occasion I heard James Brown’s ‘Sex Machine’ single, Rosko playing the A-side one week and its B-side the next. It changed my life! Many outstanding tracks like this recorded onto my cassette I went on to buy as imported American singles from ‘Contempo’ at 42 Hanway Street or ‘Record Corner’ in Balham, the main retailers for new American black music as yet unreleased in the UK. Many of those songs first heard on Rosko’s show I still know by heart and treasure to this day. Without the benefit of a black music radio station in Britain (London soul pirate ‘Radio Invicta’ did not launch until December 1970), Rosko was the nearest experience available, even though he mixed reggae and soul with some pop and rock tracks.

What marked Rosko’s shows out from the rest of ‘Radio One’s output was that he simultaneously operated a mobile discotheque (the ‘Rosko International Roadshow’) and compered concerts by American soul artists touring the UK. That gave him a unique insight into the specific music British audiences wanted to hear, something that many of his studio-bound radio colleagues did not understand. The other factor was that Rosko was allowed to choose his own records to play on the radio, whereas the music in most shows was selected by ‘Radio One’ producers, the majority of whom preferred twee British novelty acts to ‘foreign’ reggae and soul. These ‘gatekeepers’ could determine through national airplay whether a record was to become a hit or not in Britain, so the charts inevitably reflected their value judgements.

I was fascinated when analysing the British singles charts from this period to discover the volume of chart-topping pop songs that are never played as ‘oldies’ nowadays because they sound embarrassingly quaint or sentimental. Compare that to the significantly lower chart positions achieved by many black music recordings considered now to be ‘classic’ or ‘standards’ [documented in my book ‘KISS FM’]. It is forgotten just how ‘white’ the BBC’s popular music station sounded overall, despite valiant attempts to play more soul by daytime DJ’s Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis. My appreciation of reggae was sparked by Rosko but had to be developed by evenings tuned to ‘Radio Luxembourg’ which Trojan Records paid to play their latest reggae releases. In 1971, singer Nicky Thomas even recorded the song ‘BBC’ to chastise ‘Radio One’ for not playing enough reggae, its release accompanied by a protest march to Broadcasting House. This had no evident impact on the station’s producers who were almost exclusively recruited from the white middle-classes and who moulded ‘Radio One’ in their own image.

This was why my visit (without dancing) to the Paris Theatre that Saturday was to become such a memorable experience, having enjoyed some of my favourite soul and reggae tunes played loudly through Rosko’s enormous sound system loudspeakers. When the girl asked me to dance, Rosko had been playing Edwin Starr’s ‘War’, a remarkably innovative Motown production by Norman Whitfield recorded to protest the Vietnam War with its chorus: “war … what is it good for? … absolutely nothing!”

A few years ago, I created a Spotify playlist of several hundred Whitfield productions, such remains my unbridled enthusiasm for his work (often with songwriting partner Barrett Strong). At the beginning of October this year, something prompted me to return to this playlist and update it with songs Whitfield subsequently recorded for his own label, notably by Rose Royce. I spent the following days listening non-stop to songs from my enlarged playlist such as ‘War’, ‘Stop The War Now’, ‘Friendship Train’, ‘Unite The World’ and ‘You Make Your Own Heaven And Hell Right Here On Earth’ all recorded half a century ago, all explicitly criticising violence and promoting peace. This was the music I was listening to only days later when news broke of atrocities committed in Israel. The music was appropriate … but the timing was inexplicably spooky.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/i-cant-dance-to-that-music-youre-playin.html]

If you can’t stand accounts, get out of the kitchen : 1966 : Whites of Camberley payroll & the pink fridge

 “Grant, why haven’t you written anything? What did you do yesterday evening?”

Our teacher had walked along the row of desks in the classroom and noticed that I had yet to start writing. I had been staring at a blank page in my exercise book, trying to imagine a way to pen two sentences and crayon an accompanying picture. I had to draw a deep breath to explain:

“Yesterday I helped my mum in our kitchen, calculating the Income Tax and National Insurance on an adding machine for the fifty people where she works, updating their record cards for Inland Revenue and then writing those amounts on their pay packets.”

The teacher looked thoughtful for a while. What on earth was this eight-year-old boy talking about? He had a wild imagination! After some reflection, she said:

“Just write that you went out to play with your friends and draw a picture of them.”

I did not relish the idea of lying but, if even my teacher could not find a way to summarise what I had really been doing the previous evening, I would follow her suggestion. This was the first (and last) occasion I tried to explain to anyone the work I did once a week with my mother in our home kitchen. Classmates remained oblivious to the range of administrative duties I performed regularly for my mother’s employer and my father’s business. While they were playing with their Sindy or Action Man dolls, I was busy reconciling accounting entries in a financial ledger.

The kitchen was a rear extension to our suburban, two-up two-down, semi-detached house. Downstairs had been transformed into one massive room since my father had removed the dividing wall. From the front of the house, you could now look through the window and see straight through to the rear garden. Visitors would gasp and enquire why the ceiling had not fallen down as ‘knock-throughs’ were unheard of in the early 1960’s. I remember the dust clouds when builders installed an iron girder in the ceiling to replace the wall they had just demolished.

The kitchen had once been of adequate size but now was somewhat cramped following the arrival of our latest ‘mod con’ – a fridge. Before then, milk bottles had been stored precariously on the rear window’s outdoor sill. Two years earlier, my father had been intrigued by a private ‘for sale’ advertisement in his favourite journal ‘Exchange & Mart’ (think ‘eBay’ on paper) and had arranged a viewing. We drove miles to locate the U.S. Air Force base and suddenly entered a parallel, colourful 3D world only previously viewed in 405-line, black and white location shots of ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘Bewitched’. It was a miniature slice of modern-day America incongruously tucked into a hidden, rural corner of bleak, post-war Britain.

My father had to switch to the right side of the road to drive our pink and white ‘Rambler Classic 770’ station wagon along the base’s wide roads lined with identical, single-story chalets built on spacious plots around which was a complete absence of fences. This was the North America to which my parents had long dreamed of emigrating and why they had embraced all things American since the 1950’s, including their children’s names, the oversized American Motors cars they drove, the pop music they loved and their ‘Life’ magazine subscription. Three decades later, when I glimpsed the neighbourhood in ‘Edward Scissorhands’, I was transported back to my first childhood impression of American suburbia on that day.

We located the house of the lovely American couple selling the fridge who explained they were about to be posted ‘back home’ at the conclusion of their tour of duty and were selling their household contents. The fridge was a huge American ‘Kelvinator’ and, to our amazement, was bright ‘Bermuda Pink’. It had a huge horizontal chrome door handle, a foot pedal to open the door if your hands were full and a freezer compartment which I was already scheming to fill with ‘Zoom’, ‘Fab’ and ‘Funny Faces’ ice lollies or blocks of ‘Neapolitan’ ice cream, on sale in the corner shop yards from our home. Smitten, my parents needed no convincing to purchase the fridge with cash they had brought.

The Americans asked if my parents wanted a foot-high stack of DC Comics which they were happy to throw in for free. Although the fridge would not fit in our car, we could take the comics home with us. Before we left the base, we popped into its ‘grocery store’ which was filled with American brands of cookie, breakfast cereal and sweets that, until then, we had only seen in American magazine advertisements. Having spent ages selecting a variety of items, we were disappointed at the checkout to be told that the shop only accepted American dollars or credit cards, neither of which my parents possessed. We would just have to wait a little longer to sample such delights once our emigration had been realised.

A fortnight later, a truck delivered the fridge to our home. However, because everything in America was genuinely ‘bigger and better’, it was found to be too wide to fit through the house’s backdoor. My parents’ unbridled enthusiasm had overshadowed the practicality of measuring their purchase, as the fridge had appeared perfectly scaled inside the American-style kitchen we had visited on the base. Now it had to remain outside unused (houses had no outdoor power points) for more weeks until a solution was executed. The old sash window at the back of our living room had to be replaced with a modern double-glazed version and, during this building work, the wall below it would be unbricked to carry in the oversized fridge and then replaced (floor-length ‘French windows’ were unknown then).

This operation successfully moved the fridge into the living room but, once again, my parents had failed to measure the internal doorway to the kitchen extension. It was too narrow. The door was removed from its hinges. It still did not fit. The door frame had to be removed. Only then, accompanied by my father’s considerable vocabulary of swear words, did the fridge just fit with tenths of an inch to spare. Finally, the object was inside the kitchen. Our home now had not only an enlarged living room but also a door-free walk-in kitchen, both of which were unusual. It may have contravened building safety regulations but it had accidentally created a large, unified downstairs space which we loved. There still remained one problem. The fridge operated on America’s 110-volt system so a large transformer box had to be found and bought before it would function.

We now had a huge fridge but a considerably smaller kitchen space. This is where, once a week, my mother would bring her adding machine home from work and all the paperwork necessary to calculate and record the wages to be paid to the staff of Whites (Camberley) Limited where she worked as bookkeeper. Founded by Percy White in 1908 and now managed by his son Peter, the family business had diversified from bicycles into car sales and repairs, a service station and coach hire from its plum town centre location at the corner of London Road and Knoll Road.

At the beginning of each tax year and after a government budget announcement, telephone-directory-like books were mailed to every employer in the country, filled with tables to calculate how much Income Tax and National Insurance contributions were to be deducted from pay, according to the worker’s tax code and whether they were paid weekly or monthly. The skill I perfected was in looking up the appropriate amounts for each member of staff every week, entering these figures on the employee’s blue card and then writing these amounts on small brown ‘wage packet’ envelopes. My mother took these to work the following day and counted out cash from the company safe to insert in each. I always wondered if Whites’ staff ever wondered why their pay details appeared in an eight-year old’s handwriting.

I learnt to be nimble on the adding machine, keying in amounts that my mother would read out, producing totals that could be torn off from a roll of paper. At the end of each ‘tax year’ in April were additional tasks of totalling up each employee’s contribution card, reconciling these amounts with the ledger entries and sending all the cards to Inland Revenue. We also had to handwrite P60 end-of-year certificates for each employee and, if a worker left their job during the year, we had to write out a P45 form in triplicate. Only a small table would now fit in the kitchen so we had to cram the ledger, adding machine and documents there, plus lay paperwork out on the worktop area and even on top of the fridge. As no homework was set by my school, these evenings proved no distraction from my education. Instead, I became an expert in double-entry bookkeeping and the intricacies of the British taxation system at an early age.

I adored the DC comics that had accompanied our pink fridge and handled them with the utmost care, keeping them in pristine condition under my bed. They were as yet not on sale in Britain, so I was looking forward to buying more once we emigrated. However, for reasons never understood, my parents decided to give up their long-held plan to move to Canada and instead they bought a plot of land locally to build their own house. Although their obsession with Americana remained unabated, it was tinged with the sadness of a shared dream that had failed to materialise. Within a few years, their marriage disintegrated and our family broke up for good. My mother cancelled her decade-long subscription to ‘Life’ magazine. After the 1973 oil crisis, American cars became too expensive to run, particularly when she was now a single parent.

When we moved out of our house in 1968, we sadly left the pink fridge behind. I always wondered what transpired as the new owners would have had to knock a hole in an external wall to remove it from the house if they no longer wanted it. That huge pink fridge was as indestructible as Captain Scarlet!

Two decades later, I returned home to retrieve my treasured DC comic collection, only to discover that my younger brother had crayoned all over them and torn out pages while I had been away. Our 1960’s dreams had all turned to dust.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/if-you-cant-stand-accounts-get-out-of.html]

Radio is my bomb? : 2003 : the DAB digital radio customer complaint hotline, The Radio Authority

 The Bomb Squad arrived in vans, ran into the Holborn office block and up its staircase to the eighth floor. We watched events unfold from the car park below, the assembly point to which our organisation of forty-odd people had been evacuated an hour earlier.

That humdrum morning had been interrupted by a large cardboard box delivered by Royal Mail to our office. It was not particularly heavy but had lots of stamps on the outside with a ‘Belfast’ postmark. If you were a celebrity or public figure whose opinions were widely distributed, you might anticipate threats would occasionally be made against your life. If you had a desk job in a little-known British government quango, your greatest work challenge might normally be choosing where to lunch. However, that morning, the box’s addressee Soo Williams was taking no chances. The emergency services were called.

Eventually, the ‘suspicious package’ was removed by ordnance experts and exploded elsewhere. It was found to contain nothing but paper. Printed petitions signed by hundreds of Belfast citizens demanding that religious community radio stations be licensed locally. Williams’ name had been written on the box due to her recent promotion by The Radio Authority to manage the launch of ‘community radio’. Returning to our desks after the false alarm, I ruminated what those god-fearing citizens who had toiled to gather so many signatures might have thought of having been suspected by the recipient of being terrorists.

That morning’s event exemplified the disconnect between the regulator of the radio industry and the public it was supposed to serve. Someone with an interest in the UK community radio movement would have known that tiny unlicensed radio stations had existed for years on both sides of the Irish border, broadcasting church services and information to their communities. Indeed, one history argues that the Catholic Church in Ireland was “the world’s largest pirate radio operator”. However, few of The Radio Authority’s desk-bound administrators demonstrated interest in the medium they were employed to regulate. I was the only employee to have worked in a community radio station (licensed in a 1970’s experiment), having been a founder member of the Community Radio Association two decades previously. But now, within this dysfunctional workplace, I was regarded as the office junior … at the age of forty-four.

Back at my desk, I returned to taking regular phone calls from members of the public dissatisfied with the new-fangled DAB ‘digital radio’ receiver they had just purchased. I never quite understood why the switchboard regularly passed such calls to me, as I bore no responsibility for DAB radio, and my colleagues in the Development office suffered no such impositions. It was already self-evident to me that the rollout of this new radio technology had been disastrous for listeners, though I was expected to defend the system, and worse … to blame the listener for its inadequacies.

Staff were issued with a ‘helpful’ sheet of topics to raise with complainants about DAB. Suggestions to be made to members of the public experiencing difficulties tuning into stations on their new receiver included:

  • move your radio nearer a window
  • listen to the radio in an upstairs room
  • your residence might be constructed of the wrong materials
  • your residence might be located in a valley
  • your residence might be located in a dense urban area
  • your residence might be in an apartment block or a basement
  • you may need to install a rooftop antenna.

Many callers were understandably baffled and annoyed by these ‘answers’ to their problems, proffering a torrent of abuse or hanging up. Many had spent around £90 on a portable DAB receiver and expected it to deliver what the industry’s marketing had promised – ‘crystal clear’ reception of a wide choice of radio stations. The most popular receiver, the ‘Pure Evoke-1’, had been designed to be portable and had no socket to even attach the suggested external antenna, let alone the connectivity to update and improve its software. And why did it resemble a wooden post-war radio in an era when connected mobile phones were looking increasingly futuristic?

One of my callers’ commonest gripes was the result of DAB radios having been marketed and sold nationwide, even though many parts of Britain had yet to be connected to the DAB transmission system. In this instance, all I could suggest was that the consumer return their receiver to the shop and demand a refund because no digital stations were yet audible locally. I too shared this problem because, although The Radio Authority had denied me its Christmas cash bonus in 2002, I had received the DAB radio gifted to all staff. It remained in its box as I was living in Brighton, where DAB transmissions had yet to arrive.

The root of the dissatisfaction with DAB radio was not the technology itself, which had been a smart European innovation, but the way it had been implemented by Britain. Those critical roll-out decisions had been made by people like the ones in my workplace: administrators who had no experience working within the radio industry, encouraged by technologists keen to promote anything ‘digital’ with an evangelical fervour, oblivious as to whether consumer demand was evident. At the top of this unholy group of conspirators were government civil servants who mistakenly believed that Britain and British industry could dominate global markets by adopting a technological standard in which the rest of the world had shown scant interest. Meetings of this cabal seem to have merely intensified their cult-like determination.

The stumbling block their paper plan faced was the disinterest of the commercial radio industry itself which, at that time, was profitable and had expressed no dissatisfaction with its existing, robust FM radio transmission system. When The Radio Authority advertised the first national DAB multiplex licence in 1988, it faced the very real possibility that no radio companies would submit bids. To avoid this embarrassment, the regulator had to ‘strongarm’ Britain’s largest radio group into making the only application. GWR Group plc’s then chief executive Ralph Bernard later admitted:

“GWR was encouraged to apply for the national [digital] licence, and was under some pressure to invest in the opportunities for a national licence from the then regulator [The Radio Authority]. Had we not done it, there would be no national DAB platform now. Not only that, [the regulator] did not know what they would have done on the question of national radio stations with regard to the opportunities given by the then government to renew their national licences for a further period of time if they were to commit to going digital. But how can you [do that] if there are no opportunities to go digital because there is no national multiplex? When I put that question to The Radio Authority, I was told that the answer was: ‘We don’t know what would happen – there is no Plan B’. It was just an assumption that someone would go for [the national DAB multiplex].”

“When we were seduced into believing that this was going to be the only [national digital] licence, we realised that there would be substantial losses, but the payback would be when you have the opportunity to be the only player in the national market for DAB. When it’s The Radio Authority, an agency of government, you tend to believe what you are told. On that basis, the investment was justified and, at the time, getting it through my Board was not easy.”

Having rescued the regulator from potential embarrassment in its ill-judged pursuit of the DAB dream, Bernard naturally now held some sway over The Radio Authority and its decisions. There evidently did exist such a thing as a free lunch for its senior managers when Bernard would invite them to The Ivy restaurant in anticipation of outcomes coincidentally beneficial to his business. On two occasions at the regulator, my actions threw a spanner into this cosy relationship and I suffered consequences (see blogs here and here) from my bosses, despite me having acted in what I believed was the public’s interest. I learnt to my professional cost that I was supposed to be a ‘civil servant’ to commercial interests, not to our citizens.

How did the story end for commercial radio? Badly. GWR Group plc’s subsequent merger with Capital Radio Group plc, both profitable public companies prior to their investment in DAB, proved a financial disaster, their DAB assets were divested for a song, an offshore investor acquired the merged business and Bernard exited the industry. This tragedy was repeated in the lower echelons of the radio business when the entire UK commercial radio industry had to be rescued by private investors. Most local radio stations that had existed since the 1970’s were replaced by national ‘brands’. Local content all but disappeared. Thousands of radio professionals lost their jobs.

How did the story end for DAB radio? Even worse. In a presentation I was commissioned to make to the board of the second largest radio group in 2012, I predicted that the government would kick the much heralded ‘digital radio switchover’ date into the long grass. I was pooh-poohed by the company’s technologists at the meeting, but my predictions came to pass … while theirs turned to dust. Naturally, I was never invited back. British commercial radio’s enormous investment in the disastrous DAB platform impoverished the entire sector, reducing it to little more than a jukebox music service for listeners who lacked Spotify accounts.

The deluded dream finally died in 2016 when ‘Pure Digital’, the ‘great white hope’ of British designed DAB radio receivers (though manufactured in China), was sold to Austrian company ‘Aventure AB’ for £2.6m, following its £7.9m loss during 2015/6 as a result of declining sales and its “significant stock” of unsold radio inventory so old that it “needs to be assessed for risk of obsolescence.”

With the advantage of hindsight, the entire DAB debacle now seemed like a rehearsal for the similar self-harm caused by Brexit a decade later. Men in suits with little or no experience of working in the real world of commerce pursued a fever dream regardless of its practicality, oblivious to its outcomes but buoyed by their mistaken sense of superiority. Their project was to foist a uniquely ‘British’ solution on the population that would purposefully diverge the UK from the rest of the world (British DAB radios would not even function in France). Their words and documents were stuffed with misinformation and downright lies that supposedly supported their theories. Without their posh accents, they could have been mistaken for used car dealers.

Despite the wilful destruction of the commercial radio sector’s economic value, talent, creativity and public service that they had fomented, many of Britain’s DAB ‘protagonists’ went on to be lauded with industry awards, honours and lucrative jobs. For anyone who followed the Brexit disaster, it will sound like all too familiar a story.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/radio-is-my-bomb-2003-dab-digital-radio.html]

The trophy son : 1969 : Charles Church & IMIC Properties Limited, Camberley

 It was the summer of ’69. My father had insisted I accompany him to his meeting. He had driven us to a wooden gateway on the south side of Lightwater Road that led into fenced farmland. He pulled in, parked our Rambler station wagon on the roadside where, on that warm sunny morning, the man we had come to meet was already waiting. My father introduced himself and then me:

“This is my son, Grant, who will be starting at Strode’s School in September.”

My father had heard stories about this local man and his wife having bought a house, moved in, then repaired, modernised it in contemporary style and furnished it stylishly before selling it a year later at a handsome profit. They had then repeated this process … twice. The strategy Americans call ‘flipping’ was unknown in Britain at the time, but this story had fascinated my parents during recent years, being a practical route to amass capital when mortgages were difficult to obtain for self-employed professionals. My parents might have enthusiastically copied this tactic, had they not already two school-age children. Finally, my father had requested an initial meeting with Charles Church.

In 1965, Australian state-owned airline Qantas had bought twenty plots of land in Camberley out of more than 200 for sale that had formed the grounds of Copped Hall, the estate of retired Captain Vivien Loyd. Between the Wars, in a small factory on Frimley Road, he had manufactured tanks sold to twenty foreign armies, as well as an ultralight plane known as ‘The Flying Flea’. Loyd even produced an engine-powered lawnmower called ‘The Motor Sickle’ that was exhibited at the 1950 Smithfield Show. Qantas built modern detached houses with large gardens in a generously landscaped development named ‘Copped Hall Estate’ intended for occupation by its pilots flying from Heathrow Airport, a twenty-mile drive away. However, for reasons unknown, its houses were never used.

One of these properties, at 18 Green Hill Road, served as the location for the 1969 film ‘Three Into Two Won’t Go’ directed by (Sir) Peter Hall, starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. Scenes of the street showed overgrown front gardens of empty houses on this ‘ghost’ estate, seemingly ideal for a movie shoot. Except that filming was disturbed by noise from tanks driving around the Ministry of Defence’s vast 18-hectare wooded, hilly tank testing ground a mere hundred yards away on the other side of ‘The Maultway’ main road, a legacy of Captain Loyd’s enterprise. Sandwiched between Camberley and Lightwater, the land is still used for this purpose but is now shared with local dogwalkers and bikers.

Eventually, Qantas decided to appoint a local estate agent to try and sell its unused houses, despite their location on the periphery of Camberley, three miles from its town centre and lacking a regular bus service. This was an ideal opportunity for Church and his wife to purchase one, and then another, to transform them into more marketable homes with ‘all mod cons’ that were demanded during the 1960’s. We lived three-quarters of a mile away from the entrance to this estate, on the opposite side of Upper Chobham Road, enabling my curious parents to observe goings-on there.

Church had been born more than a decade after my father and was very smart, having attended grammar school and studied civil engineering at university before starting his first construction contracting business, Burke & Church, in 1965. My father’s background could not have been more different, having left school at age fourteen and taken an apprenticeship with Redland Cement in Bracknell. He had studied quantity surveying at ‘night school’ and eventually started his own home-based business, producing drawings for renovations and extensions to local houses, offices and factories. By 1967, he had created ‘Architectural Drawing Services Limited’ in a small Camberley High Street office where he had ‘graduated’ to designing entire buildings. His business stationery appended the initials ‘AFS, ARIBA’ to his name even though he held no architectural qualification.

What Church and my father did have in common was that both had been building their first houses, both unusually modern for Camberley, simultaneously in 1967. Both had wives who were intimately involved in their businesses. Both aspired to modern interior designs. Indeed, I seemed to have spent much of my childhood sat on Heals of Tottenham Court Road’s wooden rear staircase that curled around one of those old ‘cage’ lifts, awaiting my parents to finish their endless perusal of state-of-the-art furniture. The two men’s skills were complimentary. Church knew how to build houses. My father knew how to design them.

So why had I been dragged along to the pair’s initial meeting? It was because my father lacked the formal education of Church but was desperate to portray himself as an equal. I had passed the ‘Eleven Plus’ examination that summer though my parents had decided not to send me to Camberley Grammar School, located opposite the infant and junior schools I had attended the last six years and the obvious, most local choice. Instead, I was to be sent to a grammar school in Egham that required a two-mile journey from our house to Camberley station, followed by a thirty-minute train ride. I was offered no say in their decision. Why was my school journey about to be made so arduous for the next seven years? Because Church too had attended Strode’s School and my father had waited to arrange this meeting until my parallel future there had been secured.

In addition to his design skills, my father could prove helpful to Church because he had amassed significant experience over the years ensuring his renovation designs were approved by the local council’s planning committee. He had joined ‘The Camberley Society’ and was attending their monthly meetings to hobnob with the local ‘great & good’, much to the disdain of my mother. Somewhere in his life, my father had adopted a neutral middle-class accent which, along with his smart suits, seemed sufficient proof to convince people he was indeed an ‘architect’. His speech contrasted starkly with that of his older brother who spoke like a character from ‘East Enders’, though success in the building industry had rewarded him with a detached house in Farnborough that had separate in and out driveways. On the handful of occasions I accompanied my father to visit his brother, I was sent up to his daughter Janet’s room, the first person I met who attended a private school. Although the same age, we had absolutely nothing in common.

After that summer’s initial introduction, Church and his wife Susanna became regular visitors to our bungalow which my father had designed and built in a Frank Lloyd Wright style with much glass and bare brickwork. The two couples became friends and my father set up a company to formalise their partnership. I was told to find a suitable name. I leafed through my copies of ‘Billboard’ magazine, the voluminous American weekly music industry publication I bought from a newsstand on the corner of Oxford Street and Regent Street whenever we visited London. I spied an advertisement for the International Music Industries Conference organised in Cannes (forerunner of ‘MIDEM’) which was abbreviated to ‘IMIC’. The company was to be named ‘IMIC Properties Limited’.

Houses were designed. Houses were built. Houses were sold. Profits were shared. My father bought an American Motors Javelin sports car. Both he and Church started flying lessons separately at nearby Blackbushe Airport. I accompanied my father on one occasion and hated the experience. Nevertheless, it remained my task to regularly test my father’s knowledge necessary to obtain his pilot licence, which is the reason I can recite the NATO phonetic alphabet to this day. For a short while, life was good.

In 1971, our family started to fall apart. My mother had terrible bruises on her face and the toilet door of our house had been kicked in as a result of my father’s temper. By 1972, he had left us for good. After an entire childhood having been required to work in his business, providing skills in mathematics, finance and administration that he lacked, I no longer wanted to even talk to him. He responded by making his family’s life as difficult as possible, stealing back every gift he had ever bought us, starving us of funds and dispossessing me and my baby sister.

Evidently, my father’s business partnership with Church must have disintegrated at around the same time though, to their credit, both he and his wife maintained contact with my mother, offering her support and practical assistance. Charles Church Developments Limited was launched by the couple in 1972 and became one of Britain’s most successful housebuilding enterprises. IMIC Properties Limited was forcibly dissolved in 1980. By then, my father had disappeared, owing thousands in unpaid court-ordered maintenance to our family. He was eventually found by US Immigration to be living illegally in Arkansas and deported. His debts to us were never paid.

On 1 July 1989, at the age of forty-four, Charles Church was killed when, after broadcasting a mayday call, the Spitfire [G-MKVC] he had restored crash landed near Blackbushe Airport. By then, he was reportedly one of the richest two-hundred people in Britain with a fortune of £140m. My mother attended his funeral. It was a tragic conclusion to the beginnings of an exciting business opportunity for my father that I had witnessed at that roadside rendezvous two decades previously … but which had ultimately impoverished the rest of our family.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-trophy-son-1969-charles-church-imic.html]

If you go down to the lemon groves today, you’re sure of a big surprise : 2017 : Mar Menor, Spain

 The motionless car stood sideways across the road with its four doors wide open. A road accident? Moving nearer, nobody was visible either in the car or on the roadway. The engine was running and its headlights were bright, but there was no sign of another vehicle or an obstruction the car could have hit. If not a traffic accident, then what had happened?

I was taking my daily early morning run, normally uneventful, along a straight, flat tarmacked ‘agricultural road’ that led three kilometres out of the Spanish village as far as the shore of the Mar Menor inland sea. When the summer heat became this oppressive, runs proved feasible only during the darkest hour just before dawn. Other than an occasional farmer on his tractor, the roads were empty at that time of day as village life did not awaken until ten o’clock. Something about the car up ahead of me was definitely not right.

Wherever I found myself in the world, my morning constitutional involved an outdoor run. This exercise regime had been thwarted only in Moscow where, after several attempts, I was choked by engine fumes and endangered by cars driven along pavements; and in Cambodia where even a short walk in its humid heat immersed you in a sauna-like furnace. I had started running regularly forty years ago as a university student to relieve stress, initially circling the little used 400-metre Maiden Castle racetrack alongside the River Wear a few times, then having built up my regime daily until it reached dozens of laps.

At school, a weekly three-mile cross-country run had felt akin to punishment during Wednesday afternoon ‘Games’ in winter for the thirty of us disinterested in playing team football. Regardless of what the weather might throw at us, PE teacher Graham Taylor would send us out on the footpath up Coopers Hill, passing the John F Kennedy Memorial, the site of the Runnymede signing and Langham Pond, to return to our school Playing Fields more than an hour later. For a cheap thrill at the outset, boys would hold hands in a line and the end one touch the electrified fence alongside the A30 Egham By-Pass, awaiting the periodic pulse that sent a shock through each of us in turn. I am grateful to Taylor for having unwittingly initiated my fitness regime, despite his indifference in the face of my disdain for competitive sport. When I visited his office on my final school day after seven years to purchase a yellow ‘Strode’s’ sweatshirt, he scoffed: “Why would you want that now?” I still have it almost half a century later!

Not that I was wearing it in Spain that morning as, even before dawn, it was already way too hot. As I ran closer towards the car in the darkness, I could see it positioned across the roadway to shine its headlights into the neat rows of the unfenced lemon groves that stretched for miles on both sides. I was close enough now to make out that the car’s back seat and passenger seat were piled high with … lemons. Aha! Even Clouseau would have deduced that I had stumbled across a lemon thief operating under cover of darkness in the middle of nowhere. Despite my temptation to stick around and view the perpetrator, I had no desire to be shot at dawn. Instead, I ran on into the darkness, reached my end-point where sunrise was emerging over the sea, paused and returned along the same route to find the thief long gone as daylight was starting to seep across the landscape.

Friday was ‘street market day’ along the village’s ‘High Street’ where, that week, I spotted a stall with a man selling loose lemons, rather than those from marked agricultural crates. Was he the fruit bandit whose nocturnal handiwork I had witnessed? I never knew and, apparently, neither did the pair of municipal police who ambled through the market. It was an example of the combination of audacity and pettiness apparent in Spain. In the centre of another village, already I had watched an old woman nonchalantly rip out plants from a municipal flowerbed in broad daylight and carry them home, apparently unconcerned who might be watching. Do the Spanish even have a word for ‘shame’?

During another early morning run on the same route, I was surprised to find a woman’s matching check bra and knickers on the ground at the edge of the lemon grove in the middle of nowhere. My initial instinct was to leave the road and walk into the grove to convince myself this was not a horrific crime scene. Then I realised it might not be construed as civic duty for the police to find me possibly standing over the remains of one of the five thousand women murdered annually in Spain. So, yet again, I simply ran on … after photographing the evidence.

The only regular sign of life I saw on my route out of the village during daily runs was a group of men who stood outside the ‘Sport Bar’ at six in the morning on weekdays. They would await the arrival of minivans whose drivers shouted out the number of men required for that day’s work in the surrounding fields. As I passed the group, they would jeer and shout at me as if the notion of an old man running in order to maintain his health was a completely alien concept to them … which in rural Spain it probably was.

There was a memorable morning when, following their usual taunts, one man emerged from the crowd and started to run alongside me. I was not intimidated. I imagined he might continue a short distance, tire quickly and return to his mates. However, once we reached the limit of the village’s lit streets, he continued into the darkness of the lemon grove. Now I began to feel intimidated, particularly as he insisted on running so close beside me that our elbows touched, despite the unlit road being sufficiently wide for two vehicles. If I were to stop running, or to say anything, I was worried that he might turn on me, so I continued and ignored him.

After a while, he switched to running behind me, but so close that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. It was a stupid and dangerous move, as he could have easily tripped me up, so I responded by picking up my pace to pull away. This must have been misunderstood as a challenge rather than self-preservation, as he caught up, then ran closely beside me once again, then switched to running inches in front of me. If I had maintained my speed, I would have been in danger of stepping on his heels and tripping up both of us. I slowed my pace and watched as he continued to run on ahead into the darkness beyond. He must have felt so proud that day to brag to his mates how, during a quarter-hour, he had run faster than a foreigner three times his age. Angry and upset, I cut short my usual routine, turned around and re-entered the village on a longer route to avoid the ‘Sport Bar’. After that, I ensured that my morning run never passed there again.

Even everyday village life proved a challenge. Each occasion my wife and I shopped in its supermarket, we would be the only customers in the checkout queue humiliated by having to empty out the contents of our knapsack and handbag. We observed locals in its aisles pocket items from shelves with apparent impunity because it seemed self-evident that only foreigners were thieves. We also aroused ire because we paid by debit card, which the checkout person would insist on grabbing from us, inspecting this strange technology and ramming it into a prehistoric machine that only functioned sporadically and required a wait of several minutes to display ‘approved’.

Having spied a poster for an ‘open day’ at the village’s modern theatre building, we thought it would make an interesting diversion. However, before our visit inside had even reached the auditorium, we were confronted by an angry group of women who ordered us out of their building. Many such municipal projects become ‘white elephants’ created by the mayor’s ego simply to impress his chums and the electorate, regardless of practicality or cost. Belonging to neither category, we were evidently not welcome. From its published schedule, this particular theatre only staged productions on about a dozen days per year.

To make explicit this village’s unfriendliness to outsiders, it would have been an easy task to simply stick two huge posters on the outside of their building that state in big red lettering ‘DO NOT ENTER FOR NO MEMBER OF THE SOCIAL CLUB’ in English. That is exactly what the village’s social centre had done to ensure that no foreign tourist dared to cross its threshold, pointedly warning in a language we found no local spoke.

Scuttling back to our rented terraced house near the village centre, we were left to the mercy of our neighbours. On one side was a couple in their fifties who argued and watched television late at maximum volume. Friday evenings, a minibus would arrive to unload a group of primary school age children into their tiny house. Group sing-songs at high volume ensued … continuously. In pyjamas, I knocked on their front door at two o’clock in the morning to ask politely if the tuneless singing could be curtailed. The door was slammed in my face. At three o’clock, I knocked again as the noise had continued regardless. Nobody answered. Their ‘party’ ended at dawn. By afternoon, the minibus would return and take away the children. Some kind of cult?

The first we knew of our opposite neighbour’s business was our living room filling with smoke from an unidentifiable non-tobacco drug. I traced it to the electricity meter on the party wall, built so thinly that smoke from next door seeped through holes made for cables connecting the adjoining houses. Thick insulation tape had to be purchased to block the gaps around the meter and prevent us suffering involuntary highs. Noises from this neighbour’s kitchen, audible through the wafer-thin wall, sounded as if he was chopping vegetables all afternoon … but then it continued through the night. Eventually it dawned on us that he was a drug dealer cutting up supplies for customers. Why else would he drive a black sports car with gold wheel rims, darkened windows and a windscreen inscribed ‘PSAddicted’ that was parked out front? Not the kind of delinquent with whom to raise a neighbourly complaint, even though we often passed him sat outside on his front doorstep during daylight, openly smoking drugs.

One day there was a flurry of activity outside his house, including a brief visit from a local policeman. Later, a smartly dressed, middle aged man arrived and we could hear loud discussions inside the house surprisingly in French, a language never previously heard there. We could make out the lawyer instructing the dealer that he had a stark choice: negotiate with the family of the young girl he had hit while driving his car outside the local school and pay them an amount sufficiently persuasive to drop a prosecution; or flee to his native North Africa. We did not stick around long enough to learn of Kid Charlemagne’s fate.

Had we been staying in Sodom or Gomorrah? God may not have inflicted a plague of locusts on this village but he had dispatched its inhabitants a stern warning by infesting the whole place, not just the odd house, with cockroaches. You could exit your home in the heat of the noonday sun and see large bugs scuttling up the exterior walls and along the streets, totally oblivious to daylight or humans. Because household drains had been constructed without U-bends, the vermin could travel with ease through the sewers into buildings. Everything that we witnessed there resembled a biblical tableau … of a godforsaken village that was determinedly stuck in feudal times.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/09/if-you-go-down-to-lemon-groves-today.html]

Baby, we were bored to death : 2000 : FM radio station market, Toronto

 Why does Toronto have such insipid and boring radio? Our city is vibrant, artistic, culturally diverse and entertaining, so why is none of that reflected in our uninspired radio stations? Travelling in Europe and North America as a radio consultant, I listen to a lot of radio and it is tragic to concede that my own city has some of the most boring radio stations known to mankind.

Opportunities to change this sad state of radio in our city are everywhere, but have too often been ignored. When Shaw Communications purchased ‘Energy 108’ a couple of years ago, it could have reinvented the station as a cultural focus for Toronto’s young people. Instead, Shaw fired ‘Energy’s most knowledgeable DJ’s, introduced Sarah McLachlan songs once an hour (in a dance music format?) and changed the name to … ‘Energy 107.9’. Wow! How many minutes did it take the marketing department to devise a strategy that unambitious?

Rogers Media’s purchase of ‘KISS 92’ last year was a complete no-brainer. Can you name any other city of similar size in North America that has had no Top Forty radio station for a period of even a few months? And yet Toronto suffered this malaise for several years. Even if Rogers had hired a helium-voiced bimbo DJ to front a Top Forty format, it still could have captured a huge audience hungry for what used to be called ‘pop music’. And that is exactly what they did. ‘KISS’s ratings are noteworthy, not just for the hordes of spotty grade nine students who naturally gravitate towards Backstreet Boys soundalikes and terrible Canadian techno. But the station’s substantial audience over the age of twenty is a sad reflection of the lack of any other remotely exciting music station in Toronto. For those of us past our teen years, ‘KISS 92’ at least makes you feel good to be alive, compared with other FM music stations that treat listeners like senile geriatrics with one foot already in the grave.

One would hope that ‘KISS 92’s runaway success might encourage its competitors to try and become a little more imaginative in their programs. The signs so far are not particularly encouraging. ‘EZ Rock 97’ revamped its daytime line-up last week to introduce even more soporific DJ’s and has changed its slogan from ‘My Music At Work’ to ‘Soft Rock Favourites’. Station owner Telemedia appointed a new Program Director drafted from its Calgary operation to oversee these changes. Yes, Calgary – that hotbed of radical, imaginative radio formats! ‘EZ Rock’ looks certain to retain its nickname of ‘Radio Slumberland’ in our household.

Milestone Radio, scheduled to launch next year, has an incredible opportunity to turn its black music format into an exciting, inclusive station that could electrify the city. After all, black culture has never been so predominant, nor so imitated, in mainstream music and arts. With imagination, Milestone could be a very successful radio version of ‘City TV’. Whether its owners can grasp that challenge, let alone succeed with it, depends upon the station’s ability to overcome three obstacles. Milestone’s programming plans are the obvious product of committee debate, with too many worthy (but commercially disastrous) ideas generated by individuals who have particular axes to grind. Its recent effort to recruit a Program Director in the US rings alarm bells that Milestone is creating a cookie-cutter US-style urban music station that would reflect nothing of Toronto (listen to ‘WBLK’ for days on end and you will learn absolutely nothing about Buffalo, but everything about ‘strong songs’). And lastly, the spectre of minority shareholder Standard Broadcasting might be waiting quietly in the shadows for Milestone’s ambitious plans to fail in the first year, so that it can take control and resurrect the station as a smooth-jazz format, fitting perfectly alongside its mind-numbing ‘MIX 99’.

As for ‘Edge 102’ and ‘Q-107’, their owners should have been bold enough to extinguish these dinosaur formats years ago. There is so much exciting new music in the world, but you will certainly never hear any of it played on these two stations. The malaise is so bad that Toronto radio critic Marc Weisblott felt obliged to apologise in a recent column (radiodigest.com) for spending so much time listening to New York City radio via the internet. No need to apologise, Marc. Our only ray of hope is that one fine morning, some bold senior executive in Shaw/Corus, Standard, CHUM or Rogers might suddenly understand that radio which is stimulating and challenging can also be a commercial success. I would prescribe that executive a quick radio listening visit to any major city in the world to understand the potential. Otherwise, Toronto radio is condemned to be a mere revenue-generating asset designed to send us all to permanent sleep with yet another Celine Dion or Bryan Adams song.

[Submitted to Toronto weekly what’s on paper, unpublished]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/09/baby-we-were-bored-to-death-2000-fm.html]