Tag: David Vick

My application wins our tiny black music pirate station a valuable London-wide radio licence : 1989 : KISS 100 FM

 It was only just daylight when I suddenly realised that the phone was ringing. It seemed to take me ages to drag my weary body out of bed, as the phone continued to ring long and hard. Who on earth would want to phone me at this early hour on a Saturday morning? I toyed with the notion that it might be my former girlfriend, who seemed determined to inflict as much hurt on me as possible, despite our relationship having ended abruptly through her own infidelity and lies.

But it was not her. It was [‘KISS FM’ managing director] Gordon McNamee, calling me from his mobile phone. He said he was standing in the middle of his local park, walking his dog, accompanied by his mother. I could hear in the background that it was pouring with rain. McNamee asked if I had the home phone number of any of the Independent Broadcasting Authority [media regulator IBA] staff so that he could find out whether KISS FM had won the licence. I asked him why he was so anxious to find out at such an early hour in the morning. McNamee told me that ‘Music Week’ magazine’s radio correspondent, Bob Tyler, had rung him at home at around eight o’clock that morning to find out if he knew who had won the licences. McNamee admitted that he had heard nothing, despite knowing that the decisions had been made by the IBA at its Thursday meeting and should be announced imminently. McNamee told me that he had stayed at the KISS FM office [in Finsbury Park] all day Friday, but there had still been no phone call from the IBA, so he assumed that KISS FM had lost the licence for the second time, and had returned home.

Bob Tyler had phoned McNamee a second time at around nine o’clock that morning to say that he had just heard a rumour that KISS FM had won a licence, though there was still no means of official confirmation. McNamee, feeling agitated and frustrated, had decided to get out of bed and take his dog for a walk in the local park. Halfway across the park, it had started to pour with rain. Then, just as he, his mother and his dog had run for shelter, McNamee’s mobile phone had rung again. This time it was Richard Brooks, media editor of ‘The Observer’ newspaper, offering his congratulations to McNamee on KISS FM’s win of one of the two licences, and asking for a comment to include in the next day’s issue. McNamee thanked Brooks for his call, but emphasised that he himself had not been told the news and so would have to obtain official confirmation from the IBA before he could say anything publicly. Brooks assured him that he had seen a letter sent to one of the losing applicants which definitely stated that KISS FM and easy listening applicant ‘Melody Radio’ were the two winners. McNamee promised to ring him back as soon as possible.

There was jubilation in the park, despite the torrential rain. McNamee and his mother leapt up and down with excitement, watched by an astonished old man who was also sheltering from the storm. The old man asked them what all the fuss was about and, when McNamee told him he had just won a hotly contested radio licence, the old man offered him a celebration roll-your-own cigarette and apologised for not having a cigar. Now, McNamee needed to find out from the IBA if the news was true, and why it had been broken to him by a journalist, rather than in an official IBA communication. That was when he had rung me. I told McNamee that I probably had the home phone number of one of the IBA officers, if the paperwork had not disappeared from my flat, so I would find it and try to obtain official confirmation. I quickly found the home phone number of the IBA press officer, Stuart Patterson, on the top of an old press release he had sent me. I called him and, although he himself refused to confirm or deny whether KISS FM had won, he promised to arrange for someone from the IBA radio division to call me as soon as possible.

It was only a few minutes later that David Vick, the IBA’s principal radio development officer, called me. At first, he was pre-occupied with explaining to me the protocol of the IBA announcement, and did not tell me outright that KISS FM had won:

“Hi, it’s David Vick from the IBA. I gather you’re the only people who haven’t got the news officially yet … I’ve just had a quick word with Stuart, obviously … We’ve told the winners that they might expect calls from journalists. What we’re anxious not to happen, and maybe it’s a false hope now, is for journalists to ring losers before they’ve got their letters. But clearly, the Christmas post is so unpredictable that our best laid plans have fallen apart this morning.”

“I didn’t ring Stuart as a journalist,” I interrupted. “It was the KISS FM side … Did we get it or didn’t we?”

“Yes, of course you did,” answered Vick.

“Oh, brilliant,” I screamed. I was elated. Until now, I and the rest of the KISS FM team could only have dreamed of this moment when the IBA would ring us to say that we had won a radio licence. Now, it had really happened. I was very tired. I was still shattered from the long journey home [from a holiday in The Gambia the previous evening]. I had only just woken up, but I was also incredibly happy that my hard work on the licence application had won out in the end.

“Congratulations,” said Vick, while I gasped with joy at the other end of the call. He remained far more composed than I was right now, and he continued to explain the detail of the announcement: “I don’t know how The Observer got hold of it. Clearly, one of the losers has talked to The Observer fairly early on this morning, because they’ve been hot on the trail from quite early on. So congratulations on that.”

I was still laughing and whooping at my end of the conversation, as Vick continued: “We normally do ring winners on Saturday morning but, this time, we’ve been playing it so laid back and ultra cool that I hadn’t actually planned to do that. All the letters seem to have got through, but clearly some of the most serious applicants have given business addresses, and they’re the ones who haven’t actually got the letters. You’re not unique. We’ve had a vexed Lord Hanson [of Melody Radio, the other licence winner] ring us this morning, asking what’s going on and why is he being rung by journalists.”

Vick continued: “You and Lord Hanson have been in the identical situation this morning of being rung by The Observer and others at the crack of dawn, and not known what was going on … What we didn’t want was for losers who haven’t got their letters this morning to find out from the newspapers either on Sunday or ideally on Monday … We had a terrible botch-up with the Post Office on one of the previous months. And, this time, I rang the district postmaster yesterday afternoon and said ‘look, we’ve got another run of letters going through.’ And he said he’d do his best to catch them the moment they arrived at the sorting office and hustle them straight through for us. And he’s clearly done the job with unfailing skill and everything’s arrived this morning. But the ones going to business addresses, yours and Hanson’s and some of the other quite serious applicants, have ended up hearing about it through the grapevine as a result.”

“Oh, this is brilliant,” I gasped. I was still far from composed and I was barely taking in Vick’s pre-occupation with the minor points of the procedure. We had won! That was all that was important to me right there and then. We had won! Vick continued regardless: “We told everybody our press release would be [published] Tuesday morning. But I’ve spoken to Peter Baldwin [IBA director of radio] and Stuart [Patterson], and that’s clearly crazy now, so we’re going to issue the press release early Monday morning. So, if you could bear to at least smile inwardly and say as little as you can to the press until then …”

I was muttering words of agreement without really taking in all the detail that Vick was relating. He could tell my excitement was getting the better of me, so he suddenly changed gear: “Well done. We’ll obviously have a lot to do with each other in the months ahead. One of the things we’ve said in the letter is that, if you could come in [to the IBA office] and meet us all in the next couple of weeks, that would be super.”

“We would love to,” I replied, still giggling uncontrollably. Once more, Vick was keen to discuss the nitty gritty, right here and now on a Saturday morning: “Very well done. It was an excellent application. The trouble is that you’re going to get a lot of griping comment now from people saying that they [the IBA] only did it to keep the pirate lobby happy. The fact was that it was a bloody good application that got it on merit, because we certainly wouldn’t have given it to you if the application hadn’t been deserving of it.”

It was incredibly pleasing to hear Vick credit the KISS FM application after all the hard work I had put into it. I felt that, finally, I had been vindicated for my insistence to McNamee that the whole licence application had to be as perfectly presented as possible on this occasion. I thanked Vick for his kind comments, and he continued: “I think, to be honest, that the extra six months actually did you a lot of good. Not that the first application was bad or anything but, in this one, you had clearly learnt so much over the last six months, and you had strengthened it in so many ways. And, fortunately, by majoring on the new release aspect of the daytime [music] playlist, you’ve given us a very solid peg to hang the ‘diversity’ point on. Because, when ‘Capital [Radio]’ and others predictably start complaining, we can actually point to the fact that you are going to be playing the music before it gets in the charts, and they will play it after it gets in the charts, which gives greater diversity.”

Since its launch in 1973, Capital Radio had been London’s one and only commercial pop music station, and it was still eager to defend what it considered to be its own rightful territory – a monopoly over playing pop music in the capital. The IBA was charged with widening the choice of radio stations available to listeners, whilst not duplicating the existing output of Capital Radio. The emphasis I had placed in the KISS FM application on the station’s championing of new music had proven to be precisely the argument the IBA could use to defend a decision to award KISS FM the licence. Admittedly, Capital Radio did play dance music within its programmes, but it only played songs that were already in the ‘Top Forty’ singles chart. KISS FM would be playing mostly new releases, before they gained widespread popularity. My strategy for the KISS FM application had worked exactly as I had intended, which Vick confirmed as he continued to relate the detail: “The press release actually says that KISS FM has been chosen as a station that will be in the forefront of music tastes and that’s your market position, as we define it.”

McNamee must have returned home by now, so I gave his home telephone number to Vick and thanked him for calling me so promptly. It was absolutely brilliant news and I was still utterly ecstatic. I tried to phone McNamee straight away, but Vick must have managed to get through to him first. I continued re-dialling for several minutes, until the phone eventually rang. McNamee was shouting down the phone to me over the top of a loud conversation I could hear in the background:

“Grant, you c*nt,” he greeted me, in his typically perverse way. “We’ve got it! I can’t believe it! David Vick just phoned me and we went through the whole lot. I can’t fucking believe it.”

There was loud laughter in the background and McNamee already sounded drunk on the news, in spirit, if not in reality: “You’ve got a job! Your gamble worked out. We’ve all got a job. Fucking wonderful! It’s wonderful! It’s just unbelievable. I’m going to be down at Dingwalls [nightclub in Camden] tonight and the whole world will be, I should think. I’m going to phone everyone today. I’ll talk to you later on. I’ve got to phone all the bosses, and I’ll talk to you later.”

McNamee was right. My gamble had paid off. I had believed that KISS FM could win the licence, if only someone was prepared to work hard on the application this time around. Then, when McNamee had failed to take up the challenge, I had decided to take on the task myself. While McNamee had been pre-occupied with his initial failure, I had been determined to turn KISS FM’s second application into a winner. Asked subsequently what had persuaded the IBA to award KISS FM a radio licence, David Vick answered: “A well-researched application and musical knowledge.”

It was pleasing to know that my strategies had been proven correct. It was my detailed research and my belief in KISS FM’s musical expertise that had swung the licence bid. Now, here I was, having learnt the good news only hours after arriving back in the country. If KISS FM had lost its licence bid this second time around, I would have had no job to return to. Plus, my flat had been deliberately and spitefully emptied [by my former girlfriend whilst I had been away]. But these things did not matter to me anymore. The dream I had cherished for so many years of a legal black music radio station in London was about to become a reality at last. I had played my part in turning that dream into reality. I was absolutely thrilled. For me, it was literally a dream come true.

[Excerpt from ‘KISS FM: From Radical Radio To Big Business: The Inside Story Of A London Pirate Radio Station’s Path To Success’ by Grant Goddard, Radio Books, 2011, 528 pages]

[Originally blog published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-day-my-application-won-our-tiny.html ]

A little radio knowledge is a dangerous thing : 2003 : Neil Romain, The Radio Authority

 It was a hostage situation. I was sat on a chair in a large, empty room. An angry man was pacing in circles around me, shouting questions: “What have you done?” and “Why did you do that?” and “Who told you to do what you did?”

Were my family about to receive a ransom note? Unlikely. The room I was in was not some dirty disused dockside warehouse but the plush boardroom of the British government quango where I was employed. My captor was the organisation’s finance and personnel director Neil Romain. Had he mistaken his well-worn DVD of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ for a textbook such as ‘Introduction to Personnel Management’? Was his qualification for this job an earlier life as a school prefect?

My transgression was to have written a ten-page paper analysing the degree of competition between commercial radio stations in Britain’s twenty largest local markets. Qualified in maths and economics, in 1980 I had started to tabulate data about the British radio industry on A3 accountancy sheets which I then transferred to digital spreadsheets in the 1990’s. Prior to this job at The Radio Authority, I had spent most of the previous decade working overseas, hence my UK industry datasets were rather outdated. As no work tasks were given me for the first few months, I used that time to sit at my desktop computer updating my knowledge base.

At lunchtimes, management were regularly being wined and dined by commercial radio bosses at The Ivy restaurant, while I would be searching the stacks of the London School of Economics library for papers in academic economic journals that analysed the American radio industry. What I found inspired me to write my own paper contrasting the significant competitiveness evident in American local radio markets with the high levels of market concentration in Britain. I was not surprised. The United States system of radio had embraced listener choice and commercial competition from its inception in 1920, while the British system of commercial radio had been founded in 1973 upon the notion of monopoly power. My paper demonstrated these divergent outcomes by analysing UK data using a technique favoured by the US Department of Justice. In December 2002, I sent my finished paper to managers in my workplace, hoping for feedback. Zilch.

In January 2003, the government’s Competition Commission announced an investigation into the £12.5m acquisition of Bristol-based local commercial radio station ‘Galaxy 101’ by a joint venture of two large UK radio groups, one of which (GWR Group plc) already had a significant presence in the area. The Commission requested relevant evidence concerning competitiveness within local radio markets. I emailed my paper and received a response requesting my appearance before the Commission to discuss my paper. That was when all hell broke loose around me at work.

At that time, 13 companies owned 177 of Britain’s 259 commercial radio stations. The largest radio groups were lobbying politicians for the ownership law to be changed to allow them to gobble up even more stations, a notion to which The Radio Authority appeared to raise no objection. However, my paper showed that 15 of the UK’s 20 largest local radio markets already exhibited ‘highly concentrated’ ownership. Such a change in the law would only worsen this situation, reducing choice for listeners and advertisers. However, the commercial radio industry and, more surprisingly, the government were keen to argue that even greater concentration of ownership would be a positive change:

“Listeners will be the real winners, with companies like GWR being able to build local centres of excellence offering local output of greater range and quality,” said GWR Group chairman Ralph Bernard.

“A certain amount of consolidated ownership can help to create ‘localness’ by committing the necessary investment,” said Chris Smith MP (and Disney consultant).

The UK government Department for Culture, Media & Sport wrote: “Without any consolidation of ownership, the risk is that a number of small companies will all tend to aim their content at the same middle ground, all seeking the largest possible share of the mass audience…”

These statements would be understood as bollocks by anyone possessing a modicum of economics knowledge, but maybe MP’s and civil servants too had enjoyed free lunches at The Ivy. The reason my little paper created so much anger was that it challenged this bizarre avalanche of propaganda intended to persuade that the fewer companies owned Britain’s commercial radio system, the better the outcomes. Between 1973 and 1990, commercial stations in all local markets (except London) had enjoyed monopoly status. Owners were now demanding the clock be turned back to those uncompetitive times.

This is why Neil Romain had transformed into The Inquisitor, demanding to know why I had written a paper that nobody had asked me to and, then, why I had sent it to the Competition Commission when nobody had asked me to. I explained that it was a personal paper that only analysed publicly available data and which I had submitted individually, not on Radio Authority letterhead. The Commission had asked for evidence and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody else had written a recent analysis of competition issues and market concentrations in British commercial radio.

The subtext of Romain’s angry tirade was me having published incontrovertible evidence that contradicted the prevailing ‘industry’ view that further consolidation would prove more beneficial for radio listeners, rather than less. I was the fly in the ointment. I had refused to drink the Kool-Aid. I had already been given a minor job at The Radio Authority. I was meant to demonstrate gratitude by just sitting at my desk doing absolutely nothing.

This sense of absurdity was underlined after I was pushed into the office of my manager, David Vick, for a further dressing down. I was on the receiving end of another mad outburst which eventually ended with Vick demanding that I should not talk to anyone about radio, nor write anything about radio that had not been requested of me. I felt compelled to point out that I was studying an MA in media management (paid for by my employer) that required me to write and talk about the media.

“I forbid you,” he shouted. “You are not to talk to anyone about radio while you are employed here.”

It was apparently a crime to be an authority on radio at The Radio Authority. Was this ‘1984’? Rather, the situation recalled the absurd bureaucracy in the 1985 film ‘Brazil’, with me cast as Sam Lowry, the man who knew too much; Vick playing Lowry’s boss Mr Kurtzmann, the man who stymied Sam’s career; and Romain as Jack Lint, the family man who enjoyed a dose of mundane torture in his office. All that Vick and Romain’s actions confirmed was that I was working in an organisation that pretended to be a public regulator but whose levers were being pulled by commercial interests. Their reaction to my paper revealed once again the real men behind the curtain. I vowed to ignore their ridiculous posturing and continue writing papers about radio.

In April 2003, The Radio Authority funded Romain to attend the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. I asked him beforehand if he could purchase a short list of books about radio that I knew would be on sale at the convention book stall, me having attended the same event a decade earlier. Unavailable online, these materials would assist my research. On his return, I asked Romain if he had managed to purchase my requested books, to which he answered simply “no” without apology or explanation. He was subsequently promoted to deputy CEO. I had been exiled to the naughty step.

In May 2003, the Competition Commission announced that the conclusion of its investigation was to block the sale of ‘Galaxy 101’ to new owners on the grounds that GWR Group already dominated the local radio markets in Bristol and Bath. This outcome forced GWR to sell its half-share in the joint venture. I was pleased that my analysis had informed the Commission’s decision-making, though I was realistic that my chance now of ever finding employment within a large commercial radio group in the UK would be zero … and so it was.

At the end of 2003, as the Authority merged into new regulator Ofcom, Romain was appointed managing director of commercial radio group London Media Company Ltd. This was surprising on two counts: to the best of my knowledge, Romain had not previously managed a radio station; and the company he joined was owned by Avtar Lit whose activities in the radio industry were already, er, notorious. ‘The Sunday Times’ newspaper in Sri Lanka alleged that Lit had accrued 177 convictions for fraud and petty crime by 1998.

I had had occasional contact with Lit since the late 1980’s when he had claimed to run a West London pirate station ‘Sina Radio’ whose broadcasts I had never found, despite living only a few miles away. He would phone me at home for free advice on his imminent application for a legal ‘incremental’ radio licence, and I attended some of his public meetings where I heard all sorts of crazy talk.

In 1998, Avtar Lit and Radio Authority employee Janet Lee had been arrested on charges of alleged corruption in connection with Lit’s successful licence application for new London Asian station ‘Sunrise Radio’. Was Lee sacked by disciplinarian personnel director Neil Romain? No, she clung on to her management post at the Authority until it was dismantled five years later. Was Lit’s licence revoked? On the contrary, the Authority renewed it in 2000 for a further eight years because its “application for licence renewal complies with the statutory requirements”.

Only months later, The Radio Authority fined Lit’s station £10,000 for having broadcast propaganda supporting his (unsuccessful) campaign to be elected Southall’s MP. The regulator inexplicably provided Lit with the licence to operate London’s first and sole Asian commercial radio station from 1989 to 2003, enriching him sufficiently by 2005 to be lauded as one of the “twenty most powerful Asians in British media.” In 2007, ‘Forbes’ magazine profiled Lit’s success at building a global business empire, without mention of its foundation on a monopoly radio licence that allegedly had been awarded corruptly by the regulator.

The tiny local radio stations acquired by Lit’s London Media Company, managed by Neil Romain, proved to be unmitigated commercial disasters. In 2009, I wrote a 6,000-word essay analysing the abject failure and closure of two of them. In 2010, Sunrise Radio’s accounts declared a loss of £10m. In 2013, the station was prosecuted for £390,000 in unpaid taxes. In 2014, Lit was declared bankrupt by the High Court and Sunrise Radio was placed into administration. Lit’s radio group was then acquired by Ketan Somaia whose interests, ‘The Guardian’ reported at the time, “once included hotels, banking, motoring and media, [and who] is being prosecuted [at the Old Bailey] for fraudulently taking £14m in a series of deals dating back to 1999”.

Corners of the UK commercial radio industry can appear to resemble a ‘pass the parcel’ game in a pawn shop.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/06/a-little-radio-knowledge-is-dangerous.html]

The Best Man for the job : 2003 : Neil Stock, The Radio Authority

 When someone leaves their job, what are the chances that the ‘best man’ to replace them will be:

  •  the groom at whose wedding their predecessor was Best Man, AND
  •  a contemporary at the same university, AND
  •  a volunteer at the same student radio station?

Wielding my four mathematics GCE’s and a pound-shop calculator, I sat at my desk calculating the probability of such an alignment of coincidences for a job appointment within my workplace. If this had been an internet start-up of Cambridge science graduate nerds, no eyebrow would have been raised. But in a British government quango? My calculator produced a gibberish result from the very first calculation. But when I turned around its display, the characters appeared to spell out ‘NEPOTISM’. I switched to an Excel spreadsheet but it too crashed. Microsoft made contact, suggesting I lease processing time on its supercomputer to complete my calculation of a ‘1 in …..’ probability that would require several zillion zeros. I gave up.

After an unexplained rush to appoint me, The Radio Authority had left me alone, twiddling my thumbs at my desk for three months. There were no team meetings or supervisor get-togethers to attend, so nobody remarked upon my ongoing inactivity. Had my colleagues even browsed the ‘management’ section of a bookstore? Work tasks were assigned by way of someone with a supreme confidence in their own superiority marching up to your desk and barking orders, before turning around and marching away again. It began to feel as if I had been press-ganged into the Civil Service as deckhand on a ship of pen-pushing fools.

Finally, by month four, I was given a project by the manager who had appointed me, David Vick. The local commercial radio licence for West Lothian in Scotland had been advertised and my task was to write a paper to be presented at a Members’ Meeting, recommending to which applicant the licence should be awarded. No problem, I thought. A decade earlier, I had regularly spent a morning in the broadcast regulator’s library, reading multiple applications for a particular licence and then summarising them during the afternoon in an article of several thousand words for the weekly ‘Broadcast’ magazine. I was thinking that a more detailed paper might take me a week to write. Then Vick told me that I had … two months. Oh, and there was only one applicant.

I was offered no guidelines, no style sheet, no system to follow, no advice. Just “write a paper – you have two months.” I executed what I considered to have been a thorough job. I researched the local media market, the radio market, the applicant’s business plan, everything I could find. This was my first project. I wanted to impress my boss. There were days when Vick asked me why I was using the office printer so much, seemingly oblivious to the demands of evidential research. After six weeks, I gave him my draft document and asked him to mark it up so that I could understand which parts he wanted to keep or discard. He invited me into his office to discuss my work. Had I done well? Er, no. He went ballistic. He screamed and shouted at me.

“This isn’t what I wanted,” Vick yelled. “This isn’t an Authority Paper. What do you think this is? Can’t you write?”

He stormed out of his office and marched down the corridor shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit!” at the top of his voice. It was left to me to presume that our meeting must have ended, without me having uttered a word.

I was shocked. And very confused. I believed that I could write … and write quite well. Vick had read my CV and knew my articles about the radio and music industries had been published in trade and consumer publications, some of which had employed me as sub-editor or editor. My job application here had even required me to submit a one-page essay entitled ‘The London Radio Scene’. During my job interview, Vick had not critiqued my supposed inability to write. Why would I have been appointed?

Later that day, Vick’s deputy marched up to my desk and requested a meeting. In their rehearsed good cop/bad cop roleplay, Vick apparently judged Neil Stock the best man to ‘offer’ to bang my report into the requisite, undefined shape and style of ‘Authority Papers’. I did not bother to argue. Stock was eminently qualified by having studied American Literature, having never worked in commercial radio and, to the best of my knowledge, having never published an article about the radio industry. Visually, he was Beaker to Vick’s Doctor Bunsen Honeydew. Stock’s frigid demeanour recalled the android Bishop in the movie ‘Aliens’ whose ‘humanity’ module might never have been activated.

Stock occupied a spacious office on the opposite side of the corridor that resembled one of those IKEA showrooms where everything looks too perfectly arranged to be real and the desk computer turns out to be fake. I sat facing him across a desk ring-fenced with multiple stationery pots filled with over-sharpened pencils of varying hardness and a row of staplers, holepunches, paperclips and elastic bands. Stock’s patronising spiel, instructing someone twice his age how to write, floated off into the ether above my head. My eyes were scanning the office carpet for evidence of vomit stains where my colleagues had alleged his predecessor had been found unconscious following an over-liquid lunch. After that incident, Stock’s Best Man had been shoehorned into a board-level job in a commercial radio group, a responsibility which had proven so successful that I had overheard Vick on the phone to the CEO trying to save his prodigy’s bacon.

One week later, Stock gave me back the document. It still had my name on the front but almost nothing within remained of my six weeks’ graft. Every single table, graph and map had been expelled. Every reference to a specific number (such as Census population data) had been rounded and referred to as ‘approximately’ or ‘about’. All evidential sources such as media and radio market data had been expunged. My sentences had been conjoined with ‘and’ or commas until each contained at least seventy words. Some paragraphs filled almost a whole A4 page. Subjective adjectives had been attached to references to individuals, tainting them with judgement as to whether they were in or out of favour with The Radio Authority. This was writing, Jim, but not as we journalists know it.

I asked Stock to remove my name from his revised document as it no longer resembled anything that I had written. He refused. I asked that his name be added to mine as joint author. He refused. We may have been sitting opposite each other at his desk, but each of us had landed there from different worlds. My quarter-century in journalism had been spent explaining facts. His few years in this civil service madhouse seemed to have been spent obscuring facts. If his university had offered a module titled ‘Using Words as A Weapon: How to Write Baffling Prose’, he would certainly have scored an ‘A’.

Naturally, Stock’s boss David Vick was happy with the result. It looked and read just like something he would have written himself. I was required to present the paper to a monthly Members’ Meeting, reading a pre-approved two-minute script from which I was forbidden to deviate. Neither was I allowed to use audio-visual aids in my presentation. Vick had instructed me not to contribute to the ensuing debate unless a specific, factual question was addressed to me directly. I saw absolutely no point to my presence at the meeting. It achieved only what the organisation’s officers had carved up beforehand. The licence was awarded to the sole applicant. My ‘work’ in The Radio Authority was merely to keep up its appearance of objectively regulating the radio industry.

Months later, an uncharacteristic silence broke out amongst my colleagues in our crowded office. We had already been told that our regulator was about to be merged into a new, bigger government organisation. What we had not learnt until then was that our new manager was to be … Neil Stock. There was stunned silence as the news sunk in.

This was the Neil Stock who, on arrival at work each day, would email his ‘team’ a ‘Pop Quiz’ question that required an emailed response within the hour. When I refused to play this childish game, he complained that I was not a team-player. But I had no interest in flaunting my encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music earned from having created radio station formats over several decades. Mike Read was not my hero.

This was the Neil Stock who refused to attend the quarterly team-building, afterwork social visits to a local pub or restaurant that our employer mandated. Management apparently thought it was insufficient that we already spent forty hours every week in each other’s company in one cramped office. During one such social evening, my colleagues expressed astonishment that I had not been made to take a UK geography test before my appointment, which had been required of them. It was as if knowing the county town of Rutland proved a perfect substitute for non-existent knowledge of the radio industry that a new employee would be regulating.

This was the Neil Stock who only popped into our office briefly if there was something specific that he wanted to address to one of us. Watercooler chat, small talk, even casual morning greetings or afternoon farewells were apparently foreign concepts. Enter his office at 4.30 and he would be enthusiastically sharpening his huge pencil collection on a desk uncluttered by a single folder or sheet of paper. Enter his office at 4.50 and he was already being whisked by train back to his IKEA showroom house and wife in Cambridgeshire.

This was the Neil Stock who chose not to inform his own underlings that he had been appointed their new manager. Neither did we learn it from our then manager, David Vick. The news reached us that fateful day as part of a general personnel update email from the new regulator Ofcom. Once again, our managers were demonstrating their non-communication skills.

Our office was not the only one rendered speechless by the news. A hush spread over the whole floor as our colleagues digested that Stock would not just be managing our team, but most of the 40-odd staff about to be transferred from The Radio Authority to Ofcom. What a meteoric rise through the ranks for someone so, er … inexperienced? In 2000, Stock had been judged the best man to replace his Best Man. By 2003, somebody somewhere considered Stock the best man to manage Britain’s commercial radio licensing system, a job that had not been advertised publicly.

We were left to presume that Vick must have decided to take retirement since it was plainly evident that his nineteenth-century style of management – writing everything longhand, never touching a computer keyboard, bellowing from his office at his two full-time administrative assistants whenever he needed to send/receive/print an email – would have proven awkwardly Luddite within the determinately twenty-first century Ofcom.

The pair’s Hawkins/Harker partnership was about to be dissolved. Meet the new boss …

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-best-man-for-job-2003-neil-stock.html]

The rubber stamp men … and women : 2002 : Members Meetings, The Radio Authority

 “Did you enjoy your day off yesterday?” a member of my team asked me one morning.

“Yesterday?” I enquired, slightly confused.

“Yes,” he continued. “You weren’t in your office all day so we guessed you had taken the day off.”

Ah! Now it began to make more sense.

“Unfortunately, I was not off yesterday,” I replied. “I was in meetings all day in the boardroom upstairs.”

That was true. It had been just one of a multitude of similar days when, from my arrival at eight until evening, I had bounced from one meeting to another, and then another. Had I even eaten lunch? We were launching a new London radio station, KISS FM, where I was the only member of the management team with prior commercial radio experience. My page-a-day diary was necessarily crammed with all sorts of meetings. In some I had to make presentations, some I had to chair and some I had to minute. For many months, there never seemed time to do real ‘work’ in my job because of all these meetings.

My initiation into the world of apparently endless meetings had happened a decade earlier. As sabbatical deputy president of a student union, my life was sacrificed to committees, sub-committees, executive committees and student councils, listening to and engaging with student activists who loved nothing more than to talk and talk. I had also been nominated as the student representative on umpteen university committees, in which twenty to thirty grey academics and administrators sat around a massive wooden boardroom table for hours, leafing through the half-ream of agenda papers before them in an effort to stay awake. Much of my life for one year comprised evenings spent punching holes in paperwork and filing it in huge ring binders for posterity.

Two decades later, starting my first job within a government ‘quango’, I anticipated that I would once again be drowned in meetings and sub-committees. I soon discovered that, at The Radio Authority, nothing happened … literally. I was crammed into an office the size of a modest living room with five colleagues sat at trestle tables around the perimeter, obliging each of us to face a wall or the only window. Filling the middle of the room was an overlarge high storage unit with map drawers that nobody seemed to use. This anti-social working arrangement could have been an approximation of the organisation’s management system.

The first day at a new job, you except to be left alone to familiarise yourself with your desktop computer and your new surroundings. However, you do not expect the one hundred subsequent days to repeat like Groundhog Day. For three whole months, I was given nothing to do. There seemed to be no day-to-day workflow system, no meetings, no distribution of tasks amongst members of my department. I could have come to work every day and idly stared at a blank computer screen. Nobody ever asked me what I was doing, or not doing, so I busied myself writing an economic analysis of ownership concentration levels in local radio markets. Before starting, I had asked the finance department if they had already written such a document. They looked at me like I was crazy. I was already wondering why the required start date for this post had proven so urgent.

Then, out of the blue, development director David Vick, who had interviewed me for the job, asked me to attend The Radio Authority’s next ‘Members Meeting’. Once a month, senior managers like him met formally with Members, six men and three women handpicked from ‘the great and the good’ by somebody somewhere as representatives of the ‘public’ whose taxes were funding this regulator. Having drawn my salary for three months but contributed zero so far, I was keen to impress somebody/anybody that I was capable. I read the meeting agenda and accompanying documents, including one written by a Radio Authority colleague recommending the award of a new local radio licence. I researched thoroughly the issues for discussion.

At the meeting in the boardroom, Radio Authority managers were lined up along one side of the oval table, with Members seated along the other. I was not intimidated. I had attended dozens of meetings like this elsewhere over the years. I sat at one end of the table and kept my counsel until the recommendation to award the local radio licence was discussed. Once my colleague had finished presenting his paper, I raised my hand. The Member appointed as chairman, Richard Hooper, was sat at the far end of the table and asked me to speak. There was a look of collective astonishment on the managers’ faces. But I held the belief that we were all in a genuine meeting … together. I simply had some factual information to contribute.

I had brought along my own analysis of government statistics that demonstrated a high level of poverty in the locality for which this local radio licence was about to be awarded. When compared with similar stations, I concluded there would be insufficient advertising revenues to support a standalone licensee within this relatively small and poor locality. I suggested that it made more economic sense to award the new licence to an existing neighbouring radio station that could then expand its coverage area, rather than offer it to a new business that appeared very likely to fail. The lay Members listened and understood my arguments, rejected my colleague’s recommendation to award the licence to a standalone applicant and accepted my alternative solution to reward a competing neighbouring applicant.

After the meeting ended, I felt pleased that I had made a valuable contribution on the first occasion I had been involved in any kind of discussion or meeting within the organisation. I was not feeling smug but I did enjoy the sense that my skills were finally being valued and had influenced decision-making. This sense of positivity lasted less than a minute. Barrelling down the corridor behind me was the manager who had invited me.

“What the hell did you think you were you doing in that meeting?” David Vick demanded.

“I was contributing to the decision-making with a factual analysis that was not in my colleague’s report,” I replied. This appeared to make him even angrier. I will omit the swear words:

“You were not asked to speak. You were not expected to speak. Nobody asked your opinion. Nobody wanted your opinion. That licence was nothing to do with you. Had I asked you to be involved in it? No. So what the hell did you think you were doing?”

Vick was very angry and not afraid to demonstrate it. I had thought I was proving my worth at work, while he seemed to be thinking the opposite.

“What I am going to tell Ralph?” he was shouting at me. “How on earth can I explain to Ralph what just happened?”

I knew immediately that he was referring to Ralph Bernard, chief executive of Britain’s largest commercial radio owner, GWR Group plc, that operated dozens of local licences across the country … awarded by The Radio Authority’s Members Meetings. The paper written by my colleague had recommended awarding this new licence to a local start-up in which GWR had agreed to take a minority shareholding. Over the years, I had witnessed this familiar story play out remarkably often: once a new local radio licensee failed financially, it would receive a buyout offer from its minority shareholder, usually a large radio group such as GWR. A decade earlier, I had watched minority shareholder EMAP plc take over KISS FM this way. The regulator did not like to be seen to be handing new local licences to the same handful of commercial radio groups … but that was the end result anyway.

“I have to phone Ralph now. This is going to be a very difficult conversation.” Vick was still shouting at me. “I hope you realise what you have done.”

I returned to my office, shaken but not upset. I had been invited to that meeting. I was asked to attend. What would have been the point if I had not contributed? When was a meeting not a meeting, according to my understanding of the definition of the word? Was I expected to sit there dumbly, merely observing bad decisions being made due to a lack of information or analysis? Apparently, the answer was yes.

Sat at my desk, I recalled my very first day in the job when David Vick had bizarrely instructed me: “Don’t talk to the people in your office about radio.”

I thought I must have misheard him and asked him to repeat it. No, what I had understood him to have said was totally correct. Vick went on:

“You know far more about radio than the other people in your office, so don’t talk to them about it.”

At the time, I was nonplussed. We were called The Radio Authority and we were responsible for regulating the commercial radio industry. How could I not talk about radio? Three months later, I was beginning to comprehend that I was employed in an organisation where being an ‘authority’ on the topic of radio was apparently not considered a virtue.

Later that fateful day, Vick called me to his office. He was calmer now but I was wary of saying anything that might stoke his rage again. He told me there were new rules that I would have to follow:

“When you are invited to attend another Members Meeting, I want you to submit a script to me in advance of what you are going to say. It must be precisely two minutes long. In the meeting, you must say exactly the words on that script that I approve and absolutely nothing else. You must not talk about any other subject in the meeting and the only reason to speak at all will be if somebody directly asks you a question. Have you got that?”

“Yes, I understand,” I said sheepishly. It was hard not to conclude that the angry man in front of me appeared to be utterly bonkers. I remained grateful that he had offered me a much-needed job, but I now understood that I was employed in a madhouse where the definitions of ‘meeting’ and ‘decision making’ appeared to be completely alien to my own experiences working in commercial businesses. I just hoped I could survive this nightmare.

Only one other person employed at The Radio Authority while I was there had prior experience in the commercial radio industry. It was alleged by my colleagues that he had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown after starting there and had been off work for months. Why was I not at all surprised?

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-rubber-stamp-men-and-women-2002.html]