Grant Goddard – Page 9 – Grant Goddard : radio broadcasting expert : media analyst : writer/author

Just my imagination running away … to Australia : 1972 : Eric Hall, Strode’s School

A schoolboy babysitting two infant-school-age girls at night? Quick, call the police! Notify child protection services! … But wait! This was the 1970’s. That boy was fourteen-year-old me. Back then, few would have jumped to the (mistaken) conclusion that anything untoward was happening. How naïve we seemed to be!

My mother had few close friends and I fail to recall how she had come to know Cathy Bingham, who had recently moved into a new-build house at the far end of Byron Avenue, less than a kilometre away within our suburban housing development. Seeking a means to supplement my meagre pocket money, my mother had suggested to Cathy I could babysit her two young daughters if she and her husband wished to go out for an evening. I could only help out on Friday or Saturday as my school set two homework subjects each weekday and required my efforts to be submitted the following weekday. The resultant babysitting arrangement worked well and I was grateful for Cathy’s generous compensation which funded my purchase of more reggae and soul records.

Cathy was a genuinely lovely person who had moved to Camberley from Peru where her husband had apparently been posted by his employer. Prior to the birth of her daughters, she had had a job driving new cars from their Detroit production line down the Pan-American Highway for delivery to dealerships in Lima. I considered this a ‘dream job’ since my father had already stimulated my interest in American cars and I longed for the day I would be able to drive long distances myself.

One babysitting evening, once the girls had been put to bed upstairs, I spent the remainder of my time sat on the sofa in front of the television. I watched a recent British movie named ‘Walkabout’ about a father who suddenly abandons his two children in the middle of the Australian outback. The scenery was spectacular and the story fascinating of the children’s chance meeting with an Aboriginal boy who demonstrates his traditions to them and saves their lives. It made a huge impression as my first television experience of Australia beyond the formulaic ‘Skippy’ series.

I had already leafed through many large-format photo books of faraway lands, including Australia, whilst sat at a desk in the first-floor reference section of the local public library. I had been impressed by the mud-brick high-rise buildings in Yemen, the desert libraries of Timbuktu and the Ayers Rock sandstone monolith. Along the same Dewey Decimal shelf, I had recently discovered the first ‘Lonely Planet’ guide as a Roneo-ed set of booklets hand stapled together. All these readings had stimulated my desire to travel abroad, since most of our family holidays to date had been taken within Britain.

Australia was also on my mind after a recent chance meeting with a young Australian girl who was working in the bookshop on Station Road in Egham. I had made an earlier visit to the shop in 1970 to order a book (that changed my life) documenting American black music, ‘The Sound of The City’, which I had seen mentioned in its author Charlie Gillett’s weekly column in ‘Record Mirror’ magazine. My second visit was to exchange several ‘book tokens’ that had been awarded me as ‘School Prizes’. On that occasion, shop assistant Jan Somerville spent considerable time helping me choose paperbacks that might interest me, including ‘Exodus’, ‘Dune’ and ‘Topaz’. Her advice was particularly useful as I had no idea what to buy, my parents having almost no adult books at home.

I was instantly smitten with Jan as she was the first interesting girl around my age (well, she must have been two years older) I had met and, to my lusty adolescent eyes, she resembled heartthrob Susan Dey from ‘The Partridge Family’. She explained that her family had temporarily moved to Britain and she had found a job for a year in Egham’s large, well-stocked independent bookshop. After that, during my school lunch-hour, I would pop into the shop and chat with her regularly. When she finally returned to Australia with her parents, she gave me a slip of paper with her address in Clontarf, New South Wales. I was sad to lose my first ‘schoolboy crush’ but we wrote to each other for a while and she sent me a small toy koala which I have kept since. I had hoped to visit her one day … but life intervened.

All this explains why, on the occasion that English Language homework required me to write an essay about a landscape I had never visited, I naturally chose Australia. My teacher, Eric Hall, was a young man (relative to the majority of ancients that taught us) who wore tweed suits and was eager to show off what he probably believed was his sardonic wit. However, I read his attitude as sarcasm, a quality I found less than endearing after having arrived at the school wholly ignorant of his subject. Many of my classmates had previously attended private ‘prep’ schools and already knew what a noun, adjective, verb and tense were. I had never heard these terms because my state junior school had been keen to develop our creative skills rather than grammatic pedantry. I faced a steep learning curve at Strode’s School.

When I started my third year, I had been disappointed to be told that Mister Hall would be our ‘form master’, with whom we were required to register our attendance twice a day. My already poor rapport with him deteriorated considerably when, without prior consultation, my father impulsively booked a package holiday at an Egham travel agency for me and him to visit Florida during school term to witness the launch of an Apollo space mission. As a result, my mother was angry that her husband had not discussed this indulgence beforehand and had apparently demonstrated no desire to be accompanied by her and my two siblings. Mister Hall was outraged to be informed of my impending absence as a fait accompli and insisted that my trip be cancelled, which my father refused. Subsequently, my relationship with not only Mister Hall but most of the school administration was soured. I was never to be awarded a further School Prize.

At the end of our English Language period, Mister Hall walked around our desks, handing back each of our essay books … except for mine. After returning to his seated position at the front of our classroom, he said:

“You can all go now. Except for Goddard, who I want to see afterwards.”

Now what I had I done wrong? He opened my workbook to the page of my latest essay and pointed at it disparagingly.

“Your essay about Australia was very descriptive and incredibly detailed. Have you ever visited Australia?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well, I just do not understand how you could have written about somewhere you have never experienced with so much detail about its landscape and features,” he commented sourly.

I had no idea what he was trying to imply. I had worked very hard to produce a good essay and now he was trying to say obliquely that my work was too good? How was I expected to explain that?

“I’m interested in Australia,” I said. “I have seen films and read books about it, which is the reason I chose to write my essay about it.”

“Well, I am afraid I do not believe that you wrote this essay,” said Mister Hall angrily. “I have come to the conclusion that you must have copied it from some book. That is the reason that I have had to give you a fail mark for this piece of work and, naturally, this will be reflected in your end-of-term report.”

I was horrified. How could Mister Hall be so cruel? I understood he had never liked me, but I had never contemplated he could be so nasty to a student who had worked as hard as they could in order to be successful in his subject. From then on, despite my regular ranking as one of the top five students within my year of sixty pupils, Mister Hall’s comments in my termly school reports were consistently negative. His and a few other teachers’ similar attitudes to me during my seven years at Strode’s coloured my entire secondary school experience. For the first time, I learnt what it meant to be despised by an adult in a position of authority. It was an incomprehensible change from my previous positive experiences at Cordwalles Primary School, where my incredible teachers had been generous to a fault with their mentoring of me and my classmates.

I had no choice but to soldier on at school under the tutelage of Mister Hall. I took the GCE ‘O level’ exam in English Language the following year and achieved an ‘A’ grade. Three years later, I passed the ‘Use of English’ exam required of entrants to Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Before those subsequent academic successes, my life was changed irrevocably later in 1972 when my father deserted our family to run off with a newly married teenage bride who lived a few doors away on our street. The brief trip to Florida was the final occasion I spent time with my father until the day he died. Not only did he unknowingly negatively impact my school life for the remaining four years, but he knowingly impacted my family’s lives forever. The evening that I had chanced to watch the father in ‘Walkabout’ maroon his children in the outback was paralleled only months later in my own life when my father walked away from his three children, condemning them to an unexpectedly different future.

Despite these personal setbacks, Cathy Bingham’s experience of driving through the American continent in the 1960’s continued to inspire my ambitions. In 1984, I hatched a plan to hitchhike from the United States down the Pan-American Highway to Nicaragua to visit my friend Tony Jenkins who was there providing news reports to ‘The Guardian’ and ‘BBC World Service’. I visited the London embassies of all the countries I would pass through and obtained the necessary visas. However, this plan was stymied by a six-month wait for the BBC to inform me whether my second-round interviews for separate producer jobs at ‘Radio One’ and ‘Radio Two’ had been successful. In the end, I was rejected for both. Angry that my travel plans had been thwarted by the excessive wait, I enquired why to BBC Personnel, only to be informed by its employee that in future I would need to prove to interviewers that “you are one of us”.

Evidently, I never was.

[8mm film of Eric Hall by classmate & dear friend Martin Nichols]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/just-my-imagination-running-away-to.html]

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you hobnob : 1980 : Durham University Careers Advisory Service

“The Treasury,” said one.

“Banking,” responded another.

“The Civil Service,” replied another. It was my turn.

“Radio,” I said.

There was stunned silence. I felt all eyes turn toward me. Time seemed to pause while my colleagues processed their apparent incomprehension.

“What do you mean by ‘radio’?” eventually enquired the Economics professor in whose dark, dingy Old Elvet office our tutorial group was meeting.

I was somewhat taken aback. Who does not understand the word ‘radio’? Had he never read about Marconi? I grappled to maintain my decorum. I looked around at my fellow students dressed in three-piece suits or dress shirts or lavender cardigans with slacks over shiny black shoes. They appeared to have already been moulded into mini-me versions of their fathers (naturally there were no women). Their appearances were as dull and middle-aged as the careers they had said they desired. I was sporting my usual cheesecloth shirt, flared jeans and platform shoes, de rigueur 1970’s student-wear. Evidently, I inhabited a different dimension from my colleagues. Had Ann MacGregor twiddled the dials of her SAGE computer and sent me back a whole century to an era before radio had been invented? Where were Doug and Tony? I hoped they had not landed the other side of the street, inside Durham Prison.

“’Radio’ as in ‘broadcasting’,” I answered, struggling to control my patience, “where I want to produce programmes for a radio station.”

“Oh … kay,” said the tutor with the weariness of a grizzled academic attempting to explain monetarism to the village idiot. “So why are you here studying economics?”

“Because economics interests me,” I replied.

That was my second faux pas of the day. I looked around again and realised that my fellow students were not there primarily because of any enthusiasm for the subject. They were simply fulfilling their destiny, determined from the day they had been born into families who had then spent huge sums over two decades on their private education. For my colleagues, a job within the top echelons of government or commerce was not a career ambition. It was a birth right. It was simply the ‘payback’, the ‘return on investment’ expected as reward for the six-figure sum that Tarquin’s parents had spent to secure his social status. He and his former school chums felt entitled to their guaranteed shiny futures.

In the 1970’s there was no degree course in radio. No degree course in media. I was amongst Britain’s 94% of children who had attended state schools. Now I was amongst the 14% of the population to attend one of the country’s 45 universities. I had been forced to choose the academic subject in which I performed best at my school … and in which I was interested. With minimal career guidance, I had selected the university which I believed offered the best reputation. What nobody had advised me was that Durham was stuffed to the gills with toffs whose academic record at private schools had not proven exemplary enough to win them a place at Oxford or Cambridge. As someone who was certainly not ‘privileged’, had I wished to spend three years in a ‘Chariots of Fire’ theme park?

In my tutorial group, when one fellow student had spoken for the first time, I failed to understand a single word he had said. I assumed he must have been speaking some unidentifiable foreign language. Then I looked around and noticed my fellow students nodding in agreement as if they had understood him perfectly. I was confused. The next time he spoke, I struggled harder to comprehend his speech and managed to pick out the odd word in English. Only then did I realise that he habitually spoke in an upper-class accent so cut-glass as to prove almost incomprehensible to someone like me. Hand on heart, I am not exaggerating. I would have understood every word spoken by The Queen, but this young man’s speech was so stilted as to be easily mistaken for a parody of an upper-class twit.

I cannot recall a single conversation about economics with a fellow student on my course. Our academics never asked us to work in project groups. The toffs were being groomed to assume their rightful place as ‘captains’ of industry or government, for which there was no apparent necessity for them to converse with someone from the lower classes. It was evident to them from my accent, dress sense and demeanour that I resembled the servants or the ‘help’ their families employed at their mansions. I was similarly invisible to them, not having the ‘right stuff’ conferred by a private education, as had more than 90% of students at Durham. Worse, I betrayed no ambition to try and join their ‘club’. Unlike them, my parents had paid nothing toward my education, which made my chosen career very much my own affair.

I already subscribed to ‘Broadcast’ magazine and bought ‘The Guardian’ on Monday for its media job advertisements. Now it was time to visit the university’s Careers Advisory Service to locate suitable job vacancies. Its one-room office in a modern two-story building in Palmers Garth was filled with standalone shelf units of file holders, each collecting documents from one employer. I made an appointment to talk with an advisor but the earliest date was more than a month away. During the waiting period, I worked my way along every file on every shelf, searching for any employer within the media. What surprised me then was how few of the 4,000 Durham students seemed to require the facility. What I failed to understand was that most jobs for the upper classes were the outcome of who they knew or who their family socialised with, rather than requiring the bother of a formal application.

On the day of my appointment, I brought along my articles published in the student newspaper in a portfolio I had created from sheets of thick A3 black card stitched together. The advisor I met was an elderly woman with grey hair and John Lennon-style wire-frame glasses, like Granny from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’. Asked about my career choice, I replied it was ‘radio’.

“We cannot offer you any help if you choose to pursue a career in the media,” she said sternly, staring at me over the top of her spectacle frames. What? I felt outrage that I had waited more than a month for her so-called ‘advice’.

“But I started producing radio programmes seven years ago in London and …” I told her.

“I’m sorry, but getting a job in the media is all about the people you know,” she interrupted and then stood up to go.

I was abruptly left alone, not even having been offered the opportunity to show her my portfolio. Or explain to her the details of my prior radio experience. Or my election as editor of the student newspaper. Or my election as editor of the annual student handbook. Or my election as deputy president of the students’ union. Or my success arguing with the University for an unprecedented increase in the student union’s subscription income. Or my success turning around the student food shop from loss to profit. None of that seemed to matter. I was appalled by the ‘careers advice’ I had just been given. My long awaited ‘interview’ had lasted less than a minute.

Eight months later, I received a letter from the Careers Advisory Service. I presumed it must be a circular sent to former students to update its records. But no! It was a personal letter requesting my help to advise an undergraduate who desired a career in radio and asking me to show him around my workplace. My initial thought was to tear this letter into little pieces and throw it on the living room fire. How very dare they! … However, a few days later, my benevolence got the better of me and I realised I should help a student who might be in a similar situation to mine not so long ago, regardless of how much contempt I felt for the letter’s sender.

I now had a full-time job at Metro Radio, the commercial music radio station in Newcastle, which I had achieved by responding to an on-air announcement I had heard asking for candidates. The vacancy had not been advertised in either ‘Broadcast’ magazine or ‘The Guardian’. I resolved to contact the student and arrange to chat and show him around the station’s premises. Whether he went on to pursue a career in radio I never discovered.

By then, I had learnt precisely how ‘selective’ the university was about recruiting students. In 1978/9, I had been the student representative attending Durham University’s ‘Admissions & Matriculation Committee’ where statistical reports showed that some years certain of its colleges had accepted not a single student educated in a state school. These data were never published.

Four decades later, surely things must have changed? Er, maybe not. A 2022 headline in the Durham student newspaper screamed ‘Durham has lowest state school intake of any UK university’ and quoted student Keely Brown:

“… many [Durham University students from state schools] have no prior knowledge of what awaits them at university, let alone experiences of classism or discrimination and, alongside feelings of imposter syndrome, it can feel like Durham isn’t the place for them.”

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/it-aint-what-you-do-its-way-that-you.html]

Sit-in here in limbo : 1986 : Community Service Volunteers & Radio Thamesmead

“It’s just like the multinational pharmaceutical businesses deliberately designing toothpaste tubes so that you cannot squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste,” I blurted.

There was stunned silence while my colleagues seated on a circle of chairs in the middle of a low-ceiling conference room stared at me blankly. Was this young man mad? Perhaps I was. I cannot recall to which discussion topic my poorly chosen conspiracy theory analogy was intended to refer, but I clearly remember the reaction. I was present because a letter from Ric, our manager, had instructed me to attend. I had no comprehension what this meeting was intended to achieve. By the time I opened my mouth, the gathering had seemed somewhat pointless.

I had already been employed for several months of a one-year contract by the two-decade old charity Community Service Volunteers [‘CSV’], but this half-day event was the first time I had visited its sprawling offices in King’s Cross. Like me, each of the dozen people present was supervising a job creation scheme within a local radio station. Their ‘Action Desks’ were funded by government and sponsored by CSV, each employing a couple of low-wage staff to answer phone enquiries from the public about lost dogs, community events and volunteering opportunities. Unlike me, every invitee present was female because, in the pre-desktop-computer dark ages, scripts had to be prepared by Action Desk staff on a typewriter in order to be read on-air by professional radio presenters. In essence, CSV offered broadcasters its staff at zero cost to generate the ‘community’ content required by their stations’ broadcast regulations.

I was different, not just because I was male and talked crazy ideas, but because it quickly emerged that I was the only person present with prior radio experience, and I was not operating one of these ancillary Action Desks. Instead, I was supervising a larger team of paid CSV staff who worked alongside non-professional volunteers managing London’s only legal community radio station, ‘Radio Thamesmead’. Although ‘history’ (a.k.a. Wikipedia) records Britain’s ‘first’ community radio station as not having launched until 2002, significant but little-known antecedents did exist. In 1976, many of Britain’s 28 post-war ‘new towns’ had been resourced with a community radio station, initially funded by each location’s New Town Development Corporation to broadcast on a then state-of-the-art analogue cable system.

However, by 1986, only two of those pioneering radio stations had survived. Why? Having myself lived/worked in these new towns, I witnessed first-hand the grand objectives of the 1946 New Towns Plan having never been completed, leaving residents without the promised shopping centres, community facilities and sportsgrounds. Their local cable systems suffered poor maintenance and many households now subscribed to satellite TV delivery instead. In the 1980’s, Development Corporations were wound up by government and their funded projects, including community radio, were abandoned. Did the Cable Authority, which inherited regulation of the remaining community radio stations, publish an evaluation of the evident failure of the 1970’s ‘cable radio experiment’? If so, I never saw one. Its sole statement on the subject was that “community cable radio stations tended to be longer-lived than the [cable] television stations, and two still survive”.

Radio Thamesmead had endured only as a result of its job creation staff and partial funding of overheads provided by CSV. A government agency named Manpower Services Commission operated the station’s ‘Community Enterprise Programme’ for which staff were recruited from the ranks of the unemployed and contracted to CSV, whose expenses it then reimbursed monthly. In this way, money flowed from government to the Commission, then to CSV which then paid me and my team’s monthly salaries in arrears. However, there was one month when our pay failed to arrive on time. I phoned CSV which explained there had been a temporary problem and it would come soon. One week later, still none of us had been paid. This created a practical problem because our low pay was barely sufficient to cover our work expenses. I had to endure a daily commute of more than two hours each direction by coach and train which ate up the majority of my salary. I phoned CSV again and was offered only more excuses.

The following Monday morning, instead of commuting to Thamesmead, I arrived unannounced at the CSV office and demanded to meet its finance director. How could I manage a team of staff who were essential for keeping this little community radio station on-air if they were not being paid for their work? After initially being offered further excuses, it was eventually confided in me that the CSV staff member responsible for managing the finances of these job creation schemes had disappeared from its headquarters along with the funds received from government to pay our wages. I was angry. I had a responsibility to ensure my team was paid. CSV had a responsibility to fulfil its employment contracts by paying me and my team. Otherwise, it would breach those contracts and open itself to legal action.

I told the finance director that I intended to stay in his office until a solution was organised in order for us to be paid. Mine was a one-man sit-in protest. I made myself comfortable in the low chair for guests in his office, listening to my Walkman and reading a book I had brought along. Due to my long daily commutes, I was familiar with sitting for hours alone, entertaining myself with cassette recordings of the ‘John Peel Show’ from ‘BBC Radio One‘. That day, as every weekday, at daybreak I had caught the first scheduled coach into London from the London Road bus stop in Camberley. After a further two hours having sat in this office, which had been unoccupied after my tirade, I needed to use the toilet. I rose from the chair …

The next thing I remembered was opening my eyes, feeling the carpet beside my face and realising I was laid out on the floor of the office. I had no idea what had happened. My head was hurting like crazy. I felt very dizzy. I managed to crawl along the floor on all fours into the corridor where I could hear voices talking. I headed in their direction and crawled through the doorway of an office where my sudden appearance at floor level must have shocked the two women sat inside at their desks. Something catastrophic must have happened, but what exactly?

It transpired that, when I had risen from my chair in the finance office, my head had hit a bookshelf drilled into the wall directly above me which, in my initial anger, I had not noticed when starting my sit-in several hours earlier. I must have suffered concussion, though it was unknown how long I had been unconscious because nobody seemed to have entered or passed the office despite its open door. All I could recall was a vision in my head of my spirit travelling through space with bright lights passing rapidly to left and right, similar to a sequence in the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. I could now feel a large bump on the top of my head and I remained dizzy and incoherent. An ambulance was called and I was whisked away for tests in a London hospital. Following several hours under observation, I was released in late afternoon.

CSV had offered to pay for a taxi to take me home from the hospital. When I told them my destination would be my mother’s house thirty miles away in Surrey, they initially told me they could only deliver me to “my home”, not to a relative’s. I had to insist that I was commuting that distance daily as a result of having failed to find an affordable home to rent in London. They were putting up resistance but finally paid for my long £50 black cab ride all the way to Camberley. I rested the next day and took the painkillers prescribed by the hospital. When I phoned my workplace to explain my absence, my team were somewhat shocked and surprised to learn the bizarre outcome of my sit-in.

A few days later I felt well enough to return to work and, by Friday that week, my team were belatedly paid our overdue salaries by CSV. The problem never repeated. I never revisited the CSV office.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/sit-in-here-in-limbo-1986-community.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]

This is your early morning trunk call : 2004 : BBC World Service Trust, Cambodia

[Malene, BBC World Service Trust, Phnom Penh, 2004]

I pull back the bedroom curtains and, from my window, see a huge elephant ambling along the promenade above the Mekong River. I know it must be 6:30 a.m. Every day at this time Sam Bo, the only elephant in Phnom Penh, walks to his day-job giving rides to children around the base of the city’s only hill. The street beside him is already filled with rush-hour traffic, since most shops and offices open daily at seven. Weaving in and out between huge chrome-clad and tinted windscreen four-by-fours driven by NGO staff and government officials are hundreds of motorbikes, which have totally replaced the humble bicycle as Cambodians’ preferred mode of transport. If there is a Highway Code, nobody seems to have read it. Confusingly, traffic travels in both directions on both sides of the road and often on the pavement too.

You see young schoolchildren riding motorbikes to school, and parents carrying three or four children precariously on a single bike. I have seen a motorbike carrying a full-size palm tree, another loaded with an iron girder which could easily have decapitated someone, and a bike carrying three dogs, one of which had its paws on the handlebars. Few people wear crash helmets, but most wear surgical masks (available in various colours from market stalls) to keep the dust, pollution and bugs out of their mouth and nose. Phnom Penh is the L.A. of Asia – nobody walks. What were once pavements are now clogged with parked cars, row upon row of parked bikes, impromptu shops, and families sat on plastic patio chairs selling petrol in old soft drink bottles from the kerb. The few people who walk around this city – the very poor and foreigners – are forced to negotiate the gutter, where we risk being hit by bikes coming at us from all directions.

In the morning, I work at the Women’s Media Centre of Cambodia where I am training four enthusiastic staff to produce a youth phone-in show that launches in May. They are very excited that the Centre has just been nominated for this year’s One World Broadcasting Trust Special Award for Development Media. The team share an office in the Centre which they have proudly designated the ‘BBC Office’, even though they are not BBC staff. The only drawback to working in this beautifully airy, purpose-built broadcast centre is that we are shadowed by a massive transmitter mast in the car park that broadcasts the Centre’s radio station ‘FM 102’ to 60% of Cambodia’s population. Although the custom is to remove one’s shoes before entering the building, staff have to don flip-flops to use electrical equipment such as the photocopier, or risk electrocution from the mast’s 10kW electrical field (as I found out to my peril).

At lunchtime, almost everyone goes home for a two-hour siesta that offers slight relief from the constant 35-degree daytime heat. I take lunch at the real BBC office – a villa whose walled garden includes luscious banana and mango trees – with the handful of the thirty local staff who live too far away to return home. Malene, one of two BBC housekeepers, purchases our food from the plethora of nearby pavement snack stalls, according to our culinary preferences, at a cost of less than a dollar each. Dishes are always accompanied by boiled rice or noodles, though Malene once glowed with pride when she presented me with a plate of chips procured from who knows where.

After a productive afternoon working at the Women’s Media Centre, I walk home past a school when a girl, aged about eleven and dressed in regulation white blouse and navy skirt, rushes out of the school gates, runs across the road and, without a hint of self-consciousness, starts a conversation with me in perfect English. After a minute, she sees a motorbike taxi stop outside her school gates, bids me farewell, jumps on the back (side-saddle, as is customary for girls) and waves goodbye as she disappears down the street. She inspires confidence that the future of this country will be bright in her generation’s hands.

[First published in ‘Ariel’, 11 May 2004, p.3]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/04/this-is-your-early-morning-trunk-call.html]

Gonna make you a star/czar : 2001 : James Murdoch, Star TV

“I am sorry, sir, but you are not allowed in the tea room,” the head chai-wallah said to me politely but firmly. “It is OUR job to bring you cups of tea when you request them.”

I was learning that, in India, self-service was a social crime and servitude was still alive and well. I had wandered into this tiny room from my desk a few steps away in my quest for an alternative to the thick, sugary tea I had been served, reminiscent of the disgusting, syrupy ‘Camp Coffee’ my mother always drank in the 1960’s. In the ‘tea room’ was only one big aluminium machine on which there was a single large red button. Press it holding your cup underneath and it delivered ready-sugared, ready-milked tea. No options. Henry Ford would have been proud. Admonished, I skulked back to my desk, visions dancing in my head of unavailable herbal teas and a former existence in which I was allowed to make my own beverages.

My desk was on the edge of an open-plan space occupied by ‘Channel [V]’, a music video station whose ratings were failing to compete with ‘MTV Asia’. It was not hard to see why. Peeking over my desk divider I would observe the young, educated, urban team’s enthusiasm for American and European rock music which, for India’s largely rural audience, probably sounded as if it came from another solar system. At one nearby desk, a hip young man spent most of his day quietly strumming an acoustic guitar as if he were Dylan (the rabbit). This wing of the top floor of ‘Star TV’s building in Mumbai was as laid back as I imagined the Hunter Thompson-period ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine office to have been.

Why was I there? The team creating India’s first commercial FM radio network was so nascent that we had no office space of our own as yet and had to be squeezed into other channels’ unused corners. On the opposite side of my work station usually sat my young colleague, Sandeep Kapur. He was absent today sorting out paperwork that would prove he was not dead. This required him to purchase classified advertisements in several newspapers stating that he was, in fact, very much alive. After the stated period during which he hoped no objections would be lodged, he could then apply to the government for a ‘Life Certificate’, necessary for transactions such as a mortgage. In India it was insufficient to BE alive; you required a piece of paper to prove it.

At the end of every morning, the tiffin-wallahs arrived to deliver hot homemade lunches in circular metal lunchboxes to male workers at their desks. Each box was colour-coded, numbered and inscribed with symbols to designate a particular desk on a specific floor of our office building in the Andheri district. All had been collected from homes and conveyed long distances by bicycle, train and car within the previous few hours. Those of us unlucky enough not to have wives at home, or to be one of the organisation’s few female staff, could buy subsidised cooked lunches in the building’s ground floor canteen, at its busiest on Friday when the weekly Chinese fare was sufficiently admired to persuade men to forgo their wives’ home cooking.

Today had been designated a special day because the several hundred staff working in the building were to be addressed by the Great Leader via a live television satellite link. At the appointed time, I pulled up a chair alongside the hip Channel [V] dudes in a semi-circle around one of the many television sets affixed high on the corridor walls of every floor. There was an air of anticipation because we had been promised/warned that a major corporate announcement was about to be made. Reorganisation? Closures? Would a pink-slipped Dylan have to find another gig where he could continue killing his workmates softly with his songs?

The satellite connection flickered and we could see a fixed camera focused on a young man sat behind an ordinary office desk in Hong Kong. It was the very moment he started talking inanimately to the camera that the event started to become somewhat surreal. This man was chairman and chief executive of a huge media conglomerate broadcasting multiple television channels by satellite across most of Asia. He apparently had important developments to share with his workforce of thousands. So why did he have the air of a wayward son forced by his father to smile for the annual family group Christmas photo? Why was he oozing the reluctance of a boy ordered to attend his stepmother’s birthday bash and to bring a suitably expensive present that had not been manufactured in China?

I could not supress a snigger. My young Indian colleagues turned and stared at me as if it were heretical not to show the utmost respect to our ultimate boss. I realised then that they probably knew next to nothing about the twenty-eight-year-old James Murdoch who was addressing us or how he had been appointed to this job. His track record hinted at his posting to the furthest reaches of the Murdoch galaxy. Aged fifteen, daddy Rupert had given him an internship on his Sydney newspaper, only to find him photographed by a competitor asleep on a sofa at a press conference. Later on, how disappointing it must have been to buy your son’s education at Harvard to study film and history, only for him to drop out in order to launch a rap music company … which later you have to bail out.

Murdoch’s Star TV operation based in Hong Kong had been losing US$200m a year by 2000 so, naturally, it was decided to send a boy to do a man-sized turnaround job. What was the son’s new strategy to stem these losses? We learned from the television address that Murdoch Junior had come up with the amazing idea of changing the business’ name from ‘Star TV’ to … ‘Star’. I kid you not. This was apparently necessary because ‘TV’ was an outdated, fuddy duddy business while the ‘internet’ was the medium of the future, despite it having already existed for almost two decades. So it required us all to wave goodbye to the ‘TV’ brand and say hello to ‘….’.

This sounded remarkably like a rehash of Murdoch Junior’s lobbying of Pops three years earlier with his strategy that the internet was where it was at, resulting in News Corporation having submitted a $450m bid for online startup ‘Pointcast’. I had been an enthusiastic early adopter in 1996 of its application which downloaded news stories using ‘push technology’ onto a computer about topics and from leading global newspapers personalised by each user. Working months on end in Russian isolation, I would spend evenings redialling hundreds of times until my laptop’s modem connected to a landline good enough to receive the latest news stories to devour. The phrase ‘never look a Murdoch horse in the mouth’ must have eluded the Pointcast board who stupidly rejected Junior’s vastly inflated offer. Two years later, it sold the business for a meagre $7m to a different company that shut the news service after one further year of operation. Pops had been miraculously saved from a half-billion sinkhole dug by Junior on that occasion.

Quite why Junior’s ongoing affair with the internet demanded us to interrupt our work schedule for half-an-hour I had no idea, but we watched until the screens went blank again and then walked away … totally underwhelmed. I returned to my desk and found that fairies had magic-ed a hardback notebook with the new ‘Star’ logo onto every desk in the building. The change made absolutely no difference to my work. We were planning to launch our radio network with the brand ‘Star FM’ (though this plan failed once we found a competitor had already bagged the name). When I left the building that evening, I had to avoid a crew with a crane who were busy swapping the huge illuminated logo over the front door to one with the new name. Apart from losing the ‘TV’, the logo still looked much the same to me.

Less than three years after having banished Junior to Hong Kong, Pops called him back to manage a different part of his empire in Britain, claiming that his son had executed a hugely successful turnaround strategy during his posting to Asia. One Australian newspaper ran this story in 2003 under the headline ‘James Murdoch didn’t shine at Star’.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/04/gonna-make-you-starczar-2001-james.html]

Life is a battlefield : 1966 : Barossa Common & Sandhurst Royal Military Academy

My childhood playground was a warzone. While my classmates were likely splashing around in inflatable pools in the safety of their back gardens, I would be on my bike following tanks on manoeuvres, riding alongside battalions marching across the countryside, and waving at camouflaged soldiers hiding in trenches with guns. Occasionally they waved back! Nights were regularly punctured by the sound of machine-gun fire and exploding shells, while my bedroom curtain would be illuminated by phosphorous flares. Outside our house, tanks would roll along the street between daytime traffic. Nobody took any notice. This was all perfectly normal.

I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, his bed under the window, mine opposite against a wall. On my bedside table were: a hyacinth bulb in a square cardboard box that I had to water daily up to the line printed on a little transparent side window; a tray of watercress seeds on blotting paper for a school project; and a little transistor radio with a white earpiece to listen to ‘Radio Luxembourg’ at night. Taped to the wall alongside the bed was a world map I had sent for from ‘The Daily Express’, on which every day I plotted the position of Francis Chichester’s boat ‘Gipsy Moth IV’ on its record-breaking solo round-the-world voyage. Under my bed was a line of Easter egg boxes which I rationed so that I could eke out my daily chocolate intake until the approach to Christmas.

Hidden against the wall behind the Easter eggs was a line of anonymous brown boxes in which I stored ammunition I had collected whilst biking through the warzone. More than a thousand identical brass-coloured bullet casings stacked in neat rows and, in an odds-and-ends box, a hoard of variously shaped larger artillery shells. Nobody knew about my hobby and they never would because my mum had little inclination to clean beneath our beds. I had no understanding then, but now I realise that most of the cartridges were blanks and had a tell-tale indentation showing they had been fired, though some bullets and shells remained unmarked and were probably still live.

Our house was 180 metres from the corner of Old Green Lane where two tarmacked, fenced tennis courts were hidden from the road by thick foliage. Their gates were never locked, enabling me and my mates from our street to bike there and mess around with racquets and tennis balls ‘borrowed’ from our parents. Only once did army officers dressed in whites arrive unexpectedly and admonish us for using military facilities. That was the most trouble we encountered the many times our mothers saw us off after breakfast during school holidays and weekends, not expecting us to return until ‘tea’ at the end of the afternoon. Anything could have happened to us … but it didn’t.

Although the front entrance to Sandhurst Royal Military Academy was manned, the back entrances were open, allowing non-Army residents to wander through the grounds. Every winter, my mother and I almost froze to death standing on the shore of one of the Academy’s two lakes while my father insisted on showing off his ice-skating prowess, learned as part of my parents’ earlier, unfulfilled plan to emigrate to Canada. My mother would occasionally swim in the indoor heated swimming pool where, if challenged, she would claim to be an officer’s wife, with me in tow expected to play the part of the officer’s son. Security was non-existent prior to the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign in 1973.

Adjacent to Sandhurst was ‘The Common’, 4192 acres of wooded common land shared by Camberley locals for recreation and the British Army for war games. The land was criss-crossed by perfectly straight paths and wide unmade roads dating from Roman times, though the ‘Caesar’s Camp’ archaeological site within was eventually determined to be an earlier Iron Age hill fort. One part of this vast landscape was where my father struggled to teach my mother to drive, me sandwiched between them, terrified on the front seat of our American Rambler station wagon. It was the blind leading the blind as my father had never taken a driving lesson. Conscripted to the Suez, he was ordered to drive trucks across the Egyptian desert, which he did as fast and aggressively as possible for two years. Demobbed with a British driving licence, his style of driving refused to change. How my mother subsequently passed her driving test I never understood.

The Common seemed enormous to me, bordered by the scary Broadmoor Hospital to the west and Windsor Castle to the east, eleven miles from our house, a destination my mother said she had reached on foot as a child accompanying her father. The only human imposition evident on the landscape was a single line of electricity pylons that crossed it, whose cables sizzled as you passed underneath. This noise scared me after having seen my father thrown across our living room when he recklessly drilled a hole in the wall above our house’s electricity fuse board. Now, whenever I watch 1960’s/1970’s Hammer historical movies with horse drawn carriages speeding along straight unmade routes through thick wooded land, I recognise The Common that I came to know so well.

Having access to so much wilderness so nearby to explore was idyllic as a child. There was the ‘Star Post’ raised lookout junction where ten perfectly straight paths intersected. There were army assault courses with tyres on ropes, wooden climbing frames alongside ditches full of water if you fell off. There were small ruined buildings that we could run in and around, chasing each other. There were trenches we could hide in, hoping to frighten a passing dogwalker or biker. Some parts were densely wooded while others were covered with undergrowth, offering scope for all sorts of games. Most of all, there were long straight unmade roads where we could reach great speeds on our bikes without the worry of traffic … except for the odd tank.

Before adventuring onto The Common, we would habitually meet up with our bikes on Old Green Lane, a long, wide, tree-lined straight cul-de-sac of huge residences for senior Sandhurst staff. At the far end was a ditch perpendicular to the road marking the border with the Sandhurst estate, rather like a miniature moat. In the ditch were black stag beetles, some of which grew to the size of an adult hand. My mates liked to poke them with sticks. I was more wary of wildlife after having spotted a large snake in the tiny front garden of our house and then having hidden indoors, peeking from the front window with my mother as my father hacked it to death with a spade. On another occasion, my father having asked me to bring him a tool from a tall cardboard box on our garage floor, I reached inside and a huge spider crawled up my bare arm. I screamed … and still do.

One morning, at our Old Green Lane rendezvous, my mates’ poking angered a huge stag beetle sufficiently for it to climb out of the ditch. This scared me, I climbed on my bike and rode away at top speed down the road, followed by my mates on their bikes shouting “It’s flying. It’s on your back. It’s attacking you.” I was absolutely petrified, reached the other end of the road, pulled my shirt off to find … nothing. My mates laughed at their cruel jape. I was not amused. I never spoke to them again or joined them biking across The Common. I travelled alone after that, having learnt a valuable life lesson. As Bob Marley sang: “your best friend [could be] your worst enemy”.

Not long after, my parents announced that we would finally be moving into the new house two miles away they had spent several years constructing. I had very few possessions to pack, but what should I do with the secret hoard of ammunition under my bed? I knew my bike-riding, bullet-collecting days over The Common were to end now. Initially I considered the easiest solution was to throw them in the dustbin for the weekly rubbish collection, but then I realised that the crushing machinery inside the dustcart might prove catastrophic. I had no ambition to be notorious as Britain’s youngest mass murderer … if I survived the explosion that would have destroyed our house.

Instead, I made dozens of journeys across The Common during the weeks prior to our move, carrying a portion of my artillery hoard each time and throwing it back onto the common land from whence it had been harvested. Nobody would notice because the Army demonstrated no interest in clearing their wargame debris from the landscape. Environmental damage? What was that?

Once we had moved house, I did not return to The Common for three decades. In the meantime, it appeared to have been named ‘Broadmoor to Bagshot Woods & Heaths’. Snappy! I was now taking morning runs alongside my brother-in-law. The deer were still there. The pathways were still in the same place. The electricity cables beneath the pylons still sizzled. The occasional camouflaged soldier with a gun could still be spotted hiding in a trench. And night-time gunfire and flares continued. Somewhere in the world there is always a war for which to prepare.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/04/life-is-battlefield-1966-barossa-common.html]

Living on the frontline : 1985 : Dave Asher, 21 Aharonson Street, Tel Aviv

[Dave Asher, 1985]

“There’s a bomb!” someone shouted. “There’s a bomb!”

I had just collected ‘NME’ from the newsagent that reserved it for me each week and had been lazily staring at a display of the new ‘designer’ stretch jeans in the windows of Gloria Vandebilt’s shop. All had been calm on the city’s main shopping street. Then suddenly it was chaos. People ran in all directions as if their lives depended upon it … which they did. Men, women and children screamed as they fled down side streets, their shopping bags flying behind them like parachutes. I was in amongst them, running at full pelt until I thought I was far enough away from the suspect device. How would I know? I didn’t. Did I hear an explosion? No. Was it really a bomb? I never knew.

On the walk home, I called in at the post office and joined a lengthy queue at the counter for overseas mail. Once I handed over my letter, the man behind the counter inspected it and adopted the withering look of an adult castigating a child … or a new immigrant.

“You cannot send this,” he said, visibly weighing up my ignorance. “We are at war.”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly, taking back my letter. “Okay. Thanks.”

Where I came from, you could send a letter anywhere in the world. I had spent much of my childhood doing just that, writing to radio stations as far away as China, Russia and Syria … and receiving replies. However, I was now learning that life is different during a time of war. I had written a fan letter to ‘Radio One’, an FM station in Beirut, Lebanon with English-speaking DJs who played the latest international hits, interspersed with familiar identification jingles stolen from ‘BBC Radio One’. Since radio transmissions ignore borders and war zones, I had become a committed listener in recent months. Now I had to return home with my unsent letter.

‘Home’ was temporarily a house at 21 Rehov Aharonson in Tel Aviv, where I was sleeping on the living room floor of the lower flat rented by fellow Brit Dave Asher. He was a well-known DJ in Israel from having presented the ‘Voice of Peace’ radio station’s breakfast show for several years. There were drawbacks to my accommodation. One morning I awoke to find ants nesting in my hair, while the nocturnal journeys of slugs from behind the adjacent bathroom sink gave me frequent ‘Alien’-type nightmares. But Dave had let me stay for free and I was grateful for his generosity. Weeks turned into months; how quick they pass.

Dave had a job as DJ at a city centre basement lesbian nightclub which he kept inviting me to attend. I did visit on one occasion, but was faced with the challenge of convincing two burly doormen that I wanted to enter a female-only club filled with scantily clad women because I said my male friend was working inside. Dave was also the DJ at a packed concert by American drag queen Divine in a huge former cinema, one of the most entertaining events I have attended. My crazy plan was to remain in Tel Aviv by finding a job in the record industry, for which Dave had helped me make contact with people he knew in the business. Pre-internet and pre-mobiles, this required a lengthy wait for replies to handwritten letters.

As summer was hot inside the flat, at the end of the day I would walk the short distance to the end of the street and sit on one of the public seats along the promenade. I could put my feet up on the sea wall, read the day’s ‘Jerusalem Post’ newspaper, watch the sun set over the Mediterranean and cool down in the onshore breeze. One day, a man seated near me asked if he could read my paper when I had finished with it. He spoke in Hebrew and I replied likewise.

By then, I had learnt enough of the language to hold a basic conversation. The frustration of not even understanding destinations displayed on the front of city buses had forced me to learn the Hebrew alphabet and numbers from a schoolbook. Every afternoon I developed my vocabulary by watching ‘Sesame Street’ (‘Rehov Sumsum’ in Hebrew) on television, where the first word I learnt was the ‘dustbin’ in which Grouch (Moishe Oofnik) lived.

I was suspicious of this man trying to strike up a conversation because, weeks earlier, I had been sunbathing alone on Tel Aviv beach when a man came and sat far too close to me on the sand and propositioned me for sex. He appeared to interpret my indignant refusal as merely ‘playing hard to get’ and continued to pester me, so I now avoided the beach and its potential for further unwanted attentions.

Thankfully this man on the promenade seemed different. Because our initial conversation had been in Hebrew, he found it hard to believe that I was not a recent immigrant to Israel struggling to learn my new language. After several rounds of questioning, he was eventually convinced that: I was not Jewish; I was British; I spoke English; and I was Christian. Only once these facts had been established did he have sufficient confidence to identify himself to me as a Christian Palestinian.

“Meet me here at the same time tomorrow,” he told me. “There is something I want to show you.”

Despite an incendiary device having recently exploded at the end of our street, thankfully with no casualties, I decided to risk meeting this man again the next day on the promenade. We walked to a walled compound a few hundred metres away where he spoke Arabic into the intercom, the gate opened and we walked through a garden into a house. He took me inside and knocked on what appeared to be a bedroom door. When it opened, it was immediately apparent that this was no normal small bedroom.

Bunk beds were butted up against each other on three walls of the room, leaving no space in their midst for other furniture. The small window had been covered so that the room was dark except for a single lightbulb on the ceiling. After my entrance, I was being stared at by six men, each sat on their bunk, their sweat thick in this non-air-conditioned room. My guide explained to them in Arabic why I was there, then he turned to address me.

“I wanted you to see how Palestinians have to live in Israel, the same land in which our families were born,” he told me. “Before dawn every day, we are employed outside to clean the beaches, sweep the streets and collect rubbish but, by the time the sun comes up and the crowds come out, we have to make ourselves invisible by returning to accommodation like this. As a fellow Christian, I wanted you to see how we are forced to live in our own homeland so that you can tell people what life is really like in Israel for those who are not Jews.”

A man arrived with a big bag of takeaway food which he started to dole out to each of the men in the room. I wondered to myself if I was to be included in their evening meal and how that could happen when there was no available space for a guest to sit. My guide quickly quashed that notion.

“The men will not eat their food in front of a stranger,” he explained. “We have to go now.”

It had only required a few minutes in that crowded room for the man to have made his point. He was understandably angry about his people’s situation. He told me that, having seen their conditions myself, I now had evidence to refute the disinformation that most of the world believed. We left the compound, he went his own way and I never saw him again.

After several months of messages, letters and calls from public phone boxes, I was finally offered a meeting with the head of an international record company’s Israeli subsidiary in his penthouse flat. There I explained that I had recently secured airplay on British radio for Israeli pop records through my knowledge of the UK radio industry. I believed I could do more like this to develop Israeli music’s presence overseas.

“You should go home,” he told me sternly. “Israel is not the place for you. There is a war going on. The economy is in bad shape. Things are terrible here. Go home and find yourself a job there.”

I departed Israel on the next available flight, disappointed by my failure to secure a job. I left behind an economy with an annual rate of inflation nearing 1,000% and a currency so devalued that it required a thick wad of banknotes just to buy a loaf of bread. Prices in shops had to be updated daily, written on post-it notes stuck along shelf edges. At checkouts, there were insufficient banknotes in tills to provide change, so customers were given the equivalent value in sweets and candies. Coins had become obsolete because they were worthless. I was carrying around several hundred banknotes stuffed down the front of my underpants because my wallet was now too small.

Back in Britain, within three years I had organised the release and promotion of an Israeli record that reached number 15 in the UK singles chart, accompanied by a ‘Top of the Pops’ television appearance. It became the biggest selling Israeli record in Britain since Esther and Abi Ofarim’s ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ in 1968, coincidentally my very first single purchase. Singer Ofra Haza became an international star, later recording songs for a Disney movie. Despite failing to find a job in Tel Aviv, I had managed to successfully pin music from Israel on the ‘world music’ map of the 1980’s.

It was Dave Asher who had first introduced me to Ofra Haza’s music in 1985. Two decades later, his job was presenting the breakfast show on a radio station … in Beirut!

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/04/living-on-frontline-1985-dave-asher-21.html]

I’m gonna git you sucka : 1988 : Ace Records, Harlesden NW10

[my pyjama top, 1988 to 2023]

I recognised the tune. Not only did I recognise it, I knew all the words and would have happily rapped along with it. But not here. Definitely not here during rush hour on a crowded Underground train. I was seated in the end carriage on the Metropolitan line at Baker Street station, where the service often paused for around ten minutes before heading northbound. A man had just plonked himself down on the seat next to me, put on headphones and started his cassette player. The volume of his music was not excessive but, sat in close proximity to his headset on a stationary train, I was able to recognise the tune.

We were still awaiting our departure when I overheard my neighbour’s next track. I was even more surprised to recognise that tune. Not only did I recognise it, I was shocked that the two tunes he had just played were in the same order at the start of a cassette compilation I had created only weeks earlier. Once a third tune started, I had absolute certainty. The chance that a stranger would be listening to three tunes in the same order as mine was infinitesimally small. This unknown person must be listening to my cassette. I wanted to turn to him and explain this coincidence, but he would have thought I was a crazed madman. I had no idea who this man was. I had no idea how he possessed my cassette. Instead, I just sat there, smiling to myself that somebody seemed to be enjoying my music choices, until the train moved off and I could overhear his music no longer.

At the time, I had a job working three days a week at Ace Records, a small independent record label that specialised in reissues of American black music from previous decades. My task was to promote its releases to the press and radio by writing press releases, designing marketing materials, maintaining contact lists and sending out sample copies of records (tasks which I enjoyed), as well as cold-calling journalists (which I hated). I had been hired by the company’s co-founder Roger Armstrong, one of the best bosses I have worked for, with whom I shared a huge modern office. The Ace team were friendly and the building was a delight to work in, located on an industrial estate in Harlesden NW10, overlooking the Grand Union Canal. Opposite was the United Biscuits factory where you could determine which biscuit brand was rolling off its production line by the smell that permeated the air.

Harlesden had long been one of the hotspots of London pirate radio as a result of its significant Afro-Caribbean population. Walk along Harlesden High Street and you would see tall FM antenna masts installed atop roofs of the numerous record shops, transmitting live soul and reggae shows across London. All these stations were illegal and had to play cat-and-mouse games with authorities who sporadically shut them down and impounded their equipment. Working at Ace, I would often listen all day to Harlesden’s stations alone in my first-floor office because Roger spent a lot of time in the States copying master recordings from tape archives. I got to know the names of the pirate radio DJs and the styles of black music each of them played.

My colleagues at Ace were fans of the music the company released and we often shared recordings of music we had discovered. Brian Nevill, a musician with a deep knowledge of black music, worked in the ground floor stockroom and generously gave me a cassette of R&B/soul singles issued on the Sue and Chess record labels recorded from his record collection. His tape launched my ongoing search for music released by these companies, many of which are now my favourite tunes from this era. As a return favour, I recorded a 1970s reggae compilation from my record collection that I named ‘DJ’s Choice’, wrapped it in a cassette cover that I had designed and printed on Ace’s photocopier and gave it to Brian.

In my office at Ace, I particularly liked listening to one pirate radio programme of roots reggae oldies from the 1970s, unusually for the time presented by a female DJ. I had a bright idea! Maybe she would enjoy my cassette compilation. I made another copy and mailed it to her at the station. I never knew if she received or even listened to it. What I did know was that, within weeks, the man sat next to me on the Underground train was playing this cassette. For all I knew, copies might already be for sale on somebody’s market stall somewhere. Such was the world of pirate radio.

Then, one day at work, I heard a commotion and shouting from the reception desk at the other end of the corridor. There were loud voices and suddenly, behind me while I was sat at my desk, I heard a man’s loud, angry gruff voice:

“Are you Grant Goddard?”

I turned in my seat to see a large man looming over me, evidently angry in the belief that I had somehow wronged him. In between cursing me, he was shouting that I had refused to send him free copies of records that he had requested for a pirate radio show that he presented. Aha! I knew what this was about. It was true. He had written a letter asking for a long list of Ace Records’ 1950s and 1960s American R&B reissues, informing me that he worked for a Harlesden pirate radio station. I had written back, politely explaining that I was given limited numbers of free records to distribute because Ace was a small company that was forced to carefully select a minimal number of radio DJs to supply. This was all true. But there were additional truths I had not explained to him: Ace Records had a policy of not supplying records to illegal radio stations; the music he was asking for I had never heard played on ANY Harlesden pirate radio station; and I had never heard his name mentioned on ANY of the pirate stations I regularly listened to.

“I’m gonna [expletive] kill you,” he was shouting in my face. This hubbub attracted colleagues from adjacent offices who came to see what was happening. They demanded this stranger leave our building immediately, but he was not finished with me yet.

“How dare you refuse to give me the records I asked for,” he was shouting. “You’re gonna pay for this because I am gonna [expletive] KILL you.”

I realised that if I caved in now and gave him some records, he would simply return here again and again to demand even more from me. It was essential to hold the line. I calmly restated the reasons I had sent him in my written reply. Naturally this had no calming effect on him. He repeated his threat of violence. My colleagues repeated their demand that he leave. I noticed from his clothing that he must have come to our office straight from work. On his lapel was a Royal Mail badge with an identifying number, the type worn by postmen collecting and delivering mail.

After venting his anger so violently on me, and seeing how many of my colleagues were now present, he thankfully decided not to kill me and eventually stormed out of the building, just the way he had barged his way in. Once my adrenalin subsided, I realised how frightened I had been by this confrontation. My colleagues comforted me and suggested I leave work early that day. I wanted them to call the police and report the incident. I felt that if he knew he had got away with such threats, he would feel encouraged to do the same at some other record company. However, they refused steadfastly to involve the police. My colleague from the adjacent office, Chris Popham, kindly gave me a lift to the nearest railway station.

My journey to/from work at Ace required a one-kilometre walk between Harlesden station and the last building on a cul-de-sac through a sparse industrial estate. During winter months, I walked in darkness along these poorly lit roads. Following the incident, I was scared that this angry man would jump out and attack me as I walked along side roads that had little traffic. Not only could I no longer listen to my Walkman on my walk to work, I would constantly look left and right, and even over my shoulder, to be certain I was not being followed. The incident had transformed my enjoyable working environment at Ace Records into one where I was now living in fear.

It did not take long to decide to quit this job. There was another factor in my decision. After three years’ work promoting world music artist Ofra Haza, whom I had discovered in Israel and persuaded Ace Records to release her recordings, I finally achieved a UK Top Twenty single. I then asked Ace Records’ directors for a bonus because I was receiving no royalty from record sales and such chart success was a rare occurrence within its business. However, all I was eventually offered was a small payment to cover my promotion expenses to date. Furthermore, a colleague at Ace had taken credit in press interviews for Haza’s success. My role had never been mentioned. It felt like the right time to move on. Lesson learnt: the music industry fails to acknowledge or reward those who create success.

Still unsatisfied with Ace Records’ unwillingness to report the incident, I wrote to Music Week, the weekly trade magazine of the music industry, explaining how someone who had claimed to work for a pirate radio station had burst into my record company office and threatened my life. It published my letter anonymously. I was sad to leave Ace Records but it was time for me to start a new job … working for a London pirate radio station!

[My curated Chess Records R&B and soul playlists are on Spotify. A detailed history of London pirate radio is a significant part of my KISS FM book.]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/04/im-gonna-git-you-sucka-1989-ace-records.html]

Born to be hired : 2006 : the new boy, Enders Analysis

“How is it that jobs just seem to fall into the laps of posh people?” my daughter asked the other day.

A rhetorical question? A truism? Both? Those of us who work in industries populated largely by posh people whom we do not resemble may have observed two phenomena. Posh people are often appointed to posts for which they appear to have no relevant experience; and posh people are regularly promoted effortlessly without apparent need to demonstrate above-average talent or previous successes. Obviously not ALL posh people, but enough for such occurrences to be more than random chance.

Recently, I switched on BBC Radio Four mid-programme and heard a posh woman explaining her lengthy career. “I could have been anything,” she said confidently.

That single phrase encapsulates the social divisions so evident in Britain. If you are posh and your parents invest a small fortune in your private school education, it is drilled into you from an early age that you CAN and WILL do and be ‘anything’ in life. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to endure soul-destroying verdicts from state schools, careers services, Jobcentres and potential employers telling us of things we are not good enough to do and be in our apparently second-class lives. ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ proves not so entertaining a system when you have to make do in life with the scraps of opportunity that institutions occasionally chuck your way.

It used to be that posh offspring would join their families’ businesses or spontaneously be appointed ‘captains of industry’, as if managing a British industrial conglomerate was no different than taking daddy’s yacht out for a jaunt on a weekend. However, Britain’s post-war, post-colonial de-industrialisation (hastened during the Thatcher years) considerably narrowed such straight-ahead career opportunities. For a while, only politics, government, medicine, law and accountancy were considered suitable professions for posh people, whereas now those ambitions have had to be diversified into occupations such as … the media.

In 1973, Jenny Abramsky had joined the BBC as a lowly programme operations assistant, following an education at a London comprehensive (state) school and the University of East Anglia. After 26 years progressing through the ranks, she was finally appointed director of BBC radio. Following her retirement in 2008 from managing the largest radio operation in the world, it would be difficult to imagine a job description for her successor that would not have demanded similarly extensive experience in radio broadcasting. It is a sign of how times have changed that the BBC’s choice for the job was Tim Davie who had never worked in radio, but had attended private school, Cambridge University and was deputy chairman of Hammersmith & Fulham Conservative Association. It was transparent even then that the radio job was merely a stepping stone for Davie’s ambitions … and so it came to pass.

Occasionally a glitch in The Matrix does occur, maybe once in a lifetime, when mysterious forces within the universe collide to produce a job opportunity that would not normally appear on the precarious, non-linear career timelines endured by the non-posh. In 2006, I was unexpectedly offered an unadvertised post as a ‘media analyst’, a job title I had to search for on the internet to understand what it entailed. As the salary offered me was greater than any previously earned in Britain, it proved hard to resist.

On my first day of work at Enders Analysis, I was invited by my new colleagues to join them for lunch in a local ‘greasy spoon’. I had already spotted some clues: the office was located in Mayfair, a London district too expensive to even window shop; and the water cooler chatter was about made-to-measure suits by a tailor in Hong Kong.

“What school did you go to?” one of my new colleagues asked.

Decades had passed since I had last been asked about the school I had attended. I was now 48 years old, but I did not want to appear reticent to my peers on the first day.

“Strode’s College,” I replied.

My colleagues looked at each other as if I had mentioned a rarely-visited, faraway Pacific Island populated by savages.

“What sort of school is that?” one of them eventually followed up.

“It’s a sixth form college,” I replied.

This response evidently did not satisfy them. There was a more critical question they were burning to ask, a question that normally was not required of a new recruit. One of them dared to raise it with me.

“Is that a public school?”

In the 1984-ish world of British language, the phrase ‘public school’ means a private school where parents have to pay for their children’s education. What Americans call a ‘public school’ is known in Britain as a ‘state school’ because it is funded by the state. Although every child in Britain is entitled to a free education, a tiny proportion of parents choose a private schooling that they confidently expect will propel their offspring into an elitist trajectory.

It might have been my first day communing with my new ‘colleagues’, but my patience was already starting to be tested. I decided to respond obliquely.

“It used to be a grammar school,” I replied.

“So had it been a private school then?” one of them asked.

This question itself betrayed a flawed understanding of Britain’s school system viewed from the perspective of someone who graduated from private education. Grammar schools can only be state schools by definition. It was up to me to explain such fundamentals in the most black and white terms.

“No, it was a state school as a grammar school, and then it was a state school as a sixth form college,” I replied.

The fact that this humiliating Q&A was the first conversation with my new work colleagues turned out to be indicative of how my future in this job was going to proceed. I was not embarrassed about my education, a state-funded experience I shared with 94% of Brits. What I found difficult to process was my colleagues’ apparent belief that, thirty years after my departure, the status of my school continued to merit far more concern than anything I had done since.

Once the horrifying truth had been extracted from me that I was not ‘one of them’, their lunch chatter switched to other topics. Although I was employed as a media analyst, there were no follow-up questions about my relevant experience for the job, about employers I had worked for previously or about any successes I had achieved. It seemed as if my long career in radio counted for absolutely nothing with them. Of more importance was the type of school I had attended, a fact that certain colleagues were quick to remind me of later in this job.

Despite this rather rude introduction, I continued to join my colleagues for lunch in the same diner on following days in order not to appear unsociable. The cooked food was consistently terrible and caused me diarrhoea. Why did they go there? It soon became apparent from their chatter that one of them, my line manager, lusted after an East European waitress employed there who was probably a third of his age. Instead of castigating him as a ‘dirty old man’, his colleagues appeared to enjoy indulging his fantasies and encouraging his unwanted attentions by spending most lunchtimes being served food by this poor servant girl. I soon chose to duck out of their pantomime and went my own way to Eat or Pret A Manger for a cheaper, more wholesome takeaway sandwich.

During my first week, I had to ask my line manager’s advice about a paragraph I had written for a report. A quick visit to his adjacent private office should have lasted no more than a few minutes. Not so. I exited more than half-an-hour later, reeling from his account of sexual abuse suffered at private boarding school. One moment we had been talking about my punctuation, the next he had drifted into dark memories of bullying from many decades ago. I had not asked a question that might have prompted him to regale me with these horrific stories. Why had he considered it appropriate to burden the ‘new boy’ with such accounts?

Some months later, the whole team was required to attend a seasonal lunch at a basement restaurant in Mayfair. I hated these affairs as my colleagues would get drunk and talk even more loudly, but it was impossible to avoid such ‘team’ occasions. Sat facing each other along a long bench table adjacent to the kitchen, mid-meal I noticed under our table a liquid had started to flow around my shiny black shoes. In my lone sobriety, I raised the alarm with my colleagues, but was ignored until a chef appeared and shouted that a pipe containing used cooking oil had burst and was flooding the restaurant. Suddenly all us customers had to negotiate an extremely slippery floor, climb the stairs and exit onto the street.

On our way back to the office, I was walking alongside my line manager when he suddenly said: “Would you mind if I asked your advice about a personal matter?”

Considering some of our previous, scary conversations, I was half dreading what I might be about to hear. Why did he consider me to be someone suitable to share his private thoughts? His life experiences and his concerns seemed light years away from mine.

“The problem is my mother,” he explained. “She is spending money like water and nothing I say can seem to stop her. I am extremely worried that, when she dies, my inheritance will be insufficient for me to live on.”

“And how much do you think you will inherit when the time comes?” I asked with a great deal of trepidation.

“About one million pounds,” he replied without a hint of embarrassment.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/born-to-be-hired-2006-new-boy-enders.html]

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