local radio – Page 3 – Grant Goddard : radio broadcasting expert : media analyst : writer/author

From Russia with lawlessness : 1994 : Metromedia, Park Place, Moscow

“I am a paediatric doctor,” said the young woman cleaning the toilet bowl in the bathroom of my apartment. “I work at the hospital during the day but I cannot live on my salary, so I have to work as a cleaner every evening.”

I was embarrassed. Although the doctor had been cleaning my apartment nightly, this was the first occasion I had attempted to strike up a conversation. I had mistakenly presumed that my ‘cleaner’ spoke no English. How wrong I was! Maybe she assumed I was a snobby American corporate manager who had just been posted overseas. How wrong she was! I was an unemployed Brit forced to take some freelance radio consulting work abroad, having failed to secure a job in my own backyard. Both of us were having to do what we did to survive.

I felt disorientated here. It was my first time in Russia. I would never have chosen to work here. But it could have been worse. My client, American public corporation Metromedia, had initially told me my destination was to be Nizhny Novgorod. I had had to consult a map to even locate that industrial city on the Volga. Thankfully, instead, I was sent to cosmopolitan Moscow. But looks are deceiving. My surroundings gave the semblance of a modern city but almost nothing actually worked as it should. Here was an incomplete facsimile of Western capitalist infrastructure in which the Soviet state had copied the designs without implementing the mechanisms. It recalled the era when a ‘Made in China’ label was a surefire guarantee a product that might look good would quickly fail.

My one-bedroom apartment appeared quite luxurious, about three times the size of my poky second-floor flat in London, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on an upper floor that looked out over the permanent pollution rising from Moscow’s busy streets. It was inside a huge, newly built trio of linked office blocks containing office spaces and 330 apartments intended for foreign businesses that required a secure location 14 kilometres from the Kremlin. It was like living in one of those vast complexes portrayed in American movies about the self-destructive life of a harassed corporate ‘road warrior’. Maybe it was designed to offer ex-pats that kind of bland fictional familiarity.

In January 1994, Metromedia had bought one of the least popular FM radio stations in Moscow, planning to turn it into one of the most popular. There was a hitch. The Americans were baffled by the radio market not just in Russia, but in the whole of Europe. They could hear 30+ stations broadcasting in Moscow but they could not fathom what they were doing on-air. This was not simply a language problem. It was a challenge because Americans were accustomed to tightly defined music or speech broadcasters in their commercial radio system. You only had to listen to the vast majority of American radio stations for around ten minutes to recognise their ‘format’. Europe was not like that, largely because ‘public service broadcasting’ had been legislated as the bedrock of its broadcast systems since the invention of radio.

Before my flight to Moscow, I had purchased a Sony all-band radio from an electronics shop in Watford for almost £100. It was now put to service all day while I listened hour after hour to a particular Moscow radio station, writing notes about the music played, the talk, the advertisements, the jingles and anything else I heard. I was used to listening to radio stations in languages of which I had no comprehension, having spent so many weekend nights as a schoolboy DX-ing radio stations from all over the world on a Trio 9R59DS radio receiver. I had also analysed local radio markets in the UK for groups applying for new licences, monitoring existing stations’ broadcasts and tabulating the results. It might be boring work but at least I was being paid to do it!

One morning I received an email requesting my presence at an important staff meeting to be held in the Metromedia office within Park Place. This surprised me for several reasons: I was not an employee, I had never previously been invited to such a meeting in Moscow and, most astonishingly, nobody had told me that Metromedia even had an office within the same building where I was living. I had to call the phone number on the message to ask where precisely this office was located within the complex.

After spending so many days alone in the apartment listening to my radio and writing copious observations, it was an adventure to walk through the building’s labyrinth of anonymous floors and numbered doors to eventually locate and knock on the Metromedia office. After weeks of perpetual solitude, it felt like coming out of prison to be greeted by a surprise party. The room was full of Americans of whom I had never been aware, let alone met, all chatting away noisily. None of them had the faintest idea who I was, requiring my explanation that I too had received THE email. They were very welcoming in the American way, despite probably wondering why on earth this unknown, scraggy Englishman was present.

The meeting started soberly with an update on Metromedia’s progress attracting paying subscribers to its broadcast television service ‘Kosmos TV’ and mobile phone system it had apparently launched in 1991 in partnership with the state’s ‘Moscow Television & Transmitter Centre’. I had no idea that Metromedia had been operating in Moscow several years already and had been investing around US$5m annually in that particular joint venture business. The good news was its success in building a growing subscriber base. However, the reason for this meeting was the bad news that the Russian who had been appointed manager of the business had just disappeared with all its funds and had proven untraceable. There were long faces. Oh dear.

Welcoming the variation from my usual lonely routine, I spent the remainder of that day in the office chatting with some of my newly discovered Metromedia colleagues. At that stage, it seemed unclear whether the television business could continue and whether the office would even remain in operation. I met the corporation’s financial analyst Muema Lombe who shared my interest in pirate radio and he generously introduced me to the basics of Excel, the software that has been the mainstay of my analysis work ever since. We remain close friends since that chance introduction in Moscow.

On the way back to my apartment, I called in at the ‘Garden Ring Irish Supermarket’ in the Park Place lobby to buy my regular supplies. It was a smaller satellite branch of the bigger shop in the city centre that had opened in 1992. I was surviving on breakfast cereal, milk, bananas, tea and snacks, particularly American ‘Oreo’ cookies which I had never seen before. There was no cooking equipment in the apartment beyond a kettle, probably to encourage residents to eat in the complex’s vastly overpriced restaurant. Lacking a corporate expense account, I only ate there when my American line manager John Catlett was in Moscow, enduring hour-long waits to be served the simplest meals.

Although the Park Place shop’s range of food was limited, it felt too dangerous to shop outside as a foreigner. Russians bought provisions at kiosks where they could ask for the items they wanted, whereas foreigners like me had to frequent self-serve retailers where they became easily identifiable targets. In 1993, more than 7,000 crimes against foreigners had been reported in Russia, including the editor of the English-language ‘Moscow Times’ newspaper who had been robbed of cash and a laptop by men with knives outside the city centre’s Garden Ring Irish Supermarket. I had watched a ‘CNN’ report that Russia’s murder rate was three times higher than the United States’ and was only surpassed by South Africa.

Due to its success attracting foreign customers, the Irish Supermarket itself soon became a target. After its owners resisted a takeover by their Russian partner Dmitry Kishiev, there were reports of an alleged overnight explosion at its city centre store. The ‘Moscow Times’ reported: “Apparently fearing for their safety, the Irish partners then fled the country, urging their more than two-dozen expatriate employees to do likewise.”

Once Russians took over the ‘Irish’ supermarket, I noticed food on sale in Park Place marked with long gone expiry dates, the prices increased, customers deserted and eventually the shops closed altogether. Like everything else in Russia, ‘business’ was not considered a product of entrepreneurial spirit or managerial prowess. Instead, it was considered a lucky lottery ticket permitting almost anyone lacking relevant skills to intimidate, bully and exert power to enrich themselves over others.

Russia during the 1990’s was frequently referred to as the ‘Wild West’. There was a sense that just about anything you could imagine might happen there … and it frequently did. My corporate apartment felt like a haven of relative ‘normality’ within a crazed parallel universe. I cannot recall anyone being murdered at Park Place during my initial stay, unlike subsequent visits to Russia when I was given accommodation in hotels of variable quality and security. Never did I value boring old Britain so much as the days I would thankfully walk on the tarmac of Heathrow airport after yet another prolonged stay in Russia.

“A powerful bomb blast in the city’s centre on Saturday afternoon took the life of a Moscow student. The bomb which, according to police, had power equivalent to approximately 400 grams of TNT, had been placed inside a large metal dumpster on ul Bolshaya Spasskaya not far from Leningradsky train station. According to eyewitnesses, at the time of the blast, the 23-year-old female student of farming was walking by the dumpster. The strength of the explosion tore off one of her arms and blew out most of the windows in neighbouring buildings … Witnesses reported that just a few moments before the blast, several men had tried forcibly to enter a building next to where the explosion took place, but that after a doorman refused to let them enter the building, they threw a package into the dumpster.”

Small story on PAGE SEVEN of the ‘Moscow Tribune’, 30 January 1996

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/07/from-russia-with-lawlessness-1994.html]

The invisible manager : 1993 : Bud Stiker, Radio Juventus, Hungary

Nazi soldiers were everywhere. Battalions of Nazis marching down wide boulevards. Nazis standing on convoys of tanks, waving flags. Row upon row of Nazis saluting speeches by their leader. Nazis fighting on battlefields. It was exhausting to watch for too long and nothing like ‘Indiana Jones’. In fact, it was a little bit frightening.

I had viewed so many hours of ‘MTV’ that I knew Stina Nordenstam’s song ‘Little Star’ by heart. Seeking alternative entertainment, I manually retuned the hotel room’s television and was shocked to discover a grainy black-and-white channel that was broadcasting Nazi propaganda twenty-four hours a day. I was like Dennis Quaid in the movie ‘Frequency’, pulling signals from the ether transmitted several decades earlier. This bizarre television service must have been a sideshow of the civil war raging on European soil only a hundred miles from my present location, atop a Budapest hill 479 metres above sea level.

My life under ‘hotel arrest’ was proving extremely tedious. To be accurate, I could leave any time I wished but my accommodation was hardly ‘Hotel California’. I was stranded alone, five miles from the city centre in countryside popular for walking holidays in summer but dead as a dodo mid-winter. No buses, no taxis, no shops, no mobile phone, no laptop, no internet access. It felt like sensory deprivation to be cooped up in a hotel room for days with absolutely nothing to do. My sole consolation was that I would be charging the client my daily rate.

My task had been to interview each of the staff of tiny ‘Radio Juventus’ in Siófok to determine their role, their skills and their future potential. The station had been launched in 1989 by a local newspaper to serve German tourists who summered at Lake Balaton. It was about to be acquired by American public corporation Metromedia, owned by billionaire John Kluge, and I had been hired to discover precisely what he was buying and to plan its transformation into Hungary’s first national commercial radio station. I had completed a fortnight’s work when…

Three soldiers in military uniform suddenly burst into the underground bunker where I was installing computer programmes, talking loudly and waving around their guns. I was surprised but not initially alarmed as I knew they guarded the gate of the compound. Every day it took them ten minutes to inspect and approve my passport before they would let me enter. Maybe today they were simply bored. However, events quickly turned nasty when station staff translated the soldiers’ demands into basic English:

“They say: ‘you must go.’ They say: ‘go now and no stop.’”

Sorry? They mean me? But I work here! I am just doing my job! The staff were adamant. The soldiers had received orders. All foreigners (which meant only me) had to leave the compound immediately. I asked if I could telephone Metromedia’s office, a one-hour drive away in Budapest. While the soldiers glared at me, seemingly eager to make an arrest, the phone just rang and rang and rang. Where was the office secretary? In her absence, there was usually an answering machine on the end of the line. But now there was nothing.

I collected my belongings and the soldiers escorted me up the narrow stairs and out of the building. The bright sunlight made my eyes squint but the fresh air was invigorating. The bunker housing the radio station received no natural light, no fresh air and was always thick with cigarette smoke. Dust lay everywhere because it had served as an underground coal store during Soviet times. The soldiers stood in a line, holding their guns menacingly, and watched as I searched for my car keys. Above us loomed huge transmitter masts that the Soviets had built during the Cold War to jam broadcasts from West European radio stations. I drove the car slowly out of the compound and gave a friendly wave to the soldiers as I passed their checkpoint. They did not respond. In the rearview mirror, I saw them lock the gates behind me and put down their guns. This must have been the most action they had seen in months.

An hour later, I was sat in the Budapest ‘office’ of Metromedia, in reality a converted bedroom within the Normafa Hotel owned by the Americans’ Hungarian business partner György Wossala. There was no sign of Bud Stiker, imported from Maine to manage this operation. No sign either of his harassed Hungarian secretary. I called Stiker’s mobile phone but it was switched off. The remainder of the afternoon, I stayed in the office but nobody came. The office phone rang regularly, which I had to ignore as I spoke no Hungarian. It had been a baffling day. I returned to my room, watched MTV and fell asleep to the sounds of loud revelry in the hotel grounds.

The next morning, I was eating breakfast in the hotel’s deserted dining room when Wossala appeared, so I asked if he knew what was happening with his American business partner. He was evasive and wanted only to talk about the wedding party that had hired his hotel the previous evening for a huge banquet and, when presented with their invoice, had drawn guns on his staff, then fled in their fleet of Mercedes.

“This is not good business,” he suggested to me.

I sat in the office again. Nothing happened until late afternoon when the secretary finally appeared, looking flustered. She had been trying to find Stiker the last two days, visiting downtown bars he was known to frequent.

“Everybody is looking for him,” she told me, “but he has just – pouf – disappeared.”

Stiker had worked for Metromedia in the 1980’s, managing radio stations in Colorado and Maryland. Prior to his arrival in Budapest, he had been executive vice president of Bonneville Broadcasting System, the US radio network owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I recognised that Stiker would understandably be unfamiliar with the European radio industry, probably the reason I had been hired as consultant. More puzzlingly, he appeared somewhat uninterested in visiting the business Metromedia was acquiring in Hungary, meeting the staff he was nominally managing, or creating a plan to transform the radio station … all of which was delegated to me, leaving him ‘hands off’.

Stiker’s mobile phone remained switched off and we found he had left no information about his whereabouts. The secretary checked with the hotel which confirmed he had not returned to his bedroom for two days. We were both totally confused.

The next day, the secretary arrived for work and told me she was quitting her job. She had checked her bank account and found that her wages had not been paid. Neither had the expenses she had rung up on behalf of Metromedia. I helped her carry the contents of her desk to her car outside. It did not seem to matter anymore whether the office items she was taking really belonged to her or to her former employer. I was on my own now and starting to get a little worried.

The next day, Wossala told me he was repossessing Metromedia’s office to convert back into a hotel room, despite the fact that I had observed no more than five guests staying in his hotel that mid-winter. He insisted I return the keys of the tiny Hungarian car I had been using to drive to the radio station, as he claimed it belonged to the hotel rather than Metromedia. That left me completely stranded.

My anxiety intensified the next morning when I found a hotel bill had been slipped under my door during the night, demanding I pay for my stay immediately, an expense that should have been taken care of by Metromedia. I told Wossala (truthfully) that I did not have sufficient funds to pay his bill, and neither could I change the date of my charter flight back to London, still several weeks away. The situation turned into a stalemate – he grudgingly let me continue my stay in his near-empty hotel, but now refused to serve me further meals.

I had to find food. I walked out of the hotel and turned left. There was nothing but a miniature railway, closed in winter, that would take hikers further into the forest hills. I walked back the opposite direction. About a mile from the hotel was a tiny roadside kiosk where I would point to dry biscuits, cola drinks and imported chocolate bars that I purchased with the limited amount of local currency I had previously changed. I had to eke out this basic diet the rest of the week.

Ten days after his disappearance, Bud Stiker suddenly reemerged at the hotel. Amazingly, he had almost nothing to say about his sudden absence. He barely apologised for the inconvenience he had caused me and explained only that he had been “attending to important business” elsewhere. He said that there had been a “misunderstanding” between Metromedia and its Hungarian partner. I was more shocked by his lack of candour than I was by my treatment at the hands of the Hungarian soldiers ten days earlier. I half-heartedly completed my work and counted off the remaining days longingly until I could fly home.

Back in London, I wrote and submitted my report. Stiker queried my invoice, claiming I was overcharging because he believed the rate we had agreed was ‘per month’ rather than ‘per week.’ I found insulting his attempt to cut my fee by 75%, particularly after the experience I had just endured in Budapest. It seemed a bit rich coming from one of Metromedia’s old-timers whom my colleagues later alleged were being offered US$1,000,000 per year to manage one of its newly acquired stations in Europe as a kind of pre-retirement reward for earlier corporate loyalty (Metromedia had sold all of its 27 US radio stations by 1986). I resisted vociferously and was eventually paid in full. I hoped for more consulting work like this, though I wished Metromedia would not assign me to Stiker again … but it did.

That bleak winter month spent in a Budapest hotel room, watching ‘Nazi TV’, was the closest I had come to a war zone and the scary propaganda it produced.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-invisible-manager-1993-bud-stiker.html]

My life as a seadog : 1985 : The Voice of Peace, Tel Aviv

The prostitute was perched on the edge of my bed. Using the elementary Hebrew I had learned from children’s television, we chatted about her young daughter and the disastrous economic situation in Israel (inflation nearing 1,000%) that had forced her into this profession. I had been asleep in bed when the room door had opened, the light was abruptly turned on and I opened my tired eyes to see a ‘Little & Large’ couple framed in the doorway. Having ordered her client to take a shower before starting ‘work’, she had ample time for a conversation with me.

Was this another chapter of my punishment, to share a hotel room with a fat drunken Dutch sailor whose mission was evidently a missionary position in every port? I had come ashore after spending a week of nights sat alone on the ship’s bridge as ‘lookout’, tossed from side to side by the stormy Mediterranean. This was the sentence handed down by a Dutch captain angered by my point-blank refusal to enter the anchor chain locker alone and clean it of seabed debris. I cared not a jot that other DJs on board had accepted his prior orders to execute this task. I was adamant that I had not signed up as a seaman. I was there as a radio DJ. Neither the captain nor his crew had ever been required to assist us in the radio studios, so why was I expected to take on ship duties? Besides which, I suffered from claustrophobia.

Well, how did I get here? I had spent 1984 living at my mother’s house, unemployed and submitting applications for every UK radio production job I could find, none of which proved successful. All I had been offered was a six-month contract to work as a volunteer DJ on pirate radio station ‘The Voice of Peace’ in Israel. I promised myself that, if no proper job turned up by year-end, I would pursue this as a last resort. That was why, in the New Year, I was on a flight to Tel Aviv with two suitcases. It was sheer desperation. I had to convince myself that ‘doing radio’, almost any sort of radio, would be better for my career than trying to get work in radio but failing.

The deal on offer was that, for each month’s work on board the ship, I would receive US$100 in cash and be granted one week’s shore leave in paid Tel Aviv hotel accommodation. However, the seas proved too rough for crew transfers during my first three months on board, depriving me of returning my feet to land until April. It was particularly frustrating during that period to be able to clearly see the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv city at night from the ship but to have only spent a few hours there between my airport arrival and having been ferried on board.

The only ship I had experienced before was a cross-Channel ferry, so my first few weeks were spent being seasick and adjusting to the meals served by amiable cook Radha who professed he had pretended to be a chef to land this job. Initially there were plenty of DJs on board and my shifts presenting on-air were reasonable. However, as the months went on, most of my colleagues either completed their six months or quit early and were not replaced. There were occasions when I was required to present programmes for more than twelve hours a day when our number was reduced to two. I consoled myself that, detained in a floating prison, it was better to be kept occupied than to spend time reflecting on the notion of freedom.

Nominally in charge of the station’s programmes on the ship was the genial Daevid Fortune who, I seem to recall, had previously worked on Twickenham AM pirate ‘Radio Sovereign’, a station that had existed for eight months in 1983 playing only oldies. At the ripe age of twenty-seven, I was older than most of my colleagues and more experienced, having previously worked full-time for UK commercial local station ‘Metro Radio’ not only as a presenter but as a manager who had implemented an innovative playlist system to reverse its dwindling audience. However, within the ship’s radio team, I maintained a low profile as there was no incentive to propose improvements or seek additional responsibilities without decent compensation.

The many hours of off-air boredom were relieved by listening to previously unheard stations from Lebanon, Cyprus and Egypt. There was a television room on-deck where I would watch the afternoon post-war American movie of the day on Jordan TV. I would write letters to my thirteen-year-old sister back in the UK. I would read cover-to-cover all the English-language music magazines, including heavyweight weekly ‘Billboard’, that we received. I would comb the small record library and listen to previously unheard discs in the second production studio. Once the weather became calmer in the summer, it was an idyllic existence to live without day-to-day responsibilities. My hair grew longer than it had ever been, my skin turned dark brown and my body became even thinner as a result of seasickness and Radha’s meals.

The station’s Persian founder and owner, Abie Nathan, was a peace activist who had been making grand publicity-seeking gestures in Israel to promote his cause since the 1960’s. He bought the ship second-hand in 1973, allegedly with the financial assistance of John Lennon, and had installed the radio broadcasting equipment. However, after more than a decade continuously anchored a few kilometres off Tel Aviv, the ship and its facilities had seen better days by the time I arrived.

Like many station owners, Nathan was given to flights of fancy, calling up on ship-to-shore radio to demand airtime for content that interrupted our on-air routines. During my stint, Nathan hired a duo of British ‘radio consultants’ to improve the station. Their big idea was to split the station into two different services on FM and AM during certain dayparts, requiring both studios to be used simultaneously for live programmes. This proved not such a practical idea when the station was so regularly short-staffed. I was allocated the evening FM show, for which I used Steely Dan’s ‘FM’ track as theme music and selected soft rock songs. I was rewarded with a letter from a listener in Finland who had heard my show and sent me a cassette recording postmarked the following day to prove it (remember this was pre-internet).

If there was one lesson I learned from my six months at sea, it was the first occasion I had worked with self-styled ‘radio consultants’ who seemed to talk endlessly about their successes, obviously possessed the gift of the gab, but who were revealed as less knowledgeable than they might appear. In those pre-digital times, I was surprised to be the person on-board who was asked to explain which of a quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape machine’s three heads has to be used for marking up edits. In future years, I was to meet more ‘consultants’ who promised to deliver radio ‘success’ but who seemed to lack the requisite skills to achieve anything more than talking about it.

My experience presenting programmes for hours every day on-air confirmed my thinking that being a DJ was not my ambition in radio. I was told I possessed a good ‘radio voice’, I could operate the equipment and loved playing music, but I much preferred a production role in which I could contribute creatively beyond just opening my mouth. One of the most enjoyable programmes I created on ‘The Voice of Peace’ was a ‘special’ to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre with a selection of pertinent African and American music. I wish I had put a cassette in the studio tape machine to record it!

After having been denied shore leave during my first three months, I now had to endure an hour of bonking noises from the second bed on the other side of our small shared hotel room until the lady of the night slipped away, leaving the seaman to snore loudly until daylight. The hotel turfed us out during daytime, so I regularly retreated to the nearby White House café where office staff, hangers on and the station’s most loyal listeners would sit at a roadside patio table and chat ‘radio’. I came to love Tel Aviv during my total three weeks of shore leave … despite the ongoing war, the terrible economy and random acts of terrorism.

Once my six months were completed, I visited the station’s Tel Aviv office to collect my final wages. I reminded Abie Nathan that I had worked an additional three weeks beyond my contract as a result of having been denied shore leave during my first three months on board. Would he pay me an additional US$75? He adamantly refused. Unlike some of my DJ colleagues, I harboured no intention of returning for a further six-month stint. Rather, I never wanted to work or live on a ship again. Surely there must be a radio job I could secure that did not necessitate me being sick in a bucket after eating unidentifiable meals.

In 1993, I was working in East Europe when I read that the ‘Voice of Peace’ ship had been deliberately scuttled at sea by its owner after two decades’ broadcasts, the final day having comprised non-stop Beatles songs. I have never mustered the enthusiasm to attend subsequent ‘offshore radio’ nostalgia events but my experience of Israel left an indelible mark on me. Pass the halva!

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/06/my-life-as-seadog-1985-voice-of-peace.html]

Watch out! Watch out! There’s a Houdini about : 1980 : Metro Radio record library

[presenter Stephen Ayres in Metro Radio record library, 1980]

Do you believe in destiny? Not the Bardot-like Angels squadron leader Destiny who battled evil-ised Captain Black and the mysterious Mysterons. No, destiny as in fate. The notion that our futures are determined long before we realise it ourselves.

My earliest job, having just learned to write, was to take it upon myself to sort my parents’ two-dozen albums and two-score singles into some kind of order and to biro sequential numbers on their covers and labels. Nobody had told me to. Then I instructed my parents to always put their vinyl records back in the correct sleeves and return them to the shelf in the correct order.

Almost two decades later, my first full-time job required me to instruct my colleagues to always put the vinyl records back in the correct sleeves and return them to the shelves in the correct order. Destiny? Or was it fate? My office desk was located in the first-floor record library of local commercial station ‘Metro Radio’ in Newcastle. It was not strictly MY desk. It belonged to my line manager, Malcolm Herdman, who had just been seconded to record a jingle package in the station’s ground-floor studio. I had been appointed to perform Malcolm’s tasks as head of music, albeit as his deputy, and to create a new daytime playlist system that could reverse the station’s ratings decline.

Two other staff worked in the same room: at one end, young librarian Liz Elliott who was enthusiastic, helpful, chatty and a music fan; and, at the other, middle-aged Ann who was not. They faced each other with my desk positioned midway like a tennis referee. Liz catalogued newly arrived records, returned items to their shelves and maintained the card catalogue index. Ann was busy doing, er … mostly chatting with the station’s presenters or on the office phone to her friends. Colleagues alleged that she enjoyed a close personal relationship with the station’s managing director, Neil Robinson, who just happened to be paying her husband to write a computerised library programme … that never made an appearance while I was working there. I attempted small-talk with Ann but her preferred communication was to glare at me in silence.

Just inside the record library was a grey metal, two-door, six-foot tall stationery cupboard. It held spare copies of currently playlisted singles and valuable albums autographed by visiting pop and rock musicians that awaited mail-out to listeners as competition prizes. Soon after starting work, I found that records I had locked in this cupboard seemed to disappear overnight. The first occasion, I thought I must have been mistaken. However, on the second occasion, I was convinced that items I had secured had somehow been stolen. To replace them, I had to drive to the nearest record shop and buy multiple copies of our playlisted singles. The problem started to reoccur regularly. I was somewhat baffled.

When I told my colleagues about the suspected thefts, they described an event that had happened before I joined the station. The lone key to this stationery cupboard had disappeared (I cannot recall how), then was allegedly found several days later by helpful daytime DJ Giles Squire on the carpet immediately in front of the cupboard. This surprised my colleagues who had hunted high and low throughout the library for the key over several days, without success. How could it have suddenly appeared days later exactly where it had been lost? It was as if the key had been temporarily hidden by some kind of ‘Star Trek’ cloaking device. I was told that, after the key reappeared, things had started to go missing from inside the cupboard.

Theft from the library was a wider problem. Some library shelves of catalogued albums had visible gaps where items had not been returned. Behind Liz’s desk was a pigeonhole A-to-Z system where newly released seven-inch vinyl singles were filed by artist name. The station received multiple copies of around sixty newly released singles each week, most of which were stored there openly. So how come the pigeonholes rarely became overcrowded? It seemed that hundreds of new records were disappearing. I had the embarrassing task of having to phone record companies and ask for further copies of records that had already been delivered to us by post or by visiting reps. There were only so many occasions you could blame the Post Office.

The library had to be left open at night and over weekends because presenters were required to select records to play within their programmes. A security person was present twenty-four hours a day inside the station’s front door but their responsibility was apparently only to stop unwanted persons entering the building, not to frisk those leaving. Thus, theoretically it would have been easy for a presenter to exit to their truck in the car park carrying boxes of the radio station’s vinyl records that could then be exchanged for animal feed to use on their farm in Northumberland.

I embarked upon a ‘good cop’ strategy, sticking post-it notes on the most valuable items inside the cupboard with a handwritten message: ‘Dear Thief. Please leave this record which is essential to the running of the station and is needed for […]. Thank you, Grant.’ It made no difference. These items would still disappear overnight and the post-it notes would be left behind without any kind of riposte from the thief. Back to the drawing board.

I went to my manager, programme controller Mic Johnson, and informed him what had been happening. I always wondered if he was stuck with Velcro to his office chair as he was so rarely seen on the station’s ‘shop floor’. If he wanted to meet someone, rather than simply approaching them for a chat, his secretary would place a typed ‘docket’ in their pigeonhole. Sometimes I would see several presenters waiting in the corridor outside his office door, as if he were headmaster of Xavier’s School for Gifted Wafflers, where DJ’s whose latest ratings were sub-par should expect a good spanking to improve their superpowers. Did Mic wish to do anything about the thefts? No.

I switched to a ‘bad cop’ strategy. I visited a hardware shop and bought a thick metal chain that I wrapped tightly around the door handles of the stationery cardboard and secured with a large padlock. I was the only person with the key. For a few weeks, nothing disappeared from the cupboard. I no longer wrote post-it notes for the thief. Some staff laughed at my chain which admittedly looked hideous but, for a while, it worked until … records started disappearing once again. I was angry and frustrated. How could that happen? There were no signs that the chain had been cut or that the padlock had been replaced. Could the thief have tracked down the padlock I had purchased and found one that used exactly the same key? Had the culprit recently attended a GCSE evening class in lockpicking at a local den of thieves?

It was hard to accept that I had failed. However, the atmosphere within the station had recently turned icy as the result of a strike for increased pay by staff who were union members. Management had bigger fish to fry than my problem of vinyl records being pilfered by some Houdini. Presenters began to keep discs they wanted to use (or had used) inside the security of their personal lockers. Producer John Coulson stashed records he wanted to play on his weekend rock show behind the snack machine in the station canteen. If I needed Van Morrison’s latest album, he showed me, this is where I could find it.

Six months into my job, Malcolm Herdman was excited to play me the station identification jingles he had just finished producing. I went downstairs to the station’s recording studio for the first time and listened. Oh dear! Whereas ‘jingles’ are meant to be of only a few seconds’ duration to be used between records and adverts, Malcolm’s efforts were short ‘songs’ that lasted a minute, sometimes longer. How do I tell my boss, particularly when he has been so generous to me, that his last six months’ work was wasted? I tried to offer constructive criticism but had to point out that, if these longform jingles were played regularly, then fewer playlisted songs would be heard each hour … the very content for which listeners tuned in to the station.

This jingle project had been the outcome of an agreement with the Musicians’ Union, made seven years earlier upon the launch of commercial radio in Britain, requiring each local station to spend 3% annually of its net advertising revenues on Union members’ performances. For most stations, this translated into them paying local music acts to either perform at events or record songs for airplay. However, Metro Radio decided to blow the whole of that year’s budget on recording identification jingles by local band Lindisfarne who were already signed to a major label and since 1972 had achieved four Top Forty singles, including two in the Top Five. Hardly a struggling local band! The outcome was that, as long as Metro Radio paid its 3% to Union members, it mattered not a jot whether the results were ever broadcast.

If I had been asked earlier, I could have offered some advice. As a teenager, I had recorded jingles on my two-track tape machine initially for one London pirate radio station, only to be asked by other stations to produce similar work. Had the ill-fated Metro Radio jingles been some kind of reverse destiny where, sat only one floor away from this impending disaster, I might have rescued the project if only I had known?

Destiny quickly transformed into fate when I was called into managing director Neil Robinson’s office. It was the first occasion we had met because he and his fellow managers kept their distance from the rest of the staff and took lunches from the station canteen to their separate dining room. He told me I was being made redundant. So long and no thanks for all the fish.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/06/watch-out-watch-out-theres-houdini.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]

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]

Rich man, dead man, radio man, spy : 1995 : John Kluge & Natalie Slepova, Radio 7 Moscow

He was dead. He was definitely dead, his face turned blue from the extreme cold. His body was lying face-up on the street, at the top of a staircase that led from the subway station below. I was amongst hundreds of commuters that morning who were forced to crowd to one side of the exit to avoid tripping over his corpse. Nobody gasped. Nobody said anything. Nobody stared. Nobody stopped. We all remained focused on our daily journeys to work, trying not to contemplate the precarity of our own lives.

My commute to work was arduous. I had to take two subways and then an overcrowded bus. The subway was complex to navigate and I sometimes discovered I had travelled the wrong direction or alighted at the wrong stop. I always boarded the bus at its rear door without a ticket. Not because I could not afford to pay, but because I had no idea how or where to purchase a bus ticket. The job of the bus driver was simply to drive the bus, not to sell or check tickets. During several years making this journey, I worried constantly that a ticket inspector would board the bus and bundle me away forever for having broken some law. But it never happened.

I arrived at work to be informed that this was a special day. Later that morning, a coach pulled up outside our workplace. It was no ordinary coach. It was huge, the size you imagine a football team might need, and it had darkened windows. I was amongst a line of colleagues stood waiting in the cold, opposite the door of the vehicle. It opened and several men in sunglasses and dark suits emerged, marched around the vicinity and eventually radio-ed that our location appeared safe. They completely ignored us. There was yet more waiting.

Then the coach door opened a second time and a frail old man walked slowly down the steps. He was eighty years old and his name was John Kluge. He had been named number one on Forbes’ rich list in 1987, the richest man in America. The previous year, he had sold his local television stations for four billion dollars to Rupert Murdoch, who had relaunched them as his Fox TV network. Kluge had used part of the cash to acquire all sorts of businesses, one of which he had deigned to visit that day.

Some minutes later, I was surprised to see a young woman coming down the steps of the coach. Despite the cold, she was dressed as if she had just spent the morning in a Venice Beach café. The contrast in age with Kluge could not have been greater. Maybe this was his daughter, I thought. Maybe his grand-daughter? Surely not his girlfriend? His ‘companion’? Possibly a future fourth wife? I am not certain I ever understood her identity. Apart from the ‘men in black’ and the presumed coach driver, this bizarre couple were the only passengers we saw exit the huge vehicle.

In between the parked coach and our offices located in an oversized hut, our American manager Mike Lonneke was warmly greeting his billionaire employer, overlooked by a stone bust atop a column … of Lenin. Extreme communism came face-to-face with extreme capitalism that day … on the outskirts of Moscow. We were in a large, high-security park where, only years before, a powerful Soviet radio ‘jamming’ station had created deliberate interference to broadcasts by the Voice of America and BBC. Post-Perestroika, Kluge’s business, Metromedia International, had acquired a radio station located within the park named ‘Radio 7’. Lonneke led the team charged with turning around the business from the least listened of Moscow’s 30-odd stations to top of the ratings.

Within the line of personnel greeting Kluge that day was Russian citizen Natalie Slepova. Following Kluge’s purchase of the station, its entire staff had been sacked and replaced … except for Slepova. Apparently, Russia’s arcane laws prevented employers from sacking single mothers, so she had remained on the staff. She printed her own Radio 7 business card with her preferred job title. She came to the office when she wanted, such as an occasion like today. A job in Soviet Russia had seemed merely to confer entitlement to an income, rather than an onerous responsibility to perform tasks that would be evaluated. No Annual Reviews there.

My work in Moscow required almost no interaction with Slepova, so it came as a complete surprise when one day she invited me to lunch. It would have been rude (maybe fatal?) to refuse. I was told to meet at her apartment, rather than at the radio station. Most Russian city dwellers lived in horrible high-rise concrete apartment buildings that resembled Britain’s worst post-War council estates. I found her building near the Kremlin to be a mini-palace with high ceilings, enormously wide staircases and gigantic ornate doors sized for giants. Think regal Paris chic rather than Ronan Point. If her circumstances were intended to impress me, they certainly did. But how could a single mother afford to dwell in such opulence?

We ate at a reputedly excellent restaurant in a city centre shopping plaza. The food was predictably awful. Slepova asked me dozens of questions, but not casual enquiries about me and my work. She wanted to know details about how Metromedia was organised and its long-term objectives. The only accessories missing from this inquisition were the rope around my chair and the spotlight in my eyes. I offered her no information, not only out of reluctance, but more so because I was merely a distant foreign contractor to Metromedia who knew next to nothing about its strategy. Despite my years working for the corporation, I never had a contract, a job title or even a letter of agreement. Lunch over, Slepova barely acknowledged me from then on. Evidently, I had proven completely useless to her.

To compare Moscow in 1995 to the Wild West is do it an injustice. It was much more frightening than that. Several unexplained ‘incidents’ I witnessed involved the radio station. Shortly after my arrival in Moscow, its American advertising saleswoman had been dining with potential clients in a restaurant when masked men stormed in, shot dead everyone at an adjacent table and ran off. The next day, she resigned and booked the next available flight back to the States. The restaurant cleaned up and reopened for business as if nothing had happened. So much could be witnessed in Russia that was never reported.

It was evident to foreign observers that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had been demonstrating increasingly erratic behaviour during his foreign excursions. Reputedly an alcoholic, Yeltsin had refused to leave his plane at Shannon Airport to meet the Irish prime minister in 1994. Bill Clinton alleged that, on a visit to Washington in 1995, Russia’s president had been found on the street drunk, in his underwear, trying to hail a taxi to a pizza restaurant. Yeltsin had already suffered several heart attacks and a quintuple bypass operation, so it was perceived as credible that he might die on the job.

I was asked by Radio 7 manager Lonneke to create a procedure for the station’s DJs to follow, should they learn that Yeltsin had suddenly died. He was concerned that, should a presenter continue with the popular music format following the president’s death, it could provide the government with an excuse to cancel the American-owned station’s licence. I wrote a list of instructions for the DJs, scripted appropriate announcements to be read and purchased CDs of sombre Russian classical music. My document was translated into Russian, placed in a plastic wallet with the CDs and taped to the wall of the studio under a large sign: “If the president should die, open and follow this procedure.”

Within a matter of days, I arrived at work to find unusually that the overnight DJ was still present and was upset. Apparently, in the middle of the previous night when he had been the only person present in the building, several men wearing balaclavas had burst into the studio. They seemed to know exactly where to find the instructions I had written in case of Yeltsin’s death, had ripped the plastic wallet from the wall and made off with it. They had neither identified themselves nor explained their actions. It was a dramatic raid on our little radio station.

The walled and barb-wired park in which the station was located always had armed government security guards at its only entrance, to whom I was required daily to show my identify card and clearance document. How had the masked intruders entered the property? The guards could offer no rational explanation. How did the raiders know where the station’s unmarked building was within the park? How did they know exactly where to find the document in the radio studio? How did they even know that such a document existed?

It was apparent that, as a result of us having contemplated the possibility that Russia’s president might die in service, we had attracted the attention of forces much bigger than us. The evidence pointed to the worrying conclusion that the overnight raid could only been the outcome of a knowledgeable informant having observed intimate details about our radio station’s operations. We would never know for sure who that insider could have been.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/rich-man-dead-man-radio-man-spy-1995.html]

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