Tag: Neil Romain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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