Tag: radio sector

Kick archaic studio-bound public radio production out into 21st century public spaces : 2011 : BBC Radio

 Technological advances made during the last two to three decades have changed our world almost beyond recognition. Everyone now has the ability to be almost permanently ‘connected’ to a world beyond their immediate personal space.

Has BBC radio fully embraced the benefits of these technological advances? From an external perspective, the answer appears to be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. BBC radio seems to have implemented new technologies less obviously than BBC television. Yes, BBC radio programmes and stations now have an online presence, receive e-mails and tweets, and distribute their output live and on-demand via IP. But no, the basics of radio production have changed very little beyond a conversion from analogue tape to digital hard-drive storage.

In the 1920’s, a male radio announcer would sit in a BBC radio studio, dressed in a dinner jacket and reading a pre-prepared script. In order to be interviewed, guests would have to physically come to the studio. Everything had to be broadcast live, as there was no technology to include ‘actuality’ from beyond the studio’s confines. All the news and information had to be filtered through the on-air presenter. Listener involvement was limited to letters submitted, selected, edited and read on-air by the presenter.

Surprisingly, the radio production format has changed little in the interim ninety years. Presenters still sit in studios filled with expensive radio hardware and they still act as filters for the information that flows into the studio. Only three substantial changes are evident: recording systems have allowed interviews and actuality to be incorporated into programmes, and a programme itself to be time-shifted; phone-ins have allowed listener voices to be put live on-air via the telephone; and BBC reporters can be incorporated live into programmes via ISDN or IP from around the world. All these developments were pioneered by the BBC.

If we look at BBC television, we see that an increasing amount of content broadcast on the ‘BBC News’ channel comes in the form of photographs, poor quality mobile phone video (viz the ‘Arab Spring’ in Syria), eyewitness reports by phone line and Skype video/audio interviews supplied by the public from their offices or homes. In the current jargon, much of this could be called ‘user generated content’.

However, in radio, this revolution has simply not happened. When did you last hear a piece of audio on BBC radio that had been recorded and submitted by a member of the public? Never? In radio, public participation in the output still remains limited to content initiated or filtered by the production team. A member of the public will be asked to connect to the studio for a formal interview with a presenter either live in the studio, from a BBC contribution studio or via a phone line. Or a reporter may take a portable audio recorder out to interview a member of the public on location and the outcome is edited before transmission into an audio ‘package.’

The result is that, just as in the 1920’s, what we hear on the radio has still been filtered through the programme presenter and producer, so that the resulting programme is delivered from the confines of a cosy, air-conditioned studio. Radio is still largely produced in a vacuum that is far apart from the real world. Of course, there are obvious exceptions such as ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ and ‘Question Time.’ But these remain exceptions.

The continuing reliance within radio upon the hardware-equipped studio is particularly hard to understand when digital audio equipment is smaller, lighter, more portable and cheaper than its analogue ancestors. A radio programme can be produced, mixed, edited and broadcast from a basic laptop computer using software-based technology rather than considerably more expensive hardware. In this sense, radio should by now be far ahead of television, where digital equipment remains expensive, complex and still requires substantial bit rates and data storage for broadcast quality.

These incredible technological advances in radio production have been well understood and seized upon by people outside the BBC who do not have privileged access to expensive hardware-based recording studios. In their thousands, these people are making their own radio programmes (‘podcasts’) and creating their own online radio stations. The technology has filtered down so far that even a local primary school has its own radio production studio, linked to a low-power FM transmitter on the school’s roof so that children can listen on ordinary radios to the programmes they make.

London is one of the most exciting cities in the world. Yet, when I listen to ‘BBC London 94.9 FM’, I do not hear that excitement reflected much in its output. What I do hear are presenters sat in hardware-based studios, talking with guests they have invited there or talking via phone lines to selected contributors outside. What is sorely missing is ‘actuality.’ News stories are often reduced to ‘packages’ that can be inserted into hourly news bulletins. Yet the technology already exists (smartphones, IP, 3G) so that the hundreds of news stories that happen in London each day could be put to-air quickly using actuality live or ‘as-live’ recorded by either BBC reporters or the public.

Existing technologies could be implemented to create an exciting news and information driven radio station for London that more closely reflected life in the capital. It would entail taking risks, but it is only through risk-taking that innovation will happen. BBC London’s share of radio listening in London is only 1.4% and the station reaches only 5% of the population each week. Licence Fee payers could be better served by a local radio station in London that used new technologies to create an audio soundtrack that reflected their lives in this city. Such opportunities to use new technologies to change the face of radio are being missed, or being left to television to implement.

I lived in Toronto for five years and the city’s only independent television station, ‘CityTV’, offered one of the most impressive uses of new technology I have ever seen. For a start, the station did not have traditional TV studios. News programmes were presented by anchors perched on the corner of their own office desks. The nightly one-hour local news programme was filled to the brim with reports from a small team of one-person ‘videographers’ who whizzed around the city all day and recorded every available story using a single handheld camera. Sometimes the quality was not great, but the content accurately reflected the life of the city much better than any other local medium in Toronto.

At CityTV, the weekday morning show was presented from the station’s ground floor foyer. Cameras, lights, cables, production staff were all left in-shot, as were the people on the busy street outside and casual visitors to the station’s offices. CityTV’s owner, ‘media visionary’ Moses Znaimer, called this infrastructure “the streetfront/studioless television operating system” and it worked fantastically. Every Friday evening, the same foyer was turned into a free nightclub that was televised live for several hours with DJs, visiting music acts and short interviews. Admittedly, CityTV’s output was sometimes chaotic but it used cheap, lightweight technologies to successfully break down the barrier that had existed previously between formal, studio-limited programmes and their audiences. The people of Toronto felt truly connected with CityTV because every city dweller knew the location of its downtown building and could wander in, even during its live shows.

I had marvelled at CityTV’s bold use of cutting-edge technology fifteen years ago. And, since then, technologies for television have advanced much further. But it is the medium of audio where even more fundamental breakthroughs have taken place. The ability to use a smartphone, a laptop or a cheap audio recorder to record perfect digital sound quality in WAV format has opened up the possibility to produce content for broadcast much more significantly than in television. Yet, from the outside, there seems to be no strategic vision to implement these technologies within the BBC in order to change the way in which radio more pro-actively involves itself with the world outside its radio studios.

Individual BBC reporters are doing amazing things with new technology. Nick Garnett provided live interviews for ‘Radio Four’ about the outcome of the last election from a moving tram in Sheffield using only his smartphone installed with the ‘Luci Live’ application for broadcasters. His personal website demonstrates in videos his evangelism for these new technologies. He contrasts his ability to produce live coverage of the recent Salford/Manchester riots safely using only his handled smartphone with the impossibility twenty years earlier when a high-tech van was necessary, even for a short live report, and the job of holding the microphone remained the responsibility of a BBC Studio Manager.

At the heart of technological change is a necessary accompanying change in working practices in many parts of BBC radio. Whilst television underwent fundamental change when it was transformed into ‘BBC Vision’, the radio infrastructure has remained much the same. Whilst BBC television has been mostly casualised by freelance staff, radio remains dominated by full-time employees. Although BBC television has stiff competition from commercial stations, BBC radio attracts the majority of listening (54% currently) and its share continues to grow. The grave danger is that complacency in BBC radio from high ratings can stunt innovation. 

Whilst there is no doubt that technological innovations have been successfully incorporated into current working practices within BBC radio, it is a much greater challenge to incorporate the disruptive influences of those technologies in a way that forces change in current working methods. For example, at present, producers and editors of radio programmes set the agendas of programmes themselves and then seek to fulfil those plans by inviting ‘talking heads’ and commissioning ‘packages’ to make their points. This is a demand-led production system, working from the demands of the producer.

However, in a world where there are already hundreds of pieces of audio content available to choose from to make a programme, the production system could become more supply-led. The editor would use a mix of commissioned pieces and the best or most appropriate of what already existed from BBC contributors or the public. In fact, the radio editor would become more like an editor of a newspaper, selecting from what content already existed, rather than commissioning every item from scratch.

If the thought of including ‘user generated content’ from the British public in network radio output proves alarming, it is worth remembering that there are dozens of media courses up and down the country whose students would love to add some BBC radio contributions to their CVs. There are also 300 community radio stations that have an existing ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with the BBC to share content in both directions. Yet BBC radio at network level does not seem to have reached out to the wider constituency of audio producers beyond its own staff and ex-staff. When I interviewed senior BBC network radio staff last year for a ‘BBC Trust’ report and asked why no audio was being recycled from BBC local radio, student radio or podcast producers, I was told that they would not meet the ‘quality’ threshold. Equally, you might ask why the Sony Award-winning ‘Hackney Podcast’ is not a regular part of BBC London’s output.

This ‘quality’ barrier is an anachronism that remains in place in radio and yet seems to have been largely overcome in television. Within BBC radio, ‘quality’ is even used as a means to segregate one division’s content from another’s. In television, if the content communicates something newsworthy or significant, blurry mobile phone footage is broadcast. Yet, in radio, the audio quality often seems more important to producers than the content itself. This requires not so much a change in technology, as a change in attitudes and editorial policies that have not caught up with the technological possibilities.

A station such as ‘BBC 1Xtra’ should be an exciting and ground-breaking experience to listen to. Yet, on the occasions I have listened, its output has seemed hideously studio-bound and insular to me. There appears to be little difference between 1Xtra and 1920’s BBC radio, as a presenter still sits in a hardware studio, but with an assistant who reads tweets instead of letters. During one show I heard recently, the presenter was reduced to bemoaning that he had left his lip balm at home, and a clip was used of musician interviews made days earlier backstage at an awards ceremony.

Surely a station such as BBC 1Xtra that is aimed at young people should have an immediacy and an incredibly ‘live’ feel to it that is able to challenge the speed of competing information sources delivered via the internet. 1Xtra should be overflowing with exclusive news, information and music, artists dropping in for short chats and ‘actuality’ broadcast live or ‘as-live’ that reflect the diversity of the British black music scene. Yet I do not hear this kind of excitement when I listen to 1Xtra. The station would be a perfect candidate to adopt CityTV’s studio-less operating system, where it could operate from an open-door shopfront rather than from the remote bowels of a BBC office. It could even broadcast from different cities week to week, like an ever-travelling roadshow.

I have a particular interest in 1Xtra because, twenty years ago, I had launched ‘KISS FM’ in London as the UK’s first black music radio station. Even then, I had used what few new technologies were available to make the programme content less studio-bound. I regularly sent one reporter out with my mobile phone (at a time when they were uncommon) and her interviews and actuality were put live to air using nothing more sophisticated than the phone’s low-quality microphone. The audience loved that immediacy. Then, after work, I would take a digital recorder to London clubs and record the whole night’s DJ set for subsequent broadcast. These technological innovations made KISS FM one of the most successful station launches of its time because listeners understood that the station was ‘out there in London’ rather than always studio-bound. 

 Let us be clear here. Radio needs to implement as many new technologies as possible in order to adapt and change what it can do if it is to remain relevant and valuable to its audiences. Although, in total, radio listening in the UK has reached an all-time high (partly as an outcome of the increasing population), there are some disturbing long-terms trends. Six years ago, 15–24-year-olds started to spend significantly less time listening to broadcast radio. More recently, 25–34-year-olds are also spending less time with broadcast radio. If this trend continues, part of an entire generation could lose the radio habit.

BBC Radio needs to compete for consumers’ time with every other distraction out there – particularly the internet, games, social networking and video. To do that, radio has to re-invent itself so that it is exciting and entertaining for a whole new generation. That requires radio to respond to the disruptive influences of new technology, not in a defensive way, but to embrace change and to understand that, just as with other businesses, if you do not change and adapt with the times, your brand could easily die.

At present, the BBC’s strategy for implementation of new technologies in radio could appear to be somewhat slow, scattershot and disjointed. What is needed is a joined-up roadmap to bring BBC radio firmly into the 21st century, a determined push to move radio beyond its 1920’s production methods, and a programme to combat internal complacency and inertia through persuasion and education. The biggest enemy to such change often derives from the people entrenched in an organisation, not from the availability of technologies. In that sense, the imperative for change has to come from within.

The BBC has a long tradition of being at the forefront of new technological developments in radio. It is admired the world over for its innovation in the radio medium and the quality of its outputs. The biggest current danger is that, unless a strategy is developed for BBC radio that combines the implementation of new technologies with changing methods of radio production, the BBC’s track record of innovation could be acceded elsewhere.

In our enlarged, globalised radio marketplace, it would be perfectly possible for Google or Microsoft to invest sufficient R&D seed money to develop a new style of radio that could set the youth of the world on fire (viz Facebook). Until now, the main threat to broadcast radio from the internet has been in back-to-back music applications (Spotify, Last.fm) which add no value to widely available pre-recorded music. However, compared to the visual medium, it would prove relatively cheap to add value to that audio content if you could identify the appropriate editorial that will appeal to a whole new generation as ‘the new radio.’ It is important that BBC radio faces this global threat by implementing innovation as a must-have-now rather than as a long-term objective.

Within the BBC, there are already plenty of staff embracing such change on an individual level. More than 300 BBC staff have signed up to Audioboo, a UK-based online exchange for short audio clips. Similarly, some BBC programme makers are contributing to PRX, a US-based online marketplace for both complete programmes and short audio clips. I understand that the BBC is currently developing its own in-house version of these sort of E-Bay‘s for audio content.

The imperative to centralise data storage of BBC audio so as to create an internal ‘cloud’ system for radio content provides the perfect opportunity to develop new production systems that can share content, both internally and from outside the BBC. The traditional ‘silo’ system, whereby individual radio programmes and individual radio stations have managed their own content resources, cannot be productive during a time when the Licence Fee produces pressures to share and consolidate resources as much as possible.

More than ever, in BBC radio, change is necessary. But change can also be very hard to make happen, particularly within large organisations. I would suggest that the task ahead is to develop an interlocking roadmap for radio technologies that embraces:

  •   more agile content ingest, storage and accessibility (avoiding transcoding)
  •   radio production processes that focus on the intrinsic public value of content, more than its audio quality or source
  •   the evolution of radio studios from fixed hardware to portable software
  •   a plan for multi-platform distribution based on cost-benefit analysis and accurate usage data (RAJAR platform data are inaccurate)
  •   IP delivery of radio via frictionless technologies, reducing bandwidth through multicasting
  •   a focus on content availability, connectivity and ‘searchability’
  •   the unlocking of BBC archive radio content
  •   an appropriate and future-proof metadata architecture for audio content distribution
  •   use of commodity software or collaborations with external suppliers wherever possible.

The aim: to ensure that the connections between BBC radio and its audiences are maximised through available technologies, delivering content efficiently and easily wherever and whenever it is demanded.

[In 2011, London recruitment agency Lonmoor invited me to apply for the vacancy of ‘Technology Controller, Audio & Music’ at the BBC. Following initial discussion, it was suggested I submit these ideas on paper, after which I received an email response: “We shall conclude our shortlisting process in the next week and be back in touch.” I am still waiting. It became the fifty-ninth consecutive BBC job for which my application was rejected.]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/01/kick-archaic-studio-bound-public-radio.html Available as a download.]

LBC 97.3 FM, London’s whitest conversation? : 2007 : ‘Is Radio Racist?’, The Radio Academy

 The conversation at the Radio Academy event in London entitled ‘Is Radio Racist?’ became heated when the chairman, ‘LBC‘ morning show presenter James O’Brien [JO], was questioned by ‘BBC Five Live’ overnight presenter Dotun Adebayo [DA] about the absence of ethnic minority presenters at LBC. At the start of the event, O’Brien said he had been asked to chair the debate because “I am actually officially the whitest person working in the broadcasting industry today.”

DA: “James, you work for a London station. How many black presenters are there, when 20% of the London population is African-Caribbean or Asian? How many black presenters are there on LBC?”

JO: “That’s interesting because there aren’t any black presenters currently.”

DA: “If I ask James how many black cleaners there are at LBC, it would be a high percentage.”

JO: “For what it’s worth, that’s not true. If you had asked me about production staff, I would point at two or three colleagues, both current and former, who are from ethnic minorities. I object to that question because I don’t think their colour is relevant to their ability to do the job.”

DA: “That wasn’t the point. I gave you one example of London media where there are no [ethnic] presenters. You should be embarrassed about that, James.”

JO: “I think that, at the moment, I am the best person to be presenting my show and colour is entirely irrelevant to that equation. If someone who is better than me comes along, they will get my job, whatever colour they are. I would hope my employer would have the bravery to appoint the best person for the job and not say…..”

DA: “How can you explain the fact that there isn’t one black presenter on your station?”

JO: “How would you like to be the one who only got the job because there aren’t any black people on the station?”

DA: “I would be happy to get the job because at least it was an opportunity for me, whereas there is no opportunity for me there at the moment. There are no black presenters at LBC. That’s something that’s disgraceful and you know that.”

JO: “I dispute that entirely, but it’s not about me. If you want to hear me talk about myself, I’ll be back on LBC 97.3 FM tomorrow morning [laughter from audience].”

Later in the debate, Salim Salam [SS], a former BBC producer now working for digital station ‘Colourful Radio’, returned the discussion to the same issue:

SS: “It’s a managerial question. Given that you want to have a media industry which is broadly reflective of the society in which it operates, and in the case of the BBC is directly paid for by that society, then you should be looking to get (LBC being an example) a station which is broadly representative of the society to which it is broadcasting. And the fact that it’s not is a managerial question.”

JO: “LBC takes up 24 hours of programming, of which every single one, expect for two [hours] between 5 and 7am, is phone-in. So if you want to talk about a radio station that provides a platform and an opportunity for every single citizen in the city to put forward their case, their perspective, their experience or their opinion, a phone-in programme or a phone-in station is almost immune to these accusations.”

SS: “No, it’s not, because I’m talking about the people who present the programmes and who make the programmes, which actually affects the editorial. There are two elements to this question. One is: who’s making the programmes and who’s presenting the programmes, and who’s doing the hiring and firing? … The other question is the editorial, and it’s not always a question of people walking around deliberately looking for opportunities to discriminate against black people. It’s about the questions that you ask. Muslim people, for example, have a hell of a lot of questions to ask about a lot of things. There’s nobody asking those questions for them because the editorial lines that are being taken all come from one particular point of view, and then the questions that are asked follow the perceived lines of wisdom or the orthodoxy of the time. So, if you are looking for an industry that is broadly reflective of the society in which it operates, you have got to ask yourself why is it not (whether it is racism or not)?  Secondly, if you are looking for solutions to that, look at who is doing the hiring and firing. Who do they know? Are they capable of making a rational judgement when they are faced with those applicants? The BBC’s own figures will tell you that black people, once they get to the final interview stage, are still three times less likely to get the job than their white counterparts. Are you telling me that black people are three times less talented or able? I’m not of that opinion. I think it’s either unconscious discrimination, or whatever it is.”

Jimmy Buckland, external affairs officer of RadioCentre, provided the meeting with data from the forthcoming SkillCentre 2006 Employment Census which found the radio industry overall employs 6.9% of staff from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, comprising 3.1% in commercial radio and 10.9% in BBC radio. Explaining that these results appear skewed because “commercial radio is more regional based than the BBC”, Buckland said that 19% of commercial radio’s workforce is based in London, compared to 59% of the BBC’s. He added: “What we have here is a problem of representation, definitely.”

[First published in edited form in ‘The Radio Magazine’ as ‘LBC Quizzed Over All-White Presenter Team’, #777, 28 February 2007]

[Originally blog published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/11/lbc-973-fm-londons-whitest-conversation.html ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caribbean drubbing on such an “Armageddon-like” day : 2024 : Hurricane Beryl, Carriacou

 “Clackety-clack clackety-clack, from Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo, from Timbuctoo and back!”

As a young reader, I learned these words by heart from a favourite children’s book, ‘The Train to Timbuctoo’ written in 1951 by Margaret Wise Brown. I daydreamed about the journey between these two strangely-named railway stations, evoked so perfectly by the author’s prose and accompanying illustrations. Decades later, I discovered I had been sold a fantasy, it being as improbable to take a train from Kalamazoo (a city in Michigan) to Timbuktu (an ancient city in Mali) as it would to line up at Marrakesh station ticket office behind Graham Nash. Only recently did I learn that Timbuctoo (a different spelling from the Mali one) is in fact the name of: a ghost town in California; a small settlement in New Jersey; and a failed farming community in upstate New York, none of which boast a railway station. Whichever were the book’s fantasy locations, I never did manage to travel there … by train or other means. But it had stimulated dreams of foreign sojourns.

Although I never read the book, the haunting instrumental theme music to the French dramatisation of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ remains embedded in my memory, half a century after having watched its thirteen black-and-white dubbed episodes repeated ad nauseum on BBC children’s television. Seven-year-old suburban me was enthralled by the prospect of living beside the sandy beach of a sunny tropical island, despite my aversion to spiders and snakes. Scenic landscapes filmed on Gran Canaria looked picture-postcard remarkable in the era before ‘package holidays’ and ‘charter flights’ opened up international travel. The series fomented a childhood dream of one day relishing a ‘simple’ life beside a gently lapping sea … perhaps accompanied by a ‘Girl Friday’ such as Tuesday Weld whom I had just ogled alongside ‘Richard Kimble’ in ‘The Fugitive’, my parents’ favourite TV serial. It was ‘Robinson Crusoe’ that fostered dreams of island-living.

For a month during early 2004, much of my time was wasted sat at a desk in the air-conditioned open-plan BBC office in Phnom Penh with a workload stymied by disagreements with management over the danger of fulfilling my contract in the crumbling Radio National Kampuchea headquarters, following the recent workplace death of a staff member. Seeking escapism from these frustrations, I listened to the few extant streaming reggae music stations of the time, but found none were playing the selection of ‘roots’ oldies I desired. My fruitless search had identified a gap in the global online market for listeners like me who had grown up during reggae’s most fertile and creative period between the 1960’s and 1980’s.

On my return to the UK later that year, I spent months awaiting the follow-up BBC work contracts I had been promised, but which never materialised. Without employment, I busied myself creating an automated online music station ‘rootsrockreggae’, digitising 15,000 reggae recordings I had collected since childhood. Broadcast from servers in Jamaica, I managed the operation remotely, generating revenue from a few local advertisers and commissions from listeners buying compact discs of music they had heard. It started small but, using an early iteration of ‘Google Ads’ to target North American reggae fans, the audience grew quickly. Within a few years, Winamp/Shoutcast ranked it amongst the five most listened to online reggae radio stations in the world, attracting an audience of tens of thousands each day. Its online player displayed constantly updated headlines from Jamaica, reggae news and weather reports, using my computer programming skills first learnt in the 1970’s. Like most online start-ups, sadly it never turned a profit.

Out of the blue, I received an email from the engineer of an FM radio station ‘Kyak 106’, asking if it could re-broadcast rootsrockreggae’s online overnight stream of dub and DJ music when no live presenters were available. I found the station’s website, listened and loved its enthusiasm for reggae, broadcasting to an island called Carriacou of which I knew absolutely nothing. I responded positively. This random communication prompted me to find out more about the location where my online station was suddenly being broadcast on 106.3 FM.

I discovered that Carriacou is a 12-square-mile island in the southeast Caribbean Sea with a population of 9,000. It is part of the former British colony of Grenada, independent since 1974 but retaining King Charles III as head of state. Physically, it is closer to Saint Vincent & The Grenadines (another independent former British colony, population 110,000, 4 miles away) than to the main island of Grenada (population 120,000, 17 miles away). Reading what little I could find online, I was quickly charmed by Carriacou’s old-style, friendly, relaxed way of life. It was not a resort island for rich Americans, its single airstrip too small for commercial planes, its colourful buildings were low-rise and its capital Hillsborough (population 1,200) had the feel of a quaint village with a short ‘High Street’.

Such was my enthusiasm, buoyed by regular listening to Kyak 106’s live shows, that I started to sketch a budget holiday plan for Carriacou, taking a Monarch Airlines flight from the UK to Grenada, a ferry to the island and staying at ‘Ades Dream Guesthouse’. Initially, it was time constraints that delayed such a visit because my workload had permitted only a single day off that year (to attend my daughter’s graduation). Then, having unexpectedly and suddenly lost my over-demanding job and unable to find another, finance became the restricting factor.

Inevitably, life moved on. Although the listenership to my reggae station had continued to grow, revenues fell precipitously when the dollar commissions earned from compact disc sales were replaced by mere cents generated by newly legalised MP3 download sales. Lacking a job, I reluctantly closed rootsrockreggae in 2009, even though it was now regularly ranked the most-listened online reggae station in the world after five years continuously on-air. It was a disappointing and frustrating time. Without access to development funds, life had to be focused on survival above all else. I promised myself to retire to Carriacou as soon as I won the lottery.

Kyak 106 closed in 2014, the product of a falling-out between two of its three directors that escalated as far as a 2022 High Court judgement. Station engineer Michael Ward, having been summarily sacked by presenter Kimberlain ‘Kim D King‘ Mills, proceeded to commandeer the radio station and continue broadcasting from its Belair studio in Carriacou, until Mills called time and unilaterally shut the operation. Subsequently, Ward transformed Kyak 106 into an automated online reggae music station, adopting a slogan ‘Roots Rock Reggae from Carriacou’ that sounded remarkably familiar!

28 August 2008. When tropical storm Gustav arrived in Jamaica, I was listening for news to FM talk radio station ‘Power 106’ where presenter Althea McKenzie remained barricaded in its Bradley Avenue studio in Half Way Tree for hours on end. You could hear the wind and the rains aggressively pounding the building as she valiantly relayed information updates for residents and took phone calls from listeners, her voice sometimes wracked with dread and emotion. It produced some of the most impressive (but frightening) live radio I have ever heard, for which she should have won some broadcasting award. Gustav resulted in fifteen deaths and US$210m in damages on the island. McKenzie is still heard daily from 5am on this excellent station. I still dreamt of living on a Caribbean island, despite weather disasters such as this.

October 2017. I had accompanied my daughter for a meal in a Wokingham pizzeria when my sister asked me: “If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you want to be?” Without hesitation, repetition or deviation, I responded: “Carriacou.” The dream was still alive.

1 July 2024. Category 4 Hurricane Beryl tore through Carriacou on Monday morning, destroying 98% of its buildings, cutting its electricity, water supply and mobile phone coverage. Houses were reduced to matchsticks. Huge trees were uprooted. All vegetation was stripped away, turning the island from luscious green to brown. Several people (number still unconfirmed) died. Roads became impassable. All communication with the outside world was lost. To discover what had happened there, I turned to YouTube. There I discovered award-winning American journalist and ‘storm chaser’ Jonathan Petramala who had arrived on the island the previous day with colleague Brandon Clement to document the hurricane’s passage. His videos provided an absolutely remarkable record of the devastation.


Two decades earlier, when I had first sought information about Carriacou, YouTube was yet to launch. Today there are dozens of videos about the island. Petramala captured the ‘calm before the storm’ mere hours before the hurricane struck, incorporating drone footage illustrating the charm of its colourful buildings and its ‘paradise’ sandy beaches. His impassioned commentary heralded the calamity that was to come and, although the island’s one petrol station had closed after a run on fuel and the mini-mart was busy, there was no evident panic. “It’s going to be horrific,” he said … and it was.


The following day’s video was a bleak testament to the destruction Carriacou had endured. “This island is shredded,” Petramala commented. “These people are in desperate need of help.” A resident said: “Right now, Carriacou is finished for a couple of years.” I had never seen anything weather-related as shocking as the complete devastation shown here. It resembled a war-zone. The drone shots were heartbreaking. Another shell-shocked resident said: “The thing is: we have three [storm] systems right behind it. What about the people who don’t have the time to recover, who don’t have a roof over their head, who don’t have the resources to rebuild?”

This video was unique because communications (mobile, internet, radio) had been completely lost on the island in the hurricane’s aftermath. Carriacou has no TV station and its two local FM radios (‘Vibes 101.3’ and ‘Sister Isles 92.9’) had been knocked out. Using a vehicle battery, Petramala uploaded his video via the Starlink satellite. That Tuesday, there was no other footage online. Residents could be seen filming on their mobile phones but there was no signal coverage to share or upload videos and no electricity to keep their phones charged. The island’s population was in an evident state of shock. Petramala’s footage, in which he made repeated appeals for outsiders to help the population, was used in weather stories broadcast by television stations the world over to illustrate the disaster, deservedly garnering millions of views.

The next day, Wednesday, roads in the capital had been partially cleared by residents, allowing Petramala to explore beyond by vehicle. His next video showed the ‘Dover Government School’, designated as one of eight emergency shelters on the island, entirely reduced to rubble. Those who were sheltering there had to evacuate to its tiny library outbuilding completed in April 2023 that remained standing. In March 2023, the 40-bed Princess Royal Smart Hospital had reopened in Belair with fanfare as the island’s sole hospital after having been “retrofitted to improve [its] resistance to disasters like hurricanes”, using funds from the UK government and Pan American Health Organization. This video showed all its facilities unusable due to water damage.

Then, arriving at the government’s Emergency Operations Centre on Carriacou, also in Belair, Petramala explained to its seemingly baffled staff:

“I’m the only journalist on the island. We have a Starlink [satellite terminal] so we’ve been able to get in touch with the government down in Grenada. I think we’re the only people who have contact with the outside [world]. They want to be able to get in touch with you guys but nothing is working. … We can set [Starlink] up outside and give you guys ten minutes if you want to call down to the government in Grenada and communicate what has happened here.”

Surprisingly, the Centre did not appear to be a hive of activity after such total devastation. We did learn that only five of the island’s eight emergency shelters had survived (for 9,000 population?). Although the building’s generator was powering lighting, its “communications hub” (as promised by the US Charge d’Affaires) had not survived the hurricane, despite this “fantastic facility” having only been completed in 2021 with US$3m funding from the US Embassy. Did we see a basic radio transceiver (even a retail amateur radio set) to provide SOME two-way inter-island communication? No. Did we see walkie-talkies used by emergency staff for intra-island communication? No. An apparent dependence on commercial mobile phone networks (operators Digicell and Flow) was, er, unwise when their towers prove so vulnerable to weather and power issues.

Set up in their vehicle, Petramala and Clement allowed nearby traumatised residents to use their Starlink satellite link to contact their loved ones overseas, leading to emotional scenes. Later that day, a helicopter landed at Carriacou’s airport, Grenada prime minster Dickon Mitchell emerged and, interviewed by Petramala, resembled a deer caught in headlights (commented my wife). He promised aid “from tomorrow” but proposed recruitment of volunteers from the mainland and assistance from other countries over guaranteeing immediate assistance from his government. For islanders who had no homes, no water, no electricity, no food and no petrol, with vehicles destroyed and roads blocked, the unfortunate impression was of a lack of urgency two days after the hurricane had hit. (Excellent silent drone footage of the devastation recorded by Clement fills six YouTube videos.)

While Petramala and Clement had been arriving in Carriacou on the eve of the hurricane, Belair resident Rina Mills had been similarly filming from her vehicle the calm that reined that Sunday before the storm (accompanied by Belair youth worker Shem ‘Ambassador’ Quamina). Employed by the Carriacou office of the ‘Grenada Tourism Authority’, Mills’ warnings about the impending disaster were stark and serious. With hindsight, this video (like her many others) was a testament to the beauty of the island though, within a few hours, it sadly became a historic record of how much habitat and infrastructure were about to be destroyed. Her exceptional knowledge of the geography, history and culture of Carriacou, combined with her informal conversations, made her videos compelling. She promised: “After the storm, we’ll do an update as well.”

However, the next day’s destruction of mobile phone masts prevented Mills from updating viewers until Friday, when her 24-minute live feed was managed only by climbing to a high point on the south of the island to connect over the horizon to an antenna on the mainland. Mills and her partner had lost their home, like many other islanders, and appeared in an understandable state of shock whilst cataloguing the “total devastation” of their island and five known associated deaths. It was a sad, upsetting video that acknowledged how precarious is our day-to-day existence, whilst also demonstrating the resilience of the population and its sense of community in the face of unprecedented disaster. The contrast with Mills’ chatty pre-disaster videos could not have been starker. Coincidentally, I heard Mills interviewed that weekend on the BBC World Service show ‘Newshour’ about Beryl’s impact on Carriacou.

Once partial mobile communication was restored on the island, Mills uploaded video previously recorded in the aftermath of the hurricane. In the centre of the capital Hillsborough, next to the destroyed Post Office, a mobile water desalination plant had been set up to offer free drinking water to residents. This vital resource had been provided by American religious charity ‘Samaritan’s Purse’ which amazingly had dispatched a DC-8 cargo plane to Grenada (video of landing) the day after the hurricane, loaded with materials (video) to establish a field hospital, desalination plants around the island, foodstuffs, tarpaulins, clothing and bedding. Two dozen of its volunteers were airlifted to Carriacou and a barge was chartered the following day to bring the equipment there from Grenada. It was a much-needed vital resource at a time when Grenada government assistance was still not visible. “Hats off to Samaritan’s Purse,” commented Mills’ partner. “They were the first to get here, in my opinion.”

I had never heard of Samaritan’s Purse but was incredibly impressed by the scale and urgency of its work, operating a fleet of 24 aircraft and two helicopters from North Carolina. Video of a public tour of this DC-8 plane at the Dayton Air Show only days earlier demonstrated the huge volume of supplies it had carried. Its volunteers quickly spread across the island, distributing materials to residents from churches (Pastor Happy Akasie’s church in Brunswick in this video). By the following week, it had set up its second field hospital in Carriacou with doctors, nurses, medications and counsellors (video). Despite the island’s hotels/B&B’s having been destroyed, the charity operates self-sufficiently, building its own accommodation and bringing food and water for staff. It seems to embody the fictional Tracy family’s ‘International Rescue’.

Towards the end of this video, Mills understandably rails against sightseers arriving by ferry from Grenada merely to video the destruction in order to attract ‘hits’ to their social media channels. One example of this was bizarre ‘Coleen AKA Bright Diamond’ from the mainland who appeared to enjoy her ‘day out’ on the destroyed island, travelling on the back of an aid truck, making inappropriate comments, drinking from a wine bottle in the back of a car and buying bottled beer. Afterwards, the Grenada government introduced vetting of ferry travellers to Carriacou to prevent further ‘disaster tourists’ consuming the island’s scarce resources. Fortunately, these self-promoting types were in a minority, overshadowed by the many people and organisations who arrived on Carriacou to genuinely help out.

British solicitor and author Nadine Matheson had been visiting her parents’ house on Carriacou when the hurricane struck and recorded this scary video of its almost total destruction. Once back home, she is recording informative updates on her parents’ situation and a fundraising effort to replace the house’s roof. The structure is now covered by a temporary blue tarpaulin which, like so many other properties, was donated by Samaritan’s Purse.

Meanwhile, videos published by the Grenada government since the disaster have proven a quite surreal soft-focus experience after the stark wholesale destruction visible in locally-made videos. After its prime minister (who is additionally minister for disaster management) visited the island, one video showed him standing on the wreckage of a resident’s home, looking wistfully into the distance, accompanied by soft tinkling music. Its editor seems to be a big fan of 1980’s Lionel Ritchie music videos. There is lots of footage of government officials in fluorescent vests talking to each other, pointing at the destruction and being interviewed explaining what WILL happen but – dare I say? – not much footage of action IMMEDIATELY to tackle this humanitarian crisis. Initially, the government’s media focus (including its partly owned GBN television channel) was much more on the relatively minor damage suffered on the main island, rather than the total destruction of ‘sister isle’ Carriacou.

Watching hours and hours of government press conferences uploaded online, I was struck by the preoccupation with ‘process’ they exhibit, talking endlessly about which department and which officers are responsible, which meetings WILL take place and who reports to whom. This habitual use of the future tense is alarming when what should be stated was what had ALREADY happened and what was happening RIGHT NOW. The government’s adoption of the slogan ‘Carriacou and Petite Martinique Will Rise Again!’ for the disaster seems symptomatic of this somewhat wishful thinking. It raises the big question: WHEN? Electricity is unlikely to be restored to the whole island for many months. Petrol remains in short supply. The situation on-the-ground for islanders remains dire.

The government press briefing on 9 July, eight days after the hurricane had hit, promised: a 2,000-gallon water truck loaned by a company on St Lucia “will commence distribution to residents starting Wednesday July 10th 2024”; then “a second 1,800-gallon water truck loaned by the Barbados Water Authority is expected to arrive on Carriacou during the coming week.” Does Grenada not own one water truck? How have 9,000 people on Carriacou been expected to survive without government-supplied fresh water for more than a week? Why does the co-ordinator of Grenada’s ‘National Disaster Management Agency’ (whose last web site news update was three weeks ago), Dr Terence Walters, seem to consider in this press conference that distributing 2,000 food packages to residents (who number 9,000) five days after the hurricane hit was a satisfactory response?

Coincidentally, a mere four days before Hurricane Beryl hit Carriacou, a 120-page report entitled ‘Grenada: National Disaster Preparedness Baseline Assessment’ had been published by the ‘Pacific Disaster Center’. It concluded that:

“… results for Grenada showed significant multi-hazard exposure including hurricane winds, earthquakes, and volcanoes with nearly the entire population exposed. […] The assessment pointed to vulnerabilities due to Environmental Stress, Information Access, and Gender Inequality and significant deficiencies in coping capacity areas such as Air Support and Transportation Capacity indicating enhancements are necessary to bolster Grenada’s disaster response capabilities. Addressing these gaps, alongside targeted efforts to mitigate the identified vulnerabilities, will strengthen the nation’s overall resilience to disasters. […] Strengthening communication and information management systems is essential to support effective disaster response and comprehensive risk reduction strategies.” [emphasis added]

In 2019, the World Bank had allocated US$20m to be drawn down by Grenada to address natural catastrophes, but had noted in its report:

“[Grenada’s] Institutional capacity for implementation [risk] is rated Substantial due to weak inter-institutional coordination and the lack of technical expertise. Implementing the proposed operation will require the integrated work of several actors at the national and local levels to move the proposed policy actions forward. This could result in scattered, low impact, and/or uncoordinated actions.” [emphasis added]

Estimated damages and losses to Grenada’s economy from its most significant disasters suffered between 1975 and 2018 were estimated by the World Bank to have totalled US$967m (at 2017 prices). Hurricane Beryl’s financial impact is likely to be greater than these prior disasters combined, eclipsing the island’s annual GDP several times. Evidently, the fiscal catastrophe of accelerating climate change not only decimates small economies such as Grenada’s but cumulatively will precipitate a global diversion of resources away from consumption towards mitigation and repair of weather, temperature and sea level changes. 

It was evident in videos posted online that aid had quickly arrived from diverse sources: generous individuals, volunteers and groups on mainland Grenada, other Caribbean islands, the United Nations, France providing boats of supplies and troops on the ground (Grenada has no army), global charities. I watched a video of the French ambassador to Grenada interviewed whilst off-loading aid. Have I similarly seen the British high commissioner or governor general on Carriacou? Maybe I missed them. On 5 July, the UK provided £0.5m of immediate aid to Grenada and St Vincent, but will more substantial longer term assistance be forthcoming from the island’s former colonial power?

In 1983, the United States had sent 7,300 troops to invade and occupy Grenada because president Reagan chose to believe its newly built airport, funded partially by the British government, would be used to land Soviet bombers. 45 Grenadians were killed and 358 wounded. Today, if a major power were to devote similar resources to rebuild Carriacou quickly, its population might be able to endure the hardship it currently faces. However, despite residents suffering no electricity, water, food or a roof over their heads and with several emergency shelters destroyed, the government in Grenada has no current plan for significant evacuation of the island, preferring to remove only pregnant women, residents of old people’s homes and the hospitalised. How long are its citizens expected to survive when no cash is available from destroyed banks or ATM’s, forcing residents to make a four-hour round trip to the mainland? In 2024, these generous and stoic island people have been marooned in a hellish medieval landscape.

My dream of island-living is over for now. Carriacou can never be the same again. What will happen there is difficult to fathom. Its economy, seemingly reliant on retirees from the diaspora and small-scale tourism (independent travellers and two marinas of yachts) is ruined, forcing its people to make lifechanging decisions. Nowhere have I read that Grenada main island’s schools and sports halls have been opened to Carriacou refugees who have lost everything. At a time when thousands of its residents remain sat amongst the ruins of their dwellings, the Grenada government announced precipitously that:

“… the [Cayman Islands] Premier is extending an invitation to Grenadians who wish to work in the Cayman Islands, to return with her on Tuesday July 16 2024.”

The premier of this British Overseas Territory (population 85,000) was due to deliver aid relief to Grenada that day, but not before a further press statement had to hurriedly clarify that “no such offer was made during the courtesy call made to the Prime Minister of Grenada by the Premier of the Cayman Islands” and withdraw the implied invitation to potential economic migrants. Oh dear. (I recall when 8,000 refugees out of a population of 13,000 left the decimated Caribbean island of Montserrat following its 1995 volcanic eruption.)

I never got to visit Carriacou but, compared to the suffering endured presently by its resilient people, my regrets are insignificant. Watching the news from Carriacou engenders a sense of helplessness in the face of such overwhelming humanitarian need. I am highlighting Carriacou here only because it has been on my mind for two decades since receiving that fateful email from Kyak 106. The neighbouring islands of Petit Martinique and Union Island have been just as badly devastated by Hurricane Beryl. Though I am continuing to follow events in Carriacou, the mainstream media has inevitably moved on swiftly to other disasters elsewhere.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?height=476&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Funep%2Fvideos%2F1177977146792786%2F&show_text=false&width=476&t=0

Observing the aftermath of this catastrophic event since 1 July has merely reinforced the devastating impact of ‘climate change’ us humans have foisted upon populations who have done nothing to cause it. Nobody on Earth can afford to ignore this issue because its effects will inevitably be coming to your corner of the world soon. Nobody will be immune. It is coming to get you, whether or not you choose to believe it is real. Voicing this eloquently was an emotional call-to-arms video (initially at https://youtu.be/oYn-XarQM3M but mysteriously deleted since) by United Nations climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell who is seen hugging his grandmother amongst the ruins of her home on Carriacou, his homeland.

After having viewed Beryl’s immediate impact from a helicopter, Grenada prime minister Dickon Mitchell had described the destruction as “Armageddon-like” in a press briefing and promised:

“We know it is not something that will happen overnight, but we certainly believe that in the next week to two and a half weeks we should have a complete clean up.”

Weeks later, new videos from Carriacou continue to show a post-Armageddon catastrophe that could last months and years for its beleaguered population.

POSTSCRIPT

On 27 Jul, this blog entry had suggested “Hurricane Beryl’s financial impact [on Grenada’s economy] is likely to be greater than these prior disasters [1975 to 2018] combined, eclipsing the island’s annual GDP several times.” The World Bank had previously documented that “damages and losses” from Hurricane Ivan in 2008 had amounted to 148% of Grenada’s then GDP.

On 30 Jul, Grenada prime minister Dickon Mitchell, closing the 47th CARICOM heads of state meeting he hosted and chaired there, suggested that the country’s early estimated losses from Hurricane Beryl would amount to EC$ 1,000,000,000 = US$ 370,000,000.

A back-of-the envelope calculation of this assertion:

  • Grenada GDP = US$ 1,320,000,000 (source: World Bank)
  • 98% of buildings destroyed or damaged in Carriacou & Petit Martinique (source: Grenada government)
  • estimated population of Carriacou & Petit Martinique =  9,000estimated number of buildings (homes + businesses + public buildings) = 5,000 (wild guess)
  • estimated impact on GDP = 28%
    • estimated impact per building on GDP = US$ 75,500

However, the destroyed buildings included public schools, emergency shelters, Carriacou’s hospital, post office and police station, each likely to cost millions to rebuild/repair. Additional costs include destroyed infrastructure such as island-wide overhead electric cabling, ports, marinas, airport, beaches, agriculture, fishing, environment plus lost tourism income (14% of Grenada GDP in 2019, source: UN).

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/07/caribbean-drubbing-on-such-armageddon.html ]

Sacked by a boss desperate to steal my success : 1991 : Gordon McNamee, KISS 100 FM, London

 It was a little after seven o’clock in the morning when the phone rang. Normally, I would already have been out of bed by that hour on a weekday. However, the previous night’s ‘DJ meeting’ [open to all 44 KISS FM presenters] had tired me out. I was awake, but I was still trying to urge my body to get out of bed. The mobile phone stationed beside my bed rang noisily and forced my brain into action far faster than it wanted.

It was [KISS FM personal assistant to managing director] Rosee Laurence on the line, asking if I could schedule a meeting that morning with [KISS FM managing director] Gordon McNamee. I scrambled out of bed to retrieve my diary from the battered ‘WH Smith’ black plastic briefcase I always took to work. Requests for meetings at such short notice were common although, during the last few days, McNamee had had no contact with me. Laurence suggested ten o’clock. I explained that I already had an editorial meeting [of my programming department] scheduled for half past ten, but I could fit it in as long as the meeting was not going to last too long. She assured me that it would not. I scribbled “10am – Gordon” in my diary, replaced the mobile phone in its charger and got on with the business of waking up properly.

My diary told me that I had two further meetings that afternoon – a weekly sponsorship get-together at one o’clock with [KISS FM finance director] Martin Strivens and the sponsorship manager, Gordon Drummond, followed by a debriefing session in the boardroom at three o’clock with KISS FM’s partners in the Pepsi promotion. During the drive from my flat to the office, I reflected on the possible reason for the early morning phone call. Was McNamee going to tell me what had happened at the previous day’s board meeting? Was he going to pretend that nothing untoward had happened and that the board had approved all his [unachievable] targets for Year Two?

I was already running late when I became caught up in the worst of the rush-hour traffic along Holloway Road. Although my work day officially started at half past nine, I liked to arrive at work earlier so that I could snatch a little time to myself before the inevitable mayhem started in the department. However, that day, there was only time to down a quick cup of tea before walking up to the top floor in time for my ten o’clock appointment. Gordon McNamee was sat in his corner office when Laurence ushered me in. After exchanging morning greetings, I sat facing McNamee across his huge wooden desk. He shuffled from side to side in his chair a few times, avoiding looking directly into my eyes, and he sighed unusually heavily. Several times, he looked up at me as if he was going to say something, but then stopped short.

I stared at him blankly, not knowing what to expect. Eventually, he started mumbling something apologetically, but still he was making little sense. I knew then that McNamee had bad news to break to me. He had always been excellent at whipping his team into a frenzy of enthusiasm when something good was happening, but he was almost incapable of breaking negative news to anyone. He started speaking slowly and managed to explain that he had been “extremely vexed” by the memo I had delivered to him two days earlier. ‘Vexed’ was one of McNamee’s favourite words to use in situations when somebody had done something that displeased him. Anyone else might have been angry, but McNamee was always ‘vexed.’

As he reflected upon the contents of my memo and how ‘vexed’ it had made him, McNamee seemed better able to talk to me directly and to break the bad news. He explained that the board had met the previous afternoon and had decided that the company no longer needed my services. He muttered something about this being the hardest thing he had ever had to do and how he regretted the decision, but I was barely listening to his words. Instead, I was thinking how cowardly was this man sitting in front of me. I was thinking that, even now, he had no intention of telling me the truth of what had taken place at the board meeting, or how he had probably acted to save his own skin. What I wanted to know was what he had told the board about my dissent and what he had told the board of my contributions to the station’s success.

But there seemed little point in saying anything at all to the cowering figure sat in front of me, with whom I had worked so closely for more than two years. I got up to leave the room. McNamee had failed to deliver my promised rewards on so many occasions that I did not need to hear another fabricated story about why I was not getting things to which I felt I was entitled. As I left his office, McNamee said that it would be necessary for me to leave the building immediately, and he thrust some documents into my hand. I walked straight out of his office, shocked that, even at this stage in our relationship, McNamee was still incapable of telling me truthfully why I had to go.

Before I could reach the staircase to return to my office, McNamee had caught up with me and was asking me to stop. For a second, I felt as if I should ignore him totally and just carry on walking, but I turned towards him at the very top of the building’s stairwell.

“We could say that you had resigned, to make it easier for you, if you wanted,” McNamee suggested to me.

I stared at him coldly with a combination of anger and hatred that I could feel welling up inside me.

“Gordon, that’s a fucking insult,” I spat at him. Then I turned and walked down the staircase leading to my office on the next floor.

I was incensed. After all the sweat, blood and toil I had poured into this company. After all the personal sacrifices I had made to ensure that KISS FM succeeded. After my hard work had produced the required results more quickly than had ever been anticipated [Year One target of one million listeners per week achieved within first six months on-air]. Now, I was being asked to resign from a job in which I had achieved nothing but success. McNamee’s cheek to even suggest such a thing had made me really angry. I was in a rage as I stormed into my office. The programming floor was starting to fill up, as staff trickled into work. My first thought was the speed with which McNamee had insisted I must leave the station. Rather than suffer the indignity of being forcibly removed from the building by the station’s security guard, I started to pack up my possessions.

[KISS FM head of music] Lindsay Wesker caught my attention as he walked onto the floor from the staircase. He was one of my senior team members, so I felt I should break the bad news to him personally. The only private place I could think of to talk was the men’s toilet in the stairwell of the floor, so we crowded into the tiny cubicle.

“I’ve just been sacked,” I said to Wesker, “and I’ve been told to leave the building immediately.”

Wesker looked thoughtful, but did not seem particularly shocked. I suddenly understood that Wesker must have been the only member of my team to know what was going to happen to me, before I did.

“Just as you’ve said before,” said Wesker calmly, “it’s always the programming department that gets the chop.”

These were the very words I had shared with Wesker more than a year earlier, during the first programme planning meeting I had convened at [former KISS FM office] Blackstock Mews. Wesker had mulled over my words carefully then and, now, I realised why he had found those words so interesting. In Wesker’s eyes, he had got rid of me at last. I exited the men’s toilet without saying another word.

Having received no sympathy from Wesker for my predicament, I walked back to my office and continued assembling my personal effects. I had spent far more of my waking hours in that building during the last year than I had at home, so many of my own possessions were intermingled with that of the company. There was the portable television I had brought to the office when the Gulf War had started, there was a portable cassette player I used, the records I had used to make station jingles, and unread magazines that were cluttering the floor. These were all mine. I started gathering them together into a manageable pile to take away with me. Other staff on the floor noticed me through the clear plastic partition of my office and started to wonder what was going on.

I told Philippa Unwin, who had worked with me closely as the department administrator since the Blackstock Mews days, what had just happened to me. She became visibly upset. As I told other members of my team, they stood around the floor in disbelief and shock.

[KISS FM head of talks] Lorna Clarke said to me: “They can’t sack you just like that. You’re the only one who knows how this whole station works.”

I felt pressured by the urgency to get out quickly, so I started carrying boxes of my things down three flights of stairs to put in my company car parked at the back of the building. I suddenly realised that my hasty and unexpected departure from KISS FM could be explained away to the staff on any pretext, unless I could make some kind of statement myself. The memo that had ‘vexed’ Gordon so much had recorded all the significant events of the previous week, as well as having stated my unambiguous position on wanting KISS FM to adopt a realistic strategy for its future.

After less than a year on-air, one of the staff’s major criticisms was the lack of information about company decisions that trickled down to them from the senior management. Only those staff working most closely with me in the programming department understood that I was just as ill-informed about what was going on at board level as everybody else was in the building. Using a Prit-Stick from the top drawer of my desk, I glued a copy of my memo to Gordon McNamee onto the clear plastic partition of my office. My room opened onto the floor’s entrance lobby and the partition could be seen by everyone passing through the department. Alongside the memo, I glued the document detailing the programming policy changes I had been ordered by McNamee to devise.

While I continued to gather together my possessions, staff in the department started to read my two memos, all the while expressing outrage that my dismissal could be so abrupt. Then, Wesker burst into my office and handed me a sheet of ledger paper.

“Rosee [Laurence] upstairs says these things are KISS property which you have to give back before you go,” said Lindsay sheepishly.

Inscribed in red ink was a list:

“1) security tag 13-92 + ID pass.
2) office & studio keys.
3) car keys.” 

It was evident that Wesker had been anticipating my dismissal and was acting as messenger boy for the management staff on the top floor who were too cowardly to talk to me directly. I snatched the piece of paper from him, but ignored it. I asked him, rhetorically, how I was expected to take home all my personal possessions without being able to use the company car?

Before leaving the station for the last time, I walked around the programming department and said my hurried goodbyes to the few staff who were already at their desks. Because the majority of my team worked shifts, there were only a few people there. In the DJs’ office, [daytime presenter] David Rodigan was sat at his desk, facing the front windows that looked out over Holloway Road. His back was towards the office door, so I had to interrupt his preparations for that day’s lunchtime show to bid him farewell. He expressed outrage at my sacking and seemed bewildered by the speed with which I was being forced to leave.

There was nothing left to do except thank everyone who was in the department for the good times we had spent together and to give many of them one last hug. Some of the staff were crying, others were visibly angry, and some did not seem to believe the events that were unfolding right in front of their eyes. Wesker was the only person who seemed unmoved by the whole scene. He was busy protesting that I had not left the company’s property that he had been given responsibility to collect. I could not have cared less.

I got into my company car, half expecting someone to rush out and stop me driving it away. But they did not, and I drove away from the station’s car park for the very last time. I had arrived at work barely two hours ago. Now, I was already on my way home again. It felt as if some ghastly mistake had happened, some chance mishap over which I had been able to exert no control. I could not believe that this would really be the very last day I ever worked at KISS FM. The traffic was much lighter on the roads, now that the rush hour was over, so I reached home within half an hour. By then, I was feeling neither upset nor angry about my dismissal. More, I was stunned that the end could have come so abruptly, and without McNamee having offered any gratitude for my significant contributions to KISS FM’s success.

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

[Originally blog published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/05/sacked-by-boss-so-desperate-to-steal-my.html ]

Welcome to the terrordome : 2006 : Enders Analysis at Denton Wilde Sapte, City of London

 The first of April proved not such an innocuous date on which to have started my new job. Within weeks, I began to wonder if I was the fool to take on a position as ‘media analyst’ that I had never known existed, let alone submitted a job application. The previous year, I had been minding my own business, providing a steady stream of stories as uncredited news editor to weekly print publication ‘The Radio Magazine’, when an e-mail arrived from (unknown to me) Claire Enders asking if I wanted to write an analysis of Britain’s largest commercial radio owner ‘GCap Media plc’. Having tabulated radio industry data for myself since 1980, I was happy to pen six pages demonstrating that this group had already hit the rocks, ending my report:

“Someone should have done [GCap chief executive Ralph] Bernard a big favour and bought him a sign that Christmas to hang in his office that said: ‘It’s all about the content, stupid!’”

Published by ‘Enders Analysis’ that November, I was left to presume the response to my critical analysis had been positive because I was asked if I desired a full-time office position writing similar reports about the media industries. My employment would replace radio industry veteran Phil Riley who had anonymously freelanced occasional radio reports for the company until then. It was an offer too good to refuse as the salary for working in a comfy central London office was considerably greater than my pay from American public corporation ‘Metromedia International Inc’ had been a decade earlier for having schlepped around Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Berlin and Prague for several years. Persuasion proved unnecessary as funds were required for my daughter attending a London university.

Having agreed the April start date, the prior month I started to receive emails from Enders Analysis requesting my help with radio industry information it needed for a tribunal case it had taken on. I thought this was rather cheeky but, not wanting to appear unenthusiastic about the job I had yet to start, I responded helpfully. Then I received a further message from Claire Enders asking me to drive to the office for a library of legal documents concerning the tribunal to take home, read and analyse. I had to apologise that this task was not possible … but only much later did I realise this request as a harbinger of things to come.

Why my refusal? Firstly, I was still employed full-time (in addition to my freelance work for ‘The Radio Magazine’) by ‘Laser Broadcasting Ltd’, managing applications to regulator Ofcom for local commercial radio licences, a job from which I had given notice but which did not terminate until the end of March. Secondly, my rented semi-detached London home lacked a spare room in which to store a document library. Finally, I did not own a vehicle, let alone one large enough to transport thousands of documents. Only months later, once the tribunal was in session and its documents could be seen filling an entire wall of a courtroom did I realise an assumption might have been made earlier that I too resided in some inherited multi-bedroom castle, country pile or stately home … and owned a truck.

Come April, I started work in Enders Analysis’ cramped Mayfair office but was soon assigned full-time to the tribunal project which occupied me until the end of that year. During those long months, I continued to follow radio industry developments in order to write weekly news stories for ‘The Radio Magazine’ though, disappointingly, there was no opportunity for me to pen a single radio analysis for publication by my new employer. I joined a subset of Enders’s dozen staff deployed to work on the tribunal case from conference room 9.16 at the City offices of law firm ‘Denton Wilde Sapte’ (established 1785) that was representing Enders’ client in the tribunal. For several months, I hardly visited the Mayfair office, instead commuting to the lawyers on a direct rail route from home.

I had been diverted into this project once Claire Enders discovered I understood the complex system of payments made by UK commercial radio stations for playing music within their programmes, as well as the multiple agreements that had applied since the broadcast sector’s launch in 1973. At ‘Metro Radio’ in Newcastle, my work responsibilities had included ensuring accurate reports were submitted regularly to music royalty collection agencies PPL, PRS and MCPS. A decade later, planning the launch of ‘KISS FM’ in London, I had created the entire music reporting system and hired personnel to collate and submit the required paperwork in an era before usage could be tracked digitally.

The Denton Wilde Sapte lawyers with whom we worked were courteous, professional and demanding because they needed to understand how these systems functioned both theoretically and in reality. I was the only person there with experience of having been responsible for their administration or of having worked in commercial radio, requiring me to respond to multiple queries and to analyse radio industry data and documentation that I had collected during the previous two decades of my career. Those lawyers would have been earning more in a single day than I was being paid in a month, sending me emails at all hours of the day and night requesting data, but there was never any friction as they had been steeped in ‘client service’.

Although the Enders team in the conference room were contributing to a common project, it quickly became apparent that ‘teamwork’ was a somewhat alien concept. Had there been a ubiquitous whiteboard in that room, it might have shown the clear hierarchy between Claire Enders and each employee, but nothing between members of our group. Not only was there no apparent camaraderie but, at times, it appeared that some colleagues believed they were in competition with each other for the attention and approval of their boss. It felt like some kind of video wargame where the objective is to crush your opponent, where the individual is ‘king’ and where ‘collaboration’ has been outlawed. This atmosphere was worsened by Enders’ tendency to bark orders verbally to her staff, rather than negotiate tasks with them to guarantee they remained ‘onside’.

Until then, I had not realised that projects in which I had been involved and previous jobs I had performed had all required productive teamwork, without which they would have failed. Whether it was a student newspaper, a student union, a commercial radio station, a community radio station or a magazine, all had forced those of us involved to discuss, agree and focus jointly on common objectives to be achieved. Yes, I had come across the odd team member who had not prioritised the group’s success above their own. Yes, I could cite examples of projects I watched fail because of the selfishness of a manager who had pursued purely egotistical objectives. However, this was the first occasion that I felt like a complete outsider to my ‘colleagues’ who seemed happy functioning as individuals.

Whilst enjoying the work I was being asked to do because it tapped into my specialist knowledge, I disliked the working environment into which I had been dropped. Everyone else present seemed to view it as perfectly normal. I did not. I could not complain. I was the ‘new boy’ amongst men who viewed themselves differently from me, something they had communicated on my first day, interrogating as to which private school I had attended three decades earlier. Er, none. Now, each morning, I was having to steel myself to go to the office. I had never had a job at which I hated arriving as much as this one. It was a struggle to get through the day. At lunchtime, a local sandwich shop would provide respite to sit alone in a less febrile environment.

At the end of the day, I would rush down to ‘City Thameslink’ railway station in the basement of the law firm’s tower block, sit on an uncomfortable wooden bench on the southbound platform and cry, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for half an hour. Trains regularly came and went, though I stayed put until I knew I could make the journey home, crammed like sardines against fellow commuters, without sobbing uncontrollably. Sat there in that barely lit underground world, nobody approached to ask if I was okay, a forty-eight-year-old suited man in tears. Perhaps other commuters felt the same way about their workplaces but dared not let their emotions escape. Perhaps they assumed I had just lost my job. Whatever it was, I was always left alone on that bench.

I needed to arrive home in one piece. Occasionally, on the final leg, I would walk the route from the station down my suburban street with tears on my cheeks, but these had to be wiped away before I entered the front door. Nobody needed to know what I felt. There were bills to pay. We hoped to purchase our first home. I would get up at six each weekday morning and check ‘Google News’ for radio stories before heading to work. Often, I would not return home until late evening, after which I would eat and go to bed. I spent Sunday writing up news stories for submission to ‘The Radio Magazine’ on Monday morning. It did not feel much of a life but I convinced myself it must be better than the years I had spent unemployed.

It was a huge personal disappointment to feel this way about my new job. The office environment at Denton Wilde Sapte was pristine and its staff were courteous. Their ‘tea lady’ pushed a glimmering trolley around the office suites, freely offering an expanse of snacks such as salmon sandwiches and hot drinks ‘silver service’ style on exquisite porcelain crockery with immaculately polished cutlery. Many evenings after work, the firm hosted drinks receptions to celebrate a ‘win’ or an internal promotion or to welcome a new client. As portrayed in American television legal dramas, a short speech by one of the firm’s partners would be followed by wine and delicate snacks offered generously to all present on the floor, including us visitors. Some evenings, I would partake and sit on the building’s fire escape staircase, sipping my drink and looking down on London landmarks like St Paul’s Cathedral’s illuminated dome. It might have seemed an idyllic existence “but I know that this will never be mine.”

During the tribunal’s early stages, Claire Enders expressed concern that our number was insufficient to sort the huge volume of legal documents into a coherent filing system we could then reference. I thought I was being helpful by suggesting that her personal assistant could be drafted in to provide an additional pair of hands. Next moment, I was ordered to meet the assistant at London’s Victoria railway station and bring her to the lawyers’ office by Tube. Strangely, the assistant only ever worked for Enders from her own home in Brighton and, meeting me for the first time, appeared unhappy to be suddenly relocated to London for several days. I was henceforth blamed for this inconvenience, ensuring our relationship remained frosty during the years I had to communicate with her.

Why this assistant could not have travelled by Tube from Victoria to 1 Fleet Place on her own initiative I had no comprehension. A pattern later became apparent whereby Claire Enders seemed to regard us analysts as her London ‘help’ who could be dispatched at the drop of a hat for errands such as picking up prescriptions from her doctor or buying a birthday present for her daughter. Was our status that much different from her parallel household staff in Scotland who could be ordered to collect and drive her home to the family seat? Evidently, we were all ‘Parker’s, ready to be summoned by a tinkling bell. “Yes, m’lady?”

Working at the lawyers’ office one Friday, I sent an email to Enders Analysis colleague Ian Maude, asking him to write something for submission to our boss by an urgent deadline we had been given. Over the weekend, having received no response from him, I presumed this task was in hand. Until … Monday morning when Claire Enders stormed into our conference room and immediately tore a strip of me in front of the others for not having informed Maude to complete this work. Once the shouting ended, she stormed out without even asking my version of events or giving me space to respond. I realised how easy the ‘new boy’ must have been to blame for my colleague having missed our deadline.

Later that day, Maude unusually suggested the two of us go for “a drink” after work, implying he wished to recompense my betrayal. I refused. I was still furious. Never before in any job had I been addressed so disrespectfully by a boss for a wrong that was not even mine. Never before had I felt what it must be like to be employed in servitude to the privileged elite. During the following months, Maude regularly repeated his invitation. I always refused. I had learnt that it was ‘every man for himself’ in this workplace.

Months later, after another sub-group of Enders Analysis staff had completed a different project for ‘HMV Records’, it was suggested we go for a celebratory drink after work. Although by now I was wary of some of my co-workers, I felt it would appear anti-social to refuse. We stood together outside a busy bar in a pedestrianised alleyway off Park Lane. Ian Maude offered to buy the first round. I requested a ‘Bacardi & Coke’. When it arrived, my first sip tasted strange. I had favoured this drink since 1976 when the girls in my summer job workplace ‘Associated Examining Board’ had taken me one lunchtime to a huge darkened basement bar in Aldershot and insisted I drink the same as them at our trestle table. Three decades later, stood in Mayfair, after my second sip had made me unexpectedly dizzy, I realised my drink had likely been spiked.

“Some will eat and drink with you …”

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/05/welcome-to-terrordome-2006-enders.html ]

Walking on the Chinese glass ceiling : 2004 : FM 102 Radio, Women’s Media Centre of Cambodia

 I was standing over the motionless body of my line manager. He was dead to the world, naked under the sheet on his bed. Neither my arrival in his studio apartment through its wide-open front door, nor the chatter of little ‘street boys’ passing up and down the building’s internal staircase, nor the morning sunshine streaming through the open windows, nor the noise of rush hour traffic on the road below seemed to have stirred him. Should I call out? Should I nudge him? Since the limit of my responsibilities to the BBC had already been sorely tested by a recent health & safety ‘issue’, I decided that playing butler to my boss would stretch my patience one step too far. I turned around, leaving him asleep, walked out and descended the stairs to rejoin the driver waiting out front in the BBC SUV.

It was the ‘big day’ in March when my trainees were to interview candidates for two radio presenter jobs. Charles ‘Chas’ Hamilton had asked to attend too, so I had arranged a detour at eight o’clock to pick him up en route from my hotel to the radio station. This was unusual because, to date, he had demonstrated scant interest in my 28 hours per week of sessions training teams at two Phnom Penh radio stations in production skills, apparently preferring to remain at his desk in the air-conditioned, open-plan BBC office. On my arrival in Cambodia, rather than having furnished a training plan or schedule, Hamilton had invited me for an evening meal in his apartment, bending my ear with gossip about the BBC World Service Trust’s recently arrived Canadian manager. Now I was having to spend what remained of my seven-day working week determining which skills I needed to demonstrate to my teams and how to instruct them when I understood not one word of Khmer. 

Hamilton was oblivious to the supreme irony of my bedside presence that morning. Before departing London, BBC management had confided that, only after having signed contracts in December 2003 to supply radio training to two Cambodian stations, had it understood that its prior internal appointee to head the country’s radio projects had no experience producing live radio programmes. Having been hurriedly headhunted as a result of my international track record in radio production and presentation during three decades, my latest mission was necessary solely to bail out a consequence of the Corporation’s arcane appointment system. Meanwhile, in spite of my radio experience, my own applications over two decades for 43 BBC vacancies had resulted in thirteen interviews but not a single job offer.

Although the BBC contract required me primarily to train in radio production, it quickly became evident that, in order for my young but enthusiastic trainees to appoint inexperienced presenters for the station’s new youth phone-in programme, I needed to teach them how to word a job vacancy advertisement, shortlist applicants, interview candidates and take personnel decisions. They were fortunate that, after a decade assisting in my father’s self-employed architectural business, I had taken my first management post in 1978, hiring and firing people since then and managing teams of more than fifty. In Cambodia, my role became necessarily upgraded to informal ‘management consultant’ despite having had to accept a BBC freelance pay rate lower than the mediocre job at Ofcom from which I had just resigned in the UK … and undoubtedly lower than Hamilton’s pensioned salary as head of radio.

On arrival at the Women’s Media Centre that morning, I found my trainees already assembled in the first-floor radio studio to commence job interviews. I waited in the downstairs lobby to greet the candidates (a bow accompanying ‘hello’ the limit of my Khmer communication skills) and usher them upstairs. However, as Hamilton had yet to arrive, the schedule soon started to run over and resulted in successive applicants seated together in the reception area, a situation I had hoped to avoid. Eventually appearing apologetically an hour late, Hamilton would never be told about that morning’s ‘sleeping beauty’ encounter. It was more important to proceed with the tasks at hand.

During previous weeks’ sessions, the trainees had agreed upon three candidate tasks: an interview by the production team with a prepared list of questions allocated to each member; a script I had written and had translated, to be read into a studio microphone for recording; and a faked phone conversation recorded with a production member pretending to be a caller, to test each potential presenter’s spontaneity and improvisation skills. None of the candidates had prior radio experience, which it why it was imperative to identify ‘potential’ rather than ‘accomplishment’. The planned radio show was destined to become Cambodia’s first live youth phone-in, for which we needed one male and one female presenter.

Having completed the interview round, we broke for the mandatory two-hour lunch, me and Hamilton returning to the BBC office by car. I shared lunch with local staff at the kitchen table, while Hamilton took his usual sojourn with the ex-pat employees to a local restaurant. Afterwards, he did not accompany my return to the radio station for the afternoon session in which my trainees discussed and contrasted the candidates’ performances, assisted by BBC translator Keo Sothearith. I was incredibly impressed by the professionalism with which they ranked the candidates against criteria we had previously decided and then unanimously agreed upon the most suitable pair of applicants.

I was pleased that the whole interview process had been done and dusted so competently and quickly. However, just as I was ready to pat myself on the metaphorical back, a passionate conversation broke out amongst my trainees that the translator seemed reluctant to explain in English. I had to press him repeatedly to tell me what new issue had arisen, since there had been undivided agreement only a few minutes earlier.

“They say it is not possible to employ the woman because she is Chinese,” he explained embarrassedly. “They agree she is the most competent … but the job has to be given to a Khmer woman.”

I was shocked. Clarification was necessary for me to understand this issue. Though I could not discern the distinction, I was told the woman was ethnically Chinese (0.6% of Cambodia’s population) though not a recent immigrant, apparently speaking Khmer perfectly. Wikipedia explains:

“Most Chinese are descended from 19th–20th-century settlers who came in search of trade and commerce opportunities during the time of the French protectorate.”

I had read about ethnic tensions in Cambodia, but primarily involving neighbouring Thailand with which there had long been territorial disputes. In January 2003, following an alleged remark by Thai actress Suwanna Konying that Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple actually belonged to Thailand, a mob in Phnom Penh had burnt down the Thai embassy and attacked Thai businesses, forcing the evacuation by military aircraft of 400 Thai citizens to their homeland. I had recently passed Thailand’s newly opened replacement embassy in Phnom Penh, surrounded by high walls for improved security.

A 2021 academic paper reported:

“Although anti-Chinese riots are rare in Cambodia, the ethnic Chinese in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge era experienced some of the most severe repression in the world. The situation had improved by the 1990s, following the Hun Sen government’s abolishment of discriminatory policies towards them.”

The Minority Rights Group noted:

“After 1990, [the Chinese] were allowed to celebrate Chinese festivals and religious practices, then to re-establish Chinese associations and conduct business activities. They subsequently started operating their own schools…”

For the next hour, I felt compelled to argue that it was morally wrong to discriminate against a job applicant purely on the grounds of their ethnicity. It was essential to appoint the best candidate for the job. I told my trainees that the BBC would never countenance such behaviour and, since the BBC was funding their training, it was essential to follow guidelines set out within the BBC editorial handbook (a copy of which I usefully brandished from my briefcase). The trainees had already written a sign that said ‘BBC office’ (in Khmer) on their production room within the radio station, even though they were not BBC employees (as neither was freelance me).

However, I was internally conflicted by my own argument. As a 43-time applicant to the BBC who had been rejected 43 times, I was well aware from personal experience that discrimination was alive and well and living inside the Corporation. Following one of my post-interview rejections at the end of a three-month wait, I had phoned the BBC to ask precisely why I had been rejected yet again and was informed that it would be necessary for me to prove to interviewers that I was “one of us”. The unspoken implication was that I could not join the BBC ‘club’ unless either I was posh, spoke a certain way, had attended private schools or been educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Perhaps I needed a relative who was already employed there. None of the above qualified me.

Even BBC director general Greg Dyke had commented in 2001:

“I think the BBC is hideously white. […] The figures we have at the moment suggest that quite a lot of people from ethnic backgrounds that we do attract to the BBC leave. Maybe they don’t feel at home, maybe they don’t feel welcome.”

Though I had the advantage of being white, it was evident that the BBC discriminated on multiple levels. During the decades since my love of radio had blossomed at primary school, my ambition had always been to work in BBC radio. Apart from my current freelance contract, dispatched to the opposite side of the world due to the Corporation’s ineptitude, my dream was never to be realised.

In the end, I had to give up arguing with my trainees. Cambodia was not my country. I could not pretend to understand its culture or heritage. Its history was turbulent. The people’s identity was complex. I gave in to their desire to appoint the second-best female candidate for the job. I hated myself for giving in. I had been on the receiving end of discrimination on too many occasions over too long a period in several countries. But I had lost the argument. I returned to the BBC office with the names of the two presenters whom the team had chosen. Yes, I confirmed, they were the best candidates (cringe). Both quickly became astoundingly competent radio presenters.

Later that month, Charles Hamilton arrived in our Phnom Penh office one morning and explained that he had lost a BBC laptop computer on the journey from home. It would need to be replaced. Within the hour, the number of laptops he said he had lost that day had increased to two. His comments, combined with the memory of my early morning visit to his apartment, made me contemplate that the BBC staff induction programme should be appended with an additional topic: ‘How to close and lock the front door of your accommodation’.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1glfc6ziCi-9bWg4buIj-29rSK-1hV88f/preview

During the decade following my extended mission in Cambodia, I applied for a further twenty BBC job vacancies and was rejected for all.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/04/walking-on-chinese-glass-ceiling-2004.html ]

Mining for radio news in an editorial black hole : 2004-2007 : Paul Boon, The Radio Magazine

 Magazine editors. What do they do? “They create editorial calendars, develop story ideas, manage writers, edit content and manage the production process…” according to Google. Makes perfect sense. Except sometimes…

Journalism started for me in 1976 when I volunteered for student newspaper ‘Palatinate’ and attended regular meetings under editor George Alagiah who managed a team of section editors, discussed ideas for stories and sub-edited our writing efforts. Subsequently I contributed articles to many publications, including ‘rpm Weekly’, ‘City Limits’, ‘For The Record’, ‘Jazz Express’, ‘Broadcast’, ‘Music Week’, ‘Jocks’, ‘NME’, ‘Now Radio’, ‘Music & Media’ and ‘Radio World’, whose editorial systems worked in much the same way. There was dialogue, there were meetings, story ideas were passed upwards and downwards, teamwork and editorial direction were de rigueur.

In late 2004, lifelong radio industry buddy Bob Tyler called to say he was relinquishing his job as news editor of ‘The Radio Magazine’ and asked if I wanted to take over. I was desperate for paying work, having just returned from a poorly paid freelance contract in Cambodia and then been hung out to dry by ‘BBC World Service Trust’ whose promise of further, more lucrative work never materialised. I had been applying for radio-related job vacancies but none had resulted in an offer. This was the second occasion that Tyler had passed on his editorial jobs to me, for which I remain eternally grateful.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fDcJlHbzJhcOhJ-GAkFhU_xFcNXmLaqQ/preview

I knew ‘The Radio Magazine’ as the only weekly publication for the UK radio broadcast industry, published as a colour A5 booklet. In May 1986, it had been launched as a scrappy paid-for fanzine named ‘Now Radio’ by Howard Rose, former pirate radio presenter under the aliases Crispian St John and Jay Jackson, filled with gossip and opinion for wireless ‘anoraks’. In October 1992, I had begun to write and publish a weekly four-page ‘Radio News’ newsletter which I photocopied and distributed for free by mail to a small group of people I thought would be interested, not as a competitor to Rose but complementary since my focus was hard news, information and statistical analysis of ratings.

Unexpectedly, within weeks of my newsletter’s debut, Rose relaunched his fanzine as ‘The Radio Magazine’ with a new layout and new features that looked remarkably similar to mine, such as an events calendar and analysis of ratings. This seemed somewhat coincidental, given his fanzine’s prior six-year, 177-issue history. Any ambition to eventually transform my tiny newsletter into a paid-for magazine had been effectively scuttled, so I persevered for twenty issues before ceasing publication. Unfortunately, ‘good ideas’ prove impossible to copyright and I had already learnt to my cost that the radio industry included people not averse to taking credit for my innovations.

Nevertheless, twelve years later, I was so desperate for income that the opportunity to write for ‘The Radio Magazine’ had to be accepted. Rose had tragically died in 2002 during routine surgery, bizarrely one week after selling his magazine business to Sir Ray Tindle, a local newspaper and radio station owner. Paul Boon had taken over as managing editor and had employed acquaintance Bob Tyler as news editor until now. Boon was asking me what payment I would require to do the job. I quoted him the National Union of Journalists’ rate per word for contributions to the very smallest publication. He responded by saying he would only pay half that rate. I was disappointed but reluctantly accepted his measly offer, reasoning that some income would prove better than none at all. After all, this job might not last long.

At the outset, I decided upon a financial survival strategy for myself. I would need to spend zero to gather news stories because my expenses were not to be reimbursed. This meant no phone calls, no interviews, no travel to meetings. I would have to depend upon second-hand sources I could cull from the internet, newspapers and magazines. In order to maximise my payments, I would submit as many news stories as I could write, since I was to be paid per word written. Doubtless, the magazine must be receiving dozens of press releases from every organisation connected with the UK radio industry. Naturally, as with my previous magazine work, I anticipated these would be regularly forwarded to me by the editor for a quick rewrite…

Except that they were not. I quickly learnt that no press releases, no news tips, no rumours, no nothing was forwarded to me by the magazine. There were no editorial discussions, no phone calls, no meetings, no guidance, no delegation of work. In fact, nothing at all except the odd emailed complaint about things I had written. I started work in December 2004 but, by New Year, Boon wrote a complaint to my predecessor Bob Tyler:

“I’ve just had David Bain of CFM on the phone complaining about an out-of-context story with the “wrong perspective” which was printed this week.  It was a local press story and as we all know local reporters do not understand radio and in this case printed a story which was not factually correct.  We then reprinted, courtesy of Grant the same errors. While I know it has been difficult to contact people at stations over the Christmas period I really think these types of story need to be checked out.  We are not in the market of producing overtly partisan stories which demoralise staff at stations. I had a similar call from another station before Christmas.” [sic]

Already, I was baffled as to why ‘The Radio Magazine’ functioned unlike any other publication for which I had worked previously. The managing editor was printing my stories mostly verbatim (fine), sometimes chopping their ends to fit a page (okay), changing my headlines (no problem), but otherwise was only communicating with me by forwarding complaints. Another one arrived in April 2005:

“We have been fending off an irate Simon Horne of Virgin Radio who says the article you wrote (Issue 681) was based upon a mis-quote published in the Scottish Daily Record (or similar paper). Furthermore he is upset that he was not contacted over the story to either check the facts or to give them an opportunity to respond.” [sic]

Surely, this sort of beef should have been with the journalist who had originally quoted the complainant’s words, not with me who had merely extracted the quote from a respected newspaper. Normally, you might expect a managing editor to defend their staff when they had evidently done nothing wrong, but Boon’s reaction in a further email to me was:

“We just cannot let this continue.  The Scottish press are notorious for getting facts wrong, heaven knows they have some big axes to grind up there. Time would have allowed for a quick call to the appropriate press officer, Collette [Hillier] can give you a list if you don’t have one. Even an email would have given us some support.  Virgin are advertisers as well as news fodder, so treating them fairly seems only reasonable.” [sic]

Editorial ‘dialogue’ continued in a similar vein for my entire time as under-resourced news editor of the magazine. Every Monday morning, I emailed as many stories as I could muster, receiving no feedback other than occasional complaints from radio industry personnel who did not approve of what had been published. However, I was submitting so many news stories to maximise my earnings that the magazine regularly added additional pages to print them all, week in, week out…

Except for four issues per year when Boon required no news stories from me because, despite my training in statistics, he insisted upon covering the radio industry’s quarterly audience ratings results. Having collated and analysed radio station data since 1980, I regularly attended the RAJAR organisation’s press conferences announcing its latest numbers at a central London lecture theatre. Boon was present too but did not acknowledge me or seek to collaborate.

Apart from Boon (and Tyler), nobody was aware of my role providing the bulk of ‘The Radio Magazine’s editorial content, as a result of its news stories being published without author bylines. At the time, I was content with this arrangement because I was busy applying for full-time jobs in the radio industry and believed that I was unlikely to be offered employment if it were evident that I was reporting everything that was happening within the sector. 

My somewhat distant relationship with the magazine continued until March 2007 when I received an unanticipated email from Boon:

“I am sorry to say I have been forced to bring to a close the freelance arrangement we have with you for news stories. I am sorry. […] On a personal note, I’d like to thank you for the detailed and analytical dimension you have brought to your stories covering the radio industry in these stormy times. My thanks once again.” [sic]

It was the first (and last) occasion I received positive feedback from Boon. By then, I had thankfully found better paid work as a media analyst so the resultant loss of earnings was less consequential. However, this apparent ‘warm glow’ of gratitude vanished almost immediately. Prior to my abrupt dismissal, I had registered for a free press pass to attend a forthcoming radio conference whose organisers then contacted ‘The Radio Magazine’ to rightly confirm my credentials. Boon responded to them bluntly:

“Grant Goddard does not work for this publication.”

I wrote to Boon accusing him of “rudeness” because, instead of simply explaining to the organisers truthfully that, since registration, I was no longer news editor, his words connoted I was a liar. Was he already seeking to erase my substantial and transformational involvement in his magazine during the previous two years? My suspicions were far from allayed by Boon’s response to me:

“I think rudeness is rich coming from you, but that is a separate issue. […] Just chill my friend – life is too short!” [sic]

On that sour note, our email correspondence ended once and for all.

In November 2008, Boon started a job with government regulator Ofcom’s radio licensing division in the same role I had held five years previously. Perhaps he was sat at my former desk. Given that I (and predecessor Bob Tyler) had written 90% of his magazine’s editorial, I pondered whether any number of anonymous “detailed and analytical” news stories published in ‘The Radio Magazine’ might have accidentally fallen into Boon’s journalism portfolio. Any number between zero and the 848 I had written? Those words ‘detailed’ and ‘analytical’ might even have figured in Ofcom’s job description for the role.

During Boon’s subsequent “nine-year stint” at Ofcom, his CV states he was:

“Chapter Editor of the radio & audio chapter of Ofcom’s Communications Market Report an annually published in-depth insight into UK radio and audio developments.” [sic]

My work had once again passed through Boon’s hands! In 2003, having been The Radio Authority’s staff member with a maths/analysis background, I had been ordered to undertake a mammoth project to create for Ofcom the new regulator’s first historical database combining commercial radio licence, audience and financial information in a group of interlocking Excel spreadsheets. My complex formulae were required to summarise the state of the UK commercial radio industry, for publication in Ofcom’s initial annual ‘Communications Market Report’. Naturally, uncredited once again.

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/HYdNRjEzCgpV8E?startSlide=1

[None of the hundreds of issues of ‘The Radio Magazine’ appear online. My news stories for the publication are available to read at https://www.scribd.com/lists/3527224/Radio-broadcasting-industry-news-stories-by-Grant-Goddard ]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/02/mining-for-radio-news-in-editorial.html ]

The media analyst in the cupboard : 2006-2009 : Claire Enders, Enders Analysis

 “CRUELLA DE VIL”, our teacher had chalked onto the blackboard at the front of our classroom hut. We had been reading aloud excerpts from the 1956 children’s novel ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ and were completing our lesson with content analysis for ten-year olds.

“What does her name sound like if you say it quickly?”, asked our teacher. I stuck my hand in the air.

“Cruel devil,” I blurted.

“Correct, Grant,” she replied, “and we have seen how that could be a description of the way she behaved in the story.”

Our teacher’s message for the adult lives ahead of us might have been: beware of wealthy women bearing gifts! They might end up bearing down on YOU before you know it … and skin you for their own ends. I vowed to file away that advice for the future. The year was 1968.

Four decades later, a work colleague returned to the office to recount what he considered an entertaining encounter earlier that day with a client:

“When I met her, she said ‘YOU must be Grant Goddard. I am so pleased to meet you at last’ and then she seemed disappointed when I told her that I wasn’t him.”

My young colleagues laughed aloud at this case of mistaken identity. I did not. This was not the first occasion that one of them had been dispatched to meet Carolyn McCall, the 45-year-old chief executive of ‘Guardian Media Group’ [GMG] that employed 7,200 staff with £700m turnover … and where a similar conversation had ensued. For me, it was another humiliation, not some kind of ‘Famous Five’ jape.

I had previously spent several weeks researching and designing a 48-page PowerPoint that analysed the state of the UK commercial radio industry for presentation to a conference hall of GMG’s radio staff organised by McCall in Manchester. My boss, Claire Enders, had asked me to accompany her by train there where she would present my work. Although I would not be on stage, nonetheless I was looking forward to meeting McCall and some of her radio team. One dark, cold November morning, wearing my best suit and tie, I caught the train to our central London office, sufficiently early for me and my boss to travel north together.

“I have decided to take the intern with me to Manchester instead of you,” Enders announced to me in front of my colleagues, before the two of them rushed out the door to an awaiting taxi. Evidently, the intern had known to arrive early that day.

No forewarning. No explanation. No apology. I was baffled … but not surprised. This was the latest in the succession of humiliations I had encountered since joining this, er, unusual workplace nineteen months ago. I decided to pass the rest of that day sat at my desk wearing headphones, listening to my music and purposefully doing absolutely no work, a silent (and wholly unacknowledged) protest at my treatment. I felt even more humiliated than usual because the office’s parade of ‘interns’ were, in reality, merely the pampered offspring of posh media bosses whom Enders had befriended. Sat at a spare desk in our office, their mere presence would look good on CV’s already boasting a private education, despite their evident disinterest in our work.

On a separate occasion, an initial meeting had been arranged with the new chief executive of the UK’s largest commercial radio group, Global Radio, whose wealthy father had financed its acquisition, following his offspring’s lack of success securing a significant role within the industry. I was to accompany Claire Enders to meet Ashley Tabor at his office and had prepared a list of questions to ask about his plans to resuscitate the sector’s recent dismal performance. We travelled together from our office by taxi and, only once our destination was reached, did Enders turn to me and say:

“I think this meeting should be millionaire-to-millionaire so you should return to the office.”

Not only was I humiliated to have to make the return journey back across London but I had to pay the bemused taxi driver for the privilege. Although I was employed as the analyst specialising in the radio sector, Enders never debriefed me on what had been discussed at this or her other meetings with senior radio industry personnel. There seemed to be no notion of teamwork in this workplace. I was forced to gather my own intelligence about the industry whilst not meeting its bosses. It was reminiscent of some kind of ‘gentlemen’s club’ where entry was denied to those of us without wealth or influence. Meetings of the privileged elite appeared as much social events and opportunities to propagate gossip as they were business discussions.

On another occasion, I was required to produce a company presentation for the management team of Disney whom I met, accompanying Claire Enders, in the boardroom of its Hammersmith office. Disney was considering launching a national sports radio station in Britain and seemed to believe it could achieve this objective without concern for Ofcom’s regulatory regime that prescribed every commercial radio station’s format and content. I was required to be the harbinger of disappointing news to Disney’s highly paid, but seemingly oblivious, managers that it would prove necessary to proceed within Britain’s media ownership regulations, regardless of how much cash might be on the table.

After the meeting closed, Claire Enders and I adjourned to a side office with the female Disney executive who had invited us to make the presentation. I anticipated that we would be discussing further the regulatory issues I had raised. How wrong I was! For the next half-hour, I sat there while Enders suggested multiple routes for the young woman to bag a wealthy man, proposing potential candidates. Not for the first time, I felt akin to a servant whose presence could be safely ignored because ‘the help’ were paid expressly to turn a blind eye to the intimacies of their masters and mistresses. Neither woman displayed the slightest embarrassment in discussing such personal matters in front of a silent middle-aged man who self-evidently was not of their breeding or status. I was as good as invisible. For me, it merely offered an insight into Enders’ modus operandi.

On a different occasion, I recall a weird taxi ride across London to a client meeting, accompanied by Claire Enders alone, during which she just kept repeating the phrases “I’m a self-made woman” and “I am, you know” to nobody in particular. I stared out the window and remained silent. I had no idea what had prompted this line of monologue. It felt somewhat like it might to be locked in a tiny room with a tragic escapee from a mental health facility.

During that journey, I was reminded of the occasion sixteen years prior when I had attended a public meeting concerning the award of the commercial television franchise for south and southeast England that had been operated by ‘TVS’ for the last decade. Contributions were made by a succession of those seated within the tiered lecture theatre, before an American woman in the back row behind me stood to unleash a loud stream of consciousness that seemed to leave the audience baffled. An audible gap followed, as might occur after an outburst by a wordy aunt on speed at a family Christmas dinner, before the debate resumed in earnest. Afterwards, I pondered whether I might cross paths with that woman again. TVS lost its franchise the following year.

Shortly before I discovered my time working at Enders Analysis was finally up, I was invited to make a presentation to the ‘2008 European Radio Symposium’ to be held in Portugal. I spent two months creating a 39-page PowerPoint and had booked my flights and accommodation when, a few days beforehand, Claire Enders insisted that I undertake an unrelated project, unconcerned with radio but with an immediate deadline. I was forced to explain to the conference organisers that I had become unexpectedly unavailable and then pass my work to a colleague who knew nothing about radio to travel to Portugal instead to make my presentation.

I have never understood how ‘humiliation’ could be perceived as a productive means of managing personnel within a business. Given how my colleagues at Enders Analysis appeared accepting of this situation, I can only guess that their experiences attending private schools might have conditioned them to regard such treatment as ‘normal’. For state-school-educated me, it was as abnormal as any workplace behaviour I had ever witnessed. There were times when I wondered if my own mental health might be damaged by the experience of working within that environment. It had been such a long, long time since my great grandparents had lived and worked as servants in a ‘big house’. I had no desire to emulate their lives.

Following my abrupt exit from Enders Analysis after almost three years, I applied for every ‘media analyst’ vacancy I found, for none of which I was called to interview. After rejection by one small analyst business beside Charing Cross station, I requested a meeting with its chief executive to explore freelance opportunities. I showed him my published work and the regular coverage it had attracted on radio, television and in the press. He listened and then told me:

“Even if we were to hire you, you would have to take a backroom position. We could not send you out to meet clients.”

After that damning verdict, I gave up applying for jobs as an analyst. Apparently, it was evident to employers that I lacked whatever was ‘the right stuff’ necessary to be in the presence of the posh masters commanding Britain’s media industry.

I never did get to meet Carolyn McCall.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-media-analyst-in-cupboard-2006-2009.html ]

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no regulation : 2003 : Dumfries & Galloway licence, The Radio Authority

 When my wife took a job at the United Biscuits factory in Harlesden, she understood she would be making ‘Digestives’ … and she was correct. When I took a job at The Radio Authority, I anticipated I would be regulating Britain’s commercial radio industry … but I was wrong! Although it was nowhere to be found in my job description, not even hidden in the fine print, my bosses regularly required me to ‘turn a blind eye’. Perhaps this was the underlying modus operandi of government regulators: to sit in cossetted London offices, execute as little ‘regulating’ as possible and await comfortable retirement.

Before taking this job, I was aware of The Radio Authority’s, ahem, ‘chequered’ history. Seven years after it had been demerged from its precursor the Independent Broadcasting Authority [IBA], I had watched open-mouthed a November 1998 BBC2 ‘Newsnight’ report in which The Radio Authority’s former Company Secretary, John Norrington, accused his ex-employer of misconduct in its award of new commercial radio licences to ‘Vibe FM’ and ‘Sunrise Radio’. It took until March 1999 for the Authority to respond publicly that “the independent assessment by Grant Thornton makes clear that there was no abuse of process, no improper conflict of interest, and no bias.” Of course!

Though this denial was deemed sufficient for ‘The Independent’ newspaper to headline its story ‘Quango “not corrupt”’, the article also noted casually that “Janet Lee, the Authority’s programming and advertising director, is on police bail …” following her arrest by the Fraud Squad in November 1998 on corruption charges. What a bam-bam! Having arrived for my new job in 2002, I found that the organisation’s prime objective seemed to have nothing at all to do with radio, but everything to do with avoidance of further public embarrassment at all costs. Janet Lee had kept her job and occupied a huge office, larger than the one opposite that I had to share with five colleagues, but which she shared only with a jungle of huge potted plants.

Having been given few tasks to perform, I had time to conduct my own industry research. One of my papers (‘Tools For Radio Content Regulation #1: Playlist Diversity Analysis’) studied the music played by competing commercial radio stations in the same market to determine whether their formats were truly complementary, as their licences required. I was unsurprised to find my analysis demonstrated that the most played records on London station ‘Heart 106.2’ were by (in descending order) these artists: Westlife, Nelly, Liberty X, Blue, Atomic Kitten, Atomic Kitten (again), Liberty X (again), Kylie Minogue, Darren Hayes and Anastacia. To my knowledge, its music policy had never squared with its licence which required:

“The music will be melodic or soft adult contemporary and will exclude the extremes of dance, rap, teenage pop, indie and heavy rock.”

I circulated my document to managers within The Radio Authority and, not for the first time, received no response. There were evident forces within that workplace which were way above my pay grade. I had apparently become a pesky nuisance by trying to remind the organisation what objective ‘regulation’ of commercial broadcasting in the public interest should have been about. As a result, I was marginalised and belittled, particularly when it came to my year-end appraisal … which I was told I had failed with flying colours. They’ll take your soul if you let them, but don’t you let them!

“That was a good meeting,” my colleague commented as we exited The Radio Authority’s meetings room. My immediate thought was that he was being unnecessarily sarcastic. Our meeting had barely lasted ten minutes and had been completely uncontentious. Then it dawned on me that I was an oddity here who had spent half his working life in meetings within commercial businesses, some of which had lasted six hours or ended in acrimony. However, since joining this governmental organisation, I had never been called to a team, departmental or work meeting. They simply did not exist here because tasks were allocated by bosses approaching their underlings and bellowing at them in the old-fashioned master/servant style. On reflection, I realised my colleague’s comment had been made in seriousness.

My boss had allocated me the task of assessing an application by an existing local radio licensee seeking its renewal, versus a competing bid. I had been instructed that, as a direct result of the auditor’s report concerning ‘the affair whose name was never spoken’, it was now deemed necessary to convene one meeting with two colleagues from other departments about every licence application and to minute it on paper. It did not seem to matter that such meetings served no recognisable purpose or objective, except for each to produce an A4 page that documented they had happened. That was the sole reason I had had to call the meeting. It was a direct outcome of “the auditors [having] recommended that the [Radio] Authority tighten up some of its procedures for awarding licences,” according to ‘The Independent’.

The licence for Dumfries had first been awarded in 1989 by the IBA to ‘South West Sound’ at a time when each geographical area was only permitted one commercial radio station. Since then, the regulator had probably never heard the station’s broadcasts as I found that it interpreted its role narrowly as the award of licences, rather than regularly checking that the terms of those licences were being fulfilled. Being me, I insisted on reviewing the station’s output in a period when almost no UK commercial radio stations streamed on the internet, requiring the Authority to identify someone within the transmission area who would record some of its output. It took a few attempts for me to receive recordings that were even audible.

These recordings were full of regulatory surprises. The breakfast show was being relayed from co-owned station ‘West AM’ in Ayr, complete with incorrect station and frequency identifications. Similarly, its evening show was relayed from co-owned ‘West FM’ in Ayr, complete with different again, but still wrong, station and frequency identifications. The music played in those evening shows also contravened the music styles specified in the licence. Three hours of local programmes required by the licence on both Saturday and Sunday were also absent.

To get to the bottom of these issues, I interviewed managers at the station and recorded our phone conversations. Those staff appeared entirely nonchalant about these breaches of their licence, could not explain how long such practices had been pursued, or promise when these programming errors would be rectified. I was made to feel as if my questions were an undesired intrusion into broadcasting systems that had existed there for years, regardless of the station’s licence, the details of which the staff claimed to be unaware. I felt like the big, bad regulator in London interfering in the running of a little local business that had retreated into its own parochial ways.

Reporting these findings to my manager, rather than being thanked for discovering multiple regulatory breaches, I was vilified for being pedantic. I had unexpectedly opened up a hornets’ nest and my bosses swung into action to ameliorate the ‘damage’ I was apparently doing by being over-scrupulous. Although one competing bid had been submitted for the licence, it quickly became evident that the decision had already been made internally to re-award the licence to the incumbent … regardless of its licence transgressions. I was suddenly thrust into the middle of an internal ‘damage control’ exercise as the result of me having believed my job was ‘to regulate’.

My 17-page report had to be repeatedly edited severely by management to remove what were considered to be my ‘accusations’ that the station had broken the rules, even though its staff had admitted their failures to me in recorded phone conversations. Management finally settled on a careful wording that implied the breaches I had discovered were irrelevant to the re-award of the incumbent’s licence:

“Staff have thus identified two apparent breaches of the station’s Format – too much chart music in the evening and only occasional local programming at weekends. These will be investigated separately by staff, but should not be considered by Members in the context of this licence award as they do not form part of the station’s proposals for the new licence period.”

I was instructed to write a script for pre-approval to present to the ‘Members Meeting’ of the ‘great and good’ that would consider my report and make a decision. I was not permitted to deviate from this script or to mention further details of the licence breaches I had discovered. Unsurprisingly, the Meeting willingly re-awarded the licence to the incumbent, despite a stinging criticism I had managed to sneak into my report:

“Not only has South West Sound failed to give direct answers to many of the questions required within the application process, but it has barely articulated a convincing argument for being re-awarded the licence, save for the obvious benefit that its ratings are extremely high.”

Immediately after the Meeting, it was my responsibility to contact the chairman of the winning applicant, Hal McGhie, by phone to officially confirm the outcome. My call was answered by a woman who told me he was too busy to come to the phone. I had to insist that I needed to converse with him personally, if only briefly, to relay that afternoon’s result of his re-application for the local commercial radio licence. She put me on hold and returned after a while to explain that, after speaking with him, he had insisted that he was far too busy to talk presently and that I would have to call back at some other time.

I suspect he had no need for my phone call to inform him of the result he already knew.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/01/see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no.html ]