Tag: radio sector

Health & safety & death in the workplace : 2004 : BBC World Service Trust, Phnom Penh

 We were standing in a concert hall designed like a futuristic room on the ‘Discovery One’ spaceship in the film ‘2001’. Every feature was brilliant white. White plastic seats. White walls. White ceiling. When the house lights were switched on, it was a dazzling sight. In 1968, my father had accompanied me to watch that sci-fi movie at our local cinema because my school project concerned the American space race. Simultaneously, maybe an unknown architect somewhere had exited a theatre, sufficiently inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic vision to design their next project, this room, all-white.

The huge hall appeared little used and surprisingly intact, despite the sprawling two-story concrete headquarters of ‘Radio National Kampuchea’ [RNK] in which it was built exhibiting significant evidence of the raging civil war that had started with the overthrow of Cambodia leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk in March 1970. I wondered to myself whether this concert hall had served as a secret location for the Khmer Rouge leadership to enjoy a Friday night knees-up after a hard week’s work torturing and murdering fellow citizens. There might be ghosts here that would be best undisturbed.

“You will be training our staff here,” ordered Tan Yan, RNK director general, waving his hand around the cavernous hall. 

“Er …,” I replied, on the verge of telling him that this was no suitable venue to train a handful of his staff in radio production. But I managed to restrain myself from contradicting this Cambodia government appointee. I recalled that, only months prior, Chour Chetharith – deputy editor of an independent Phnom Penh radio station ‘Ta Prohm 90.5 FM’ critical of the country’s ruling party – had been shot dead by two gunmen on a motorbike on arrival at his workplace. Like anybody, I would like to live.

From his instruction to me, it was evident that our host likely had never made a radio programme, had scant idea how radio programmes were produced and had never needed to learn. His role, in charge of the government’s one national radio channel, was to ensure that its output caused no problems for his masters. We had just come from an initial meeting in his office, a cramped room awash with paper and lacking any twentieth century technology other than a telephone and an electric fan, but weirdly reminiscent of a North London taxi cab office. Then he had shepherded our delegation into a long narrow room, empty apart from two lines of chairs on opposing walls. Speeches were made in Khmer by government men sat opposite. My BBC colleague said something in English. We all stood up, uncomfortably close together in that small sweaty space, a photograph was taken and printed in the following day’s newspaper, trumpeting the first partnership between the Cambodia government and the BBC to produce radio programmes.

After the concert hall, our guided tour of the radio station took us to a large windowless office crammed with desks piled high with papers and occupied by scribbling staff. Our host explained that this was the nerve centre of his operation where everything had to be ‘checked’. Strangely, there were no signs of radio production equipment. The sign on the office door said ‘CENSORS’. This is where every script written by lowly radio employees was edited by important managers to ensure the words’ suitability for broadcast to the nation. Then it was recorded onto analogue tape in an unseen studio somewhere, to be returned here for checking that the announcer had not inserted any personal inflection or inference into their reading of the approved script. Every item within the station’s output was created this way. Not one minute of ‘live’ content had ever been transmitted. If aliens were to invade, this radio would inform Cambodians a week after their abduction to a distant galaxy.

We were then taken to a large darkened room in the bowels of the building, filled with standalone metal shelf units on which the station’s tape archives were stored. Thousands of items were evident, many in boxes, some not, much seemingly uncatalogued, some unspooling all over the floor. It was an unholy mess. No air conditioning. No organisation. But it was surprising it had survived at all the Khmer Rouge era. Right here, since the station’s launch in 1947 under the supervision of the Ministry of Propaganda, we were told there were priceless recordings of musicians, interviews and news reports spanning the country’s turbulent history … if you could ever find them amongst the chaos. I was awestruck.

Then it was down to work. The BBC had requested interviews with a dozen of RNK’s existing staff, from which we would choose a radio production team whom I would train to create (shock horror!) a live weekly phone-in programme, the first in the station’s history. We decamped to one of several unused rooms whose doors had been removed and that opened onto the compound, where we sat around a group of old desks pushed together in the middle. No air conditioning. Just a bare room and the three of us: the BBC’s radio manager in Cambodia, Chas Hamilton; BBC translator Keo Sothearith; and freelance me. We had a list of staff names and that was all. No CV’s. No idea who we were about to see.

One by one, our candidates arrived and what ensued was the most bizarre round of interviews I have ever encountered. Asked what their present job entailed, what skills they possessed and what they wanted to achieve in their career, most failed to answer anything at all. Some just stared at us as if we were mad. Several answered “I do what my boss tells me”. None appeared enthusiastic about their work or the potential of training with the BBC. Reluctance would be a gross understatement. I wondered to myself how they had secured their jobs in radio in the first place if their communication ‘skills’ were so poor. They seemed to consider our polite enquiries as interrogation, as if we might incarcerate them for any incorrect answer … or worse. Perhaps the government radio station staff were still being managed through ‘fear’, just as the Khmer Rouge had terrorised the population not so long ago.

By the time we reached our last interviewee, we had noticed that all our candidates had been dressed in black. We asked why. Our last man explained that one of their female colleagues at the station had recently been killed by falling masonry from the crumbling war-torn building, so the staff would be attending the funeral that afternoon. We looked at each other open-mouthed. We were sitting in a death trap. Oh dear! What were we doing there? Despite me having interviewed potential candidates for radio jobs in many countries, this selection proved the most difficult to assess because we had elicited almost no relevant information. We remained there a while afterwards to discuss our preferences, deciding to select the marginally least reticent six staff and hope for the best. I felt anxious about how I could train people who appeared so disinterested.

Our morning’s work done, we left the room and headed to the director’s office to thank him and say goodbye. It was empty. We walked out to the front gates of the compound and were astonished to find them locked from the outside. We walked back to the building and wandered around offices on the two floors, shouting ‘hello’. It was completely deserted. Like their former colonial masters, the staff must have left en masse at precisely midday and would not return for two hours. We had been locked in without anyone anticipating that their morning visitors might still be present.

All the three of us could do was walk through foliage around the inside of the high perimeter zinc fence and look for a gap to escape. Eventually we did find a small hole where the metal had suffered damage, we prised it open and, bending down, could just about crawl through. By then, we had been outdoors in the midday sun for a while and, once returned to the BBC office, we desperately needed refreshment. It was a bizarre end to a bizarre morning of meetings at the government radio station.

That afternoon, after reflecting upon our experience, I told my local line manager, Chas Hamilton, and the BBC Cambodia project manager, Giselle Portenier, that I considered the RNK premises a wholly unsuitable venue for me to train staff. Was there a room in the BBC building I could use instead? The local staff showed me a conference room with a boardroom table that seemed ideal. I almost fainted when I realised I had seen this exact space, with its large circular motif embedded in the marble floor, during a dream five years earlier. Not for the first time, ‘déjà vu’ sneaks up out of nowhere to surprise you in the strangest situations.

To me, it seemed self-evident that this room – in a secure, air-conditioned environment with access to a kitchen and toilet facilities – was the perfect solution to hold my training sessions two full days each week for the next few months. I was taken aback to be told that neither Hamilton (who had visited RNK with me) nor Portenier (who had not) agreed. Apparently, the BBC’s contract with the government insisted the training would take place on-site at RNK and that was considered the end of it. Before making that agreement, had anyone from the BBC actually visited the RNK building? This stalemate lasted more than a month. Maddeningly, in January the BBC in London had sent me to Cambodia to start work with the utmost urgency and yet, by March, I was still unable to commence training one of my two radio production teams.

In desperation, I felt forced to send this formal email on 30 March to Hamilton and Portenier:

“I feel I should flag that no specific resolution has yet been agreed to the health and safety issue of the RNK building.

After my visit to RNK on 2 March 2004, I immediately expressed my concern (verbally) to Charles and Giselle about the health and safety risk of undertaking training work at the RNK premises. In subsequent conversations with Charles, Giselle and Lori [McDougall], possible remedies were discussed that involved training RNK staff off-site.

Paragraph 10(5)(a) of the WST [BBC World Service Trust] Freelance Terms Of Trade requires the Freelance to “make an assessment of all risks to health and safety reasonably foreseeable by him/her that may affect the WST or any others arising out of or in any way connected with the performance of the Contract” and to “promptly make and give effect to arrangements to eliminate or adequately control such risks.” The Freelance is made responsible for health and safety issues.

The Freelance is obliged to “notify the WST accordingly,” which I have done (verbally), and I will reiterate (in writing) my assessment: The RNK building is in a terrible state of repair and looks as though it has not been maintained for at least a decade, maybe longer. Most exterior windows have no glass and many of the rooms no longer have doors. Only a few rooms seem to have air conditioning. We learnt that a member of staff has recently been killed by masonry falling from the building. There is little or no visible security, and the large front reception area within the building is completely empty. When we went to leave the premises at noon, we found all exit gates were padlocked, and the building devoid of any staff to assist. We eventually found an exit through a gap in a zinc fence to the rear of the building. We have yet to see any kind of refreshment facility, or inspect the toilet facilities.

I do not feel that this is a safe environment in which to spend several days a week training RNK staff. Such training could be arranged off-site without any loss of relevant radio facilities (since RNK has no live studio/production environment relevant to the training). As you are aware, I suggested that training could instead be conducted at the BBC office and/or ‘FM 102’ (or elsewhere).

I am sure that we can work together to resolve this issue and commence the training of RNK staff.”

Still enduring no local approval, I then had to write a similar email to the BBC office in London which resulted in further queries, more correspondence but, eventually, grudging acceptance that my work could be undertaken in the conference room only metres away from my office desk. The outcome was that training sessions which should have started in January did not commence until April, by which time the plan had been for me to return home. However, having just won such a frustratingly minor victory, I felt it would have been irresponsible to leave immediately, so I offered to extend my time in Cambodia a further few months. Nonetheless, the RNK phone-in programme had still not launched by the time I eventually left, sadly as a direct result of these delays attributable to the BBC. This was the first time I had been employed by the BBC, as well as my first work for an international charity, and my experience with ex-pat managers had proven far from productive.

By contrast, my training sessions in the BBC conference office with the RNK staff, about whom we had harboured such initial doubts, proved to be amazingly positive. They were wonderful people who taught me as much about Cambodia as I hopefully taught them about radio. I was so sad to leave them without having seen through their phone-in programme, which finally launched on-air in October.

I never returned to the RNK building. However, I did run into the station’s director at the press launch of some health project in Phnom Penh that the BBC insisted I attend. We stood together in silence in the garden of the venue, a small high circular table between us on which we placed our free drinks. Conversation was impossible. My knowledge of French proved irrelevant because the language had been effectively extinguished by Khmer Rouge assassinations of anyone vaguely academic in the 1970’s. This middle-aged government man smiled at me friendlily, though I found myself wondering what ‘successes’ he might have achieved in Year Zero to have sufficiently impressed the ruling party.

Once back in London, I wrote an email to UNESCO explaining that I had viewed RNK’s broadcast archives and believed they should be preserved, catalogued and stored in an improved environment because of their historical significance not only to Cambodia, but globally. No reply. I tried my best!

I had had a job to do … flying to Cambodia.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/health-safety-death-in-workplace-2004.html]

One little indie music show : 1980-1981 : Saturday night 10 to midnight, Metro Radio

“You will present a weekly two-hour rock music show on Saturday night,” my manager informed me.

No if’s or but’s. No offer over which to mull. No demo tape to produce. No question asked about previous experience. Without warning, I was appointed as presenter on one of Britain’s largest commercial radio stations. I had just started a full-time backroom job at ‘Metro Radio’ but had never asked to present a show. This was my first paying job in radio and suddenly I was also to be put on-air. The start of my radio career seemed to be heading in a positive direction.

Some aspiring DJs spend their whole life trying to secure a presenting job on radio, often without success. I felt slightly guilty that this opportunity had fallen into my lap without effort. My employer did not even realise that I had started presenting for various London pirate stations seven years earlier, as such lawbreaking activities were not productive additions to a CV then. A decade into the future, employed as programme director of London’s ‘KISS FM’, one young hopeful desiring a DJ job would sit in the station’s reception area day after day, awaiting his opportunity to buttonhole me on my way to lunch at the ‘greasy spoon’ on Highbury Corner. Little did he know that we already had the largest DJ roster of any British radio station, or that management had just cut payments per show by half, or that several loyal presenters had been made redundant within months of launch. Oblivious, he was not so much ‘networking’ as ‘stalking’.

Management at Metro Radio seemed not to care one jot what was broadcast evenings and overnight because commercial stations then believed their advertisers were only interested in daytime shows and that their most significant audience was housewives. My small additional payment for the rock show was eaten into by the cost of driving twenty miles to the studio on Saturday night and then back again in the early hours of Sunday. Nevertheless, the station would jump at any chance to cut its minor expenses, such as the occasion excellent overnight presenter Tony Crosby was replaced in 1981 by a new DJ who offered to do the same show for free. Never mind the quality, feel the penny-pinching! (Tony went on to train as a solicitor.)

No direction was offered me as to what to do in my show. Whereas daytime presenters were required to wait outside programme controller Mic Johnson’s office for individual appointments to hear his critique whenever a JICRAR ratings book was published, management expressed zero interest in what I was doing on-air. There were already two other rock shows on the station. My line manager Malcolm Herdman played two hours of heavy metal and hard rock. Full-time producer John Coulson used his two hours to play an esoteric mix of mainstream rock and read passages from ‘beat generation’/‘new journalism’ authors. I decided to fill the evident gap for the ‘indie’ music that had emerged after several years of punk.

Music trade weekly ‘Record Business’ had published its first weekly ‘indie’ chart in January 1980, following a suggestion by Iain McNay, founder of London’s ‘Cherry Red Records’. I decided to use one hour of my show to run down this chart, playing the new entries and highest climbing singles. As far as I know, mine was the first ever British radio ‘indie’ chart show and was soon mentioned in the ‘indie’ columns of the music trade press. Most ‘indie’ releases were not supplied to commercial radio stations because there was zero possibility of them being playlisted, necessitating me to establish contact with the main ‘indie’ distributor, ‘Rough Trade’ in London, to receive copies. Each week, I would phone its very helpful director and head of promotions Scott Piering to request records that he would then mail to me (later that decade I worked in Scott’s office).

In the other hour of my show, I would play a selection of newly released album tracks, both indie and mainstream. Working full-time in the station’s record library, I had access to all major label releases that arrived either by post or from weekly visits by record company promotion staff. I would place interesting new albums in a holdall I carried back and forward to the show although, with only time to play around fifteen tracks within an hour, my hoard of unplayed recent releases grew heavier by the week. My running order ranged from ‘Steely Dan’ to ‘Joy Division’ to ‘Crass’, none of which were exposed elsewhere within the station’s output.

Although the Tyneside local band scene then was dominated by heavy metal bands and record labels such as ‘Neat’ and ‘Guardian’, there were a few ‘indie’ bands that were recording good quality demo’s or releasing their records independently. I received a nice letter from Paddy McAloon asking me to play his group ‘Prefab Sprout’s first self-published single. I had already been the lone person not walking straight past the stage when the band had performed at the Durham Miners’ Gala, so I was happy to oblige. There were some excellent local bands, including ‘Dire Straits’ and ‘The Police’ who were quickly signed by major labels, but also many that went largely unnoticed until ‘Kitchenware Records’ launch in Newcastle in 1982. I tried to play any local band recordings I found or received.

Because my two hours on-air were so precious, I talked minimally between records and rarely featured interviews. I recall receiving a telegram at home from the station one day asking me to phone it urgently. Our house had no phone so I had to walk to the one phone box in Sherburn Village and call in. Was I interested in recording an interview for my show with ‘Duran Duran’ who were promoting their first single release ‘Planet Earth’? I turned down this opportunity because the group was not local, were not ‘indie’ (having already signed to ‘EMI’) and their music was audibly more ‘pop’ than ‘rock’. However, I did interview local artists such as Pauline Murray from Ferryhill whose first solo album (after the punk group ‘Penetration’) sounded remarkably innovative and remains one of my favourite recordings.

I spent quite a lot of time each week compiling a local ‘gig guide’ from adverts in local newspapers (pre-internet newsprint) and flyers. I would update it each week, type it out myself, pin it on the radio station’s noticeboard and mail copies to all the local record shops. In my show, I would read out the following week’s concerts though I never heard any other presenter refer to my list because, beyond Malcolm and myself, the station seemed to be disconnected from the local music scene. On occasional visits to ‘Volume Records’, the only ‘indie’ record shop in Newcastle, I would secretly feel proud to see the latest A4 sheet of gigs I had mailed out pinned to its noticeboard. Like my show’s content, the reason for undertaking this research-intensive work was because nobody else seemed to be exposing this information at the time. There was no ‘what’s on’ publication for the region.

Although I had competently operated radio studio equipment myself since my days at school recording pirate radio shows, management at Metro Radio insisted I sat in a soundproofed studio in front of the microphone while a ‘technical operator’ facing me from an adjoining control room played the records, advertisements and mixed the audio. I was unfamiliar with this arrangement, which the station’s managers had brought with them from overstaffed BBC local radio stations at which they had worked previously. I was extremely lucky to have had John Oley assigned as my ‘T.O.’, one of the most professional and enthusiastic people I have had the pleasure to work with in radio. His contribution to my show was enormous and freed me to talk my rubbish on-air and answer the phone line when I occasionally held competitions.

Metro Radio showed no interest in promoting my show so it seemed a miracle when I started receiving letters from listeners who had discovered it. In the days before internet or community stations, each region of Britain was served by only one local BBC station and one commercial music station. Although my show was tucked away in the weekend schedule, it still felt groundbreaking to play music little heard outside of John Peel’s weeknight show on national ‘BBC Radio One’. There were quite a few records lasting only two or three minutes that each required several hours’ work transferring them to quarter-inch tape in order to edit out swear words with a razor blade and white editing tape on a metal block. If only those bands knew how much extra effort was necessary just for them to receive one radio play!

Living in a rural village, there were Saturday nights during winter snows when I was unable to drive to the station. Snowploughs would habitually clear the roads eastward from Durham City as far as the junction with the A1(M) motorway but, frustratingly, not the further one mile beyond to my home. I would have to trudge out in icy temperatures to the public phone box and call either Malcolm Herdman or John Coulson at home, asking if they could reach the studio to fill in for me on those days. Because they lived in Newcastle city, I think they found it hard to believe that I was literally ‘snowed in’. Unfortunately, my salary was insufficient to contemplate a relocation nearer my workplace, meaning I missed out on concerts and the city nightlife which I would have loved to explore.

All good things come to an end. Quickly in my case. Metro Radio made me redundant from my full-time job. I continued to present my Saturday night show for a while through 1981 but the expense of maintaining a car to drive to Newcastle was proving greater than my payments from the station, which had to be subtracted from my Unemployment Benefit. I was applying for any relevant vacancy in the radio and music industries but getting nowhere. In the end, I had to follow Tebbit’s advice and get on my bike (well, in my car to be accurate), leaving the region where I had lived the last five years in order to take a totally different job 218 miles down south. It was disappointing because I had acquired so much knowledge of indie music, the regional music scene and had built an audience for my unique radio show.

The start of my radio career now seemed to be heading in a negative direction. I was unable to secure work in the broadcast industry for a further four years and, only then, by taking a contract in Israel on a pirate radio ship that paid little more than expenses. However, I have always treasured the memories of my time working alongside John Oley and Tony Crosby late on Saturday nights when the only other person in the darkened Metro Radio building on a bleak industrial estate was the security guard downstairs. This was when innovative radio programmes were made … even though Metro Radio probably never realised it.

Postscript: Forty years later, I received a polite email from a member of a former local band enquiring if I still had their demo tape I had been sent and played on my Metro Radio show. Sadly, no.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/one-little-indie-music-show-1980-1981.html]

One good turn deserves a cold shoulder? : 2004 : BBC World Service Trust, Phnom Penh

“I understand you’re an expert in messaging,” said the woman sat behind the desk.

I looked blank. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. If she meant SMS text messaging, I did not even own a mobile phone!

“I was told you are experienced in capacity building,” continued the woman, undeterred.

I looked even more blank. What on earth was she talking about? I had just flown half way around the world. This was my first meeting with the boss of the project where I was to work. Yet I had zero understanding of what she had just said. I began to wonder if the office back in London had mistakenly sent the wrong person (me) to the wrong location (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). Did she think I was someone else? I had been sent here to do radio training. Had the international wires become crossed somewhere?

It took me several weeks to understand that Giselle Portenier, manager of Cambodia’s BBC World Service Trust project, had been addressing me in ‘NGO-speak’, an esoteric language I had never before encountered. People working in such ‘Non-Governmental Organisations’ (er, international charities) apparently use terminology that substitutes long words for concepts which the rest of the world refer to with short words. Some might call this professional obscurantism.

During my first week, Portenier insisted I attend a two-day workshop organised by the Centre for Disease Control concerning drama programmes created to communicate health issues to the population. My takeaways were that NGO staff love the sound of their own voices and try their utmost to turn simple tasks into overcomplicated diagrams and flow charts. I strained to stay awake in Cambodia’s oppressive daytime heat and quickly tired of hearing NGO people talk to each other in a language that was apparently English, but might as well have been Mongolian for all I could understand. Luckily, I managed to excuse myself from a similar two-day workshop about ‘messaging’ the following week.

Why was I in Cambodia? In July 2002, I had been unemployed and applied in desperation for an advertised role with the BBC World Service Trust in Ethiopia. The only thing I recall about that interview was sitting alongside dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah (born two days before me!) in the lobby of Bush House. Having neither attended Oxbridge nor benefited from a family member or acquaintance employed in the Corporation, I was hardly surprised to receive my thirty-seventh consecutive BBC rejection letter. The Holy Grail I had coveted since childhood was receding further over my horizon with every CV submitted.

Fast forward to December 2003. I was in a dead-end job at Ofcom where my line manager Neil Stock had met me on Christmas Eve to say “there is nothing for you to contribute to” the media regulator’s work schedule during the first quarter of the next year. I had just discovered a voicemail message on my work phone from the BBC, asking if I was the ‘Grant Goddard’ who had applied for a job the previous year. My contact details had proven a dead-end and it had resorted to contacting a referee in the United States I had listed who advised that I now worked for ‘The Radio Authority’ … which was found to have closed. I phoned back, confirmed it was me and explained that I had since changed address. Would I be interested in a consultancy role lasting two to three months? Though I had accrued eight weeks’ unused holiday at Ofcom, it refused me paid or unpaid leave to pursue this opportunity … so I resigned.

Roy Head, director of the BBC World Service Trust’s health division, explained by phone that a contract had recently been signed between the Cambodia government and the Corporation to train local staff at two radio stations to produce phone-in shows around health issues. A decade earlier, he had managed the United Nations’ radio station ‘UNTAC’ in Cambodia. Head confided that, only after signing this contract had he discovered that the BBC’s ‘executive producer, radio’ in Cambodia, despite having held numerous posts within the Corporation since 1987, apparently had no experience producing a live radio programme. Neither had the Cambodia project manager who had produced television documentaries for the BBC since 1986. I respected Head’s honesty when he admitted my involvement would help him out of a very large hole. The Cambodia government was becoming increasingly impatient for the training to start, necessitating my arrival as quickly as possible. Yes, the pay (£750 plus US$100 pocket money per week) was not great because it had had to be unexpectedly eked out of an existing budget, but Head promised me better paid similar BBC work afterwards if I would solve his pressing problem.

I nearly never made it to Cambodia. The nurse I was mandated to visit at BBC White City could not locate the required ‘BCG’ vaccination on my left arm and threatened to block my departure for several weeks to redo it. Was I born in Britain? Yes. Did I have paperwork proving I had received the vaccine? Er, I was a child. Where did I receive it? In a health clinic, long gone, at the corner of Upper College Ride and Saddleback Road on the Old Dean Estate in Camberley, 200 metres from the house in which I had been born. After an extended interrogation, as a last resort she inspected my right arm and found a faint tell-tale circular mark there, and expressed astonishment that I was the first person she had encountered with it on the ‘wrong’ arm. All I could presume was that some nurse in the 1960’s had decided it would never matter as council estate children were destined to go nowhere anyway.

On arrival in Phnom Penh, my line manager Chas Hamilton invited me to homemade dinner in his flat and filled my head with gossip about his BBC colleagues. He was particularly incensed that his boss Portenier, before her recent arrival, had allegedly demanded her flat be remodelled at considerable public expense to include, shock horror, a sunken bathtub. As a short-term consultant (given BBC contract number WST001), I preferred to avoid such office politicking. I chose to keep my burning question – how is a BBC employee promoted to a radio management role without having produced a live radio programme? – to myself. The Corporation evidently worked in mysterious ways.

After a morning visit to one of the radio stations in Phnom Penh at which I would be working, the Cambodian BBC driver was en route to the office when I requested he stop for me to buy a takeaway lunch.

“I will take you to a hotel for lunch, sir,” he kindly offered.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I can buy something at one of these roadside shacks and eat it at the office.”

“But they only serve noodles, sir,” he explained patiently.

“Yes, and that is what I want for lunch,” I insisted.

Despite his complete puzzlement, he parked the BBC four-wheel-drive alongside a random food stall, translated my order into Khmer and, minutes later, I left clutching a knotted transparent plastic bag containing my freshly stir-fried order for less than a dollar. At the BBC office, I went to the kitchen, requested a plate, emptied out my food and sat at the dining table to eat it, much to the amazement of the Cambodian staff. My new colleagues found it hard to believe that I ate noodles at home all the time.

From that day forward, I joined the local staff for lunch daily in the BBC kitchen, with between five and fifteen of us gathered around the large dining table for the mandatory two-hour break inherited from French colonialists. Each of us paid the BBC kitchen manager a dollar a day to take our preferences and venture out to numerous street stalls to fulfil our orders. The food was always fantastic and the company was excellent, though I could not understand the Khmer chatter. The project’s Cambodian receptionist sidled up to me and explained with awe:

“In all the time we have been here, not one of the foreigners working here has sat down and ate our food with us, except on special occasions such as Chinese New Year.”

So where did all the ‘foreigners’ go every day? On one occasion, sat at the kitchen table ready to eat lunch, Portenier approached me and insisted I accompany her and the other ex-pats ‘out’. We were driven in several cars to an international hotel that appeared completely devoid of guests, where we were offered menus and then waited over an hour in the lobby for our dishes to arrive. The food, the surroundings and the conversation were all mediocre, though I presume that the BBC was picking up the tab for its employees’ daily lunchtime jollies to various Phnom Penh hotels. Thankfully, I was never invited again.

The BBC had initially ordered my air ticket to return to London three months later. As my work was still far from complete, I had to spend three hours sat uncomfortably on a long wooden bench in a tiny Phnom Penh travel agency that attempted to change the date … unsuccessfully. I decided unilaterally to use the ticket (rather than waste it) to fly home for a quick visit, only to discover that Roy Head, having sent me to Cambodia, was no longer with the BBC, reportedly having become ill after a work trip to Brazil. Back in London, I was called to a meeting with his successor at Bush House, a brusque woman who demonstrated little interest in my work but asked me to spy on my line manager Chas Hamilton and report what he was or was not doing. I refused. I had been hired as a consultant solely to train people in radio, not indulge in espionage. The BBC booked my new ticket to return to Cambodia a week later and gave me boxes of radio equipment to transport in my heavily surcharged, overweight suitcases.

Returned to Phnom Penh, when one of my station projects was about to launch its new weekly live youth phone-in show, I drafted a press release and asked Portenier to approve it, transpose it onto BBC notepaper and circulate it through established PR channels. She refused. I was perplexed. Surely it was positive news to herald the successful completion of part of the BBC’s contract with the Cambodia government. Apparently not. In order not to disappoint the radio station’s production team with whom I had worked so closely for months, I was reduced to secretly commandeering a BBC car and driver when Portenier was absent from the office in order to hand deliver to each of Phnom Penh’s newspapers my press releases in Khmer and English that omitted mention of the BBC’s involvement.

This negative response was very dispiriting as it appeared that neither my local project manager, nor my local line manager, nor the replacement BBC manager in London seemed even vaguely appreciative of my success saving their bacon. My second radio station project was almost ready to launch too but I considered now was a good time to return home, having already spent twice as long in Cambodia as my contract had required. The local BBC staff organised a fantastic farewell party for me in the office and gave me presents. Neither Portenier nor Hamilton attended. To be accurate, Hamilton arrived at work after it had finished. At the airport, several of the wonderful Cambodian radio station staff I had trained arrived unexpectedly to see me off. They cried. I cried. They and the lovely local office staff had made my work worthwhile.

By the time I landed in London, my BBC e-mail account had already been cancelled, preventing continuing contact with my colleagues in Cambodia. I sent Portenier an email apologising (ahem!) for not having seen her before I left and thanking her for “all her help”. Her reply lacked a shred of gratitude:

“I know you were planning to do a handover report for David. Did that happen? I know he tried to get in touch in England, but failed.”

My BBC contract had not required me to write a report. Besides, in Cambodia I had been fully occupied each week spending four days from 8am to 5pm training two teams, one day in the radio studio and two days preparing materials for my next sessions, without any BBC input. Meanwhile, the project’s head of radio seemed to have spent most of his time sat in his cosy BBC office. Neither did I know who ‘David’ was. Nevertheless, I offered my services to help out for free in the BBC’s Bush House office, hoping to avail myself of future opportunities. I submitted six applications for advertised vacancies in the BBC World Service Trust during 2004 and 2005, for one of which I was interviewed, but without success. Nobody in the BBC thanked me for my work bailing it out in Cambodia or offered me the better paid, follow-on opportunities I had been promised. I had no idea how to contact Roy Head once he had left the BBC.

When I signed on for Unemployment Benefit, my most recent work in Phnom Penh was viewed suspiciously because, whilst I had been away, British tabloid newspaper front pages had splashed stories about 1970’s pop star ‘Gary Glitter’s exploits with underage boys in Cambodia. The young ‘JobCentre’ officer instructed me to apply for a radiology vacancy in a local hospital, not comprehending it was totally unrelated to radio production.

Giselle Portenier completed one year in charge of the Cambodia project before leaving the BBC and returning to Canada.

In 2006, Chas Hamilton lauded the youth phone-in radio show I and my trainees had created as the project’s “most popular”, noting that “all members of the production team … had no previous media experience before we plucked them from university and trained them.” His invisible ‘executive production’ role while I was there had apparently proven so successful that the BBC promoted him to manage their entire Cambodia project. I hope he enjoyed the accompanying apartment’s sunken bathtub he had seemed to envy so much.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/things-you-say-you-love-youre-gonna.html]

Knock me down with a mugger : 1986 : Share A Capital Christmas, Capital Radio, London

 Blam!! A sudden force on my back knocked me over in a second. No time to figure out what had just happened. I was sprawled front-down on the floor with a weight on my back. I shouted. People around me screamed. I could sense a struggle taking place overhead. The object on my back lifted and, from my ground level line of sight, I made out the feet of someone running ahead of me into the crowd.

“Are you alright?” asked one of the group of people standing around me, looking concerned.

“We saw that man push through the crowd,” explained another, “then knock you over and jump on top of you. We managed to pull him off but he ran away.”

They helped me to my feet and I realised that I was indeed alright and thanked them profusely for their swift action rescuing a complete stranger. I was wearing a thick winter coat that had broken my fall. I had been lucky not to have hit my head and to have landed on the soft bag I had been carrying in front of me. Nothing appeared broken. As I rejoined the throng of commuters journeying home, one of the Good Samaritans added:

“It looked as if he knew you were there amongst the crowd and targeted you. It was very strange.”

Indeed, it was. I had travelled this same journey every day and nothing untoward had happened. I always left work at the end of the afternoon, walked across Euston Road to Warren Street tube station, caught the southbound train and alighted four stops later at Charing Cross, one of London’s busiest hubs. I had been walking through the narrow, low-ceiling tunnel that led up from the Underground platform to the railway station concourse when I had been jumped. The train and tunnel had been more crowded than usual because it was Christmas Eve. It seemed bizarre to be jumped on not when I was alone in the winter darkness outside, but amongst a tightly packed crowd inside a well-lit underground travel conduit.

There was one significant difference between all the other days I had travelled home without incident and that day. Stuffed down the front of my underpants was a white envelope containing a substantial amount of cash representing payment for my last six weeks’ work. I had requested my employer’s accounts department pay me by bank transfer but, for reasons unknown, it had insisted on paying cash and only at the conclusion of my contract. If this money was the reason I had been attacked, then only the accounts department staff and the handful of people in my work team knew I had been paid that day. But the latter had just been paid that same day in the same way. So had I been merely a random victim of violence … or had something more sinister happened?

A few months previously, I had applied for a full-time job at ‘Capital Radio’. I was interviewed by Steve Billington, a social worker who had left his job in 1984 managing a social work team in Harrow to become the station’s head of community affairs. Although my application was unsuccessful, he contacted me weeks later to ask if I wanted to manage its Christmas charity appeal. I was soon to finish a non-renewable, twelve-month job creation role managing a team at ‘Radio Thamesmead’ so it was an ideal time for me to switch to a ‘proper’ job. I had dreamt of working at London’s only commercial music station since it had opened in 1973 and had even contemplated not going to university in order to take a programme production role there like Annie Challis on Tommy & Joan’s daily ‘Swop Shop’ show. Back then, I was innocent of the fact that to secure such a job in the media it was rarely, if ever, WHAT you knew about radio but WHO you knew.

Now, thirteen years after its launch, I was finally working at Capital Radio. My first two weeks were spent in the office, sat opposite the amiable charities manager Millie Dunne who helped me organise files of paperwork for the huge volume of goods she had persuaded businesses to donate, a task at which she was extremely proficient. During the subsequent four weeks leading up to Christmas, I worked in the station’s foyer, organising the receipt of donated goods and their delivery to London charities who would distribute them as gifts to needy families. I managed a small team that Steve had already appointed, all of whom were incredible and worked hard collecting and delivering goods as needed.

Steve had also appointed a ‘deputy’ to help me with the project’s management. His name was Pol. Never call him ‘Paul’! Unlike me, he was loud and extrovert, networking relentlessly with anyone remotely important who passed through the revolving door entrance to the foyer. He seemed to view the job as a sinecure that would permit him to further his ambition to be … something famous. While the rest of us worked long hours and weekends, Pol was AWOL for chunks of that time, claiming that he had had to attend appointments for this or that. In the pre-mobile-phone era, it was impossible to call someone to demand “where the hell are you?” I was regularly tempted to complain to Steve about this young man’s work ethic deficiency but I had no inkling if he had been recruited by some friend or relative within the company. He appeared to possess no relevant skillset for our work so I just had to grit my teeth and hold my tongue.

Despite this frustration, the job turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding I have done. Knowing that the radio station was making a practical difference to Londoners’ lives was incredibly heart-warming. The foyer – our ‘office’ – was enormous, more than 1000 square meters, with a ridiculously high ceiling and permanent home to three freestanding stalls: the ‘Capital Radio Shop’ sold station merchandise, ‘Capital Radio Jobspot’ offered job vacancy details and ‘Capital Radio Flatshare’ produced a printed sheet every Thursday afternoon listing rental accommodation available. The building’s ground floor full-length windows on a corner site enabled traffic passing on busy Euston Road and Hampstead Road to view the impressive Christmas decorations within, including a massive, illuminated pine tree. Pedestrians would stop and peer through the glass at us working inside.

Capital Radio’s decision prior to the station’s launch to rent the foyer and first floor was a brilliant marketing strategy, as its logo and name were emblazoned across the building at ground level around one of London’s busiest road junctions. To passers-by, it appeared that the station occupied the entire 36-storey tower, the capital’s tallest office block when completed in 1970. In reality, its upper floors were filled with unconnected businesses including the UK government’s military intelligence department intercepting mail. Capital Radio’s high-profile visibility was in stark contrast to its competitor ‘Radio One’ which had operated from an anonymous outbuilding (Egton House) since launch in 1967. BBC bigwigs had feared its youthful staff (including former pirate radio ship presenters) might scare the ‘serious’ broadcasters in Broadcasting House employed on its existing talk and classical music networks.

Another significant difference with its competitor was Capital’s open-door policy, permitting anyone to enter its impressive foyer through the revolving doors without a security check. Music fans would stand around hoping to get a glimpse of pop stars visiting for interviews. Radio presenters walked in and out and up the grand curved staircase to the first-floor studios. During the charity appeal, many generous listeners ventured in clutching their donations of toys which we added to the piles of presents. For amusement, we unboxed and put batteries in one state-of-the-art toy mouse that ran around on wheels with a movement sensor, enabling it to independently charge at speed across the polished floor towards anyone who entered through the revolving door and then chase them wherever they walked. Only on one occasion did we have to close and evacuate the foyer for several hours due to a bomb scare.

Christmas Eve was a sad day when the team had completed the charity appeal and parted ways for the final time. Following my mysterious attempted mugging, I reached home and found I was lucky to have escaped with mild bruising on my forearms. I packed a bag and headed to Deptford railway station, only to discover that the last train had already left. I had to return to my rented room, phone my mother and ask if she would come and collect me as there was no public transport during the next two days. Though she hated driving through London, she kindly drove fifty miles from Camberley to pick me up on Christmas morning so that I could spend the holidays with her and my sister.

In the New Year, I returned to the Capital Radio office to type up a report that catalogued, with Millie’s help, the volume of goods we had distributed during the Christmas appeal and the number of charities and families we had helped. Though no such post mortem had been requested, I considered it ‘good practice’ and I hoped to impress my boss with my thoroughness as a manager.

Much later that year, Steve Billington requested a further meeting in his office. Perhaps a full-time vacancy at the station had arisen? Sadly, it had not. I was asked if I would work on the next Christmas charity appeal. I was grateful for the opportunity. However, I was flummoxed to be told that I was to be demoted to the role of ‘deputy co-ordinator’ despite me having believed I had achieved a satisfactory job the previous year. Then I was gobsmacked to be told that the co-ordinator that year was to be … Pol. It seemed like some kind of voodoo that the person within our team who had demonstrated the least commitment last year should now be appointed to manage the rest of us.

Once activity started in December 1987, did Pol step up to his promotion and manage everything smoothly? No change of spots was evident. The only thing he seemed interested in managing was his own social calendar. It was Hobson’s choice: either the charity appeal would rapidly descend into chaos or I would have to manage it, just as I had the previous year. I took the reins informally, even though it proved frustrating when the most regularly spoken phrase by everyone involved was “Where’s Pol?” The charity appeal proved as successful as the previous year, though on this occasion Pol would take the credit. Did he write a report afterwards, as I had done? Er …

With the exception of the baffling change of co-ordinator, Steve Billington had been a fantastic boss and, in the New Year, he invited our whole team to reunite for a lunchtime meal at a restaurant in Tottenham Court Road to express his gratitude. I was appreciative of the start he had offered me at Capital Radio and the opportunity it presented to further develop my management experience. I had thoroughly enjoyed my time working there and, like my earlier job at ‘Metro Radio’, it taught me a lot about the problems that can befall a commercial radio station.

And so to ‘The Epilogue’:

• In 1988, Camilla ‘Millie’ Dunne (daughter of Sir Thomas Dunne) married The Honourable Rupert Soames (grandson of Sir Winston Churchill) at a society wedding attended by her friend Lady Diana, Princess of Wales.

• In 1989, I co-ordinated and wrote former pirate station ‘KISS FM’s successful second application for a London commercial radio FM licence, beating 39 competing bids.

• In 1990, Capital Radio closed its community department as a result of the new commercial radio regulator ‘The Radio Authority’s ‘light touch’ strategy no longer requiring commitments from licensees to community activities. Steve Billington left Capital Radio.

• In 1991, I attracted a weekly audience of more than one million listeners a week to black music station ‘KISS FM’ within six months of its successful launch, as its Programme Director, exceeding the Year One target.

• As for Pol …

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/knock-me-down-with-stalker-1986-share.html]

Radio is my bomb? : 2003 : the DAB digital radio customer complaint hotline, The Radio Authority

 The Bomb Squad arrived in vans, ran into the Holborn office block and up its staircase to the eighth floor. We watched events unfold from the car park below, the assembly point to which our organisation of forty-odd people had been evacuated an hour earlier.

That humdrum morning had been interrupted by a large cardboard box delivered by Royal Mail to our office. It was not particularly heavy but had lots of stamps on the outside with a ‘Belfast’ postmark. If you were a celebrity or public figure whose opinions were widely distributed, you might anticipate threats would occasionally be made against your life. If you had a desk job in a little-known British government quango, your greatest work challenge might normally be choosing where to lunch. However, that morning, the box’s addressee Soo Williams was taking no chances. The emergency services were called.

Eventually, the ‘suspicious package’ was removed by ordnance experts and exploded elsewhere. It was found to contain nothing but paper. Printed petitions signed by hundreds of Belfast citizens demanding that religious community radio stations be licensed locally. Williams’ name had been written on the box due to her recent promotion by The Radio Authority to manage the launch of ‘community radio’. Returning to our desks after the false alarm, I ruminated what those god-fearing citizens who had toiled to gather so many signatures might have thought of having been suspected by the recipient of being terrorists.

That morning’s event exemplified the disconnect between the regulator of the radio industry and the public it was supposed to serve. Someone with an interest in the UK community radio movement would have known that tiny unlicensed radio stations had existed for years on both sides of the Irish border, broadcasting church services and information to their communities. Indeed, one history argues that the Catholic Church in Ireland was “the world’s largest pirate radio operator”. However, few of The Radio Authority’s desk-bound administrators demonstrated interest in the medium they were employed to regulate. I was the only employee to have worked in a community radio station (licensed in a 1970’s experiment), having been a founder member of the Community Radio Association two decades previously. But now, within this dysfunctional workplace, I was regarded as the office junior … at the age of forty-four.

Back at my desk, I returned to taking regular phone calls from members of the public dissatisfied with the new-fangled DAB ‘digital radio’ receiver they had just purchased. I never quite understood why the switchboard regularly passed such calls to me, as I bore no responsibility for DAB radio, and my colleagues in the Development office suffered no such impositions. It was already self-evident to me that the rollout of this new radio technology had been disastrous for listeners, though I was expected to defend the system, and worse … to blame the listener for its inadequacies.

Staff were issued with a ‘helpful’ sheet of topics to raise with complainants about DAB. Suggestions to be made to members of the public experiencing difficulties tuning into stations on their new receiver included:

  • move your radio nearer a window
  • listen to the radio in an upstairs room
  • your residence might be constructed of the wrong materials
  • your residence might be located in a valley
  • your residence might be located in a dense urban area
  • your residence might be in an apartment block or a basement
  • you may need to install a rooftop antenna.

Many callers were understandably baffled and annoyed by these ‘answers’ to their problems, proffering a torrent of abuse or hanging up. Many had spent around £90 on a portable DAB receiver and expected it to deliver what the industry’s marketing had promised – ‘crystal clear’ reception of a wide choice of radio stations. The most popular receiver, the ‘Pure Evoke-1’, had been designed to be portable and had no socket to even attach the suggested external antenna, let alone the connectivity to update and improve its software. And why did it resemble a wooden post-war radio in an era when connected mobile phones were looking increasingly futuristic?

One of my callers’ commonest gripes was the result of DAB radios having been marketed and sold nationwide, even though many parts of Britain had yet to be connected to the DAB transmission system. In this instance, all I could suggest was that the consumer return their receiver to the shop and demand a refund because no digital stations were yet audible locally. I too shared this problem because, although The Radio Authority had denied me its Christmas cash bonus in 2002, I had received the DAB radio gifted to all staff. It remained in its box as I was living in Brighton, where DAB transmissions had yet to arrive.

The root of the dissatisfaction with DAB radio was not the technology itself, which had been a smart European innovation, but the way it had been implemented by Britain. Those critical roll-out decisions had been made by people like the ones in my workplace: administrators who had no experience working within the radio industry, encouraged by technologists keen to promote anything ‘digital’ with an evangelical fervour, oblivious as to whether consumer demand was evident. At the top of this unholy group of conspirators were government civil servants who mistakenly believed that Britain and British industry could dominate global markets by adopting a technological standard in which the rest of the world had shown scant interest. Meetings of this cabal seem to have merely intensified their cult-like determination.

The stumbling block their paper plan faced was the disinterest of the commercial radio industry itself which, at that time, was profitable and had expressed no dissatisfaction with its existing, robust FM radio transmission system. When The Radio Authority advertised the first national DAB multiplex licence in 1988, it faced the very real possibility that no radio companies would submit bids. To avoid this embarrassment, the regulator had to ‘strongarm’ Britain’s largest radio group into making the only application. GWR Group plc’s then chief executive Ralph Bernard later admitted:

“GWR was encouraged to apply for the national [digital] licence, and was under some pressure to invest in the opportunities for a national licence from the then regulator [The Radio Authority]. Had we not done it, there would be no national DAB platform now. Not only that, [the regulator] did not know what they would have done on the question of national radio stations with regard to the opportunities given by the then government to renew their national licences for a further period of time if they were to commit to going digital. But how can you [do that] if there are no opportunities to go digital because there is no national multiplex? When I put that question to The Radio Authority, I was told that the answer was: ‘We don’t know what would happen – there is no Plan B’. It was just an assumption that someone would go for [the national DAB multiplex].”

“When we were seduced into believing that this was going to be the only [national digital] licence, we realised that there would be substantial losses, but the payback would be when you have the opportunity to be the only player in the national market for DAB. When it’s The Radio Authority, an agency of government, you tend to believe what you are told. On that basis, the investment was justified and, at the time, getting it through my Board was not easy.”

Having rescued the regulator from potential embarrassment in its ill-judged pursuit of the DAB dream, Bernard naturally now held some sway over The Radio Authority and its decisions. There evidently did exist such a thing as a free lunch for its senior managers when Bernard would invite them to The Ivy restaurant in anticipation of outcomes coincidentally beneficial to his business. On two occasions at the regulator, my actions threw a spanner into this cosy relationship and I suffered consequences (see blogs here and here) from my bosses, despite me having acted in what I believed was the public’s interest. I learnt to my professional cost that I was supposed to be a ‘civil servant’ to commercial interests, not to our citizens.

How did the story end for commercial radio? Badly. GWR Group plc’s subsequent merger with Capital Radio Group plc, both profitable public companies prior to their investment in DAB, proved a financial disaster, their DAB assets were divested for a song, an offshore investor acquired the merged business and Bernard exited the industry. This tragedy was repeated in the lower echelons of the radio business when the entire UK commercial radio industry had to be rescued by private investors. Most local radio stations that had existed since the 1970’s were replaced by national ‘brands’. Local content all but disappeared. Thousands of radio professionals lost their jobs.

How did the story end for DAB radio? Even worse. In a presentation I was commissioned to make to the board of the second largest radio group in 2012, I predicted that the government would kick the much heralded ‘digital radio switchover’ date into the long grass. I was pooh-poohed by the company’s technologists at the meeting, but my predictions came to pass … while theirs turned to dust. Naturally, I was never invited back. British commercial radio’s enormous investment in the disastrous DAB platform impoverished the entire sector, reducing it to little more than a jukebox music service for listeners who lacked Spotify accounts.

The deluded dream finally died in 2016 when ‘Pure Digital’, the ‘great white hope’ of British designed DAB radio receivers (though manufactured in China), was sold to Austrian company ‘Aventure AB’ for £2.6m, following its £7.9m loss during 2015/6 as a result of declining sales and its “significant stock” of unsold radio inventory so old that it “needs to be assessed for risk of obsolescence.”

With the advantage of hindsight, the entire DAB debacle now seemed like a rehearsal for the similar self-harm caused by Brexit a decade later. Men in suits with little or no experience of working in the real world of commerce pursued a fever dream regardless of its practicality, oblivious to its outcomes but buoyed by their mistaken sense of superiority. Their project was to foist a uniquely ‘British’ solution on the population that would purposefully diverge the UK from the rest of the world (British DAB radios would not even function in France). Their words and documents were stuffed with misinformation and downright lies that supposedly supported their theories. Without their posh accents, they could have been mistaken for used car dealers.

Despite the wilful destruction of the commercial radio sector’s economic value, talent, creativity and public service that they had fomented, many of Britain’s DAB ‘protagonists’ went on to be lauded with industry awards, honours and lucrative jobs. For anyone who followed the Brexit disaster, it will sound like all too familiar a story.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/radio-is-my-bomb-2003-dab-digital-radio.html]

Baby, we were bored to death : 2000 : FM radio station market, Toronto

 Why does Toronto have such insipid and boring radio? Our city is vibrant, artistic, culturally diverse and entertaining, so why is none of that reflected in our uninspired radio stations? Travelling in Europe and North America as a radio consultant, I listen to a lot of radio and it is tragic to concede that my own city has some of the most boring radio stations known to mankind.

Opportunities to change this sad state of radio in our city are everywhere, but have too often been ignored. When Shaw Communications purchased ‘Energy 108’ a couple of years ago, it could have reinvented the station as a cultural focus for Toronto’s young people. Instead, Shaw fired ‘Energy’s most knowledgeable DJ’s, introduced Sarah McLachlan songs once an hour (in a dance music format?) and changed the name to … ‘Energy 107.9’. Wow! How many minutes did it take the marketing department to devise a strategy that unambitious?

Rogers Media’s purchase of ‘KISS 92’ last year was a complete no-brainer. Can you name any other city of similar size in North America that has had no Top Forty radio station for a period of even a few months? And yet Toronto suffered this malaise for several years. Even if Rogers had hired a helium-voiced bimbo DJ to front a Top Forty format, it still could have captured a huge audience hungry for what used to be called ‘pop music’. And that is exactly what they did. ‘KISS’s ratings are noteworthy, not just for the hordes of spotty grade nine students who naturally gravitate towards Backstreet Boys soundalikes and terrible Canadian techno. But the station’s substantial audience over the age of twenty is a sad reflection of the lack of any other remotely exciting music station in Toronto. For those of us past our teen years, ‘KISS 92’ at least makes you feel good to be alive, compared with other FM music stations that treat listeners like senile geriatrics with one foot already in the grave.

One would hope that ‘KISS 92’s runaway success might encourage its competitors to try and become a little more imaginative in their programs. The signs so far are not particularly encouraging. ‘EZ Rock 97’ revamped its daytime line-up last week to introduce even more soporific DJ’s and has changed its slogan from ‘My Music At Work’ to ‘Soft Rock Favourites’. Station owner Telemedia appointed a new Program Director drafted from its Calgary operation to oversee these changes. Yes, Calgary – that hotbed of radical, imaginative radio formats! ‘EZ Rock’ looks certain to retain its nickname of ‘Radio Slumberland’ in our household.

Milestone Radio, scheduled to launch next year, has an incredible opportunity to turn its black music format into an exciting, inclusive station that could electrify the city. After all, black culture has never been so predominant, nor so imitated, in mainstream music and arts. With imagination, Milestone could be a very successful radio version of ‘City TV’. Whether its owners can grasp that challenge, let alone succeed with it, depends upon the station’s ability to overcome three obstacles. Milestone’s programming plans are the obvious product of committee debate, with too many worthy (but commercially disastrous) ideas generated by individuals who have particular axes to grind. Its recent effort to recruit a Program Director in the US rings alarm bells that Milestone is creating a cookie-cutter US-style urban music station that would reflect nothing of Toronto (listen to ‘WBLK’ for days on end and you will learn absolutely nothing about Buffalo, but everything about ‘strong songs’). And lastly, the spectre of minority shareholder Standard Broadcasting might be waiting quietly in the shadows for Milestone’s ambitious plans to fail in the first year, so that it can take control and resurrect the station as a smooth-jazz format, fitting perfectly alongside its mind-numbing ‘MIX 99’.

As for ‘Edge 102’ and ‘Q-107’, their owners should have been bold enough to extinguish these dinosaur formats years ago. There is so much exciting new music in the world, but you will certainly never hear any of it played on these two stations. The malaise is so bad that Toronto radio critic Marc Weisblott felt obliged to apologise in a recent column (radiodigest.com) for spending so much time listening to New York City radio via the internet. No need to apologise, Marc. Our only ray of hope is that one fine morning, some bold senior executive in Shaw/Corus, Standard, CHUM or Rogers might suddenly understand that radio which is stimulating and challenging can also be a commercial success. I would prescribe that executive a quick radio listening visit to any major city in the world to understand the potential. Otherwise, Toronto radio is condemned to be a mere revenue-generating asset designed to send us all to permanent sleep with yet another Celine Dion or Bryan Adams song.

[Submitted to Toronto weekly what’s on paper, unpublished]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/09/baby-we-were-bored-to-death-2000-fm.html]

One small step for radio, one giant leap for black music radio in London : 1990 : KISS 100 FM launch day

 The final few days before KISS FM’s official launch were a blur of frenetic activity and outright panic. It was only at this late date that construction of the three studios was completed by the contractors. Now, at last, they were ready for the engineers from the Independent Broadcasting Authority [IBA] to test and inspect. Much to my relief, their report required only a few minor alterations to the air conditioning system, after which the IBA issued KISS FM with a certificate of technical competence. I affixed it to my office wall, alongside the poster of Betty Boo [I had pinned as my memento of DJ Tim Westwood’s ‘reason’ for reneging last-minute on his scheduled daily daytime show].

With only days to go, I held two long, evening meetings with all the part-time DJs to explain what they could and could not do legally on-air. As former pirate DJs, they were unfamiliar with the conventions of libel, slander and other legal niceties which legitimate radio DJs have to learn. It was important for me to emphasise how essential it was for KISS FM to protect itself against prosecution or rebuke by the commercial radio regulator, the IBA. I went through their employment contracts, page by page, explaining what the jargon meant and what implications the clauses had for their radio shows. Also, I had to stress the importance of playing the right advertisements at the right time. This was a contractual requirement that had been relatively relaxed on pirate stations.

The night before the station’s launch, I was still busy putting the finishing touches to the inside of the studio until the early hours of the morning. Although two on-air studios had been built, there was only time to bring one of them up to scratch with all the accessories required for live broadcasts. With only hours to go, the engineers and I were frantically drilling holes in the studio walls to hang the storage racks for audio cartridges used to play advertisements, as well as wiring up the studio lights on the ceiling. I handwrote several large posters in thick felt pen to remind the presenters of the station’s address, its phone number for requests, and what to say about the station’s launch. Then, I had to spend several hours making labels with a Dymo and sticking them onto each piece of equipment in the studio for the presenters to know precisely which button performed which task. Finally, when everything was ready, I drove home and collapsed into bed.

The next morning, Saturday 1 September 1990, was the biggest day of our lives. Some weeks earlier, [managing director] Gordon McNamee had hung a handwritten sign on his office wall that read “X DAYS TO GO” with the number being changed daily. That number was now down to zero and the sign had finally become redundant. The day had arrived at last, whether we were ready for it or not. McNamee and I met at the station in the morning and locked ourselves away inside the production studio. McNamee wanted to perform a countdown to the station’s launch at midday but, in order to ensure that it went perfectly smoothly, he wanted to pre-record it. I set the timer on my digital wristwatch to five minutes and recorded McNamee’s voice, counting down at one-minute intervals from five minutes to one minute, and then counting down the seconds during the final minute until the alarm sounded. It took two attempts to get it right.

After that, we moved to the main on-air studio, taking the tape of the countdown with us. We had decided not to allow anyone other than essential station personnel into the studio for the launch. It was not a big enough room to comfortably accommodate more than a few people, and the presence of journalists would only have made us even more nervous. McNamee had arranged for Mentorn Films, which was making the television documentary about the station, to erect a tripod camera in the corner of the studio to record the whole event. A video link had also been booked to relay the picture live to a large screen in Dingwalls nightclub, where the official KISS FM launch party was being held that day.

With all the tension that surrounded that historic day, we quickly forgot that we were being watched by a video camera from the corner of the room. I spooled McNamee’s countdown recording onto a tape machine and started it at precisely five minutes to midday. McNamee’s countdown was now automatically being superimposed over the music from the test transmission VHS cassette that had been playing continuously for the last ten days. Over the beats of the Kid Frost hip hop track ‘La Raza,’ McNamee’s voice coolly counted down the minutes. At the one-minute point, McNamee counted “59, 58, 57, 56….” and I slowly faded out the music to increase the suspense of the moment. Accompanied by the pre-recorded sound of my digital watch alarm, McNamee said the magic words “twelve o’clock.”

I turned up the microphone in the studio for McNamee to make KISS FM’s live opening speech:

“This is Gordon Mac. There are no words to express the way I feel at this moment. So, with your permission, I’d just like to get something out of my system. Altogether – we’re on air – hooray!”

Everyone in the studio joined in a loud cheer, before McNamee continued:

“Welcome, London. Do you realise it’s taken us fifty-nine months, four hundred and sixty-five thousand, seven hundred and twenty working hours, plus three and a half million pounds, as well as all of your support over the last five years, to reach this moment? As from today, London and everywhere around the M25, within and without, will have their own twenty-four-hour dance music radio station. I’m talking to you from our new studios in KISS House, which is completely different from the dodgy old studios we used to have in the past [laughter in the studio]. The odds were against us. None of the establishment fancied our chances but, with the force of public opinion and our determination, the authorities had to sit up and listen and take notice. Today, I’m being helped by Rufaro Hove, the winner of ‘The Evening Standard’ KISS 100 FM competition. Rufaro was chosen from thousands of people who entered and she will press the button for the first record. But before that, the first jingle.”

McNamee pushed the cartridge button to play a lo-fi jingle from KISS FM’s pirate days. The sound of a telephone answering machine tone was followed by McNamee’s personal assistant, Rosee Laurence, saying:

“It’s me again. I forgot to say – hooray, we’re on. Bye-bye.”

The jingle ended with the sound of a phone being put down. McNamee continued:

“There we go, Rufaro, now you can press the first one. Go!”

The first record played on the new KISS FM was the reggae song ‘Pirates’ Anthem’ by Home T, Cocoa Tea & Shabba Ranks. The song was a tribute to London’s pirate radio stations. The rallying call of the chorus was:

“Them a call us pirates

Them a call us illegal broadcasters

Just because we play what the people want

DTI tries [to] stop us, but they can’t”

One of the song’s verses narrated the story of pirate radio in the UK:

“Down in England we’ve got lots of radio stations

Playing the peoples’ music night and day

Reggae, calypso, hip hop or disco

The latest sound today is what we play……..

They’re passing laws. They’re planning legislation

Trying their best to keep the music down

DTI, why don’t you leave us alone?

We only play the music others want”

These lyrics were the perfect choice for the station’s first record. KISS FM’s pirate history may have been behind it now, but the station had proven that pirate broadcasting had been necessary to open up the British airwaves to new musical sounds and fresh ideas for the 1990s. ‘Pirates’ Anthem’ was followed by the personal choice of the Evening Standard competition winner, ‘Facts of Life’ by Danny Madden. In the studio, the atmosphere was electric. It was difficult to believe that the few of us crowded into that little room were making broadcasting history. This was the creation of the dream that some of us thought we might never witness – a legal black music radio station in London, at last. It was difficult to believe we were really on the air.

Next, McNamee thanked “all the original disc jockeys, all the backers, all the new staff and last, but not by any means least, all of the listeners that have supported us over the five years.”

He introduced the record that he had adopted as KISS FM’s theme tune – ‘Our Day Will Come’ by Fontella Bass. The station’s first advertisement followed, booked by the Rhythm King record label to publicise its latest releases. Soon, McNamee’s stint as the station’s first DJ came to an end and his place was taken by Norman Jay, whose croaky voice betrayed the emotion of the day. Jay told listeners over his instrumental ‘Windy City’ theme tune:

“After nearly two very long years, all the good times, all the bad times we shared on radio … Thanks to all of you. Without your help, this day could not have been possible. On a cold and wet October day in 1985, KISS FM was born. Gordon Mac, George Power and a long-time friend of mine, Tosca, got together to put together a station which meant so much to so many. And thanks to those guys, Norman Jay is now on-air.”

Once Jay was on the air, McNamee said farewell to the rest of us in the studio and left to attend the station’s official launch party at Dingwalls. We stayed in the studio, still thrilled to be part of the celebration of that historic moment and enjoying the music that Jay played. Throughout the rest of the weekend, each KISS FM DJ presented their first show on the newly legal station. Many of them reminisced about the pirate days of KISS FM and played music from that era, when they had last graced the airwaves of London. To the majority of the station’s audience, who might never have heard of KISS FM until now, the weekend’s broadcasts must have sounded rather indulgent. Far from most of the records played that weekend reflecting the cutting edge of new dance music that the new KISS FM had promised, the songs mostly reeked of nostalgia and the station’s former glory days as a pirate station. This brief moment of indulgence was a healing process that was necessary for the station’s staff.

I remained in the studio the rest of the day, helping the DJs to grapple with the unfamiliar equipment and showing them the new systems with which they had to contend. Despite the intensive training they had been given in the last ten days, it had been twenty months since any of them had spoken a word on the radio, let alone presented a professional show. Nearly all the DJs looked incredibly nervous, and several seemed gripped with terror at the prospect of having to present a show from a fully equipped radio studio for the first time in their lives. I stayed there until the early hours of Sunday morning, with only an occasional break for a takeaway pizza.

Everybody involved in KISS FM, apart from the small group of us left in the studio – the DJ on the air, me, [head of talks] Lyn Champion and programme assistants Colin Faver and Hannah Brack – were at Dingwalls, enjoying the party celebrations. It felt strange, during the station’s first day on-air, that the rest of the huge KISS FM building was entirely empty. In the evening, the only lights visible from outside were in the tiny studio on the first floor. By two o’clock in the morning, I was absolutely exhausted. It had been an incredibly exciting day and everything had run much more smoothly than I had expected. I drove home, having left Champion and Brack to ‘babysit’ the studio overnight to ensure that the rest of the presenters could cope with the equipment.

[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 published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/08/one-small-step-for-radio-one-giant-leap.html]

The spy who disliked me : 2003 : Eva Koekelbergh, The Radio Authority

 “Do you know who I am?” my workplace colleague shouted down the phone. “Do you know who I work for?”

I suspect customer service personnel at Fortnum & Mason (which promises “everyone remembers their first encounter with us”) endure similarly haughty conversations with their upper crust clientele day in day out and follow a scrupulously polite script such as:

“Yes, madam, I can read your name on the order for wedding guest name cards and I can tell from your posh accent that you are a member of the British elite who since 1707 have purchased ordinary things from our Piccadilly shop at extraordinary prices, BUT …”

Perhaps private school timetables schedule one period per week of ‘Privilege Studies’ during which pampered Torquil’s and Persephone’s confidently acquire the skill of always getting their own way in life by addressing the 95% of Brits who they consider not ‘one of us’ as inferior beings … though I fail to recall my state school reciprocally teaching ‘deference’. Whether the harangued employee at Fortnum & Mason (“committed to delivering a sense of pleasure”) on the other end of the call had heard of The Radio Authority I doubt. Our government quango was so marginal that there were probably people toiling in radio stations who had never heard of it.

My colleague was usually more softly spoken until an issue arose with ‘service’, at which point the inherited gene that had probably balled out ‘the help’ in centuries past suddenly emerged on the radar screen like the tip of an upper-class iceberg. On a previous occasion, a phone charger left permanently plugged in under the same colleague’s desk had burnt out with a bang while she was sat in our crowded, unventilated office, but without injury. No eavesdropping was necessary to overhear how forcibly the manufacturer would be complained to, sued and adequate compensation secured for her having suffered this apparent near-death experience.

Our office proved the ideal place for my colleague to spend most of the year meticulously planning her spectacular wedding in the grounds of a hired West Country mansion. Months could pass without management delegating any work to us ‘development officers’ to do. The pay and conditions in this public sector agency were undeniably rubbish, but never have I been required to do so little work for a salary. If I exited the office even ten minutes after five o’clock, it would be my duty to switch off all the lights and lock the Radio Authority front door. So much time, so little work!

Evidently, no run-of-the-mill wedding was being planned from the desk next to mine. Its scale and lavishness would easily have triumphed in a ‘Radio Industry Wedding of the Year’ awards ceremony. Like all historic royal weddings, this was not a purely personal affair. It celebrated the alliance of two established ‘houses’ that since 1973 had been at war with each other, fighting innumerable battles over every issue known to the broadcast industry’s opposing armies. The bridegroom was a board member and director of a significant British commercial radio group. The bride worked for the government regulator of the very same commercial radio industry. It was a match made in conflict-of-interest heaven.

I had already observed that, as soon as something of even minor significance occurred at The Radio Authority, the bride-to-be would unhook her mobile phone from its charger and march to the ladies’ loo where she might remain a good while. Maybe she just suffered a weak bladder exacerbated by radio industry events. Whatever, by dint of a mysteriously indirect route, such news would magically appear within the pages of the next ‘Radio Magazine’, a weekly publication brimming with insider gossip that naturally was rabidly consumed by The Radio Authority’s staff.

Normally I would have remained coldly detached from such workplace intrigue but, this time, my life was impacted by the whiff of in-house espionage. Bob Tyler, a good friend for as many decades as I have attended radio conferences, was then news editor of the Radio Magazine and had a habit of phoning The Radio Authority switchboard and asking to be put through to me for an innocent chat. Having signed some kind of Official Secrets Act on my first day of work, I told him absolutely nothing confidential. However, his calls may have sowed seeds of doubt with my boss, David Vick, who one day discovered me alone in his office after I had entered to retrieve a document I had mistakenly left on his desk minutes beforehand. As the only employee with hundreds of published articles about the radio industry to my name, the fickle finger of fate appeared to point directly at me and, without explanation, Vick started to lock his office door when he was absent. Subsequently, I was the sole employee not to be awarded a Christmas bonus and my annual review was unremittingly negative.

“My father worked as a spy for the Dutch government,” the bride-to-be would tell the rest of us in the office, as if addressing an interviewer for a place at Oxbridge. I wondered to myself whether such an occupation passed as a ‘family business’ amongst her peers. Could her employment with The Radio Authority be merely an undercover mission in a quiet backwater for an MI5 agent? Suspicions were further aroused when our boss David Vick insisted he vet and approve each of her wedding guests, the list apparently resembling a who’s-who of everyone who presently worked in the British commercial radio industry. Not that I ever saw it. 

As the Big Day approached, it became apparent that all who worked in our office had received an invitation … except me. In fact, everybody in our department had been invited … except me. Indeed, I suspect that just about everyone employed by The Radio Authority had been invited … except me. Not that Eva Koekelbergh ever told me to my face that I would not receive an invitation to her big fat Wessex wedding. My desk was only six feet away from hers so the ‘oh dear, it must have been lost in the post’ excuse would have been wholly redundant. I had endured almost a year of aural torture, forced to listen to every minor detail concerning the biggest day of her life being phoned through to dozens of contractors and then chased up relentlessly from her desk, yet now I was being treated as if I might deliver a homemade bomb as my gift-wrapped present.

Though there may be eight million eligible bachelors in the naked city, the universe of Britain’s 5% appears more akin to the gene pool within a rural Mormon village. The bridegroom just happened to be the former Radio Authority line manager of the bride, and he also just happened to be best man at her present line manager’s wedding, and both men just happened to have attended the same university. For the cherry on top of this cake of coincidence, one of the six people working in our office was the daughter of one of the bride’s teachers at her former private school. When people casually comment ‘it’s a small world’, do they realise what a truism it is for a certain stratum of society?

One week before the Big Day that had necessitated a year of planning, including its own internet domain with gooey photos of the couple and a lengthy wedding gift list, the bride casually asked me if I wanted to attend her post-wedding evening soiree, but not the main event. I was tempted by an appropriately pithy two-word response but instead feebly explained that I was already busy that weekend. The few friendly staff I knew at The Radio Authority had already asked me privately why I had not been invited and all I could do was shrug. I had no idea. Anybody who was anybody in the British radio industry seemed to have been invited. I could only surmise that I must be ‘nobody’, despite having planned and executed London’s most successful large-scale commercial radio station launch during the previous decade.

Naturally, the wedding juggernaut did not come to rest abruptly at the end of the Big Day. Afterwards there were still the communal experiences and the photos to be ooh-ed and ah-ed over by colleagues in the office … and the gossip. Who did what, who saw what and who said what occupied many of the staff for several weeks afterwards. I just sat at my desk pretending to be deaf, dumb and blind. All I learned was that everybody seemed to have had a good time. The wedding had at least not cost me a penny. No present, no card, no car hire, no petrol, no hotel, no tuxedo hire. Even if I had received an invitation, I might have proffered a public explanation that I could not afford all these costs on my meagre salary (particularly as I was commuting to London by train from Brighton), even whilst harbouring the private reason that the wedding’s scale and ostentatiousness seemed to be drawn from the pages of ‘Emma’.

A few months later, The Radio Authority closed and the majority of its staff transferred to a new regulator named Ofcom where we worked in a huge, open plan office overlooking the River Thames. I was relieved that my newly appointed desk was no longer next to the post-honeymoon bride, not because I disliked her, but because during my eighteen months at The Radio Authority she had insisted on running a powerful electric fan on her desk, whatever the season. It might have had the effect of making her feel like Kate Winslet on the bow of ‘The Titanic’ but the airstream had simultaneously played havoc with my sinuses. I had asked her repeatedly to adjust the fan’s angle but somehow it had still subjected me to painful headaches.

I had only transferred to Ofcom in the desperate hope of being offered some proper work tasks to tackle after having been required to do so little at its predecessor. It was not to be. My new boss Neil Stock gave me nothing to do. When the BBC called unexpectedly to offer me contract work in Cambodia, I accepted the challenge. During my last afternoon at Ofcom, I bade a fond farewell to the few lovely colleagues who had been so good to me. On route towards the exit, I passed Eva’s desk. I considered stopping to say farewell but then reflected on my experiences and resolved to walk on by.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-spy-who-disliked-me-2003-eva.html]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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