Tag: radio sector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Treasury,” said one.

“Banking,” responded another.

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

“Radio,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Because economics interests me,” I replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Best Man for the job : 2003 : Neil Stock, The Radio Authority

 When someone leaves their job, what are the chances that the ‘best man’ to replace them will be:

  •  the groom at whose wedding their predecessor was Best Man, AND
  •  a contemporary at the same university, AND
  •  a volunteer at the same student radio station?

Wielding my four mathematics GCE’s and a pound-shop calculator, I sat at my desk calculating the probability of such an alignment of coincidences for a job appointment within my workplace. If this had been an internet start-up of Cambridge science graduate nerds, no eyebrow would have been raised. But in a British government quango? My calculator produced a gibberish result from the very first calculation. But when I turned around its display, the characters appeared to spell out ‘NEPOTISM’. I switched to an Excel spreadsheet but it too crashed. Microsoft made contact, suggesting I lease processing time on its supercomputer to complete my calculation of a ‘1 in …..’ probability that would require several zillion zeros. I gave up.

After an unexplained rush to appoint me, The Radio Authority had left me alone, twiddling my thumbs at my desk for three months. There were no team meetings or supervisor get-togethers to attend, so nobody remarked upon my ongoing inactivity. Had my colleagues even browsed the ‘management’ section of a bookstore? Work tasks were assigned by way of someone with a supreme confidence in their own superiority marching up to your desk and barking orders, before turning around and marching away again. It began to feel as if I had been press-ganged into the Civil Service as deckhand on a ship of pen-pushing fools.

Finally, by month four, I was given a project by the manager who had appointed me, David Vick. The local commercial radio licence for West Lothian in Scotland had been advertised and my task was to write a paper to be presented at a Members’ Meeting, recommending to which applicant the licence should be awarded. No problem, I thought. A decade earlier, I had regularly spent a morning in the broadcast regulator’s library, reading multiple applications for a particular licence and then summarising them during the afternoon in an article of several thousand words for the weekly ‘Broadcast’ magazine. I was thinking that a more detailed paper might take me a week to write. Then Vick told me that I had … two months. Oh, and there was only one applicant.

I was offered no guidelines, no style sheet, no system to follow, no advice. Just “write a paper – you have two months.” I executed what I considered to have been a thorough job. I researched the local media market, the radio market, the applicant’s business plan, everything I could find. This was my first project. I wanted to impress my boss. There were days when Vick asked me why I was using the office printer so much, seemingly oblivious to the demands of evidential research. After six weeks, I gave him my draft document and asked him to mark it up so that I could understand which parts he wanted to keep or discard. He invited me into his office to discuss my work. Had I done well? Er, no. He went ballistic. He screamed and shouted at me.

“This isn’t what I wanted,” Vick yelled. “This isn’t an Authority Paper. What do you think this is? Can’t you write?”

He stormed out of his office and marched down the corridor shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit!” at the top of his voice. It was left to me to presume that our meeting must have ended, without me having uttered a word.

I was shocked. And very confused. I believed that I could write … and write quite well. Vick had read my CV and knew my articles about the radio and music industries had been published in trade and consumer publications, some of which had employed me as sub-editor or editor. My job application here had even required me to submit a one-page essay entitled ‘The London Radio Scene’. During my job interview, Vick had not critiqued my supposed inability to write. Why would I have been appointed?

Later that day, Vick’s deputy marched up to my desk and requested a meeting. In their rehearsed good cop/bad cop roleplay, Vick apparently judged Neil Stock the best man to ‘offer’ to bang my report into the requisite, undefined shape and style of ‘Authority Papers’. I did not bother to argue. Stock was eminently qualified by having studied American Literature, having never worked in commercial radio and, to the best of my knowledge, having never published an article about the radio industry. Visually, he was Beaker to Vick’s Doctor Bunsen Honeydew. Stock’s frigid demeanour recalled the android Bishop in the movie ‘Aliens’ whose ‘humanity’ module might never have been activated.

Stock occupied a spacious office on the opposite side of the corridor that resembled one of those IKEA showrooms where everything looks too perfectly arranged to be real and the desk computer turns out to be fake. I sat facing him across a desk ring-fenced with multiple stationery pots filled with over-sharpened pencils of varying hardness and a row of staplers, holepunches, paperclips and elastic bands. Stock’s patronising spiel, instructing someone twice his age how to write, floated off into the ether above my head. My eyes were scanning the office carpet for evidence of vomit stains where my colleagues had alleged his predecessor had been found unconscious following an over-liquid lunch. After that incident, Stock’s Best Man had been shoehorned into a board-level job in a commercial radio group, a responsibility which had proven so successful that I had overheard Vick on the phone to the CEO trying to save his prodigy’s bacon.

One week later, Stock gave me back the document. It still had my name on the front but almost nothing within remained of my six weeks’ graft. Every single table, graph and map had been expelled. Every reference to a specific number (such as Census population data) had been rounded and referred to as ‘approximately’ or ‘about’. All evidential sources such as media and radio market data had been expunged. My sentences had been conjoined with ‘and’ or commas until each contained at least seventy words. Some paragraphs filled almost a whole A4 page. Subjective adjectives had been attached to references to individuals, tainting them with judgement as to whether they were in or out of favour with The Radio Authority. This was writing, Jim, but not as we journalists know it.

I asked Stock to remove my name from his revised document as it no longer resembled anything that I had written. He refused. I asked that his name be added to mine as joint author. He refused. We may have been sitting opposite each other at his desk, but each of us had landed there from different worlds. My quarter-century in journalism had been spent explaining facts. His few years in this civil service madhouse seemed to have been spent obscuring facts. If his university had offered a module titled ‘Using Words as A Weapon: How to Write Baffling Prose’, he would certainly have scored an ‘A’.

Naturally, Stock’s boss David Vick was happy with the result. It looked and read just like something he would have written himself. I was required to present the paper to a monthly Members’ Meeting, reading a pre-approved two-minute script from which I was forbidden to deviate. Neither was I allowed to use audio-visual aids in my presentation. Vick had instructed me not to contribute to the ensuing debate unless a specific, factual question was addressed to me directly. I saw absolutely no point to my presence at the meeting. It achieved only what the organisation’s officers had carved up beforehand. The licence was awarded to the sole applicant. My ‘work’ in The Radio Authority was merely to keep up its appearance of objectively regulating the radio industry.

Months later, an uncharacteristic silence broke out amongst my colleagues in our crowded office. We had already been told that our regulator was about to be merged into a new, bigger government organisation. What we had not learnt until then was that our new manager was to be … Neil Stock. There was stunned silence as the news sunk in.

This was the Neil Stock who, on arrival at work each day, would email his ‘team’ a ‘Pop Quiz’ question that required an emailed response within the hour. When I refused to play this childish game, he complained that I was not a team-player. But I had no interest in flaunting my encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music earned from having created radio station formats over several decades. Mike Read was not my hero.

This was the Neil Stock who refused to attend the quarterly team-building, afterwork social visits to a local pub or restaurant that our employer mandated. Management apparently thought it was insufficient that we already spent forty hours every week in each other’s company in one cramped office. During one such social evening, my colleagues expressed astonishment that I had not been made to take a UK geography test before my appointment, which had been required of them. It was as if knowing the county town of Rutland proved a perfect substitute for non-existent knowledge of the radio industry that a new employee would be regulating.

This was the Neil Stock who only popped into our office briefly if there was something specific that he wanted to address to one of us. Watercooler chat, small talk, even casual morning greetings or afternoon farewells were apparently foreign concepts. Enter his office at 4.30 and he would be enthusiastically sharpening his huge pencil collection on a desk uncluttered by a single folder or sheet of paper. Enter his office at 4.50 and he was already being whisked by train back to his IKEA showroom house and wife in Cambridgeshire.

This was the Neil Stock who chose not to inform his own underlings that he had been appointed their new manager. Neither did we learn it from our then manager, David Vick. The news reached us that fateful day as part of a general personnel update email from the new regulator Ofcom. Once again, our managers were demonstrating their non-communication skills.

Our office was not the only one rendered speechless by the news. A hush spread over the whole floor as our colleagues digested that Stock would not just be managing our team, but most of the 40-odd staff about to be transferred from The Radio Authority to Ofcom. What a meteoric rise through the ranks for someone so, er … inexperienced? In 2000, Stock had been judged the best man to replace his Best Man. By 2003, somebody somewhere considered Stock the best man to manage Britain’s commercial radio licensing system, a job that had not been advertised publicly.

We were left to presume that Vick must have decided to take retirement since it was plainly evident that his nineteenth-century style of management – writing everything longhand, never touching a computer keyboard, bellowing from his office at his two full-time administrative assistants whenever he needed to send/receive/print an email – would have proven awkwardly Luddite within the determinately twenty-first century Ofcom.

The pair’s Hawkins/Harker partnership was about to be dissolved. Meet the new boss …

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-best-man-for-job-2003-neil-stock.html]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Dave Asher, 1985]
“There’s a bomb!” someone shouted. “There’s a bomb!” 
I had just collected ‘NME’ from the newsagent that reserved it for me each week and had been lazily staring at a display of the new ‘designer’ stretch jeans in the windows of Gloria Vandebilt’s shop. All had been calm on the city’s main shopping street. Then suddenly it was chaos. People ran in all directions as if their lives depended upon it … which they did. Men, women and children screamed as they fled down side streets, their shopping bags flying behind them like parachutes. I was in amongst them, running at full pelt until I thought I was far enough away from the suspect device. How would I know? I didn’t. Did I hear an explosion? No. Was it really a bomb? I never knew.
On the walk home, I called in at the post office and joined a lengthy queue at the counter for overseas mail. Once I handed over my letter, the man behind the counter inspected it and adopted the withering look of an adult castigating a child … or a new immigrant.
“You cannot send this,” he said, visibly weighing up my ignorance. “We are at war.”
“Oh,” I said sheepishly, taking back my letter. “Okay. Thanks.”
Where I came from, you could send a letter anywhere in the world. I had spent much of my childhood doing just that, writing to radio stations as far away as China, Russia and Syria … and receiving replies. However, I was now learning that life is different during a time of war. I had written a fan letter to ‘Radio One’, an FM station in Beirut, Lebanon with English-speaking DJs who played the latest international hits, interspersed with familiar identification jingles stolen from ‘BBC Radio One’. Since radio transmissions ignore borders and war zones, I had become a committed listener in recent months. Now I had to return home with my unsent letter.
‘Home’ was temporarily a house at 21 Rehov Aharonson in Tel Aviv, where I was sleeping on the living room floor of the lower flat rented by fellow Brit Dave Asher. He was a well-known DJ in Israel from having presented the ‘Voice of Peace’ radio station’s breakfast show for several years. There were drawbacks to my accommodation. One morning I awoke to find ants nesting in my hair, while the nocturnal journeys of slugs from behind the adjacent bathroom sink gave me frequent ‘Alien’-type nightmares. But Dave had let me stay for free and I was grateful for his generosity. Weeks turned into months; how quick they pass.
Dave had a job as DJ at a city centre basement lesbian nightclub which he kept inviting me to attend. I did visit on one occasion, but was faced with the challenge of convincing two burly doormen that I wanted to enter a female-only club filled with scantily clad women because I said my male friend was working inside. Dave was also the DJ at a packed concert by American drag queen Divine in a huge former cinema, one of the most entertaining events I have attended. My crazy plan was to remain in Tel Aviv by finding a job in the record industry, for which Dave had helped me make contact with people he knew in the business. Pre-internet and pre-mobiles, this required a lengthy wait for replies to handwritten letters.
As summer was hot inside the flat, at the end of the day I would walk the short distance to the end of the street and sit on one of the public seats along the promenade. I could put my feet up on the sea wall, read the day’s ‘Jerusalem Post’ newspaper, watch the sun set over the Mediterranean and cool down in the onshore breeze. One day, a man seated near me asked if he could read my paper when I had finished with it. He spoke in Hebrew and I replied likewise.
By then, I had learnt enough of the language to hold a basic conversation. The frustration of not even understanding destinations displayed on the front of city buses had forced me to learn the Hebrew alphabet and numbers from a schoolbook. Every afternoon I developed my vocabulary by watching ‘Sesame Street’ (‘Rehov Sumsum’ in Hebrew) on television, where the first word I learnt was the ‘dustbin’ in which Grouch (Moishe Oofnik) lived.
I was suspicious of this man trying to strike up a conversation because, weeks earlier, I had been sunbathing alone on Tel Aviv beach when a man came and sat far too close to me on the sand and propositioned me for sex. He appeared to interpret my indignant refusal as merely ‘playing hard to get’ and continued to pester me, so I now avoided the beach and its potential for further unwanted attentions.
Thankfully this man on the promenade seemed different. Because our initial conversation had been in Hebrew, he found it hard to believe that I was not a recent immigrant to Israel struggling to learn my new language. After several rounds of questioning, he was eventually convinced that: I was not Jewish; I was British; I spoke English; and I was Christian. Only once these facts had been established did he have sufficient confidence to identify himself to me as a Christian Palestinian.
“Meet me here at the same time tomorrow,” he told me. “There is something I want to show you.”
Despite an incendiary device having recently exploded at the end of our street, thankfully with no casualties, I decided to risk meeting this man again the next day on the promenade. We walked to a walled compound a few hundred metres away where he spoke Arabic into the intercom, the gate opened and we walked through a garden into a house. He took me inside and knocked on what appeared to be a bedroom door. When it opened, it was immediately apparent that this was no normal small bedroom.
Bunk beds were butted up against each other on three walls of the room, leaving no space in their midst for other furniture. The small window had been covered so that the room was dark except for a single lightbulb on the ceiling. After my entrance, I was being stared at by six men, each sat on their bunk, their sweat thick in this non-air-conditioned room. My guide explained to them in Arabic why I was there, then he turned to address me.
“I wanted you to see how Palestinians have to live in Israel, the same land in which our families were born,” he told me. “Before dawn every day, we are employed outside to clean the beaches, sweep the streets and collect rubbish but, by the time the sun comes up and the crowds come out, we have to make ourselves invisible by returning to accommodation like this. As a fellow Christian, I wanted you to see how we are forced to live in our own homeland so that you can tell people what life is really like in Israel for those who are not Jews.”
A man arrived with a big bag of takeaway food which he started to dole out to each of the men in the room. I wondered to myself if I was to be included in their evening meal and how that could happen when there was no available space for a guest to sit. My guide quickly quashed that notion.
“The men will not eat their food in front of a stranger,” he explained. “We have to go now.”
It had only required a few minutes in that crowded room for the man to have made his point. He was understandably angry about his people’s situation. He told me that, having seen their conditions myself, I now had evidence to refute the disinformation that most of the world believed. We left the compound, he went his own way and I never saw him again.
After several months of messages, letters and calls from public phone boxes, I was finally offered a meeting with the head of an international record company’s Israeli subsidiary in his penthouse flat. There I explained that I had recently secured airplay on British radio for Israeli pop records through my knowledge of the UK radio industry. I believed I could do more like this to develop Israeli music’s presence overseas.
“You should go home,” he told me sternly. “Israel is not the place for you. There is a war going on. The economy is in bad shape. Things are terrible here. Go home and find yourself a job there.”
I departed Israel on the next available flight, disappointed by my failure to secure a job. I left behind an economy with an annual rate of inflation nearing 1,000% and a currency so devalued that it required a thick wad of banknotes just to buy a loaf of bread. Prices in shops had to be updated daily, written on post-it notes stuck along shelf edges. At checkouts, there were insufficient banknotes in tills to provide change, so customers were given the equivalent value in sweets and candies. Coins had become obsolete because they were worthless. I was carrying around several hundred banknotes stuffed down the front of my underpants because my wallet was now too small.
Back in Britain, within three years I had organised the release and promotion of an Israeli record that reached number 15 in the UK singles chart, accompanied by a ‘Top of the Pops’ television appearance. It became the biggest selling Israeli record in Britain since Esther and Abi Ofarim’s ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ in 1968, coincidentally my very first single purchase. Singer Ofra Haza became an international star, later recording songs for a Disney movie. Despite failing to find a job in Tel Aviv, I had managed to successfully pin music from Israel on the ‘world music’ map of the 1980’s.
It was Dave Asher who had first introduced me to Ofra Haza’s music in 1985. Two decades later, his job was presenting the breakfast show on a radio station … in Beirut!

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

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

[my pyjama top, 1988 to 2023]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you Grant Goddard?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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