Tag: radio sector

The rubber stamp men … and women : 2002 : Members Meetings, The Radio Authority

 “Did you enjoy your day off yesterday?” a member of my team asked me one morning.

“Yesterday?” I enquired, slightly confused.

“Yes,” he continued. “You weren’t in your office all day so we guessed you had taken the day off.”

Ah! Now it began to make more sense.

“Unfortunately, I was not off yesterday,” I replied. “I was in meetings all day in the boardroom upstairs.”

That was true. It had been just one of a multitude of similar days when, from my arrival at eight until evening, I had bounced from one meeting to another, and then another. Had I even eaten lunch? We were launching a new London radio station, KISS FM, where I was the only member of the management team with prior commercial radio experience. My page-a-day diary was necessarily crammed with all sorts of meetings. In some I had to make presentations, some I had to chair and some I had to minute. For many months, there never seemed time to do real ‘work’ in my job because of all these meetings.

My initiation into the world of apparently endless meetings had happened a decade earlier. As sabbatical deputy president of a student union, my life was sacrificed to committees, sub-committees, executive committees and student councils, listening to and engaging with student activists who loved nothing more than to talk and talk. I had also been nominated as the student representative on umpteen university committees, in which twenty to thirty grey academics and administrators sat around a massive wooden boardroom table for hours, leafing through the half-ream of agenda papers before them in an effort to stay awake. Much of my life for one year comprised evenings spent punching holes in paperwork and filing it in huge ring binders for posterity.

Two decades later, starting my first job within a government ‘quango’, I anticipated that I would once again be drowned in meetings and sub-committees. I soon discovered that, at The Radio Authority, nothing happened … literally. I was crammed into an office the size of a modest living room with five colleagues sat at trestle tables around the perimeter, obliging each of us to face a wall or the only window. Filling the middle of the room was an overlarge high storage unit with map drawers that nobody seemed to use. This anti-social working arrangement could have been an approximation of the organisation’s management system.

The first day at a new job, you except to be left alone to familiarise yourself with your desktop computer and your new surroundings. However, you do not expect the one hundred subsequent days to repeat like Groundhog Day. For three whole months, I was given nothing to do. There seemed to be no day-to-day workflow system, no meetings, no distribution of tasks amongst members of my department. I could have come to work every day and idly stared at a blank computer screen. Nobody ever asked me what I was doing, or not doing, so I busied myself writing an economic analysis of ownership concentration levels in local radio markets. Before starting, I had asked the finance department if they had already written such a document. They looked at me like I was crazy. I was already wondering why the required start date for this post had proven so urgent.

Then, out of the blue, development director David Vick, who had interviewed me for the job, asked me to attend The Radio Authority’s next ‘Members Meeting’. Once a month, senior managers like him met formally with Members, six men and three women handpicked from ‘the great and the good’ by somebody somewhere as representatives of the ‘public’ whose taxes were funding this regulator. Having drawn my salary for three months but contributed zero so far, I was keen to impress somebody/anybody that I was capable. I read the meeting agenda and accompanying documents, including one written by a Radio Authority colleague recommending the award of a new local radio licence. I researched thoroughly the issues for discussion.

At the meeting in the boardroom, Radio Authority managers were lined up along one side of the oval table, with Members seated along the other. I was not intimidated. I had attended dozens of meetings like this elsewhere over the years. I sat at one end of the table and kept my counsel until the recommendation to award the local radio licence was discussed. Once my colleague had finished presenting his paper, I raised my hand. The Member appointed as chairman, Richard Hooper, was sat at the far end of the table and asked me to speak. There was a look of collective astonishment on the managers’ faces. But I held the belief that we were all in a genuine meeting … together. I simply had some factual information to contribute.

I had brought along my own analysis of government statistics that demonstrated a high level of poverty in the locality for which this local radio licence was about to be awarded. When compared with similar stations, I concluded there would be insufficient advertising revenues to support a standalone licensee within this relatively small and poor locality. I suggested that it made more economic sense to award the new licence to an existing neighbouring radio station that could then expand its coverage area, rather than offer it to a new business that appeared very likely to fail. The lay Members listened and understood my arguments, rejected my colleague’s recommendation to award the licence to a standalone applicant and accepted my alternative solution to reward a competing neighbouring applicant.

After the meeting ended, I felt pleased that I had made a valuable contribution on the first occasion I had been involved in any kind of discussion or meeting within the organisation. I was not feeling smug but I did enjoy the sense that my skills were finally being valued and had influenced decision-making. This sense of positivity lasted less than a minute. Barrelling down the corridor behind me was the manager who had invited me.

“What the hell did you think you were you doing in that meeting?” David Vick demanded.

“I was contributing to the decision-making with a factual analysis that was not in my colleague’s report,” I replied. This appeared to make him even angrier. I will omit the swear words:

“You were not asked to speak. You were not expected to speak. Nobody asked your opinion. Nobody wanted your opinion. That licence was nothing to do with you. Had I asked you to be involved in it? No. So what the hell did you think you were doing?”

Vick was very angry and not afraid to demonstrate it. I had thought I was proving my worth at work, while he seemed to be thinking the opposite.

“What I am going to tell Ralph?” he was shouting at me. “How on earth can I explain to Ralph what just happened?”

I knew immediately that he was referring to Ralph Bernard, chief executive of Britain’s largest commercial radio owner, GWR Group plc, that operated dozens of local licences across the country … awarded by The Radio Authority’s Members Meetings. The paper written by my colleague had recommended awarding this new licence to a local start-up in which GWR had agreed to take a minority shareholding. Over the years, I had witnessed this familiar story play out remarkably often: once a new local radio licensee failed financially, it would receive a buyout offer from its minority shareholder, usually a large radio group such as GWR. A decade earlier, I had watched minority shareholder EMAP plc take over KISS FM this way. The regulator did not like to be seen to be handing new local licences to the same handful of commercial radio groups … but that was the end result anyway.

“I have to phone Ralph now. This is going to be a very difficult conversation.” Vick was still shouting at me. “I hope you realise what you have done.”

I returned to my office, shaken but not upset. I had been invited to that meeting. I was asked to attend. What would have been the point if I had not contributed? When was a meeting not a meeting, according to my understanding of the definition of the word? Was I expected to sit there dumbly, merely observing bad decisions being made due to a lack of information or analysis? Apparently, the answer was yes.

Sat at my desk, I recalled my very first day in the job when David Vick had bizarrely instructed me: “Don’t talk to the people in your office about radio.”

I thought I must have misheard him and asked him to repeat it. No, what I had understood him to have said was totally correct. Vick went on:

“You know far more about radio than the other people in your office, so don’t talk to them about it.”

At the time, I was nonplussed. We were called The Radio Authority and we were responsible for regulating the commercial radio industry. How could I not talk about radio? Three months later, I was beginning to comprehend that I was employed in an organisation where being an ‘authority’ on the topic of radio was apparently not considered a virtue.

Later that fateful day, Vick called me to his office. He was calmer now but I was wary of saying anything that might stoke his rage again. He told me there were new rules that I would have to follow:

“When you are invited to attend another Members Meeting, I want you to submit a script to me in advance of what you are going to say. It must be precisely two minutes long. In the meeting, you must say exactly the words on that script that I approve and absolutely nothing else. You must not talk about any other subject in the meeting and the only reason to speak at all will be if somebody directly asks you a question. Have you got that?”

“Yes, I understand,” I said sheepishly. It was hard not to conclude that the angry man in front of me appeared to be utterly bonkers. I remained grateful that he had offered me a much-needed job, but I now understood that I was employed in a madhouse where the definitions of ‘meeting’ and ‘decision making’ appeared to be completely alien to my own experiences working in commercial businesses. I just hoped I could survive this nightmare.

Only one other person employed at The Radio Authority while I was there had prior experience in the commercial radio industry. It was alleged by my colleagues that he had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown after starting there and had been off work for months. Why was I not at all surprised?

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-rubber-stamp-men-and-women-2002.html]

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To win, somebody’s got to lose : 1989 : Martin Strivens, Centurion Press

 It has always been difficult for me to understand how white South Africans who built successful careers under the country’s apartheid regime can live with the guilt and shame. Does their sense of superiority extend to EVERYONE else? Do they harbour an intrinsic cruelty to others? Would they have been merciless playground bullies if they had attended school with ‘normal’ kids? Had the word ‘meritocracy’ been purged from South African dictionaries?

Our Earth has finite resources. For each ‘winner’ within society, there has to be an equivalent ‘loser’. The much-vaunted term ‘wealth creator’ is an oxymoron. No billionaire is lauded by The Financial Times for their success as a ‘poverty creator,’ despite the accelerating transfer of resources from the poor to the rich having widened inequalities. In a South Africa where apartheid legislation rigged the education, social and legal system in their favour, each white colonial who succeeded must have purposefully condemned five black Africans to failure and lifelong poverty.

Nothing could have been further from my own experience growing up in Britain. When ten-year old Jacqueline Dixon came to school one day with a red dot painted on her forehead, our teacher Mr Hales invited her to the front of the classroom to explain to the rest of us what it signified. My school explored, explained and respected the cultural differences of the mixed bunch of kids it taught. I never witnessed anyone being abused or bullied there. I imagined that the grown-up outside world would be like that too. I was wrong.

When I joined London black music pirate radio station KISS FM in 1988, its only non-music policy was rejection of South Africa’s apartheid regime. I wholeheartedly supported this stance, having boycotted South African produce, transferred my account from Barclays Bank and protested at demonstrations since the 1970’s. The majority of KISS FM’s personnel were black, not by design but because the station had attracted the most knowledgeable personnel from London’s vibrant black music scene.

To obtain a legal broadcasting licence, it was necessary to name a person qualified in finance on the application form submitted to government. I was surprised to discover that the person selected for this role at KISS FM had attended school and university in South Africa between 1965 and 1974, then been employed for four years by a Johannesburg accountancy firm. I was baffled as to how this choice squared with the station’s anti-apartheid policy.

Apparently, a family friend of KISS FM’s co-founder was David Evans (now Lord Evans) who had launched a print business named Centurion Press in 1971. It was Evans who had recommended his company’s finance director Martin Strivens, now relocated to London. If the licence application were to prove successful, Evans, Strivens and Centurion Press would become KISS FM shareholders.

From Strivens’ initial visit to the KISS FM office in his smart suit, it was immediately apparent that he was not like the rest of us. His white South African accent, his shiny briefcase and his cold attitude did not seem to fit at all with the station’s ‘Radical Radio’ slogan. Visits from a succession of similarly suited men soon followed.

After KISS FM’s first licence application managed by radio DJ Dave Cash had failed, I volunteered to take on the task of co-ordinating and writing the second application for a London licence. The important financial aspects of our application proved particularly difficult because Strivens possessed no knowledge of radio broadcasting, no knowledge of black music and no understanding of London pirate radio’s two-decade history of creating a huge underground music scene. I found that I had to explain every little requirement of a radio station … and then justify it at length, often in written form.

I never sensed that Strivens respected me or my skills. I had already written successful funding applications to government. I had managed staff. My radio career had started in London pirate radio almost two decades earlier. I was the only member of KISS FM’s management to have worked in commercial radio. I was the only team member to have implemented a successful radio station turnaround strategy. I knew intimately all the elements required to build and run a commercial radio station, yet I found that each of these elements had to be argued interminably with Strivens. He was already insisting that essential components be cut from the budget, despite him not comprehending their purpose.

Additionally, my education in economics, accountancy and law meant that I understood and could challenge the budgets and spreadsheets that Strivens shared with me. Maybe he had been accustomed to presenting swathes of computer printouts to non-financial people who simply stared at the jumble of numbers and nodded their heads. I was different. I had worked with accounts for my family since I was in junior school. I had turned around a university bookshop and food store from loss to profit within a year. Yes, I was involved in KISS FM because I was a huge fan of black music and radio … but I had practised skills in running a business too.

During 1989, out of the blue, I was told to attend a meeting late one afternoon with Strivens in Centurion Press’s office at 52 George Street. This seemed highly unusual as he normally visited the KISS FM office in Finsbury Park to discuss the station’s budget. Entering a deep lobby from the street, Centurion’s offices were located to the left on the ground floor behind two sets of plate glass sliding doors. My discussions with Strivens comprised the usual dialogue of him demanding budget cuts and me having to explain how an item was essential for a functioning commercial radio station. Our talk dragged on past five o’clock and I saw Centurion’s staff leave.

After we finished, Strivens informed me that the KISS FM office had called his receptionist and asked me to call back. I thought this was unusual because, as far as I knew, nobody was aware I was at Centurion’s office. Using one of the desk phones, I called the office and enquired why I had been contacted. While I was in conversation, Strivens interrupted and said he had to rush off.

“How will I get out of your office?” I asked him.

“Go through the first set of sliding doors, then press the button to open the second set. It is all automatic.”

I thanked him. He rushed out and left me alone in the office suite. The KISS FM office could not understand why I had been left a message to call them. Nobody there had needed to contact me that afternoon. I hung up, somewhat baffled. Strivens had left. I packed up and left too. I exited through the first set of sliding doors which closed behind me. I pressed the next button in the ‘airlock’, as instructed. Nothing happened. I pressed again. Still nothing. I turned behind me. There was a button for the doors I had passed through. Nothing happened when I pressed it. I was now trapped in a small space between two sets of thick glass sliding doors.

Despite suffering mild claustrophobia, I was reassured by the fact that the two sets of sliding doors were plate glass, so I could clearly see the office behind me and I could view the rear of the building’s lobby in front of me. There was a tiny gap between each pair of doors, not enough to prise them open, but sufficient to supply air for me not to suffocate. The floor space was about four feet by four feet, too small to lay down in but I could sit on the floor and wait for someone in the lobby to see that I was trapped. Except that nobody ever appeared. It became dark.

It was seven o’clock the next morning when a cleaner arrived, shocked to see me locked inside the small space. Using her keys, she opened the outside door. I thanked her. I had been lucky the meeting had been on a weekday. Tired and cold, I caught the Underground home, had a wash, ate breakfast and headed back into London for a normal day’s work at the KISS FM office. I told nobody what had happened. Strivens never said a word to me about the incident, though I presumed the cleaner must have shared her shock with staff at Centurion. Our budget meetings continued for many months, though I was never asked to visit Centurion’s office again.

My relationship with Strivens failed to improve. The budgets were amended to pay the station’s senior managers (except me) considerably higher salaries, while my budgets for producing the station’s programmes were cut. At the end of 1989, I was thrilled that my licence application proved successful, beating dozens of competing groups with access to many more resources than us. But, for me personally, it was the beginning of the end. I was denied the bonus I had been promised. I was denied the shareholding in the station for which I had already negotiated a bank loan. I was even denied any initial pay, despite having been ordered to give up my other work commitments. Once my KISS FM salary started, it was half the amount paid to Strivens, despite the enormity of my role as programme director, managing the majority of station staff and the largest departmental budget.

Only months after its launch in 1990, KISS FM hit financial problems as a result of its sales and sponsorship directors having failed to come even close to meeting their targets. Everyone was ordered to attend a staff meeting at which redundancies and pay cuts were announced, mostly within my department. At the same time, extra staff were to be recruited within advertising sales. We learned that Strivens would forego a promised pay rise, him having already sacrificed his Porsche company car at Centurion Press for a Jeep at KISS FM. There was anger in the room at the notion that this was a ‘sacrifice’ when DJs had just been told their payments per show would be halved.

Within six months of its launch, KISS FM’s audience exceeded one million listeners per week, the objective I had written into the station’s budget as achievable by the end of Year One. Despite having been the only manager to surpass my target, I was summarily sacked. No bonus. No pay increase. No Jeep. No gratitude. The station’s co-founder purloined my job title. It was evident that this had been his plan all along. If I had failed to achieve my target, I would have been sacked. If I succeeded, he was ready to take the credit. Within weeks, he went on to libel me in The Independent national newspaper, blaming me for the station’s problems. I was on the dole.

Despite (because of?) the drastic cuts that had been implemented, KISS FM continued to under-perform financially. By 1992, media conglomerate EMAP plc had bought out sufficient shareholders, including Strivens, Evans and Centurion Press, to take control of the company. EMAP had previously held a minority stake in the station, the outcome of an introduction I had made back in 1989. Strivens resigned as finance director of KISS FM in 1993 and returned to Centurion Press, promoted to managing director.

Strivens’ LinkedIn profile states that he “played a major role in the successful launch of London radio station Kiss 100 FM.” Rather, he epitomised the dawning of the ‘roots versus suits’ antagonism that bedevilled the station in its transition from illegal pirate station to corporate youth brand. Perhaps unknowingly, Strivens heralded the end of KISS FM’s pirate radio ethos. He and fellow shareholders’ undeclared objective had always been to transform our little black music fan club into a pop music station to rival market leader Capital Radio. Loadsamoney!

Farewell ‘Radical Radio’.

[The story of the pirate station’s transformation is detailed in my KISS FM book]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/02/to-win-somebodys-got-to-lose-1989.html]

The 'Fahrenheit 451' of commercial radio history : 2003 : The Radio Authority

“Without a knowledge of your history, you cannot determine your destiny” Misty In Roots, ‘Live At The Counter-Eurovision 1979’

 I love history. I hated History. My Empire-made History GCE text book chronicled world history from the era Neanderthal Man emerged from Milton Keynes up to Britain’s singlehanded success winning the Second World War. Neither the book nor my teacher brought history to life, debated the outcomes or analysed lessons learned. Weekly homework was an essay merely paraphrasing one chapter of the book. Termly tests required regurgitation of these essays, a task I failed as I could not memorise names, dates and events by rote. After two tortuous years, we had just learned of Hannibal opening an elephant sanctuary and Britain’s offer to the Romans of work visas to build its roads and public baths … when I was finally allowed to drop History.

Before grammar school beat History out of me, I had developed my own random interest in the subject. We had few books in our home and my parents had a remarkably hands-off attitude to childrearing, so the local library substituted as my mentor as soon as I could walk. I would stagger along the 500-metre route home weighed down with dozens of fiction and non-fiction books, my borrowing limit enhanced hugely by additional tickets I had registered in the names of my younger brother, parents and grandparents. Junior school set no homework, my schoolfriends all lived a mile away and my parents left me home alone most weekends to build their dream house, so I read voraciously. Combining the librarians’ helpful suggestions with my own casual curiosity, I devoured The Narnia Chronicles by age eight, lost interest in finishing ‘The Lord of The Rings’ at age nine and was given nightmares by John Fowles’ novels at age ten.

Radio broadcasting had emerged as an early interest, stimulated by my parents’ love of ‘Big L’ on their car radio, so I collected any information I found about the industry, clipping news stories from newspapers and Pritt sticking them into scrapbooks. Much later, I combed second-hand book sellers and charity shops for books to add to my growing personal collection. As one of Amazon’s earliest international customers, I had to fax a scan of my credit card to order arcane radio books unseen in Britain. I kept two lists, one of radio books I owned and the other of book titles I wanted, updated by scanning British Books in Print catalogues in libraries. I felt there was much I could learn about radio from its history.

It was not until the 1980’s that I discovered the library of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) government quango, a little-known haven in its Brompton Road office. Its diligent librarian clipped every story about broadcasting from national and local newspapers and filed them by topic in folders. I spent weeks there, probably months in total, reading commercial radio licence applications and researching the history of commercial radio from its launch in 1973. Cuttings in the library’s ‘pirate radio’ folders proved an essential source for my narrative about the two-decade struggle by London pirate stations for legal status published later in my KISS FM book. Then, in 1991, the government split the IBA into separate regulators for television and radio. The library that had proven so invaluable suddenly vanished.

Years passed until I was reminded of the usefulness of this library when I was researching a report for the BBC Trust. Where was it now? I learnt that it had been stuffed into 1,100 boxes containing a million documents and been donated to Bournemouth University. However, 800 of those boxes remained archived in an off-site storage facility that could not be visited. The University sent me a 10MB file of its ‘IBA Archive’ that detailed its contents, but it had been compiled in Microsoft Access, not a software within reach of a cheapskate non-academic. Dead end. My cherished memories of reading thousands of documents in the air-conditioned comfort of the peaceful IBA library would never be repeated.

The government replaced the IBA with The Radio Authority for the regulation of commercial radio. In 2002, on my first day of employment there in a junior role, I was shown around all the offices of its floor within a Holborn tower block. At the end of the tour, I asked: “Where is the library?”

“Library?”, my guide laughed. “We don’t have a library.” I was nonplussed.

“But you receive hundreds of applications for radio licences,” I replied. “What happens to them?” A decade earlier, I had sat in the IBA library for days reading dozens of radio licence applications. Then I had written the application for London pirate station KISS FM that had won its licence. I knew from experience that applications could be as thick as phone directories and included detailed tables, spreadsheets, budgets, programme plans and market research. They were significant historical documents.

“Once we have read the applications and awarded a particular licence, we send them to an archive somewhere,” replied my guide. “If you want a particular document, you CAN request it. But it can take weeks or months to be delivered from the archive.” I was still reeling. I was thinking to myself: surely the basic day-to-day task of a media regulator is to ensure that a radio station acts upon the promises that it has made in its licence application. But if that document is not at hand, apparently not.

By the end of my first day of work, this conversation was just the first indication of baffling work practises I encountered at The Radio Authority. One year later, the organisation was preparing to be closed and merged into a new regulator named Ofcom. Each of the forty-odd staff was required to join an assigned group that was preparing the merger. I was told to attend meetings of an Ofcom sub-sub-subcommittee that I found had no responsibility for radio. My contribution was nil.

Then, unexpectedly, one of the managers approached me and assigned me a second task. The entire correspondence between commercial radio stations and the IBA, plus its successor The Radio Authority, was kept in a series of packed filing cabinets in the finance office, ordered by sequential chronological licence number. These were effectively the regulator’s master files. Nothing at the organisation was stored digitally. Everything was still on paper. 

What was my new task? I was ordered to look at the paperwork of every licenced radio station and destroy all documents that were not a legal or contractual requirement. Day-to-day correspondence in both directions would be discarded. I was told that Ofcom had requested the records of commercial radio licences be reduced from several overflowing filing cabinets to a single drawer. Everything not legally required had to be destroyed. (Afterwards I was uncertain if this had been a genuine Ofcom order or just a useful excuse to destroy evidence.)

I was conflicted. To this day, I fail to comprehend whether I was given this task because I had a better knowledge of radio history than my colleagues (only one other of whom had worked in a commercial radio station). Or was it an act of deliberate cruelty by a manager who had already screamed at me for having had the temerity to write and circulate documents that analysed the radio industry WITHOUT HAVING BEEN ORDERED TO? Was I being valued … or bullied?

I set to work over the following weeks, glancing at each report and item of correspondence filed during the thirty-year history of Britain’s 267 commercial radio stations. The only exception was KISS FM’s folder which I had been forbidden to handle. I had to discard more than ninety percent of this fascinating history. Other staff were similarly throwing out their own paper records, filling huge fabric sacks that lined both sides of the main corridor. At times the volume of rubbish was so great that it became difficult to navigate until the weekly pick-up. The scene resembled a movie thriller when the bad guys have been tipped about an imminent police raid and then rush hell for leather to destroy all their incriminating evidence. During those few months, we produced dozens of rubbish bags that were to be shredded and burnt.

I was sorely tempted to try and save some of these historical documents but, having signed some kind of Official Secrets Act on my first day of work, I realised I could be prosecuted if any of these discarded documents ever appeared in public. For consolation, I salvaged the contents of the stationery room which bizarrely had also been binned, hid it all under my desk and took home night-by-night sufficient paper, pens, notepads and folders to supply my household for the next decade. Many of The Radio Authority’s senior staff had chosen to retire rather than transfer to the new regulator, so we can only guess how many skeletons in their office closets were burned in the organisation’s bonfire of the vanities.

After decades having researched, read and created a personal library focused on the history of radio broadcasting, it remains difficult to reconcile this crazed episode in my career when I had to incinerate a significant part of that history. I love history. I hated being ordered to destroy so much irreplaceable history at The Radio Authority. Having worked in Germany and Cambodia, I know what horrors sometimes follow such book burnings. 

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-fahrenheit-451-of-commercial-radio.html]

Whoah, I'm going to Guyana : 1986 : Mary Strong, Radio Thamesmead

 

People don’t just disappear, do they? I don’t mean a clothes-on-beach John Stonehouse sort of disappearance. Nor a dead-nanny-on-floor Lord Lucan type of crime. Those were elaborate, doing-a-runner schemes. As was my father disappearing for good with the teenage bride of a neighbour. That had simply been middle-aged madness, but I digress. No, I mean a person who achieves a vanish-into-thin-air disappearance, leaves no trace whatsoever and is never heard from again. Sometimes it does happen.

There were only a few of us who lived as far away from our school as a thirty-minute train journey. We would gather on the train platform in our bottle-green blazers, kids surrounded by bowler-hatted grey men with briefcases who had been passing their entire grey lives riding the 8:10 train to grey jobs in The City. Being children, we always boarded the eighth carriage, the last that fitted onto our station’s platform, and walked through the long connecting corridor to the empty twelfth carriage which served as our pre-school playground. Spending an hour each day travelling back and forwards on trains meant we got to know each other well.

Then, one day, one of us was not on the platform. Maybe a doctor’s appointment? But the next day it was the same. If a family holiday had been imminent, surely he would have told us? A week passed. No sign of our friend. Another in our group phoned his home and learned that he had been killed in a car accident. It was a huge shock. Aged twelve, we always imagined we would live forever. Until then, the most tragic incident witnessed at school had been Marina Hirons’ screams on breaking her arm in a playground fall during netball. The school failed to acknowledge our friend’s death. His name was hurriedly deleted from the morning class register. No announcement was made at morning assembly. Counselling? What was that? We were expected to demonstrate stiff upper lips. But I never forget our young schoolfriend and the way he suddenly disappeared from our lives.

After that loss, I witnessed further disappearances. Did I mention my father walking out the following year, taking with him everything he had ever bought for his family? Or my girlfriend fifteen years later who, after admitting to sex with a teenage work colleague, then disappeared while I was away with half the contents of the flat we had jointly furnished. (Maybe a pattern here?) Or the female tenant who disappeared in 1986 from my ten-person Deptford Housing Co-operative house. After several months’ absence, I requested the key to her top-floor bedroom which I coveted as less noisy than mine on the first floor. I opened her door with trepidation and the scene uncannily resembled a TV detective entering the bedroom of a missing person. All her possessions had been left in situ, except that she had gone. It took me a week to clear it all out in black bin bags before I could move in. Sorting through her personal stuff, I began to feel I knew her life, even though she might possibly be dead.

The most memorable disappearance happened that same year in my workplace. Mary Strong was an affable middle-aged woman employed as full-time secretary at Radio Thamesmead community station. She lived locally, was very outgoing and chatty with everyone who worked in or visited our office. It seemed as if she had worked at the station forever because she knew everyone who had passed through its doors. We saw her as a reliable, responsible fixture in the building, someone who was adept at solving problems and making things happen. Then, one day, she did not come to work. She would always phone if there was a problem. Now her home phone remained unanswered. Nothing was heard from her. A week passed. Someone at the station visited her Thamesmead flat. There was no answer and no sign of her.

Mary’s boss at Radio Thamesmead was the station’s formidable volunteer chairwoman, Lesley Pullar, whom I respected immensely. She took me aside at work and confided how extremely worried she had become about the sudden disappearance of her previously reliable, right-hand woman. She explained that Mary had long been entrusted with administration of the station’s finances and had held the organisation’s cheque book to pay its bills. Then Lesley suddenly and uncharacteristically became sombre and tears started to well up in her eyes.

“Last week,” she admitted, “Mary asked me unusually to sign a blank cheque to pay a bill because she knew I was going to be away … and I have to admit that I did what she asked.”

The gravity of her words hung in the air. I looked at her in shock. Surely the disappearance of such a reliable mainstay of our tiny radio station could not be connected to this blank cheque. We had to consider all possibilities. Lesley regularly came to the radio station but, as I worked there full-time, she requested my input to understand what might have happened. We attempted to figure out what events might have led up to the day of Mary’s disappearance. I consulted my diary and subtly asked my team if they had observed anything untoward in recent weeks.

At that time, only four local radio stations had been licensed in London, of which Radio Thamesmead was the smallest and the only one to broadcast solely on a local cable system, rather than on the FM or AM wavebands. Despite the station’s audience probably never having exceeded a hundred listeners, in the minds of people seeking publicity we were worth a visit. It was a relatively simple task for Mary Strong to arrange their on-air interview. As a result, whilst I was there, politicians such as former British prime minister Edward Heath were happy to visit Radio Thamesmead for an interview, as were musicians such as legendary reggae singer Alton Ellis who lived locally.

One such visitor was musician Rudolph Grant, younger brother of superstar Eddy Grant who was probably the most successful black singer/songwriter/producer in Britain during that time. Rudolph had recorded a popular reggae song ‘Move Up Starsky’ in 1977 under the name The Mexicano (which I had bought as a single), despite him having been born in Guyana and having no apparent connection with Mexico. By the early 1980’s, he was recording under the name Rudy Grant, had secured a contract with renowned producer Mickie Most’s RAK Records but, having failed to find commercial success, was no longer with the label. Rudy had visited Radio Thamesmead recently to promote his music and had been a big hit with Mary Strong, who then talked about him regularly to station staff. It was apparent to those of us working in the office that the two had struck up a friendship that had extended beyond his promotional visit.

Mary had a desk in the Radio Thamesmead office, where Lesley told me the station’s cheque book was kept locked in its top drawer. Problem was that only Mary had the key. We searched for a duplicate in the office but found none. I asked Lesley if I should break open the desk. She reluctantly agreed. I took a letter opener to the top drawer and broke the lock. Inside we found the station’s cheque book. Lesley was too terrified to open it. I picked it up. Inside there was no blank cheque. It had been torn out. With Mary’s usual efficiency, every cheque stub had been inscribed with the date, the payee and its amount … except for the final cheque stub which had been left blank. Our worst suspicions had now been confirmed.

Lesley contacted the bank and was told that the entire balance of the account had been withdrawn with that one cheque she had signed. This would be as much a disaster for Lesley as for the radio station. She contacted the police. They explained that there was little they could do because Lesley had signed the blank cheque and given it to Mary, but they would investigate. I felt immense sympathy for Lesley. She had trusted a long-time salaried employee and this is how her confidence had been repaid. Now she had the difficult task of explaining to the station’s management committee that its funds had suddenly disappeared, along with its most trusted member of staff.

Eventually Lesley heard back from the police that it was believed Mary Strong had taken a flight to the Caribbean immediately after her disappearance from Radio Thamesmead. There was nothing we could do. I do not recall reading anything about Mary’s disappearance in the press. Understandably, the incident was too embarrassing for the radio station, and for Lesley Pullar, to court public attention. By the end of 1986, when I moved on from working at Radio Thamesmead, Mary had not reappeared.

Now, whenever I recall colleagues I knew at Radio Thamesmead, I imagine Mary Strong could have been lounging on a deserted sandy beach drinking iced cocktails in the shade of palm trees by the sunny Caribbean Sea … leaving the rest of the station’s team volunteering for free or working for peanuts in two cramped, terraced houses on one of the most deprived council estates in London. As Hughie Green would say: Opportunity Knocks!

According to Wikipedia, Rudy Grant’s “single [record] ‘Mash in Guyana’ proved a major success in his country of birth” and “he wrote the song on a visit to Guyana in 1986,” only his second return trip since his family had emigrated to Britain in 1960.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/02/whoah-im-going-to-guyana-1986-mary.html]

One door opens, another is closed by someone posh : 2009 : John Myers, Digital Britain

 A posh voice opens doors. Not literally, unless you are royalty, but figuratively. Opportunities seem to fall out of the sky for those who speak in a recognised way that conveys their breeding and their assumed elevated status in British society. I have observed this as someone who has never considered myself posh, as someone who has never been perceived as posh, but as someone who was thrust unprepared into a world of posh people from the age of eleven. Until my first day at grammar school, I had mistakenly believed that ‘people were people’ (to quote Lou Rawls) and that ‘meritocracy’ was a fact rather than a fancy theory. My mum had believed it too, having just bought me a red ‘Harvard’ sweatshirt from Farnborough outdoor market for having passed the eleven-plus exam. I wore it to bed (in the style of Susan Saint James) for the next thirty years until it literally wore out .. but Harvard remained a fantasy.

My claim to have never had a posh, or posh-ish, voice could be challenged by someone who knew me at age four. I was shocked when I revisited a recording of my recital by heart at that age of ‘Winnie The Pooh’, made on a Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder my father had bought second-hand from the pages of ‘Exchange & Mart’ magazine which he would pore over every week. I sounded frighteningly like a distant relative of the Queen and nothing at all like my parents. Maybe I was trying to emulate fellow toddlers at Gay Trees nursery school on Grand Avenue where owner Mrs Potten had insisted I play a reluctant shepherd in the annual Nativity play. In summer, she would lead us all onto the adjacent Recreation Ground to sit on the grass and watch the uncensored violence of her one-woman Punch & Judy show.

During the following seven years, I attended a state school on a council estate where my posh-ish voice must have been modified by a desire to integrate with my new set of peers whose ‘overspill’ families had been relocated there from South London suburbs bombed during the War. From then onwards, the only posh voice evident in our household was my mother habitually answering our phone with “Camberley double one three one”, inexplicably speaking as if she were Mrs Bouquet. Aside from this mannerism, I cannot remember meeting anyone who had a posh voice. It was not until I was aged seventeen that I visited the Ascot home of posh schoolfriend Kate Graves and asked why there was a bell button in every room, only to be told that it was used to call a servant from the scullery. Okay, I thought to myself, I must have passed into a parallel universe.

My first indication that posh people and radio were a match made in heaven arrived when I was sharing a landing with a Durham University final year music student who had heard me regularly rabbit away about my passion for radio. One day he startled me with the news that he had accepted his first job as a producer on BBC radio. I was gobsmacked. Why? Because he had never once shown an interest in radio or demonstrated any understanding of how radio programmes are produced. I was pleased for him … but I was baffled. He had not been hired as a trainee. He had been hired to produce radio programmes without apparently having what might be considered the relevant skills to do the job. Months later, I looked in ‘Radio Times’ and, sure enough, his name was listed as producer of major daytime programmes on BBC Radio Three.

Perhaps this event, which seemed insignificant at the time, had been sent to me as a sign. Perhaps the gods were telling me that I should heed their advice, that I must stop believing in ‘meritocracy’ and that I should find myself a career ambition other than radio. If that was the case, I stupidly ignored their heavenly intervention. As a result, I expended a huge amount of effort during the next three decades, making dozens of applications for BBC radio job vacancies, being interviewed for many of them, but always being rejected. On occasion, I knew the person whom the BBC appointed and I knew the brevity of their CV … but they did possess a posh voice.

Fast forward to 2009. I was crossing London’s Shaftesbury Avenue in the company of John Myers, for whom I was writing a report for the British government’s Digital Britain initiative. Having finished a work meeting together in a nearby café, I was about to catch an Underground train home, whilst John was heading to his chauffeur-driven car. As we stood on the kerb, waiting for the traffic lights to change, John said something casually to me that started with the words: “Posh boys like you …”.

I immediately laughed out loud. Without thinking, my reflex action was to declare to John: “I’m not posh”. The words fell out of my mouth immediately without considering any potential consequences.

“Really?” said John.

“Yes,” I said. “I was born in a council house and went to school on a council estate. I am definitely not posh.”

“Oh,” responded John … and then we moved on to discussing other topics.

On my way home, I reflected on why John might have thought I was posh. He had a broad Lancashire accent and could never himself have been described as posh. He had worked his way up the radio industry from a start as programme assistant in BBC local radio in 1980, ending as chief executive of Guardian Media Group Radio in 2008. I could only guess that most of the people John was meeting at his present level of work were undeniably posh. He had been commissioned by the government, its ministers and its civil servants to produce a significant report on the regulation of the commercial radio industry in the digital age. Almost every one of his contacts for this work must have been posh. Perhaps, to him, I appeared to be just another of these posh ‘boys’.

Whatever the reason for his off-the-cuff comment, I sensed during the weeks and months that followed, that John’s attitude to me altered perceptibly. He continued to hold daily conversations with me by phone, email or in-person, as was necessary for me to ghost-write his report. In parallel, he had regular conversations and meetings with senior people in the radio industry, government and the Civil Service. But I was never invited to meet any of these people, even though it would have proven a lot more productive for me to have taken notes at these meetings rather than having to wait for John to relay me their content and outcomes. John convened and met regularly with a ‘committee’ of seven senior people and with a separate ‘consultation group’, both of which are listed at the end of the written report. I was credited merely with ‘research and support’, despite having transformed John’s handful of pages into a coherent 104-page document.

As a result of the report, John was invited by the radio industry to give the keynote speech at the 2009 Radio Festival event. As with the report, John sent me his drafted notes in advance, which I converted into a speech and an accompanying presentation. He did not invite me to attend the event. One morning, I woke to hear the bedside radio on BBC Radio Four broadcasting a live interview with John concerning the report. Once the written work had been completed, John did not keep me informed of the publicity it was receiving or its impact on government policy.

I was disappointed. John had needed my skills to research and write what came to be known as ‘The Myers Report’. However, after our ‘posh’ conversation, he had been careful to keep me away from the radio industry people who might prove useful contacts for me to find a job in radio, but who might see that it was really me writing the report rather than John himself. I understood how difficult it must be for a significant document bearing your name to be ghosted by someone else who had never been chief executive of a radio business, as he had, and by someone who was not even posh like his peers. 

I consider John an example of how ‘posh’ not only commands respect amongst similarly posh people, but equally from people who are not at all posh. Posh equals clever. Posh equals superior. Posh equals special. Posh equals the ability to make people of every class believe you deserve to be treated as someone who can rule, can manage, can order, can tell the rest of us what we do. Whatever comes out of a posh person’s mouth is believed and, even if evidently untruthful, is retained as ‘gospel’. Posh people maintain their superiority only because the rest of us let them, encourage them and look up to them in the master/servant, upstairs/downstairs deference we have implicitly imbibed since childhood. Posh is superpower.

I had worked with John only as a result of sending him an e-mail attached to an analysis paper for MA studies that I had written earlier about the same regulatory aspect of radio for which his report had been commissioned. He had offered me a £10,000 fee to provide research support. Very quickly, my responsibilities went much further and led to five months full-time work on this report, during which time I had to reject offers of other freelance work. I shared my concerns with John that my work with him had deprived me of income and he promised that, although I was underpaid for this commission, he believed it would lead to further reports on which the two of us could continue to work together. He recognised that we had complementary skills and we worked well together.

The first negative signal arrived when I invoiced John for my fee once the report had been published by the government. I was registered with HMRC for VAT (sales tax) and was legally required to add an additional 17.5% to my invoice. John responded that he was not registered for VAT and therefore could not reclaim any VAT he might pay to me. As a result, he did not want to pay the VAT on my invoice. This response confused me. I had no knowledge of the amount he had been paid by the government to write the report that I had just ghosted for him. I was certain it must be at least ten times the fee he was paying me. He was disputing a payment of £1,750 that was required by tax law, when he had probably earnt one hundred times that sum for the same work. I persisted but he refused steadfastly to pay the VAT of my invoice. I was not at all happy.

In 2010, I read in the news that John had been commissioned by the BBC to write a report about its radio services. This was exactly the kind of further work that John had promised me and which I was hoping to be considerably more lucrative for my contributions. I met him at a café near Broadcasting House to discuss this next project. Initially, he wanted to know about the online blog I had been publishing since 2008.

“How much are you paid for your blog?” John asked me, betraying his lack of understanding of online social media platforms.

I had to explain that a blog pays nothing but its author hopes that their online presence would lead to connections, work and income in the long run. It was a marketing exercise, but intrinsically unprofitable. He still seemed enthusiastic.

“How did you get your book published about DAB?” John asked.

My anthology of blog pieces about DAB radio had just been self-published as a book, so I offered him a free copy and explained the basics of creating a book for sale online and in bookshops. He seemed intrigued by the potential. Finally, our discussion moved on to the BBC report which John had been commissioned to write. My expectations were high. I was excited by the prospect of much needed work.

“You will not be involved in this report,” John said suddenly. “But I hope there will be something we can work on together in future.”

I was in shock. So much shock that I cannot recall the remainder of the meeting. I left feeling disappointed, deflated but mostly … betrayed. I had had to reject work the previous year because of the intensity of work on our last report. I had been paid a pittance. I had been promised work that now had not materialised. Because of the minor contribution with which I had been credited in the last report, I had received no unsolicited approaches to write similar reports. My work had been unacknowledged, unrewarded and now I felt I had been side-lined altogether.

I never received further offers of work from John Myers. But he started publishing his own blog about radio, much like mine. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery … but it does not pay the bills. Eventually I noticed that, in his blog, John was citing analyses of radio data that I had done and published in my blog, but he was neither crediting me nor linking to the source. As a result, I stopped publishing further blog entries after August 2011. It seemed pointless offering John further examples of my skills in analysis for him to claim the credit and make money.

In 2011, John Myers was appointed chief executive of The Radio Academy. In 2012 he was appointed visiting professor at the University of Cumbria. He published his own book about radio the same year but did not send me a copy.

At a Tribunal in 2015, John Myers was found guilty of tax evasion on earnings of £6.3m in 2005/6, for which he had paid only £130,000 in tax.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/02/one-door-opens-another-is-closed-by.html]

The year of living namelessly : 1986 : Grant Pearson, Radio Thamesmead

[pic: Lorraine Holloway, The Radio Thamesmead Survivors’ Forum]

 What’s in a name? Well, first impressions are lasting impressions (as The Impressions’ song goes). When our names are usually the first thing that strangers know about us, we are judged solely on the basis of two words. So many people have met me and said “I thought you were American”, a belief based on nothing other than my name. I recall a colleague at The Radio Authority, Janet Lee, confiding that when some people met her for the first time, they would admit “I thought you would be Asian”. All our prejudices and preconceptions are poured into imagining who someone is, even before we know anything about them beyond their name. If you have an unusual or foreign-sounding name, in Britain you are much less likely to be selected for a job interview and your career will be considerably more difficult to pursue in many professions.

In radio broadcasting, your name takes on even more importance. Most radio presenters do not use their real name on-air because it is either too boring, too common or, conversely, too difficult to enunciate easily. Sometimes, like former Metro Radio colleague ‘Giles Squire’, they might choose their on-air name to match a voice that is supposed to convey authority and superiority. So many radio presenters I have worked with have asked me “What is your real name?”, anticipating that I must really be called something quite plain. They are surprised when I respond that ‘Grant Goddard’ is my real name and always has been. The only exception was, as a fourteen-year-old, I had used the name ‘Kid Grant’ when presenting shows on London pirate radio stations, mainly because I thought it would avoid the Post Office tracking me down and prosecuting me. It was also a childish homage to Kid Jensen on Radio Luxembourg, one of my favourite presenters on one of my favourite radio stations of the time.

I have always had difficulty making people understand my name. Grant was an unknown first name in the 1960’s and 1970’s. I never discovered anyone who shared my name until I was amazed to meet another Grant in Durham in 1977, a fellow student with whom I instantly shared a bond of name difficulty. Names I have mistakenly been called include Graham, Grunt, Gram, Gran, Great, Green and Greet. As an adult, I have given up correcting people who call me ‘Mister Grant’ in their belief that it must be my surname. I thought that this identity problem was going to be my life forever. Then, unexpectedly, the landscape changed after February 1990 when Grant Mitchell was introduced as a character on popular British TV soap ‘Eastenders’. The power of television suddenly created an avalanche of people named Grant. I have always wondered why the show’s writers chose this particular name. Was it connected to me having just appeared as the subject of the lead story on the front page of Broadcast magazine, the weekly trade paper for the TV and radio industries?

So why was I named Grant? Once my father had returned from National Service in the Suez, my parents decided they would emigrate to Canada. Had they visited Canada? No. Did they know anyone who had emigrated or visited Canada? No. But, in the 1960’s, no paperwork was required by Canadian authorities. You just booked a flight to Canada and there you were, ready to start a ‘new life’. In preparation for this family adventure, my younger brother and I were both given what my parents believed to be common North American names, thinking it would help their children integrate. However, by 1966, my parents had changed their minds and, instead of emigrating, they decided to buy a plot of land in Britain and build their own Frank Lloyd Wright-style house. Do I mean they contracted builders to construct their house? No. They built their house literally with their own hands. It took years … but that is a story for another day. Anyway, the outcome was that my brother and I were saddled with ‘foreign’ names that would forever elicit “Can you spell that?” in phone calls to customer service staff.

After a lifetime of name difficulties, I was totally resigned to owning a name which had been designed for an existence elsewhere that my parents believed would somehow resemble lifestyles seen in ‘Bewitched’ (our dog had been named Samantha), ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’. It was now January 1986. I desperately wanted a job working in radio. My applications to the BBC and commercial radio stations had all been rejected. I took a job as programme manager at a tiny community station called Radio Thamesmead. The pay was so low that I barely broke even. I was living at my mother’s house 30 miles west of London and spent four hours per day commuting to and from its location 10 miles east of London. It was crazy … but it was work.

I arrived for the first day in my new job and was greeted by Radio Thamesmead’s station manager, Grant Pearson. He was only the second person I had ever met with my name. Quite a coincidence, I had thought. Sat behind his desk, this older man explained the basics of my work and then suddenly said something that I could never have anticipated in a million years.

“It would be too confusing to have two Grant’s working here. You will have to choose a different name,” he said. There was a gap of silence. I thought I must have misheard him.

“Sorry?”, I said eventually.

“Your name,” he repeated. “We cannot have two people working here with the same name. Do you have a middle name you can use instead?”

“I have no middle name,” I replied truthfully. I was still baffled. Never in all my years had anyone told me I could not be called by my real name. I stared at him, sitting behind his desk in the former living room of a converted flat on a council estate in one of the most deprived areas of London, managing one of Britain’s smallest radio stations. He was strangely wearing a suit in a community project where everyone else I had seen (including myself) was dressed casually. He resembled a salesman in a Bexley hi-fi shop. I later learnt that this had in fact been his previous job. He apparently had no prior experience in radio. Whereas my resume had shown that my career in radio had started more than a decade earlier, during which time I had worked at stations with audiences measured in millions.

“Do you have a nickname that you can use instead of Grant?” he asked, continuing to press his point.

“No, I have never had a nickname,” I replied. “Everyone has always called me Grant.” In the bafflement of the moment, I believed this to be completely true. I was momentarily too floored to delve so far back as to recall that Mrs Keep, the very elderly lady who lived next door when I was a toddler, insisted on calling me Little Jo. She had heard my father calling “Jo” in our garden and had assumed it must be the baby’s name, whereas it was my mother’s pet name (but not her given name). To this one neighbour, I remained Little Jo until we moved house when I was aged ten. But, now sat opposite this seemingly bizarre man in his smart suit, I was too preoccupied with the here and now to access memories from almost thirty years earlier.

“You will have to choose a name you want to be called,” said the man who evidently enjoyed flexing his powers in this miniscule community project. My new role did not even report to him. My salary was to be paid from a job creation scheme funded by a national charity commissioned by the government, not from the project’s own resources. My line manager, who I had never met, apparently worked in an office located miles away in central London. I reflected that it would not be a good start to this new job to argue with someone in my workplace with whom I would have to work so closely. I could judge in my mind that this was not the day to start a name war.

“I have always been called Grant. How can I choose another name?” I asked him, sounding somewhat desperate but accepting of my fate. I was wondering what other craziness I would have to endure in this job, beyond this jumped-up man in a suit. Should I leave now? No. I knew I needed a job, any job right now, and I would have to suffer the humiliation that he seemed eager to direct my way.

“You need to choose a name right away,” he insisted. “I am about to write a press release to post on our noticeboards. In a few minutes, I will introduce you to each of the team working here and I need to know how I should introduce you.” I considered what name to choose. It was a task I had never imagined I would be required to do in the first hour of my first day. His insistence was so illogical that I decided I would substitute one of the most uncommon first names with the one that was the most common in Britain.

“If I have to change my name,” I replied, “then I will be called John.” My logic was that there must be someone else in this workplace who was named John. Would that prove to be an equally problematic choice in the mind of this evidently crazed man? Would he reject John too? Or was this just a case of him flaunting his egoistic power over his own name?

“Okay,” he said. “Here you will be called John Goddard.” Question answered. It was apparently all about his inflated ego. That day, he went on to introduce me as John to everyone at the radio station. He put my new name on the noticeboard. For that entire year of 1986, I was known at Radio Thamesmead as John Goddard. Nobody else and nowhere else knew me by that name. It was confusing for me. At first, when one of the staff I was managing called “John”, I thought they were addressing someone else. The madness continued until, by December, my one-year contract ended and I left to join what I thought might be a less bizarre employer, London’s Capital Radio. Grant Pearson was still working at Radio Thamesmead when I left. I had moved on, he had not. Did I ever run in to him again in subsequent decades? No, I did not.

During the following three years, I never gave another thought to this strange episode in my career. By 1989, I was involved in London black music pirate radio station KISS FM with whom I was preparing a licence application. I was attending a radio industry conference in Birmingham with some of my new colleagues. After one seminar in a lecture theatre had ended, our group got up and joined the crowd in the aisle headed towards the exit. I noticed that someone who looked familiar was rushing up to us.

“John, it’s good to see you again,” said this person. Close up I recognised him as Cemal Hussein, the chief engineer (and much more) of Radio Thamesmead. He was one of the cleverest people and also one of the friendliest of the wonderful team I had worked with there. We hugged and chatted a little. It was great to see him again. After he left, my colleagues from KISS FM looked at me quizzically.

“John?” one of them asked.

“It’s a long story,” I responded.

This is that story.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-year-of-living-namelessly-1986.html]

What are words worth? : 2003 : Professor Anthony Everitt’s community radio report, The Radio Authority

 I like to be helpful. If I have a skill, I will offer it to help solve a problem at work. I thought that was what working for an organisation was all about. The bringing together of people with different skills to work together to move things forward. But, in reality, I have often found that demonstrating a skill you have at work can get you noticed, but not necessarily in a positive way. Bizarrely, someone in a workplace who can demonstrate proven skills can be seen as the enemy. Why? Because, in the British media industry, most people are appointed not on the basis of the skills they bring to the job, but on the basis of who they are. Are they ‘one of us’? Did they go to the right school, usually a private school? Do they speak with a posh accent? Do they know the ‘right people’? Once given the job, these incumbents do not take kindly to some upstart colleague or underling who demonstrates in the workplace that they have proven skills which their posh colleague or manager have never had … and have never had to have. They have been granted their role because they are simply ‘the right stuff’.

The Radio Authority had commissioned a report about the potential for a new community radio sector in the United Kingdom. The Authority had no real interest in launching community radio, but it had suddenly become convenient. The British commercial radio industry had lobbied to be relieved of its responsibility to provide local news bulletins on its radio stations. News was expensive, compared to DJ’s playing records. News was unionised and journalists were relatively well paid compared to non-unionised local presenters. After 30-odd years of having had to provide local news bulletins, commercial radio owners demanded to their regulator, The Radio Authority, that this requirement be stopped. But how to succeed in proving that doing less, cutting its services, making journalists redundant, could be argued as good for commercial radio’s listeners? It needed a good wheeze that was believable.

Although there had been demands for a community radio sector in Britain since the 1970’s that had consistently been rebuffed by the regulator and government, thirty years later it was suddenly the perfect time to accept and promote the idea. The plot went like this: new community radio stations would broadcast local news to their listeners, so what was the point of local commercial radio stations also providing a similar local news service? The commercial radio industry cooked up a scheme with the regulator under which community radio stations would be licensed nationwide for the first time. However, those stations would be shackled to a licence regime that denied them the technical resources to reach many people, the financial resources to be sustainable or the ability to generate revenues by selling on-air advertising. As a result, these stations would prove no threat to existing commercial radio owners, either by stealing their listeners or their revenues. Starved of sustainability, community radio stations would likely go bust very quickly. The stations themselves could be blamed for their failures, not The Radio Authority and certainly not commercial radio.

For the commercial radio industry, this was a win-win proposal. This new tier of community radio stations was to be licensed to fail but could relieve them of having to continue the expensive job of providing local news. Their stations could later lobby that they no longer needed to be local at all because they no longer broadcast local news. Their stations could be regional, or even national, cutting their operators’ expenses even further. The British government went along with this bizarre scam. I sat in the front row of a conference and witnessed a government minister argue from the podium that, by licensing a new tier of community radio stations to broadcast local news, commercial radio owners could no longer be required to provide regular local news bulletins. I wanted to jump up and shout “bullshit” but everyone in the audience nodded their heads sagely as if it all made perfect logical sense. Not for the first time, I felt like the upstart in a room of worthies who could not see the reality unfolding in front of them because their only evident skill was having ‘the right stuff’.

It was 2003. I desperately wanted a job working in radio but all my applications for vacancies had been rejected. So here I was unexpectedly working for The Radio Authority. By now, I had sat at my desk for several months without doing any work. That sentence is not an exaggeration. My managers had not given me a single task to do, so I had been able to sit there, getting on with my own projects on my desktop computer, but looking busy. I had no idea why I had been recruited for a job that seemed to involve doing nothing. Now they had commissioned a report on the potential for community radio from an academic. I had had no involvement in the commissioning. Nobody at The Radio Authority had ever asked me anything about community radio, despite the fact that I was the sole employee to have worked in a British community radio station. In 1983 I had been a founder member of the Community Radio Association. I was the only person at The Radio Authority who had attended the Association’s last annual conference. I had circulated to colleagues a short note on what had happened at the conference. Nobody responded.

Somebody in the office shared with me a Word copy of the professor’s completed report to read and told me it was about to be sent to the designers commissioned to put fancy graphics and a cover around it. I read it and realised immediately that the document was not ready to print. Nobody at The Radio Authority had even thought about editing the report, correcting the layout, correcting typos or doing all the little stuff that a sub-editor has to do prior to publication. I had not been given this Word document because it was my responsibility at work or because of my experience as a writer and editor since the 1970’s. A conversation ensued that seemed rather baffling to my colleague. I suggested the document could not be published as it was because it had not been ‘subbed’. Bafflement. I tried a different approach. If the document was published as is, it would prove an ‘embarrassment’ to The Radio Authority. I had already learnt that my workplace only acted decisively when it needed to avoid ‘embarrassment’. It worked. I offered to sub-edit the document prior to publication because I had the skills that apparently nobody else in my office possessed.

During the next few weeks, I communicated regularly with the report’s author whilst editing his document. I was pleased to have something to do that could use my skills and was connected with radio. I knew about community radio, I knew about editing. I had honed these skills over several decades. In the back of my mind, I must also have been thinking that I might be given some actual work to do by my managers at The Radio Authority in editing and/or community radio if I demonstrated my skills with this document. I wanted to be able to use my skills in my job. Until now, I had had no opportunity to show what I could do. After completing the editing of the document, I shared it with the author who was fulsome in his praise for my contribution and commented that I had been the best editor he had ever worked with. I handed back the edited version to my colleague. It was passed to the designers and printed.

I was not even sure that my line mangers knew or cared that I had edited this report. Internally I did not receive any credit or thanks for my work. On the contrary, I was the only employee denied an end-of-year bonus that year. My hope that it might lead to my involvement in the licensing of new community radio stations was quashed when it was announced that the person responsible would be Soo Williams who worked in the same office as me. I had never heard her express any interest in community radio. She was initially charged with organising a large meeting with community groups interested in applying for licences. She seemed fearful and asked me how to organise such a meeting and to suggest a suitable venue. I helped selflessly, once again with the hope it would lead to involvement. She accepted my suggestion of hiring a room at the London School of Economics. The meeting went ahead. I was not invited. I had no further involvement in The Radio Authority’s work on community radio.

In 2019, Soo Williams was awarded an MBE for her services to community radio.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/01/what-are-words-worth-2003-professor.html]