Tag: travel

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]