It's Not What You Think (14 page)

10 Take calls

  9 Send out prizes

  8 Prep callers for on air

  7 Log records

  6 Perform characters

  5 Edit tape with razor blade and chinagraph
*

  4 Operate portable tape recorder
*

  3 Operate the radio car

  2 Operate the studio

  1 Present a show

Now that I had moved to Manchester,
the radio station completely consumed my every waking hour. I had more or less picked up from where I left off, going in during the day when the place was entirely different from how it was at night and weekends.

The sales, promotions and admin teams rushed around all day whilst the whacky commercial production guys with the loud shirts and funny voices (honestly) could be found in full flow, hidden away in their studios, lost in the throes of creation. The newsroom buzzed with an impressive roster of journalists—many more than you would find at a similar station today. News was very important to independent local radio in those days and many of the stations were home to proper old hacks with the legendary drinking habits to match.

As the days, weeks and months went by, I got to know more and more people and was asked to do more and more odd jobs, working on other shows, more studio management and lots more work in the radio car.

I loved the radio car. It was a Ford Cortina estate with the Piccadilly logo plastered across the bonnet. On its roof was mounted a bulky
retractable thirty-foot aerial—a proper bit of kit which always caused a fuss wherever it pitched up.

The radio car was a real workhorse, taking the radio station to the listeners and putting the listeners on the radio station. One of my jobs was to drive it to wherever it needed to go and set it up ready for action. Having located the site this basically involved pressing a button, waiting for the mast to elevate and then pointing it in the general direction of Manchester city centre. A highly hit-and-miss ‘fine-tuning’ operation would then commence which usually involved a quite pissed off and condescending studio engineer back at the base shouting at me via a short-wave radio in a patronising manner for the next ten minutes.

Before ISDN lines became de rigueur, the radio car was one of the few ways of gaining semi studio-quality sound at sports fixtures and the like. I remember all too well freezing my nuts off in the car park of St Helen’s Rugby League Club, while Stuart Pike—now a top voice on Five Live, was attached to the other end of my cable commentating on how ‘The Saints’ were faring out on the pitch.

Sport was also a massive part of Piccadilly’s output and football especially, with Man U. and Man City leading an impressive cluster of local clubs regularly involved in the thick end of the First Division.

One of the most exciting shows you could be asked to work on was a show called
Sport on Saturday. Sport on Saturday
was a non-stop four-hour maelstrom, packed full of action from beginning to end.

There was so much going on during this broadcast that the presenters only had time to focus on what they were saying, leaving them no time for operating any of the equipment. This meant the control desk had to be operated separately, usually by a technical operator, a rather grand name for someone who just about knew how some of what was laid out in front of them might work—at least that’s how I always felt.

Working on
Sport on Saturday
was a learning curve like few others and again I couldn’t get enough. The operator would sit behind the main control console where the DJ would normally sit while two sports presenters would sit opposite over the desk at the guest mics. The presenters would then spend most of the afternoon with their heads buried in makeshift notes and rip and reads (hurriedly prepared scripts), just trying to hold themselves and everything else together. They would
have the output of the station in one ear and the producer in the other, updating them with scores and any additional information they might need to know or that might be useful. It was a highly impressive scene to witness.

The console, the guardianship of which was down to the likes of me, was not unlike a mixing desk you might witness at a gig, consisting of faders, sound meters, gains of one type or another and a whole host of illuminated buttons with little letters on them which either did or didn’t do what they were supposed to. When it came to
Sport on Saturday
the faders, normally linked up to records, CDs and cart machines during other shows, were connected to ten or more outside sources which were permanently dialled up throughout the afternoon. They were our live links to all the reporters at the local grounds.

The big guns, however, were behind us in the shape of four enormous clunking great ten-inch reel-to-reel tape machines, slowly turning like huge wheels in some sinister Victorian workhouse. They were mighty indeed and they commanded respect.

Each one of the four machines would have a direct input from full commentary of one of our featured games. Now here’s the fun bit—when there was a goal, the operator would have to instantaneously swing around on his chair and thrust a scrap of paper in the take-up reel approximately where the goal took place. It was then down to the pressure of the ensuing tape to hold the scrap of paper in place. Consequently, as a result and if we were lucky, we would have some idea of where the goal might be when it came to full time.

It was then the operator’s job to spool back on all four machines and splice the goals together for the final highlights package—very hairy, highly precarious, unbelievably messy but surprisingly productive.

At the end of a sports show, as you might imagine, there was always a real sense of relief, quickly followed by a sense of overwhelming achievement; celebratory beers in the bar afterwards were often the order of the day.

I don’t believe there’s anything better than live sport on the radio. Sports commentators are by far the most gifted of broadcasters—they are the people I have the most respect for in my industry. They make what they do sound so easy and it makes me shudder with dread at the thought
of ever having to do it myself. The excitement they manage to convey is infectious and the accuracy with which they choose their words as the action changes from one thing to the other lightning fast is jaw-dropping—and whilst all this is going on they still find time to be articulate, humorous and even poetic—I hate them. Of course I’m joking.

I was recently told that a good commentator actually has to state the action before the crowd reacts to that action, otherwise it will sound like he’s behind, so he almost has to guess what’s going to happen next! If he gets it wrong he risks sounding like a dufus; if he gets it right, however, the oohs and ahs serve only to enhance his commentary, making the whole thing sound like a carefully prepared film score designed to highlight the scene in all the right places—now that’s quality.

Like most places of work, at the radio station there were good jobs and bad jobs. Driving the desk for big shows and operating the radio car were up there with the best; whereas tape reclamation and record logging were most definitely down there with the worst.

Tape reclamation involved taking all the old tape that had been discarded during editing from out of the tape bin and sticking it all back together again for reuse. Whereas tape cost a fortune—me, a razor blade and a roll of sticky tape were a relative bargain.

As dull as tape reclamation was, it was nowhere near as dull as the music logging. The logging of records was a legal requirement, so that the various royalties could be paid to the various people concerned in the making of the records in the first place. Every song that was ever played on the radio had to be logged by hand.

The easiest way to do this was to take all the records off the DJ, during or after the show and log them then and there, but often it would be late at night and there were more interesting things going on, so I would more likely leave my logging until later—big mistake, huge.

What was already a mind-numbingly tedious process now became a prolonged pain in the ass marathon of detective work, all my own fault of course. I would have to listen back to the shows, identify the records, locate them in the record library and then take down all the details to pay the contributors—the label, the record number, the artist, the name of the song, the writer/s, the publisher and for how long the record was played.

The humdrum of this process was compounded by the fact the record industry had thus far not agreed on a uniform place to write all these details, so they would be in different places for every disc; sometimes all the details would be on the sleeve, sometimes they would all be on the record label, sometimes a mixture of both…soul-destroying. It often took longer to log the records for a show than the show itself, especially if you did it the way I did.

By this time, by the way, Timmy had moved on: he had flitted to London and to the zany world of early morning television and his kiddie-filled creation called
The Wide Awake Club
and
Wacaday
—the programme that was to make him rich and famous.

Timmy had a theory that there would always be kids and they would always want entertaining, whereas in his opinion adults would use you and lose you, leaving you for dead. It was a theory I didn’t quite understand then and one that I still don’t quite understand now, but for Timmy it was a logic that worked and one that proved to be mightily lucrative for him.

He quickly became the most successful children’s television presenter of his day, taking children’s television to a whole different level. He set new benchmarks with his energy and creativity, making most of the other kids’ shows look interminably dull by comparison. Piccadilly’s loss was very much
TV-am
’s gain:
Wacaday
was a smash, literally taking over breakfast television during the summer months and at weekends. Timmy was everywhere—for such a little guy he couldn’t have been any bigger; rock stars used to be ordered to appear on the show by their kids! And Timmy even went on to top the charts himself after being chosen by Andrew Lloyd Webber to front his remake of ‘Itsy Bitzy Teeny Weeny’.

Both Timmy and his show were a ratings winner—of that there is no doubt. I just wish everyone could have seen or at least heard him doing the things we witnessed him doing on the radio.
Timmy on The Tranny
will always be number one for me.

10 Your mum will one day stop finding you cute

  9 A friend will betray you

  8 You will start to exhale a sigh of relief whenever you have a ‘sit down’

  7 You will one day be older than the current James Bond

  6 You will one day be older than the current Prime Minister

  5 Your body will start to fall apart

  4 You will listen to the same songs and find new music ‘strange’

  3 Naughty afternoons with the curtains drawn will be replaced by repeats of
Columbo
and a cup of tea

  2 Girls will always cry—it’s what they do

  1 Your mentor will one day leave you to fend for yourself and you will never learn as much from anyone ever again

Change is the only one true constant
and is always going to happen no matter what we try to do to stop it. In the end only the fool stands in its way, the wise man accepting things for what they are and moving on. Any other strategy is an abject waste of energy, time and emotion, and so it was when Timmy left to seek his fame and fortune in London. But as always there was a flip side to the situation.

The fact that Timmy was no longer around at Piccadilly meant that we had to change too. I, like the rest of the Timmy-helpers, may have lost our guru, but there were still many more lessons to be learnt and we were now forced to stand on our own two feet in Radioland.

The time had come for us to develop our own characters and find our own voices. It was all very well hiding behind a character on someone else’s show but what would we say and how would we say it if we were ever given our own shows? It wasn’t long before we all began working with other on-air talent—none of them anywhere near as dynamic as our old boss but all different and unique in their own special radio ways.

Independent radio was still a very free medium at the time, trusting and encouraging its producers and presenters to do whatever they
thought might be worth listening to—all good to watch and learn from, and not always how to do it but often very much how not to do it.

The existence of such a variety of individuals all pulling in the same direction, albeit admittedly with different ropes, is unfortunately very much a thing of the past, independent radio having long gone the way of tightly formatted predictable output designed to appease the advertisers. I blame the Americans.

A short rant

The argument for tightly formatted output came from America; this is how things had always been there and as more and more radio stations popped up over here and bigger radio groups were formed, the more this model began to be adopted. A big mistake in my book—and after all this is my book.

The model is based on the fact that a radio station needs to guarantee a definitive audience so its commercial clients know who’s listening and thus advertising can be sold to the highest bidder. The more stations the group’s owners can get to sound the same, the more potential customers they can deliver to specific advertisers, but a side effect of this is the sacrifice of anything surprising, new or different, which is the very reason why commercial radio was so popular in the first place.

The vast majority of commercial radio is so bland nowadays. I find that very sad, the irony being that many of the colourful characters who now run it came from the original crazy days of the ‘let’s give it a go and see what happens’ era. Not only this but when it comes to Britain, the American model is fundamentally flawed in the first place because of one thing—the existence here of the BBC.

In America there is nothing that comes anywhere close to being like the BBC and what nobody realised was that in an ever-increasing cutthroat world of commercialism, where costs and standards would inevitably have to be compromised in order to keep making money out of a thinner and thinner slice of the pie, the BBC would be able to continue producing high-quality product that would keep sounding better and better compared to its dumbed-down rivals. This, in turn, would cause the more discerning and ultimately desirable audiences, the likes of which the advertisers would kill for, to leave commercial radio once and for all—which is exactly
what’s happened. As a result commercial radio has never been in worse shape than it is today.

I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility to take an overall philosophy for a radio station and sell it to advertisers, as opposed to a minute-by-minute breakdown of exactly what will be said and played at every second of the day, albeit guaranteeing a product but at the same time removing any room for creativity or personality. And the mad thing is, this is the only way their next big hit is going to be discovered—the next new voice or idea that could catapult their station ahead of the rest needs the space and freedom to be found out.

The two caveats to this are Classic FM and TalkSport, who both know and respect their audiences inside out, so much so that their audiences in turn trust them enough for there to be some freedom within the schedules. TalkSport especially I find an excellent listen, and Classic FM is a previous winner of the prestigious Sony Award for Radio Station of the Year.

Listening figures for radio are up yet commercial radio is in decline—this speaks volumes. It’s not because of the dominance of the BBC but simply because somewhere along the line commercial radio lost its balls and became boring.

The sales guys started calling the shots over the production guys and the tail started to wag the dog. Today the sales floors remain intact whereas the vast majority of production floors have disappeared altogether. What on earth do they think they are going to sell?

Entertainment must come before advertising. It can never be the other way round—content is king. In the long term, the audience will realise what’s going on and vote with their dials, anyone who presumes otherwise will be out of business, probably for good and quite rightly so. Surely, the better the entertainment, the more money you can make around that entertainment, but there has to be entertainment there to start with.

The beginning of this suicide by over-advertising was the ‘promotion-based feature’, a phrase just the mention of which was enough to make a producer’s blood run cold.

‘We’re gonna have another winning weekend,’ came the cry from the sales floor. This was where a whole weekend’s output would be hung around the promotion of a certain product. Basically it was a straight money deal, usually excused by an hourly competition.

‘All this weekend we’re giving you the chance to win blah blah blah…’ I know, I’ve been there, for my sins I have uttered such phrases.

Features like these do not have entertainment at their heart, they are purely designed to make as much money as possible. Eventually the audience come to realise this and see them for what they really are, an endless stream of unimaginative ideas. They then begin to resent this hijacking of what was once colourful and entertaining airtime, ultimately losing interest altogether and switching off.

This programming ‘con’ is the difference between an amusement arcade and a bouncy castle: the amusement arcade may well be full of flashing lights and loud noises but they are merely there to hide the fact that nothing else remotely amusing is going on other than some poor soul gradually being squeezed of their hard-earned cash.

The bouncy castle, on the other hand, may cost 50p to have a go on in the first place, but after that is almost guaranteed joy, smiles and laughter all the way, with the exception of the odd twisted ankle and sprained wrist.

I can only presume Rupert Murdoch was brought up with a big bouncy castle in his garden at home when he was a kid as Sky television seemed to embrace this philosophy from the beginning. People would rather pay extra for programmes they want to see than have to put up with lame excuses for entertainment that they don’t—even if it’s for free, even if they might win a flat-screen television in the bargain, especially when it’s obvious these programmes are just thinly veiled revenue streams driven by avarice and laziness.

It’s bizarre that this was the exact type of dross we were warned to expect from Sky by the same terrestrial broadcasters who are now mostly responsible for churning it out.

One more thing—while we’re on the subject of sales guys completely messing this industry up for everyone else—the broadcasters and the public and anyone else in between, what drives me really crazy is…

If a (TV or radio) station’s audience starts to deteriorate, and as it does so begins to attract a lower demographic, instead of stopping, regrouping and attempting to recapture its lost, more desirable and now disenfranchised audience, what do the sales guys do? Bring in a whole set of equally lowly advertisers to appeal to the dregs, drug addicts and no-hopers that are still tuning in and probably only because they
can’t be bothered to get their fat arses off the sofa to stretch for the remote control.

Rest assured, as long as the sales team hit their targets and get their bonuses they don’t give a hoot what’s going out on the air. They are the ‘bankers’ of the television industry. They don’t care how long ad breaks are becoming and what’s offered up as so-called entertainment in between them as long as X + Y = £.

I swear, if the sales guys could justify 59 minutes of adverts per hour and just the one minute of actual content, maybe even less, they would go home with their heads held high as long as their back pockets were bulging, guiltless of the fact it was they and their like that slaughtered the goose that used to lay that oh so very golden egg.

If the BBC does ever get bullied off the air, God help us all.

End of the short rant (please forgive me)

Back at the ranch at Piccadilly, my weekend overnight shifts were soon to be supplemented with weekday overnight shifts—more official hours meant more official pay, whoopee! My feet were now firmly under the Piccadilly Radio table and I was willing to play footsy with anyone who would have me. There wasn’t a show I hadn’t worked on, there wasn’t a ‘jock’ I hadn’t worked with.

I started to be given warm-up jobs for the various road shows and it wasn’t long before I was appearing on the breakfast show as the tea boy, again as a character rather than a real person. This time I was called White and Two Sugars.

One of the ruses with ‘Whitey’, as he was known, was how he always wanted the DJ’s job but was so unbelievably inarticulate and narrowminded that he didn’t have a hope in hell. This wasn’t going to stop him, of course—he was in show business and he was going to milk it for all it was worth. Not only did he want the DJ’s job but he also wanted his life. This would make up the basic premise for each on-air exchange.

A lot of the DJs had sponsored cars, supplied by local companies, emblazoned with their names on the side. I thought it might be fun to see if Whitey could jump on the sponsored car bandwagon and bag a set of wheels. He was on the air, after all, so why couldn’t he have a car like the top guys?

The sponsored car thing was a huge big deal for some of the DJs, the make, model and type of sponsored car they had saying a lot about their perceived popularity and coolness—in their minds at least. A couple of the presenters were leaders of the sponsored car pack, always managing to secure the latest snazziest models and quietly having a secret duel to try and outdo each other every September when it was new reg time.

This all came to an embarrassing head one year when one of the guys suddenly couldn’t get a deal—for a car of any kind. The story goes that this was such a crushing blow for him, he went out and bought a brand new car out of his own pocket and then had his name sign painted on the vehicle along with an imaginary sponsor. This was made all the more ludicrous by the fact that, previously, he had always claimed what a bind it was to have to endure the rigours of a sponsored car with such overt livery attached to it.

Based on the DJ-sponsored car philosophy, I had decided that if White and Two Sugars was to get a car, it would probably be a Skoda or something similar. Skodas had for a while been the butt of a lot of jokes and as a result the company were doing everything they could to change their profile, a battle they were gradually beginning to win—there was even a rumour of a sporty version.

I was told I was free to make some enquiries as long as it was all good ‘business’ on the air. Not for a second did any of us think anything would ever come of it, but as the daily on-air reports of my sponsored car-seeking mission progressed, gaining more and more programme time, local garages realised that if one of them was to give the tea boy some wheels, there was a good chance they would receive some decent publicity, maybe even more than the other car sponsors, with their ‘reluctant’ DJs having to pretend a free motor car was a cross they were forced to bear.

So lo and behold, the day came when Whitey was offered his own diamond white Skoda—there was a sports version of this latest model and this was it. I couldn’t believe my luck, none of us could, they were offering me a brand new car and it was mine for twelve months—if I wanted it, which of course I did. When it arrived I thought it was beautiful—Reg no. E363 WNE…I’ll never forget it and of course,
Name…on…the…side…!!!
The brightly coloured caption read:

‘WHITE AND TWO SUGARS BLENDS PERFECTLY WITH SKODA.’

And if you don’t believe me:

Everyone thought it was hilarious—I thought it was amazing.

Along with the radio from the newsagent’s, it’s the one thing I would buy back from my past—in a heartbeat.