Rudinblog

Living the dreams

What were your dreams as a child and adolescent, and have you lived them? Aged about eleven I went into some sort of big exhibition in Birmingham (England!) and there was a whole section devoted to the Wild West – its history, how it had been 'won', the stories, the legends, the places, the people. The huge expanse, the tremendous achievement of laying the railroads, dynamiting the mines. I bought a wall chart which laid it all out and this had pride of place on my bedroom wall. As I progressed into my mid-late teens this merged or morphed into the fascination for US radio, especially for its 'West Coast sound'; the whole California hippy, laid-back country-rock deal, The Eagles, Poco, Jackson Browne. By the time I was in my early 30s I had achieved the ambitions I'd fixed on by my mid-teens. But before this reads as insufferably smug I should qualify it, stating that although I've done the jobs that I dreamed about doing from my early teens, they didn't quite work out quite as I'd hoped and I certainly didn't achieve the fame and the riches that I blithely assumed would naturally flow. Seeing what fame does to people and those around them I am certainly not sorry that I never even achieved mid-table ranking in terms of name recognition. The riches would have been nice, but (another homily from Rudin senior), you can only live in one house at a time, wear one shirt at a time drive one car at a time. In any case, 'Confucius he say', pity man who achieves his ambition (because what's he going to aim for then?).

Tony Benn – that sage of the British Left, who has featured in the Rudinblog on numerous occasions – says many things in his various books and collections of diaries, but two or three are especially pertinent here. One is that as you become older naturally become a Buddhist as you lose desire; sexual desire can, in particular, cloud your judgement (I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said that the sex drive in young men made you feel like you are chained to a maniac). Another is that the greatest thing any person can become is a teacher. The thing that I hadn't expected to do as a teenager (and indeed much later in life) was to become a 'professor' (as I can grandly style myself in the US!) and experience the great happiness that comes from passing on your knowledge and experience, and helping others develop. In turn, there is the joy of scholarship; of being part of a great voyage of discovery with other like-minded people, who are doing their bit of research and investigations, which can add to yours; to build a bigger picture; to add to the sum of human knowledge.

All of that came together in my eight successive annual trip to the Broadcast Education Association's (BEA) annual festival and convention in Las Vegas, which now runs exactly concurrent with the biggest broadcast convention in the world – the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). Plenty of people in search of riches there – and plenty of sex for sale, to meet every possible desire. Nobody ever believes me ,of course, but these were not what I was seeking or what was motivating me to go there (I've still to spend a cent on gambling in these eight visits – but better keep quiet about that, they might lot let me in next time). This year's event was, for me, all the sweeter, for several reasons. One is – let's get the bragging over with! - that I won a prize for a paper I'd subtitled in the 'open' section of one of the BEA's Divisions. Another is that that was the ONLY thing I had to do – talk about my paper and pick up my cheque! After some years of multiple presentations as a panel and paper participant, and five in total as Vice-Chair then Chair of the International Division, then last year as Acting Chair of the new International District (in place of my great mentor and friend Brian Pauling (pictured) from the New Zealand Broadcasting School in Christchurch, who was detained there due to the aftermath of the tragic earthquakes and numerous after-shocks), my duties and responsibilities were otherwise nil. I should also point out that, in contrast to the first few years of these visits, no public or private funds were involved in this trip – I am entirely self-funded, spending my son's inheritance! So I also gave myself permission to kick back a bit.

Added to THAT, because of one of the biggest changes in personal circumstances in my adult life some six months ago, when I became a carer for my mum, the prospect of a whole eight days (a week, plus red-eyed flight time!) of freedom and independence, when I can, essentially do what and when I want it, and have fun and bit of adventure with great friends, was a really enticing prospect. The USA – self-declared land of the free - is a good place to think about freedom and you won't be spared these thoughts in future blogs, I am sure, plus a bit of the road movie as we headed into the High Desert of California, but for now let's think about the future of broadcasting – specifically radio.

 

There were several sessions at the BEA on this theme – explicitly or implicitly - and, frankly, I thought it absurd that we were not hearing from the people who wold be both making and listening – we hope – to the radio in the future. One of the great things about the BEA is that it brings together industry practitioners, educators (who often have previous and sometimes ongoing industry experience) and their students. So, my suggestion from the floor that we should directly hear from the students – a bit cheeky, I know, but there you go, you can get away with it if you have a British accent! – brought forth as passionate and eloquent a 'manifesto' of what – uniquely – radio can do that I have ever heard. And these were not, as I expected university or college kids – these were still at High School!

Meet Ian and Corey. Talk about living the dream! They both work on – Ian is the manager – their High School radio station on the glorious Pacific coast, not far from Carmel. Now, I remember stopping at Carmel (which then had Clint Eastwood as its mayor – yes, Clint Eastwood was the bloody mayor!!) when I went with a mate on the bus trip on that glorious coast road between San Francisco and Los Angeles, back in 1980. I thought – and said! – at the time, if there was any better place on earth I'd like to see it. It was perfect - even though this was October – with seals bobbing about not far offshore. The whole vibe was gorgeous. Now, to be in High School in a place called Pebble Beach, and be manager of an FM station serving a million people and of course potentially many more online…and then be in 'Vegas with your buddy and a couple of girls from the school (I met up with them all again on the last morning of the conference, but – in case their folks should read this – I am sure they guys behaved like perfect gents and the girls were chaperoned everywhere and at all times by their teacher who accompanied them on their trip)and you are also good at sports; well, does life get any better than that? I could almost have had the little green-eyed devil in my heart, but they were such nice kids I could do nothing but wish them well. Stevenson High School is private – I think these guys must have been boarders, because Corey talked about doing his show at 6am, and I know they start very early in High Schools in the US compared with the UK, but…! So, for sure, they have a privileged upbringing. But that was not their choice; they have just done well, so far, in life's lottery (or casino). Anyway, here's my chat with them from my podcast site.

NEXT TIME ON THE RUDIN BLOG (MAYBE): It's my way and the Highway (Radio), the sound of silence, roads and railroads, and, as so many millions are spent on journalism education in the US, how come what is on the airwaves is often so bad?

Radio Noir

Here's a 'podcast' based on a recent seminar on 'Radio Noir', including an interview with Dr Frank Krutnik of the University of Sussex, following a paper he delivered as part of the Liverpool Film Seminars.

 

Podcast Radio Noir seminar

 

No, Simon Jenkins, we were not wrong to fight the Cold War

I like reading columnists – and not just the ones with whom I generally agree, even if it is always a good feeling to read something that encapsulates and develops exactly what you were kind of half-thinking.

When a columnist changes newspapers/magazines it is fascinating to see if their opinions also change: you wonder whether they left one to join the other because they thought their new home would be more congenial to their views, or that they'd had a column 'spiked' for not fitting in with the publication's 'line', or whether they had been offered more money: or a combination of any of these factors. I was especially curious to see how the views of Simon Jenkins - the Knighted, Right-ish, figure, albeit one who often attacked parts of the conservative establishment, such as farmers - would shift when he left The Times to join The Guardian. In fact, his tone and his targets don't seem to have changed. Generally, even if I don't 'buy' the whole of his arguments, I think his points are well argued and based on pretty sure foundations of fact and relevant experience, mixed with a refreshing dose of pragmatism. Being so well-written, his columns are also a pleasure to read. But last week his column contained arguments that I thought were so wrong-headed, so perverse, that I wonder whether I can ever read him again.

In a piece titled 'We are fighting Islamism from ignorance, as we did the Cold War', he argued that the West "wasted trillions" countering a phantom threat from the old Soviet Union, which never had any intention of invading the West. The public was more or less brainwashed by a rapacious, cynical, power-crazed Pentagon, a vast and influential armaments industry, and the USA's craven allies, and the whole military-industrial complex (a phrase invented by a Republican US President and former World War II General), and that the 40 'wasted' years put back economic and democratic development in many parts of the Globe, some of which suffered unimaginably from proxy, 'Hot' wars, supported by the Superpowers.

Well, let's agree that the threat from the USSR and its client states was often exaggerated for political and other ends; e.g. there wasn't - contrary to claims by Democratic Presidential candidate JFK in 1960 – then a 'missile gap' between the USSR and the USA. There were certainly head-bangers in the US military who argued, Dr Strangelove style, for a surprise nuclear strike, even if this did trigger a nuclear exchange ("100 million Americans dead, tops!") and, most pertinently, that the USSR had good reason to fear being invaded from the West and it wasn't surprising that they were keen to have a 'buffer' between itself and Germany.

But to argue from this that, if the West (specifically the US and its NATO allies), had decided not to arm itself to deter any further spreading West by the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, there would have been a more benign and speedy resolution of these tensions is jaw-droppingly stupid. It's not just wrong, it could not be more wrong.

Perhaps Simon Jenkins never saw - let alone, as I did - live near the Berlin Wall. I arrived in the divided city 30 years ago. By then the Wall - strengthened and made more deadly in each of the several, subsequent phases – had been up for more than two decades. Forget the politics for a moment: it divided families and friends in an especially cruel, wicked fashion. Before its erection in 1961 some three million people had, literally, voted with their feet and used the Western Allies' sector of the USA, British and French, to cross into the West. Before that, in 1953, protesting East Berlin workers had been mown down by the regime; their murder commemorated in West Berlin as '17 June Street'. In 1956 and 1968, citizens in Hungary and Czechoslovakia respectively, had pleaded in vain with the West to save them from Soviet tanks, who proceeded to crush dissenting citizens and governments and ensure that pliant, satellite regimes were installed. The West felt compelled to stand by, impotently, as to do anything else would have triggered World War III. But in Berlin – itself some 100 miles inside the 'Inner German Wall' in what became the perversely named German Democratic Republic – the Western powers held their nerve. When the Soviets tried to starve out West Berliners in a blockade in 1948-49, the three western Allies kept up – at great financial and human cost – flights into the city, dropping off food, fuel and other essential supplies, at a time when Britain was itself suffering great hardship, with even bread being rationed. But the USSR knew that a 'free' part of Berlin would be a constant challenge to its own brutal regimes; which had, lest it not be forgotten, resulted in the murder, starvation, enslavement and torture of millions of its own citizens. Soviet leaders wanted to goad and intimidate the West into giving up its part of Berlin, which, Soviet leader Khrushchev said, was "the testicles of the West" – he would merely have to "squeeze" Berlin to "make the West scream". In the years when Germany was divided, thousands more tunnelled, flew, stowed away and found any manner of ingenious ways of escaping from the Soviet sphere to the West, many through Berlin; others over the much longer Inner German Wall between East and West Germany. At least 1200 died; blown up, shot, in the death strips, easily visible from the many look-out posts along the Western side of the Wall, and in at least one case, left to bleed to death in no-man's land; the pitiful cries of the anguished Peter Fechter being easily heard from the Western side.

The rest – those who remained behind the Wall – endured a life mostly of fear, frustration and misery. People like Heidi, who lived in East Berlin with her family, who dreamed of, one day, going to the West and for whom Western broadcasters, including the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), where I worked, were a lifeline; a window into a life that might be. The act of listening to such stations was her defiance – very dangerous; if the Secret Police had found out her and/or her family might have been imprisoned or worse; job promotions would certainly have disappeared and their life made even more sparse and miserable. But Heidi was even braver even than that: she would phone the station, always from different phone boxes. We could talk to her and even have 'coded' requests. When the Stasi files were opened it was clear that her family were of great 'interest' to the State – but they never caught her listening, or making the phone calls, or recording programmes. Her testimony is truly humbling. I don't think she will mind me including some of what she posted to my Facebook Wall, after I wrote a 'status' marking my 30 years since I came face to face with the Wall(s), travelling through the road 'corridor' (with my then girlfriend, now Mrs Rudin (!)) linking the East Germany and Berlin Soviet checkpoints.

In those days so much precious life time was wasted, we were young and hungry for the world, sometimes it felt like (being) buried alive. Our only connections to the world were TV from West Germany and West Broadcasting stations…. The phone number is burned in my mind, I always can say it very fast in English but not in German, I would have to translate it first :-))) Of course many people in the East would have loved to meet people from other countries than only from East countries and even this was limited and watched by the Stasi. Also to go abroad, having a look what the other part of the world looks like but this was impossible for well known reasons.

In a follow-up to this, and after I talked to her – and had seen her, via Skype, from her flat in Berlin - I mused at the weird thought I'd had: that I could have passed her on my trips to East Berlin. Sometimes this was officially, as a visitor, through Checkpoint Charlie, allowed under the four-power agreement. At other times I was on more, shall we say, 'unofficial' missions - on one occasion, in the company of a British Spy, being chased through the streets of East Berlin by the 'Vopos'. But I wouldn't have known what she looked like and, even if I had recognised her, would have been unable to stop and make conversation. This would have been far too dangerous for her. A strange and unsettling thought. Like those dreams where you see friends and family, but they don't seem to acknowledge you. I don't think it's an exaggeration that Eastern Europe was a living, waking, bad dream. And it lasted for 40 years. I had even more goose-pimples (well, tears, in fact) that Heidi had these dreams all those years ago:

I can´t tell how often I thought maybe my BFBS friends might be in East Berlin and I wouldn´t even recognize them. My dream was to meet up with them at least when I would be an old-age pensioner because then we could go to the West countries. But luckily we didn´t have to wait that long!

But according to Sir Simon, the Western countries should (presumably) just have given up on West Berlin; the US need not have staked its own survival on defending Western Europe, effectively prepared to sacrifice New York for Berlin, because the Soviet Union did not have any bad intentions! Or, if they had, well, the freedom of Heidi and millions of others was a price worth paying. He doesn't say that of course, but surely that is the logic of his argument. Perhaps he thinks – despite the Blockade, the East Berlin uprising, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. - everything in the end would have been fine; they would have allowed free elections, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, etc., and that it was only the belligerence of the West that stopped them doing it? If he does think that, then 'useful idiot' (as Stalin termed intellectuals and others in the West who were prepared to overlook, the erm, less benign side of the USSR and its allies, because of their loathing of America and of capitalism) is hardly adequate.

I am not arguing that if the US had pulled out of Europe post-World War II and the Allies had let Berlin go, say, in 1948, that the Red Army would have been marching down Whitehall before the year was out, with Clem Attlee replaced by a puppet Prime Minister. But subjugation comes in many forms. How long do you think West Germany could have survived – or even been formed? For an idea of what might have happened westwards, look at Finland. Never formally part of the Soviet bloc, but one which was in 'forced neutrality' and dared not do anything to upset the Russian Bear. Without the billions spent by the US, Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany and others in maintaining the Western sector of Berlin, without that flickering candle of hope, it is hard to see how any of us in western Europe would have lived the life of freedom that we've had. Of course, without the US, there would have been no arms race between the two Superpowers as there'd have been no one to race. The Soviet Union would have had all its own way – of course, it vastly outnumbered NATO in conventional forces anyway. The idea that the USSR would otherwise have used all the money and manpower it had to deploy on armaments and troops, to spread democracy and peace around the globe, would make a cat laugh.

The Wall was opened on that glorious night of 9 November, 1989, for one reason only: the West had not only kept its commitment to the West Berliners, it had out-spent the Soviets on weaponry, so that the Warsaw Pact countries could not keep up their commitments when their economies were collapsing. The Soviet leadership was no longer prepared to back their failing states to the east. As soon as that became clear, the borders were opened and – let's not forget – Berlin, and then Germany as a whole, was reunited, and – gloriously, almost unbelievably - without a shot being fired. Other Eastern Europe autocrats and their regimes put up more resistance, as they did in the USSR itself. But within barely a year all were gone: in my opinion, the most astonishing, positive chain of developments in the history of mankind. I still think that, even if (I write this with the Russian Federation's Presidential elections taking place), the way things have turned out in the 'core' of the old USSR is hardly – put it at its slightest - as benign as one might have hoped for. Maybe Russia – for cultural and historical reasons – is destined forever to be ruled by one kind of authoritarian kleptocracy or another.

Simon Jenkins may be right about the West's wrong-headedness and ignorance regarding the 'threat' from Islam. But he will never persuade me that the West was wrong about defeating the Soviet Union and its enforced, wretched allies and so, eventually, freeing the millions who were trapped inside the 'anti-Fascist protection ramparts'. For Heidi, and for millions now living, as well as millions not yet born, the decision to defend and protect one enclave in Europe against the USSR (even if it was, from the USA's point of view, 'enlightened self interest' in defending its military and its markets) was not a foolish, wasteful and destructive policy. It is the reason they are now free to live, work, associate with whomever, and travel to wherever, they wish. The freedoms that, Sir Simon, you and I have always had. I think that was a price worth paying.

Chat to the legend that is Kieran Devaney

Kieran has worked for a number of national TV and radio broadcasters in Britain and Ireland. In this chat, recorded earlier today outside the Crows Nest pub, in Crosby, near Liverpool, we talk mainly about his time at Radio City - the first Independent Local Radio Service on Merseyside.

Kieran has some cracking tales - some funny, some poignant - about stories and people he covered for the station, but we also talk about the darker side of Liverpool in the late 1970s and '80s - a time when the then 'de facto' council leader, Derek Hatton, described the city as being in a 'pre-revolutionary state'.

We end on an optimistic note about the way Liverpool has changed for the better - and its chances of weathering the current economic storm.

 

Kieran Mixdown

What we need is free radio, not Free Radio

We seem to be reaching endgame for anything approaching truly local radio commercial operators in the UK, at least in the big conurbations in England and Wales. The dream of having local, relevant, dynamic public services, but funded by advertising which first came to public debate around 60 years ago, is finally dying. What were local stations are now effectively regional broadcasters, and the more recent regional licences have become quasi-national 'brands', all of them, pretty much, playing the same music and having the same, shall we say, audio texture. The last great hope, with the stations run by the Guardian Media Group, has gone, with the announcement that their relatively well-resourced 'news hub' in Manchester is to be slashed.

In my view – or listen! – you can only serve regions, let alone specific localities, in any credible sense if your news teams are, say, within 30 minutes' driving time of any of the main centres of population. It's no good saying that with modern technology you can do just as good a job hundred miles away. Certainly, you can process the news – you can provide 'churnalism' – from anywhere in the globe, but you don't break stories; you don't provide original insights, because you only do that by building face-to-face contacts and see the whites of their eyes and by getting the feel of what's happening on the ground, ideally with people who have grown up in the area.

From April, BRMB the fourth licensed commercial radio station to go on air in this country, based in Birmingham, along with Beacon Radio, Mercia and Wyvern, are all to be replaced with a new brand: Free Radio. There will then be local output only at breakfast and drive-time. The stations have been owned for about the last 2 1/2 years by Orion Media, backed by an investment arm of the Lloyds TSB Bank, and Orion's Chief Executive Phil Riley, who began his career as a graduate trainee at BRMB about a third of a century ago. I've known him – not well – for a long time and I like and respect him. He has helped me with my academic research. I think he is a good man, who loves radio and I have no axe to grind against him, his company, or even any personal reasons to attack the previous owners of Beacon Radio, the GWR group, having never worked for them, or even applied for a job with any of their stations, or even had any close friends hired and fired by them. I do take great issue with what GWR did to British local commercial radio, but what follows is not motivated by any personal malice or score-settling, except to 'set the record straight'. OK, that's 'the legals' sorted!

However, I must point out my particular interest in the fate of the stations. I was living in the BRMB area when it opened up in 1974. I'd started on the 'city region's' hospital radio network – it then covered some 25 hospitals and was I think the second-biggest network in the country – some three months before. The hospital radio network actually co-presented with BRMB a Sunday morning programme of requests, and of course many of those working, like me, as volunteers at the station hoped to find employment at BRMB and other new stations. Furthermore, the presenters at BRMB were very kind in that they use to come along to my Saturday morning programme of reviews of new releases. What you have to bear in mind is I was only 16-18 years in this period and it was so good of them to do this, and of course in turn it made me feel that I was being taken seriously as a broadcaster, at a time when I had only just started shaving. Heady stuff! To understand how important it was, it would be a bit like a 17-year-old football fan having the top players in the local premiership round to play the kick-about at your local playing fields! I was the youngest at the station – nearly everybody else was in their 20s, 30s or even older - so it was a maturing process as well, especially given that they were from quite a wide range of backgrounds and occupations.

Joining Beacon at the age of 21 felt like I had been picked for the premiership team itself. At the age of 22 – a time when most of my graduates are just trying to get a bit of freelance work or any paid work at all - I was presenting hour-long news programmes and reporting on stories for the commercial radio news network. An extraordinary level of responsibility and exposure at such a young age and again, I was the youngest in the newsroom and I think on the station overall, apart from one of the technical operators. I've expounded my thoughts about Beacon before in my blogs and elsewhere and indeed I'm quoted in no less than a Ph.D. thesis, which compares the different histories of BRMB and Beacon – and very different stations, and very different histories they are to. It's quite funny reading someone else's dissection of places, times and events that you experienced first-hand that they didn't; rather like someone of my age writing about World War II being read by my mum's generation.

Book plug time! Just in case I lose any of you by the sixth paragraph, I'd better get in that a chapter in a new collection of papers, emanating from a New Zealand conference I attended last year, has just been published. My contribution is about the reaction of the establishment of commercial radio in Britain, and in particular how this was expressed through the national press, to the idea that there should be alternative stations to the BBC, funded by advertising.

The real history of Beacon is quite astonishing. As I mentioned in my blog post as an obituary to the original Managing Director, Jay Oliver, he wanted me to write this history, not least because he felt the early years had been rewritten by the successive managements. I was wary of doing this, bearing in mind the strict laws of defamation that apply in Britain are clearly had an axe to grind, even though I was sympathetic to his cause. Sadly of course it is now too late to do it, because both he and the original Programme Director are dead. But I'm determined that their story and those of the other pioneers UK commercial radio that extraordinary turbulent period of the mid-to-late '70s should be told, if only semi-fictionalised form.

Beacon was very much the rebel station of the original 19 Independent Local radio services, established between 1973-76. If BRMB were the sensible, responsible sixth formers - given a bit of licence to let their hair down occasionally, because you knew they'd get your daughter home safely and wouldn't throw up on the carpet - Beacon were the bad boys, who got up to no good, and as soon as your back was turned would be smoking Woodbines outside, stubbing out in your rosebushes. I think I knew at the time how lucky I was to be at the station in these early days and frankly, if you don't enjoy being part of a rebel army at the ages of 21 to 23, as I was at Beacon, then you don't deserve to have a youth. If you are young yourself in an industry that is itself very young, finding its feet and making up the rules, then you're very fortunate indeed. Plus, the staff, from the journalists, the 'jocks', to the engineers, to the sales exec's were brilliant. In some ways, it was the best of times.

I met one of my best-ever friends, who died over 10 years ago, under 50 years of age at the station. How good a friend? Well, I was abroad on holiday with the family when he died. Amazing to think now, when I wouldn't go down the road without my mobile phone, I hadn't taken my phone with me. And of course there was no Facebook or other social media. I wouldn't even think of trying to log onto email on holiday in those days. So, the first I knew of his death was when I returned and listened to a series of messages on the answerphone from his wife, starting at 4a.m. on the night he died. I am not even sure the body had been moved at that time. By the time I returned I'd missed everything, including the funeral (which was packed of course). Everybody loved him and although I might have led a bit of a sheltered life, I have never seen anyone else cause a cat-fight between two women in a pub!

When it came to sorting out his effects, his widow wanted me to have his most precious tapes, such as his interview with Paul McCartney. But going back to 1980, he left Beacon to have a job at one of the other stations now belonging to Orion: Mercia, the ILR station for Coventry and Warwickshire. On my days off from Beacon (generally Tuesdays and Wednesdays) I'd go to Coventry and, after a great lunch with him at an Indian restaurant, record character voices, sketches, ghost stories and stuff. A bit corny now. Maybe lame. But whatever; in its first audience survey, Mercia (now 'co-located' with BRMB in Birmingham) achieved a weekly reach that has never been surpassed by any local station in England. Later, when he was approached by Wyvern in Worcester and I was by then in Germany with BFBS, he wanted us to do a double-header breakfast show on the station: "Funky (his soubriquet for me at Beacon, which stuck), he said. "You could be the credible journo and I could be the whacky 'jock'. It would be brilliant!" But I was then just getting established with BFBS Germany and having too much of a good time and having too many opportunities to come back to the UK. So it never happened. Another 'what if?' that sometimes torments me in the early hours.

So I accept I can't be totally rational about Beacon or these other stations. My 'emotional investment' is too great. The memories too precious. But the way its history was trashed by the guy on breakfast at Beacon, on the station's 35th anniversary, was unforgivable to me. Why do that? Do Liverpool fans trash their team of '77 even though the management and players then are all gone? Because the players wore skimpy shorts, had big perms and 'taches? This sneering at the past is lamentable. It also involves dear friends who are no longer here, so accept I am emotional about it and am a cheerful BOF, out of target and out of area!

But one of the points of the early stations was that they did serve a very wide range of the population. Beacon certainly had a target demographic but the beauty of radio is that you should be, or can be, aiming right across the board, and the most successful stations do this. For example, when I was at Radio City Gold some 12 years later – an AM station aimed at 35 to 55-year-olds - my modest mid-morning offering (which, I can't resist boasting, quickly trebled the audience of the previous incumbent in one survey – so there!) included a significant number of 15 to 24-year-old C2DE males, who shouldn't have been listening to the station at all, as well as a significant number of older, especially female, listeners. So – young men and old women: very camp! I did have the majority of the audience in the right demographic, but the point is it spread right across the board. The station itself was so successful that we overtook the FM service in some of the day-parts, which was then virtually unheard of, and proved something of an embarrassment to the station.

We certainly did research, but on the AM station we also used our judgement, including that of the wonderful Angela Bond, who had been Kenny Everett's producer at Radio One back in the day. She has the best some of the best pairs of ears in the business, had been a DJ herself in Hong Kong and knew how to use the Selector software but also her instincts and her own sense of what sounds good on the radio. Once we had gone through all of that, I still checked every track of every day myself. Just as importantly, it included 'surprises – tracks you hardly ever heard on the radio, but sounded good. This is the trick of music-based radio: to keep it familiar and provide a generally upbeat aural blanket, but throw in something new/unexpected/surprising. And above all, perhaps, to give the presenters some leeway and some identity/credibility with the audience. But if you are a slave to the research you do none of this: you get rid of anything that 'doesn't test well', and what tests well is what the audience already knows and, even more dispiritingly doesn't necessarily like, but doesn't strongly object to. So you end up with a grey splodge: tedious, totally predictable and uninspiring – and fewer listeners.

Well, of course, critics to this approach will no doubt say I am talking through my backside; that the radio environment has changed beyond recognition since 'my day'. That would have some force if the various buy-outs and managements had made a success of the stations. But on the whole they haven't. Failure has been a great reward for many; bizarrely, enriching some of those who were the least successful and made the biggest mistakes, because their stations were bought out in better economic times.

Anyhow, fast forward to the more recent past: the decade leading up to the Orion Media buyout in 2009 was disastrous for one of those stations. According to Phil Riley, both in the excellent Radio Academy podcast with John Myers and in the stations' own special podcast about the name change – I have now carefully listened twice to both of them – BRMB had lost 75% of its audience in that decade. A truly astonishing figure. The others have done better – they've lost only about half their audience! (Curiously, the stations' podcast seems to have disappeared from the site in the last couple of days – I wonder why?).

It was a decade in which commercial radio was trying to come to terms with not only great increase competition in the sector but the rise and rise of the Internet, of multichannel television and various other forms of competition for their audiences' loyalty and affection. On top of all that of course has come the economic and banking catastrophe of 2007-8, continuing and quite possibly gathering apace with the potential collapse of the Eurozone to come, and resulting dip in advertising revenues, on top of the structural changes which have had such a calamitous consequence on stations' revenues. The almost universal response in the commercial radio sector has been consolidation, huge cutbacks in newsrooms and other expensive aspects of the stations' output, and an increasingly doomed attempt to 'super-serve' the audience which advertises generally crave above all else: young(ish) adults.

But even with all these additional and enticing attractions with current and potential listeners, radio audiences as a whole have not only been holding up, but expanding. It's just that most of that expansion has gone to the BBC networks. The Corporation's share of the total radio audience continued to grow, although in fairness did fall back slightly in the most recent figures.

The rationale for the change, explained clearly and openly by Phil Riley, is that the advertising agencies in London do not understand how a number of different stations, even when programmed with the same music and largely the same features, contests etc., such as still exist, can provide similar audiences, and that therefore the group is losing revenue to the well-defined semi-national brands of Heart and Capital. I can't quite understand how the agencies are so unintelligent us not to be able to grasp this, but there you are. It is a long time since I've been in commercial radio and I suppose I have to accept what Phil Riley says on this. But the killer argument is that to build the audiences they need strong marketing, and the only game in town for this is advertising on commercial television. As ITV advertising and its transmissions are organised still on a regional basis, that means that if you advertise one station you are paying for a region-wide audience, which can only have an impact on the segment of it who live in that station's broadcast area. So a huge amount of that very expensive advertising time is wasted. Therefore the way to go is to have just one brand and one advertising/marketing push to try and entice people to try the station. For this reason, none of the previous station names will do because they carry too much baggage and have changed their formats so many times over recent years (no doubt each of them inspired by very expensive research, convincing the revolving-door management teams that THIS was the way to go!) that the audience is confused about their 'offering'. Nothing less than a clean break will now do if they are to have a chance of surviving, goes the argument.

I cannot understand why they would want to compete with brands who are after the same audience and doing the same thing. And I can't help thinking if they can find hundreds of thousands of pounds on TV advertising, why don't they spend a fraction of that on doing some good, local programming? Local does not have to equate with boring and worthy. 'Local' is what most people are concerned with.

Changing the name and then doing a huge marketing push is the oldest game in town. Traditionally, the biggest advertisers, other than the government, have been Proctor and Gamble and Unilever, who each market a number of different soap powders which in fact vary only slightly from each other. The smaller the difference, the bigger advertising/marketing spend. So it is with commercial radio. If there are only tiny differences between your playlists and if you don't have a significant local presence, then you have to spend a lot of money trying to convince people they should listen to brand 'a' rather than brand 'b'. And the name and the music/format has of course all been well researched. Hmmm.

It's not only the programme content though that has been stripped of its localness and its value as a service: it's ADVERTISERS. Local commercial radio used to be a very cost-effective way of advertising for local businesses (who often want a broader target audience than 25-45 year olds) and I found it very satisfying when a client would show up, delighted at the positive impact his campaign had had on his turnover. I also used to enjoy voicing commercials – which had to be 're-voiced' by someone else if they were to appear in my programme, to maintain the hermetic seal between the advertising and programme content. It might surprise some to read that in fact I also think they should be MORE commercial. When I was at Red Rose Radio we did what I think was the first ever 'live read' commercial. It was for Co-Op Travel and we had special dispensation from the IBA to read a live script of their latest holiday bargains – faxed in that morning - between their jingles. A little audience of sales exec's and programme types gathered on the other side of the studio glass to watch this little moment of broadcasting history – would the ghost of Lord Reith strike us down! Well, no. But I hardly ever hear this happen now. Why? Don't they trust their presenters? Probably, as they don't seem to trust them even to read their 'positioning statements' between tracks, but compel them to play a pre-recorded voice. Bizarre. In fact, the presenters have so little to do they might as well not be there – which of course they often aren't, given the extent of voice-tracking, this robbing the station not only of the 'local' bit but the 'live' as well. When we visited Beacon Radio during the reunion weekend in 2003, there was one guy running two stations (the one for Wolverhampton/Black Country and the one that was supposed to be for Shropshire). He only seemed to talk once every 20 minutes on either station, then pressed a button which set off the next sequence. "A monkey could do this, couldn't it?" he said to us, half-embarrassed. The polite thing was to say nothing. The impolite, even harsh thing, to have said would be: "Probably a monkey would have more integrity." As it is, we have long music sequences, followed by seemingly endless commercial breaks, so long that not only have I tuned out by the end, but have almost lost the will to live. Yes, they have dispensed with 'clutter' but they have suffocated any life or spontaneity, pace or excitement out of the output. The Stepford Wives of broadcasting – giving you what it seems you want whenever you want it, which is good for a short time, but in the end becomes (literally, in their case) moribund and lifeless.

I have been part of big changes in commercial radio, e.g. at Metro Radio in NE England, where a big change in the output resulted in us being a rather poor second to the then market leader Radio 1, to – in a remarkably short time - a dog-fight which we sometimes won.

I am certainly not sniffy about appealing to a mass audience – quite the reverse. I want to be number one if at all possible and certainly number one on the station. Whether as Programme Controller and/or part of the on-air team, I was always very aware of my responsibility to the people who worked at the station and those who had invested their money. I knew that my performance would partly determine whether the sales exec's met their targets and commission at the end of the month, or whether indeed they had a job at all. Any commercial enterprise is not the place for self-indulgence. There is a bit of the huckster in me that relishes this imperative to appeal to the biggest audience. One of my great-grandparents ran a small end-of-the-pier type show. Being on local commercial radio feels a bit like that! They want more clowns? Give 'em clowns? They don't want clowns, but like comedians and crooners? In they come, and sorry old red-nose! We know that dinosaurs die out, we're in a completely different world, etc., etc. - all true. But look how Jim Moir did it on Radio 2 - moved the station on , changed it in quite significant ways, but held on to most of its former listeners and gained millions of new ones, mostly from commercial radio. It is amazing how commercial 'local' radio has virtually given up on 45 plus year olds. I'd love to know how much of the 75% loss of audience of BRMB in 10 years (astonishing figure!) was over 45. We're gone, of course, mainly to BBC networks, and it's going to be tough to win us back now. An astonishing and catastrophic misjudgement of historic proportion in media terms, IMHO. A third of the population is aged 45-75 and the highest income group is in the 45+ range.

Part of the appeal for music-led radio has gone, of course. Now, hardly anyone would go to radio to hear new music, because that is far more effectively and thoroughly delivered and personalised through iTunes, etc. If commercial radio relies on its music offering then it is dead. Long gone are the days when we were rationed – indeed starved – of music and the radio; where the charts, and the latest releases of the more esoteric ends of rock/pop music had real significance and excitement. Long gone are the times when a motorcyclist would arrive at the station with great fanfare with a white label copy of a newly-minted disc for you to slap onto the turntable, unheard, for the waiting millions (well, alright, tens of thousands!). Rudin 87.6 FM 'latest podcasts, greatest memories' and the Shuffle function on my iPod Touch, provides my personal 'better music mix' whenever and wherever I want it. So if commercial radio is to survive and prosper it has to be vital and relevant to people in other ways. The managements though seem content to throw away the one super advantage they have over Radio 2 (the market leader in most areas) or other national stations: their local presence. I won't say it is a tragedy because, to continue Phil Riley's point, no one died, but it is amazing how thoroughly and deliberately it has squandered the extraordinary loyalty it had with its audiences.

If radio becomes purely functional then it is dead. I will put up with tracks I don't like on Radio 2 or 6 Music because I like the vibe and attitude of the station, and because the presenters talk about something other than the bloody X Factor, and treats listeners with respect. But because most commercial radio has no loyalty or relationship with its listeners beyond an instant gratification and is only interested in me if I fit a particular demo', then if something comes along I don't like I say 'f**k that' and switch over. Commercial radio is in a different game of course from the BBC in terms of extracting revenue but it is NOT in a different game in terms of its relationship with listeners. Or at least it wasn't. You see, I am a great believer in the value of research in telling you what people are doing NOW! I quote research extensively in my book about broadcasting today. The exit polls at the last general election – correct to a percentage point, even though the sample was small – proves that if you do it right you have a very accurate picture of what people are up to. But in my view, research is MUCH less good at predicting what people MIGHT like. And I've done it all – Auditorium Testing, focus groups, call-outs, etc. People will tell you what they think they ought to tell you, and they can't know whether they like it until you do it. So once you let marketing people dictate the programming on the basis of research you are doomed.

I also have a particular issue with the name Free Radio, because that was the banner that was used by campaigners who took to the streets and defied the law, to prise radio from a monopoly or duopoly and to indeed free it from restrictions in speech, ownership, control, etc. For it to be used in this way is positively Orwellian; for what we have with the semi- closure of local stations and even tighter control over the market by one company, is precisely the opposite of 'free'.

Radio needs creativity, imagination, and a bit of risk-taking. It needs to gain the respect of the listeners. And finally(!) there needs to be a change of regulation. At the moment, all broadcast stations have to observe 'due impartiality' in the coverage of news and 'controversial issues'. I would keep that requirement of news – islands of fair, balanced, straight reporting – but I would allow stations to be partisan on issues. For example, stations in Buckinghamshire should be free – outside formal news coverage – to oppose the proposed HR2 fast train development. They could be a conduit for the protests. Similarly, a proposed hospital closure, say, or the change of a school in the Academy status. Even those who disagreed with their stance would be compelled to listen and react to it. And if/when the campaign was won, the station could justly boast 'WE did it, together!" People don't forget that sort of thing. There would still be requirements through the law of the land about stirring up racial hatred, etc., so a right-wing populist agenda which attacked minorities would still be illegal, but stations would be free to be subversive, anti-establishment, cheeky. Above all, indispensable. Independent stations are not weighed down by the institutional baggage, compliance and public service demands of the BBC, yet they usually seem more timid than those working for the Corporation. (I absolve the current LBC from these criticisms).

They do need credible news teams. Phil Riley argues that the coverage of the summer riots did not do the stations any good, because you can't 'monetise' it; there's no extra revenue. In contrast, he said, to Sky News. But this is wrong! Perhaps Phil hasn't noticed, but when there really is a big, breaking news story, Sky drop all their commercials! This is so viewers don't tune over to the rival BBC News Channel when the ad's come on (which can also seem very distasteful when covering wars, shoot-outs and other tragedies) but stick with Sky, not just then (and this is the point!) but other times too. Because Sky has won them over as a credible news service. So I expect those commercial stations that did cover the riots well (often at great risk to their staff) did have a 'pay off' in the summer figures. But you must then get out and about – the technology makes this ridiculously cheap these days – and get stuck in to other issues. My first manager in BBC local radio had the same view over bad weather: "Every snow flake is a like a new listener dropping into our lap", Richard". Because he knew that those who didn't normally listen to the station might well do so on those days. And if they liked what they heard, which might be very different from what they expected, or from when they last listened, they might be hooked on the station, or at least add it to their listening repertoire. But you do need the human resources – not just journalists and presenters, but technical operators and engineers (a dying breed in commercial radio) to do it.

The most dispiriting conversation I ever had about commercial radio was with a sales executive. I argued that, to keep the high level of audience we then had, required us to keep the relatively well-staffed newsroom and other resources. But she gently explained the realities: if they cut the budget by, say, £250,000, they might lose x thousands of listeners. But those listeners might have brought in only £200,000 of 'extra' revenue. So, although they would lose huge chunks of the audience, the company would be better off by £50,000. Simples! This, in fact, is in broad terms what they did on this station. Within a couple of years they had one third of the audience they had when I was Programme Controller and morning presenter, establishing in that slot a new peak audience which many stations today would be happy to have over the entire week. (Sorry about the boasting again but there have been attempts to re-write history about that as well, the figures are all in the public domain and I have the RAJARs to prove this!).

Of course, to prove that my ideas would work you do need financial backing as well as a licence to try this. And I don't have either. So, fine: 'dream on Rudin and w**k off to your tapes of Beacon, circa '76-'79 if it makes you happy', as I am sure some of my critics will be thinking – and by the way, despite the above boasting, I don't delude myself that my views are of the utmost insignificance to Orion, the late and unlamented GWR, and all the rest.

Any such station as I could imagine would have to be some sort of mutual/social enterprise/partnership. Something between the John Lewis Partnership and a co-operative. Not a public company or private equity business, which demands short-term returns above all else. It would need investors who would be happy to have a small stake in the business and accept small returns, especially in the early years, when most of the 'profits' would be re-invested in programming. Something in fact like the early days of ILR.

But to misquote yer man Lennon: You may say I am dreamer, but I am not the only one. Maybe some day you'll join me and we can challenge Radio 1 (and 2!).

One thing is for sure: Phil Riley and co probably can't lose. If this move proves to be a success, they can legitimately say to Ofcom and other doubters: "You see! People didn't notice! All they want is a brand! All that 'live and local' stuff is SOOO 20^th century!" And if it doesn't work – if, as with most local newspapers, consolidation, cutting staff and reducing local content results in spiral of audience decline and revenue - he can say: "Well, the only way we can stay in business is to abandon local programming altogether and become one regional station!" Anyone want take a bet that, by the second anniversary of this 'merger', that is exactly what will happen?

Stay tuned. Or probably not.

Liverpool and Thatcher had a lot in common

The release of the 1981 Cabinet papers under the 30 year rule have yielded some truly historic revelations. Perhaps the most fascinating relate to Margaret Thatcher’s direct interventions and communications with the IRA. At a time of acute tension in Northern Ireland, mainly the result of hunger strikes by Republican convicts, who demanded they be treated as political prisoners rather than common criminals. This was no posturing - they began to die and one, Bobby Sands, was by then an MP. The official stance of the government was that they would not deal with 'terrorists' - they were murderers and bombers. To countenance any change in their status would be to acknowledge that such acts could be justified as part of a legitimate struggle against the British occupiers.

The assassinaions and bombings on the mainland had ben in full swing for eight years and Republicans had audaciously murdered Thacher's Northern spokesman, close aide and Colditz PoW escapee Airey Neive as the election campaign that brought her to power got underway, by blowing him up as he started his car in the House of Commons underground car park. It was now personal. 

Of course, 'everyone' knew there were negotiations using 'back channels', but the revelation that Thatcher herself was involved in the communiques with the IRA leadership and was leaving all options on the table - including one for Britain to withdraw from Northern Ireland, would certainly have caused -to put it mildly - ructions in N Ireland. The Unionists were, in any case,rightly terrified that the English were not too fussed about hanging onto N Ireland  and would- as I suspect they will soon over Scotland - to conclude that, you know, we've been good together, but if you feel that way, thanks and by bye. Don’t let us stand in your way!

Britan as in a pretty demoralised state in 1981. When Thatcher came to power two years earlier, the brutal but accurate verdict was that Britain was not only no longer a world power, but wasn't even in the first rank in Europe. The view of the Foreign Office was that the UK's decline from being undisputed number one in the world, with an Empire that covered a third of the globe and where the sun never set, etc., to one beleaguered and neutered by over-ambitious and unrealistic defence commitments and a failing economy, should be managed gently. Only a third of Thacher’s Cabinet supported upgrading Britain's nuclear defence to new Trident submarines - it was pushed through in secret using the Royal Prerogative.  Many right across the political spectrum reckoned that Britain’s economic decline - just five years after the previous Labour government had felt compelled to agree to IMF terms to slash public spending in order to secure a 'standby' loan and avoid the possibility of the country going bankrupt - was equally inevitable. The country was too set in its ways, too complacent, the unions too powerful, the political class too weak and it could no longer compete on the world stage. Best to go gently into that long good night.

Thatcher of course was having none of this but some in her Cabinet - even those who were, at that stage anyway, 'true believers' - believed that some parts of the country were unlikely to respond to the harsh medicine which was thought necessary to cure the 'patient'. In Liverpool's case, her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe argued to her,  public money would be wasted. Like paramedics at the scene of a catastrophe where there are many severely injured and dying casualties, brutal assessments were needed to choose between those who were doomed and those who might survive and to concentrate limited resources on the latter.

In interviews given to coincide with the release of the papers, Howe has denied that he meant that his view that the city should be subjected to a "managed decline" Liverpool should be simply abandoned and left to its fate. But, frankly, I don't believe him. 

The fact is Liverpool represented everything Thatcher  loathed and were the awkward squad who she feared could block her goal of changing Britain. It, and many of the former great industrial cities, had become barren for Conservatives and they and their populations were expendable. In many constituencies, the Labour party was being taken over by Militant; the true nasty party, demonstrating a political version of Newton's third law of Physics.

And the poilitical parties weren't the only nasty ones.  My favourite quote in these papers is from Michael Heseltine, sent to Merseyside for what many in Thacher's government regarded as a 'fool's errand',  was so shocked by the police ( ready to be used as a political force in the great industrial battles to come, whose pay had doubled under Thatcher and were better equipped than ever) and declared they were not racist- they were thuggish and brutal to everyone! So some sort of equality was achieved.

Visiting Liverpool yesterday though, on the fourth day of sales, we found the car parks at (UNESCO heritage) waterfront - pictured! -and multi-million private investment-led shopping centre were showing 'full' signs. Queues to get into Pandora's, where cheapest item is about £60. And of course, queues past Anfield for the visit by Newcastle United. It has top-rated car plant(s), Biotech and Gaming industries, to name just a few of its employment highlights, a world-class Philharmonic orchestra, superb theatre, the rich cultural and architectural heritage and superb museums and art galleries.

 In the case of Liverpool's citizens and Thatcher - unlike another law of physics - opposites repelled. Yet both refused to accept the accepted wisdom of inevitable decline.  Both were proved right. By the end of the '80s, Britain was no longer "the sick man of Europe", it was rushing up the league tables of economic power and productivity - indeed one car plant in the depressed north-east was rated as  the most productive in the world. The country still had a seat at the top table - still a nuclear power, still a permanent member of the UN Security Council, still a leading light in NATO, the Queen was still Head of State in more than a dozen countries and of a Commonwealth of a third of the nation's peoples and, after giving them a good hand-bagging, Thatcher had secured a significant rebate of the UK's contributions to the EU.

Could all of this had been achieved without the destruction of so many people's futures, so many communities, so much wasted talent? In 1981, much needed to change in Britain, not least on trade unions who often blocked sensible and necessary changes in working practices, etc.. But couldn’t the North Sea oil revenues been put into a sovereign fund, as Norway has done, to secure the country’s economic future and provide excellent pensions, public services, transport infrastructure, etc., rather than on unemployment benefits to a 'lost generation' and tax cuts for the already fortunate?  

One thing is for sure – 1981 was the year of fateful decisions and long-lasting consequences. The Cabinet papers make for fascinating reading aboout the realities, dilemmas, conflicts and uncertainities of governance. And in their different ways, with the benefit of hindsight and as we are facing very uncertain, perilous times once again, both Britain’s and Liverpool’s post-1981 history can give us some grounds for optimism. Happy new year!

 

 

 

Myths, legends, identity and the magic of radio

Psychologists – and, indeed, psychiatrists – reckon that all of us, certainly the healthiest of us, construct myths about ourselves and our past. Ironically, the most mentally healthy people construct a version of their past which gives them support and succour. It is an existentialist point I suppose, but to an extent if we imagine the past to be something then that in a way is what it is, for what is the past but somebody else's perception and version of events and people?

The construction of myths is well recognised to be a powerful force in national identity. The British, for example, like to think that they are unique in their courage and forbearance in the Blitzkrieg in World War II. Yet, diaries and other accounts of German civilians during their far worse aerial bombardment provide much the same narrative; they too were united against a common enemy.

Hilariously, last week-end one of the Australian newspapers, reflecting not only on the Commonwealth conference in Perth but also on the announcement of the end of primogeniture in deciding the succession to the British monarchy, has discovered that if the proposed rules had been in place over the last couple 100 years or so, the current British monarch would be a homoeopathic in Halle, Germany. I'm tempted to say "you couldn't make it up", but of course we did during World War I, when our German Royal Family changed their name and effectively renounced their entire national heritage, being as Britain was then fighting a country headed by one of their cousins.

Just as we were coming to terms with  all this came the announcement of the death, two days before his 85th birthday, one of the best-known and certainly most extraordinary figures in our national life. Sir Jimmy Savile created so many myths about himself and assumed such an extraordinary impenetrable character, it was impossible to know the truth about him or virtually any aspect of his life. We know that he was the youngest of seven children born in poverty in 1926: we know that he was a "Bevin boy" sent down to work in the pit in World War II, during which time an accident nearly crippled for life and we know that he was a full-time professional wrestler. There are some other facts that many the newspapers and other media got wrong but can be verified as incorrect: for example, The Observer obituary stated that he worked on radio Caroline but he never worked on any of the pirate radio ships, although he did visit radio Caroline North in 1965 and, according to Keith Skues's book, Pop Went the Pirates, was full of admiration congenial circumstances in which the seafaring and seasick disc jockeys worked. BBC online so that he was one of the first DJs on Radio One – complete rubbish as a quick check on the line-up of that famous picture at all souls Church opposite broadcasting house in London would testify, as well as a scan of the early schedules which are easily seen online. Skues's book also quotes his reaction to the launch of radio one, saying it could never replace the pirates because one station had replaced the variety produced by so many.

The biggest unknowns and intrigues are to do with his private life and sexual proclivities. I do know that a number of journalists on national newspapers had a number of files on him that they wanted to run as a story over some decades, but he put great legal pressure on them – he refers to this one occasion in his autobiography – not to run it and it seems that usually, they couldn't make it (ahem!) 'stand up'. The Sun did in 2008, and he sued - apparently with success. Of course, you can't libel the dead, so we might expect a flurry of stories in the weeks and months ahead. I think his existentialist self has been lucky in that, due to the public opprobrium over ‘Hack-gate’ the newspapers are being very careful about what they print at the moment – even about dead men and not wishing to further alienate the public who often feel it is unfair to attack people once they are unable to answer back. We do know that he was devoted to his mother – whom he called The Duchess - to an extent which I think most of us would regard as unhealthy. If ever there was a case to support Freud's theories psychoanalysts and Jimmy Savile is surely it! 

We don't even know, as he often boasted, whether he was in fact the first person to regularly spin records professionally as the main form of entertainment for the evening dance halls and ballrooms, but no one else has made this claim so we can be pretty sure that was true. This period though is one of the murkiest in his past. He hints in his autobiography and has subsequently claimed various interviews that he was, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a thug. A tough man in a tough and tenuous business, he would "sort out" any trouble and any rivals. They called him The Godfather, he boasted.

He says that, whilst he never actually had anyone beaten up, some of the stuff that he did give him these 10 years in prison. 

And was he, as has often been claimed, the first radio DJ to ditch scripts and talk off-the-cuff? That's more questionable, given that was on Radio Luxembourg which at the time was in thrall to dedicated, sponsored slots from the big four record companies.

This strange arrangement, which did not seem to cause a great deal of comment at the time – probably because Radio Luxembourg and the other pre-war continental commercial stations had established the idea of sponsored programming being a normal part of commercial radio – was commented on several times by Pete Townshend, who gave the inaugural John Peel lecture on Monday night at the annual Radio Festival, the home of which is now near the futuristic Media City in Salford.
It was a privilege to be in the audience – at the first opportunity I scrambled into the hall to get the nearest available non-reserved seat directly opposite the lectern and mic set up for The Who’s lead songwriter and guitarist. 
I think Pete Townshend is one of the greatest creative forces we’ve had in Britain in the post-war era, with a takent  which is spread well beyond being in one of the greatest rock bands of all time and somebody who, moreover, thinks, speaks and writes extremely intelligently about rock music and other forms of art. His interview with Jon Savage in December's Mojo magazine for example is well worth reading. And the link with John Peel – who could hardly contrast more with Jimmy Savile – is especially strong in my case, for the moment that I really appreciated Peel was when he played the whole of what I still think of as side two of Quadrophenia straight off the back of the 11 o'clock news one night. I can't remember hearing that done – certainly not on the BBC – before, but what I didn't know ungtil the Toiwnshgend lecture (introduced by Peel's eldest son, Tom Ravenscroft, himself now a radio DJ), was that Peel had been an important part of the production of the album, having helped Pete mix the radio distort bit at the end of Cut My Hair.

But The Who were clearly fascinated by radio and especially commercial radio, having produced the hilarious The Who Sell Out album, which mixes their music tracks with jingles and commercials from the offshore pirate stations of the mid-1960s, notably Radio London – the most commercially successful of those stations and which was financed and programmed by Texans. And ironically, although Peel came to be the  'antithesis of the 'Boss Jock', fast talking, jingle playing top 40 radio style that Radio London so successfully produced - albeit in  a slightly watered-down form for the sensibilities of English listeners - he did in fact in Dallas on top 40 station, where a lot of those classic Top 40 radio ideas came together in the early 1960s.

Now, I have met both John Peel and Jimmy Savile, although if I said I'd worked with them both that would be pushing it a bit, except that I was a full-time employee of the British Forces Broadcasting Service during the Peel period in which John Peel’s Music  was recorded at the London HQ and broadcast on its stations around the world; I met Jimmy Savile at the time  he was presenting a syndicated golden oldies radio programme, which I bought and programmed on Sunday lunchtimes when I was Program Controller at Radio City Gold in Liverpool.

They could hardly be more contrasting characters and it won't surprise you to learn that I felt a far greater affinity with John Peel than I did Jimmy Savile! Like many of the best radio presenters, andDJs John Peel was shy, but unlike most radio presenters he had absolutely no interest in the showbiz side and was especially unusualat Radio One  in not pursuing the huge amounts of money to be gained by opening supermarkets and the like. Although he did, not eschew all the financial games that could be made if you were a well-known and unique voice, earning quite spectacular amounts of money for voicing commercials for lavatory paper and the like!

But when I met him at the BFBS studios in London and was allowed to sit in on his programme, I kept very quiet for the first 20 minutes or so as I know how sensitive many radiopersonalities are to breaking that magic that somehow they create in  inbetween microphone and listener. Much as I wanted to chat to him, my inner voice told me to shut up and wait to be spoken to!

After a while, he looked up at me and said: "I do like reggae records Richard, don't you?" I nodded and tried to think of some pointed and intelligent reason for my liking of such music, before he continued: "they have such pretty labels".

I think that was his very kind way of telling me that I shouldn't be overawed by his status and reputation, as someone who would bring to the attention of the great British public – and indeed the publics of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium and other countries within the transmitter range of the BFBS Germany (according to independent research then reaching some 5 million citizens across Europe in addition to that those for whom it was intended; British servicemen and women and their families and civil servants working for the Armed Forces) so many artistes and so many different kinds of music.

Indeed, even way beyond the audiences for the BFBS stations was his BBC World Service programme, which had extraordinary number of listeners in, I think, every continent. But although he took that side of his work extremely seriously he didn't take himself too seriously and that is what I think people perhaps loved about it more than anything else.

Anyway, I obviously hadn't  made a complete idiot of myself as, at the end of the programme he said he he was going off to Radio One and invited me to sit in on his programme there at Broadcasting House in Portland Place – which, in deference to the audience in Germany he’d just been addressing, he termed ‘Portland Plaza’,  which for some reason (probably giddiness at finding such a rapport with one whom I so admired), I found hilarious!

But what I also liked about John Peel was the fact that he didn't just make a few extra quid by recording programmesfor BFBS and then forgetting about the Services audience, he actually went out to Germany and other places to the big summer showsand the  like. I think it was because he never forgot his time as a conscript – he must have been amongst the last of the National Servicemen - and he realised that although after 1960  British troops were all volunteers in theory, in reality if you were, say, a working-class lad from South Yorkshire, your options were somewhat limited. The Army provided a regular income, food, board and great mates, in return for what was, at that time, the  rather limited risk of receiving an enemy bullet to the head.

There are countless tales of how John Peel connected with those otherwise feeling disconnected, isolated, insecure and alone – just as the young John Ravenscroft had been, at private school, in the army and – the reason for him making the foray to Dallas – to be a representative of his father’s firm. (He was working on radio there when JFK was assassinated and in fact had met and shaken hands with both President Kennedy and LBJ on a previous visit they had made to the city - the photograpbhic evidence of this he liked to flourish to doubters at social gatherings!). Having all these experiences - the banal and the bizarre - made him able to relate so well to people through the radio.

Radio presenting IS an artifice of course; it is so strange to be able to make that connection from the microphone. It's only when you stop doing it you realise what a weird job it is!

For some of the time when I was at the BFBS Berlin and did the Breakfast Show, there literally would be nobody else in the studio, indeed the only person I saw first thing in the morning and for the first and a half of the programme orso was the security guard came round with his German Shepherd dog to check that the IRA had not left a ‘present’ overnight. To go into the studio first thing in the morning, open a microphone and make that connection with the unseen audience - then on both sides of the divided city - was an odd thing. I also had, along with the other presenters, a late-night show every other week (just as Peel had to 'double up' on the Midnight-2 am slot on Radio London, where he made his reputation with The Perfumed Garden Show) and on at least two occasions I repeated the same thing that I'd  heard John Peel do all those years ago; play the whole of oneside of Quadrophenia.

So, John Peel made you relax but it won't surprise you to know that that was certainly not the case with 'Sir Jimmy Jangles’. He came up to Liverpool as a kind of promotional trip to promote his show and for us local radio types to bask in his reflected glory and have a bit of national celebrity stardust sprinkled over us as we gathered in the main studiofor the  team photo, which I'll dig out and perhaps post of online on another occasion.

He came up with the producer of the show, who I knew because we both worked at Metro Radio in Newcastle upon Tyne.  Sir Jimmy never actually spun a record on the radio in his life – he was always ‘tech op driven’. Indeed, this syndicated show was contrived from a series of links recorded by the producer at the flat in Leeds and then later mixed with the music. He could knock off a  few shows in one afternoon at a time long before ‘voice tracking’ became common!

Savile's first words to me when greeted him in reception was: "where’s the photographer?" I replied that we hired a photographer to come along and take some shots in a little while, but he said impatiently: "No, no. I mean the press photographer!" It was quite clear that his only interest in coming to Liverpool was to get into the local/regional papers but unfortunately both the morning and evening paper in Liverpool were, if not exactly downright hostile, extremely reluctant to give the station any publicity.

This had been the case for years – the reason being that not only were we rivals in terms of news coverage and I suppose in some way for the audience's respect and attention, but as a commercial station, for advertising revenue. Up until the launch of Radio City in 1974 the local papers had a monopoly on the lucrative display advertising for car showrooms, stores and like. So it was that if the paper felt obliged to feature the station or its presenters, because they opened an event for example, they would routinely refer the person as being from "a Liverpool radio station."

It was actually hilarious and became a running joke at the stationas to the lengthsgs they would go not to mention Radio City. And, fair enough, on this occasion, our PR department hadn't supplied them with a story to justify picture, so they didn't show up.

Whilst we were doing the tour and the photo shoot in the studio, Savile got on the phone to his contacts at the paper and, after beating a hurried retreat as soon as the main business had been done, headed downtown and, low and behold, next day he was in the paper with some sort of contrived story which had nothing to do with the station and of course didn't mention it.

His exit may have also been hastened by a slight disagreement I had with him as walked round the newsroom. He was saying that competition in his day was much greater than  ow. I said this was rubbish – he had a virtual monopoly when he started, whereas now there were hundreds of stations. I have a notion he wasn’t used to being contradicted. It may be that I am one of the few people to have crossed him not to have their legs broken by his friends in the Underworld, or their scrotum cut off and hung on the door of his revolting mobile home, featured on the Louis Theroux documentary (don’t watch any repat of THAT if you’re feeling queasy).

So this was my experience of this extraordinary one man machine devoted to his own publicity and glorification. There was certainly nothing about Savile that was anything to do with promoting music – I don't believe he had any interest in popular music and you can tell this by the way he introduces it either on radio or on his creepy Top of the Pops’ performances. (If you don’t believe me and you have a strong stomach, check out some of the repeats they’re currently showing on BBC4 from the relevant week in ’76, just before punk arrived on the scene, the promotion of which was the re-making of Peel's  credibility for a new generation.) No: Savile was not my idea of a DJ at all. I just didn't get ‘it’, or his attraction. Those stupid catch-phrases and the faux yodelling. Is that supposed to be funny???

 However, as in other radio fields I believe he was genuinely a pioneer. Aongst all the glowing obituaries on account of his radio and TV stardom, two shows hardly got a mention and yet these are the very ones for which I believe he does deserve some credit. One was called Speak Easy, produced by the religion department at the BBC and was a Sunday afternoon panel/audience talk show on Radio One, whichwass very innovative for its day and tackled wide range of subjects related to morals, current affairs and so on, from an interesting variety of locations. The chief innovation was the "Mr Roving Mic' which went round the hall to pick up questions and comments from the audience. As I say, this hardly sounds ground-breaking now but it was at the time, especially for ashow dedicated to young people's opinions and lives.

The other was called Savile’s Travels – the same title that was usedfor  the syndicated golden oldies' show many years later. This was innovative on several levels: firstly Savile used a very small tape recorder and he went around the country during his stints as a hospital porter, marathons, etc., and talk to "ordinary people" as he did so and then linking into the music. The show was seamlessly put together and again it doesn't really sound very original now but there was nothing like it to my knowledge before and rarely since.

I think this idea stuck in my mind for when I did a special afternoon programme from Maltby colliery in South Yorkshire on BBC Radio Sheffield. I recorded the different links and interviews as I went in the 'cage' down the mine, scrambled along the seams with my specially adapted Uhe ( bulky reel to reel tape machine (maximum recording time on one school of tape at the minimum acceptable professional speed of 7.5 i.p.s, which therefore had to be changed by torchlight underground). The machine was one of two specially adapted by the BBC and approved by the mining authorities as safe to use underground. Essentially, there was a special outer case to prevent any chance of an electric spark being emitted from the machine, which could cause the catastrophic deep underground. Anyway, as I stumbled along I had a list of the records that had been programmed to playin  my head and so could link to the tracks, and then I played the whole thing out 'liv'e in the show, whichwass apparently so effective that the newsroom thought that I was presenting thewhole  show live form the pit and were quite amazed to find – when they tried to send a message to me at the mine! – that I was sitting in the studio.. So I have to thank Savile for planting that idea in my head.

Back to the Radio Festival and Pete Townshend's lecture was introduced by two of my favourite radio presenters. I've blogged about before when I visited there then evening show on Radio Two  in the spring and afre now to be found on weekday afternoons on BBC 6 Music. To me, Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe are pretty well everything I want in a radio presenter: knowledgeable, witty, sharp, with a superb rapport with their listeners and the sort you'd love to go to the pub with for a couple of hours. This is what you strive to do I believe as a radio presenter.

I also greatly respect both their talents as writers and journalists. I met Stuart again when he gave a talk as part of my university’s series of lectures on ‘identity’, to promote his latest book  Hope and Glory: The Days That Made Britain. Unsurprisingly, he is also an excellent lecturer and, again, quite shy and self-deprecating. After going up to him with a colleague and re-introducing myself, he signed my copy of his book and graciously accepted – or let his agent accept on his behalf! – a dedicated copy of MY book! It was a bit of a cheek and was not sure whether even I would have the bottle or the gall to do that but then again I am always telling my students that people can only say ‘no’ at worst and I did hope he might find some of it interesting. His agent was very kind about it, told me later she had indeed handed it on to Stuart  and said she was ordering a copy for herself – so that’s one extra sale!

Shortly after arriving there I was greeted warmly by John Myers – with whom I worked in the mid-late ‘80s at Red Rose Radio. He went on to become a very grande fromage indeed in radio and is now Director of the Radio Academy. This was his first Radio Festival, so naturally he was a bit nervous. He described me to another big radio person as his 'hero'. Nonsense of course, but nice! He was enjoying my book, he said; I talked sense and it was perfect for an hour or so on a long train journey! Not a bad recommendation: hope he can post that on Amazon! After doing a very significant report on radio for the government he has just been asked by the Beeb to do one on how to implement local radio cits with the least pain. Should be fascinating!

My main reason - or excuse  – for attending the Radio Festival though was to accompany my students at the Foot in the Door session on the opening afternoon. This is a great idea and similar to the 'crossove'r day that we have at the BEA and NAB  in Las Vegas, where students and other wannabes are given the chance to have their show-reel critiqued and then to meet industry professionals, make contacts and quiz them about how to get into the business. At Foot in the Door they use the ‘speed dating’ idea, whereby you have 10 tables, each of which has two or three professionals on it in different areas of the business and you move on after klaxon call every 15 min. It was hosted by Rob Ellis of Capital FM fame, much to the delight of my female students, as can be seen!  

We had a bit of time before the event, and, whilst the girls ‘did lunch’, a male student, Adam, and I did a quick tour to check out the mazing changes at Media City. I asked him to take a pic of me outside the new Manchester home of Radios 2, 3, 4 and 6 Music in ‘The North’, with Stuart Maconie’s face prominent in it!

 

FITD with the team 31 Oct 2011

We were interviewed by the Radio Festivals' podcast team before the main event started. As you can hear, the students find my undimmable enthusiasm for radio quite amusing as I readily concede, yes I've never been' cool'… never seen the point of ‘cool’; I think that being in a radio station can be the most fun you can have with another group of adults without taking your clothes off! So I make no apology for my enthusiasm and, as I sometimes waspishly point out, I've never been out of work and these two things may be connected.

I did make a gratuitous plug from my book in the  interviews but sadly this was cut! Not so into other interviews I've done recently of which I'm very grateful to have the chance to do a bit of promotion,one of which was by a fomer student on our international journalism course for Euranet,

Euranet int 17 Oct 2011

 

to a potential audience of over 13 million. I often joke with my students that when it comes to the stage where I am applying to them for work  I know they have made it and I couldn't be happier. Well, I wasn't quite asking for work here but it was still good to be interviewed by one of my former students, although she said she felt like a 19-year-old again and was very nervous!

The other interview, this week, was on BBC Radio Merseyside, which, as I mentioned in my last blog post, is still reeling at the thought of some 20% cuts in its funding but which also had just received good news about improved ratings, adding some 43,000 weekly listeners. The spot that I was given was just about the peak time of 07.50 so I was very pleased with that and delighted that the interviewer would be my former colleague on the sister station to Radio City Gold, Tony Snell.

Rudin B21 int R Merseyside 2 Nov 2011

and, thanks Tony, for allowing me to give the title publisher of the book again at the end of the interview!

 

 Tony is a real star and someone has developed so much as a broadcaster from his days as a breakfast show FM jock someone who can handle with ease and without awful 'gear- crunching' as I call it, in going from different types of items, the wide-ranging daily current affairs based programme, but still keep his slightly cheeky and 'Anfield lad made good' approach. It's a neat trick and it works because it is real and genuine and Tony can break through to make a direct connection with the listener. The magic of radio. Contrived, in very strange circumstances - but reality, not a myth.

 

 

Time for the BBC to put its distant, unloved relation up for adoption?

In most people's lives there are key moments when you realise that something – a relationship, a job or even a car – that has worked very well for you both is not working any more and it's better for everyone's sake to call it a day. In fact, it happens with nations, too. Of all the empires the world has ever known, Britain's was not only the biggest, but was dismantled – with the notable exception of India – with greater good grace, speed and lack of bitterness than any other. It nearly happened in Northern Ireland, which is what so terrified the Unionists; at the height of The Troubles most Brits would probably have said a reluctant but resigned farewell to the six counties of Ulster, and the same may well happen in the next few years with Scotland. You know: it was great when we were together, we did good things and we played to each other's talents and resources, but it's time to move on. No hard feelings. Thanks and goodbye.

I think that time has come for the BBC and its local radio stations in England. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed these things over the years and even decades that one of the biggest, proportionate cuts announced yesterday as part of 'Delivering Quality First' in the whole of the Corporation's empire was to local radio. We've been here before, as 'Fiona' would say in the classic BBC radio comedy Round The Horne, many times; many, many times. In fact, I joined local radio just after the last but one (or was it the last but one but one?) set of cuts, when the stations were salami-sliced 10%. Shared evening programmes? Been there, did that. In fact, the week after I arrived the 'Night Network' was launched across six stations in what the BBC terms (with spectacular dismissal of any real geographical or cultural realities) the 'North-east'. The Night Network was produced by, and came from on weekdays, the BBC studios in Leeds, a city which no one else in the country would describe as being in the north-east of England, but there you are. So back in '89, those BBC local stations only had local output between 6 AM and 6 PM; 6 PM to midnight we shared programming  - including the brilliant, highly creative Martin Kelner doing the late slot - and from midnight it was back to a BBC network. In fact, even shared daytime regional programme predates that, with the legendary Denis McCarthy in the East Midlands and the late Norman Thomas in north-west England having an afternoon show broadcast over several stations. Between those periods, though, the Corporation decided that shared programming during the daytime was not a good idea and I think at one stage even separate, distinct evening programmes were given a financial boost. If you work with, or study the BBC long enough, it is absolutely true that the wheel is reinvented over and over again. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear Alvar Lidell reading the Nine O'Clock News on a new station called the Home Service before the decade is out, although this would involve some original and creative human resources management.

Each time these cuts happen, the BBC seems to reckon that, because local radio is by its nature diffuse, it will have less trouble if it cuts these services rather than the rightly loved and revered Radio Four (I think, uniquely, with a 0% 'cut'). The problem is greater than that: large sections of the BBC, especially in its senior management, have never understood the appeal of local radio. I think there is a kind of collective folk memory from when John Reith, by sheer brute force and personality, stifled what was a disparate collection of independent – as opposed to Independent, the euphemism that was to be used for commercial radio! - local radio services into a unifying national and regional network back in the 1920s. The BBC wanted control of all radio output; it didn't like mavericks doing their own thing. Ultimately, the BBC, like governments, doesn't trust the people and it certainly doesn't trust its staff. But the ambition of the BBC was, in any case, to be a major national institution and a vital part of Britain's life and lives, and in that, you have to concede, it has succeeded. So a national, unified, voice, with the highest editorial, technical and artistic standards under a single management became the goal and was largely achieved, with a few sops to the 'National Regions'.

Not everyone in the BBC thought this way, of course. The pioneer of its local radio was Frank Gillard, a wartime correspondent who became enamoured with what he termed Home Town Radio, after listening to small public broadcasters in the United States. But it took a rebel Irishman, Ronan O'Rahilly and a fleet of radio ships in the mid-1960s to demonstrate that the public rather liked having an alternative to the BBC, (which many working class people and not a few middle-class always found patronising in tone and elitist in content), playing non-stop pop played by 'personalities' - which, as Tony Benn, the then Minister in charge of broadcasting described in his diaries as anathema to the BBC :"like having the pubs open all day". But faced with a straight choice between having a new national radio competitor – Benn's creative solution to the problem - to provide what millions clearly wanted, and doing it itself, the BBC, in many cases with extreme reluctance and even outright hostility of senior staff, opened up Radio One.

The 'pirates' had also established, ironically perhaps through the rather less commercially successful, lower powered ones, that local services of information and personality chat were also popular. Tony Benn didn't want the BBC to do those sorts of stations either; he proposed a new independent corporation which would look after local radio and a new national commercial pop station. The latter would help - through what would be huge profits, with the 'pirate' stations forced to close down - with the financing of less commercially viable, local services. But, handed this job as well by the Labour government after Benn was 're-shuffled' , the BBC couldn't afford the local stations and went into partnership with local authorities for its at first experimental-only services, and only on VHF/FM. But so much for history – I wouldn't add! This period fascinates me and is the crux of the research I've been undertaking for several years now, some of it published; some of it, hopefully, still to be published! But it demonstrates the unloved birth of the stations and the residual snobbishness and dismissiveness that is evident still today in the BBC hierarchy.

Not only has it gone through different stages of salami-slicing local services, the BBC never made up its mind what its local stations should, primarily, be doing and how much of this should be dictated from the centre and how much autonomy individual station managers should have over their output. Again, I went through several stages of this; at one-time, at least in the 'north-east', we were to have a 'spine' of all speech at breakfast-time, from say around 7:45 to 25 past the hour. But Radio Merseyside had, all by itself, decided years before that to have an all-speech breakfast show – indeed I applied for the freelance presenter's job on that; one of the few interviews when I didn't get the job, I might add! In fact, Radio Merseyside has always blithely ignored most of the diktats from Broadcasting House. Sometime, it was even reluctant to use 'BBC' in its identification, idents, logos, etc., because it (rightly in my view) thought that an important part of the appeal of Radio Merseyside was that it was not the BBC 'writ large', indeed the imprimatur of the Corporation could be a turnoff for its largely working-class audience, for the reasons outlined above. And even between stations in the same region or sub-region there was always a distinction between those - like Radio Birmingham, Radio Manchester and, where I was, Radio Leeds - that were nestling, generally unloved and largely despised, within the broad bosom of a regional centre (which did telly, you know, even to the whole nation!), and those that existed in buildings that were just for that station. The contrast when I went from Radio Leeds to Radio Sheffield was marked and it can be no coincidence that the stations that have been enclosed within a regional Corporation empire have been the least successful in terms of percentages of the local population tuning in each week, and that Radio Merseyside was the most successful – indeed it had, and has had for years, more listeners than any other BBC local station outside London, where the potential audience is more than five times larger.

One of the key clashes - in which I was more an innocent victim more than a player - was whether there should be a strong element of entertainment-led output and such things as specialist music shows, where local bands, artists and others could gain airtime and experience; or were the stations primarily or even wholly to be effectively a local news bureau of the BBC, with output at the very least dominated by news and current affairs and talkback programmes of one kind or another? Again, the circle has spun several times on that one. At Radio Leeds I just could not make the new Head of Centre (then a recently created but long since disbanded post), who had never worked in radio before (as he proudly told the station staff on his arrival) understand that, of course, listeners to BBC local radio expected comprehensive and high-quality news and sports coverage, but that was a 'given'. That didn't actually win over listeners – let alone, as we were desperate to do at the time, pull in new listeners. How you built and sustained an audience was by really getting under the skin of the area and becoming an indispensable part of the fabric of everyday life, and that was just as likely, if not more likely, to be achieved by having strong personalities, strong branding and promotion, and quite a lot of what might sound like trivial and 'fluffy' output. You had to be both entertaining and credible – indeed that was the reason given for my appointment as Programme Organiser (again, a long disbanded title, but of course the same job has to be done no matter what you call it!) and Deputy Manager. The problem was, I wasn't HIS appointment! But the Head of Centre, who went on to be only the second most important person in the BBC and recently retired, just didn't seem to 'get it' and this undermined the whole credibility of myself, my Manager, and the staff. It was a horrible experience!

This is funny really because the BBC in its national networks, especially when it developed the 'pyramid of taste' idea after the War, thought, and certainly hoped, that you drew people in via a lighter, popular, network and then hoped to elevate their tastes and interests to more serious fare. This was as much an age as it was a class, cultural and education thing. So, for example, I first became interested in my local station, Radio Birmingham ("the heart of the nation station") in the early 1970s because it had an excellent Heavy Metal show on Tuesday night, called, erm, Heavy Pressure. My joy was almost unconfined when its presenter, Malcolm Jay, announced on-air that I had won that week's competition – to win a copy of the new Edgar Winter Group album. He read my letter in full and said "well done, mate". He called me mate! He called me mate! That was a great thing to think about during next day's double Chemistry lesson. More than that, the presenter of the weekday breakfast show was an amazing character, with a strong Brummie accent, who was very funny and became a legend – Les Ross. And on Saturdays – oh joy! – and long before 'double-header' shows became common, he teamed up with another DJ called John Henry for, indeed, the Ross and Henry show ("They're outrageous!" - I still have the pin badge). Not only that, but this had a 'live' audience, in the sense that you could just stroll into the BBC's Pebble Mill studios, and take the lift to the tiny bit of that building occupied by Radio Birmingham and just be in the studio with them: not behind the glass, or anything! Indeed, when the news came on at 11 o'clock, we all had to shush up, as a newsreader would simply sit at the table in the studio and intone the local bulletin. There was a weekly competition for the "far out listener" and the whole thing was a 'gas'(as we would say then!) from start to finish, not least because they played fantastic soul music, so much so I can't hear Al Green or James Brown without thinking about those days. But anyway, the point is that this would be a way in which many younger people would get into local radio.

This sort of stuff though still represented quite a small part of the station's overall output. I went, aged 15, to a sort of interview, having sent a tape of myself knocked up using my cassette recorder and our home record player – a tape which I'd also previously sent to Radio One and had a very nice letter back from the Controller saying that he "admired my technique" but that I should really set my sights a little lower for the start of what he was sure would be an illustrious career! But when the Radio Birmingham Manager asked me what I listen to, I said, of course, "Les Ross and Heavy Pressure". "Anything else?" Now I was stumped! I mean, I didn't listen to the steam engine programme, or the sport. And, frankly, with the exception of sport, why would I be expected to? The point was that they had a listener in a 15-year-old who was interested in working at the station in some capacity, liked the output that he liked and would probably, in time, as he grew older, and his interests expanded would listen more as he wanted to know about local developments, schools, the economy and so on.

But the impetus of the last few years has been that, whatever they say about its appeal to all audiences and providing what we used to call a "full service station", the stations have been skewed towards audiences who are largely old and working class. In fact, the average age is so old that the listeners are dying off, which is why the figures have fallen pretty well consistently in every survey for the last five or six years. As the various rounds of cuts have taken their toll, the output that might refresh that audience has gone, and therefore the whole audience has gone down. So we're now into a vicious spiral, where the audience is declining, so there's a hard case to make for the stations being protected against the worst of the cuts, resulting in lower audiences, and so on. And now, in the latest round, its most successful station, Radio Merseyside, is facing 20% cuts.

"Oh, well they're overstaffed anyway" is a common riposte, disappointingly including from my former colleague John Myers on this morning's Today programme. Well, not from what I can see. I shall be going to Radio Merseyside on Monday with some of my students, but the last time I was there one of the journalists had to come down to staff the reception during the receptionist's lunch-break. And if you are going to do journalism properly, and actually break stories, attend council meetings and the like and really get under the skin of the area (rather than just being another news processing bureau, with your main sources being PR 'news releases', and 'the calls'), then you do have to employ quite a few people at that level alone.

In the last few years, we have also had, at long last, and some 40 years after Tony Benn proposed it, a protected, third tier of radio of full-time community radio licences. Well, the BBC locals were supposed to be community radio – you know, not just a professionalised staff, talking at people, but the people being the broadcasters and managers themselves. The Corporation's local radio stations, even in this digital and online age, are also squatting on a huge number of attractive FM and even AM frequencies. Expansion of radio in most parts of the country on the traditional broadcast bands has come to a halt now because there are simply no more frequencies. Should the BBC be squatting on all of these if it is only providing a half-hearted, poorly resourced and unloved service? Might this now be the time to take to do what Tony Benn wanted to do all those years ago, and have a separate authority, structure and funding basis for local public broadcasting radio stations? Genuinely locally run and managed, perhaps on a mutual, co-operative type of basis, and involving such organisations as universities (okay, full disclosure/declaration of interest time!). Stations which could provide the sort of output which a broad range of citizens could enjoy and relate to, and indeed to which they could contribute? Where there would be a real sense of shared ownership in every sense and which would not be encumbered by the baggage of the Corporation. I know to my cost that everything you do on one of its local radio station has implications for the wider BBC and you just cannot be fleet of foot and daring in ideas, because if you screw up you may damage the whole BBC 'brand', its reputation and cause a whole lot of serious trouble, right up to Cabinet level.

It shouldn't be run from London – or even Salford. In local radio you should have all the management under the same roof; you should be able to go to even the top boss with ideas and get their feedback instantly, not have to go through some complicated compliance procedure or tiers of intervening regional and national management. In that respect it should be in fact more like a self-contained commercial organisation, such as Sky News, which deeply impressed me as a place to work, because, as one of the 'workers' said to me, not only was there a great atmosphere and that he would be happy to go for drink with anyone in what is a pretty large newsroom, but if you had an idea you can go to the management and you'll get a decision quickly, one way or the other. This is how life should be! The BBC can be a dead hand and suck passion, creativity and initiative into a black hole of corporate governance. For all its virtues and strengths it just is not suited to local broadcasting. It wasn't in the 1920s and it isn't now. By thy deeds shall they be known; by its cuts shall be known the nature of the BBC's attitude to the constituent parts of its portfolio.

In short, BBC local radio now faces a death of a thousand cuts, gradually fading out, along with its listeners; a situation which I'm sure will come as a great relief to many senior BBC managers – the only Director-General I can think of that genuinely passionately supported local radio was Greg Dyke.

It's time to give the stations back to the people. It's time for the BBC to clear out and make way for true local radio, by the people, for the people. Been nice knowing you, BBC. No hard feelings. Thank you and goodbye.

Liverpool bids farewell to Labour's next ex-Leader

The revelation that Paul Greengrass, the director of The Bourne Supremacy, and who co-authored with Peter Wright the bug-and-tell expose of the UK's secret services, Spycatcher, helped Ed Miliband prepare for his public appearances, provides too many potential threads for any blogger on this week's Labour conference to ignore. The most obvious one is that Miliband, like the fictitious Jason Bourne, is pictured looking stunned and confused and, frankly - as it was rather and tactlessly put to him on BBC Radio 4's Today programme - somewhat "weird", and seemingly having no knowledge of the sinister conspiracies of which he was a part. But no writer of political thrillers would have dared to have its main character – who is usually a figure designed to engender interest and even empathy by the reader and viewer - committing fratricide. The elephant in the room – in fact the trunk at least was visible one or two occasions at the conference, held in a glorious looking sun-drenched Liverpool – was that the party had chosen the wrong brother and Ed was just not up to the job.

To say that personalities do not matter in politics is ridiculous. Looking good on television has been essential for any political leader since at least the early 1960s and being able to engender at least grudging respect, even if you disagree with their policies, is equally important. The Mail on Sunday – admittedly not a newspaper generally helpful to the Labour cause – commissioned a poll which asked the public to characterise the main party leaders through a variety of prisms and circumstances. In fact, I think this can be narrowed down to two main questions: the foxhole and the neighbour test.

The first is the person who you would like to be beside you, with the enemy perhaps a few hundred yards away; you're running out of rations and the bullets are whizzing over your head. In the circumstances you'd want somebody tough, ruthless, decisive and who, if you are wounded or temporarily knocked out, would do their very best to drag you to safety, even at the cost of their own life.

The neighbour test is who you would like living next door to you; who could be relied on to water your roses whilst you're away, would alert you if they saw water or smoke emitting from your home, and with whom you could imagine spending a pleasant evening, and to whom you would trust with your secrets and problems – and receive sage advice.

Few political leaders passed both these tests. Churchill and Thatcher, for instance, would both easily pass the foxhole test, but Thatcher would be scolding about you not having done the weeding, or keeping up with the paintwork; Churchill would be to self- absorbed and absent-minded. Harold Wilson and John Major both pass the 'good neighbour test' but I would think I was doomed if I was in the foxhole with them. Of the leading Labour figures of the last half-century or so, Denis Healey and Barbara Castle both pass both tests, as does Jim Callaghan, the only one of that trio to make it to number 10 and the only person in the 20^th century to hold all four big offices of state – Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as PM, and, as it happens, the only Prime Minister I have sat down for a one-to-one lengthy interview.

Ed Miliband fails both miserably. I'm sure he would say all the right, soothing things in that foxhole just before the 'fun' started, but would be would be useless under fire and indeed, as he was almost forced to concede by the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson, he's never had to fight for anything in his life. Paradoxically, though, he has done one thing which, you might argue, demonstrates the necessary political ruthlessness needed in a Prime Minister – the decision to run against his brother in the Labour leadership last year. But although that was unquestionably a tough thing to do it was also hugely disloyal and, in my view, utterly wrong. And I reckon most British people who have older brothers will think the same. I just cannot imagine that if my brother and I were both political figures – or in any other line - that I would work to stop him getting to the top by putting myself into the frame. Indeed, I would do everything I could to help him to get there. To do otherwise goes against something quite atavistic and elementary. Maybe it's also paternalistic and reactionary but that's what I feel. I just wouldn't trust a man who would do that.

I couldn't see him as an ideal neighbour either; he neither has the kind of 'laddish' approach to life that I can enjoy, and I'm sure he'd be scolding me from not recycling more. Like many on the Left, he says all the right things – he can talk the talk – but his actions betray a very selfish agenda. I suppose you have to have a supposedly Marxist father to have an arrangement where you can inherit property and avoid tax, where dad's connections and name means you get an internship with Tony Benn to set you off on your political career , and, naturally, a 'career' that never actually includes what we might call a proper job, to have complete ignorance of the everyday concerns, aspirations and attitudes of your fellow countrymen.

I do have – full disclosure time! – a particular beef with Miliband Jr over his ministerial job in the last government as Secretary of State for (well, presumably AGAINST!) Climate Change, when he compared those who objected to wind turbines as being socially irresponsible, comparable with someone not wearing a seatbelt or ignoring a pedestrian waiting at a zebra crossing. I fiercely object to the turbines, bearing in mind their enormous cost, inefficiency and most of all their blight on what's left of our countryside. It is typical that Miliband would support something as modish and voguish as those. Naturally, he would throw them himself into the climate change cause, denounce those who were somewhat sceptical about the evidence and the actions proposed by government and the huge cost to the taxpayer as being heartless and irresponsible; unmoved by the flight of drowning polar bears or the melting ice cap on Everest.

For the record, let me make it clear that I do think that the climate is changing and that man's activities have an effect on it – it would be astonishing if it did not. What I cannot go along with though is the idea that there is a direct and precise connection between, say a certain tonnage of methane or carbon dioxide and a change in global temperatures. The Earth is just too complicated a biosphere for this to be the case and there are many other factors, such as sunspots and volcanoes, which have a habit of throwing all the predictions out of the window. And anyone who thinks that the 'scientific community' has more integrity than the supposedly more flaky academics and practitioners in the arts and humanities is naive in the extreme. Now, I have no scientific training beyond school level and neither does Miliband, but I do know that scientists have an agenda that is driven as much by the need for the next research grant, the promotion of a book and career matters generally, than it is by dispassionate observation and conclusions. (More on the BBC's coverage of the Climate Change issue, as well as EU and much more in my new book! Did I mention….? Everything from Baudrillard to penis-size discussed within its covers).

What drives me even more bonkers though is the smugness and condescension of the Green party, a spokesman for which I once heard scolding a man who wanted to fly off with his family to have a bit of sunshine; the first time he'd ever been able to do so. He should, said the Green, think first about the damage that flight was doing to the Earth and should holiday at home. By this time I was screaming at the TV: "and where did you go on your gap 'yar'? Presumably you took the train to, say Kirkby down the road from here, where there is lots of poverty and social projects in need of doing, rather than, say, off to work with indigenous tribes in South America, paid for by daddy's trust fund." Grr, grr, etc.

The Miliband of course would never criticise the NHS, because all the focus groups – and true enough, the applause in Liverpool – will tell him that this state health monolith is our new religion and that all who work in it are angels and heroes. Again, this view does ignore the evidence, including from some of those who work in the health service, with several reports in the last few months saying that there is indeed much wrong with the service and the attitude of many of its employees. For all its achievements and its plus points – and there are many – you are, for example, many more times as likely to die from certain cancers in particular in Britain that you are in the (Boo! Hiss!) U.S. system and other comparable first-world countries. Even in largely social democratic Western Europe, health is usually provided by competing social insurance groups, trade unions, mutual societies and the like. But any suggestion of even a tentative move in this direction provokes screams from the "four legs good, two legs bad" brigade of 'privatisation!' I realise, that despite all the evidence, I'm in a minority position here and as a democrat I have to wearily accept that the British people will never countenance any real change in the system, even though it would manifestly lead to much better life expectancy and an all-round better service. But a political leader who wants to be a weather changer, not just a manager, has to take political risks and Miliband never will. He is constrained by the knowledge that general elections are decided by a relatively small number of uncommitted voters in a minority of marginal seats. The swing voters must be modified, flattered, smothered with vanilla-flavoured speeches and photo opportunities.

But he just doesn't say anything of any interest and his scheme keynote speech to the conference was truly dreadful at every level, in my view. The most astonishing part was the line: "I am not Tony Blair", which was greeted by some boos. Michael Portillo said on the BBC's late-night TV political gab-fest This Week, you just cannot imagine what was going through his and his speechwriters' minds when they put that line in, because there is just no way it can have a good reaction. If the audience approves the line, it demonstrates how much they disliked their most electorally successful leader and are effectively disowning the decade when he, and the party, was in power. If it was greeted – as it was – by boos, that is capable of being read both ways, neither them helpful to Labour, showing there is even more antagonism towards Blair, or that they are sorry that he isn't Blair! And silence would be just embarrassing. Quite extraordinary when you think this speech must have been written by supposedly very bright people who are politically aware and are being paid to sniff out all the fault-lines of the speech. And it demonstrates at the very least a lack of competence on his part, to add to charges above.

Of course, I could be proved wrong; I might have predicted, six months in advance, the last election results within a seat (he modestly reminds his readers!), but if the coalition survives the course – and that is quite a big 'if' in my opinion – we have some 3 1/2 years to the next election. Please feel free to remind me of this if indeed Miliband sweeps to power on a landslide, provided by a grateful and adoring nation. It's possible: governments tend to lose elections, rather than oppositions wining them, so it will largely depend on how the ConDem government is viewed at the time. But as it stands I would say he is doomed to join Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and (although of course death took him before he stood an electoral test) John Smith in the post-Callaghan pantheon of Labour leaders who never made it to Number 10. I think it is even likely that the next Labour Prime Minister is not even in the House of Commons at present. As with Blair, who wasn't elected until after Callaghan's defeat, or Cameron - first elected more than a decade after Thatcher left office - they may need someone who is not tainted by past failures and the fissures of the party in government; who can indeed be Bourne again.

That was good for me – is it good for you?

….in which your Blogger achieves critical mess.

A couple of years ago, our regional TV news from the BBC here in north-west England had a refreshingly different 'take' on the annual story of the latest GCSE exam results. You know the sort of thing they usually do: the 'package' features a group of telegenic girls excitedly ripping open the envelopes with the results, then there's the expression of sheer joy, excitement, whooping, "Oh my God! Six A stars!", hugging with fellow pupils, etc. Not this time! Instead, a group of lads, possibly not in the top quartile of intelligence, was seen opening the envelopes with a mixture of pessimism and world-weary acceptance that the results would be, shall we say, slightly less than impressive. As indeed they were.

One in particular, though, clearly had a realistic and cheerful view of his prospects, because when you read his results out - which, if I remember rightly consisted of two grade Es, if that's still the lowest pass grade, and the rest 'U', which I think is for 'unclassifiable' - far from being embarrassed to recite these results in front of the TV cameras, he was clearly, as they say round these parts, 'dead chuffed': "That's good for me, that" was his considered response and he went off with his mates quite happy. In a way this was touching, and "that's good for me, that" instantly entered the family list of catchphrases, to be deployed whenever someone does something which, to most people, would be considered quite unexceptional – for example, when I screw in a key-ring cabinet in the downstairs 'cloaks'. In fact, any achievement involving me and DIY is greeted with this response. Because that's what you do in families – you take the proverbial from each other. It's a sign of affection, because, as my dad would have said, unless you want a fight, you can only be rude to people you like. You can usually see the extent of friendship amongst males by the amount they take the p**s out of each other.

There's a good reason why men do this, of course: in evolutionary terms we're but a few steps away from hunter-gatherers, who need to know whether others are tough enough, quick enough, bold enough to do the day's 'kill' and fight off sabre-toothed tigers and the like. If not, your role is to be back at the cave, doing your best to help protect and nurture the land and the young. That is not a soft option and usually requires more individual courage and initiative and being happy to rely on your own wits, make your own decisions and judgements, and this requires the capacity and tenacity to take a stance that others might challenge. As will become apparent to anyone who knows me or reads even a smattering blogs, Tweets, Facebook updates, etc., I do have a number of *fairly strongly* held opinions (some of which, on the UK joining the Euro for instance, I feel have been vindicated - so there!) and are more than happy to express them in, shall we say, robust terms. That of course invites criticism from time to time and that is fair enough.

Of course, if you have spent all your working life prior to going into education in the media, everything you write, say and, in TV's case, how you look (actually, increasingly in radio's case also how you look, thanks to the ubiquitous WebCam) is open to scrutiny and challenge: first by your colleagues, and then by the public. If you start on a weekly newspaper and then progress to a regional daily, as I did, you are very conscious of the impact your work has and that you not only had better get it right but you know you might have to defend it, in person, to a very angry punter who turns up at the office counter. I have a feeling that if Johann Hari, instead of going straight from Oxford University to a national, liberal newspaper had done an apprenticeship in local newspapers (so brilliantly portrayed, at least in the time the drama is set, by the recent TV adaptation of The Field of Blood), then, despite what Toby Young may think, he would be less touchy about criticism, more respectful of others' views, leave their Wikipedia pages alone, and be more wary about making stuff up or passing others' work as his own. Certainly - and of course I do have a vested interest in this - some training would be a good idea, but you can't get the feel for the relationship between the words that you type and the people who read them outside the workplace bubble until you get up close and personal with your readers and audiences.

However, journalism and broadcasting is one thing – academic writing is another and brings a whole different raft of criticism and review, which can be chastening and even crushing, but which has to be endured and expected if you are to make any kind of impact. I've loved writing since, well, since I could write – which is a terrible way of expressing a love of writing! Stephen Fry, unsurprisingly, says this a lot better, in his introduction to a new BBC series, which starts on Sunday. Here's how his piece in the Radio Times (24-30 September, 2011: 19) – which forms part of the forward to the book of the series – begins:

Words are all we have. Certainly, reader, words are all we have, you and I, as you read this and I sit and tap at my keyboard. You have no idea where I am as I do this, and I have no idea who, where or what you are as you continue to read. We are connected by a filament of language that stretches from somewhere inside my brain to somewhere inside yours. There are so many cognitive and cerebral processes involved simply in the act of my writing and your reading these words that not all the massed ranks of biology, genetics, linguistics, neurology, computational science or philosophy can properly describe, let alone understand or explain, how it all works.

 

Yes, well, not bad Stephen - but par for the course for the Fry. When I was in the final stages of writing my new book – gosh, you're wondering how many paragraphs it would take until I actually got round to the plug when you? – I re-read David Hendy's superb work on BBC Radio Four, Life On Air. It has rightly won awards: the research is extraordinarily good and, most importantly, the narrative around it is lively, engaging and even riveting – quite a feat when it's discussing internal BBC memos! David gets under the skin of what was going on, why things happened the way they did, what were the key points when decisions were made and decides if those decisions were due to the force of particular personalities, or for artistic, ideological, bureaucratic or pragmatic reasons. All this I try to do in my own research, particularly the historical elements that I'm working on. When I finished re-reading his book I e-mailed David (who I've known for some years and with whom I've presented papers at conferences and so on) and said that his work was both inspiring, but also demoralising. Inspiring, because of the quality of the work and the elegance of his writing; demoralising, because I knew that I could never write anything as good. He responded, saying that I was being too kind, etc. But I'm not - and neither is it a case of false modesty on my part; the readers of this blog will know that is not an accusation that can fairly be levelled at me! But I hope I do have a realistic assessment of my abilities. I know that my book is the best that I can produce, given my own limitations (see below!) and that of time and the distraction of little things like life, but I think I've pulled together some coherent arguments and evidence, and that it is written in a lively style. Given the wide scope indicated by the title it is of course open to criticism at a more general level; that I've chosen to concentrate on the wrong things and that I've missed or underplayed key developments and exaggerated others. Here is a bit of a blurb on the book – roaring up the Amazon top 1000,000 chart (!) - and then we can move on:

• A lively and engaging text, using interviews with broadcasters and managers, as wells as research and case studies from the UK, USA, China, India, South Africa, Australia and many other countries.
• Argues that it is important to understand broadcasting's history in order to appreciate today's issues.
• Reveals how people 'really' use the broadcast media and explains why 'on demand' and multiplatform viewing and listening is causing a fundamental shift in our relationship with broadcasting.
• Explores the significance of Reality TV, including Big Brother and shows how social media has helped to blur the distinctions between fantasy and 'truth' and the continuation of broadcasting 'myths'.
• Assesses the validity of accusations from both the 'Left' and the 'Right' of bias in broadcasting.
• Investigates the impact of broadcasting, including the TV leaders' debates in the UK 2010 general election, and arguments that TV news coverage encourages 'copycat' mass killings.
• Analyses claims of 'dumbing down' in broadcasting and contains startling evidence of reductions in viewing of 'serious' programmes.
• Shows how trust in broadcasting and broadcasters is under threat, including studies of the 'Gilligan' and 'Ross/Brand' affairs.
• Considers the impact of TV and radio programmes, formats and news coverage across national borders.
• Discusses the nature and importance of Citizen Journalism.
• Makes the case for the continued importance and special appeal of radio, including 'pirate' radio, but reveals a potentially fatal drop in listening by younger people.

I give myself credit, too, for exposing myself to those very possibilities of negative criticism. I might immodestly think that I have a good reputation at the moment and every time you put out something new you risk that reputation being damaged. Every person who creates anything – and then, when the first 'thing' turns out well, creates something else, whether it be an album, a book, a movie, or, indeed, a piece of furniture - knows this. Yet still we do it because, despite all the risks involved with such a venture, let alone the hard slog (and although the research is wonderful and the end result can be satisfying writing is hard, hard, hard!), the sacrifices, both financial (I took three months' unpaid leave because that was the only where I could have a sustained period I could really concentrate on the work) and personal, not least to my wife, you feel you need to do it. Because you can – or you think you can - and because the rewards in making the connections with the mere words that Fry talks about are immense. Getting into somebody else's brain, engaging with them through those collections of shapes, IS an extraordinary business and hugely gratifying.

After those e-mails to David I also thought I was being rather too unkind on myself; not in my assessment of the comparative merits of our work, but in remembering that (and this is absolutely not to take ANYTHING away from his towering achievements), aside of course from being highly intelligent, he had read mediaeval history at Oxford, and would therefore have been taught and mentored by some of the best in the academic world on how to research material, how to assess it and how to write it up. Whereas I didn't attend – other than weekend and summer schools - a traditional university (of any type, let alone 'the dreaming spires') and went to and FE and Tech College before becoming an indentured trainee at a local 'paper. I went into academic life late and have been playing 'catch up' ever since, in contrast to most of the others who write in my field, generally squeezing in my research and writing at week-ends and holidays. That could read like an almost Hari-style special pleading of mitigating circumstances, or a request for special sensitivity in the assessment of my work. It isn't, but, if the book doesn't go down well, those thoughts will help me bounce back and increase my determination to do even better next time (if fate and circumstances permit a 'next time'). The book is done, it's out there, and although, it will be a 'squeaky bum moment' when I see the first reviews, if they are harsh I shall at least think back to that lad with his GCSE results: that's good for me, that. Bugger! That crash was the key-ring cabinet falling down.