Kick archaic studio-bound public radio production out into 21st century public spaces : 2011 : BBC Radio

 Technological advances made during the last two to three decades have changed our world almost beyond recognition. Everyone now has the ability to be almost permanently 'connected' to a world beyond their immediate personal space.

Has BBC radio fully embraced the benefits of these technological advances? From an external perspective, the answer appears to be both 'yes' and 'no'. BBC radio seems to have implemented new technologies less obviously than BBC television. Yes, BBC radio programmes and stations now have an online presence, receive e-mails and tweets, and distribute their output live and on-demand via IP. But no, the basics of radio production have changed very little beyond a conversion from analogue tape to digital hard-drive storage.

In the 1920’s, a male radio announcer would sit in a BBC radio studio, dressed in a dinner jacket and reading a pre-prepared script. In order to be interviewed, guests would have to physically come to the studio. Everything had to be broadcast live, as there was no technology to include 'actuality' from beyond the studio's confines. All the news and information had to be filtered through the on-air presenter. Listener involvement was limited to letters submitted, selected, edited and read on-air by the presenter.

Surprisingly, the radio production format has changed little in the interim ninety years. Presenters still sit in studios filled with expensive radio hardware and they still act as filters for the information that flows into the studio. Only three substantial changes are evident: recording systems have allowed interviews and actuality to be incorporated into programmes, and a programme itself to be time-shifted; phone-ins have allowed listener voices to be put live on-air via the telephone; and BBC reporters can be incorporated live into programmes via ISDN or IP from around the world. All these developments were pioneered by the BBC.

If we look at BBC television, we see that an increasing amount of content broadcast on the 'BBC News' channel comes in the form of photographs, poor quality mobile phone video (viz the 'Arab Spring' in Syria), eyewitness reports by phone line and Skype video/audio interviews supplied by the public from their offices or homes. In the current jargon, much of this could be called 'user generated content'.

However, in radio, this revolution has simply not happened. When did you last hear a piece of audio on BBC radio that had been recorded and submitted by a member of the public? Never? In radio, public participation in the output still remains limited to content initiated or filtered by the production team. A member of the public will be asked to connect to the studio for a formal interview with a presenter either live in the studio, from a BBC contribution studio or via a phone line. Or a reporter may take a portable audio recorder out to interview a member of the public on location and the outcome is edited before transmission into an audio 'package.'

The result is that, just as in the 1920’s, what we hear on the radio has still been filtered through the programme presenter and producer, so that the resulting programme is delivered from the confines of a cosy, air-conditioned studio. Radio is still largely produced in a vacuum that is far apart from the real world. Of course, there are obvious exceptions such as 'From Our Own Correspondent' and 'Question Time.' But these remain exceptions.

The continuing reliance within radio upon the hardware-equipped studio is particularly hard to understand when digital audio equipment is smaller, lighter, more portable and cheaper than its analogue ancestors. A radio programme can be produced, mixed, edited and broadcast from a basic laptop computer using software-based technology rather than considerably more expensive hardware. In this sense, radio should by now be far ahead of television, where digital equipment remains expensive, complex and still requires substantial bit rates and data storage for broadcast quality.

These incredible technological advances in radio production have been well understood and seized upon by people outside the BBC who do not have privileged access to expensive hardware-based recording studios. In their thousands, these people are making their own radio programmes (‘podcasts’) and creating their own online radio stations. The technology has filtered down so far that even a local primary school has its own radio production studio, linked to a low-power FM transmitter on the school's roof so that children can listen on ordinary radios to the programmes they make.

London is one of the most exciting cities in the world. Yet, when I listen to 'BBC London 94.9 FM', I do not hear that excitement reflected much in its output. What I do hear are presenters sat in hardware-based studios, talking with guests they have invited there or talking via phone lines to selected contributors outside. What is sorely missing is 'actuality.' News stories are often reduced to 'packages' that can be inserted into hourly news bulletins. Yet the technology already exists (smartphones, IP, 3G) so that the hundreds of news stories that happen in London each day could be put to-air quickly using actuality live or 'as-live' recorded by either BBC reporters or the public.

Existing technologies could be implemented to create an exciting news and information driven radio station for London that more closely reflected life in the capital. It would entail taking risks, but it is only through risk-taking that innovation will happen. BBC London's share of radio listening in London is only 1.4% and the station reaches only 5% of the population each week. Licence Fee payers could be better served by a local radio station in London that used new technologies to create an audio soundtrack that reflected their lives in this city. Such opportunities to use new technologies to change the face of radio are being missed, or being left to television to implement.

I lived in Toronto for five years and the city's only independent television station, 'CityTV', offered one of the most impressive uses of new technology I have ever seen. For a start, the station did not have traditional TV studios. News programmes were presented by anchors perched on the corner of their own office desks. The nightly one-hour local news programme was filled to the brim with reports from a small team of one-person 'videographers' who whizzed around the city all day and recorded every available story using a single handheld camera. Sometimes the quality was not great, but the content accurately reflected the life of the city much better than any other local medium in Toronto.

At CityTV, the weekday morning show was presented from the station's ground floor foyer. Cameras, lights, cables, production staff were all left in-shot, as were the people on the busy street outside and casual visitors to the station's offices. CityTV's owner, 'media visionary' Moses Znaimer, called this infrastructure "the streetfront/studioless television operating system" and it worked fantastically. Every Friday evening, the same foyer was turned into a free nightclub that was televised live for several hours with DJs, visiting music acts and short interviews. Admittedly, CityTV's output was sometimes chaotic but it used cheap, lightweight technologies to successfully break down the barrier that had existed previously between formal, studio-limited programmes and their audiences. The people of Toronto felt truly connected with CityTV because every city dweller knew the location of its downtown building and could wander in, even during its live shows.

I had marvelled at CityTV's bold use of cutting-edge technology fifteen years ago. And, since then, technologies for television have advanced much further. But it is the medium of audio where even more fundamental breakthroughs have taken place. The ability to use a smartphone, a laptop or a cheap audio recorder to record perfect digital sound quality in WAV format has opened up the possibility to produce content for broadcast much more significantly than in television. Yet, from the outside, there seems to be no strategic vision to implement these technologies within the BBC in order to change the way in which radio more pro-actively involves itself with the world outside its radio studios.

Individual BBC reporters are doing amazing things with new technology. Nick Garnett provided live interviews for 'Radio Four' about the outcome of the last election from a moving tram in Sheffield using only his smartphone installed with the 'Luci Live' application for broadcasters. His personal website demonstrates in videos his evangelism for these new technologies. He contrasts his ability to produce live coverage of the recent Salford/Manchester riots safely using only his handled smartphone with the impossibility twenty years earlier when a high-tech van was necessary, even for a short live report, and the job of holding the microphone remained the responsibility of a BBC Studio Manager.

At the heart of technological change is a necessary accompanying change in working practices in many parts of BBC radio. Whilst television underwent fundamental change when it was transformed into 'BBC Vision', the radio infrastructure has remained much the same. Whilst BBC television has been mostly casualised by freelance staff, radio remains dominated by full-time employees. Although BBC television has stiff competition from commercial stations, BBC radio attracts the majority of listening (54% currently) and its share continues to grow. The grave danger is that complacency in BBC radio from high ratings can stunt innovation. 

Whilst there is no doubt that technological innovations have been successfully incorporated into current working practices within BBC radio, it is a much greater challenge to incorporate the disruptive influences of those technologies in a way that forces change in current working methods. For example, at present, producers and editors of radio programmes set the agendas of programmes themselves and then seek to fulfil those plans by inviting 'talking heads' and commissioning 'packages' to make their points. This is a demand-led production system, working from the demands of the producer.

However, in a world where there are already hundreds of pieces of audio content available to choose from to make a programme, the production system could become more supply-led. The editor would use a mix of commissioned pieces and the best or most appropriate of what already existed from BBC contributors or the public. In fact, the radio editor would become more like an editor of a newspaper, selecting from what content already existed, rather than commissioning every item from scratch.

If the thought of including 'user generated content' from the British public in network radio output proves alarming, it is worth remembering that there are dozens of media courses up and down the country whose students would love to add some BBC radio contributions to their CVs. There are also 300 community radio stations that have an existing ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with the BBC to share content in both directions. Yet BBC radio at network level does not seem to have reached out to the wider constituency of audio producers beyond its own staff and ex-staff. When I interviewed senior BBC network radio staff last year for a ‘BBC Trust’ report and asked why no audio was being recycled from BBC local radio, student radio or podcast producers, I was told that they would not meet the 'quality' threshold. Equally, you might ask why the Sony Award-winning 'Hackney Podcast' is not a regular part of BBC London's output.

This 'quality' barrier is an anachronism that remains in place in radio and yet seems to have been largely overcome in television. Within BBC radio, 'quality' is even used as a means to segregate one division's content from another's. In television, if the content communicates something newsworthy or significant, blurry mobile phone footage is broadcast. Yet, in radio, the audio quality often seems more important to producers than the content itself. This requires not so much a change in technology, as a change in attitudes and editorial policies that have not caught up with the technological possibilities.

A station such as 'BBC 1Xtra' should be an exciting and ground-breaking experience to listen to. Yet, on the occasions I have listened, its output has seemed hideously studio-bound and insular to me. There appears to be little difference between 1Xtra and 1920's BBC radio, as a presenter still sits in a hardware studio, but with an assistant who reads tweets instead of letters. During one show I heard recently, the presenter was reduced to bemoaning that he had left his lip balm at home, and a clip was used of musician interviews made days earlier backstage at an awards ceremony.

Surely a station such as BBC 1Xtra that is aimed at young people should have an immediacy and an incredibly 'live' feel to it that is able to challenge the speed of competing information sources delivered via the internet. 1Xtra should be overflowing with exclusive news, information and music, artists dropping in for short chats and 'actuality' broadcast live or 'as-live' that reflect the diversity of the British black music scene. Yet I do not hear this kind of excitement when I listen to 1Xtra. The station would be a perfect candidate to adopt CityTV's studio-less operating system, where it could operate from an open-door shopfront rather than from the remote bowels of a BBC office. It could even broadcast from different cities week to week, like an ever-travelling roadshow.

I have a particular interest in 1Xtra because, twenty years ago, I had launched 'KISS FM' in London as the UK's first black music radio station. Even then, I had used what few new technologies were available to make the programme content less studio-bound. I regularly sent one reporter out with my mobile phone (at a time when they were uncommon) and her interviews and actuality were put live to air using nothing more sophisticated than the phone's low-quality microphone. The audience loved that immediacy. Then, after work, I would take a digital recorder to London clubs and record the whole night's DJ set for subsequent broadcast. These technological innovations made KISS FM one of the most successful station launches of its time because listeners understood that the station was 'out there in London' rather than always studio-bound. 

 Let us be clear here. Radio needs to implement as many new technologies as possible in order to adapt and change what it can do if it is to remain relevant and valuable to its audiences. Although, in total, radio listening in the UK has reached an all-time high (partly as an outcome of the increasing population), there are some disturbing long-terms trends. Six years ago, 15–24-year-olds started to spend significantly less time listening to broadcast radio. More recently, 25–34-year-olds are also spending less time with broadcast radio. If this trend continues, part of an entire generation could lose the radio habit.

BBC Radio needs to compete for consumers' time with every other distraction out there – particularly the internet, games, social networking and video. To do that, radio has to re-invent itself so that it is exciting and entertaining for a whole new generation. That requires radio to respond to the disruptive influences of new technology, not in a defensive way, but to embrace change and to understand that, just as with other businesses, if you do not change and adapt with the times, your brand could easily die.

At present, the BBC's strategy for implementation of new technologies in radio could appear to be somewhat slow, scattershot and disjointed. What is needed is a joined-up roadmap to bring BBC radio firmly into the 21st century, a determined push to move radio beyond its 1920's production methods, and a programme to combat internal complacency and inertia through persuasion and education. The biggest enemy to such change often derives from the people entrenched in an organisation, not from the availability of technologies. In that sense, the imperative for change has to come from within.

The BBC has a long tradition of being at the forefront of new technological developments in radio. It is admired the world over for its innovation in the radio medium and the quality of its outputs. The biggest current danger is that, unless a strategy is developed for BBC radio that combines the implementation of new technologies with changing methods of radio production, the BBC's track record of innovation could be acceded elsewhere.

In our enlarged, globalised radio marketplace, it would be perfectly possible for Google or Microsoft to invest sufficient R&D seed money to develop a new style of radio that could set the youth of the world on fire (viz Facebook). Until now, the main threat to broadcast radio from the internet has been in back-to-back music applications (Spotify, Last.fm) which add no value to widely available pre-recorded music. However, compared to the visual medium, it would prove relatively cheap to add value to that audio content if you could identify the appropriate editorial that will appeal to a whole new generation as 'the new radio.' It is important that BBC radio faces this global threat by implementing innovation as a must-have-now rather than as a long-term objective.

Within the BBC, there are already plenty of staff embracing such change on an individual level. More than 300 BBC staff have signed up to Audioboo, a UK-based online exchange for short audio clips. Similarly, some BBC programme makers are contributing to PRX, a US-based online marketplace for both complete programmes and short audio clips. I understand that the BBC is currently developing its own in-house version of these sort of E-Bay's for audio content.

The imperative to centralise data storage of BBC audio so as to create an internal 'cloud' system for radio content provides the perfect opportunity to develop new production systems that can share content, both internally and from outside the BBC. The traditional 'silo' system, whereby individual radio programmes and individual radio stations have managed their own content resources, cannot be productive during a time when the Licence Fee produces pressures to share and consolidate resources as much as possible.

More than ever, in BBC radio, change is necessary. But change can also be very hard to make happen, particularly within large organisations. I would suggest that the task ahead is to develop an interlocking roadmap for radio technologies that embraces:

•   more agile content ingest, storage and accessibility (avoiding transcoding)
•   radio production processes that focus on the intrinsic public value of content, more than its audio quality or source
•   the evolution of radio studios from fixed hardware to portable software
•   a plan for multi-platform distribution based on cost-benefit analysis and accurate usage data (RAJAR platform data are inaccurate)
•   IP delivery of radio via frictionless technologies, reducing bandwidth through multicasting
•   a focus on content availability, connectivity and 'searchability'
•   the unlocking of BBC archive radio content
•   an appropriate and future-proof metadata architecture for audio content distribution
•   use of commodity software or collaborations with external suppliers wherever possible.

The aim: to ensure that the connections between BBC radio and its audiences are maximised through available technologies, delivering content efficiently and easily wherever and whenever it is demanded.

[In 2011, London recruitment agency Lonmoor invited me to apply for the vacancy of ‘Technology Controller, Audio & Music’ at the BBC. Following initial discussion, it was suggested I submit these ideas on paper, after which I received an email response: “We shall conclude our shortlisting process in the next week and be back in touch.” I am still waiting. It became the fifty-ninth consecutive BBC job for which my application was rejected.]

[Available as a download.]

I just looked around and he was gone : 1979 : Jerry Dennis, Palatinate editor, Durham University

 “I am here for the Accommodation Office, please,” I said with trepidation to the uniformed man behind the huge wooden reception desk in the lobby of the Old Shire Hall. On the front of the desk, elaborately carved nineteenth century working-class scenes from Durham’s coalmining industry seemed to clash with this building’s present users – high-flying academics and the children of Britain’s upper classes.

The man behind the desk looked at me with a suspicion seemingly reserved for the occasional long-haired student who ventured into his domain wearing crumpled denim clothes and platform shoes … like me.

“You will have to leave a message,” he eventually replied in a bored tone that conveyed the regularity with which he was required to offer such a response. He did not bother to elucidate whether the Accommodation Office was presently unmanned, temporarily closed or existed in any physical form. Instead, he gestured towards an open hard-backed ledger laid at one end of his mighty desk, beside which was a chained Biro.

I was made to feel so small and insignificant in the foyer of that hugely imposing town centre monolith constructed in 1898 as the headquarters of Durham County Council but, since 1963, used as the administrative centre of Durham University. (Years later, when I watched Lowry approach the front desk of The Ministry of Information Retrieval in the movie ‘Brazil’, I instantly recalled my sentiment). I wrote in the visitors’ book that I was requesting information urgently about landlords presently offering accommodation to rent. 

I was homeless, secretly spending my nights in a sleeping bag on the floor of an office in the Students’ Union building, Dunelm House. Student ‘digs’ around Durham were advertised but landlords were demanding rents way beyond my budget. Extortion proved no barrier to the 95%+ of undergraduates who had arrived from private schools, receiving only the minimum student grant from their local authority, but whose parents were sufficiently wealthy to uncomplainingly pay such rents through their noses. Some students I met lived in accommodation their parents had even bought for them as an investment within this English county so poor that miners’ cottages could be acquired for £1,000.

I was not amongst this privileged majority of students. Since arriving in Durham in 1976, a chunk of my full student grant from Surrey County Council and my vacation earnings had been diverted to pay the utility, property ‘rates’ bills and overheads of my family’s home in Camberley. After my father had deserted his family four years earlier and then ignored court-ordered maintenance payments, my mother had been struggling to raise my two younger siblings in austere circumstances. During my first two undergraduate years, I had opted for subsidised college rooms but then had been forced out onto the ‘open market’ by university policy. Additionally, I had waived my vacation earnings during the summer of 1978 by choosing to remain in Durham to edit (unpaid) the annual ‘Durham Student Handbook’ with the hope it might benefit my career in media. Whereas, the previous two summers, I had worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week continuously for two months in a basement office in Aldershot, maximising available overtime to help fund my family’s expenses.

Weeks after having left my message for the university’s Accommodation Office, I received by internal mail sent to my college’s basement pigeonholes a photocopied A4 page listing about a dozen local landlords. This document was of no practical use, lacking basic, accurate and timely information that could have helped me. I wondered whether the university’s ‘Accommodation Office’ really even existed since Durham’s posh students scarcely appeared to require practical assistance when their parents were still organising their education. Who was the university’s ‘Accommodation Officer’ Catrin Prydderch-Jones, a 1977 graduate of Durham University with a 2:2 in music who had been appointed in September that year to the post of “Administrative Assistant in the University Office”?

I was not her only unsatisfied customer. In January 1979, a letter from archaeology undergraduate Jeanette Ratcliffe published in Durham student newspaper Palatinate had complained:

• “Miss Prydderch-Jones sent out to students looking for accommodation next year a list of landlords and their respective houses and flats” that was “incomprehensible, grossly out of date and of little constructive use”
• “A considerable number of landlords no longer wished to be on the list and students who contacted them became the subject of their anger at receiving numerous phone calls a day enquiring about their property.”
• One listed house “according to the landlord has not been standing for six years”
• “What exactly does Miss Prydderch-Jones do to retain her position in the Accommodation Office?”
• “… I suggest she give up her position as Accommodation Officer”.

In a follow-up front-page article in February 1979, the student newspaper reported that “doubts have been expressed in Durham Student Union council [meetings] about the efficiency of an Old Shire Hall-based Accommodation Office.” It explained that “complaints about the way that the [Accommodation] Office is working led Palatinate to talk to Ms. Prydderch-Jones” who was pictured sat at a desk. Her quoted responses proved to be wholly evasive and she ended by assuring readers “there is no crisis at the moment about finding places to live!”, apparently oblivious to the notion that the high prices of available accommodation might prove a barrier for those students having to survive without parental support.

In the same issue of Palatinate that had published the letter from Ratcliffe, a front-page expose had criticised the financial management of the Durham University Athletic Union [DUAU], provider of the university’s “excellent” sporting facilities, under the headline ‘DUAU Foul Play’. Beneath a photo of DUAU treasurer Ian Graham sat at his Old Shire Hall desk, the article explained that the £38 annual ‘Composition Fee’ paid by the local government authorities of each of Durham’s 4,000 students was divided by the university between its athletic union, student union and college ‘Junior Common Rooms’. DUAU audited accounts showed that:

• In 1977/8, 42% of the Composition Fee had been spent on sport, compared to the 18% national average (the DUAU share increased to 52% the following year)
• When Durham colleges’ expenditure was included, £20 of the £38 per head Composition Fee was spent on sport.

DUAU accounts documented a surplus greater than £4,000 during each of the previous three years, a situation that “should lead to a cut in their grant, as showing a surplus is interpreted as meaning that too much money has been given”. Surpluses of £5,200 in 1976/7 and £10,000 in 1977/8 were said to have been allocated to “reserve funds”. Questioned about these reserves, Graham “evaded the fundamental points by talking at some length about the rather vague uses of these funds” which the article concluded “does not alleviate Palatinate’s concern[s]” which were:

• “One of the complaints that the [government] Department of Education & Science is making is that there is not enough public accountability for student unions”
• “DUAU, by claiming large sums of money for their FUTURE but, as yet, UNSPECIFIED capital expenditure, is effectively avoiding any sort of accountability whatsoever.”

Some of Ian Graham’s unverified arguments in the interview to justify DUAU’s dominant share of the per capita funding appeared bizarre:

• “It is much easier for a student who has been actively involved in university sport to get a job”
• “Many parents have sent their children here because of its fine sporting reputation”
• “There was a correlation between the increase in good A-level results of Durham students and the growth and success of DUAU”.

Confusingly, although DUAU was constituted as a student organisation, just like Durham Students’ Union, Graham was no student but rather the university registrar responsible for managing the entire institution’s administration. This would be like having a school principal in charge of its students’ council! It was no wonder that DUAU could appropriate the greater part of each student’s Composition Fee with impunity, to the detriment of the student union, because each year it was the university administration, led by the very same Ian Graham, that determined the division of funds. Conflict of interest or what?

These separate anonymous front-page articles appeared in Palatinate within weeks, criticising two Durham University administrators, Catrin Prydderch-Jones and Ian Graham. However, a link existed between these two that had not been published. It was Graham who had appointed Prydderch-Jones to the accommodation job for which she appeared to be poorly qualified. It was also Graham who allegedly had invited Prydderch-Jones amongst a bevy of posh, female undergraduate first-years to stay in the expansive university flat at 71 Saddler Street that accompanied his job.

Whether the Palatinate editor of the day knew of this connection I know not. What I divine is that the student newspaper’s simultaneous critical coverage of Graham and his ‘protegee’ must have embarrassed and infuriated the registrar who ran our university with an iron rod. Having served in the British Army and been wounded at Anzio during “the Italian campaign”, he had joined Durham University in 1950 as assistant registrar. Promoted to registrar in 1963, Graham devised and drafted a new constitution and statutes for the university that were reported to be “almost entirely Ian’s work.” His objective was said to be “to provide for the North of England a Collegiate University, one in which the undergraduate experience would be essentially the same, though simpler (and less expensive) than that afforded by Oxford and Cambridge in the South.”

A lifelong bachelor, Graham was said to have given “to the University the time which most people spend with their families” and to have “sought out also a large number [of students] whose names were known to him through his acquaintances in the schools or among previous generations of students.” In this way, he perpetuated the institution’s old (private) school tie connections, making Durham University a natural social repository for posh people’s children not smart enough to attend ‘Oxbridge’. Apparently, “all of these people were welcome in [Graham's flat at] 71 Saddler Street, not only for the crowded parties which regularly took place there, but on frequent more private occasions.”

Whoa! This 50-something year old bureaucrat was organising student ‘parties’ for newly arrived teens in his flat? It would be easy to characterise Graham as the Hugh Heffner of Durham University, an aged man with a gammy limb, surrounded by a bevy of good-looking, posh-sounding, double-barrelled debutantes prancing around his flat in their underwear. The truth is rather more insidious. Graham had been the architect in 1963 of Durham University’s ‘divorce’ from its considerably less posh partner Newcastle University and had accumulated more power to control the organisation he had created during thirty years in the job than anyone else employed in Old Shire Hall. Any perceived threat to Graham’s eco-system would have to be eradicated. And so it was.

The elected editor of Palatinate at the time was Jerry Dennis, an English Literature undergraduate who was not at all the typical upper-class student that Graham desired at ‘his’ university. Despite a posh accent, Dennis appeared somewhat hippy-like with a tall rake-thin body and long straight brown hair falling to his shoulders. He spoke languorously and purposefully with a keen wit and an analytical mind. He was fearless and unafraid to challenge the status quo, hence the investigative articles concerning Prydderch-Jones and Graham published in a fortnightly student newspaper that, until his appointment, had been more a gossip sheet and CV builder for adolescent essays by aspiring upper-crust authors.

Graham required revenge. Unfortunately for him, Dennis’ two-year academic record at Durham had been positive as he had passed all mandatory exams. Instead, Graham had to scour ancient statutes within the 1832 Act of Parliament and 1837 Royal Charter that had created England’s third-oldest university. There he discovered that a student accused of holding the university ‘in contempt’ could be expelled by a specially convened committee. This procedure had never been used in Durham’s century and a half history, though Graham was undaunted given the power he wielded. He set about convening the requisite brand-new committee of university personnel upon whom he could rely to do his bidding.

Weeks later, I was startled to find in my college pigeonhole an official letter from Ian Graham inviting me to be the one student that the statute required to attend the meeting of this committee which would be considering Dennis’ case. Out of the university’s 4,000 students, it was against all odds that I had supposedly been chosen randomly to consider a verdict on a fellow student with whom I was already acquainted. I could read between the letter’s lines. In reality, it had been sent as a warning shot across my bows, hinting that I might soon follow Dennis and be dispatched into the wilderness. Why?

That year, I had been tasked with writing the annual Durham Students’ Union submission to the university to request the following year’s Union funding through the aforementioned Composition Fee. My application was the most voluminous and forensic ever compiled, documenting why a substantial year-on-year increase proved necessary. The chair of the university Finance Committee, finance officer Alec McWilliam, seemed to appreciate my expertise in accountancy (the result of my mother having taught me double-entry bookkeeping and accounts reconciliation at the age of seven). The outcome was that McWilliam’s committee awarded Durham Students’ Union its largest ever year-on-year increase in funding.

However, for every winner, there has always to be a loser. My personal success meant that Ian Graham’s competing bid for additional funds for the Athletics Union had been rebuffed at the same committee meeting. For once, Graham was not getting all his own way and was probably not enamoured of this outcome. That was my reading of the reason I had received his letter. My suspicions were confirmed when I called the confirmation phone number in the letter and was told by a woman administrator at Old Shire Hall that my receipt of the invitation letter had been an ‘administrative error’. In fact, I had never been randomly selected to witness the ‘Inquisition’ against Jerry Dennis … who Graham’s committee agreed to expel at the end of his second year.

Palatinate subsequently published a front-page story beneath a photo of Dennis that noted “a considerable degree of shock and dismay at the apparently unsympathetic attitude taken by the University authorities towards this case, an attitude which several students believe to be almost vindictive.” It commented somewhat hesitantly that “the paper did adopt a particularly critical stance under the editorship of Mr Dennis, and many feel that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the difficulties he created for the University may not be totally unconnected with his present predicament.”

Incensed by Dennis’ expulsion, I wrote Palatinate a signed letter it published in October 1979:

“It is frightening to think that any students at this University can be sent down for not ‘keeping term’, which could mean:

• Not attending a course of instruction (which could be a subsidiary [subject]) to the satisfaction of the Chairman of the Board of Studies concerned.
• Not attending ‘academic engagements to the satisfaction of the Board of Studies concerned.
• Not presenting written work as and when required unless excused in advance.

Is it really fair to leave such vague definitions to the interpretation of the Chairman of the Board of Studies? How clearly are these conditions communicated to new students? How many students treat their lectures as ‘optional’?

It is a sobering thought that if YOU do not get on the right side of the Chairman of your Board of Studies (do you know who he/she is?) and you:

• Miss a lecture because your alarm clock fails to go off
• Miss a tutorial because you muddle the date
• Hand in an essay late because you could not get the books

YOU could be accused of not keeping term …. Sweet dreams.”

If Ian Graham’s letter to me the previous term had been an oblique personal warning, this publication of my opinions ensured that there was now an oversized target on my back. That is a story for another day.

Despite this realisation, I was determined to persevere with investigating Ian Graham for a potential further article in Palatinate. Each new academic year, Graham distributed invitations for a ‘fresher’ party held in his flat to first-year female students arriving from the private schools he favoured. My then student girlfriend had a friend who was prepared to pose as one of these targeted young women. ‘KT’ was suitably talkative, pretty and had a posh accent. Although she was in her second year, she would attend using a ticket we wrangled from a new student who had no interest in taking up the offer.

KT arrived at Ian Graham’s flat the evening of the party with my Sony TCM-3 cassette recorder under her clothing, attached to a hidden lapel microphone. She was sufficiently bold to strike up conversation with Graham who, as hoped, suggested she return on her own for one of his “more private occasions.” However, after reviewing the tape recording, there was nothing substantial enough from their dialogue with which to craft an article. After much discussion, and in light of Jerry Dennis’ expulsion, we decided regrettably that a further ‘mission’ to follow up Graham’s invitation would prove too dangerous for KT’s academic future. His annual recruitment of ‘pretty young things’ would continue regardless.

I had been upset, angry and horrified by Jerry Dennis’ expulsion. I still am. It was me who had analysed the audited financial data for the article Dennis published about DUAU’s finances. I was partly responsible for the ructions caused with Ian Graham. However, it frustrates me that, whenever Palatinate is mentioned now in the media, its former student editors Hunter Davies and Harold Evans are frequently vaunted for their subsequent glittering journalistic careers. From my perspective, it was Dennis who introduced investigative journalism into the formerly staid student newspaper … and paid a terrible price. The Jerry Dennis I recall remains an inspiration.

On 27 December 1984, Ian Graham was returning to Durham from Edinburgh by car when he was involved in an accident in which he died from his injuries. His official university obituary mentioned his “happy and congenial social life” and noted that, for many Durham graduates, “the name of Ian Graham has been something of a legend.”

In March that year, the British government had announced the initial closure of twenty coalmines, including one in County Durham, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. It was the cornerstone of a deliberate strategy by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher to destroy the strong trade unions within traditional North of England industries, the dominant employer of working-class people there. This annihilation was enabled by financial and electoral support for Thatcher’s Conservative Party provided by successive generations of the very same privileged, wealthy class of (mostly) southerners with whom Ian Graham had successfully populated Durham University. Their ideological objective destroyed the surrounding County Durham local economy and created mass unemployment on a hitherto unseen scale.

The figurines of miners carved into the front of that huge wooden Edwardian reception desk in Old Shire Hall would have wept at the ease with which their new owner’s affluent cohorts had so casually succeeded in destroying their centuries-old livelihoods. Before long, coalmining disappeared altogether from Durham.

You little trust-maker, you’re a heart-breaker : 2006 : Claire Enders, Enders Analysis

 I was seated in the London Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane watching a performance, hardly my usual weekday evening entertainment. It was my first time ‘at the opera’ and I had absolutely no comprehension of the storyline unfolding on-stage. Instead, my mind was wandering to a recent rewatch of the 1976 horror film ’The Omen’. It was ostensibly about the cruel, devilish offspring of a United States ambassador to London who delights in plotting terrible ends for the adults around him, his elevated status immunising him from scrutiny. Viewing it again, I had wondered if the movie had been written by American screenwriter David Seltzer as an allegory for the subset of wealthy, privileged heirs who zealously execute their destructive ambitions to make life hell for the ‘little people’ around them. In Hollywood? In London?

During my career in a media industry dominated by the privileged, I have observed many such ‘fortunates’ seemingly glide effortlessly through their gilded lives, exercising a steely determination to wreak havoc and mayhem on us ‘unfortunates’. One colleague at a London ‘indie’ record company was driven to suicide by his manipulative, lying boss who subsequently was promoted to the top of the industry with impunity. I had mentored an excellent daytime radio presenter with incredible ratings who was sacked by a new station boss lacking any radio production experience, ostensibly because the DJ in question was black. Sadly, he never worked in radio again. I have witnessed the ease with which talented Brits’ careers and lives have been destroyed by managers wielding their power of destruction in a sad indictment of Britain’s rotten class system.

The British political system stinks in exactly the same way. Think chancellor George Osborne’s imposition of a wholly unnecessary ‘austerity’ policy in 2010-2016 that reduced so many to poverty in order to further enrich the already rich. Think the entire ‘Brexit’ scam dreamt up by Old Etonians to wilfully impoverish the entire non-privileged nation. While the rest of us lose sleep fretting about how to pay our red reminders, those lacking such money worries are granted sufficient time and energy to plan and plot ways to destroy others’ lives. I have no idea why some who inherit so much wealth seem to delight in destroying the lives of those of us lacking silver spoons.

Why was I at the opera? I was three weeks into a new media analyst job in London when my boss kindly offered me and a work colleague two tickets each to attend English National Opera’s performance of Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’, described by the ‘Financial Times’ as “so entrancing that analysis can only belittle its impact.” This unexpected invitation to such a posh event had necessitated the hasty purchase of a designer formal jacket for me, my most costly clothing purchase ever, and a smart dress for my wife, rendering the invitation not as ‘free’ as it had initially appeared. I had never had to dress up like this to skank beside the speaker columns of Jah Shaka’s reggae sound system nights! However, having just started with my latest employer, it seemed churlish not to accept such an apparently generous offer.

So, there we were, my wife and I sat together for two hours (without interval) on the venue’s plush front row seats in our finery, accompanied by my work colleague and her partner. I had no inkling my boss would be attending too, but there she was, sat between us two couples as if an enthroned queen flanked by loyal courtiers. It was all very civilised. A night at the opera! How innocent the occasion appeared. I wondered whether there would be further ‘refined’ cultural events I might be invited to attend, their expense normally off-limits during two decades living in London. At the end of the performance, we said our goodbyes and headed home our separate ways. For one night, I had been a guest in posh peoples’ world. I was not reflecting upon why my new workmate and I alone out of the larger analyst team had been offered invites.

My young female colleague had arrived at Enders Analysis unannounced soon after me. ‘HT’ was likewise employed as a media analyst, having just relocated from a plum job at the German office of a global entertainment business in order to join her boyfriend in London. Until her appearance, I had been hastily installed at a spare desk in a cramped, noisy upstairs office shared with other analysts. It was less than ideal to be in such close proximity to the incessant banter of loud, patronising former private schoolboys. Then, Claire Enders instructed HT and me to work together in a previously unoccupied large basement office that was eerily spacious and quiet. We were given our first client project that would utilise our combined knowledge of the music industry and copyright systems.

We quickly found other things we had in common. We were both ‘outsiders’ compared to the company’s all-male all-Brit analyst staff that, mostly toff, appeared to have scant hands-on industry experience. HT was North American, while I had relocated there for six years and had worked for a large American media public corporation. We set to work on our first little client project which pleasingly necessitated little contact with our colleagues sat two floors above us. Our basement room felt like a private oasis of calm compared to the strident, booming male voices prevalent upstairs. 

For lunch, the men upstairs would frequent a local ‘greasy spoon’ café whose food had made me ill after accepting an invitation to accompany them during my first week, or they visited a ‘Spaghetti House’ restaurant. Cooked lunches had never been my thing. I preferred a sandwich or wrap, so I would accompany HT to the local ‘Pret A Manger’ or ‘Eat’ to buy takeaways. Frankly, after my initial attempt at social lunching with the lads upstairs, during which they had grilled me about which school I had attended thirty years ago, enquiring whether it was a ‘private’ grammar school, I was relieved to have an excuse to escape their company.

London’s Mayfair district proved a bizarre place to work. Not only is it the most expensive square on the ‘Monopoly’ board, it remains home to the city’s richest residents, costliest townhouses and most exclusive shops. Around the corner from our office was the shop window of ‘The Spy Shop’ in South Audley Street, displaying secret camera apparel and surveillance equipment hitherto only seen in James Bond movies. Shopfronts with beautifully lit showrooms had inordinately expensive huge shiny new cars inside to tempt a passing resident to pop in impulsively one lunchtime and casually lay down a volume of cash that could have bought me my first house.

HT and I would regularly walk past the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square where former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko would be poisoned later that year. When the weather allowed, we sat in the Square on a bench to eat our takeaways, overlooked by the United States Embassy and opposite the statue of American wartime president Franklin Roosevelt. HT laughed when, reading the plaque beneath the monument, I pronounced his middle name as ‘Del-AH-no’. The only person I had come across before with that name was Jamaican singer Delano Stewart whose song ‘Stay A Little Bit Longer’ had been one of my first reggae purchases in 1970.

Other days, we would walk further to the ‘Eat’ shop on Berkeley Square, sit inside if it was wet or otherwise find a bench in the calming Square, chatting about our working lives before having been thrown together by our present employer. On one occasion, we walked after lunch to the Myanmar embassy on Charles Street to pick up visitor visas for HT and her boyfriend to take a vacation booked there. I kept my opinion to myself about supporting an oppressive regime through international tourism. These carefree lunchtimes made my job bearable at a time when I was already finding our employer’s master/servant management style worryingly reminiscent of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’.

After a few weeks in the basement office, we completed our first project successfully and I was hoping that we would be asked to work together in the service of a further client, given how successful and productive we had been. However, it was not to be. I was sent to the offices of a law firm to work on a project that would occupy the rest of my year. Despite her expertise on the issues with which I was now tasked, HT was elsewhere working on other projects. At my new location in an office block above City Thameslink station, I now ate lunch alone in a cheap nearby takeaway. Those carefree spring and summer days munching our food together became a distant memory. I no longer had a lunchtime respite from the oppressive work environment in which I was immersed.

Months later, on a rare occasion when I returned to the Mayfair office, HT buttonholed me and asked if we could chat privately. She seemed uncharacteristically worried and upset. She told me about two distinct issues that had understandably shocked her. Our boss, Claire Enders, had contacted her boyfriend after the opera event we had attended and the two had talked without her prior knowledge. Secondly, her boyfriend had come to believe that HT and I were having some kind of workplace affair. I was astonished. This was all unknown to me, I explained. I had certainly done nothing to propagate such a falsehood. Whether she believed me or not, I never discovered. Mine was an innocent friendship with a woman who was closer to the age of my daughter than to old-man me. What could I do to rescue this situation? Apparently, nothing.

Weeks later, I learnt indirectly that HT had quit work, though there had been no goodbye or official announcement. She had simultaneously broken up with her boyfriend and returned to her home city in North America, presumably to rebuild her upended career. I was shocked and saddened. What had precisely happened I would never know, but it might appear to an observer that my positive working relationship with HT, unbeknownst to me, had proven a catalyst for forces that I had neither anticipated nor understood. Nobody else in our workplace seemed the least concerned about HT’s disappearance after her few months there.

Much later, in March 2007, Claire Enders asked me to contact HT to request some information about a project she had done during her time in our office. I refused, explaining that I did not feel HT would want ever again to hear from anybody at Enders Analysis. I did wonder why I was being singled out for this task rather than any one of my colleagues. It felt like a concerted effort to rub salt into the fatally wounded relationship between myself and HT. Enders persisted and so I eventually did write a cringingly inappropriate email begging for information. I received no reply and understandably so. I never heard from HT again.

Perhaps this was just a strange workplace misunderstanding into which I might have read too much, you could be thinking. Mmmm. Later that year, a young female intern was given a temporary desk in our now crowded basement office of all-male analysts in Mayfair. Such interns were usually the offspring of high-flying media owners whom Claire Enders had befriended and they often displayed almost zero interest in our work. This one was unusual because she was a student friend of Claire Enders’ daughter at St Andrews University, the alma mater of British royalty and the rich.

Everyone else in the office rudely ignored her presence so I chatted with her and discovered she was a big music fan. I lent her my ‘C86’ NME cassette, a compilation of my original Scottish ‘Postcard Records’ singles that I treasure, and a reissued Ella Washington CD of soul recordings for ‘Sound Stage 7’. When she admitted she had no record player in her rented London accommodation, I lent her one of my vinyl turntables, barely touched since my pirate radio days. We chatted regularly in the office environment and that was it. She was around the age of my daughter.

After a few weeks’ work, the intern confided that Claire Enders had started to allege she was self-harming. I had seen no evidence to support such an accusation and was shocked that such a serious assertion had been made. I could offer no explanation as to why this was happening. Then, at home in my kitchen one evening after work, I received a call from the intern’s parents who asked if I could elucidate why their daughter was being falsely accused of self-harm. I could not. Then the parents alleged that they had received numerous unprompted calls from Claire Enders insisting they act to resolve their daughter’s supposedly poor mental health. They told me they were considering a referral to the police to stop these unwanted calls. Their daughter left our workplace immediately afterwards and later returned by post the articles she had borrowed from me.

By now, I had witnessed sufficient strange behaviours in that workplace to understand that the environment there was not what I considered ‘normal’. I hung on to the job for almost three years before being edged out myself in similarly bizarre circumstances. Afterwards, I discovered that Claire Enders is the offspring of a former United States ambassador born “into a family of wealthy patricians” who, attending Yale, was “a member of one of the secret societies which are said to guarantee success in life”, according to ‘The Independent’. His 1996 ‘New York Times’ obituary said his “career was highlighted by cold war intrigues in tropical climes”, having survived three assassination attempts whilst stationed in Cambodia. Why was I reminded of 'The Omen'?

During 2008, I was given so much work at Enders Analysis that I only managed to take a single day’s holiday the entire year to attend my daughter’s graduation ceremony. Having explained the reason for my absence, Claire Enders regularly suggested she could find employment for my daughter through her contacts. No enquiry seemed necessary about her studied subject or what might be her interests or ambitions. This is how the job market appears to work amongst the privileged. You can always be found a highly paid job bossing around ‘little people’ in some workplace, regardless of having no relevant experience or understanding of the industry. Admittance requires only proof that you too are proposed by one of the chosen few. After the things I had witnessed in my workplace, I would have preferred my daughter be unemployed than participate in the ‘gravy train’ of the upper classes. No interloper will be infiltrating my harmonious family!

After my first night at the opera, I was never invited by Enders to another social event. Neither have I had occasion to wear my expensive jacket again.

LBC 97.3 FM, London's whitest conversation? : 2007 : 'Is Radio Racist?', The Radio Academy

 The conversation at the Radio Academy event in London entitled 'Is Radio Racist?' became heated when the chairman, 'LBC' morning show presenter James O’Brien [JO], was questioned by 'BBC Five Live' overnight presenter Dotun Adebayo [DA] about the absence of ethnic minority presenters at LBC. At the start of the event, O’Brien said he had been asked to chair the debate because “I am actually officially the whitest person working in the broadcasting industry today.”

DA: “James, you work for a London station. How many black presenters are there, when 20% of the London population is African-Caribbean or Asian? How many black presenters are there on LBC?”

JO: “That’s interesting because there aren’t any black presenters currently.”

DA: “If I ask James how many black cleaners there are at LBC, it would be a high percentage.”

JO: “For what it’s worth, that’s not true. If you had asked me about production staff, I would point at two or three colleagues, both current and former, who are from ethnic minorities. I object to that question because I don’t think their colour is relevant to their ability to do the job.”

DA: “That wasn’t the point. I gave you one example of London media where there are no [ethnic] presenters. You should be embarrassed about that, James.”

JO: “I think that, at the moment, I am the best person to be presenting my show and colour is entirely irrelevant to that equation. If someone who is better than me comes along, they will get my job, whatever colour they are. I would hope my employer would have the bravery to appoint the best person for the job and not say…..”

DA: “How can you explain the fact that there isn’t one black presenter on your station?”

JO: “How would you like to be the one who only got the job because there aren’t any black people on the station?”

DA: “I would be happy to get the job because at least it was an opportunity for me, whereas there is no opportunity for me there at the moment. There are no black presenters at LBC. That’s something that’s disgraceful and you know that.”

JO: “I dispute that entirely, but it’s not about me. If you want to hear me talk about myself, I’ll be back on LBC 97.3 FM tomorrow morning [laughter from audience].”

Later in the debate, Salim Salam [SS], a former BBC producer now working for digital station 'Colourful Radio', returned the discussion to the same issue:

SS: “It’s a managerial question. Given that you want to have a media industry which is broadly reflective of the society in which it operates, and in the case of the BBC is directly paid for by that society, then you should be looking to get (LBC being an example) a station which is broadly representative of the society to which it is broadcasting. And the fact that it’s not is a managerial question.”

JO: “LBC takes up 24 hours of programming, of which every single one, expect for two [hours] between 5 and 7am, is phone-in. So if you want to talk about a radio station that provides a platform and an opportunity for every single citizen in the city to put forward their case, their perspective, their experience or their opinion, a phone-in programme or a phone-in station is almost immune to these accusations.”

SS: “No, it’s not, because I’m talking about the people who present the programmes and who make the programmes, which actually affects the editorial. There are two elements to this question. One is: who’s making the programmes and who’s presenting the programmes, and who’s doing the hiring and firing? … The other question is the editorial, and it’s not always a question of people walking around deliberately looking for opportunities to discriminate against black people. It’s about the questions that you ask. Muslim people, for example, have a hell of a lot of questions to ask about a lot of things. There’s nobody asking those questions for them because the editorial lines that are being taken all come from one particular point of view, and then the questions that are asked follow the perceived lines of wisdom or the orthodoxy of the time. So, if you are looking for an industry that is broadly reflective of the society in which it operates, you have got to ask yourself why is it not (whether it is racism or not)?  Secondly, if you are looking for solutions to that, look at who is doing the hiring and firing. Who do they know? Are they capable of making a rational judgement when they are faced with those applicants? The BBC’s own figures will tell you that black people, once they get to the final interview stage, are still three times less likely to get the job than their white counterparts. Are you telling me that black people are three times less talented or able? I’m not of that opinion. I think it’s either unconscious discrimination, or whatever it is.”

Jimmy Buckland, external affairs officer of RadioCentre, provided the meeting with data from the forthcoming SkillCentre 2006 Employment Census which found the radio industry overall employs 6.9% of staff from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, comprising 3.1% in commercial radio and 10.9% in BBC radio. Explaining that these results appear skewed because “commercial radio is more regional based than the BBC”, Buckland said that 19% of commercial radio’s workforce is based in London, compared to 59% of the BBC’s. He added: “What we have here is a problem of representation, definitely.”

[First published in edited form in 'The Radio Magazine' as 'LBC Quizzed Over All-White Presenter Team', #777, 28 February 2007]

My application wins our tiny black music pirate station a valuable London-wide radio licence : 1989 : KISS 100 FM

 It was only just daylight when I suddenly realised that the phone was ringing. It seemed to take me ages to drag my weary body out of bed, as the phone continued to ring long and hard. Who on earth would want to phone me at this early hour on a Saturday morning? I toyed with the notion that it might be my former girlfriend, who seemed determined to inflict as much hurt on me as possible, despite our relationship having ended abruptly through her own infidelity and lies.

But it was not her. It was [‘KISS FM’ managing director] Gordon McNamee, calling me from his mobile phone. He said he was standing in the middle of his local park, walking his dog, accompanied by his mother. I could hear in the background that it was pouring with rain. McNamee asked if I had the home phone number of any of the Independent Broadcasting Authority [media regulator IBA] staff so that he could find out whether KISS FM had won the licence. I asked him why he was so anxious to find out at such an early hour in the morning. McNamee told me that ‘Music Week’ magazine’s radio correspondent, Bob Tyler, had rung him at home at around eight o’clock that morning to find out if he knew who had won the licences. McNamee admitted that he had heard nothing, despite knowing that the decisions had been made by the IBA at its Thursday meeting and should be announced imminently. McNamee told me that he had stayed at the KISS FM office [in Finsbury Park] all day Friday, but there had still been no phone call from the IBA, so he assumed that KISS FM had lost the licence for the second time, and had returned home.

Bob Tyler had phoned McNamee a second time at around nine o’clock that morning to say that he had just heard a rumour that KISS FM had won a licence, though there was still no means of official confirmation. McNamee, feeling agitated and frustrated, had decided to get out of bed and take his dog for a walk in the local park. Halfway across the park, it had started to pour with rain. Then, just as he, his mother and his dog had run for shelter, McNamee’s mobile phone had rung again. This time it was Richard Brooks, media editor of ‘The Observer’ newspaper, offering his congratulations to McNamee on KISS FM’s win of one of the two licences, and asking for a comment to include in the next day’s issue. McNamee thanked Brooks for his call, but emphasised that he himself had not been told the news and so would have to obtain official confirmation from the IBA before he could say anything publicly. Brooks assured him that he had seen a letter sent to one of the losing applicants which definitely stated that KISS FM and easy listening applicant ‘Melody Radio’ were the two winners. McNamee promised to ring him back as soon as possible.

There was jubilation in the park, despite the torrential rain. McNamee and his mother leapt up and down with excitement, watched by an astonished old man who was also sheltering from the storm. The old man asked them what all the fuss was about and, when McNamee told him he had just won a hotly contested radio licence, the old man offered him a celebration roll-your-own cigarette and apologised for not having a cigar. Now, McNamee needed to find out from the IBA if the news was true, and why it had been broken to him by a journalist, rather than in an official IBA communication. That was when he had rung me. I told McNamee that I probably had the home phone number of one of the IBA officers, if the paperwork had not disappeared from my flat, so I would find it and try to obtain official confirmation. I quickly found the home phone number of the IBA press officer, Stuart Patterson, on the top of an old press release he had sent me. I called him and, although he himself refused to confirm or deny whether KISS FM had won, he promised to arrange for someone from the IBA radio division to call me as soon as possible.

It was only a few minutes later that David Vick, the IBA’s principal radio development officer, called me. At first, he was pre-occupied with explaining to me the protocol of the IBA announcement, and did not tell me outright that KISS FM had won:

“Hi, it’s David Vick from the IBA. I gather you’re the only people who haven’t got the news officially yet ... I’ve just had a quick word with Stuart, obviously ... We’ve told the winners that they might expect calls from journalists. What we’re anxious not to happen, and maybe it’s a false hope now, is for journalists to ring losers before they’ve got their letters. But clearly, the Christmas post is so unpredictable that our best laid plans have fallen apart this morning.”

“I didn’t ring Stuart as a journalist,” I interrupted. “It was the KISS FM side ... Did we get it or didn’t we?”

“Yes, of course you did,” answered Vick.

“Oh, brilliant,” I screamed. I was elated. Until now, I and the rest of the KISS FM team could only have dreamed of this moment when the IBA would ring us to say that we had won a radio licence. Now, it had really happened. I was very tired. I was still shattered from the long journey home [from a holiday in The Gambia the previous evening]. I had only just woken up, but I was also incredibly happy that my hard work on the licence application had won out in the end.

“Congratulations,” said Vick, while I gasped with joy at the other end of the call. He remained far more composed than I was right now, and he continued to explain the detail of the announcement: “I don’t know how The Observer got hold of it. Clearly, one of the losers has talked to The Observer fairly early on this morning, because they’ve been hot on the trail from quite early on. So congratulations on that.”

I was still laughing and whooping at my end of the conversation, as Vick continued: “We normally do ring winners on Saturday morning but, this time, we’ve been playing it so laid back and ultra cool that I hadn’t actually planned to do that. All the letters seem to have got through, but clearly some of the most serious applicants have given business addresses, and they’re the ones who haven’t actually got the letters. You’re not unique. We’ve had a vexed Lord Hanson [of Melody Radio, the other licence winner] ring us this morning, asking what’s going on and why is he being rung by journalists.”

Vick continued: “You and Lord Hanson have been in the identical situation this morning of being rung by The Observer and others at the crack of dawn, and not known what was going on ... What we didn’t want was for losers who haven’t got their letters this morning to find out from the newspapers either on Sunday or ideally on Monday ... We had a terrible botch-up with the Post Office on one of the previous months. And, this time, I rang the district postmaster yesterday afternoon and said ‘look, we’ve got another run of letters going through.’ And he said he’d do his best to catch them the moment they arrived at the sorting office and hustle them straight through for us. And he’s clearly done the job with unfailing skill and everything’s arrived this morning. But the ones going to business addresses, yours and Hanson’s and some of the other quite serious applicants, have ended up hearing about it through the grapevine as a result.”

“Oh, this is brilliant,” I gasped. I was still far from composed and I was barely taking in Vick’s pre-occupation with the minor points of the procedure. We had won! That was all that was important to me right there and then. We had won! Vick continued regardless: “We told everybody our press release would be [published] Tuesday morning. But I’ve spoken to Peter Baldwin [IBA director of radio] and Stuart [Patterson], and that’s clearly crazy now, so we’re going to issue the press release early Monday morning. So, if you could bear to at least smile inwardly and say as little as you can to the press until then ...”

I was muttering words of agreement without really taking in all the detail that Vick was relating. He could tell my excitement was getting the better of me, so he suddenly changed gear: “Well done. We’ll obviously have a lot to do with each other in the months ahead. One of the things we’ve said in the letter is that, if you could come in [to the IBA office] and meet us all in the next couple of weeks, that would be super.”

“We would love to,” I replied, still giggling uncontrollably. Once more, Vick was keen to discuss the nitty gritty, right here and now on a Saturday morning: “Very well done. It was an excellent application. The trouble is that you’re going to get a lot of griping comment now from people saying that they [the IBA] only did it to keep the pirate lobby happy. The fact was that it was a bloody good application that got it on merit, because we certainly wouldn’t have given it to you if the application hadn’t been deserving of it.”

It was incredibly pleasing to hear Vick credit the KISS FM application after all the hard work I had put into it. I felt that, finally, I had been vindicated for my insistence to McNamee that the whole licence application had to be as perfectly presented as possible on this occasion. I thanked Vick for his kind comments, and he continued: “I think, to be honest, that the extra six months actually did you a lot of good. Not that the first application was bad or anything but, in this one, you had clearly learnt so much over the last six months, and you had strengthened it in so many ways. And, fortunately, by majoring on the new release aspect of the daytime [music] playlist, you’ve given us a very solid peg to hang the ‘diversity’ point on. Because, when ‘Capital [Radio]’ and others predictably start complaining, we can actually point to the fact that you are going to be playing the music before it gets in the charts, and they will play it after it gets in the charts, which gives greater diversity.”

Since its launch in 1973, Capital Radio had been London’s one and only commercial pop music station, and it was still eager to defend what it considered to be its own rightful territory – a monopoly over playing pop music in the capital. The IBA was charged with widening the choice of radio stations available to listeners, whilst not duplicating the existing output of Capital Radio. The emphasis I had placed in the KISS FM application on the station’s championing of new music had proven to be precisely the argument the IBA could use to defend a decision to award KISS FM the licence. Admittedly, Capital Radio did play dance music within its programmes, but it only played songs that were already in the ‘Top Forty’ singles chart. KISS FM would be playing mostly new releases, before they gained widespread popularity. My strategy for the KISS FM application had worked exactly as I had intended, which Vick confirmed as he continued to relate the detail: “The press release actually says that KISS FM has been chosen as a station that will be in the forefront of music tastes and that’s your market position, as we define it.”

McNamee must have returned home by now, so I gave his home telephone number to Vick and thanked him for calling me so promptly. It was absolutely brilliant news and I was still utterly ecstatic. I tried to phone McNamee straight away, but Vick must have managed to get through to him first. I continued re-dialling for several minutes, until the phone eventually rang. McNamee was shouting down the phone to me over the top of a loud conversation I could hear in the background:

“Grant, you c*nt,” he greeted me, in his typically perverse way. “We’ve got it! I can’t believe it! David Vick just phoned me and we went through the whole lot. I can’t fucking believe it.”

There was loud laughter in the background and McNamee already sounded drunk on the news, in spirit, if not in reality: “You’ve got a job! Your gamble worked out. We’ve all got a job. Fucking wonderful! It’s wonderful! It’s just unbelievable. I’m going to be down at Dingwalls [nightclub in Camden] tonight and the whole world will be, I should think. I’m going to phone everyone today. I’ll talk to you later on. I’ve got to phone all the bosses, and I’ll talk to you later.”

McNamee was right. My gamble had paid off. I had believed that KISS FM could win the licence, if only someone was prepared to work hard on the application this time around. Then, when McNamee had failed to take up the challenge, I had decided to take on the task myself. While McNamee had been pre-occupied with his initial failure, I had been determined to turn KISS FM’s second application into a winner. Asked subsequently what had persuaded the IBA to award KISS FM a radio licence, David Vick answered: “A well-researched application and musical knowledge.”

It was pleasing to know that my strategies had been proven correct. It was my detailed research and my belief in KISS FM’s musical expertise that had swung the licence bid. Now, here I was, having learnt the good news only hours after arriving back in the country. If KISS FM had lost its licence bid this second time around, I would have had no job to return to. Plus, my flat had been deliberately and spitefully emptied [by my former girlfriend whilst I had been away]. But these things did not matter to me anymore. The dream I had cherished for so many years of a legal black music radio station in London was about to become a reality at last. I had played my part in turning that dream into reality. I was absolutely thrilled. For me, it was literally a dream come true.

[Excerpt from ‘KISS FM: From Radical Radio To Big Business: The Inside Story Of A London Pirate Radio Station’s Path To Success’ by Grant Goddard, Radio Books, 2011, 528 pages]