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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farewell ‘Radical Radio’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” said John.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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