Don’t play that song for me : 2004 : unusual FM radio formats, Phnom Penh

 Here in Phnom Penh, there are seventeen radio stations on the FM dial, even though Cambodia’s capital city has a population of less than a million. But you are more likely to hear a song by Britney Spears or Madonna on the 'BBC World Service' (100 FM here) than on any of the local FM stations. Only one, 'Love FM' 97.5, plays Western music and its playlist stretches solely from the obscure ('Pretty Boy' seems to be the most requested song) to the bizarre (New Kids On The Block?). The rest of the local stations play exclusively Cambodian music. It’s radio, Jim, but not as we know it. Several hundred hours of radio listening suggest two Cambodian programme formats that could be adopted in the West:

KARAOKE CALL-IN RADIO

Most stations in Phnom Penh have a daily show or two of karaoke call-in. Each station employs a pair of singers (one male, one female) who sit in the radio studio with a standard karaoke CD machine plugged into the mixing desk. Listeners call in to a mobile phone number which is also routed to the desk. Most stations have no Telephone Balance Units or 'clean feed' system, so callers can only hear the presenter by keeping the volume of their radio turned up, which leads to howling feedback (considered normal here) during every call. Stations with Optimod-style audio processing suffer ever worse feedback loops.

There is no pre-screening of callers. There is no delay system. You hear the mobile phone ring in the studio. The presenters answer the phone on-air, ask the caller’s name, where they are calling from, and the song they wish to sing. While one presenter finds and cues the appropriate karaoke CD, the other chats amiably with the caller about the reasons they have chosen the particular song. The song starts, one of seemingly hundreds of Cambodian love songs that are all male/female duets. If the caller is female, the station singer sings the male verses, and prompts the caller to sing the female verses. If the caller is male, the reverse applies.

The karaoke machine adds echo to the singer’s voice. It is no exaggeration to say that most callers have no sense of either melody or rhythm. The majority are absolutely appalling singers and seem to have no sense of shame exhibiting their complete lack of ability on-air. Conversely, all the radio station singers are excellent, not only at singing but also at treating every caller with dignity and respect. Each caller is allowed to complete their selected song, despite their obvious lack of talent, the howling feedback and the poor-quality audio (most callers use analogue mobile phones). At the end of the song, the presenters thank the caller and, as soon as they end one call, you hear the mobile phone ring again, and they move immediately to the next caller.

Because there is no pre-screening, some callers inevitably are put directly on-air who want a different radio programme, a different radio station, or the local pizza delivery service. The presenters treat even the mistaken callers with the same respect. Each karaoke show continues in this fashion for several hours, punctuated only by batches of hideous commercials, each lasting two minutes and using more voice echo than the average King Tubby dub plate. At the end of the show, the two station singers get to sing a song together, without the humiliation of having to duet with an out-of-tune, out-of-sync caller bathed in feedback.

GRIEVANCE DROP-IN RADIO

In a country where the legal system rarely delivers results that resemble natural justice, the majority of the population look elsewhere for ways to resolve their problems. What better medium than a radio station? At the same time, in a country where the news agenda is dominated by ruling politicians’ pre-occupations, what content can journalists safely use to fill time in their news bulletins? The answer for both the people and the journalists is to air relatively minor grievances from the population that in no way threaten the government’s rule.

For state radio, this means sending journalists to distant provinces to interview farmers about agricultural problems or minor disputes with their neighbours. The results are passed off on-air as 'news'. Imagine if 'You & Yours' replaced the 'Today' programme on 'BBC Radio Four'. In Phnom Penh, where hard-pressed commercial radio stations can barely afford to employ journalists, some stations sympathetic to opposition parties operate an open-lobby system. Citizens who have grievances to air simply turn up at the radio station, their complaint is recorded, and then broadcast unedited and without context. The results are startling for a Westerner accustomed to hearing only carefully produced 'packages' of balanced opinions or only short sound bites of real people’s voices emanating from cosy UK radio stations.

This week I heard a woman sobbing and moaning her way through an unedited ten-minute monologue, explaining how her husband had allegedly been abducted by a criminal gang and disappeared. Last week, on another station, I heard a widow sobbing uncontrollably and threatening to set fire to herself and her children because ownership of the radio station belonging to her dead husband had just been awarded to another man by the municipal court. Both broadcasts moved me to tears, despite being in a language I cannot understand. Why? Because I cannot remember hearing such raw emotion spilling out of my radio set (except in drama) for a very long time.

The majority of our phone-in shows have become carefully packaged entertainment while our grievances seem trivial compared to the tribulations suffered by people here. Because the majority in Cambodia still have no access to a telephone, the radio station drop-in provides an important forum for aggrieved citizens to voice their anger and emotion. Listening to these raw, unedited voices has reminded me of the potential emotional power embodied in the radio medium, and the need for programme producers back home to play less safe, allowing more real voices on the radio that can move listeners to tears.

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After several more months on this diet of karaoke and tear-jerking stories, I anticipate that my return home to a menu of 'BBC Radio One' and 'Capital FM' will quickly reveal such 'professional' stations to be wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes. All faux excitement and faux dialogue with listeners, but nary a raw emotion in sight … or sound.

[First published in 'The Radio Magazine', May 2004]

Give them a foot and they’ll take a metre : 1972 : Bill Beaver, Camberley & Alicante

 It was the summer of rock’n’roll. Bill Haley. Buddy Holly. Chuck Berry. Fats Domino. The Big Bopper. Now, every time I hear one of their songs, I am reminded of a summer vacation never to be forgotten … for all the wrong reasons! Certainly, much of it had been spent lazing on a lounger beside a swimming pool, immersed in an interesting book I had brought along. However, my ears had been battered for days by continuous rock’n’roll, blasted at maximum volume from a tinny cassette machine leant against the wall of a Spanish villa’s veranda. This was not the preferred soundtrack of my teenage years.

At age fourteen, ‘oldies’ from a decade earlier already belonged to a bygone generation. I was obsessed with contemporary pop music and, since the occasion Jim Morrison had dropped his leather pants onstage, every Thursday a slice of my pocket money crossed the counter of a Frimley High Street newsagent for ‘Disc & Music Echo’, ‘Record Mirror’, ‘Sounds’, ‘NME’, ‘Melody Maker’ and ‘Blues & Soul’. I devoured their every word cover-to-cover, as well as teen magazine ‘Fab 208’ that my grandparents bought for older cousin Lynn but offered me a sneaked read. These publications’ preoccupation with the newest music (aligning perfectly with their most lucrative advertisers, the major record companies) reinforced my youthful music snobbery, as dismissive of rock’n’roll as I was of The Andrews Sisters.

Our family’s summer sojourn read like a rejected script for ‘Benidorm’. Following his impulsive visit to a Camberley travel agent to book a package holiday to Spain for the five of us, my father had handed me a pocket guide to Spanish, anticipating my fluency by the time we arrived. Although I shouldered the mantle of family administrator, this expectation proved unrealistic considering my recent struggle at school to learn French, where I had come bottom of the class during my first two years. As the teacher insisted on seating us in his classroom in rank order of our most recent termly exam result, I was placed in the front row due to my consistently dismal performances. By the time our charter flight touched down in Alicante, I had just about mastered Spanish numbers, greetings, shopping etiquette and the ordering of ‘steak and chips’.

Arrived at our hotel in the Albufereta district, the receptionist confessed that the promised restaurant and swimming pool were still ‘under construction’. Our two adjacent bedrooms on an upper floor lacked air conditioning and offered a view of only the hotel’s ongoing noisy building works. Daily pills my father took for high blood pressure had insufficient efficacy to stop him raising hell with the hotel’s management, to no avail, tipping his mood into a very un-holiday rage. To escape the confines of our half-finished accommodation, one hot afternoon we all trooped down to the beach, only for my months-old sister to put a handful of sand in her mouth. She cried, my mother panicked, my father shouted, screaming that he would never take his family to a beach again … a threat he kept.

After that incident, my father decided to hire a small Seat car so that we could explore Spain beyond the coast. One day he drove us inland to a random small village where we disembarked and wandered around in the heat of the blazing sun. It resembled a sand-blown ghost town from a television Western where everything was closed up, my parents having no knowledge of Spain’s daily siesta. The odd elderly person we encountered stopped what they were doing to stare pointedly at us, as if we resembled aliens arrived from another galaxy. They understood that only mad Brits and package holiday families came out in the midday sun. Feeling somewhat intimidated and having found nothing to do there, we retreated to the hire car to return to the ‘civilisation’ of our hotel.

My father tried to rescue our totally unedifying village visit by driving back along the picturesque Alicante seafront. Confronted by a small roundabout, he drove around it at his usual excessive speed in the wrong direction and collided with a car headed towards us. Nobody was hurt but the encounter caused visible damage to the front of both cars. The Spanish driver jumped out and understandably raged at my father, whose short fuse had been smouldering since the hour of our arrival. My translation skills were demanded, unrealistically as the pocket guide lacked a chapter on Spanish expletives. While the two drivers locked in verbal combat, the four of us sat on the low wall along the edge of the brightly tiled Alicante promenade. Passers-by stared. My baby sister was screaming. My mother was crying. The sun was baking us.

After a while, a police car arrived. My father was offered two choices. Either he could be arrested and taken to the police station to face a charge of dangerous driving, or he could pay the other driver to repair his car. While we remained sat on the promenade, my father accompanied a policeman to the nearest money exchange bureau to swap our remaining British ‘Travellers’ Cheques’ for Spanish pesetas. In the heat, it seemed like an eternity until he returned, paid the driver and we could all depart the scene of the crime. Our hire car was damaged but fortunately driveable, though there remained the problem of what to explain to the hire company at the end of our holiday from hell.

Our more immediate problem was how to survive the remainder of our fortnight now that almost all our money had been used to pay the angry driver. British credit cards might have launched in 1966 but had not been offered to families like ours. Debit cards would not exist until 1987. The limited amount of cash or Travellers’ Cheques you were permitted to take abroad had to be inscribed on the last page of your passport. Transferring funds from a British bank account to Spain, while you were in Spain, was an impossibility. During the following days, I escaped the worsening parental arguments at our hotel by finding a nearby newsagent where I would sit cross-legged on the floor for hours, looking through piles of imported DC comic titles never seen at home. I also found a record shop where I used pocket-money I had secreted to buy a Spanish 1971 James Brown picture-sleeve single (‘I Cried’) unreleased in the UK.

That summer’s rock’n’roll soundtrack was a consequence of my father’s solution to our predicament. While we would continue to sleep in our package holiday’s half-finished hotel, he had hustled an invitation to spend our remaining vacation daytimes at the nearby villa of one of his business associates. We lounged beside an Olympic-size outdoor swimming pool whose shallow end was bizarrely three times my height. The towering villa’s doorways were big enough to drive through a truck. Its rooms were the height of a church and the living room resembled a ballroom. We had traded our building-site hotel for a newly built mansion that could have easily served as a set for ‘Land of The Giants’ or the inspiration for a new ‘The Borrowers Abroad’ sequel.

The owner had purchased the plot of land, ordered a custom plan for a villa from an architect in Britain, brought the designs on paper to Spain and given them to local builders to construct during his absence. Returning only once it had been finished, he was astonished to realise that his plan’s dimensions in ‘feet’ had been misinterpreted as ‘metres’, resulting in the building and pool being three times their intended size. It was too late to remedy the error and too expensive to demolish it and rebuild. Planning regulations? What were they? The accidentally gigantic villa was there to stay … and we were now its guests.

It was the owner’s two sons, around a decade older than me, who had wired up a cassette machine outdoors to play their favoured rock’n’roll music. Though our three hosts hung around the villa and pool all day, they mostly ignored me quietly reading my book in the shade. Even the pool’s shallow end was too scary for a non-swimmer like me, however much they tried to persuade me to dive in. They were plainly enjoying their lazy, hazy days of summer on the ‘Costa del Dodgy’. I must have appeared quite a joyless nerd to them.

Our ebullient host Bill Beaver owned a successful car and truck dealership in Camberley, located on an expansive near-derelict triangle of land at the town’s western extreme. He lived in an old-style mansion named ‘Badgers’ Sett’ opposite ‘The Cricketers’ pub on Bracknell Road in nearby Bagshot. His accent was ‘Eastenders’ and his patter was pure Del Boy. My father had lately begun to forge local property redevelopment deals for which Beaver provided the cash, while he ensured local council planning approval for architectural schemes he drafted. My parents had uncharacteristically started hosting dinner parties for Beaver and his wife, despite my mother not warming to the couple’s brash ostentatiousness. My father probably hoped Beaver’s wealth would rub off on him … and, for a while, some of it did.

I had been pressganged into their joint enterprise to calculate the potential ‘return on investment’ of their projects, using my O-level maths studies to amortise the costs over varying numbers of years. One such development site was an anachronistic one-pump petrol station and car repair workshop that occupied a valuable rectangular plot on the busy London Road at Maultway North between Camberley and Bagshot. Owner John Sparks had inherited the business in 1966 upon the death of his father Arthur, though neither had updated its blue corrugated iron shack since 1926 when Arthur’s mother had purchased this large corner plot from the adjacent secondary school sportsground for her son to launch his one-man business.

Once I had calculated the viability of replacing the ramshackle building with flats, including the cost of removing the underground petrol tank and cleansing the polluted soil, the project was determined a ‘go’. However, we had not reckoned on Sparks’ stubborn refusal to sell. Beaver visited him. My father visited him. The Beaver sons visited him. Sparks remained intransigent. Their ‘persuasion’ techniques were evidently not working. Beaver purchased the Jolly Farmer pub on the roundabout opposite the Sparks site. One night it suffered a large unexplained fire. Sparks still refused to sell. In the end, the project had to be abandoned.

Like my mother, I was less in thrall of Beaver’s ‘entrepreneurship’ style than was my wide-eyed father, so the end of our disastrous two-week holiday in Spain and our farewells to his oversized villa came as a welcomed relief. On the flight home, I was seated next to larger-than-life Trinidadian bandleader Edmundo Ross. Despite already loving reggae and Brazilian music, my youthful snobbery regarded Ross as old-school due to his regularity on ‘BBC Radio 2’. Unaware of his fascinating life, I now regret not having chatted with him more.

A short time after our return to Britain, my father left us permanently to set up a new home with a teenage girl only a few years older than me. Our Spanish holiday seemed to have proven his last straw playing ‘happy families’. Children just got in his way. I had no further contact with the Beaver family … and I disowned my father.

In 1986, Tesco and Marks & Spencer jointly purchased a huge 76-acre site on the western fringe of Camberley to build two massive superstores (‘The Meadows’). The adjacent four-acre site, bounded by the London Road, Laundry Lane and Tank Road housed Bill Beaver’s open-air vehicle sales operation and was necessary to developers for a revised traffic flow system that included a new Sainsbury’s Homebase superstore. This plot on the far edge of town had suddenly become Camberley’s most valuable piece of land … to the benefit of its wily owner.

In 1990, John Sparks applied to Surrey Heath council for permission to build a bungalow (for his retirement?) on empty land at the back of his one-man garage. It was granted but never built. In 2014, seventy-eight-year-old Sparks retired, closed his business and sold the land to developer North Maultway Limited which demolished the workshop to build ten flats, for which planning permission was approved the following year. By 2017, the land had been sold to Seville Developments Limited which reapplied for planning permission to build nine flats. Two years later, this permission expired … leaving the former ‘Sparks Garage’ site derelict to this day.

One small step for radio, one giant leap for black music radio in London : 1990 : KISS 100 FM launch day

 The final few days before KISS FM’s official launch were a blur of frenetic activity and outright panic. It was only at this late date that construction of the three studios was completed by the contractors. Now, at last, they were ready for the engineers from the Independent Broadcasting Authority [IBA] to test and inspect. Much to my relief, their report required only a few minor alterations to the air conditioning system, after which the IBA issued KISS FM with a certificate of technical competence. I affixed it to my office wall, alongside the poster of Betty Boo [I had pinned as my memento of DJ Tim Westwood’s ‘reason’ for reneging last-minute on his scheduled daily daytime show].

With only days to go, I held two long, evening meetings with all the part-time DJs to explain what they could and could not do legally on-air. As former pirate DJs, they were unfamiliar with the conventions of libel, slander and other legal niceties which legitimate radio DJs have to learn. It was important for me to emphasise how essential it was for KISS FM to protect itself against prosecution or rebuke by the commercial radio regulator, the IBA. I went through their employment contracts, page by page, explaining what the jargon meant and what implications the clauses had for their radio shows. Also, I had to stress the importance of playing the right advertisements at the right time. This was a contractual requirement that had been relatively relaxed on pirate stations.

The night before the station’s launch, I was still busy putting the finishing touches to the inside of the studio until the early hours of the morning. Although two on-air studios had been built, there was only time to bring one of them up to scratch with all the accessories required for live broadcasts. With only hours to go, the engineers and I were frantically drilling holes in the studio walls to hang the storage racks for audio cartridges used to play advertisements, as well as wiring up the studio lights on the ceiling. I handwrote several large posters in thick felt pen to remind the presenters of the station’s address, its phone number for requests, and what to say about the station’s launch. Then, I had to spend several hours making labels with a Dymo and sticking them onto each piece of equipment in the studio for the presenters to know precisely which button performed which task. Finally, when everything was ready, I drove home and collapsed into bed.

The next morning, Saturday 1 September 1990, was the biggest day of our lives. Some weeks earlier, [managing director] Gordon McNamee had hung a handwritten sign on his office wall that read “X DAYS TO GO” with the number being changed daily. That number was now down to zero and the sign had finally become redundant. The day had arrived at last, whether we were ready for it or not. McNamee and I met at the station in the morning and locked ourselves away inside the production studio. McNamee wanted to perform a countdown to the station’s launch at midday but, in order to ensure that it went perfectly smoothly, he wanted to pre-record it. I set the timer on my digital wristwatch to five minutes and recorded McNamee’s voice, counting down at one-minute intervals from five minutes to one minute, and then counting down the seconds during the final minute until the alarm sounded. It took two attempts to get it right.

After that, we moved to the main on-air studio, taking the tape of the countdown with us. We had decided not to allow anyone other than essential station personnel into the studio for the launch. It was not a big enough room to comfortably accommodate more than a few people, and the presence of journalists would only have made us even more nervous. McNamee had arranged for Mentorn Films, which was making the television documentary about the station, to erect a tripod camera in the corner of the studio to record the whole event. A video link had also been booked to relay the picture live to a large screen in Dingwalls nightclub, where the official KISS FM launch party was being held that day.

With all the tension that surrounded that historic day, we quickly forgot that we were being watched by a video camera from the corner of the room. I spooled McNamee’s countdown recording onto a tape machine and started it at precisely five minutes to midday. McNamee’s countdown was now automatically being superimposed over the music from the test transmission VHS cassette that had been playing continuously for the last ten days. Over the beats of the Kid Frost hip hop track ‘La Raza,’ McNamee’s voice coolly counted down the minutes. At the one-minute point, McNamee counted “59, 58, 57, 56....” and I slowly faded out the music to increase the suspense of the moment. Accompanied by the pre-recorded sound of my digital watch alarm, McNamee said the magic words “twelve o’clock.”

I turned up the microphone in the studio for McNamee to make KISS FM’s live opening speech:

“This is Gordon Mac. There are no words to express the way I feel at this moment. So, with your permission, I’d just like to get something out of my system. Altogether – we’re on air – hooray!”

Everyone in the studio joined in a loud cheer, before McNamee continued:

“Welcome, London. Do you realise it’s taken us fifty-nine months, four hundred and sixty-five thousand, seven hundred and twenty working hours, plus three and a half million pounds, as well as all of your support over the last five years, to reach this moment? As from today, London and everywhere around the M25, within and without, will have their own twenty-four-hour dance music radio station. I’m talking to you from our new studios in KISS House, which is completely different from the dodgy old studios we used to have in the past [laughter in the studio]. The odds were against us. None of the establishment fancied our chances but, with the force of public opinion and our determination, the authorities had to sit up and listen and take notice. Today, I’m being helped by Rufaro Hove, the winner of ‘The Evening Standard’ KISS 100 FM competition. Rufaro was chosen from thousands of people who entered and she will press the button for the first record. But before that, the first jingle.”

McNamee pushed the cartridge button to play a lo-fi jingle from KISS FM’s pirate days. The sound of a telephone answering machine tone was followed by McNamee’s personal assistant, Rosee Laurence, saying:

“It’s me again. I forgot to say – hooray, we’re on. Bye-bye.”

The jingle ended with the sound of a phone being put down. McNamee continued:

“There we go, Rufaro, now you can press the first one. Go!”

The first record played on the new KISS FM was the reggae song ‘Pirates’ Anthem’ by Home T, Cocoa Tea & Shabba Ranks. The song was a tribute to London’s pirate radio stations. The rallying call of the chorus was:

“Them a call us pirates

Them a call us illegal broadcasters

Just because we play what the people want

DTI tries [to] stop us, but they can’t"

One of the song’s verses narrated the story of pirate radio in the UK:

"Down in England we’ve got lots of radio stations

Playing the peoples’ music night and day

Reggae, calypso, hip hop or disco

The latest sound today is what we play........

They’re passing laws. They’re planning legislation

Trying their best to keep the music down

DTI, why don’t you leave us alone?

We only play the music others want”

These lyrics were the perfect choice for the station’s first record. KISS FM’s pirate history may have been behind it now, but the station had proven that pirate broadcasting had been necessary to open up the British airwaves to new musical sounds and fresh ideas for the 1990s. ‘Pirates’ Anthem’ was followed by the personal choice of the Evening Standard competition winner, ‘Facts of Life’ by Danny Madden. In the studio, the atmosphere was electric. It was difficult to believe that the few of us crowded into that little room were making broadcasting history. This was the creation of the dream that some of us thought we might never witness – a legal black music radio station in London, at last. It was difficult to believe we were really on the air.

Next, McNamee thanked “all the original disc jockeys, all the backers, all the new staff and last, but not by any means least, all of the listeners that have supported us over the five years.”

He introduced the record that he had adopted as KISS FM’s theme tune – ‘Our Day Will Come’ by Fontella Bass. The station’s first advertisement followed, booked by the Rhythm King record label to publicise its latest releases. Soon, McNamee’s stint as the station’s first DJ came to an end and his place was taken by Norman Jay, whose croaky voice betrayed the emotion of the day. Jay told listeners over his instrumental ‘Windy City’ theme tune:

“After nearly two very long years, all the good times, all the bad times we shared on radio ... Thanks to all of you. Without your help, this day could not have been possible. On a cold and wet October day in 1985, KISS FM was born. Gordon Mac, George Power and a long-time friend of mine, Tosca, got together to put together a station which meant so much to so many. And thanks to those guys, Norman Jay is now on-air.”

Once Jay was on the air, McNamee said farewell to the rest of us in the studio and left to attend the station’s official launch party at Dingwalls. We stayed in the studio, still thrilled to be part of the celebration of that historic moment and enjoying the music that Jay played. Throughout the rest of the weekend, each KISS FM DJ presented their first show on the newly legal station. Many of them reminisced about the pirate days of KISS FM and played music from that era, when they had last graced the airwaves of London. To the majority of the station’s audience, who might never have heard of KISS FM until now, the weekend’s broadcasts must have sounded rather indulgent. Far from most of the records played that weekend reflecting the cutting edge of new dance music that the new KISS FM had promised, the songs mostly reeked of nostalgia and the station’s former glory days as a pirate station. This brief moment of indulgence was a healing process that was necessary for the station’s staff.

I remained in the studio the rest of the day, helping the DJs to grapple with the unfamiliar equipment and showing them the new systems with which they had to contend. Despite the intensive training they had been given in the last ten days, it had been twenty months since any of them had spoken a word on the radio, let alone presented a professional show. Nearly all the DJs looked incredibly nervous, and several seemed gripped with terror at the prospect of having to present a show from a fully equipped radio studio for the first time in their lives. I stayed there until the early hours of Sunday morning, with only an occasional break for a takeaway pizza.

Everybody involved in KISS FM, apart from the small group of us left in the studio – the DJ on the air, me, [head of talks] Lyn Champion and programme assistants Colin Faver and Hannah Brack – were at Dingwalls, enjoying the party celebrations. It felt strange, during the station’s first day on-air, that the rest of the huge KISS FM building was entirely empty. In the evening, the only lights visible from outside were in the tiny studio on the first floor. By two o’clock in the morning, I was absolutely exhausted. It had been an incredibly exciting day and everything had run much more smoothly than I had expected. I drove home, having left Champion and Brack to ‘babysit’ the studio overnight to ensure that the rest of the presenters could cope with the equipment.

[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]

Economics! Economics! Read all about it! : 1974 : Mr Hodges, Strode’s College

 “Each of you will subscribe to ‘The Times’ newspaper and read it every day,” Mr Hodges told us. “In class, we will discuss one of its news stories about economics.”

What?? It was my first lesson of a two-year Economics A-level course taught by a newly appointed young teacher wearing a dapper suit that could have been hiding a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath. His thick moustache signified the educational wind of change in the air. A revolution had torn through our school during the summer holidays and life for us students would never be the same. Ye olde buildings remained intact but events within had unexpectedly fast-forwarded to the late twentieth century.

A modest name-change from ‘Strode’s School’ to ‘Strode’s College’ failed to communicate the extent of the transformation. When I had arrived five years earlier, it was a grammar school whose calendar seemed to be set in 1869. The all-male teaching staff wafted around in faded black gowns as if momentarily materialised from the staff room of the University of Transylvania. Girls had ne’er been enrolled since Henry Strode founded the school in 1704. Latin lessons were compulsory. Boys wore bottle-green blazers, shorts and caps that were not permitted to be removed until we reached home. Pupils had to choose ‘arts’ or ‘science’ A-levels but not mix the two.

Headmaster James ‘Jock’ Brady would cane the bare backsides of boys in his office without the inconvenience of parental pre-approval. When carpeted for my first minor demeanour, as neither my parents nor my primary school teachers had ever laid a hand on me, I refused point blank to bend over and submit to Brady’s corporal punishment. Thereafter I was sanctioned with detentions, mediocre termly school reports and passed over for school prizes. Some of Brady’s staff seemed to be competing with him in a Strode’s league table of sadism. Writing on the blackboard, our biology teacher would suddenly spin around and hurl the wooden board eraser like a missile at the head of a student he suspected was not paying sufficient attention.

Our raised-from-the-dead English Literature tutor seemed to both teach and dwell in a dimly lit cobwebbed outbuilding that daylight had never touched, a hovel straight out of ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’. He would pace along our aisles of Victorian wooden desks, eager to whack his cane across our hands if we failed to recite our homework word-perfect. I can still reel off passages from ‘Henry V’ without the faintest notion of their meaning because the school never contemplated showing us a production. Neither were my parents of assistance since the only theatres I had been dragged to were a West End pantomime with Cliff Richard playing Buttons and appearances at Camberley Civic Hall by Lenny the Lion and Pinky & Perky.

For the first five years, my school ‘short break’ had passed standing beneath the window of the enigmatic Sixth Form Common Room hut at the edge of the Playing Field, hearing records played at extreme volume and banging on the window to be handed down a chilled bottle of Coke in exchange for some pocket money. Sixth-form prefects randomly picked on us younger students for minor infractions and handed out after-school detentions like confetti. I was once sent home by a teacher for wearing brown, instead of regulation black, socks. My slip-on Hush Puppies were deemed unlawful because shoes were required to have laces. My long journey home would result in missing an entire day of classes, and for what educational purpose? ‘Discipline over learning’ should have been the school motto … in Latin, of course.

I passed those years daydreaming of being chosen as a Prefect once I reached the Sixth Form. But the revolution denied me that power. Prefects were abolished. The Head Boy position was abolished. Girls were admitted. Uniforms were abolished. Morning and afternoon registration ended. Students were only required on-site when their timetable required attendance for a class. The Sixth Form Common Room was closed. A new teaching block was built for girls to learn Domestic Science. A host of new teachers, including women (gasp!), were employed for previously unknown subjects. Female toilets were built. Headmaster Mr Brady retired to his mansion in the nineteenth century from whence he had come. The canes were put away. One entire century of enlightened progress had been compressed into a single school summer holiday.

In our first Economics lesson, Mr Hodges gave each of us a text book but insisted the economic news stories we would read in ‘The Times’ were equally important. A discount student subscription enabled it to be delivered by a local newsagent every morning. My parents had always read ‘The Daily Express’ which I skimmed but found unedifying, exemplified by its anti-Common Market ‘Back Britain, Buy British’ masthead. However, ‘The Sunday Times’ had been my parents’ weekend preference since the 1960’s for its ground-breaking ‘Magazine’ colour supplement, permitting me to devour the newsprint sections they discarded unread and which introduced me to investigative journalism on topics such as the thalidomide scandal.

My daily journey to Strode’s by bus and train was one hour in the morning, but two hours in the afternoon that included a half-hour wait at Egham railway station and forty minutes at Camberley bus station. Though this travel elongated my school day to ten hours, it offered me the ideal opportunity to read newspapers thoroughly. Even before Mr Hodges introduced me to ‘The Times’, I had been purchasing ‘The Evening News’ at Egham station to read on my way home, it being unavailable as far out of London as Camberley. I recall once pushing open the waiting room door on Egham station’s westbound platform, only to be confronted by a couple wearing the uniforms of the adjacent Catholic girls’ and boys’ schools noisily engaged in sex on the wooden bench seat. After that graphic shock, I always waited outside on the platform.

Mr Hodges’ revolutionary teaching method stimulated my fierce appetite for the daily news cycle by reading ‘The Times’ cover-to-cover (except for the sports pages). Initially, it proved challenging to grasp the detail of British government machinations and the influence of global developments on the economy. However, significant events such as the 1973 oil crisis, ‘winter of discontent’ and ‘three-day week’ provided plenty of real-world material to discuss and analyse what ‘Economics’ was all about. I loved learning about the interaction of economic policy with politics and international news stories.

In the Lower Sixth form, some of my closest school friends decided to apply to study at Cambridge University, which encouraged me to do likewise. Tim, Martin and Philip planned to first complete their A-levels and then focus during a ‘year out’ solely on their applications. This avenue was not available to me as my family’s dire financial situation meant my single-parent mother could not afford to support my studies for a further year. Despite his substantial arrears, my absent father had already persuaded Farnham court on my sixteenth birthday to reduce his maintenance obligation for me to £1 per year. I had tried desperately to find a summer job in 1974 to assist my family but to no avail.

As a result, I was required to sit Cambridge’s entrance examination papers at the same time as studying for my A-levels, with extracurricular one-to-one tutorials generously fitted around my timetable by Mr Hodges and a maths teacher. Somehow, I managed to pass by a slim margin and was called for interview. I travelled to Cambridge alone, wearing the one stiff grey suit that my mother had bought for me to attend my cousin Lynn’s church wedding. On the train, I read the day’s papers thoroughly to ensure I could confidently discuss the British government’s economic policies and the latest international affairs. After all, I had applied to study economics.

“What sort of school is Strode’s?” my elderly interviewer asked.

“It’s a sixth form college,” I replied, “that used to be a grammar school.”

“Of which school sports teams have you been captain?” he asked.

“None,” I replied.

“What positions of responsibility, such as Head Boy, have you held at school?” he asked.

“None,” I replied. “Our college does not have a Head Boy or Prefects.”

“What does your father do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied truthfully.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he immediately shot back at me.

“My parents are divorced and I haven’t seen my father for several years, which is why I don’t know what he is doing presently.”

“But he must have a profession, like a doctor or a banker or a barrister. What is his profession? Who employs him?”

“He qualified as a quantity surveyor and used to be self-employed.”

He seemed unsatisfied by my response. My father had left school at age fourteen. What could I do? I was not my father’s keeper! My interviewer waved towards a corner of the dingy interview room.

“There’s a piano over there,” he said. “Can you play something for me?”

“Sorry but I can’t,” I admitted. In my head, I was reflecting that I could name every minister in the present British government cabinet, if asked, and every aspect of its economic policy. However, my interviewer seemed convinced I was destined to be another Jane Fairfax.

“Did you not learn piano at school?” he asked.

“No. My school is focused on academic subjects, which is how I passed nine O-levels,” I replied.

The ‘interview’ continued in this same baffling style for half-an-hour. Not a single question was asked of me about economics, current affairs, news or, indeed, anything relating to the real world in which I lived. Enquiries were wholly about my success at making myself noticed by my peers and being appointed to team responsibilities by schoolteachers. There was no opportunity for me to mention having been male head of my family for the last few years, visiting solicitors, phoning courts, responding to Final Demands, writing endless letters to the tax office, utility companies and benefit agencies. Even if I had desired, I had insufficient free time to glorify my ego because I had all these responsibilities at the same time as passing three hours a day commuting to and from school.

On the long train journey home, I was not upset because I had no understanding of what had just happened. From an early age, I had had to invest and believe in the concept of ‘meritocracy’. Otherwise, I would never have bothered struggling to succeed in life. It was only years later I fully understood that my application, having lacked the benefit of wholehearted support from my school, had been made to a Cambridge college that accepted only around a hundred new undergraduates a year. Probably between zero and five of those accepted that year would arrive from state schools such as mine, regardless of how many had applied. My answers to the interviewer had merely reinforced a prevalent belief that boys like me were unsuited to aspire to study alongside the favoured elite from private schools. It had never been about academic ability alone. It required proof that you longed to be accepted by ‘them’ as ‘one of us’.

Unsurprisingly, the college I had applied to rejected me. My name was then placed in a ‘pool’ of applicants, probably filled with young people like me who had failed to prove at interview that they were ‘gentleman’ or ‘deb’ material. Eventually, I was informed that every other Cambridge college had similarly rejected me. The dream was over. It’s just one of those things you put down to experience.

What did not end was my insatiable appetite for reading newspapers, stimulated by the amazing Mr Hodges, that led me to ravenously consume a broadsheet daily for decades to come. For that I remain eternally grateful to a teacher who broke away from our school’s usual text book rote learning and opened the door to me understanding the big world beyond.

[8mm film of Mr Hodges by classmate & dear friend Martin Nichols]