The spy who disliked me : 2003 : Eva Koekelbergh, The Radio Authority

 “Do you know who I am?” my workplace colleague shouted down the phone. “Do you know who I work for?”

I suspect customer service personnel at Fortnum & Mason (which promises “everyone remembers their first encounter with us”) endure similarly haughty conversations with their upper crust clientele day in day out and follow a scrupulously polite script such as:

“Yes, madam, I can read your name on the order for wedding guest name cards and I can tell from your posh accent that you are a member of the British elite who since 1707 have purchased ordinary things from our Piccadilly shop at extraordinary prices, BUT …”

Perhaps private school timetables schedule one period per week of ‘Privilege Studies’ during which pampered Torquil’s and Persephone’s confidently acquire the skill of always getting their own way in life by addressing the 95% of Brits who they consider not ‘one of us’ as inferior beings … though I fail to recall my state school reciprocally teaching ‘deference’. Whether the harangued employee at Fortnum & Mason (“committed to delivering a sense of pleasure”) on the other end of the call had heard of 'The Radio Authority' I doubt. Our government quango was so marginal that there were probably people toiling in radio stations who had never heard of it.

My colleague was usually more softly spoken until an issue arose with ‘service’, at which point the inherited gene that had probably balled out ‘the help’ in centuries past suddenly emerged on the radar screen like the tip of an upper-class iceberg. On a previous occasion, a phone charger left permanently plugged in under the same colleague’s desk had burnt out with a bang while she was sat in our crowded, unventilated office, but without injury. No eavesdropping was necessary to overhear how forcibly the manufacturer would be complained to, sued and adequate compensation secured for her having suffered this apparent near-death experience.

Our office proved the ideal place for my colleague to spend most of the year meticulously planning her spectacular wedding in the grounds of a hired West Country mansion. Months could pass without management delegating any work to us ‘development officers’ to do. The pay and conditions in this public sector agency were undeniably rubbish, but never have I been required to do so little work for a salary. If I exited the office even ten minutes after five o’clock, it would be my duty to switch off all the lights and lock the Radio Authority front door. So much time, so little work!

Evidently, no run-of-the-mill wedding was being planned from the desk next to mine. Its scale and lavishness would easily have triumphed in a ‘Radio Industry Wedding of the Year’ awards ceremony. Like all historic royal weddings, this was not a purely personal affair. It celebrated the alliance of two established ‘houses’ that since 1973 had been at war with each other, fighting innumerable battles over every issue known to the broadcast industry’s opposing armies. The bridegroom was a board member and director of a significant British commercial radio group. The bride worked for the government regulator of the very same commercial radio industry. It was a match made in conflict-of-interest heaven.

I had already observed that, as soon as something of even minor significance occurred at The Radio Authority, the bride-to-be would unhook her mobile phone from its charger and march to the ladies’ loo where she might remain a good while. Maybe she just suffered a weak bladder exacerbated by radio industry events. Whatever, by dint of a mysteriously indirect route, such news would magically appear within the pages of the next ‘Radio Magazine’, a weekly publication brimming with insider gossip that naturally was rabidly consumed by The Radio Authority’s staff.

Normally I would have remained coldly detached from such workplace intrigue but, this time, my life was impacted by the whiff of in-house espionage. Bob Tyler, a good friend for as many decades as I have attended radio conferences, was then news editor of the Radio Magazine and had a habit of phoning The Radio Authority switchboard and asking to be put through to me for an innocent chat. Having signed some kind of Official Secrets Act on my first day of work, I told him absolutely nothing confidential. However, his calls may have sowed seeds of doubt with my boss, David Vick, who one day discovered me alone in his office after I had entered to retrieve a document I had mistakenly left on his desk minutes beforehand. As the only employee with hundreds of published articles about the radio industry to my name [see bibliography], the fickle finger of fate appeared to point directly at me and, without explanation, Vick started to lock his office door when he was absent. Subsequently, I was the sole employee not to be awarded a Christmas bonus and my annual review was unremittingly negative.

“My father worked as a spy for the Dutch government,” the bride-to-be would tell the rest of us in the office, as if addressing an interviewer for a place at Oxbridge. I wondered to myself whether such an occupation passed as a ‘family business’ amongst her peers. Could her employment with The Radio Authority be merely an undercover mission in a quiet backwater for an MI5 agent? Suspicions were further aroused when our boss David Vick insisted he vet and approve each of her wedding guests, the list apparently resembling a who’s-who of everyone who presently worked in the British commercial radio industry. Not that I ever saw it. 

As the Big Day approached, it became apparent that all who worked in our office had received an invitation … except me. In fact, everybody in our department had been invited … except me. Indeed, I suspect that just about everyone employed by The Radio Authority had been invited … except me. Not that Eva Koekelbergh ever told me to my face that I would not receive an invitation to her big fat Wessex wedding. My desk was only six feet away from hers so the ‘oh dear, it must have been lost in the post’ excuse would have been wholly redundant. I had endured almost a year of aural torture, forced to listen to every minor detail concerning the biggest day of her life being phoned through to dozens of contractors and then chased up relentlessly from her desk, yet now I was being treated as if I might deliver a homemade bomb as my gift-wrapped present.

Though there may be eight million eligible bachelors in the naked city, the universe of Britain’s 5% appears more akin to the gene pool within a rural Mormon village. The bridegroom just happened to be the former Radio Authority line manager of the bride, and he also just happened to be best man at her present line manager’s wedding, and both men just happened to have attended the same university [see blog]. For the cherry on top of this cake of coincidence, one of the six people working in our office was the daughter of one of the bride’s teachers at her former private school [see blog]. When people casually comment ‘it’s a small world’, do they realise what a truism it is for a certain stratum of society?

One week before the Big Day that had necessitated a year of planning, including its own internet domain with gooey photos of the couple and a lengthy wedding gift list, the bride casually asked me if I wanted to attend her post-wedding evening soiree, but not the main event. I was tempted by an appropriately pithy two-word response but instead feebly explained that I was already busy that weekend. The few friendly staff I knew at The Radio Authority had already asked me privately why I had not been invited and all I could do was shrug. I had no idea. Anybody who was anybody in the British radio industry seemed to have been invited. I could only surmise that I must be ‘nobody’, despite having planned and executed London’s most successful large-scale commercial radio station launch during the previous decade [see blog].

Naturally, the wedding juggernaut did not come to rest abruptly at the end of the Big Day. Afterwards there were still the communal experiences and the photos to be ooh-ed and ah-ed over by colleagues in the office … and the gossip. Who did what, who saw what and who said what occupied many of the staff for several weeks afterwards. I just sat at my desk pretending to be deaf, dumb and blind. All I learned was that everybody seemed to have had a good time. The wedding had at least not cost me a penny. No present, no card, no car hire, no petrol, no hotel, no tuxedo hire. Even if I had received an invitation, I might have proffered a public explanation that I could not afford all these costs on my meagre salary (particularly as I was commuting to London by train from Brighton), even whilst harbouring the private reason that the wedding’s scale and ostentatiousness seemed to be drawn from the pages of ‘Emma’.

A few months later, The Radio Authority closed and the majority of its staff transferred to a new regulator named Ofcom where we worked in a huge, open plan office overlooking the River Thames. I was relieved that my newly appointed desk was no longer next to the post-honeymoon bride, not because I disliked her, but because during my eighteen months at The Radio Authority she had insisted on running a powerful electric fan on her desk, whatever the season. It might have had the effect of making her feel like Kate Winslet on the bow of ‘The Titanic’ but the airstream had simultaneously played havoc with my sinuses. I had asked her repeatedly to adjust the fan’s angle but somehow it had still subjected me to painful headaches.

I had only transferred to Ofcom in the desperate hope of being offered some proper work tasks to tackle after having been required to do so little at its predecessor. It was not to be. My new boss Neil Stock gave me nothing to do [see blog]. When the BBC called unexpectedly to offer me contract work in Cambodia, I accepted the challenge [see blog]. During my last afternoon at Ofcom, I bade a fond farewell to the few lovely colleagues who had been so good to me. On route towards the exit, I passed Eva’s desk. I considered stopping to say farewell but then reflected on my experiences and resolved to walk on by.

The unmagical mystery tour : 1973 : Piggott’s Manor, Letchmore Heath

 There was a loud knock on the front door. Who could be visiting unannounced after dark? Certainly not Mr Dickinson from ‘The Pru’ who always called during daylight hours to collect monthly premiums in cash for our insurance policy. The opened door revealed two men in uniform whose van parked outside had a strange aerial on its roof. What had my father done? Was he about to be forcibly dragged away from our suburban Orgonon? No. The men said they were from the Post Office’s 'Radio Interference Service' and were investigating a recent spate of complaints from residents in surrounding streets of strange patterns interrupting their television viewing. Could they come in and inspect our equipment?

My parents’ enthusiasm for modern gadgets had equipped our living room with one of Camberley’s first state-of-the-art Bush colour televisions to receive the ‘BBC2’ service launched earlier in 1964. It had required the installation of a different aerial on the roof and an amplifier to successfully receive the UHF signal from a far transmitter. Although our own television reception had been fine, the men from the ministry believed that the amplifier must be faulty, transmitting interference instead of receiving signals, a problem they had sleuthed to our house. We were required to switch off the amplifier and temporarily refrain from watching BBC2. Hullabaloo and Custard had sold us a technicolour dream, though I was now to be deprived of my daily look through the square or round window with Big Ted and Jemima.

The technical problem was eventually fixed and our BBC2 viewing resumed, even after the annual Licence Fee was doubled to £10 in 1968 for the 20,428 UK households that owned a colour TV, a dismal figure that betrayed the initial failure of the technology’s launch. We missed the first black-and-white BBC1 transmission of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ on Boxing Day 1967 because we always spent the holiday at my grandparents’ house next door, stoically without a television. Instead, we gathered in our living room expectantly on 5 January to watch BBC2 repeat the programme in colour. This film premiere had been trailed as an artistic triumph for the world’s biggest pop group.

My parents owned all The Beatles’ albums to date and had watched their films at the Camberley Odeon. Earlier that decade, my father had bought a second-hand Uher reel-to-reel tape machine and had recorded the group’s performances broadcast live on the BBC Light Programme with a microphone held to the speaker, while his family was ordered to remain silent. The resultant tapes were played repeatedly in our house at high volume, years before homemade audiocassette compilations became possible and decades before Spotify would offer the same outcome at the press of a mouse button.

Once the 52-minute film of embarrassingly indulgent pop icons acting sillily in and around a bizarre coach trip had ended, we looked around to gauge each other’s reactions. It had been an incomprehensible and barely entertaining viewing experience, we agreed. The next day at school I wrote a short account of our evening in my ‘day book’ and drew an accompanying colour picture. No classmates had watched the film. My female teacher likely presumed my parents to be hippies. Our home’s complete collection of Beatles albums came to an abrupt halt. My mother transferred her musical affections to non-stop Herb Alpert.

After this artistic disappointment, The Beatles faded from my childhood. I learned that John Lennon had moved into a mansion (‘Tittenhurst Park’) in nearby Ascot when one of my father’s clients was appalled to discover the identity of his new neighbour. I recall our family being dragged along by my father to walk around Bruce Forsyth’s house on Wentworth Drive as a possible home, the estate agent spouting that a Beatle lived nearby (Tittenhurst Park is 1.6 miles away). I was excited by our potential neighbour but appalled to contemplate a home adjacent to a golf course in the middle of nowhere. Luckily it never happened.

Years passed during which our family circumstances changed irreversibly [see blog]. One morning in 1973, my father turned up unexpectedly at our home and insisted I accompany him on a trip. I adamantly refused but my mother insisted I go, hoping I might learn something about my father’s current ‘circumstances’. Only months earlier, he had quit our home for good and since had done his best to humiliate and impoverish his former family. He had even gone to court to demand regular access to his two-year-old daughter whom he had never wanted in the first place. One Friday a month, he would turn up and drive off with my baby sister, leaving my mother fretting inconsolably the whole weekend as to whether we might ever see her again. What ‘childcare’ my father provided at weekends we never learned, as he had been notably absent in his other children’s upbringing and his new lover was a mere teenager.

There was no conversation during our car journey. Not LITTLE conversation, NO conversation. My father talked though I said absolutely nothing. He still drove his left-hand-drive American Motors 'Javelin AMX' sports car as fast and recklessly as he ever had, breaking speed limits, overtaking on blind corners and generally terrifying me. Only the air conditioning kept me cool. I hated being there. Since leaving our home, my father had ignored me, ignored my birthday, ignored Christmas and sustained his total disinterest in my life. I had no respect for him because he had never done anything to earn respect from me. He seemed not to have the faintest idea of what a father should say or do for his children. Tellingly, after he had left, I never missed my father at all. Rather than tears, I felt relief. Why would I miss someone who had only ever used my talents to further his own greedy ambitions?

After an hour and a half of stony silence, we had travelled past Elstree and arrived before a huge mock-Tudor mansion in extensive grounds. He parked facing the front of the house and its luxurious lawns, telling me he had to go inside for a meeting and would leave me in the car for a while. I was just pleased not to have to suffer any more of my father’s dangerous driving and not to have to be in the company of someone who had always felt like a stranger to me. I switched on the car radio and listened to music.

I saw lots of people all dressed in similar orange medieval-style robes coming and going from the mansion and walking along its driveway in singles and in groups. I had never seen anything like it. Not in Britain anyway. I had seen photos of Buddhist monks in picture albums of faraway lands. But it felt eerie to be seated in a car in deepest rural Hertfordshire, surrounded on its driveway by people who looked as if they had materialised en masse from another dimension and a different time. What was I doing here and, more to the point, what was my father doing here?

Only later did I learn that Beatles member George Harrison had recently purchased this property with its seventeen acres of land, then known as Piggott’s Manor, and donated it to the Hare Krishna religious movement that had outgrown its Hindu temple in central London. The property was renamed Bhaktivedanta Manor and immediately attracted a huge volume of visiting devotees, the religion’s membership having been boosted by Harrison’s very public advocacy since The Beatles years. In the present day, 60,000 visitors annually are reported to attend its religious festivals.

For me, the irony of our visit that day was that my father’s life could not have been further from the altruistic philosophies of the Hare Krishna movement. I knew he had no interest in religion and had probably never even visited a church. If he was here, it must have been for his professional advice as a quantity surveyor. Perhaps modifications were necessary to this mansion as it had functioned as a nurses’ training college since 1957, owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. How could he have hustled this appointment? We knew from my father’s court papers that he claimed now to be living in the gated, 420-property St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge, home to many pop and entertainment celebrities, including John Lennon (before his move to Ascot) and Ringo Starr.

Did I meet George Harrison? No. Was I invited inside the mansion to hold the end of my father’s tape measure, a task required of me since I could walk? I honestly cannot remember. What happened next? I know he drove me home … again in silence. I was so consumed by the pointlessness of our father/son ‘road trip’ that almost everything else that had occurred was immediately eclipsed in my mind. Why had he insisted I accompany him? Was he trying to impress me? Was he trying belatedly to demonstrate his credential as a father? Or had he imagined I could help him secure a new client? I have no answers. It became our final day spent (un)together.

Half a century later, I was watching the 1969 Beatles footage in the fascinating 2021 ‘Get Back’ documentary when I noticed a Hare Krishna member who had accompanied George Harrison sat cross-legged on the floor of the group’s recording session. Memories of one of the strangest and most unrewarding days spent with my father came flooding back.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat : 2006-2009 : Enders Analysis

 1976. With trepidation, I knocked on the door of the Durham student newspaper to volunteer, opened it and encountered a cacophony of shrill, loud voices in an office no bigger than a two-up-two-down front room. A dozen people in close proximity were conversing at sufficient volume for their voices to project into a distant corner of a non-existent adjacent room. Never had I heard so few people generate so much noise. Not a chummy American loudness, but a commanding-the-troops ‘I’m in charge’ harshness. When one woman spoke, it sounded exactly how I imagined a horse might talk. I had stumbled into toff-land, the privileged world of the privately educated, a parallel universe of entitlement I had observed in television historical dramas but not realised still existed in the late twentieth century. Did I grow accustomed to their gratuitous noise pollution? No.

2006. With trepidation, I started my first day’s work at Enders Analysis. Its location in elite Mayfair, opposite the rear entrance of Park Lane’s Grosvenor Hotel, conveyed ‘class’. I was given a desk in a cramped room shared with colleagues who spoke loudly in plummy accents. The previous occasion I had endured transportation to toff-land, thirty years earlier, at least my commitment had been voluntary. Now I was indentured to spend forty hours a week in this socially hostile environment. Each occasion I opened my mouth seemed to confirm my appointment as the ‘accidental analyst’ to a job usually pre-ordained for yet another privately educated chap. Within days, the questions started.

“Why do you arrive at work so early every day?” asked Ian Watt one morning.

“My wife has to start work early, so I leave home with her,” I replied.

“Your wife is a banker?” my colleague suggested. I struggled to maintain a straight face at such a bizarre presumption.

“No,” I responded with hesitancy. “She works in an NHS hospital.”

There was a gap. I sensed a sharp intake of breath.

“Ooooohhhh,” said Watt with evident disappointment that betrayed a palpable disregard for public service, whether someone worked in a hospital kitchen or the deputy chief executive’s office.

If boisterous office chit-chat (“I’m off on holiday to Brazil next week”) proved insufficiently distracting, it was accompanied by personal phone calls made from colleagues’ desks, sometimes communicating disturbing content. Do I really need to hear you phoning a credit card company to increase the limit on a card in your father’s name for which you had applied and use? We all carried personal mobile phones and could go outside to make calls but, for these colleagues, there was evidently no shame or embarrassment in broadcasting their latest Famous Five-ish japes.

One regularly phoned his wife and, instead of a loving message, he would bark orders to her at the top of his voice as if she were a half-deaf scullery maid in his medieval castle. The tone of his phone calls disturbed me sufficiently to glance around our room to determine if the others had similarly felt they were being forced to eavesdrop on a suspected witch undergoing torture by the Inquisitor. None of them looked up or flinched during his tirades, as I did. I felt so alone in this workplace, observing that such humiliation of a fellow human appeared not only acceptable in toff-land but might be practised by my other colleagues.

“My wife is an opera singer,” he would turn around to tell us once his aggressive phone diatribes ended. I was uncertain whether this occupation was some kind of toff codeword for ‘slave’, or perhaps his entire household was staging a never-ending operetta in the ballroom where he had to phone in his part as the angry, posh analyst husband from Mayfair. His behaviour made me contemplate walking over and committing workplace violence but I was restrained by my poor chances in a pistol duel at dawn.

I soon discovered that ritual humiliation appeared to be my new workplace’s predominant management style. Within weeks of starting the job, I attended my first one-day radio conference at a Mayfair hotel a few hundred metres from the office. During the opening morning session, I received a text from a colleague telling me to return to the office because our boss needed me to do something unspecified urgently. Reluctantly leaving the conference, I returned to the office to be told that our boss was not there but would return soon. By the time the conference ended, I had wasted most of the day sat at my desk waiting for something, anything, to happen that required my presence.

If your private schooling imbued you with the notion that Miss Havisham was an ideal role model, such behaviour must simply propagate down your family money-tree. Many more humiliations followed, all of which I accepted with the uncomplaining resignation that a servant is forced to adopt to remain in the employ of an unhinged ‘big house’. The consequence is that the master progressively ups the ante in order to prompt a reaction, any kind of reaction, to their extensive repertoire of humiliations … and so it was.

2008. In front of my colleagues, boss Claire Enders told me she did not appreciate my work clothes. My suits were too baggy and my shirts were too patterned. I had not changed my dress style since starting work there, so I recognised this as her latest attrition. I wore a black or grey suit, a ‘designer’ work shirt, a subtly patterned tie and black shiny shoes. Once a month, my wife accompanied me on a Saturday hike around local men’s outfitters to peruse and purchase sale items. As a result of my daily cross-country run, my shoulders were broad but my waist was narrow, making any suit look ‘baggy’ on me. It was not my fault that many of my work colleagues were Billy Bunter-like!

In response, I resorted to wearing a plain white shirt and black tie every day under one of my existing suits. Then, in front of my colleagues, Enders complained I looked like an undertaker and ordered me to go to gentleman’s shops on Jermyn Street to buy new clothes. My patience with these workplace humiliations was wearing thin by my third year there. I neither agreed nor refused. As the only parent in the analyst team financially supporting their child’s university education, I could not suddenly throw my earnings at hideously expensive clothes. I had kept to my employer’s dress code at all times. I hoped that this latest humiliation might blow over … but I underestimated the persistence of my protagonist.

One week later, colleague Ian Watt told me he had been instructed to take me to Jermyn Street to buy new, more suitable clothes. We took a taxi, something I never afforded. During the one-kilometre journey, Watt wittered on about stuff while I shut my ears and stared vacantly out the window. I had decided to go along passively with his mission, as if he were demonstrating his superior breeding to a servant or slave … or wife. I did not lose my temper, argue or contradict him. I was merely a lowly bit player in his ‘Downton Abbey’ roadmap of British society. In my head, I was amused at the ridiculousness of this situation.

Inside the Dickensian shop (“Suits you, sir!”), Watt chose a new wardrobe for me. Bright pink shirts, elastic braces, ugly black shoes. I offered no opinion about his preferences. All I would have needed was a red nose to join a touring circus. He took my ‘outfit’ to the cash desk and unexpectedly asked me to pay. I refused. There was a standoff. Frustrated at not fulfilling the ultimate humiliation of making me fund my own unrequested makeover, he stormed off to replace most items on their shelves, before proffering his credit card to pay for the remaining two. During our taxi journey back to the office, I remained detached even when I heard him bellow at me:

“If you had attended a public school*, even a minor one, you would know how to dress!”

There, laid bare, was his contempt for me. It mattered not one iota that I had started working in radio more than three decades earlier and had successfully launched commercial stations attracting millions of listeners in the UK, Europe and Asia [see 'about']. It mattered not one iota that I had earned more mass media coverage for Enders Analysis with my published reports about the radio industry [see list] than all my analyst colleagues combined. All that mattered to him was the type of school I had attended many moons ago. The five-figure sum that his parents must have paid each term for his private school education seemed to entitle him to treat me like … you know what.

Unlike Pip, I harboured no desire to be accepted as a ‘gentleman’ by London society. You could stuff your flouncy shirts, your waistcoats, your pocket watch, your braces, your uncomfortable shoes, your sickening attitude to people like me. I knew who I was and was perfectly content in my own skin. Born in a council house, I attended school on a council estate [see blog] and was obliged to become male head of my single-parent household at the age of fourteen [see blog]. That is who I was. I refused to lick your … overprivileged ego.

Back at the office, the clothes bought in Jermyn Street sat in a bag beside my desk. I refused to even look at them. Naturally, further humiliations followed until, within months, I was forced out of my job. When I left for the final time, I placed the bag of new, unworn toff-wear on my empty office chair. There were no farewell drinks. There was no gratitude. There were no goodbyes. One day I was at work, then I had gone. Exiled from toff-land.

Several months later, I received an unexpected call on my mobile from Ian Watt. There was some work Enders Analysis wanted me to do. I knew from experience that Claire Enders could humiliate to the bitter end former employees who had been edged out of her workplace by asking a staff member to renew contact on her behalf [see blog]. Watt droned on for a while and, though I was sorely tempted to shout an expletive at the same volume he reserved for humiliating people like me, I simply responded ‘no’ and put the phone down.

I don’t wanna go to Jermyn Street … ever again.

[* In British English, 'public school' confusingly means a private secondary school requiring fees.]

Blinded by the light : 1967 : Architectural Drawing Services, 27b High Street, Camberley

 It was a mystery. Questions were asked. Answers were not forthcoming. Nobody could understand what had happened. Evidently something must have occurred. But what? And how? The professionals were stumped. I could not help. I had no answers either. Had I been in an accident? No. Had I hit my head? No. Had my face been hurt? No. I remained as baffled as were they. I had no answers. The whole thing was to remain a complete mystery … for decades.

Once a year, we were told to stand in line in the corridor in our underwear. Boys in the morning, girls in the afternoon. I hated standing around near-naked in public. One by one we were ushered into an office where a nurse rushed through an eye test, a hearing test and pinged our underpants’ elastic for a gender check. It was the result of my eye test that held up the ‘production line’ for processing my classmates [see blog]. The record card had logged my vision as 20/20 one year ago. How come, now, I was so short-sighted that I could read no further than the second line on the eye chart? It was a complete mystery.

Children tend to join a ‘family business’ once they have finished their education. I was put to work by my father before I started school. Once I could walk, I accompanied him on appointments to measure houses, shops, offices and factories where I held the end of a long tape measure marked in feet-and-inches, wound out from a brown holder the size and shape of a discus. Once I could read, I ensured copies of design periodicals including ‘Architects Journal’ were returned to his office shelves in strict chronological order. Once I could write, I used Letraset sheets to transfer stylised, appropriately scaled men or women pushing pushchairs onto his ‘artist’s impression’ building elevation plans. Such was the volume of graphics and lettering I used that the well-thumbed, thick, ring-bound Letraset catalogue became the closest we had to a Bible in our house.

My father’s office was a Portacabin behind the garage in our back garden. As our house was only 300 yards from the town centre, clients could visit him easily. However, my parents were about to move to a house they had been building two miles on the opposite side of town that was reached by an unmade road. It would prove useless for a business. The solution was the rental of a town centre office at 27b High Street on a busy pedestrian alleyway connecting to the Knoll Road public car parks. It had three rooms: a small lobby, a main room large enough for two drawing boards and a desk with an electric typewriter, plus a smaller back room. My father registered a company named ‘Architectural Drawing Services’ and ordered letterheads, invoices, statements and business cards with an olive-green border from Southwell Press in Park Street.

The office windows faced the wall of the Midland Bank building on the other side of the alley. My mother had applied to work there in the early 1950’s, desiring a job closer to home than the administrative role at Elizabeth Shaw’s chocolate factory she had taken after leaving the grammar school on Frimley Road. Thrilled to learn that her application had been successful, she was disappointed to be told she could not work there because no women’s toilet existed in the building where only men were employed. Instead, she was offered the same job at the Midland branch in Farnborough where she could use the female public toilet in the newly built Queensmead shopping plaza … which she accepted and had to commute.

In my father’s new office, I was given three additional tasks. At the end of each month, I typed the invoices, statements and their envelopes. If clients’ payments were overdue, I had a box of green, yellow and red warning stickers I would lick and attach to their statements, printed with progressively strident threats. I handwrote details of each invoice into a large accounting ledger, the opposite page of which my mother updated with bill payments she had made.

Secondly, once school finished at four o’clock, I would pay a halfpenny to catch the number 1 or 2 or 3C bus to the town centre and wait in my father’s office until he was ready to drive us home for ‘tea’ at our new house. He would regularly ‘pop out’ and leave me alone in order to (I learned much later from my mother) spend an hour or so with his current mistress. Clients and potential clients visiting the office late afternoon might find it manned only by a polite nine-year old boy, banging out documents on an IBM Selectric typewriter he had mastered years earlier. It must have seemed bizarre.

Things could have been worse. If I had been born a hundred years earlier, I might have been sent up chimneys as I was appropriately thin and tall (only Pamela Munroe and Marina Hirons were taller in my class of thirty). As it was, I was made familiar with most aspects of running a small business by the time I finished primary school. These were skills that schools (and even university) failed to consider worthwhile imparting, and why girls like my mother had to be sent subsequently to ‘secretarial school’ to learn the practical aspects of commerce about which their male bosses would never need to worry their unpretty big heads.

My third task was to work in the rear office that was off-limit to clients, kept darkened by a venetian blind across its window and contained two printing machines. One was an absolutely massive dyeline printer that used ammonia solution and photosensitive paper to reproduce paper copies of 36- by 48-inch architectural plans drawn onto tracing paper. There was no ventilation from the room as the door to the main office had to be kept shut to keep out the light, as did the one window to prevent a breeze blowing the blind. The second machine was a Rank Xerox monochrome photocopier that used ultraviolet light to print onto photosensitive A4 paper.

During term time, I would regularly do small copying jobs for my father after school on both machines. I hated the smell of the ammonia, the heat generated by the machines and the bright light emitted by the photocopier. During this era, such machines were uncommon outside cities and my father soon realised he could subsidise their cost by offering copying services to non-clients. He was approached by the Associated Examining Board [AEB], the only GCE examination board not linked to a university, which had moved from London to nearby Aldershot in 1966 and was seeking a business to contract for photocopying services. It would mean taking on a lot of seasonal work but the returns would prove significant. The deal was done.

Schools in the UK and former colonies took GCE exams every June, sent them directly to the persons appointed to mark them, who then sent them to AEB. A percentage of papers for each subject were then forwarded by AEB to a different academic whose job was to check that the initial marking was appropriate and consistent. They were sent a photocopy of the student’s marked work to ensure the original would not be lost. Turnaround time for these tasks was critical as exam boards notified students of their results in August before the new school year started the following month.

My mother was occupied at home caring for my younger preschool brother so it fell upon me to fulfil this contract. Most of my school summer holiday had to be spent in the darkened back room of my father’s office, photocopying thousands of examination scripts for days on end. It was hot work and the ultraviolet light flashed around the edges of the document plateau thousands of times. AEB were pleased with the results and renewed the contract to execute the same work for their less busy December exam retakes. Bang went my Christmas holidays too!

The outcome, which everyone had apparently failed to anticipate, was my mother taking me to Leightons opticians at the top of the High Street to purchase my first pair of NHS glasses with thick lenses in tortoiseshell frames. I refused to wear them at school, not because I feared being bullied (something never witnessed at Cordwalles Junior School) but because it was so rare then for children of my age to wear glasses. My stubbornness perplexed teacher Mr Hales who struggled to comprehend why I could no longer copy down things he wrote on the blackboard. Had one of 4H’s brightest students suddenly become illiterate?

Subsequent eye tests proved just as baffling to opticians who could not understand why my eyesight had deteriorated so suddenly during one year, but then remained static for years afterwards. It confounded me too for a long time until I finally understood the havoc wreaked on eyesight by lengthy unfiltered exposure to UV light. The only positive side effect was that, in every workplace I have since worked, I have been the one person in the office who can be relied upon to fix a malfunctioning photocopier!

Once I progressed to secondary school in 1969, I became too busy completing mountains of homework to continue the monthly office tasks. Besides, my father was about to upgrade my ‘help’ to evaluating the potential profitability of local property deals for a considerably more lucrative sideline he had discovered. I also suspect he preferred I spend less time at his office because, the older I was, the more difficult it became for him to disguise his dalliances with women.

In 1972, my father left our family forever to run off with recent teenage bride Suzie Anthony who lived a few doors away. The courts ordered him to pay the mortgage on our house and maintenance to my mother and her three children. He avoided payment, claiming he was unemployed despite living in salubrious, gated St Georges Hill, Weybridge. He broke into our house while we were out and stole almost everything he had ever provided for us, including some of my treasured vinyl records purchased with pocket money [see blog]. My mother had to take both a day job and an evening cleaning job to try and make ends meet.

On my sixteenth birthday in 1974, my father applied to Farnham court to reduce my maintenance payment to £1 per year, arguing that I was now old enough to take a job. The court agreed, despite him already owing thousands in arrears and me about to take eight O-level exams and hoping to continue my education with A-levels and university. I received a letter from the court informing me of its decision at a hearing of which neither I nor my mother had prior knowledge. When the amount owing mounted even further, he fled abroad. Farnham court said it was our responsibility to trace his whereabouts.

In 1976, entirely coincidentally, my first paying job was processing examination papers at AEB in Aldershot. Almost a decade had passed since I had similarly handled thousands of students’ handwritten GCE scripts from all over the world in my father’s office. It was difficult not to believe in some kind of ‘fate’.

My father died in 2013 though I was not invited to his funeral. A handwritten will bequeathed the majority of his assets to my younger brother whose contribution to my father’s business in Camberley had been … zero.

From Russia with lawlessness : 1994 : Metromedia, Park Place, Moscow

 “I am a paediatric doctor,” said the young woman cleaning the toilet bowl in the bathroom of my apartment. “I work at the hospital during the day but I cannot live on my salary, so I have to work as a cleaner every evening.”

I was embarrassed. Although the doctor had been cleaning my apartment nightly, this was the first occasion I had attempted to strike up a conversation. I had mistakenly presumed that my ‘cleaner’ spoke no English. How wrong I was! Maybe she assumed I was a snobby American corporate manager who had just been posted overseas. How wrong she was! I was an unemployed Brit forced to take some freelance radio consulting work abroad, having failed to secure a job in my own backyard. Both of us were having to do what we did to survive.

I felt disorientated here. It was my first time in Russia. I would never have chosen to work here. But it could have been worse. My client, American public corporation Metromedia, had initially told me my destination was to be Nizhny Novgorod. I had had to consult a map to even locate that industrial city on the Volga. Thankfully, instead, I was sent to cosmopolitan Moscow. But looks are deceiving. My surroundings gave the semblance of a modern city but almost nothing actually worked as it should. Here was an incomplete facsimile of Western capitalist infrastructure in which the Soviet state had copied the designs without implementing the mechanisms. It recalled the era when a ‘Made in China’ label was a surefire guarantee a product that might look good would quickly fail.

My one-bedroom apartment appeared quite luxurious, about three times the size of my poky second-floor flat in London, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on an upper floor that looked out over the permanent pollution rising from Moscow’s busy streets. It was inside a huge, newly built trio of linked office blocks containing office spaces and 330 apartments intended for foreign businesses that required a secure location 14 kilometres from the Kremlin. It was like living in one of those vast complexes portrayed in American movies about the self-destructive life of a harassed corporate ‘road warrior’. Maybe it was designed to offer ex-pats that kind of bland fictional familiarity.

In January 1994, Metromedia had bought one of the least popular FM radio stations in Moscow, planning to turn it into one of the most popular. There was a hitch. The Americans were baffled by the radio market not just in Russia, but in the whole of Europe. They could hear 30+ stations broadcasting in Moscow but they could not fathom what they were doing on-air. This was not simply a language problem. It was a challenge because Americans were accustomed to tightly defined music or speech broadcasters in their commercial radio system. You only had to listen to the vast majority of American radio stations for around ten minutes to recognise their ‘format’. Europe was not like that, largely because ‘public service broadcasting’ had been legislated as the bedrock of its broadcast systems since the invention of radio.

Before my flight to Moscow, I had purchased a Sony all-band radio from an electronics shop in Watford for almost £100. It was now put to service all day while I listened hour after hour to a particular Moscow radio station, writing notes about the music played, the talk, the advertisements, the jingles and anything else I heard. I was used to listening to radio stations in languages of which I had no comprehension, having spent so many weekend nights as a schoolboy DX-ing radio stations from all over the world on a Trio 9R59DS radio receiver. I had also analysed local radio markets in the UK for groups applying for new licences, monitoring existing stations’ broadcasts and tabulating the results. It might be boring work but at least I was being paid to do it!

One morning I received an email requesting my presence at an important staff meeting to be held in the Metromedia office within Park Place. This surprised me for several reasons: I was not an employee, I had never previously been invited to such a meeting in Moscow and, most astonishingly, nobody had told me that Metromedia even had an office within the same building where I was living. I had to call the phone number on the message to ask where precisely this office was located within the complex.

After spending so many days alone in the apartment listening to my radio and writing copious observations, it was an adventure to walk through the building’s labyrinth of anonymous floors and numbered doors to eventually locate and knock on the Metromedia office. After weeks of perpetual solitude, it felt like coming out of prison to be greeted by a surprise party. The room was full of Americans of whom I had never been aware, let alone met, all chatting away noisily. None of them had the faintest idea who I was, requiring my explanation that I too had received THE email. They were very welcoming in the American way, despite probably wondering why on earth this unknown, scraggy Englishman was present.

The meeting started soberly with an update on Metromedia’s progress attracting paying subscribers to its broadcast television service ‘Kosmos TV’ and mobile phone system it had apparently launched in 1991 in partnership with the state’s ‘Moscow Television & Transmitter Centre’. I had no idea that Metromedia had been operating in Moscow several years already and had been investing around US$5m annually in that particular joint venture business. The good news was its success in building a growing subscriber base. However, the reason for this meeting was the bad news that the Russian who had been appointed manager of the business had just disappeared with all its funds and had proven untraceable. There were long faces. Oh dear.

Welcoming the variation from my usual lonely routine, I spent the remainder of that day in the office chatting with some of my newly discovered Metromedia colleagues. At that stage, it seemed unclear whether the television business could continue and whether the office would even remain in operation. I met the corporation’s financial analyst Muema Lombe who shared my interest in pirate radio and he generously introduced me to the basics of Excel, the software that has been the mainstay of my analysis work ever since. We remain close friends since that chance introduction in Moscow.

On the way back to my apartment, I called in at the ‘Garden Ring Irish Supermarket’ in the Park Place lobby to buy my regular supplies. It was a smaller satellite branch of the bigger shop in the city centre that had opened in 1992. I was surviving on breakfast cereal, milk, bananas, tea and snacks, particularly American ‘Oreo’ cookies which I had never seen before. There was no cooking equipment in the apartment beyond a kettle, probably to encourage residents to eat in the complex’s vastly overpriced restaurant. Lacking a corporate expense account, I only ate there when my American line manager John Catlett was in Moscow, enduring hour-long waits to be served the simplest meals.

Although the Park Place shop’s range of food was limited, it felt too dangerous to shop outside as a foreigner. Russians bought provisions at kiosks where they could ask for the items they wanted, whereas foreigners like me had to frequent self-serve retailers where they became easily identifiable targets. In 1993, more than 7,000 crimes against foreigners had been reported in Russia, including the editor of the English-language ‘Moscow Times’ newspaper who had been robbed of cash and a laptop by men with knives outside the city centre’s Garden Ring Irish Supermarket. I had watched a ‘CNN’ report that Russia’s murder rate was three times higher than the United States’ and was only surpassed by South Africa.

Due to its success attracting foreign customers, the Irish Supermarket itself soon became a target. After its owners resisted a takeover by their Russian partner Dmitry Kishiev, there were reports of an alleged overnight explosion at its city centre store. The ‘Moscow Times’ reported: “Apparently fearing for their safety, the Irish partners then fled the country, urging their more than two-dozen expatriate employees to do likewise.”

Once Russians took over the ‘Irish’ supermarket, I noticed food on sale in Park Place marked with long gone expiry dates, the prices increased, customers deserted and eventually the shops closed altogether. Like everything else in Russia, ‘business’ was not considered a product of entrepreneurial spirit or managerial prowess. Instead, it was considered a lucky lottery ticket permitting almost anyone lacking relevant skills to intimidate, bully and exert power to enrich themselves over others.

Russia during the 1990’s was frequently referred to as the ‘Wild West’. There was a sense that just about anything you could imagine might happen there … and it frequently did. My corporate apartment felt like a haven of relative ‘normality’ within a crazed parallel universe. I cannot recall anyone being murdered at Park Place during my initial stay, unlike subsequent visits to Russia when I was given accommodation in hotels of variable quality and security. Never did I value boring old Britain so much as the days I would thankfully walk on the tarmac of Heathrow airport after yet another prolonged stay in Russia.

“A powerful bomb blast in the city’s centre on Saturday afternoon took the life of a Moscow student. The bomb which, according to police, had power equivalent to approximately 400 grams of TNT, had been placed inside a large metal dumpster on ul Bolshaya Spasskaya not far from Leningradsky train station. According to eyewitnesses, at the time of the blast, the 23-year-old female student of farming was walking by the dumpster. The strength of the explosion tore off one of her arms and blew out most of the windows in neighbouring buildings … Witnesses reported that just a few moments before the blast, several men had tried forcibly to enter a building next to where the explosion took place, but that after a doorman refused to let them enter the building, they threw a package into the dumpster.”

Small story on PAGE SEVEN of the ‘Moscow Tribune’, 30 January 1996

The invisible manager : 1993 : Bud Stiker, Radio Juventus, Hungary

 Nazi soldiers were everywhere. Battalions of Nazis marching down wide boulevards. Nazis standing on convoys of tanks, waving flags. Row upon row of Nazis saluting speeches by their leader. Nazis fighting on battlefields. It was exhausting to watch for too long and nothing like 'Indiana Jones'. In fact, it was a little bit frightening.

I had viewed so many hours of ‘MTV’ that I knew Stina Nordenstam’s song ‘Little Star’ by heart. Seeking alternative entertainment, I manually retuned the hotel room’s television and was shocked to discover a grainy black-and-white channel that was broadcasting Nazi propaganda twenty-four hours a day. I was like Dennis Quaid in the movie ‘Frequency’, pulling signals from the ether transmitted several decades earlier. This bizarre television service must have been a sideshow of the civil war raging on European soil only a hundred miles from my present location, atop a Budapest hill 479 metres above sea level.

My life under ‘hotel arrest’ was proving extremely tedious. To be accurate, I could leave any time I wished but my accommodation was hardly ‘Hotel California’. I was stranded alone, five miles from the city centre in countryside popular for walking holidays in summer but dead as a dodo mid-winter. No buses, no taxis, no shops, no mobile phone, no laptop, no internet access. It felt like sensory deprivation to be cooped up in a hotel room for days with absolutely nothing to do. My sole consolation was that I would be charging the client my daily rate.

My task had been to interview each of the staff of tiny ‘Radio Juventus’ in Siófok to determine their role, their skills and their future potential. The station had been launched in 1989 by a local newspaper to serve German tourists who summered at Lake Balaton. It was about to be acquired by American public corporation Metromedia, owned by billionaire John Kluge [see blog], and I had been hired to discover precisely what he was buying and to plan its transformation into Hungary’s first national commercial radio station. I had completed a fortnight’s work when…

Three soldiers in military uniform suddenly burst into the underground bunker where I was installing computer programmes, talking loudly and waving around their guns. I was surprised but not initially alarmed as I knew they guarded the gate of the compound. Every day it took them ten minutes to inspect and approve my passport before they would let me enter. Maybe today they were simply bored. However, events quickly turned nasty when station staff translated the soldiers' demands into basic English:

“They say: 'you must go.' They say: 'go now and no stop.'”

Sorry? They mean me? But I work here! I am just doing my job! The staff were adamant. The soldiers had received orders. All foreigners (which meant only me) had to leave the compound immediately. I asked if I could telephone Metromedia’s office, a one-hour drive away in Budapest. While the soldiers glared at me, seemingly eager to make an arrest, the phone just rang and rang and rang. Where was the office secretary? In her absence, there was usually an answering machine on the end of the line. But now there was nothing.

I collected my belongings and the soldiers escorted me up the narrow stairs and out of the building. The bright sunlight made my eyes squint but the fresh air was invigorating. The bunker housing the radio station received no natural light, no fresh air and was always thick with cigarette smoke. Dust lay everywhere because it had served as an underground coal store during Soviet times. The soldiers stood in a line, holding their guns menacingly, and watched as I searched for my car keys. Above us loomed huge transmitter masts that the Soviets had built during the Cold War to jam broadcasts from West European radio stations. I drove the car slowly out of the compound and gave a friendly wave to the soldiers as I passed their checkpoint. They did not respond. In the rear-view mirror, I saw them lock the gates behind me and put down their guns. This must have been the most action they had seen in months.

An hour later, I was sat in the Budapest ‘office’ of Metromedia, in reality a converted bedroom within the Normafa Hotel owned by the Americans’ Hungarian business partner György Wossala. There was no sign of Bud Stiker, imported from Maine to manage this operation. No sign either of his harassed Hungarian secretary. I called Stiker’s mobile phone but it was switched off. The remainder of the afternoon, I stayed in the office but nobody came. The office phone rang regularly, which I had to ignore as I spoke no Hungarian. It had been a baffling day. I returned to my room, watched MTV and fell asleep to the sounds of loud revelry in the hotel grounds.

The next morning, I was eating breakfast in the hotel’s deserted dining room when Wossala appeared, so I asked if he knew what was happening with his American business partner. He was evasive and wanted only to talk about the wedding party that had hired his hotel the previous evening for a huge banquet and, when presented with their invoice, had drawn guns on his staff, then fled in their fleet of Mercedes.

“This is not good business,” he suggested to me.

I sat in the office again. Nothing happened until late afternoon when the secretary finally appeared, looking flustered. She had been trying to find Stiker the last two days, visiting downtown bars he was known to frequent.

“Everybody is looking for him,” she told me, “but he has just – pouf – disappeared.”

Stiker had worked for Metromedia in the 1980’s, managing radio stations in Colorado and Maryland. Prior to his arrival in Budapest, he had been executive vice president of Bonneville Broadcasting System, the US radio network owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I recognised that Stiker would understandably be unfamiliar with the European radio industry, probably the reason I had been hired as consultant. More puzzlingly, he appeared somewhat uninterested in visiting the business Metromedia was acquiring in Hungary, meeting the staff he was nominally managing, or creating a plan to transform the radio station … all of which was delegated to me, leaving him ‘hands off’.

Stiker’s mobile phone remained switched off and we found he had left no information about his whereabouts. The secretary checked with the hotel which confirmed he had not returned to his bedroom for two days. We were both totally confused.

The next day, the secretary arrived for work and told me she was quitting her job. She had checked her bank account and found that her wages had not been paid. Neither had the expenses she had rung up on behalf of Metromedia. I helped her carry the contents of her desk to her car outside. It did not seem to matter anymore whether the office items she was taking really belonged to her or to her former employer. I was on my own now and starting to get a little worried.

The next day, Wossala told me he was repossessing Metromedia’s office to convert back into a hotel room, despite the fact that I had observed no more than five guests staying in his hotel that mid-winter. He insisted I return the keys of the tiny Hungarian car I had been using to drive to the radio station, as he claimed it belonged to the hotel rather than Metromedia. That left me completely stranded.

My anxiety intensified the next morning when I found a hotel bill had been slipped under my door during the night, demanding I pay for my stay immediately, an expense that should have been taken care of by Metromedia. I told Wossala (truthfully) that I did not have sufficient funds to pay his bill, and neither could I change the date of my charter flight back to London, still several weeks away. The situation turned into a stalemate – he grudgingly let me continue my stay in his near-empty hotel, but now refused to serve me further meals.

I had to find food. I walked out of the hotel and turned left. There was nothing but a miniature railway, closed in winter, that would take hikers further into the forest hills. I walked back the opposite direction. About a mile from the hotel was a tiny roadside kiosk where I would point to dry biscuits, cola drinks and imported chocolate bars that I purchased with the limited amount of local currency I had previously changed. I had to eke out this basic diet the rest of the week.

Ten days after his disappearance, Bud Stiker suddenly re-emerged at the hotel. Amazingly, he had almost nothing to say about his sudden absence. He barely apologised for the inconvenience he had caused me and explained only that he had been “attending to important business” elsewhere. He said that there had been a “misunderstanding” between Metromedia and its Hungarian partner. I was more shocked by his lack of candour than I was by my treatment at the hands of the Hungarian soldiers ten days earlier. I half-heartedly completed my work and counted off the remaining days longingly until I could fly home.

Back in London, I wrote and submitted my report. Stiker queried my invoice, claiming I was overcharging because he believed the rate we had agreed was 'per month' rather than 'per week.' I found insulting his attempt to cut my fee by 75%, particularly after the experience I had just endured in Budapest. It seemed a bit rich coming from one of Metromedia’s old-timers whom my colleagues later alleged were being offered US$1,000,000 per year to manage one of its newly acquired stations in Europe as a kind of pre-retirement reward for earlier corporate loyalty (Metromedia had sold all of its 27 US radio stations by 1986). I resisted vociferously and was eventually paid in full. I hoped for more consulting work like this, though I wished Metromedia would not assign me to Stiker again … but it did.

That bleak winter month spent in a Budapest hotel room, watching ‘Nazi TV’, was the closest I had come to a war zone and the scary propaganda it produced.

My life as a seadog : 1985 : The Voice of Peace, Tel Aviv

 The prostitute was perched on the edge of my bed. Using the elementary Hebrew I had learned from children’s television, we chatted about her young daughter and the disastrous economic situation in Israel (inflation nearing 1000%) that had forced her into this profession. I had been asleep in bed when the room door had opened, the light was abruptly turned on and I opened my tired eyes to see a ‘Little & Large’ couple framed in the doorway. Having ordered her client to take a shower before starting ‘work’, she had ample time for a conversation with me.

Was this another chapter of my punishment, to share a hotel room with a fat drunken Dutch sailor whose mission was evidently a missionary position in every port? I had come ashore after spending a week of nights sat alone on the ship’s bridge as ‘lookout’, tossed from side to side by the stormy Mediterranean. This was the sentence handed down by a Dutch captain angered by my point-blank refusal to enter the anchor chain locker alone and clean it of seabed debris. I cared not a jot that other DJs on board had accepted his prior orders to execute this task. I was adamant that I had not signed up as a seaman. I was there as a radio DJ. Neither the captain nor his crew had ever been required to assist us in the radio studios, so why was I expected to take on ship duties? Besides which, I suffered from claustrophobia.

Well, how did I get here? I had spent 1984 living at my mother’s house, unemployed and submitting applications for every UK radio production job I could find, none of which proved successful. All I had been offered was a six-month contract to work as a volunteer DJ on pirate radio station ‘The Voice of Peace’ in Israel. I promised myself that, if no proper job turned up by year-end, I would pursue this as a last resort. That was why, in the New Year, I was on a flight to Tel Aviv with two suitcases. It was sheer desperation. I had to convince myself that ‘doing radio’, almost any sort of radio, would be better for my career than trying to get work in radio but failing.

The deal on offer was that, for each month’s work on board the ship, I would receive US$100 in cash and be granted one week’s shore leave in paid Tel Aviv hotel accommodation. However, the seas proved too rough for crew transfers during my first three months on board, depriving me of returning my feet to land until April. It was particularly frustrating during that period to be able to clearly see the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv city at night from the ship but to have only spent a few hours there between my airport arrival and having been ferried on board.

The only ship I had experienced before was a cross-Channel ferry, so my first few weeks were spent being seasick and adjusting to the meals served by amiable cook Radha who professed he had pretended to be a chef to land this job. Initially there were plenty of DJs on board and my shifts presenting on-air were reasonable. However, as the months went on, most of my colleagues either completed their six months or quit early and were not replaced. There were occasions when I was required to present programmes for more than twelve hours a day when our number was reduced to two. I consoled myself that, detained in a floating prison, it was better to be kept occupied than to spend time reflecting on the notion of freedom.

Nominally in charge of the station’s programmes on the ship was the genial Daevid Fortune who, I seem to recall, had previously worked on Twickenham AM pirate ‘Radio Sovereign’, a station that had existed for eight months in 1983 playing only oldies. At the ripe age of twenty-seven, I was older than most of my colleagues and more experienced, having previously worked full-time for UK commercial local station ‘Metro Radio’ not only as a presenter but as a manager who had implemented an innovative playlist system to reverse its dwindling audience [see blog]. However, within the ship’s radio team, I maintained a low profile as there was no incentive to propose improvements or seek additional responsibilities without decent compensation.

The many hours of off-air boredom were relieved by listening to previously unheard stations from Lebanon, Cyprus and Egypt. There was a television room on-deck where I would watch the afternoon post-war American movie of the day on Jordan TV. I would write letters to my thirteen-year-old sister back in the UK. I would read cover-to-cover all the English-language music magazines, including heavyweight weekly ‘Billboard’, that we received. I would comb the small record library and listen to previously unheard discs in the second production studio. Once the weather became calmer in the summer, it was an idyllic existence to live without day-to-day responsibilities. My hair grew longer than it had ever been, my skin turned dark brown and my body became even thinner as a result of seasickness and Radha’s meals.

The station’s Persian founder and owner, Abie Nathan, was a peace activist who had been making grand publicity-seeking gestures in Israel to promote his cause since the 1960’s. He bought the ship second-hand in 1973, allegedly with the financial assistance of John Lennon, and had installed the radio broadcasting equipment. However, after more than a decade continuously anchored a few kilometres off Tel Aviv, the ship and its facilities had seen better days by the time I arrived.

Like many station owners, Nathan was given to flights of fancy, calling up on ship-to-shore radio to demand airtime for content that interrupted our on-air routines. During my stint, Nathan hired a duo of British ‘radio consultants’ to improve the station. Their big idea was to split the station into two different services on FM and AM during certain dayparts, requiring both studios to be used simultaneously for live programmes. This proved not such a practical idea when the station was so regularly short-staffed. I was allocated the evening FM show, for which I used Steely Dan’s ‘FM’ track as theme music and selected soft rock songs. I was rewarded with a letter from a listener in Finland who had heard my show and sent me a cassette recording postmarked the following day to prove it (remember this was pre-internet).

If there was one lesson I learned from my six months at sea, it was the first occasion I had worked with self-styled ‘radio consultants’ who seemed to talk endlessly about their successes, obviously possessed the gift of the gab, but who were revealed as less knowledgeable than they might appear. In those pre-digital times, I was surprised to be the person on-board who was asked to explain which of a quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape machine’s three heads has to be used for marking up edits. In future years, I was to meet more ‘consultants’ who promised to deliver radio ‘success’ but who seemed to lack the requisite skills to achieve anything more than talking about it.

My experience presenting programmes for hours every day on-air confirmed my thinking that being a DJ was not my ambition in radio. I was told I possessed a good ‘radio voice’, I could operate the equipment and loved playing music, but I much preferred a production role in which I could contribute creatively beyond just opening my mouth. One of the most enjoyable programmes I created on ‘The Voice of Peace’ was a ‘special’ to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre with a selection of pertinent African and American music. I wish I had put a cassette in the studio tape machine to record it!

After having been denied shore leave during my first three months, I now had to endure an hour of bonking noises from the second bed on the other side of our small shared hotel room until the lady of the night slipped away, leaving the seaman to snore loudly until daylight. Hotel Astor turfed us out during daytime, so I regularly retreated to the nearby White House café where office staff, hangers on and the station’s most loyal listeners would sit at a roadside patio table and chat ‘radio’. I came to love Tel Aviv during my total three weeks of shore leave … despite the ongoing war, the terrible economy and random acts of terrorism.

Once my six months were completed, I visited the station’s Tel Aviv office to collect my final wages. I reminded Abie Nathan that I had worked an additional three weeks beyond my contract as a result of having been denied shore leave during my first three months on board. Would he pay me an additional US$75? He adamantly refused. Unlike some of my DJ colleagues, I harboured no intention of returning for a further six-month stint. Rather, I never wanted to work or live on a ship again. Surely there must be a radio job I could secure that did not necessitate me being sick in a bucket after eating unidentifiable meals.

In 1993, I was working in East Europe when I read that the ‘Voice of Peace’ ship had been deliberately scuttled at sea by its owner after two decades’ broadcasts, the final day having comprised non-stop Beatles songs [see blog]. I have never mustered the enthusiasm to attend subsequent ‘offshore radio’ nostalgia events but my experience of Israel left an indelible mark on me. Pass the halva!

A little radio knowledge is a dangerous thing : 2003 : Neil Romain, The Radio Authority

 It was a hostage situation. I was sat on a chair in a large, empty room. An angry man was pacing in circles around me, shouting questions: “What have you done?” and “Why did you do that?” and “Who told you to do what you did?”

Were my family about to receive a ransom note? Unlikely. The room I was in was not some dirty disused dockside warehouse but the plush boardroom of the British government quango where I was employed. My captor was the organisation’s finance and personnel director Neil Romain. Had he mistaken his well-worn DVD of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ for a textbook such as ‘Introduction to Personnel Management’? Was his qualification for this job an earlier life as a school prefect?

My transgression was to have written a ten-page paper analysing the degree of competition between commercial radio stations in Britain’s twenty largest local markets. Qualified in maths and economics, in 1980 I had started to tabulate data about the British radio industry on A3 accountancy sheets which I then transferred to digital spreadsheets in the 1990’s. Prior to this job at The Radio Authority, I had spent most of the previous decade working overseas, hence my UK industry datasets were rather outdated [see CV]. As no work tasks were given me for the first few months, I used that time to sit at my desktop computer updating my knowledge base.

At lunchtimes, management were regularly being wined and dined by commercial radio bosses at 'The Ivy' restaurant, while I would be searching the stacks of the London School of Economics library for papers in academic economic journals that analysed the American radio industry. What I found inspired me to write my own paper contrasting the significant competitiveness evident in American local radio markets with the high levels of market concentration in Britain. I was not surprised. The United States system of radio had embraced listener choice and commercial competition from its inception in 1920, while the British system of commercial radio had been founded in 1973 upon the notion of monopoly power. My paper demonstrated these divergent outcomes by analysing UK data using a technique favoured by the US Department of Justice. In December 2002, I sent my finished paper to managers in my workplace, hoping for feedback. Zilch.

In January 2003, the government’s Competition Commission announced an investigation into the £12.5m acquisition of Bristol-based local commercial radio station ‘Galaxy 101’ by a joint venture of two large UK radio groups, one of which (GWR Group plc) already had a significant presence in the area. The Commission requested relevant evidence concerning competitiveness within local radio markets. I emailed my paper and received a response requesting my appearance before the Commission to discuss my paper. That was when all hell broke loose around me at work.

At that time, 13 companies owned 177 of Britain’s 259 commercial radio stations. The largest radio groups were lobbying politicians for the ownership law to be changed to allow them to gobble up even more stations, a notion to which The Radio Authority appeared to raise no objection. However, my paper showed that 15 of the UK’s 20 largest local radio markets already exhibited ‘highly concentrated’ ownership. Such a change in the law would only worsen this situation, reducing choice for listeners and advertisers. However, the commercial radio industry and, more surprisingly, the government were keen to argue that even greater concentration of ownership would be a positive change:

“Listeners will be the real winners, with companies like GWR being able to build local centres of excellence offering local output of greater range and quality,” said GWR Group chairman Ralph Bernard.

“A certain amount of consolidated ownership can help to create ‘localness’ by committing the necessary investment,” said Chris Smith MP (and Disney consultant).

The UK government Department for Culture, Media & Sport wrote: “Without any consolidation of ownership, the risk is that a number of small companies will all tend to aim their content at the same middle ground, all seeking the largest possible share of the mass audience…”

These statements would be understood as bollocks by anyone possessing a modicum of economics knowledge, but maybe MP’s and civil servants too had enjoyed free lunches at The Ivy. The reason my little paper created so much anger was that it challenged this bizarre avalanche of propaganda intended to persuade that the fewer companies owned Britain’s commercial radio system, the better the outcomes. Between 1973 and 1990, commercial stations in all local markets (except London) had enjoyed monopoly status. Owners were now demanding the clock be turned back to those uncompetitive times.

This is why Neil Romain had transformed into The Inquisitor, demanding to know why I had written a paper that nobody had asked me to and, then, why I had sent it to the Competition Commission when nobody had asked me to. I explained that it was a personal paper that only analysed publicly available data and which I had submitted individually, not on Radio Authority letterhead. The Commission had asked for evidence and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody else had written a recent analysis of competition issues and market concentrations in British commercial radio.

The subtext of Romain’s angry tirade was me having published incontrovertible evidence that contradicted the prevailing ‘industry’ view that further consolidation would prove more beneficial for radio listeners, rather than less. I was the fly in the ointment. I had refused to drink the Kool-Aid. I had already been given a minor job at The Radio Authority. I was meant to demonstrate gratitude by just sitting at my desk doing absolutely nothing.

This sense of absurdity was underlined after I was pushed into the office of my manager, David Vick, for a further dressing down. I was on the receiving end of another mad outburst which eventually ended with Vick demanding that I should not talk to anyone about radio, nor write anything about radio that had not been requested of me. I felt compelled to point out that I was studying an MA in media management (paid for by my employer) that required me to write and talk about the media.

“I forbid you,” he shouted. “You are not to talk to anyone about radio while you are employed here.”

It was apparently a crime to be an authority on radio at The Radio Authority. Was this ‘1984’? Rather, the situation recalled the absurd bureaucracy in the 1985 film ‘Brazil’, with me cast as Sam Lowry, the man who knew too much; Vick playing Lowry’s boss Mr Kurtzmann, the man who stymied Sam’s career; and Romain as Jack Lint, the family man who enjoyed a dose of mundane torture in his office. All that Vick and Romain’s actions confirmed was that I was working in an organisation that pretended to be a public regulator but whose levers were being pulled by commercial interests. Their reaction to my paper revealed once again the real men behind the curtain. I vowed to ignore their ridiculous posturing and continue writing papers about radio.

In April 2003, The Radio Authority funded Romain to attend the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. I asked him beforehand if he could purchase a short list of books about radio that I knew would be on sale at the convention book stall, me having attended the same event a decade earlier. Unavailable online, these materials would assist my research. On his return, I asked Romain if he had managed to purchase my requested books, to which he answered simply “no” without apology or explanation. He was subsequently promoted to deputy CEO. I had been exiled to the naughty step.

In May 2003, the Competition Commission announced that the conclusion of its investigation was to block the sale of ‘Galaxy 101’ to new owners on the grounds that GWR Group already dominated the local radio markets in Bristol and Bath. This outcome forced GWR to sell its half-share in the joint venture. I was pleased that my analysis had informed the Commission’s decision-making, though I was realistic that my chance now of ever finding employment within a large commercial radio group in the UK would be zero … and so it was.

At the end of 2003, as the Authority merged into new regulator Ofcom, Romain was appointed managing director of commercial radio group London Media Company Ltd. This was surprising on two counts: to the best of my knowledge, Romain had not previously managed a radio station; and the company he joined was owned by Avtar Lit whose activities in the radio industry were already, er, notorious. ‘The Sunday Times’ newspaper in Sri Lanka alleged that Lit had accrued 177 convictions for fraud and petty crime by 1998.

I had had occasional contact with Lit since the late 1980’s when he had claimed to run a West London pirate station ‘Sina Radio’ whose broadcasts I had never found, despite living only a few miles away. He would phone me at home for free advice on his imminent application for a legal ‘incremental’ radio licence, and I attended some of his public meetings where I heard all sorts of crazy talk.

In 1998, Avtar Lit and Radio Authority employee Janet Lee had been arrested on charges of alleged corruption in connection with Lit’s successful licence application for new London Asian station ‘Sunrise Radio’. Was Lee sacked by disciplinarian personnel director Neil Romain? No, she clung on to her management post at the Authority until it was dismantled five years later. Was Lit’s licence revoked? On the contrary, the Authority renewed it in 2000 for a further eight years because its “application for licence renewal complies with the statutory requirements”.

Only months later, The Radio Authority fined Lit’s station £10,000 for having broadcast propaganda supporting his (unsuccessful) campaign to be elected Southall’s MP. The regulator inexplicably provided Lit with the licence to operate London’s first and sole Asian commercial radio station from 1989 to 2003, enriching him sufficiently by 2005 to be lauded as one of the "twenty most powerful Asians in British media.” In 2007, ‘Forbes’ magazine profiled Lit’s success at building a global business empire, without mention of its foundation on a monopoly radio licence that allegedly had been awarded corruptly by the regulator.

The tiny local radio stations acquired by Lit’s London Media Company, managed by Neil Romain, proved to be unmitigated commercial disasters. In 2009, I wrote a 6,000-word essay analysing the abject failure and closure of two of them. In 2010, Sunrise Radio’s accounts declared a loss of £10m. In 2013, the station was prosecuted for £390,000 in unpaid taxes. In 2014, Lit was declared bankrupt by the High Court and Sunrise Radio was placed into administration. Lit’s radio group was then acquired by Ketan Somaia whose interests, ‘The Guardian’ reported at the time, “once included hotels, banking, motoring and media, [and who] is being prosecuted [at the Old Bailey] for fraudulently taking £14m in a series of deals dating back to 1999”.

Corners of the UK commercial radio industry can appear to resemble a ‘pass the parcel’ game in a pawn shop.

Watch out! Watch out! There’s a Houdini about : 1980 : Metro Radio record library

[presenter Stephen Ayres in Metro Radio record library, 1980]

 Do you believe in destiny? Not the Bardot-like Angels squadron leader Destiny who battled evil-ised Captain Black and the mysterious Mysterons. No, destiny as in fate. The notion that our futures are determined long before we realise it ourselves.

My earliest job, having just learned to write, was to take it upon myself to sort my parents’ two-dozen albums and two-score singles into some kind of order and to biro sequential numbers on their covers and labels. Nobody had told me to. Then I instructed my parents to always put their vinyl records back in the correct sleeves and return them to the shelf in the correct order.

Almost two decades later, my first full-time job required me to instruct my colleagues to always put the vinyl records back in the correct sleeves and return them to the shelves in the correct order. Destiny? Or was it fate? My office desk was located in the first-floor record library of local commercial station ‘Metro Radio’ in Newcastle. It was not strictly MY desk. It belonged to my line manager, Malcolm Herdman, who had just been seconded to record a jingle package in the station’s ground-floor studio. I had been appointed to perform Malcolm’s tasks as head of music, albeit as his deputy, and to create a new daytime playlist system that could reverse the station’s ratings decline.

Two other staff worked in the same room: at one end, young librarian Liz Elliott who was enthusiastic, helpful, chatty and a music fan; and, at the other, middle-aged Ann who was not. They faced each other with my desk positioned midway like a tennis referee. Liz catalogued newly arrived records, returned items to their shelves and maintained the card catalogue index. Ann was busy doing, er … mostly chatting with the station’s presenters or on the office phone to her friends. Colleagues alleged that she enjoyed a close personal relationship with the station’s managing director, Neil Robinson, who just happened to be paying her husband to write a computerised library programme … that never made an appearance while I was working there. I attempted small-talk with Ann but her preferred communication was to glare at me in silence.

Just inside the record library was a grey metal, two-door, six-foot tall stationery cupboard. It held spare copies of currently playlisted singles and valuable albums autographed by visiting pop and rock musicians that awaited mail-out to listeners as competition prizes. Soon after starting work, I found that records I had locked in this cupboard seemed to disappear overnight. The first occasion, I thought I must have been mistaken. However, on the second occasion, I was convinced that items I had secured had somehow been stolen. To replace them, I had to drive to the nearest record shop and buy multiple copies of our playlisted singles. The problem started to reoccur regularly. I was somewhat baffled.

When I told my colleagues about the suspected thefts, they described an event that had happened before I joined the station. The lone key to this stationery cupboard had disappeared (I cannot recall how), then was allegedly found several days later by helpful daytime DJ Giles Squire on the carpet immediately in front of the cupboard. This surprised my colleagues who had hunted high and low throughout the library for the key over several days, without success. How could it have suddenly appeared days later exactly where it had been lost? It was as if the key had been temporarily hidden by some kind of ‘Star Trek’ cloaking device. I was told that, after the key reappeared, things had started to go missing from inside the cupboard.

Theft from the library was a wider problem. Some library shelves of catalogued albums had visible gaps where items had not been returned. Behind Liz’s desk was a pigeonhole A-to-Z system where newly released seven-inch vinyl singles were filed by artist name. The station received multiple copies of around sixty newly released singles each week, most of which were stored there openly. So how come the pigeonholes rarely became overcrowded? It seemed that hundreds of new records were disappearing. I had the embarrassing task of having to phone record companies and ask for further copies of records that had already been delivered to us by post or by visiting reps. There were only so many occasions you could blame the Post Office.

The library had to be left open at night and over weekends because presenters were required to select records to play within their programmes. A security person was present twenty-four hours a day inside the station’s front door but their responsibility was apparently only to stop unwanted persons entering the building, not to frisk those leaving. Thus, theoretically it would have been easy for a presenter to exit to their truck in the car park carrying boxes of the radio station’s vinyl records that could then be exchanged for animal feed to use on their farm in Northumberland.

I embarked upon a ‘good cop’ strategy, sticking post-it notes on the most valuable items inside the cupboard with a handwritten message: ‘Dear Thief. Please leave this record which is essential to the running of the station and is needed for […]. Thank you, Grant.’ It made no difference. These items would still disappear overnight and the post-it notes would be left behind without any kind of riposte from the thief. Back to the drawing board.

I went to my manager, programme controller Mic Johnson, and informed him what had been happening. I always wondered if he was stuck with Velcro to his office chair as he was so rarely seen on the station’s ‘shop floor’. If he wanted to meet someone, rather than simply approaching them for a chat, his secretary would place a typed ‘docket’ in their pigeonhole. Sometimes I would see several presenters waiting in the corridor outside his office door, as if he were headmaster of Xavier’s School for Gifted Wafflers, where DJ’s whose latest ratings were sub-par should expect a good spanking to improve their superpowers. Did Mic wish to do anything about the thefts? No.

I switched to a ‘bad cop’ strategy. I visited a hardware shop and bought a thick metal chain that I wrapped tightly around the door handles of the stationery cardboard and secured with a large padlock. I was the only person with the key. For a few weeks, nothing disappeared from the cupboard. I no longer wrote post-it notes for the thief. Some staff laughed at my chain which admittedly looked hideous but, for a while, it worked until … records started disappearing once again. I was angry and frustrated. How could that happen? There were no signs that the chain had been cut or that the padlock had been replaced. Could the thief have tracked down the padlock I had purchased and found one that used exactly the same key? Had the culprit recently attended a GCSE evening class in lockpicking at a local den of thieves?

It was hard to accept that I had failed. However, the atmosphere within the station had recently turned icy as the result of a strike for increased pay by staff who were union members. Management had bigger fish to fry than my problem of vinyl records being pilfered by some Houdini. Presenters began to keep discs they wanted to use (or had used) inside the security of their personal lockers. Producer John Coulson stashed records he wanted to play on his weekend rock show behind the snack machine in the station canteen. If I needed Van Morrison’s latest album, he showed me, this is where I could find it.

Six months into my job, Malcolm Herdman was excited to play me the station identification jingles he had just finished producing. I went downstairs to the station’s recording studio for the first time and listened. Oh dear! Whereas ‘jingles’ are meant to be of only a few seconds’ duration to be used between records and adverts, Malcolm’s efforts were short ‘songs’ that lasted a minute, sometimes longer. How do I tell my boss, particularly when he has been so generous to me, that his last six months’ work was wasted? I tried to offer constructive criticism but had to point out that, if these longform jingles were played regularly, then fewer playlisted songs would be heard each hour … the very content for which listeners tuned in to the station.

This jingle project had been the outcome of an agreement with the Musicians’ Union, made seven years earlier upon the launch of commercial radio in Britain, requiring each local station to spend 3% annually of its net advertising revenues on Union members’ performances. For most stations, this translated into them paying local music acts to either perform at events or record songs for airplay. However, Metro Radio decided to blow the whole of that year’s budget on recording identification jingles by local band Lindisfarne who were already signed to a major label and since 1972 had achieved four Top Forty singles, including two in the Top Five. Hardly a struggling local band! The outcome was that, as long as Metro Radio paid its 3% to Union members, it mattered not a jot whether the results were ever broadcast.

If I had been asked earlier, I could have offered some advice. As a teenager, I had recorded jingles on my two-track tape machine initially for one London pirate radio station, only to be asked by other stations to produce similar work. Had the ill-fated Metro Radio jingles been some kind of reverse destiny where, sat only one floor away from this impending disaster, I might have rescued the project if only I had known?

Destiny quickly transformed into fate when I was called into managing director Neil Robinson’s office. It was the first occasion we had met because he and his fellow managers kept their distance from the rest of the staff and took lunches from the station canteen to their separate dining room. He told me I was being made redundant. So long and no thanks for all the fish.