Just my imagination running away … to Australia : 1972 : Eric Hall, Strode’s School

 A schoolboy babysitting two infant-school-age girls at night? Quick, call the police! Notify child protection services! … But wait! This was the 1970’s. That boy was fourteen-year-old me. Back then, few would have jumped to the (mistaken) conclusion that anything untoward was happening. How naïve we seemed to be!

My mother had few close friends and I fail to recall how she had come to know Cathy Bingham, who had recently moved into a new-build house at the far end of Byron Avenue, less than a kilometre away within our suburban housing development. Seeking a means to supplement my meagre pocket money, my mother had suggested to Cathy I could babysit her two young daughters if she and her husband wished to go out for an evening. I could only help out on Friday or Saturday as my school set two homework subjects each weekday and required my efforts to be submitted the following weekday. The resultant babysitting arrangement worked well and I was grateful for Cathy’s generous compensation which funded my purchase of more reggae and soul records.

Cathy was a genuinely lovely person who had moved to Camberley from Peru where her husband had apparently been posted by his employer. Prior to the birth of her daughters, she had had a job driving new cars from their Detroit production line down the Pan-American Highway for delivery to dealerships in Lima. I considered this a ‘dream job’ since my father had already stimulated my interest in American cars and I longed for the day I would be able to drive long distances myself.

One babysitting evening, once the girls had been put to bed upstairs, I spent the remainder of my time sat on the sofa in front of the television. I watched a recent British movie named ‘Walkabout’ about a father who suddenly abandons his two children in the middle of the Australian outback. The scenery was spectacular and the story fascinating of the children’s chance meeting with an Aboriginal boy who demonstrates his traditions to them and saves their lives. It made a huge impression as my first television experience of Australia beyond the formulaic ‘Skippy’ series.

I had already leafed through many large-format photo books of faraway lands, including Australia, whilst sat at a desk in the first-floor reference section of the local public library. I had been impressed by the mud-brick high-rise buildings in Yemen, the desert libraries of Timbuktu and the Ayers Rock sandstone monolith. Along the same Dewey Decimal shelf, I had recently discovered the first ‘Lonely Planet’ guide as a Roneo-ed set of booklets hand stapled together. All these readings had stimulated my desire to travel abroad, since most of our family holidays to date had been taken within Britain.

Australia was also on my mind after a recent chance meeting with a young Australian girl who was working in the bookshop on Station Road in Egham. I had made an earlier visit to the shop in 1970 to order a book (that changed my life) documenting American black music, ‘The Sound of The City’, which I had seen mentioned in its author Charlie Gillett’s weekly column in ‘Record Mirror’ magazine. My second visit was to exchange several ‘book tokens’ that had been awarded me as ‘School Prizes’. On that occasion, shop assistant Jan Somerville spent considerable time helping me choose paperbacks that might interest me, including ‘Exodus’, ‘Dune’ and ‘Topaz’. Her advice was particularly useful as I had no idea what to buy, my parents having almost no adult books at home.

I was instantly smitten with Jan as she was the first interesting girl around my age (well, she must have been two years older) I had met and, to my lusty adolescent eyes, she resembled heartthrob Susan Dey from ‘The Partridge Family’. She explained that her family had temporarily moved to Britain and she had found a job for a year in Egham’s large, well-stocked independent bookshop. After that, during my school lunch-hour, I would pop into the shop and chat with her regularly. When she finally returned to Australia with her parents, she gave me a slip of paper with her address in Clontarf, New South Wales. I was sad to lose my first ‘schoolboy crush’ but we wrote to each other for a while and she sent me a small toy koala which I have kept since. I had hoped to visit her one day … but life intervened.

All this explains why, on the occasion that English Language homework required me to write an essay about a landscape I had never visited, I naturally chose Australia. My teacher, Eric Hall, was a young man (relative to the majority of ancients that taught us) who wore tweed suits and was eager to show off what he probably believed was his sardonic wit. However, I read his attitude as sarcasm, a quality I found less than endearing after having arrived at the school wholly ignorant of his subject. Many of my classmates had previously attended private ‘prep’ schools and already knew what a noun, adjective, verb and tense were. I had never heard these terms because my state junior school had been keen to develop our creative skills rather than grammatic pedantry. I faced a steep learning curve at Strode’s School.

When I started my third year, I had been disappointed to be told that Mister Hall would be our ‘form master’, with whom we were required to register our attendance twice a day. My already poor rapport with him deteriorated considerably when, without prior consultation, my father impulsively booked a package holiday at an Egham travel agency for me and him to visit Florida during school term to witness the launch of an Apollo space mission. As a result, my mother was angry that her husband had not discussed this indulgence beforehand and had apparently demonstrated no desire to be accompanied by her and my two siblings. Mister Hall was outraged to be informed of my impending absence as a fait accompli and insisted that my trip be cancelled, which my father refused. Subsequently, my relationship with not only Mister Hall but most of the school administration was soured. I was never to be awarded a further School Prize.

At the end of our English Language period, Mister Hall walked around our desks, handing back each of our essay books … except for mine. After returning to his seated position at the front of our classroom, he said:

“You can all go now. Except for Goddard, who I want to see afterwards.”

Now what I had I done wrong? He opened my workbook to the page of my latest essay and pointed at it disparagingly.

“Your essay about Australia was very descriptive and incredibly detailed. Have you ever visited Australia?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well, I just do not understand how you could have written about somewhere you have never experienced with so much detail about its landscape and features,” he commented sourly.

I had no idea what he was trying to imply. I had worked very hard to produce a good essay and now he was trying to say obliquely that my work was too good? How was I expected to explain that?

“I’m interested in Australia,” I said. “I have seen films and read books about it, which is the reason I chose to write my essay about it.”

“Well, I am afraid I do not believe that you wrote this essay,” said Mister Hall angrily. “I have come to the conclusion that you must have copied it from some book. That is the reason that I have had to give you a fail mark for this piece of work and, naturally, this will be reflected in your end-of-term report.”

I was horrified. How could Mister Hall be so cruel? I understood he had never liked me, but I had never contemplated he could be so nasty to a student who had worked as hard as they could in order to be successful in his subject. From then on, despite my regular ranking as one of the top five students within my year of sixty pupils, Mister Hall’s comments in my termly school reports were consistently negative. His and a few other teachers’ similar attitudes to me during my seven years at Strode’s coloured my entire secondary school experience. For the first time, I learnt what it meant to be despised by an adult in a position of authority. It was an incomprehensible change from my previous positive experiences at Cordwalles Primary School, where my incredible teachers had been generous to a fault with their mentoring of me and my classmates.

I had no choice but to soldier on at school under the tutelage of Mister Hall. I took the GCE ‘O level’ exam in English Language the following year and achieved an ‘A’ grade. Three years later, I passed the ‘Use of English’ exam required of entrants to Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Before those subsequent academic successes, my life was changed irrevocably later in 1972 when my father deserted our family to run off with a newly married teenage bride who lived a few doors away on our street. The brief trip to Florida was the final occasion I spent time with my father until the day he died. Not only did he unknowingly negatively impact my school life for the remaining four years, but he knowingly impacted my family’s lives forever. The evening that I had chanced to watch the father in ‘Walkabout’ maroon his children in the outback was paralleled only months later in my own life when my father walked away from his three children, condemning them to an unexpectedly different future.

Despite these personal setbacks, Cathy Bingham’s experience of driving through the American continent in the 1960’s continued to inspire my ambitions. In 1984, I hatched a plan to hitchhike from the United States down the Pan-American Highway to Nicaragua to visit my friend Tony Jenkins who was there providing news reports to ‘The Guardian’ and ‘BBC World Service’. I visited the London embassies of all the countries I would pass through and obtained the necessary visas. However, this plan was stymied by a six-month wait for the BBC to inform me whether my second-round interviews for separate producer jobs at ‘Radio One’ and ‘Radio Two’ had been successful. In the end, I was rejected for both. Angry that my travel plans had been thwarted by the excessive wait, I enquired why to BBC Personnel, only to be informed by its employee that in future I would need to prove to interviewers that “you are one of us”.

Evidently, I never was.

[8mm film of Eric Hall by classmate & dear friend Martin Nichols]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/just-my-imagination-running-away-to.html]

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you hobnob : 1980 : Durham University Careers Advisory Service

“The Treasury,” said one.

“Banking,” responded another.

“The Civil Service,” replied another. It was my turn.

“Radio,” I said.

There was stunned silence. I felt all eyes turn toward me. Time seemed to pause while my colleagues processed their apparent incomprehension.

“What do you mean by ‘radio’?” eventually enquired the Economics professor in whose dark, dingy Old Elvet office our tutorial group was meeting.

I was somewhat taken aback. Who does not understand the word ‘radio’? Had he never read about Marconi? I grappled to maintain my decorum. I looked around at my fellow students dressed in three-piece suits or dress shirts or lavender cardigans with slacks over shiny black shoes. They appeared to have already been moulded into mini-me versions of their fathers (naturally there were no women). Their appearances were as dull and middle-aged as the careers they had said they desired. I was sporting my usual cheesecloth shirt, flared jeans and platform shoes, de rigueur 1970’s student-wear. Evidently, I inhabited a different dimension from my colleagues. Had Ann MacGregor twiddled the dials of her SAGE computer and sent me back a whole century to an era before radio had been invented? Where were Doug and Tony? I hoped they had not landed the other side of the street, inside Durham Prison.

“’Radio’ as in ‘broadcasting’,” I answered, struggling to control my patience, “where I want to produce programmes for a radio station.”

“Oh … kay,” said the tutor with the weariness of a grizzled academic attempting to explain monetarism to the village idiot. “So why are you here studying economics?”

“Because economics interests me,” I replied.

That was my second faux pas of the day. I looked around again and realised that my fellow students were not there primarily because of any enthusiasm for the subject. They were simply fulfilling their destiny, determined from the day they had been born into families who had then spent huge sums over two decades on their private education. For my colleagues, a job within the top echelons of government or commerce was not a career ambition. It was a birth right. It was simply the ‘payback’, the ‘return on investment’ expected as reward for the six-figure sum that Tarquin’s parents had spent to secure his social status. He and his former school chums felt entitled to their guaranteed shiny futures.

In the 1970’s there was no degree course in radio. No degree course in media. I was amongst Britain’s 94% of children who had attended state schools. Now I was amongst the 14% of the population to attend one of the country’s 45 universities. I had been forced to choose the academic subject in which I performed best at my school … and in which I was interested. With minimal career guidance, I had selected the university which I believed offered the best reputation. What nobody had advised me was that Durham was stuffed to the gills with toffs whose academic record at private schools had not proven exemplary enough to win them a place at Oxford or Cambridge. As someone who was certainly not ‘privileged’, had I wished to spend three years in a ‘Chariots of Fire’ theme park?

In my tutorial group, when one fellow student had spoken for the first time, I failed to understand a single word he had said. I assumed he must have been speaking some unidentifiable foreign language. Then I looked around and noticed my fellow students nodding in agreement as if they had understood him perfectly. I was confused. The next time he spoke, I struggled harder to comprehend his speech and managed to pick out the odd word in English. Only then did I realise that he habitually spoke in an upper-class accent so cut-glass as to prove almost incomprehensible to someone like me. Hand on heart, I am not exaggerating. I would have understood every word spoken by The Queen, but this young man’s speech was so stilted as to be easily mistaken for a parody of an upper-class twit.

I cannot recall a single conversation about economics with a fellow student on my course. Our academics never asked us to work in project groups. The toffs were being groomed to assume their rightful place as ‘captains’ of industry or government, for which there was no apparent necessity for them to converse with someone from the lower classes. It was evident to them from my accent, dress sense and demeanour that I resembled the servants or the ‘help’ their families employed at their mansions. I was similarly invisible to them, not having the ‘right stuff’ conferred by a private education, as had more than 90% of students at Durham. Worse, I betrayed no ambition to try and join their ‘club’. Unlike them, my parents had paid nothing toward my education, which made my chosen career very much my own affair.

I already subscribed to ‘Broadcast’ magazine and bought ‘The Guardian’ on Monday for its media job advertisements. Now it was time to visit the university’s Careers Advisory Service to locate suitable job vacancies. Its one-room office in a modern two-story building in Palmers Garth was filled with standalone shelf units of file holders, each collecting documents from one employer. I made an appointment to talk with an advisor but the earliest date was more than a month away. During the waiting period, I worked my way along every file on every shelf, searching for any employer within the media. What surprised me then was how few of the 4,000 Durham students seemed to require the facility. What I failed to understand was that most jobs for the upper classes were the outcome of who they knew or who their family socialised with, rather than requiring the bother of a formal application.

On the day of my appointment, I brought along my articles published in the student newspaper in a portfolio I had created from sheets of thick A3 black card stitched together. The advisor I met was an elderly woman with grey hair and John Lennon-style wire-frame glasses, like Granny from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’. Asked about my career choice, I replied it was ‘radio’.

“We cannot offer you any help if you choose to pursue a career in the media,” she said sternly, staring at me over the top of her spectacle frames. What? I felt outrage that I had waited more than a month for her so-called ‘advice’.

“But I started producing radio programmes seven years ago in London and …” I told her.

“I’m sorry, but getting a job in the media is all about the people you know,” she interrupted and then stood up to go.

I was abruptly left alone, not even having been offered the opportunity to show her my portfolio. Or explain to her the details of my prior radio experience. Or my election as editor of the student newspaper. Or my election as editor of the annual student handbook. Or my election as deputy president of the students’ union. Or my success arguing with the University for an unprecedented increase in the student union’s subscription income. Or my success turning around the student food shop from loss to profit. None of that seemed to matter. I was appalled by the ‘careers advice’ I had just been given. My long awaited ‘interview’ had lasted less than a minute.

Eight months later, I received a letter from the Careers Advisory Service. I presumed it must be a circular sent to former students to update its records. But no! It was a personal letter requesting my help to advise an undergraduate who desired a career in radio and asking me to show him around my workplace. My initial thought was to tear this letter into little pieces and throw it on the living room fire. How very dare they! … However, a few days later, my benevolence got the better of me and I realised I should help a student who might be in a similar situation to mine not so long ago, regardless of how much contempt I felt for the letter’s sender.

I now had a full-time job at Metro Radio, the commercial music radio station in Newcastle, which I had achieved by responding to an on-air announcement I had heard asking for candidates. The vacancy had not been advertised in either ‘Broadcast’ magazine or ‘The Guardian’. I resolved to contact the student and arrange to chat and show him around the station’s premises. Whether he went on to pursue a career in radio I never discovered.

By then, I had learnt precisely how ‘selective’ the university was about recruiting students. In 1978/9, I had been the student representative attending Durham University’s ‘Admissions & Matriculation Committee’ where statistical reports showed that some years certain of its colleges had accepted not a single student educated in a state school. These data were never published.

Four decades later, surely things must have changed? Er, maybe not. A 2022 headline in the Durham student newspaper screamed ‘Durham has lowest state school intake of any UK university’ and quoted student Keely Brown:

“… many [Durham University students from state schools] have no prior knowledge of what awaits them at university, let alone experiences of classism or discrimination and, alongside feelings of imposter syndrome, it can feel like Durham isn’t the place for them.”

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/it-aint-what-you-do-its-way-that-you.html]

Sit-in here in limbo : 1986 : Community Service Volunteers & Radio Thamesmead

 “It’s just like the multinational pharmaceutical businesses deliberately designing toothpaste tubes so that you cannot squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste,” I blurted.

There was stunned silence while my colleagues seated on a circle of chairs in the middle of a low-ceiling conference room stared at me blankly. Was this young man mad? Perhaps I was. I cannot recall to which discussion topic my poorly chosen conspiracy theory analogy was intended to refer, but I clearly remember the reaction. I was present because a letter from Ric, our manager, had instructed me to attend. I had no comprehension what this meeting was intended to achieve. By the time I opened my mouth, the gathering had seemed somewhat pointless.

I had already been employed for several months of a one-year contract by the two-decade old charity Community Service Volunteers [‘CSV’], but this half-day event was the first time I had visited its sprawling offices in King’s Cross. Like me, each of the dozen people present was supervising a job creation scheme within a local radio station. Their ‘Action Desks’ were funded by government and sponsored by CSV, each employing a couple of low-wage staff to answer phone enquiries from the public about lost dogs, community events and volunteering opportunities. Unlike me, every invitee present was female because, in the pre-desktop-computer dark ages, scripts had to be prepared by Action Desk staff on a typewriter in order to be read on-air by professional radio presenters. In essence, CSV offered broadcasters its staff at zero cost to generate the ‘community’ content required by their stations’ broadcast regulations.

I was different, not just because I was male and talked crazy ideas, but because it quickly emerged that I was the only person present with prior radio experience, and I was not operating one of these ancillary Action Desks. Instead, I was supervising a larger team of paid CSV staff who worked alongside non-professional volunteers managing London’s only legal community radio station, ‘Radio Thamesmead’. Although ‘history’ (a.k.a. Wikipedia) records Britain’s ‘first’ community radio station as not having launched until 2002, significant but little-known antecedents did exist. In 1976, many of Britain’s 28 post-war ‘new towns’ had been resourced with a community radio station, initially funded by each location’s New Town Development Corporation to broadcast on a then state-of-the-art analogue cable system.

However, by 1986, only two of those pioneering radio stations had survived. Why? Having myself lived/worked in these new towns, I witnessed first-hand the grand objectives of the 1946 New Towns Plan having never been completed, leaving residents without the promised shopping centres, community facilities and sportsgrounds. Their local cable systems suffered poor maintenance and many households now subscribed to satellite TV delivery instead. In the 1980’s, Development Corporations were wound up by government and their funded projects, including community radio, were abandoned. Did the Cable Authority, which inherited regulation of the remaining community radio stations, publish an evaluation of the evident failure of the 1970’s ‘cable radio experiment’? If so, I never saw one. Its sole statement on the subject was that “community cable radio stations tended to be longer-lived than the [cable] television stations, and two still survive”.

Radio Thamesmead had endured only as a result of its job creation staff and partial funding of overheads provided by CSV. A government agency named Manpower Services Commission operated the station’s ‘Community Enterprise Programme’ for which staff were recruited from the ranks of the unemployed and contracted to CSV, whose expenses it then reimbursed monthly. In this way, money flowed from government to the Commission, then to CSV which then paid me and my team’s monthly salaries in arrears. However, there was one month when our pay failed to arrive on time. I phoned CSV which explained there had been a temporary problem and it would come soon. One week later, still none of us had been paid. This created a practical problem because our low pay was barely sufficient to cover our work expenses. I had to endure a daily commute of more than two hours each direction by coach and train which ate up the majority of my salary. I phoned CSV again and was offered only more excuses.

The following Monday morning, instead of commuting to Thamesmead, I arrived unannounced at the CSV office and demanded to meet its finance director. How could I manage a team of staff who were essential for keeping this little community radio station on-air if they were not being paid for their work? After initially being offered further excuses, it was eventually confided in me that the CSV staff member responsible for managing the finances of these job creation schemes had disappeared from its headquarters along with the funds received from government to pay our wages. I was angry. I had a responsibility to ensure my team was paid. CSV had a responsibility to fulfil its employment contracts by paying me and my team. Otherwise, it would breach those contracts and open itself to legal action.

I told the finance director that I intended to stay in his office until a solution was organised in order for us to be paid. Mine was a one-man sit-in protest. I made myself comfortable in the low chair for guests in his office, listening to my Walkman and reading a book I had brought along. Due to my long daily commutes, I was familiar with sitting for hours alone, entertaining myself with cassette recordings of the ‘John Peel Show’ from ‘BBC Radio One‘. That day, as every weekday, at daybreak I had caught the first scheduled coach into London from the London Road bus stop in Camberley. After a further two hours having sat in this office, which had been unoccupied after my tirade, I needed to use the toilet. I rose from the chair …

The next thing I remembered was opening my eyes, feeling the carpet beside my face and realising I was laid out on the floor of the office. I had no idea what had happened. My head was hurting like crazy. I felt very dizzy. I managed to crawl along the floor on all fours into the corridor where I could hear voices talking. I headed in their direction and crawled through the doorway of an office where my sudden appearance at floor level must have shocked the two women sat inside at their desks. Something catastrophic must have happened, but what exactly?

It transpired that, when I had risen from my chair in the finance office, my head had hit a bookshelf drilled into the wall directly above me which, in my initial anger, I had not noticed when starting my sit-in several hours earlier. I must have suffered concussion, though it was unknown how long I had been unconscious because nobody seemed to have entered or passed the office despite its open door. All I could recall was a vision in my head of my spirit travelling through space with bright lights passing rapidly to left and right, similar to a sequence in the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. I could now feel a large bump on the top of my head and I remained dizzy and incoherent. An ambulance was called and I was whisked away for tests in a London hospital. Following several hours under observation, I was released in late afternoon.

CSV had offered to pay for a taxi to take me home from the hospital. When I told them my destination would be my mother’s house thirty miles away in Surrey, they initially told me they could only deliver me to “my home”, not to a relative’s. I had to insist that I was commuting that distance daily as a result of having failed to find an affordable home to rent in London. They were putting up resistance but finally paid for my long £50 black cab ride all the way to Camberley. I rested the next day and took the painkillers prescribed by the hospital. When I phoned my workplace to explain my absence, my team were somewhat shocked and surprised to learn the bizarre outcome of my sit-in.

A few days later I felt well enough to return to work and, by Friday that week, my team were belatedly paid our overdue salaries by CSV. The problem never repeated. I never revisited the CSV office.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/sit-in-here-in-limbo-1986-community.html]

The Best Man for the job : 2003 : Neil Stock, The Radio Authority

 When someone leaves their job, what are the chances that the ‘best man’ to replace them will be:

•  the groom at whose wedding their predecessor was Best Man, AND
•  a contemporary at the same university, AND
•  a volunteer at the same student radio station?

Wielding my four mathematics GCE’s and a pound-shop calculator, I sat at my desk calculating the probability of such an alignment of coincidences for a job appointment within my workplace. If this had been an internet start-up of Cambridge science graduate nerds, no eyebrow would have been raised. But in a British government quango? My calculator produced a gibberish result from the very first calculation. But when I turned around its display, the characters appeared to spell out ‘NEPOTISM’. I switched to an Excel spreadsheet but it too crashed. Microsoft made contact, suggesting I lease processing time on its supercomputer to complete my calculation of a ‘1 in …..’ probability that would require several zillion zeros. I gave up.

After an unexplained rush to appoint me, The Radio Authority had left me alone, twiddling my thumbs at my desk for three months. There were no team meetings or supervisor get-togethers to attend, so nobody remarked upon my ongoing inactivity. Had my colleagues even browsed the ‘management’ section of a bookstore? Work tasks were assigned by way of someone with a supreme confidence in their own superiority marching up to your desk and barking orders, before turning around and marching away again. It began to feel as if I had been press-ganged into the Civil Service as deckhand on a ship of pen-pushing fools.

Finally, by month four, I was given a project by the manager who had appointed me, David Vick. The local commercial radio licence for West Lothian in Scotland had been advertised and my task was to write a paper to be presented at a Members’ Meeting, recommending to which applicant the licence should be awarded. No problem, I thought. A decade earlier, I had regularly spent a morning in the broadcast regulator’s library, reading multiple applications for a particular licence and then summarising them during the afternoon in an article of several thousand words for the weekly ‘Broadcast’ magazine. I was thinking that a more detailed paper might take me a week to write. Then Vick told me that I had … two months. Oh, and there was only one applicant.

I was offered no guidelines, no style sheet, no system to follow, no advice. Just “write a paper – you have two months.” I executed what I considered to have been a thorough job. I researched the local media market, the radio market, the applicant’s business plan, everything I could find. This was my first project. I wanted to impress my boss. There were days when Vick asked me why I was using the office printer so much, seemingly oblivious to the demands of evidential research. After six weeks, I gave him my draft document and asked him to mark it up so that I could understand which parts he wanted to keep or discard. He invited me into his office to discuss my work. Had I done well? Er, no. He went ballistic. He screamed and shouted at me.

“This isn’t what I wanted,” Vick yelled. “This isn’t an Authority Paper. What do you think this is? Can’t you write?”

He stormed out of his office and marched down the corridor shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit!” at the top of his voice. It was left to me to presume that our meeting must have ended, without me having uttered a word.

I was shocked. And very confused. I believed that I could write … and write quite well. Vick had read my CV and knew my articles about the radio and music industries had been published in trade and consumer publications, some of which had employed me as sub-editor or editor. My job application here had even required me to submit a one-page essay entitled ‘The London Radio Scene’. During my job interview, Vick had not critiqued my supposed inability to write. Why would I have been appointed?

Later that day, Vick’s deputy marched up to my desk and requested a meeting. In their rehearsed good cop/bad cop roleplay, Vick apparently judged Neil Stock the best man to ‘offer’ to bang my report into the requisite, undefined shape and style of ‘Authority Papers’. I did not bother to argue. Stock was eminently qualified by having studied American Literature, having never worked in commercial radio and, to the best of my knowledge, having never published an article about the radio industry. Visually, he was Beaker to Vick’s Doctor Bunsen Honeydew. Stock’s frigid demeanour recalled the android Bishop in the movie ‘Aliens’ whose ‘humanity’ module might never have been activated.

Stock occupied a spacious office on the opposite side of the corridor that resembled one of those IKEA showrooms where everything looks too perfectly arranged to be real and the desk computer turns out to be fake. I sat facing him across a desk ring-fenced with multiple stationery pots filled with over-sharpened pencils of varying hardness and a row of staplers, holepunches, paperclips and elastic bands. Stock’s patronising spiel, instructing someone twice his age how to write, floated off into the ether above my head. My eyes were scanning the office carpet for evidence of vomit stains where my colleagues had alleged his predecessor had been found unconscious following an over-liquid lunch. After that incident, Stock’s Best Man had been shoehorned into a board-level job in a commercial radio group, a responsibility which had proven so successful that I had overheard Vick on the phone to the CEO trying to save his prodigy’s bacon.

One week later, Stock gave me back the document. It still had my name on the front but almost nothing within remained of my six weeks’ graft. Every single table, graph and map had been expelled. Every reference to a specific number (such as Census population data) had been rounded and referred to as ‘approximately’ or ‘about’. All evidential sources such as media and radio market data had been expunged. My sentences had been conjoined with ‘and’ or commas until each contained at least seventy words. Some paragraphs filled almost a whole A4 page. Subjective adjectives had been attached to references to individuals, tainting them with judgement as to whether they were in or out of favour with The Radio Authority. This was writing, Jim, but not as we journalists know it.

I asked Stock to remove my name from his revised document as it no longer resembled anything that I had written. He refused. I asked that his name be added to mine as joint author. He refused. We may have been sitting opposite each other at his desk, but each of us had landed there from different worlds. My quarter-century in journalism had been spent explaining facts. His few years in this civil service madhouse seemed to have been spent obscuring facts. If his university had offered a module titled ‘Using Words as A Weapon: How to Write Baffling Prose’, he would certainly have scored an ‘A’.

Naturally, Stock’s boss David Vick was happy with the result. It looked and read just like something he would have written himself. I was required to present the paper to a monthly Members’ Meeting, reading a pre-approved two-minute script from which I was forbidden to deviate. Neither was I allowed to use audio-visual aids in my presentation. Vick had instructed me not to contribute to the ensuing debate unless a specific, factual question was addressed to me directly. I saw absolutely no point to my presence at the meeting. It achieved only what the organisation’s officers had carved up beforehand. The licence was awarded to the sole applicant. My ‘work’ in The Radio Authority was merely to keep up its appearance of objectively regulating the radio industry.

Months later, an uncharacteristic silence broke out amongst my colleagues in our crowded office. We had already been told that our regulator was about to be merged into a new, bigger government organisation. What we had not learnt until then was that our new manager was to be … Neil Stock. There was stunned silence as the news sunk in.

This was the Neil Stock who, on arrival at work each day, would email his ‘team’ a ‘Pop Quiz’ question that required an emailed response within the hour. When I refused to play this childish game, he complained that I was not a team-player. But I had no interest in flaunting my encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music earned from having created radio station formats over several decades. Mike Read was not my hero.

This was the Neil Stock who refused to attend the quarterly team-building, afterwork social visits to a local pub or restaurant that our employer mandated. Management apparently thought it was insufficient that we already spent forty hours every week in each other’s company in one cramped office. During one such social evening, my colleagues expressed astonishment that I had not been made to take a UK geography test before my appointment, which had been required of them. It was as if knowing the county town of Rutland proved a perfect substitute for non-existent knowledge of the radio industry that a new employee would be regulating.

This was the Neil Stock who only popped into our office briefly if there was something specific that he wanted to address to one of us. Watercooler chat, small talk, even casual morning greetings or afternoon farewells were apparently foreign concepts. Enter his office at 4.30 and he would be enthusiastically sharpening his huge pencil collection on a desk uncluttered by a single folder or sheet of paper. Enter his office at 4.50 and he was already being whisked by train back to his IKEA showroom house and wife in Cambridgeshire.

This was the Neil Stock who chose not to inform his own underlings that he had been appointed their new manager. Neither did we learn it from our then manager, David Vick. The news reached us that fateful day as part of a general personnel update email from the new regulator Ofcom. Once again, our managers were demonstrating their non-communication skills.

Our office was not the only one rendered speechless by the news. A hush spread over the whole floor as our colleagues digested that Stock would not just be managing our team, but most of the 40-odd staff about to be transferred from The Radio Authority to Ofcom. What a meteoric rise through the ranks for someone so, er … inexperienced? In 2000, Stock had been judged the best man to replace his Best Man. By 2003, somebody somewhere considered Stock the best man to manage Britain’s commercial radio licensing system, a job that had not been advertised publicly.

We were left to presume that Vick must have decided to take retirement since it was plainly evident that his nineteenth-century style of management – writing everything longhand, never touching a computer keyboard, bellowing from his office at his two full-time administrative assistants whenever he needed to send/receive/print an email – would have proven awkwardly Luddite within the determinately twenty-first century Ofcom.

The pair’s Hawkins/Harker partnership was about to be dissolved. Meet the new boss …

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-best-man-for-job-2003-neil-stock.html]