See no evil, hear no evil, speak no regulation : 2003 : Dumfries & Galloway licence, The Radio Authority

 When my wife took a job at the United Biscuits factory in Harlesden, she understood she would be making ‘Digestives’ … and she was correct. When I took a job at The Radio Authority, I anticipated I would be regulating Britain’s commercial radio industry … but I was wrong! Although it was nowhere to be found in my job description, not even hidden in the fine print, my bosses regularly required me to ‘turn a blind eye’. Perhaps this was the underlying modus operandi of government regulators: to sit in cossetted London offices, execute as little ‘regulating’ as possible and await comfortable retirement.

Before taking this job, I was aware of The Radio Authority’s, ahem, ‘chequered’ history. Seven years after it had been demerged from its precursor the Independent Broadcasting Authority [IBA], I had watched open-mouthed a November 1998 BBC2 ‘Newsnight’ report in which The Radio Authority’s former Company Secretary, John Norrington, accused his ex-employer of misconduct in its award of new commercial radio licences to ‘Vibe FM’ and ‘Sunrise Radio’. It took until March 1999 for the Authority to respond publicly that “the independent assessment by Grant Thornton makes clear that there was no abuse of process, no improper conflict of interest, and no bias.” Of course!

Though this denial was deemed sufficient for ‘The Independent’ newspaper to headline its story ‘Quango “not corrupt”’, the article also noted casually that “Janet Lee, the Authority’s programming and advertising director, is on police bail …” following her arrest by the Fraud Squad in November 1998 on corruption charges. What a bam-bam! Having arrived for my new job in 2002, I found that the organisation’s prime objective seemed to have nothing at all to do with radio, but everything to do with avoidance of further public embarrassment at all costs. Janet Lee had kept her job and occupied a huge office, larger than the one opposite that I had to share with five colleagues, but which she shared only with a jungle of huge potted plants.

Having been given few tasks to perform, I had time to conduct my own industry research. One of my papers (‘Tools For Radio Content Regulation #1: Playlist Diversity Analysis’) studied the music played by competing commercial radio stations in the same market to determine whether their formats were truly complementary, as their licences required. I was unsurprised to find my analysis demonstrated that the most played records on London station ‘Heart 106.2’ were by (in descending order) these artists: Westlife, Nelly, Liberty X, Blue, Atomic Kitten, Atomic Kitten (again), Liberty X (again), Kylie Minogue, Darren Hayes and Anastacia. To my knowledge, its music policy had never squared with its licence which required:

“The music will be melodic or soft adult contemporary and will exclude the extremes of dance, rap, teenage pop, indie and heavy rock.”

I circulated my document to managers within The Radio Authority and, not for the first time, received no response. There were evident forces within that workplace which were way above my pay grade. I had apparently become a pesky nuisance by trying to remind the organisation what objective ‘regulation’ of commercial broadcasting in the public interest should have been about. As a result, I was marginalised and belittled, particularly when it came to my year-end appraisal … which I was told I had failed with flying colours. They’ll take your soul if you let them, but don’t you let them!

“That was a good meeting,” my colleague commented as we exited The Radio Authority’s meetings room. My immediate thought was that he was being unnecessarily sarcastic. Our meeting had barely lasted ten minutes and had been completely uncontentious. Then it dawned on me that I was an oddity here who had spent half his working life in meetings within commercial businesses, some of which had lasted six hours or ended in acrimony. However, since joining this governmental organisation, I had never been called to a team, departmental or work meeting. They simply did not exist here because tasks were allocated by bosses approaching their underlings and bellowing at them in the old-fashioned master/servant style. On reflection, I realised my colleague’s comment had been made in seriousness.

My boss had allocated me the task of assessing an application by an existing local radio licensee seeking its renewal, versus a competing bid. I had been instructed that, as a direct result of the auditor’s report concerning ‘the affair whose name was never spoken’, it was now deemed necessary to convene one meeting with two colleagues from other departments about every licence application and to minute it on paper. It did not seem to matter that such meetings served no recognisable purpose or objective, except for each to produce an A4 page that documented they had happened. That was the sole reason I had had to call the meeting. It was a direct outcome of “the auditors [having] recommended that the [Radio] Authority tighten up some of its procedures for awarding licences,” according to ‘The Independent’.

The licence for Dumfries had first been awarded in 1989 by the IBA to ‘South West Sound’ at a time when each geographical area was only permitted one commercial radio station. Since then, the regulator had probably never heard the station’s broadcasts as I found that it interpreted its role narrowly as the award of licences, rather than regularly checking that the terms of those licences were being fulfilled. Being me, I insisted on reviewing the station’s output in a period when almost no UK commercial radio stations streamed on the internet, requiring the Authority to identify someone within the transmission area who would record some of its output. It took a few attempts for me to receive recordings that were even audible.

These recordings were full of regulatory surprises. The breakfast show was being relayed from co-owned station ‘West AM’ in Ayr, complete with incorrect station and frequency identifications. Similarly, its evening show was relayed from co-owned ‘West FM’ in Ayr, complete with different again, but still wrong, station and frequency identifications. The music played in those evening shows also contravened the music styles specified in the licence. Three hours of local programmes required by the licence on both Saturday and Sunday were also absent.

To get to the bottom of these issues, I interviewed managers at the station and recorded our phone conversations. Those staff appeared entirely nonchalant about these breaches of their licence, could not explain how long such practices had been pursued, or promise when these programming errors would be rectified. I was made to feel as if my questions were an undesired intrusion into broadcasting systems that had existed there for years, regardless of the station’s licence, the details of which the staff claimed to be unaware. I felt like the big, bad regulator in London interfering in the running of a little local business that had retreated into its own parochial ways.

Reporting these findings to my manager, rather than being thanked for discovering multiple regulatory breaches, I was vilified for being pedantic. I had unexpectedly opened up a hornets’ nest and my bosses swung into action to ameliorate the ‘damage’ I was apparently doing by being over-scrupulous. Although one competing bid had been submitted for the licence, it quickly became evident that the decision had already been made internally to re-award the licence to the incumbent … regardless of its licence transgressions. I was suddenly thrust into the middle of an internal ‘damage control’ exercise as the result of me having believed my job was ‘to regulate’.

My 17-page report had to be repeatedly edited severely by management to remove what were considered to be my ‘accusations’ that the station had broken the rules, even though its staff had admitted their failures to me in recorded phone conversations. Management finally settled on a careful wording that implied the breaches I had discovered were irrelevant to the re-award of the incumbent’s licence:

“Staff have thus identified two apparent breaches of the station’s Format – too much chart music in the evening and only occasional local programming at weekends. These will be investigated separately by staff, but should not be considered by Members in the context of this licence award as they do not form part of the station’s proposals for the new licence period.”

I was instructed to write a script for pre-approval to present to the ‘Members Meeting’ of the ‘great and good’ that would consider my report and make a decision. I was not permitted to deviate from this script or to mention further details of the licence breaches I had discovered. Unsurprisingly, the Meeting willingly re-awarded the licence to the incumbent, despite a stinging criticism I had managed to sneak into my report:

“Not only has South West Sound failed to give direct answers to many of the questions required within the application process, but it has barely articulated a convincing argument for being re-awarded the licence, save for the obvious benefit that its ratings are extremely high.”

Immediately after the Meeting, it was my responsibility to contact the chairman of the winning applicant, Hal McGhie, by phone to officially confirm the outcome. My call was answered by a woman who told me he was too busy to come to the phone. I had to insist that I needed to converse with him personally, if only briefly, to relay that afternoon’s result of his re-application for the local commercial radio licence. She put me on hold and returned after a while to explain that, after speaking with him, he had insisted that he was far too busy to talk presently and that I would have to call back at some other time.

I suspect he had no need for my phone call to inform him of the result he already knew.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/01/see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no.html ]

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. 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.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/06/a-little-radio-knowledge-is-dangerous.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]

The rubber stamp men … and women : 2002 : Members Meetings, The Radio Authority

 “Did you enjoy your day off yesterday?” a member of my team asked me one morning.

“Yesterday?” I enquired, slightly confused.

“Yes,” he continued. “You weren’t in your office all day so we guessed you had taken the day off.”

Ah! Now it began to make more sense.

“Unfortunately, I was not off yesterday,” I replied. “I was in meetings all day in the boardroom upstairs.”

That was true. It had been just one of a multitude of similar days when, from my arrival at eight until evening, I had bounced from one meeting to another, and then another. Had I even eaten lunch? We were launching a new London radio station, KISS FM, where I was the only member of the management team with prior commercial radio experience. My page-a-day diary was necessarily crammed with all sorts of meetings. In some I had to make presentations, some I had to chair and some I had to minute. For many months, there never seemed time to do real ‘work’ in my job because of all these meetings.

My initiation into the world of apparently endless meetings had happened a decade earlier. As sabbatical deputy president of a student union, my life was sacrificed to committees, sub-committees, executive committees and student councils, listening to and engaging with student activists who loved nothing more than to talk and talk. I had also been nominated as the student representative on umpteen university committees, in which twenty to thirty grey academics and administrators sat around a massive wooden boardroom table for hours, leafing through the half-ream of agenda papers before them in an effort to stay awake. Much of my life for one year comprised evenings spent punching holes in paperwork and filing it in huge ring binders for posterity.

Two decades later, starting my first job within a government ‘quango’, I anticipated that I would once again be drowned in meetings and sub-committees. I soon discovered that, at The Radio Authority, nothing happened … literally. I was crammed into an office the size of a modest living room with five colleagues sat at trestle tables around the perimeter, obliging each of us to face a wall or the only window. Filling the middle of the room was an overlarge high storage unit with map drawers that nobody seemed to use. This anti-social working arrangement could have been an approximation of the organisation’s management system.

The first day at a new job, you except to be left alone to familiarise yourself with your desktop computer and your new surroundings. However, you do not expect the one hundred subsequent days to repeat like Groundhog Day. For three whole months, I was given nothing to do. There seemed to be no day-to-day workflow system, no meetings, no distribution of tasks amongst members of my department. I could have come to work every day and idly stared at a blank computer screen. Nobody ever asked me what I was doing, or not doing, so I busied myself writing an economic analysis of ownership concentration levels in local radio markets. Before starting, I had asked the finance department if they had already written such a document. They looked at me like I was crazy. I was already wondering why the required start date for this post had proven so urgent.

Then, out of the blue, development director David Vick, who had interviewed me for the job, asked me to attend The Radio Authority’s next ‘Members Meeting’. Once a month, senior managers like him met formally with Members, six men and three women handpicked from ‘the great and the good’ by somebody somewhere as representatives of the ‘public’ whose taxes were funding this regulator. Having drawn my salary for three months but contributed zero so far, I was keen to impress somebody/anybody that I was capable. I read the meeting agenda and accompanying documents, including one written by a Radio Authority colleague recommending the award of a new local radio licence. I researched thoroughly the issues for discussion.

At the meeting in the boardroom, Radio Authority managers were lined up along one side of the oval table, with Members seated along the other. I was not intimidated. I had attended dozens of meetings like this elsewhere over the years. I sat at one end of the table and kept my counsel until the recommendation to award the local radio licence was discussed. Once my colleague had finished presenting his paper, I raised my hand. The Member appointed as chairman, Richard Hooper, was sat at the far end of the table and asked me to speak. There was a look of collective astonishment on the managers’ faces. But I held the belief that we were all in a genuine meeting … together. I simply had some factual information to contribute.

I had brought along my own analysis of government statistics that demonstrated a high level of poverty in the locality for which this local radio licence was about to be awarded. When compared with similar stations, I concluded there would be insufficient advertising revenues to support a standalone licensee within this relatively small and poor locality. I suggested that it made more economic sense to award the new licence to an existing neighbouring radio station that could then expand its coverage area, rather than offer it to a new business that appeared very likely to fail. The lay Members listened and understood my arguments, rejected my colleague’s recommendation to award the licence to a standalone applicant and accepted my alternative solution to reward a competing neighbouring applicant.

After the meeting ended, I felt pleased that I had made a valuable contribution on the first occasion I had been involved in any kind of discussion or meeting within the organisation. I was not feeling smug but I did enjoy the sense that my skills were finally being valued and had influenced decision-making. This sense of positivity lasted less than a minute. Barrelling down the corridor behind me was the manager who had invited me.

“What the hell did you think you were you doing in that meeting?” David Vick demanded.

“I was contributing to the decision-making with a factual analysis that was not in my colleague’s report,” I replied. This appeared to make him even angrier. I will omit the swear words:

“You were not asked to speak. You were not expected to speak. Nobody asked your opinion. Nobody wanted your opinion. That licence was nothing to do with you. Had I asked you to be involved in it? No. So what the hell did you think you were doing?”

Vick was very angry and not afraid to demonstrate it. I had thought I was proving my worth at work, while he seemed to be thinking the opposite.

“What I am going to tell Ralph?” he was shouting at me. “How on earth can I explain to Ralph what just happened?”

I knew immediately that he was referring to Ralph Bernard, chief executive of Britain’s largest commercial radio owner, GWR Group plc, that operated dozens of local licences across the country … awarded by The Radio Authority’s Members Meetings. The paper written by my colleague had recommended awarding this new licence to a local start-up in which GWR had agreed to take a minority shareholding. Over the years, I had witnessed this familiar story play out remarkably often: once a new local radio licensee failed financially, it would receive a buyout offer from its minority shareholder, usually a large radio group such as GWR. A decade earlier, I had watched minority shareholder EMAP plc take over KISS FM this way. The regulator did not like to be seen to be handing new local licences to the same handful of commercial radio groups … but that was the end result anyway.

“I have to phone Ralph now. This is going to be a very difficult conversation.” Vick was still shouting at me. “I hope you realise what you have done.”

I returned to my office, shaken but not upset. I had been invited to that meeting. I was asked to attend. What would have been the point if I had not contributed? When was a meeting not a meeting, according to my understanding of the definition of the word? Was I expected to sit there dumbly, merely observing bad decisions being made due to a lack of information or analysis? Apparently, the answer was yes.

Sat at my desk, I recalled my very first day in the job when David Vick had bizarrely instructed me: “Don’t talk to the people in your office about radio.”

I thought I must have misheard him and asked him to repeat it. No, what I had understood him to have said was totally correct. Vick went on:

“You know far more about radio than the other people in your office, so don’t talk to them about it.”

At the time, I was nonplussed. We were called The Radio Authority and we were responsible for regulating the commercial radio industry. How could I not talk about radio? Three months later, I was beginning to comprehend that I was employed in an organisation where being an ‘authority’ on the topic of radio was apparently not considered a virtue.

Later that fateful day, Vick called me to his office. He was calmer now but I was wary of saying anything that might stoke his rage again. He told me there were new rules that I would have to follow:

“When you are invited to attend another Members Meeting, I want you to submit a script to me in advance of what you are going to say. It must be precisely two minutes long. In the meeting, you must say exactly the words on that script that I approve and absolutely nothing else. You must not talk about any other subject in the meeting and the only reason to speak at all will be if somebody directly asks you a question. Have you got that?”

“Yes, I understand,” I said sheepishly. It was hard not to conclude that the angry man in front of me appeared to be utterly bonkers. I remained grateful that he had offered me a much-needed job, but I now understood that I was employed in a madhouse where the definitions of ‘meeting’ and ‘decision making’ appeared to be completely alien to my own experiences working in commercial businesses. I just hoped I could survive this nightmare.

Only one other person employed at The Radio Authority while I was there had prior experience in the commercial radio industry. It was alleged by my colleagues that he had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown after starting there and had been off work for months. Why was I not at all surprised?

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-rubber-stamp-men-and-women-2002.html]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-fahrenheit-451-of-commercial-radio.html]

What are words worth? : 2003 : Professor Anthony Everitt’s community radio report, The Radio Authority

 I like to be helpful. If I have a skill, I will offer it to help solve a problem at work. I thought that was what working for an organisation was all about. The bringing together of people with different skills to work together to move things forward. But, in reality, I have often found that demonstrating a skill you have at work can get you noticed, but not necessarily in a positive way. Bizarrely, someone in a workplace who can demonstrate proven skills can be seen as the enemy. Why? Because, in the British media industry, most people are appointed not on the basis of the skills they bring to the job, but on the basis of who they are. Are they ‘one of us’? Did they go to the right school, usually a private school? Do they speak with a posh accent? Do they know the ‘right people’? Once given the job, these incumbents do not take kindly to some upstart colleague or underling who demonstrates in the workplace that they have proven skills which their posh colleague or manager have never had … and have never had to have. They have been granted their role because they are simply ‘the right stuff’.

The Radio Authority had commissioned a report about the potential for a new community radio sector in the United Kingdom. The Authority had no real interest in launching community radio, but it had suddenly become convenient. The British commercial radio industry had lobbied to be relieved of its responsibility to provide local news bulletins on its radio stations. News was expensive, compared to DJ’s playing records. News was unionised and journalists were relatively well paid compared to non-unionised local presenters. After 30-odd years of having had to provide local news bulletins, commercial radio owners demanded to their regulator, The Radio Authority, that this requirement be stopped. But how to succeed in proving that doing less, cutting its services, making journalists redundant, could be argued as good for commercial radio’s listeners? It needed a good wheeze that was believable.

Although there had been demands for a community radio sector in Britain since the 1970’s that had consistently been rebuffed by the regulator and government, thirty years later it was suddenly the perfect time to accept and promote the idea. The plot went like this: new community radio stations would broadcast local news to their listeners, so what was the point of local commercial radio stations also providing a similar local news service? The commercial radio industry cooked up a scheme with the regulator under which community radio stations would be licensed nationwide for the first time. However, those stations would be shackled to a licence regime that denied them the technical resources to reach many people, the financial resources to be sustainable or the ability to generate revenues by selling on-air advertising. As a result, these stations would prove no threat to existing commercial radio owners, either by stealing their listeners or their revenues. Starved of sustainability, community radio stations would likely go bust very quickly. The stations themselves could be blamed for their failures, not The Radio Authority and certainly not commercial radio.

For the commercial radio industry, this was a win-win proposal. This new tier of community radio stations was to be licensed to fail but could relieve them of having to continue the expensive job of providing local news. Their stations could later lobby that they no longer needed to be local at all because they no longer broadcast local news. Their stations could be regional, or even national, cutting their operators’ expenses even further. The British government went along with this bizarre scam. I sat in the front row of a conference and witnessed a government minister argue from the podium that, by licensing a new tier of community radio stations to broadcast local news, commercial radio owners could no longer be required to provide regular local news bulletins. I wanted to jump up and shout “bullshit” but everyone in the audience nodded their heads sagely as if it all made perfect logical sense. Not for the first time, I felt like the upstart in a room of worthies who could not see the reality unfolding in front of them because their only evident skill was having ‘the right stuff’.

It was 2003. I desperately wanted a job working in radio but all my applications for vacancies had been rejected. So here I was unexpectedly working for The Radio Authority. By now, I had sat at my desk for several months without doing any work. That sentence is not an exaggeration. My managers had not given me a single task to do, so I had been able to sit there, getting on with my own projects on my desktop computer, but looking busy. I had no idea why I had been recruited for a job that seemed to involve doing nothing. Now they had commissioned a report on the potential for community radio from an academic. I had had no involvement in the commissioning. Nobody at The Radio Authority had ever asked me anything about community radio, despite the fact that I was the sole employee to have worked in a British community radio station. In 1983 I had been a founder member of the Community Radio Association. I was the only person at The Radio Authority who had attended the Association’s last annual conference. I had circulated to colleagues a short note on what had happened at the conference. Nobody responded.

Somebody in the office shared with me a Word copy of the professor’s completed report to read and told me it was about to be sent to the designers commissioned to put fancy graphics and a cover around it. I read it and realised immediately that the document was not ready to print. Nobody at The Radio Authority had even thought about editing the report, correcting the layout, correcting typos or doing all the little stuff that a sub-editor has to do prior to publication. I had not been given this Word document because it was my responsibility at work or because of my experience as a writer and editor since the 1970’s. A conversation ensued that seemed rather baffling to my colleague. I suggested the document could not be published as it was because it had not been ‘subbed’. Bafflement. I tried a different approach. If the document was published as is, it would prove an ‘embarrassment’ to The Radio Authority. I had already learnt that my workplace only acted decisively when it needed to avoid ‘embarrassment’. It worked. I offered to sub-edit the document prior to publication because I had the skills that apparently nobody else in my office possessed.

During the next few weeks, I communicated regularly with the report’s author whilst editing his document. I was pleased to have something to do that could use my skills and was connected with radio. I knew about community radio, I knew about editing. I had honed these skills over several decades. In the back of my mind, I must also have been thinking that I might be given some actual work to do by my managers at The Radio Authority in editing and/or community radio if I demonstrated my skills with this document. I wanted to be able to use my skills in my job. Until now, I had had no opportunity to show what I could do. After completing the editing of the document, I shared it with the author who was fulsome in his praise for my contribution and commented that I had been the best editor he had ever worked with. I handed back the edited version to my colleague. It was passed to the designers and printed.

I was not even sure that my line mangers knew or cared that I had edited this report. Internally I did not receive any credit or thanks for my work. On the contrary, I was the only employee denied an end-of-year bonus that year. My hope that it might lead to my involvement in the licensing of new community radio stations was quashed when it was announced that the person responsible would be Soo Williams who worked in the same office as me. I had never heard her express any interest in community radio. She was initially charged with organising a large meeting with community groups interested in applying for licences. She seemed fearful and asked me how to organise such a meeting and to suggest a suitable venue. I helped selflessly, once again with the hope it would lead to involvement. She accepted my suggestion of hiring a room at the London School of Economics. The meeting went ahead. I was not invited. I had no further involvement in The Radio Authority’s work on community radio.

In 2019, Soo Williams was awarded an MBE for her services to community radio.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/01/what-are-words-worth-2003-professor.html]