Before ISDN lines became de rigueur, the radio car was one of the few ways of gaining semi studio-quality sound at sports fixtures and the like. I remember all too well freezing my nuts off in the car park of St Helen’s Rugby League Club, while Stuart Pike—now a top voice on Five Live, was attached to the other end of my cable commentating on how ‘The Saints’ were faring out on the pitch.
Sport was also a massive part of Piccadilly’s output and football especially, with Man U. and Man City leading an impressive cluster of local clubs regularly involved in the thick end of the First Division.
One of the most exciting shows you could be asked to work on was a show called Sport on Saturday. Sport on Saturday was a non-stop four-hour maelstrom, packed full of action from beginning to end.
There was so much going on during this broadcast that the presenters only had time to focus on what they were saying, leaving them no time for operating any of the equipment. This meant the control desk had to be operated separately, usually by a technical operator, a rather grand name for someone who just about knew how some of what was laid out in front of them might work—at least that’s how I always felt.
Working on Sport on Saturday was a learning curve like few others and again I couldn’t get enough. The operator would sit behind the main control console where the DJ would normally sit while two sports presenters would sit opposite over the desk at the guest mics. The presenters would then spend most of the afternoon with their heads buried in makeshift notes and rip and reads (hurriedly prepared scripts), just trying to hold themselves and everything else together. They would have the output of the station in one ear and the producer in the other, updating them with scores and any additional information they might need to know or that might be useful. It was a highly impressive scene to witness.
The console, the guardianship of which was down to the likes of me, was not unlike a mixing desk you might witness at a gig, consisting of faders, sound meters, gains of one type or another and a whole host of illuminated buttons with little letters on them which either did or didn’t do what they were supposed to. When it came to Sport on Saturday the faders, normally linked up to records, CDs and cart machines during other shows, were connected to ten or more outside sources which were permanently dialled up throughout the afternoon. They were our live links to all the reporters at the local grounds.
The big guns, however, were behind us in the shape of four enormous clunking great ten-inch reel-to-reel tape machines, slowly turning like huge wheels in some sinister Victorian workhouse. They were mighty indeed and they commanded respect.
Each one of the four machines would have a direct input from full commentary of one of our featured games. Now here’s the fun bit—when there was a goal, the operator would have to instantaneously swing around on his chair and thrust a scrap of paper in the take-up reel approximately where the goal took place. It was then down to the pressure of the ensuing tape to hold the scrap of paper in place. Consequently, as a result and if we were lucky, we would have some idea of where the goal might be when it came to full time.
It was then the operator’s job to spool back on all four machines and splice the goals together for the final highlights package—very hairy, highly precarious, unbelievably messy but surprisingly productive.
At the end of a sports show, as you might imagine, there was always a real sense of relief, quickly followed by a sense of overwhelming achievement; celebratory beers in the bar afterwards were often the order of the day.
I don’t believe there’s anything better than live sport on the radio. Sports commentators are by far the most gifted of broadcasters—they are the people I have the most respect for in my industry. They make what they do sound so easy and it makes me shudder with dread at the thought of ever having to do it myself. The excitement they manage to convey is infectious and the accuracy with which they choose their words as the action changes from one thing to the other lightning fast is jaw-dropping—and whilst all this is going on they still find time to be articulate, humorous and even poetic—I hate them. Of course I’m joking.
I was recently told that a good commentator actually has to state the action before the crowd reacts to that action, otherwise it will sound like he’s behind, so he almost has to guess what’s going to happen next! If he gets it wrong he risks sounding like a dufus; if he gets it right, however, the oohs and ahs serve only to enhance his commentary, making the whole thing sound like a carefully prepared film score designed to highlight the scene in all the right places—now that’s quality.
Like most places of work, at the radio station there were good jobs and bad jobs. Driving the desk for big shows and operating the radio car were up there with the best; whereas tape reclamation and record logging were most definitely down there with the worst.
Tape reclamation involved taking all the old tape that had been discarded during editing from out of the tape bin and sticking it all back together again for reuse. Whereas tape cost a fortune—me, a razor blade and a roll of sticky tape were a relative bargain.
As dull as tape reclamation was, it was nowhere near as dull as the music logging. The logging of records was a legal requirement, so that the various royalties could be paid to the various people concerned in the making of the records in the first place. Every song that was ever played on the radio had to be logged by hand.
The easiest way to do this was to take all the records off the DJ, during or after the show and log them then and there, but often it would be late at night and there were more interesting things going on, so I would more likely leave my logging until later—big mistake, huge.
What was already a mind-numbingly tedious process now became a prolonged pain in the ass marathon of detective work, all my own fault of course. I would have to listen back to the shows, identify the records, locate them in the record library and then take down all the details to pay the contributors—the label, the record number, the artist, the name of the song, the writer/s, the publisher and for how long the record was played.
The humdrum of this process was compounded by the fact the record industry had thus far not agreed on a uniform place to write all these details, so they would be in different places for every disc; sometimes all the details would be on the sleeve, sometimes they would all be on the record label, sometimes a mixture of both…soul-destroying. It often took longer to log the records for a show than the show itself, especially if you did it the way I did.
By this time, by the way, Timmy had moved on: he had flitted to London and to the zany world of early morning television and his kiddie-filled creation called The Wide Awake Club and Wacaday—the programme that was to make him rich and famous.
Timmy had a theory that there would always be kids and they would always want entertaining, whereas in his opinion adults would use you and lose you, leaving you for dead. It was a theory I didn’t quite understand then and one that I still don’t quite understand now, but for Timmy it was a logic that worked and one that proved to be mightily lucrative for him.
He quickly became the most successful children’s television presenter of his day, taking children’s television to a whole different level. He set new benchmarks with his energy and creativity, making most of the other kids’ shows look interminably dull by comparison. Piccadilly’s loss was very much TV-am’s gain: Wacaday was a smash, literally taking over breakfast television during the summer months and at weekends. Timmy was everywhere—for such a little guy he couldn’t have been any bigger; rock stars used to be ordered to appear on the show by their kids! And Timmy even went on to top the charts himself after being chosen by Andrew Lloyd Webber to front his remake of ‘Itsy Bitzy Teeny Weeny’.
Both Timmy and his show were a ratings winner—of that there is no doubt. I just wish everyone could have seen or at least heard him doing the things we witnessed him doing on the radio. Timmy on The Tranny will always be number one for me.
*A chinagraph is the pencil/crayon we used to mark the edit point on the tape with. I used to love editing. As