*These were mini reel to reel tape recorders called Uhers—they had to be charged up like car batteries and were a constant source of worry and woe.
Top 10 Things that Will Happen to You and that You Will Have to Accept
10 Your mum will one day stop finding you cute
9 A friend will betray you
8 You will start to exhale a sigh of relief whenever you have a ‘sit down’
7 You will one day be older than the current James Bond
6 You will one day be older than the current Prime Minister
5 Your body will start to fall apart
4 You will listen to the same songs and find new music ‘strange’
3 Naughty afternoons with the curtains drawn will be replaced by repeats of Columbo and a cup of tea
2 Girls will always cry—it’s what they do
1 Your mentor will one day leave you to fend for yourself and you will never learn as much from anyone ever again
Change is the only one true constant and is always going to happen no matter what we try to do to stop it. In the end only the fool stands in its way, the wise man accepting things for what they are and moving on. Any other strategy is an abject waste of energy, time and emotion, and so it was when Timmy left to seek his fame and fortune in London. But as always there was a flip side to the situation.
The fact that Timmy was no longer around at Piccadilly meant that we had to change too. I, like the rest of the Timmy-helpers, may have lost our guru, but there were still many more lessons to be learnt and we were now forced to stand on our own two feet in Radioland.
The time had come for us to develop our own characters and find our own voices. It was all very well hiding behind a character on someone else’s show but what would we say and how would we say it if we were ever given our own shows? It wasn’t long before we all began working with other on-air talent—none of them anywhere near as dynamic as our old boss but all different and unique in their own special radio ways.
Independent radio was still a very free medium at the time, trusting and encouraging its producers and presenters to do whatever they thought might be worth listening to—all good to watch and learn from, and not always how to do it but often very much how not to do it.
The existence of such a variety of individuals all pulling in the same direction, albeit admittedly with different ropes, is unfortunately very much a thing of the past, independent radio having long gone the way of tightly formatted predictable output designed to appease the advertisers. I blame the Americans.
A short rant
The argument for tightly formatted output came from America; this is how things had always been there and as more and more radio stations popped up over here and bigger radio groups were formed, the more this model began to be adopted. A big mistake in my book—and after all this is my book.
The model is based on the fact that a radio station needs to guarantee a definitive audience so its commercial clients know who’s listening and thus advertising can be sold to the highest bidder. The more stations the group’s owners can get to sound the same, the more potential customers they can deliver to specific advertisers, but a side effect of this is the sacrifice of anything surprising, new or different, which is the very reason why commercial radio was so popular in the first place.
The vast majority of commercial radio is so bland nowadays. I find that very sad, the irony being that many of the colourful characters who now run it came from the original crazy days of the ‘let’s give it a go and see what happens’ era. Not only this but when it comes to Britain, the American model is fundamentally flawed in the first place because of one thing—the existence here of the BBC.
In America there is nothing that comes anywhere close to being like the BBC and what nobody realised was that in an ever-increasing cutthroat world of commercialism, where costs and standards would inevitably have to be compromised in order to keep making money out of a thinner and thinner slice of the pie, the BBC would be able to continue producing high-quality product that would keep sounding better and better compared to its dumbed-down rivals. This, in turn, would cause the more discerning and ultimately desirable audiences, the likes of which the advertisers would kill for, to leave commercial radio once and for all—which is exactly what’s happened. As a result commercial radio has never been in worse shape than it is today.
I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility to take an overall philosophy for a radio station and sell it to advertisers, as opposed to a minute-by-minute breakdown of exactly what will be said and played at every second of the day, albeit guaranteeing a product but at the same time removing any room for creativity or personality. And the mad thing is, this is the only way their next big hit is going to be discovered—the next new voice or idea that could catapult their station ahead of the rest needs the space and freedom to be found out.
The two caveats to this are Classic FM and TalkSport, who both know and respect their audiences inside out, so much so that their audiences in turn trust them enough for there to be some freedom within the schedules. TalkSport especially I find an excellent listen, and Classic FM is a previous winner of the prestigious Sony Award for Radio Station of the Year.
Listening figures for radio are up yet commercial radio is in decline—this speaks volumes. It’s not because of the dominance of the BBC but simply because somewhere along the line commercial radio lost its balls and became boring.
The sales guys started calling the shots over the production guys and the tail started to wag the dog. Today the sales floors remain intact whereas the vast majority of production floors have disappeared altogether. What on earth do they think they are going to sell?
Entertainment must come before advertising. It can never be the other way round—content is king. In the long term, the audience will realise what’s going on and vote with their dials, anyone who presumes otherwise will be out of business, probably for good and quite rightly so. Surely, the better the entertainment, the more money you can make around that entertainment, but there has to be entertainment there to start with.
The beginning of this suicide by over-advertising was the ‘promotion-based feature’, a phrase just the mention of which was enough to make a producer’s blood run cold.
‘We’re gonna have another winning weekend,’ came the cry from the sales floor. This was where a whole weekend’s output would be hung around the promotion of a certain product. Basically it was a straight money deal, usually excused by an hourly competition.
‘All this weekend we’re giving you the chance to win blah blah blah…’ I know, I’ve been there, for my sins I have uttered such phrases.
Features like these do not have entertainment at their heart, they are purely designed to make as much money as possible. Eventually the audience come to realise this and see them for what they really are, an endless stream of unimaginative ideas. They then begin to resent this hijacking of what was once colourful and entertaining airtime, ultimately losing interest altogether and switching off.
This programming ‘con’ is the difference between an amusement arcade and a bouncy castle: the amusement arcade may well be full of flashing lights and loud noises but they are merely there to hide the fact that nothing else remotely amusing is going on other than some poor soul gradually being squeezed of their hard-earned cash.
The bouncy castle, on the other hand, may cost 50p to have a go on in the first place, but after that is almost guaranteed joy, smiles and laughter all the way, with the exception of the odd twisted ankle and sprained wrist.
I can only presume Rupert Murdoch was brought up with