Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC Page 4
At the age of eight I sat the entrance exam for Bradford Grammar School, and later won a City of Bradford scholarship, which meant that my tuition was free. All the rest of my school education was there, but I would say I have a respect for BGS rather than a deep love. On the plus side, the school was academically strong in those days, and a few teachers were outstanding. When I was twelve, my English teacher gave me The French Lieutenant’s Woman to read as an addition to the curriculum, and that and other novels that he suggested made me adventurous in literature. When I was sixteen, an exceptional teacher transformed history from learning by rote into something with academic rigour and the exciting exploration of sources, and set me up well for university. I made lifelong friendships there – notably my oldest friend Conrad Walker and the next-in-line Michael Forte (né Blackburn), who remain key members of my kitchen cabinet: the friends I rely on for advice and support. On the negative side, all-boys northern grammar schools of that age had their grim side and were not good at freeing up the mind: we were at risk of emerging with lots of O and A levels but not much creative energy. Music and art were for wimps; and for those not naturally talented at sport, like me, it seemed that ‘Games’ was a punitive and unpleasant part of the timetable. The school was divided, it seemed, between rugby players and non-rugby players, and I was firmly in the latter category.
In the sixth form I joined the national Young Liberals, then a byword for student radicalism, and earned myself a prim comment on my school report: ‘I hope he will no longer bask on the wilder shores of Young Liberalism.’ This naturally redoubled my commitment, and in the February 1974 general election I helped run the Liberal campaign in Bradford South, where we were operating in virgin territory but enthused by the national Liberal surge. I yomped around the streets after school, pushing leaflets through letter boxes and explaining as an earnest sixteen-year-old why the two-party system had failed. One evening I went to a Liberal rally in Pudsey, where the guest speakers were the party leader Jeremy Thorpe and the famously obese MP for Rochdale Cyril Smith. Quite a combination, given what we later found out about one officially innocent man and one who died without his alleged crimes being prosecuted.
By the time I was at Bradford Grammar, my parents had left the post office. My granddad, who had owned both shops, decided to sell up. My dad became a commercial sales rep, selling confectionery and moving between companies such as Batgers in London, Taveners in Liverpool and the Blue Bird toffee company. We had jars of sweets and lollies stacked up in the garage, which fortunately – maybe inured by years of living in a shop – I never found attractive. But it was a tough job for my dad, with thousands of miles of travelling each year and a constant fear about not hitting his sales targets, and he never achieved stability in it. He was made redundant twice, and I experienced through him the blow to morale of unemployment and the worry about paying the bills. His pride always made him believe that the worst option would be for my mother to have to go back to work to support us, so that never happened. But the two of them made astute investments in property when times were good, and we rose from the terraced house in inner-city Bradford to a detached house in the suburb of Heaton, which had trees and fields and even a nearby bistro which used garlic in its cooking and was regarded as daringly avant-garde.
In these somewhat grey teenage years there was then an episode in transatlantic technicolor. At sixteen I had the chance to go on an English-Speaking Union exchange visit to the United States for part of a term at an absurdly low cost which included a subsidy from Bradford Council. I was allocated to Farmington, Missouri, which had probably been the original one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. By 1974, it had seemingly more churches for a population of 7,000 than Bradford had for a quarter of a million, along with a single main street with shops that smelt of citrus air freshener, and a drive-in cinema on the edge of town. But teenagers had the benefit of the great American car culture and were able to drive from the age of sixteen, so, as night fell in the soggy heat of a Midwestern summer, they took to the streets in their automobiles, tooted the horn at stop signs and urged passengers to jump from one vehicle to another before roaring off again. We would then meet at the Dairy Queen for a malt and some fries to a soundtrack provided by the St Louis Top 40 radio station, KXOK.
This was impossibly exotic compared with the England of the 1970s. My host family was headed by a man called Homer, which was funny even then, but they did me proud. We went to the top of the Gateway Arch in St Louis, voyaged on a Mississippi paddle steamer, and went water-skiing on the Lake of the Ozarks, where I stayed upright for approximately three seconds and then sank inelegantly into its balmy waters. I ate pizza for the first time. I attended classes at Farmington High School which were some years behind Bradford Grammar School in their intellectual challenge, but the American students were socially confident and boundlessly optimistic in a manner that was unknown back home. When they graduated, with the school band playing Pomp and Circumstance, I felt an emotional commitment to their school and their town and their country that remained with me for years. I flew unwillingly home to Britain in a fit of teenage moroseness.
But the following year something transformational happened in Bradford: the city became the home of a commercial radio station. I had long been fixated by radio, starting with the discovery of The World Tonight on Radio 4 when I was twelve or so. At the risk of sounding like William Hague, I also used to listen in bed to Today in Parliament. But I liked music radio too, and in the analogue days of the 1970s – with little choice of listening – it was a thrill that Bradford was going to have its own station. In September 1975, Pennine Radio came on air, with a logo that included an ear affixed to nothing in particular and a jingle package that incorporated the refrain ‘Pennine Two Thirty-Five. That’s the sound going into your ear ’ole.’ I was captivated by the programmes if not by the jingles. Pennine was part commercial operation and part community trust, which meant that it had a higher than usual speech content alongside the pop music that attracted its biggest audiences. I listened voraciously, even when I was doing my homework, and it was on Sunday night that I came across a programme called Tops and Noils presented by Austin Mitchell, who was then the star presenter on Yorkshire Television. It was a mix of folklore and brass band music, and featured within it old folk reminiscing about days gone by in a segment called ‘How We Were Then’. I wrote to Austin professing a not entirely sincere admiration for the show, and he replied suggesting I could be a student volunteer collecting some of the material for him – which is how I made my first visit to that holy of holies, a proper radio station. It somehow added to the romance that it was located in the light-starved basement of a converted wool warehouse. After training that must have lasted fifteen minutes, I was sent out on my first assignment: interviewing an elderly man about his experience of the First World War.
Along with Austin, the big figure in my early experience of broadcasting was Dorothy Box. She was the community affairs producer at Pennine, and she took me under her wing: endlessly kind and patient with someone who was still a schoolboy, and willing to let me experiment with the medium with which I was falling ever more deeply in love. I made a half-hour documentary about Bradford Grammar School for the community access slot, and another programme about my German teachers, who had fled Austria in 1938 and made a new life here. Austin sent a letter in spidery handwriting on Yorkshire Television notepaper: ‘Just a note, as all such letters begin, to say how much I enjoyed your Viennese interview. It was well done – apart from a dodgy first question – and the interest was very well kept up. Congrats.’ Heartened by the mentoring I was getting, I knew with absolute certainty that this was the sort of thing I wanted to do in my working life.
But there was university still to come. The A-level factory did its stuff and I was considered good enough to apply for Oxford, so I did the entrance exam and on a misty December day I was interviewed by Wadham College and shortly afterwards offered a scholarship to read Modern
History. When I started there in the autumn of 1976, I added German to my course for a reason that now seems odd: I had decided that I didn’t like any history before the modern age, so studying Modern Languages allowed me to ditch the tiresome medieval stuff. It was quixotic too, because I was never an expert linguist and my eagerness to get out to work meant that I was determined to be away from Oxford after the minimum three years; I therefore didn’t do the year living in Germany, which would have helped me enormously with my language skills.
I loved Oxford, while at the same time getting much less out of it than I should have. Wadham was a non-stuffy place, and it was conspicuous for its left-wing politics and its social liberalism. We had a Ho Chi Minh Quad in solidarity with the people of Vietnam. Despite thinking this was a silly gesture, even for 1970s students, I felt at home at Wadham. I adored living in a seventeenth-century building even though the plumbing had progressed little since its construction. We had to go down three flights of stairs and across the quadrangle to another staircase if we wanted to use the bathroom, and there was no heating in the bedrooms. In winter I sometimes slept in an unhygienic student fashion, with my pullover on top of sensible Yorkshire pyjamas, and the bed covered by the thickest duvet known to humankind. The more conventional images of Oxford turned out to be true, too. For two years running I had friends who rented a room from a don at New College, and the condition of tenancy was that they had to walk his three dogs each day. So I wandered miles with them, along the banks of the Cherwell and beyond, forming a particularly strong bond with a basset hound called Sally. I devoured what was on offer in the great libraries, wandered contemplatively across Christ Church Meadows on sunlit days, cheered our rowers from the banks of the river (always a position preferred to being in the boat itself) and debated political issues with my friends till dawn. By then, I had joined the Labour Party. I was probably one of a vanishingly small number of people to become a member because of the Lib–Lab pact, since I liked Jim Callaghan’s centrist pragmatism and it was some years before I understood Mrs Thatcher’s appeal.
In contrast to students of today, I also felt better off than at any time previously in my life. Tuition was free, and due to my parents’ low income I received a grant towards my living costs from the City of Bradford. The teaching was, I suspect, patchier than it should have been. Like most students, I did best in the papers where I was inspired by my tutor and given no quarter when I was thinking sloppily – and not all my history sessions achieved those goals. In my German classes, I found I was fired up by the challenges of Goethe and Schiller and Grass and Thomas Mann, though my tutor sometimes accused me of taking too high an overview of the subjects. ‘You write like a journalist’, he said once, doubtless intending that to be a terrible insult. I, of course, regarded it as a compliment.
I know I spent too much time working at Pennine when I was back home in Bradford for the vacations. I used to do early shifts on the breakfast show co-ordinating the travel news and answering listeners’ phone calls, and then I would persuade the programme controller to let me make a documentary or contribute to the station’s magazine shows. I was unimpressed by people who did student media: I was doing the real thing. That should not, however, have included helping Pennine to cover the 1979 general election declaration in Skipton just six weeks ahead of my Finals.
My fascination with radio meant that I had a set with a powerful aerial that allowed me to pick up the London commercial radio stations – Capital and LBC – in Oxford. I supplemented this with a daily fix of news from the PM programme on Radio 4, though I never heard Today. It was on way too early for a student. The allure of the media was strengthened by appearing on University Challenge in the autumn of 1978. Wadham lost, and I wore a dreadful cardigan. There was a brief moment of pride when I broke into a question about ancient history and earned myself a ‘well interrupted, Wadham’ from the quizmaster Bamber Gascoigne, which made up for a number of wrong answers earlier in the show. But the main appeal was in seeing Granada Television, a shiny outpost of Television Land in the centre of Manchester, and being accommodated in dressing rooms used by the stars of Coronation Street. I concluded during the filming of the programme that I had no desire to be on television myself. The moment when I wrongly interrupted the first question was when I had a jolt of awareness that I was appearing on national television and this could be a route to glory or, more likely if I kept screwing things up, humiliation. What interested me most was what was happening behind the scenes: the mechanics of making the show, what the producers did – and how to set about getting a job there.
To my disappointment, a few months later Granada turned me down as a graduate recruit. So did the BBC news trainee scheme, without so much as an interview. But otherwise I did well: among my job offers was the Thomson Regional Newspaper traineeship in Newcastle and a researcher’s job at London Weekend Television. What I did then was a case of heart overruling head. I turned down the big beasts of the media world and opted instead to take an initial six-month contract at Pennine Radio. My parents seemed phlegmatic at the time, but they later told me that they had received much ‘sympathy’ for having a son who had gone to Oxford and yet had chosen to return to Bradford and work in what its critics saw as a two-bit commercial radio station. All I felt at twenty-one was that, having had my life defined by high-pressure exams for almost as long as I could remember, I had the right to do what I wanted for once. Nowhere else would I have been trusted to do so much so young as at the place where they had known me for five years. I therefore set to work with a song in my heart on a starting salary of £3,750 per annum.
CHAPTER 3
LOCAL RADIO
WHEN I STARTED working full-time at Pennine Radio, just a week after I had finished at Oxford, I had a lesson drummed into me. If we sold commercials and made enough money, I was in a job. If we didn’t, I would be out of one. It was most commonly articulated by our managing director, Mike Boothroyd, who had a Yorkshire attitude to financial prudence: never spend a pound if a penny will do. I knew that a community affairs producer, the role I was given, was a bit of a luxury even for a well-rooted local station like Pennine – and our speech programming depended on us being successful as a business. I have therefore always appreciated an entrepreneurial spirit in media, even though my career ended up being overwhelmingly in the BBC. I also know that commercial radio can offer a public service.
As it happened, my first few months at Pennine coincided with the prolonged ITV strike that ran from August to October in 1979. This made it a lucky miss that I hadn’t gone to London Weekend Television: I would have moved to London and promptly out onto a picket line. But it also meant swathes of the advertising displaced from ITV moved over to independent local radio, and Pennine was brimful with commercials – and not just the usual DIY warehouses and the Bradford Co-op. We had proper brands with decently produced ads, and real money coming into our tills. There was a sense of exhilaration among the sales team, and the sound of coins being counted could be heard from the boardroom. There was no talk of booting out the community affairs chap.
This was a golden time for commercial radio stations. There were not many of them, so they had local monopolies. Major personalities wanted to be on them, and Pennine often featured the Yorkshire miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, while local MPs including Sir Keith Joseph would dutifully turn up for phone-ins. While he waited, Sir Keith read Proust in Pennine’s reception area. The stations were popular enough to offer something for everyone, with Bradford’s schedule including classical music, country music, a nightly Asian magazine programme, and a DJ called Julius K. Scragg who offered a late-night weekend show with ‘dares’ for guests including removing their clothes in his studio.
The stations could afford relatively large newsrooms: Pennine had between eight and ten journalists, and the main news programme of the day at 6 p.m. was an hour long. I produced ‘The Community Show’ twice a week within that, which gave me experience at the age of twenty-one of devis
ing running orders and creating an appealing mix of speech items. I was also allowed to range across the daytime music programmes, booking guests and running campaigns on everything from getting fit to furnishing homes for Vietnamese boat people. It was what I had hoped for: the programme controller, Jeff Winston, gave me autonomy on a professional radio station. I learned a vast amount.
By contrast, the BBC at the time seemed like a somewhat grey and hierarchical place. We derided the output of our competition at BBC Radio Leeds because it was, to us, so yawn-inducingly dull. But I could tell that commercial radio would never offer me the opportunities in speech radio that there were at the BBC, so in the spring of 1980 I started applying for jobs at the corporation. I went for a role at Radio Sheffield and another one at Radio Lincolnshire, which was a new station scheduled to launch later in the year. My job at Pennine had been offered without competition and confirmed in a cheery letter from Jeff, but the BBC had a majestic appointments process that sent papers and projected salary charts and expense guidelines at every stage. After my preliminary interview in Lincolnshire, I was invited to London for a voice test followed by an appointment board, and candidates were offered a choice of subjects on which to speak: (a) Lincolnshire – the forgotten county; (b) Moscow or not – politics or sport?; (c) The problem of Doing-It-Yourself. Ever the sporting politician, I chose to advocate that Britain should take part in the 1980 Olympics. It was probably also a reflection of my youthful instinct that Mrs Thatcher was wrong about almost everything.
I was offered jobs by both stations. I had no hesitation in choosing Lincolnshire because it was about to pioneer radio in a county without any locally based broadcasting, and because Sheffield didn’t seem much of a trade-up from Bradford. So on 14 July 1980, Bastille Day, I set off from my home city in a first class train carriage, since my reporter role qualified for such privilege. I presented myself as a new BBC employee at the Local Radio Training Unit in the Langham building in central London. It was the former grand hotel opposite Broadcasting House, and has since been converted back into a luxury hotel. Then, it was a decaying warren of BBC offices and studios for those not grand enough to inhabit BH itself. I began as a member of a new station training course, lasting five weeks, before we were transferred to our new patch and began preparing for an on-air date in November.