On the Mic - Surrey Life - June 2013

My last Surrey Life column for a while. Full archive below...

Everybody loves music. If you told someone you didn’t, they would think you were odd. The problem is with radio it attracts people who love music a bit too much.

I was brought up in the days when records were a scant resource. Pocket money would just about stretch to one single a week, and if you didn’t own it, you had to work hard to find it. 

For me, this meant switching on the radio and waiting forever to hear a favourite song, or kneeling next to the single speaker at the front of our tiny telly, recording Top of the Pops on the internal microphone of the mono cassette recorder I was given for my 8th birthday. 

The quality was bad enough at the best of times, but the audience whooping and clapping during Don't You Want Me by the Human League on the 1981 TotP Christmas Special rendered my recording completely unlistenable. Not that it still rankles or anything.

Youthful obsessions with Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran and The Cure gave way to a wider appreciation of pop made in the pre-punk era. 

By the mid-nineties I was working at my university’s student radio station. Britpop was in its heyday, promotional budgets were huge and student radio programmers gathered substantial crumbs. Once I would spend cumulative hours in record shops agonising over which album I would buy each month. Now I was being sent every record by every new band and getting into any gig I wanted for free.

When I sauntered through the doors of my first professional radio station, I thought I knew pretty much everything there was to know about music, and I thought it wouldn’t be long before I got the chance to share my enthusiasm with the station’s listeners.

It’s a perfectly natural impulse. People who work in radio want to play their favourite records on the radio. Listeners expect and understand this because, given the chance, they would do exactly the same. It’s the perennial appeal of Desert Island Discs.

Unfortunately (and this has been a slow learning curve for me), just because I have the privilege of working in radio, I don’t have the right to commandeer precious airtime to inflict my tedious musical enthusiasms on people. With good reason. 

Very few presenters choose any, let alone all of the songs they play, save a knowledgeable few with excellent taste and, often, very small audiences.

The music policy at BBC Surrey is based on selecting the very best and/or most popular songs in existence, sprinkled with a fair bit of new stuff. But you’ll hear as much Bowie, Beatles and Beach Boys as you will Adele, Paloma Faith and Stooshe. 

Whilst it’s extremely unlikely we’ll play anything to scare the horses (unless you are tuned to master horse-scarer Phil Jackson and his new music show on Saturday nights) that doesn’t mean bland, benign rubbish. 

Obviously I’d love to hear more Adam and the Ants. But would you?

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May 2013 - on supermarkets

April 2013 - on The Invasion of the Coffee Shops

March 2013 - There was NO column in March 2013...

February 2013 - on turning 40

January 2013 - why January should be about headaches, mild depression and whisky

December 2012 - on doing more stand up comedy

November 2012 - on stopping doing weekday breakfast

October 2012 - on trying to engage brain and mouth on air

September 2012 - on my BBC microphone

August 2012 - on the Olympics

July 2012 - on being on holiday with three small children

June 2012 - on joining a gym

May 2012 - on making live radio

April 2012 - on being ill

On being asked to write a column for Surrey Life magazine

Leicester, a tale of modern times...

I met a man today in a jeweller's shop in Leicester. His father had been banished from Uganda by Idi Amin in the early seventies.

He told me his family settled in Leicester because Leicester City Council placed an advert in their national paper in Uganda telling Indians they were not welcome in Leicester, and that there was nothing for them there.

The jeweller told me that was why so many Indians expelled from Uganda decided to settle in Leicester. The city must have something worth hiding if the council were so keen to take out an advert in a foreign newspaper actively discouraging them.

"Is that true?" I asked, incredulously.

"Yes!" he laughed.

The jeweller's father, who gave his son his trade, arrived in Britain in 1972 with nothing but £50 in his pocket. He asked his wife to give him all the jewellery she owned so he could start a business. 

By the time he retired he had three jewellery shops on Leicester's so-called Golden Mile. The senior jeweller gave two of the shops to his brothers and the remaining shop to his son. The shop I was in had £600,000 worth of stock on display. They melt down gold in the tatty back office. The senior jeweller is still alive, as is his wife. She drives a Bentley. 

The jeweller's son told me how the trade has changed in recent years. When Leicester had a hosiery industry, the Indian factory girls would come in at the end of the week and buy tiny amounts of gold to wear (and as an investment) for £20 or £30 pounds a time. The owners of corner shops, usually frugal people, would occasionally give their daughters £2000 in the run up to Diwali and tell them to buy some jewellery for themselves.

The hosiery factories are long since closed, and the supermarkets have taken over the corner shops, sucking money out of the community.

The jeweller still sells, but is also often buying scrap gold, melting it down and trading it by the gramme. Since the recession began, the rising gold price has outstripped the stock market and the housing market to become more valuable than ever.

As a result most jewellers on the Golden Mile operate in shops protected by airlock doors, security cameras, smoke cannisters, bullet-proof glass, guard dogs and panic buttons. 

A couple of years ago gangs of masked robbers would regularly travel up (mainly from Birmingham) to attack the shops on the Golden Mile, charging in with axes and sledgehammers to break the glass cabinets.

"People are desperate" said the jeweller.

There haven't been any armed robberies so far this year. The police now regularly patrol the Golden Mile, the shop owners meet regularly to discuss security and the expensive new defences put in place appear to be holding.

"The police and council are taking an interest in our situation because we're the only businesses left round here paying any tax!" he jokes

He is a smartly-dressed man, and, as you might expect, wears a fair bit of gold on his fingers. 

When we part, he turns to deal with something in his shop, and I see how frayed the back of his suit is.

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Internet privacy and the government

There is no such thing as a private email. There never was. I don't understand how people see it any other way.

It's the same as writing a letter. Letters were always the formal expression of our thoughts, and because, when I was growing up, they repeatedly appeared in newspapers, books, court evidence and history I saw them as matters of public record.

You put your innermost feelings (or controversial opinions) down on paper and handed it over to someone else. You have just given it to the world.

Email speeded up the process. To me "send" has always meant "publish".

That's not to say there aren't many hundreds of emails I've sent that I would rather were only read by the initial recipient, but always at the back of my mind has been the knowledge that what I have written takes seconds to forward, or even upload.

It's the same with phone calls. Phone tapping has been around longer than I've been alive. Why do you think your conversation is secure? If it's that interesting, it might not be.

The real debate should be how we, as a society, deal with it, not whether it should be happening. The genie is out of the bottle. We are entering an age where privacy, as we know it, is dead. The rise of CCTV and social media takes this way beyond electronic communications.

You should assume that everything you are doing outside your own house is being watched and stored, as are the people you call up, and the websites you browse. You'd be stupid not to.

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Frank Skinner is very good

There must be a reason for putting your best presenters on the radio on a Saturday mid-morning. There's certainly a tradition of it in the UK. Jonathan Ross on Radio 2, Adam and Joe on BBC 6 Music, Danny Baker on 5live, and for the last 4 years, Frank Skinner on Absolute Radio.

I find it hard to listen to Frank live on Saturday mornings - I like to listen to BBC Surrey's Danny Pike on my way home from being his warm-up man, so I podcast Messrs Baker and Skinner to listen to in the gym.

I don't know why Frank doesn't get more industry attention for what he is doing with his show at the moment. It is the funniest thing on the radio by a long, long way. His love of wordplay, cultural awareness, quicksilver wit, encyclopaedic memory and deadpan erudition are perfectly suited to the medium. And despite making it sound completely off the cuff (which I suspect a good 80% of it is), you can tell he's often thought about where he wants to take something.

His sidekicks are posh Emily and Northern Alun. In this clip Emily helps build up the anecdote perfectly. (If you can't see the soundcloud widget below, this link will take you to it)




Note: the above audio obviously belongs to Absolute Radio and will be removed at their request.

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General Sir David Richards, Chief of Defence staff, message to all UK troops after Woolwich murder

The following message was posted to twitter by Steven Nightingale, a British Army Sergeant, earlier today. It is an internal message to all British Armed Forces personnel, sent by General Sir David Richards, Chief of Defence staff.

The reason I am posting it here is because the message was posted as a non-searchable screen-grab, and although I have searched for the statement in a more friendly format online I have yet to come across it.

I am indebted to the BBC's Alex Barnett and the Sunday Times' Toby Harnden for providing the tweet bridge to Sgt Nightingale's timeline.

Here it is as transcribed from the screen grabs attached to Sgt Nightingale's three tweets:

"The appalling murder of one of our number has left us all deeply saddened. For my own part, the death of any Service man or woman is a tragedy. It is for all of us the loss of a friend and comrade. But for the family, the loss is much greater, so it is of them I am primarily thinking today.

20 years ago British forces faced danger to defend the Muslims of Bosnia after the tragic massacres in Srebrenica. Today their successors are risking their lives to bring peace to the people of Afghanistan.

British soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen fight not for or self-interest but to protect people of every creed from those who would harm them. Many have been Muslims. That is why we are able to recruit so many good people into the forces and civilians who support them. Today’s Armed Forces is made up of men and women from every religion and culture of the UK. The ties that bind us are stronger than ever and I’m hugely proud of all those serving.

Your duty, courage and self-sacrifice stands in marked contrast to the murderous exhibitionism of crazed men representing no-one. Remain where we are, held in high esteem by the people we serve and do not get drawn into the politics of this incident.

Whilst taking sensible security precautions hold your head high and trust in the government, police and agencies to do the right thing by us, as I know they will."

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