Radio 1's Big Weekend. With kids.

Not "the" kids, who were there in their thousands, worshipping at the Radio 1 altar, but our kids, who don't yet know Radio 1 exists.

My wife Nic works at Radio 1, and therefore qualified for a pair of guest tickets, so we chose Saturday and brought our little ones, aged 4 (Amy) and 1 (Abi).

We aimed to take them last year for the Madonna one in Maidstone, but I was asked to do Nolan for 5 live that weekend, and Nic didn't feel she could take them both on her own. Wise.

We had limited ambition for the day. Get there at 12 noon, leave around 8pm-ish, see a few colleagues and ex-colleagues, and maybe, just maybe, catch a few bands. Hmm.

Getting there was fine. By the time we arrived at 12.45pm (having thoroughly enjoyed Vernon Kay's childish excitement at the possibilities the site webcams provided) the park-and-ride car park was full and we were into the overspill. This entailed a yomp with the buggy, buggy board, rucksack and shoulder-mounted-baby-carrier-cum-backpack (is there a proper name for these?) most of which we had brought out of retirement for the day.

The nice men and lady stewards and the nice men running the park-and-ride buses could not have been nicer, and all the other ticket-holders were suitably indulgent of and possibly amused at our family outing.

As Vernon pointed out (via the various texts he was getting from listeners looking at the webcams) the odd thing about the crowd at this event is that everyone is paired up, because that's how the tickets are given away. So people really do start the event wandering around in couples.

When the park-and-ride bus reached its drop off point there was another half hour walk to the site. We got there, got our wristbands and got in just in time for Daniel Merriweather. I took Amy in to the big tent and watching her taking it all in was moving. I pointed a few things out and she stayed very quiet, overwhelmed by the scale of things.

We left mid-way through Daniel's first song to get into the guest area and say hello to a few people. Abi was off as soon as her feet touched the floor and Amy started to get eggy, but there were plenty of parents and kids around. I had a brief chat with Nihal's wife whose little one is a month older than Abi, and then had to entertain Amy by taking her to the Live Lounge bar in the guest area where JLS were soundchecking.

This was more on a scale she could cope with and she was happy to watch JLS soundcheck Stand By Me (twice) and then perform it for real. I was happy she was happy.

At various stages of the afternoon I had brief chats with the legend that is Dylan White from Anglo plugging, my old boss Shabs, my old boss Rod McKenzie and a multitude of other people from Newsbeat, but it was not a time for sitting down with a flimsy cup of weak lager and catching up.

When we finally got everything together, dumped the buggy and headed out into the main arena for a look round, I was very impressed by the scale of the event and the sheer effort that goes into making sure every base is covered for every sort of listener.

The BBC and Radio 1 branding is omnipresent, but subtle, and the cross-BBC sub-brands (In New Music We Trust, Introducing, Switch, Three etc) were all there doing their thing and doing it very well.

Away from the 4 main stages (main, outdoor, In New Music We Trust, Introducing) there were tents and an open top bus for Switch (signed "No Olds!"), as well as all the usual concessions. There was also a local council arts initiative which had a load of juggling sticks, unicycles and hula hoops for people to pick up and try. Amy loved having a go at plate balancing. Then she went into the Switch area (which I thought was aimed at teenagers, but not just so) where she got to make her own sticker.

It was great to give the girls their first experience of dealing with the sensory assault of a festival. The echoey, loud music, the lights and screen and the mass of people. Abi thought the man dressed as a chicken was great and Amy took delight in the various inflatables she spotted (banana, dolphin etc).

The signing tent was popular, just as much for the DJs as the artists, and you really get a sense of the connection the listeners have with the DJs as much as the bands at this event.

By mid-afternoon Amy was getting listless and when she refused to eat some of her favourite food, we realised something was up. She had a temperature and we decided we were going to have to go home early.

Nic went to say some goodbyes and I stayed out in the main area on our picnic rug looking after Abi whilst Amy went to sleep.

Total "live" music experienced: Half a Daniel Merriweather song One JLS song, three times 2 halves of two Chris Moyles songs, plus Dom and Dave's effort. Zane Lowe doing his thing on the outdoor stage.

Then the fun started. We put Amy in the buggy and Abi on my shoulders to walk out of the venue at around 6pm. Having trekked the half hour back to the bus point (with a surprisingly large number of punters who had clearly decided they wanted to get home for tea), we were told the buses to the park-and-ride were departing from a different point "ten minutes walk" away.

The route of this "ten minute walk" was clearly signposted and stewarded, so we followed it. On the way we had started questioning the stewards who had assured us we were heading in the right direction, but also that there were no buses running to the park and ride at all at the moment because variously "the drivers are having a break", "the buses need refuelling", "we don't know, we just got told to send you this way".

One of them also said when we got to where we were meant to be going there were no direct buses to the park-and-ride. We'd have to get a bus into the town centre and then one out to the park-and-ride.

Senses of humour were beginning to fail at this point. Eventually we arrived at the back of a shopping centre and were directed to a bus stop by some more stewards. But there were no buses. A scheduled town bus turned up and began trying to charge people for tickets. People refused and started "politely explaining" the line they'd been spun whilst hacking their way through Swindon's suburbs for the past 40 minutes.

Driver knew nothing about it, and evidently didn't care. He radioed back to base. Base told him we'd been sent to the wrong spot by the stewards, despite the fact the last of the stewards was in sight of where we were.

The driver told us that he'd been told there were never going to be any buses to the park and ride from where we were, but if we went 5 minutes walk up the road to a specific underpass, they'd all be waiting for us there. No one knew where he was trying to send us and people were not happy. Amy was asleep throughout all this, thank goodness, but Abi had gone from gurgly and happy to weepy and screamy, which wasn't so nice.

Eventually someone from Swindon spoke to the driver and said that indeed the underpass in question was 5 minutes away and he would lead us there. I thought this could well be a wild goose chase, but nothing was going to happen were we were, so we set off in a group of about a hundred. After 10 more minutes of walking, having crossed two dangerous roads and lifted the buggy up a load of steps I was knackered and fuming.

Nic caught sight of a hotel and I noted the phone number on the side of a passing minicab. I called them minicab firm and got them to pick us up at the hotel. The taxi back to our car cost a tenner. We got the kids into their pyjamas in Membury services disabled toilet, bought some Calpol for Amy and listened to Dizzee Rascal's set on Trevor's show on the way home. It sounded brilliant. He also managed to specifically thank Radio 1's Big Weekend, which was impressively on-message, especially given Vernon managed to call it One Big Weekend twice on his show in the morning.

Radio 1 switched the event name from One Big Weekend to Radio 1's Big Weekend a few years back for obvious reasons, but One Big Weekend is such a resonant brand it's been hard to shift it in peoples' minds.

Dizzee's ability to rock a very large tent very very well was confirmed when we got back, put the kids to bed, poured a couple of drinks and settled down in front of the telly to listen to his set again with the added bonus of pictures. Apart from the unexpected endurance training, I enjoyed myself. Nic less so.

She had arranged during the week to see a few of her colleagues and whilst we managed to see one or two, most of them were working in various parts of the site. Co-ordinating a simple meet up with 2 kids in tow was tough. I hadn't arranged to meet anyone, so when I did bump into people it was a Brucey bonus, and spending some time with tha nippas is always time well spent, even though Amy was ill.

Amy was still under the weather today and didn't mention the event at all, but just before bed she was lying on her duvet looking at the plastic Hawaiian flower garland in her dressing up basket.

"Daddy...?" she said. "Yes?" "If we go to the Radio 1 Big Weekend again, next time I think I will take my flower necklace."

Memorable career-related incidents so far

In no particular order:

1) Presenting a paper on media outreach to a conference of rocket scientists at the 2nd Appleton Space Conference at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory alongside (and at the behest of) Alex James from Blur.

2) Being asked to cover for Richard Bacon whilst he was off on honeymoon. Three weeks straight presenting on 5 live - everything I had been working towards for 10 years of my career. Shame it didn't lead to anything more regular.

3) Interviewing Nick Cave at the premiere of The Proposition. You should never meet your heroes, but he was everything I wanted him to be - self-possessed, wary, polite, funny and swaying in a charmingly deranged way.

4) Working as a runner on Ricky Gervais' show on Xfm before The Office was even thought of. Nine months of telling people the man was a comedy genius and then 3 years later, everyone suddenly agreeing.

5) Being paid to watch Radiohead and Morrissey at the V Festival in Chelmsford in 2006. Also blagging tickets to see the Pixies in Chelmsford in 2004. Still probably my favourite ever gig.

6) Being asked if I wanted to start reporting for London Tonight and subsequently, Five News, in the space of 4 months.

7) Being elected Chair of the Student Radio Association and persuading Matthew Bannister to launch the Radio 1 Student Radio Awards.

8) Being invited by The Queen to a "reception for the media and arts" at Windsor Castle in 1999 (presumably because I was Chair of the SRA, but I never found out how or why). I arrived on the train with George Martin and walked up to the castle two yards behind him too tongue-tied to speak.

This theme continued as I found myself in close proximity to Dawn French, Michael Caine, Joanna Lumley, Joan Collins, Shirley Bassey, Wendy Richards and Kenneth Branagh, among others.

Eventually rescued from staring at the wall by Thomas Prag - a radio industry exec who introduced me to other radio execs Trevor Dann and Richard Park. As they were being polite to me, we were interrupted by a nice middle-aged lady who chatted to us for bit about Radio 4 and then disappeared. Turns out it was Princess Alexandra.

As I was leaving I walked through the newly-restored St George's Chapel and turned around for one last look. Booker Prize winner Ben Okri clapped me on the shoulder and said "That's right - take it all in. What a night." before wandering off, chuckling to himself.

8) Being asked if I wanted a job in London by PR and music mogul Shabs Jobanputra. My first real, and best ever boss (except, of course, for my current ones) and an absolute visionary.

9) Hanging around with a Radio 1 microphone "backstage" at a North London venue whilst waiting for a Pete Doherty interview. After watching various people fiddling with small wraps of silver paper, Mr Doherty staggered out of the toilet and I was granted an audience. He told me he was leaving The Libertines for good, which was news to The Libertines. Hard to believe now that this was a big story at the time.

10) Watching Harry Hill and Al Murray's Pub Internationale gig at the Neptune theatre in Liverpool, interviewing them backstage for my student radio station and then taking them to meet their friends at the Casablancas night club, as I was the only person present who knew where it was. I interviewed Al Murray at the This Morning studios several years later and he still remembered how dodgy Casablancas was.

11) Pitching and producing a well-received London Tonight piece by Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre on the MMR vaccine.

12) In the first few days of working at Television Centre in 2001 Paul Weller politely held a door open for me. Never more in my life have I more felt like Wayne and Garth backstage at an Aerosmith gig.

13) Staging a guerilla gig with Mercury-nominated ace violinist Seth Lakeman at Glastonbury. We actually pulled together a decent-sized crowd and it seemed to generally enhance the Glastonbury experience for everyone present. And we got a decent TV news package out of it.

14) Approaching John Barnes at the height of his godlike powers (alright they were slightly on the wane) in a bar in Liverpool and persuading him to promise to drop by our student radio station and do an interview on an anti-racism campaign he was fronting. 2 days later, bless him, he turned up.

15) Watching a band called Coldplay perform second on the bill to 200 people above a pub in Oxford. To be fair the secret was already out by that stage, but it still felt like we were witnessing the start of something big.

16) Writing a sitcom called "Touched" with Bex Palmer. It took weeks. Feedback from BBC broadly supportive, changes suggested, none made. Sitcom now in attic.

Civilians and Muggles

It was apparently Liz Hurley who let the cat out of the bag when she revealed the contempt celebrities have for "ordinary" people by calling them "civilians". I couldn't find the direct quote on google, which suggests it might be like the apocryphal Peter Mandelson "avocado mousse" line. Nonetheless, she's never denied it.

The term is in current usage. Matt Damon dropped it into an MSNBC interview, and the veteran DJ and remixer Arthur Baker used it when I interviewed him at Creamfields in 2004 when talking about a hotel for DJs and performers he was hoping to open in Brixton that "wouldn't be for civilians".

There is now a better one doing the rounds on the panto/musical theatre/holiday park entertainment troupe circuit. The new term for civilian is Muggle.

Lifted, of course, straight from Harry Potter, it describes someone who isn't touched by the magic of showbiz, an ordinary person, a Muggle.

I found this out yesterday, in conversation with a comedian friend.

Me: "Are you still seeing that girl you really liked, the legal secretary?"
Him: "No, she dumped me."
Me: "You're kidding."
Him: "I know, dumped by a f****** Muggle."

That's what they call us, you, the paying public. I asked where he heard the term "Muggle" first.

Him: "The Aussie actress I did panto with. She'd finished with her boyfriend, so I asked her who she had her eye on next. She said 'No one, really. I might just go and f*** some random Muggle.'"

Magic.

.

Ben Goldacre on ITV1's London Tonight

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfheO9H8CD4

Broadcast on 9 Mar 2009 Written and presented by Dr Ben Goldacre Produced by Nick Wallis

Nick Wallis's blog on The Making Of this piece here. Comments welcome.

Bad Science the Movie on London Tonight

That was exhausting. I blogged about the back story to this here. Having done so I realised it might make a good piece for London Tonight.

After all, the broadcast was made on a London radio station and immunisation rates for the MMR vaccine in London have fallen from around 90% to around 50% in a few short years. It's therefore a public health issue, especially relevant to Londoners.

The day after I wrote the blog piece I pitched it to Stuart Thomas, the editor at London Tonight. This would be an authored television package, which in broadcast news-speak means an opinion piece presented by a non-reporter. Stuart liked the idea and commissioned it.

I emailed Ben Goldacre (seen here working hard in ITV's media lounge at Gray's Inn Road) and got a positive response. After a long chat on the phone we agreed a filming date (not easy when dealing with a full-time NHS doctor who has a very healthy journalism career already) and set about finding the elements.

The main people to try and get involved were Jeni Barnett and/or her employers LBC (the radio station who effectively sparked the story when they got their lawyers onto Ben) and Norman Lamb, the MP who felt the issue was important enough to put down an early day motion in the house of commons.

I got the planning desk to call Norman Lamb's office and was delighted to find he was available on the day we were filming. I also emailed Jonathan Richards, the big cheese at LBC to see if Jeni were available to be interviewed by Ben, or failing that, if Jonathan would speak to Ben.

Jonathan was courteous, but was not prepared to put anyone up for interview. I can see why he didn't (I think they just want this story to go away now), but it would have made fascinating viewing if he had.

Incidentally both Ben himself and Jeni's agent Robert told me that Jonathan had invited Ben onto Jeni's programme to discuss MMR, but Ben has so far refused. Again I think I can see why.

The context of any debate (ie the medium, the media) is just as important to the protagonists as the content. The internet has democratised the delivery of a point of view to the extent that a successful blogger can build a significant powerbase that allows them to get their message across without having to jump at every airtime opportunity that comes their way.

If you believe the media is biased then why wouldn't you do everything you can to control the medium through which you attempt to get your message? I  believe the personal is political, and therefore every action and utterance anyone ever makes has an inherent bias - the best we can do is to monitor and if necessary redress how people in the supposedly neutral media manifest their biases, especially the unconscious ones. It's an impossible task, as it's human behaviour. But that's yer paradox.

Jonathan said he would provide us with a statement via the LBC press office, which I was grateful for. Like all my dealings with LBC on this story the press officer I spoke to was as friendly and helpful as I could expect him to be.

Having worked out what we were and weren't going to get from the filming I set about drafting a script. After doing so I got involved in a near-stand up row with another reporter in the newsroom who revealed her dislike of Ben ("too superficial" I think she claimed, before I directed her to his blog, which she hadn't read) and trotted out similar lines to many of the things Jeni said in her broadcast, adding words to the effect that:

a) double-blind scientific testing cannot be trusted
b) every child is different and no one can prove that the MMR jab hasn't given children autism
c) how can a perfectly healthy child have the jab, suddenly regress horribly into autism and the two events not be related?

I was gobsmacked. Anyway the script went to Ben three days before filming. When I hadn't got anything back 48 hours later I was starting to get jumpy. Thankfully, on the night before we were due to meet, Ben sent back his thoughts.

Working off my original template his script was a) better than mine and b) editorially in the same ballpark, which was a considerable relief.

He also didn't lay down any pre-conditions for script-lines or filming, which was a godsend as it meant we could at least attempt to work together.

 Filming was exhausting. We started at 12.45pm on Thursday outside the Millbank media centre and finished some time past 7pm, working right through. Norman Lamb met us first and Ben arrived soon after in a taxi. We got the interview filmed with Norman and then went into some set up shots before saying goodbye. It was the first time Ben and Norman had met and there was some polite mutual respect going on.

I stayed in the background, checking Gemma had her shots whilst Ben and Norman chatted. Then we had to film the multiple pieces to camera (PTCs) that made up the bulk of the rest of the piece. For these we stuck closely to the script, filming in Soho and Leicester Square before making our way back to Gray's Inn Road to film the interior sequences.

Ben is a natural with a very expressive face and an ability to do most of his pieces to camera first time of asking. Not that they were in the can first time of asking as there was always something to discuss, re-do and improve, whether it was a technical change, script suggestion or an interruption beyond our control like background noise.

Whilst also trying to get the piece done I was trying to arrange filming for the following day on a completely different story in Hackney and trying to get the lawyer to tell me if anything about the latest version of the script needed radical surgery, as we only had Ben and his voice for the rest of the afternoon.

Thankfully the lawyer was happy and I could let Ben go knowing we were basically covered. Ben recorded some track and a bong (only after being reminded to do so by a colleague as we were just about to say goodbye) and we went our separate ways. To cut a long story short the piece got to air the following Monday, but not before a lot more lawyering, more communication between myself and LBC, myself and Jeni's agent and a final referral to a different ITN lawyer who insisisted on removing what I thought was a completely innocuous section regarding, er, radioactive paedophiles.

I knew this would upset Ben as he had been looking forward to saying radioactive paedophiles on television. I texted him to warn him and received the message:

"This is a massive fail." I know Ben, I know...

I got lots of props in the debrief for the story, and for my other piece (the one I was trying to organise) which led the programme, although by that stage I was too completely knackered and confused by working on two stories at once (especially as we neared TX) to point out that both pieces only got there because of a long list of people who helped out massively. Stuart, Faye, Becky, Tracey, Toby, Hannah, Nicolette, Gemma, Bill, Sophia, Nigel, Ken, Tobias, John, Glenn and of course the good doctor himself: thank you. I'll post the link to the relevant video as soon as I know where it is.

Bad Science and LBC

Ben Goldacre (@bengoldacre) is someone I first became aware of through his excellent Guardian column, which I used to read when I picked up a copy of the newspaper.

Ben's central belief (explained here more fully) is that newsrooms are effectively run by clueless humanities graduates who wouldn't know how to question the scientific veracity of the nutritional claims on the side of a cereal packet.

Ben decided to take a stand when he realised that uninformed media reporting was actively damaging public debate over important scientific issues.

This had three main effects:

1) The degrading of the reputation of scientists and the practice of science (and it is thanks to science your car works, your cancer is cured and you are reading this blog post. It's not because of religion, or crystals).

2) The growth industry of quacks, alternative healers and pseudo-scientists who spout stuff that sounds right, provide a few of their own case studies and suddenly find themselves on television making fortunes from credulous members of the public.

3) The real danger to individual lives a growing ignorance of science can foster, particularly when making decisions about things like medical care and immunisation.

Unfortunately, whilst science in its purest form can do incredible things, lead to astounding discoveries and regularly changes our lives for the better, it has too often been used as a business tool by those who only wish to see scientific progress if it grows markets and makes profits. When this works together for the benefit of humanity it is a truly wondrous thing.

When it is misappropriated to grow market share, it sucks (read this blog entry on pharmaceutical happy drugs (SSRIs) by a traumatised user). But the swing against the received wisdom of science in recent decades has been horrendous.

All sorts of extraordinary hippy shit has not only been given credence by its media exposure, but it started gaining a toe-hold amongst politicians and academics who gave it the credibility it craves. This week's Private Eye quotes course notes from a University of Westminster undergraduate module on vibrational medicine which reveals students are taught the following "[amethyst] emits high yin energy so transmuting lower energies and clearing and aligning energy disturbances at all levels of being".

The article is reprinted on the excellent Improbable Science website which is a prime example of scientists belatedly, and at last successfully, taking the fight to the quacks.

So Ben Goldacre decided to draw a line in the sand. Adopting the cunning guise of the very humanities graduates he aims to expose (despite being a practising NHS doctor and one time visiting researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Milan), Ben comes across like an affable, articulate and determinedly bemused debunker of pseudo-science.

He writes well, he speaks engagingly and he has, I think, been at the forefront of the recent willingness in the media to think a lot harder about repeating claims that don't have any peer-reviewed scientific evidence to back them up.

Knowing this makes it easier to understand Ben's reaction to a recent broadcast by Jeni Barnett on the London commercial talk radio station LBC.

I first found out about it in the popbitch weekly email, and I have pasted the relevant section from that weekly email below:

 *****************************************
LBC bloke throws toys out of pram

Guardian Bad Science columnist, Dr Ben Goldacre, recently blogged about an LBC show by Jeni Barnett. Unimpressed by what she was saying about MMR, Goldacre posted up the audio of the show so that his readers could judge it for themselves. LBC got the legal heavies on to him about it. The result? A small story became a huge to-do on the web, newspapers picked up on it and hundreds of blogs around the world took up the story, transcribed Barnett's interview, played the audio etc. One of the station's top execs then rang Goldacre to vent, telling him: "You were on my list of people to contact. I was thinking of giving you your own show... but you've RUINED THAT NOW." Needless to say, we're sure Dr Ben must be heart-broken.

***********************************************

To read Ben's perspective on LBC's legal action take a look at this. To read Ben's version of the above exchange click here and go to the bottom of the entry, but in reality it's an unimportant sideshow, so please don't do it until you've read the whole story.

In short, Ben has played a blinder. He is very much the little guy, the gifted amateur with little other than a) a solid reputation b) a total understanding of the facts c) lots of very bright, very tech-savvy, very influential and opinionated followers.

As things stand this is far from over. Dr Ben's latest entry suggests things might escalate. Questions are being asked in The House, you know.

.

Mucking about in the snow again

Long day. Actually too tedious to get into, other than the fact we got to get in the back of a cop car with the blues and twos flashing. Top speeds in the slush. In Welwyn Garden City. Now that's glamour.

  I had to get out of the car at one stage so Gemma the Top Camera Lady could get some shots from the back seat, so they dropped me off at a Porsche dealership.

I got out of the squad car in the car park in front of this two story glass and steel structure. The police car had blacked out windows so the staff inside couldn't see Gemma or the cops. So all they saw was a police car with sirens blaring coming to a halt in their car park and a man wearing a black longcoat get out of the back seat and come striding towards them.

"I need two of your fastest 911s," I said to the salesman. "It's a matter of national security."

I didn't really, but I felt like I ought to say something, so I explained what was going on.

"Oh," said the salesman, looking disappointed, "I thought you were a customer."

They offered me a coffee. I got the full Porsche dealership experience (Sky News, every single daily paper, a leather banquette and a flirtatious receptionist) without having to shell out for a Porsche.

£30,000 for a new entry level Boxter, if you're interested.

Anyway we got the job done and met up with veteran reporter (hee hee) Marcus Powell and the sat truck in the car park of the Red Lion, Ayot Green.

Marcus n' me

Marcus and his crew filed his report first and went to the pub, whilst I slaved over my script in the truck.

Afterwards I rewarded myself with a pint of ginger beer shandy. Then we had a snowball fight and went home.