The Sonys 2010

Further to my last post, I think the above photo goes some way towards showing why I love doing the webcast reporter job at the Sonys. Yes that is Sir David Attenborough and me in the "winners interview area", which is basically a small area of branding next to the Grosvenor kitchens.

I have no recollection of the moment, I've listened back to the interview and can't identify it from the audio, but there it is, a photo which looks to all the world as if me and Sir David are sharing some sort of hilarious joke. He is, as you won't be surprised to hear, a very nice man.

The night itself was damnably hard work. It's usually tolerably hard work, but the new set up meant concentrating even more than usual. If you want to hear the interviews Marsha Shandur and I recorded on the night, have a gander at the Sony Radio Academy website.

Highlights include a long interview with Jarvis Cocker about 6Music. I haven't interviewed him since approaching him in a cafe at the Queen Elizabeth Hall a few hours before the John Peel tribute gig in 2005. He was lovely then. He was equally patient and gracious on Monday night.

It was also great to collar Moz Dee, the man who gave me a break when he was commissioning editor at 5live and who is currently steering TalkSPORT to new heights.

I interviewed a few other gold winners, a few celebs and a few people who we thought would have something interesting to say about their nomination or about the industry as a whole. I was chagrinned (is that even a word?) to miss Nihal, because he is a lovely bloke, a very talented broadcaster and now a Sony Gold award winner (getting admiring props from Victoria Derbyshire on 5live the following day for his wonderful acceptance speech).

Nihal and I were also once colleagues at the legendary Media Village offices in the late nineties before either of us had got anywhere near the BBC, and I haven't really had a proper chat to him since, other than to occasionally swap texts as his career has continued its meteoric rise. Nihal is one of the good guys and I am chuffed for him.

The most annoying aspect of the night was seeing loads and loads of friends and ex-colleagues and being unable to do anything other than give them a quick hug/kiss, garble something about doing an interview with Frank Skinner or whoever and then run off, promising to trying and find them afterwards.

Usually there is the prospect of relaxing with a few drinks afterwards and catching up with people then, but as I had to be up at 4am to gear up to the show I got a cab back to Walton as soon as I had finished. I arrived home at 12.46am.

Just as I was walking out with my coat, I saw my best man, my former agent, and one of my radio gurus standing near the bar engaged in what looked like the mother of all gossip sessions. I solemnly shook their hands and made my way outside. Next time..!

One final word about another interviewee - Trevor Nelson was given Sony Broadcaster of the Year.  It is the main award of the evening. Before being asked to the stage the winner has to endure the screening of a film which takes the audience through every significant moment of their career, complete with dodgy publicity shots and fawning quotes from their peers.

Trevor apparently had no idea he was going to get the award, and after watching his entire working life pass before him, he gave a very moving speech, right off the cuff. He described his early radio days, which involved allowing the then pirate station Kiss FM to move into and broadcast from his flat. This, unsurprisingly, led to his then girlfriend moving out. He paid tribute to the significant people in his life before revealing that whilst he was getting ready for the Sonys his mum told him she had just been given the all-clear from cancer.

In between fielding multiple congratulations Trevor gave me an interview in which he revealed his love for The Goon Show and (like Jarivs Cocker earlier) paid tribute to his inspiration (and I suspect, still the inspiration for many music broadcasters in the room) John Peel.

Thanks to Alfi Media for their great production job on the webcast (and taking both the above photos), Marsha and Sam for being there, and profound thanks to Zafer, the event producers.

.

The Sony Radio Academy Awards 2010

I'm working at the Sonys again on Monday 10 May. For the last 4 years I've helped with the live webcast, variously presented by Emma B, Kevin Greening, Margherita Taylor and Richard Allinson. This is what I wrote after last year's event.

In the past, the presenters would do the set piece interviews before the awards were being handed out, and during the dinner breaks. They would also commentate, Eurovision-style, on the proceedings as they happened.

My job was to go and report from the floor, interviewing various Gold winners and the telly celebrities who often show up.

In previous years the all-round radio/podcasting/talent-wrangling/tune-spotting genius that is Marsha Shandur from Xfm has looked after the interactivity - reading out emails and texts into the webcast.

Radio 1's equally gifted Sam Bailey has also been there for as long as I have, working on updating the awards website as the gongs are handed out, and making sure none of the computers on site fall over.

Given the amount of equipment which spends an evening whirring away in one of the Grovesnor House Great Room antechambers, Sam often has quite a task on his hands.

This year the organisers are taking a different approach. Reflecting the phenomenal rise of twitter and the way we now use it to participate in events, our focus will be on the interactive element of the webcast. Sam will be taking over the twitter feed and working the emails and texts. I will still be reporting from the floor, primarily to take photographs and record interviews which will stay up on the awards website.

As it is pretty simple to take the interviews live on the webcast feed (which is up for people to listen to and watch the awards themselves), my interviews will go out live.

This year Marsha will also be live reporting from the floor. Between the three of us we will keep tabs on everything that is happening at the Sonys and become the eyes and ears of the webcast audience participating online. 

I've always had the best of both worlds with the Sonys. It's a wonderful opportunity to see many many old friends and colleauges who are making their way in the industry. My working brief has also given me the opportunity to buttonhole the most interesting people in the room and ask them annoying questions which they have always, very generously, made time to answer.

My favourite interviewee ever was Mark Radcliffe, but for a surreal vignette I will never forget being backstage in 2007 trying to interview Paul Gambaccini about his Sony Gold whilst a (presumably) very drunk Carla Bruni (then a completely unknown singer/songwriter with an album to flog, now wife of the President of France) draped herself all over a flummoxed Gambo, alternately sticking her tongue in his ear and proclaiming to everyone in the duskiest of voices how "bay-ooti-fool" his voice was.

The vibe she gave off was pure and simple attention-seeking ambition (albeit devastatingly sexy attention-seeking ambition) and even at the time I remember thinking "He's not playing hard to get, love, he's er... genuinely not interested."

Ten years before that, my first ever proper boss, Shabs (then MD of a small music PR firm, now UK President of Virgin Records - see the second number 8) in this blog post), took me to the Sonys when I was a starry-eyed rube straight out of student radio. He knew how much it would mean to me just to be in the same room as people I'd been listening to for years.

I want to continue working at the Sonys for as long as they want to have me, but now I have a radio show of my own, nothing would give me greater pleasure than being there on merit, as a nominee. That's the hard part.

.

Woking - home of McLaren F1 and the new MP4-12C

This is the new, environmentally-friendly McLaren MP4-12C.

Actually it's a gas-guzzling beast, but according to the marketing blurb "With the 12C’s power output of around 600hp and its low CO2 emissions, it delivers the highest horsepower to CO2 ratio of any car on the market today with an internal combustion engine…and that includes petrol and diesel hybrids.”

So your conscience is clear.

The car will be built in a new £40m factory in Woking (where the McLaren F1 team are based), creating 300 jobs.

Quite how the construction of the 12C sits with recent comments made by Woking Borough Council about how we should all be doing everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint makes for the subject of an interesting email from Mark in Woking. It's the longest email I've ever read out on air, but I thought it was worth sharing.

"Hello Nick,

A recent edition of the "Woking Magazine", contained the obligatory environmental feature mentioning Woking Borough Council's Climate Change Strategy, stating: "this is not something to be ignored, we all have to take action now".
We now have the MP4-12C, McLaren's new road car, to be built in Woking.

I must congratulate McLaren on the environmental "spin" in their press release: "lowest CO2 emissions per horse power of any car". Definitely worth shouting about if the car is 60bhp, but surely not if it is 600bhp!
The facts are it is a two seater, 3.8 litre twin turbo, that does 0-60mph in 3.5 seconds, with a top speed of over 200mph, and will cost £150,000. It does not sound like a vehicle that will "save the planet".

Ron Dennis (McLaren Automotive Chairman) describes the car as a "long held dream". Surely for WBC it should be a climate change "nightmare".

I have nothing against McLaren as a company, indeed I know them to be an excellent employer. But I wonder if any representatives of WBC will be at the McLaren party when the production line starts in 2011.

WBC recently granted planning permission for the new factory. It will be discreetly hidden behind trees and a grassy mound. (Out of sight, out of mind?). You would presume WBC would want McLaren's employees to cycle to work, or use public transport. Wrong. There is also a 400 space car park included in the plans.

So why did WBC grant planning permission? Probably because this new facility will provide 300 new jobs. Is it an uncomfortable truth that the economy always has priority over the environment, even in Woking?
Perhaps I have got it all wrong, and this is a wonderful "carbon neutral" project. I would be very interested to hear a public statement from Ray Morgan (WBC CEO) as to whether our green council endorse the production of a 600bhp road car.
Instead of "By Faith and Diligence", perhaps the Woking Borough motto should be: "Don't do as I do, do as I tell you", or "One rule for the rich, one rule for the rest".

So come on everyone, change your light bulbs, get on your bike, and order your photovoltaic solar panels. Remember, as The Woking Magazine says: Climate Change "is not something to be ignored, we all have to take action now".

Well, perhaps not all of us it seems."

As I write I am earwigging a conversation with my producer who is on the phone to Woking Borough Council trying to persuade them to come on and address the points Mark raises in his email. We'll see what happens.

A day in the life

I have two alarms. One alarm goes off at 4am. The other alarm goes off at 4.01am. Getting up isn't the problem - it's going to sleep at an early enough time. Presuming eight hours is a good idea, I usually get six.

At 4.01am I pull on my Slobbing Around At Home Clothes and head downstairs with my ipod in my hand. Over breakfast I check my twitter feeds, which will usually alert me to any big local or national story and an interesting number of small ones. I can also check my emails and facebook messages so that by the time I go back upstairs to have a shower and get dressed I'm already thinking about what I can put into the show.

I make sure I'm in the car by 4.55am as that allows me to get a bit of the LBC paper review before switching over to BBC Surrey at 5am to a) check the early breakfast show presenter is there and b) hear what he has to say in the 5am news.

As soon as he finishes the news and weather, I switch over to Morning Reports on BBC 5 live and keep it there until I arrive at BBC Surrey in Guildford at around 5.15am.

It takes 15 minutes to make a cuppa, log on and generally adjust to being at work, but by 5.30am I am having an initial conversation with my producer about the big topics on the show.

Between 5.30am and 6am my producer is cutting, writing and editing. I am usually going through listener correspondence - deciding what I will read out on air, and how much any listener correspondence will shape the editorial direction of the show.

By 6am I am looking through the scripts we've been left from the night before, getting my head round the stories.

I know at breakfast people are dipping in for a short period of time, but if I start with a few things and a few ideas about where they might go, it helps. You need to have a few (hopefully witty, pithy and illuminating) lines ready in your head before you go on air. Scripting doesn't work - it has to sound right.

Also around 6am the papers and the newsreader arrives. We have an hour to get the programme ready and we do so by beavering away feverishly at our terminals, watching the telly and reading the papers, but also by talking - what is the big story? how do we present it? what ideas and audio will lift the programme and make it genuinely engaging?

So the hardest creative thinking work is done at the most difficult time of day - between 5.30am and going on air at 7am.

Starting the programme isn't easy - we hot desk, which means the early breakfast show presenter Ben Kerrigan finishes saying what he's saying and leaps out of his seat, giving me the duration of a song to watch his computer log off, log back in as me, re-arrange the keyboard layout to the way I need it, log out of his running order and log mine in, all the while trying to come up with hilarious, witty weather/travel/news/music-based banter which will ease the transition into my show and keep in my head the top stories and a reasonably sharp preamble.

Thankfully Ben is a past master, both technically and professionally, so we get through what is quite a sticky junction without too much awkwardness.

The next three hours (7am - 10am) are about being across my brief, and concentration.

During the programme, I interview at least ten people, talk my way around various recorded features, promote the schedule, host a quiz and try to steer the listener through the news, weather, travel and sport, without too much in the way of hesitation or repetition. Deviation is fine, though.

At 10am I switch the transmitter and saunter/stagger back into the newsroom. Usually I am assigned to report on a story happening somewhere in Surrey or North East Hampshire for the following day's programme. I wolf down a sandwich and head out in the car. After recording what I need to record, I go straight home, and try to get an hour's sleep before waking to pick my daughter up from school at 3pm. I then have 4 hours of childcare before my wife returns home.

This does not leave much time to make calls or process emails, let along grub up stories. Like anyone at work, I get around 50 - 100 emails a day and I prioritise those from listeners, and then those directly addressed to me. The rest don't really get read, let alone actioned.

Between 6-6.30pm I'll get a call from the day producer, to talk me through the next day's show. This is vital - chewing everying over with the person who has set the stories up, asking the questions you'd ask on air and making sure they're happy you know what you're going to talk about, and you're happy you've got a proper story to get your teeth into.

My wife Nic returns home around 7.15pm and helps put the kids to bed. Once they go down, usually around 8pm, we eat some dinner, tidy up, and have a brief chat before we start preparing for the next day.

Each second after 9pm I am awake has a significant impact on my ability to perform the next day. I usually get to sleep around 10pm.

It's a tough gig, but there's nothing I'd rather be doing right now. And, of course, the weekends provide a respite. It's how I find the time to do things like put together this.

.

Nick Wallis contact information

You can reach me via twitter or facebook. If you want to discuss work, please call Chris North at North Media Talent on 07989 396 901 or email chris@northmediatalent.com

Here are some testimonials.

Here's all the information you need about my BBC Surrey show, which you can listen to on the BBC iPlayer.

My full biography can be found here.

.

F*** you, Cowell

Far greater minds will hold forth much more effectively on the same subject, but that's never stopped me piping up before, so here goes...

When did you first hear about the attempt to make Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" Christmas Number 1?

I remember smiling at the thought.

As if. As if a poxy internet campaign to get a relatively obscure, ancient and sweary song to the top of the charts would beat the X Factor juggernaut.

Well, good luck to them, I shrugged, and thought no more about it. The next thing that caught my attention was a pompous little blog post by one of my broadcasting heroes Andrew Collins.

Missing the point quite spectactularly, he notes the RATM song is old, and downloading it, far from harming Simon Cowell, enriches the company he works for.

Finally, he objects to being told how he should protest about things, concluding "Fuck you, I won't buy what you tell me."

So what if the song is old? So what if RATM aren't exactly armed insurrectionists? So what if a music journalist sniffily chooses to affect a lofty disdain for what used to be the biggest pop event of the year?

I'm an indie stone-kicking snob at the best of times, and much as I can't stand the unremitting silage that Simon Cowell has inflicted on the charts, I'm no fan of RATM.

But NONE of that matters. What matters is that someone thought to themselves: "Wouldn't it be great if there were a way of breaking the smug X Factor hegemony? Wouldn't it be great if a really sweary, shouty song was number one at Christmas instead of all those horrendous MOR power ballads? What's a really good sweary, shouty song? Hmmm.... I know, I'll set up a Facebook page dedicated to getting Killing in the Name to number one."

And that was it. The whole process probably took less than 5 minutes. And, thanks to the power of social networking, the idea took off.

With nothing in the way of resources, against the phenomenal might of ITV and X Factor, Killing in the Name got to number 1.

Watching the campaign gather momentum over the space of a few days was interesting. Shortly after various types I follow on twitter had 1) dismissed it 2) stopped talking about it, I noticed a number of people outside the self-regarding snidey London media circle were enthusiastically promulgating the campaign with a view to doing one thing, and one thing only - giving Simon Cowell a bloody nose.

The game was on. And as it played out, the RATM campaign developed something Joe and the X Factor machine simply did not have - a narrative. Oh the irony.

X Factor's brilliance lies in the brutal emotional excavation of its participants. The show relentlessly drills into the humanity of each hopeful contestant and reduces them to excoriated, blubbering husks.

All in order to satiate our cravings for mawkish (and preferably visibly raw) trauma. And yet, when the challenge came, X Factor's ability to manipulate a story was found wanting.

Joe's a nice bloke, singing a terribly average song. He won the X Factor. He's going to be Christmas Number 1. He could be as big as Shane Ward or Alexandra Burke for a bit, then we can get excited about Britain's Got Talent. Yawn. Whereas with RATM, every day brought a new, shiny, sparkly development.

Amazon's selling it for 29p and it's still chart eligible!
Simon Cowell has dismissed it as "stupid"! 

RATM swore on the BBC!

RATM are ahead in the official midweek charts, but most X Factor singles are bought by kids and grannies on a Saturday, so Joe's going to have a late surge!

Will the snowy weather affect the kids and grannies shopping trips?! 

RATM have endorsed the campaign and will make a donation to a homeless charity on the back of the number of downloads sold!

The underdog has a genuine chance of pulling off a shock victory! Everyone is talking about it!

The sheer exhilaration of watching this campaign go from nothing, with what seemed like absolutely no chance, to one of the most life-affirming showbiz stories this decade is gently gratifying. It is confirmation of the excellent Caitlin Moran's maxim that pop music is simultaneously "the most important yet most ridiculous thing in the world".

Of course, unlike the twitter campaigns to protect our parliamentary democracy or challenge dinner-party bigots, getting RATM to No 1 doesn't really mean anything. But to be caught up in it, to buy that single for whatever excuse or reason you gave yourself was to briefly, ephemerally (and almost certainly conveniently) do the Right Thing, and you knew it.

It also proves that, thanks to social media, someone who comes along at exactly the right time with exactly the right idea, even if they have no money at all, can mobilise more than half a million people against cynical, anodyne, corporatised dross.

A book I'm reading at the moment quotes the American author Willa Cather as saying the purpose of art is to "imprison for a moment, the shining, elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose."

I wouldn't pretend for a second that downloading a shouty, sweary pop song as part of a mass protest against the grindingly boring prospect of yet another X Factor Christmas Number 1 is in any way art.

But the sentiment within Cather's statement, the delight in being able to witness an elegant, spontaneous and prescient idea turn into an odds-defying success through the sheer enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands of people must be worth celebrating.

Well, that's what I think, anyway. Happy Christmas, y'all.

Live in the snow in Guildford

Well, we did it. And here's the proof... Okay to be honest, whilst we did set up outside in the dark, I did have a desk to broadcast from inside St Saviour's Church in Guildford. Every Friday the good people at St Saviour's provide a bacon roll for homeless people. This morning, as a Christmas treat, that was upgraded to a full English... Around 30 people turned up to eat, drink tea and coffee, and have a smoke on the steps of the church. The atmosphere was great, and the people we spoke to were very open about their situation. Craig, on the left in the photo above, is living in a shed at the bottom of the garden of an abandoned house with his girlfriend Dianne. Tinky, in the foreground of the photo above, lives at Vaughan House, a hostel on Chertsey Street in Guildford. I visited there earlier this week and heard the stories of people desperately trying to free themselves from the grip of alcohol addiction. We broadcast the results on the show this morning, along with other recordings I made at the YMCA and with the Street Angels. My thanks to the likes of Revd Andy Wheeler and Sally (below) from St Saviour's who made us all feel so very welcome. and my final, but heartfelt thanks to the idiot standing next to me below, Producer Karl, who worked tirelessly to get the show to air and, as you can see, keep me appraised of the time, all the time. I'm off now until 28 Dec, so this blog will be quiet for a bit. Have a great Christmas and be good!