What's up at the Post Office?

This story has been updated: 14 Aug 2013



In November last year, whilst on air, I got a random tweet from a man called Davinder Misra who wanted to know if I might use his West Byfleet-based taxi service.

I replied, possibly a bit flippantly, that it depended on whether he had any good stories to tell.

Davinder said something like "oh I've got a story to tell alright".

I took his number, we spoke on the phone and I went to see him.

I also spoke to Alan Bates, the man who runs the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, then I took the story to my boss at BBC Surrey and my colleagues at Inside Out South. Nearly three months later on Mon 7 Feb 2011, we broadcast the above piece on BBC 1 South.

If you can't view it, a transcript of the film can be found here.

On the same day the television piece went out we broadcast a radio programme focussing on the story on the BBC Surrey Breakfast Show. Have a listen...



The above 28 minute piece features a longer conversation with Davinder Misra and three live guests - Jo Hamilton (who features in the TV piece), her lawyer Issy Hogg, and Seema Misra's MP, Jonathan Lord.

In it Jonathan Lord MP calls for

"a full investigation... we need absolutely independent double-checking of the Horizon computer system... but I think also... if discrepancies are shown up within a subpostmaster systems - I think that needs looking into. I think our postmasters need to be able to contact the Post Office in the knowledge that things will be looked at in a fair, balanced and compassionate way. Peoples' livelihoods are on the line here.

"They... almost certainly have invested thousands, if not tens of thousands of pounds in their businesses and if they don't feel secure in going to the Post Office and saying, look, there's a discrepancy here, I need help... rather than thinking the Post Office, because of the contract they've signed is going to pounce on them, and potentially take them out of the business they've worked so hard to build up and put so much money into, then you can understand why they feel worried and why that side of things needs looking at."

In the radio broadcast Jo Hamilton's MP, James Arbuthnot, says:

"I find it very difficult to believe that all these subpostmasters and subpostmistresses are suddenly found to be dishonest, if the alternative is that it may be a public sector computer system which has gone wrong. We've heard of that before."

We invited the Post Office and the Minister for Postal Affairs, Ed Davey, to be interviewed for the television piece and the radio discussion. They declined. To paraphrase their statements, the Post Office says everything about the computer system is fine, and the Minister for Postal Affairs says he's asked the Post Office and it says everything is fine, so he's not going to intervene.

I asked Jonathan Lord MP if he was happy that the Minister was "sitting on his hands." Mr Lord said:

"I suspect there's a little bit more going on behind the scenes than perhaps the Minister is willing to let on. I hope that is the case."

Two days after the above broadcasts I asked Ben Goldacre (I worked with Ben on this) and Richard Wilson to have a look into what I'd managed to put together so far.
 
A follower of Ben's called Melissa Wilde sent me a link to an almost identical story in the Manchester Evening News I wasn't previously aware of.
 
Richard did some digging himself and found this.
 
Since the broadcast went out on BBC1 South, Jon Cuthill, the Inside Out South presenter, has been forwarding me some of the emails he's received. These are all genuine, with certain names and locations changed to protect serving postmasters/mistresses. Some of the people below have had their livelihoods and reputations destroyed. They still cannot understand why.

1) Paul: "I have just seen Inside Out South on BBC iPlayer after a friend told me about the episode transmitted on 7/2/2011.

"I myself was taken to court by the Post Office and sentenced to 15 months in prison for false accounting. The amount owing to the Post Office changed at every court hearing, but the last amount was £51,000.

"In court the judge asked if the money was stolen. The Post Office did not say yes I stole the money but when I said money was in the Post Office when it was not was false accounting. One day I lost £6,000 according to the system.

"I do think the Horizon system has lots of flaws, and find it hard to understand why they can accuse people, but don't look into the system.

"They have ruined many peoples lives including my own. I'm sure there are many more subpostmasters like myself out there."

2) Steve in Northumberland: "Many thanks for reporting on the theft allegations of Post Office Ltd. I am a serving subpostmaster and was obliged to "pay back" just over £4,000 last October. Keep up the good work and don't let go of the scandal of the Post Office Horizon system."

3) Simon in Norfolk: "It was good to see your program last night exposing the shameful issues that the Post Office are subjecting their subpostmasters to.

"My wife Allison took over an ran the small Sub Post Office in our village of Worstead, Norfolk in June 1997. All ran well until three years ago when unexplained losses started appearing in her weekly balance.

"Like the others featured in your film she believed that it was a system error and it would correct itself. A few weeks went by and the system did not rectify itself, so, like she was told to do previously, the figures were inputted incorrectly to make the system balance.

"(At training sessions for the older "ledger" accounting system they were told that large sums do not go missing, these are down to errors so put incorrect figures in the ledger and correct them when a correction notice is received from central accounting).

"Time went on and the losses mounted until they reached £12,000. Allison received little assistance from the "helpline" and did not know where to turn.

"Surprise, surprise, an auditor suddenly arrived and after a short inspection told her that she was some £18,000 adrift in the accounts. This he whittled down to £12,000 after some 10 minutes of looking. Allison was suspended without pay.

"Some nine months later she was charged with theft and summoned to the Norwich Magistrates Court, and then sent for trial at the Crown Court. At the Crown Court a second charge of false accounting was levelled at her.

"She intended to plead not guilty to all charges but the barrister told her that the Post Office would look for a custodial sentence if she was found guilty. This if course frightened her and she decided to plead guilty to false accounting.

"The sentence was 200 hours of community service plus £1400 cost to the Post Office. She has also had to pay back the £12,000 of supposed losses.

"The sad part of all this is that due to the bullying of the barristers into accepting the charge of false accounting the Post Office did not have to produce any evidence to support their claim of losses. Also, at no time during this sad debacle did the Post Office ever try to show where they thought the losses were in the books or try to assist a long-serving member of their staff.

"They hid behind the clause that says postmasters make good losses however caused and basically hung her out to dry.

"Our local community, however, was, and still is, very supportive of Allison but the stigma and the criminal record will not go away for a long time.

"I look forward to seeing updates in your future programmes."

4) Pam in Barkham: "I have just watched your item on Inside Out concerning the Post Office.

"I am a former subpostmistress with 24 years experience who has been at the receiving end of the Horizon System.

"My problems began in October 2009 when my office was relocated into a Portacabin whilst my shop and office were rebuilt. The first balance after moving was short by £388, the next on 6 Dec was short by £3500.

"I telephoned the helpline to query both of these, but paid them, assuming that it was perhaps lost paperwork during the move and the error would manifest itself at a later date, and the money returned.

"However, the next balance on 6 Jan 2010, which followed a period with bad snow conditions, my daughter's wedding, Christmas, New Year and more bad snow, when the Post Office was only open for two and a half weeks, was £9000 short.

"Yet again, I rang the helpline, got no help, so I registered this as a disputed loss and decided that I needed to protect myself by printing out transaction logs of every single transaction performed in the office from 6th December 2009.

"At that point I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I knew that there was never £9000 in the Post Office over that short period which was unaccounted for and which could have been removed.

"February proved no better, £8500 short. At this point I rang Horizon and demanded that they compare their logs with mine since they appeared to differ. I was dismissed with the words:

"Sorry, we've checked the nodes. They're working. This is your problem".

"I have to admit that I was very angry and told Horizon and everyone else at the Post Office that I had printed out the logs and would not accept that my office had lost this money until they had compared the logs they had with mine. I was ignored.

"So we continued. I disputed every loss at each balance, I became paranoid about my part time member of staff. I spent my waking life counting money. I worked my way through the transaction logs, which I had eventually managed to print from 17 Nov 2009, pulling out all cash deposits, all cash withdrawals, any remittances which were made to the cash centre; then comparing these with the overnight cash figure for the office. There were no obvious differences. I continued to ring the helpline, by this stage we were almost on first name terms, but still nothing was done.

"An auditor was sent out to sit and watch me while I worked,to see if I was doing anything wrong. At the end of a morning, the office was £200 short and all he could offer was that I might be keying in items too fast for the computer. However, he did point out that this shortage did help my case.

"I wanted the computer system checked before we were due to move back into the new building in June, since I was convinced that the move out had triggered these errors.

"In the weeks leading up to the move I was required to count the cash 3 times a day and report shortages, which I did each time. They were regularly short.

"Then suddenly, just two weeks before we were going to move, without any checks being done, I was audited for closure and suspension without any notice.

"I only found out a couple of weeks ago, at my preliminary interview with the Post Office Fraud Strand, that the balance on closure showed a surplus of almost £3000, this despite the fact that my regular daily checks showed shortages.

"I am unable to contact anyone at the Post Office management, having been told that I must wait until I am contacted by them. As a suspended employee I have no right to speak to anyone. So, I have been waiting and finally received notification of this interview on 6 Jan 2011, exactly one year to the day since I first flagged up the problems.

"I still have all my evidence, transaction logs from 17 Nov until the day before I was suspended. I am still hopeful that I might get to check the logs at each end of the information highway. The gentleman from the fraud department was trying to get copies of the Horizon logs for me so that I could compare them. It's now a month since I saw him and I am beginning to believe that they will never be released to me. I have found anomalies in the logs which have never been explained by Horizon/Fujitsu.

"Please continue to publicize the plight of the subpostmasters, there are hundreds of us nationwide and the Post Office, a Government-owned business, is hiding behind a technological company which just refusing to even consider that something might be wrong. In fact, when I first mentioned Horizon to a Manager, I was told "A lot of subpostmasters have said that but nobody has been able to prove it yet."

"Surely, someone must be able to investigate this for us?"

5) Anna in Cambridgeshire: "Thank you so much for your Inside Out South report re the Post Office. I am one of the subpostmasters that this has happened to, and you brought out how awful it is, and how we feel. So frustrated and so sick with worry. What really makes me annoyed is that Post Office Ltd. has
evidently bullied these people into giving the monies that Post Office Ltd., say they owe. I have refused to do this, as I am not going to give them any monies, even if I win the lottery I wouldn't because as we all say, we haven't taken it!

"I am emailing as many East radio stations and Look East to see if they could do a programme about it, and hopefully it would help our cause."

6) Clare in Dorset: "Reference your piece about the Post Office. How I sympathise with those people who have been wrongly prosecuted. Dreadful.

"I worked at a Post Office but left after six months because Horizon and Post Office audit staff were not able to detect what I had done wrong with a transaction which resulted in a deficit which I knew I had not stolen but looked suspicious as it was a round figure.

"On a day I had been left on my own, the subpostmaster was taking a lunch break and a customer wished to withdraw £200 from a savings account.

"I scanned the passbook and the computer allowed me to follow through the process of a withdrawal transaction.

"However, the transaction should NOT have been processed as I later found out, several weeks later, the customer should have applied for a letter of authority from Head Office and this letter would have a barcode to be scanned at the post office, NOT the passbook.

"Consequently I gave the customer the £200 but because the correct barcode had not been registered with Horizon this in turn resulted in a deficit at our end-of-day balance. The subpostmaster spoke with the Help Desk but nothing came of their investigations (if they did any at all).

"The Sub-Postmaster was not exactly believing and I just could not take the pressure of him thinking that I had taken the money. I handed in my notice.

"It was only after I left that the other clerk at the post office told me that the same lady came in again to withdraw another sum of money; this clerk was more experienced and asked her for the letter of authority. She said she had withdrawn the money previously against the passbook but luckily my initials were in the passbook and so the clerk realised this was how I'd made the error.

"On many transactions Horizon asks you whether you have performed checks but it failed on this occasion.

"What I found most alarming is that nothing came of the conversations with the Help Desk. This deficit was a rare occurence at our post office. I suppose it was too small amount of money and it would come out the the Sub postmaster wages, the post office would not lose.

"Horizon is not foolproof and certainly when you are new to counter work, it is a minefield. You cannot know everything all the time."

7) Gurinder: "My question for the Post Office is, if they constantly supervise every transaction we make is monitored how can they allow these error figures to grow up to five figures?

"At least in once in six weeks their professional supervisors check our accounts. How can they overlook them?

"Why were we not given the proper help or advice which is in the contract under their obligations."

8) Linda in Surrey: "I am an ex subpostmistress, who was also prosecuted for false accounting, and have been through hell, debt and disbelief for almost 6 years.

"I would very much like to talk to the people involved, and my heart goes out to the others, as I know what they are going through.

"Several postmasters joke about the black hole that money seems to disappear into, and leave you having to make good unexplained shortages!

"I even had ex-employers standing up for me in court, that couldn't believe what was happening, the Post Office was the worst company I have ever worked for.

"The training is abysmal, and the support non-existent. When my father was dying in intensive care, and I received a telephone call from the hospital asking me to get there as quickly as possible, I asked the post office if I could close early and explained the circumstances, the only reply I got, was" get someone else to cover", which as a single-handed office is nigh impossible.

"I knew I was innocent of dishonesty, and I never stole any money, but I now have a conviction for false accounting, debts, a destroyed reputation ,a wrecked family, asthma, and a long recovery from emotional trauma. Even now I still find it difficult.

"I hope you can pass my details on to the people investigating, and hope to hear from someone. 55 of us can't all be wrong. I thought I was the only one."

------------------------

The Post Office has its own trainers, auditors and prosecutors. It says the Horizon system has been tested against "independently-assured" standards.

This is a computer system that has been in place for 10 years, which, to my untrained eye has all the user-friendliness (and interface speed) of a ZX81. But the Post Office holds the line - everything is fine.

Subpostmasters get full training, says the Post Office, they also get access to a helpline, so any discrepancies that can't be resolved must be the subpostmaster/subpostmisstresses' fault. Ones they need to make good.

The subpostmasters/subpostmistresses can dispute them, of course, but the Post Office can decide, without giving any evidence, that they are wrong, and that they need to pay back what the Post Offices says they owe them.

Or be prosecuted, suspended or sacked.

At the time of writing there are three subpostmistresses in jail. No one has ever found the money they are supposed to have stolen/falsely accounted.

As Ben Goldacre said on twitter a couple of days ago: "really you need some computer security / accountant ninjas now".

If you are an investigative journalist/programme editor/newspaper editor/blogger/computer security/accountant ninja and want to pursue this story, call me.

Amy and Abi's diaries

In 2009 I started watching Strictly Come Dancing with my then 4 year old daughter Amy.

Then as now, on a Monday, we had a feature called "The Shots in 60 seconds". Here the relevant commentary highlights of Aldershot Town's Saturday match, plus the comments of the manager, would be condensed into 60 seconds and set to music.

It didn't take me long to realise I could do something like that with Strictly Come Dancing, and so was born "Strictly in 60".

Every Sunday in the Autumn of 2009 I would record my daughter's thoughts about the show - who left and why, who did well etc - cut them down to 60s and play them out straight after The Shots in 60.

I liked it because it was a piece of audio, in quality, which broke up the tone of the show - you don't often get to hear a 4 year old speak for a minute on any subject, let alone on the radio, so it provided us with something very different to the usual ebb and flow of the morning.

When Strictly was over I thought about what I could do next, and the idea of Amy's diary presented itself to me. A once a week insight into Surrey life from a 4 year old's perspective.

So in January 2010 we started broadcasting Amy's journal, 60s to 90s worth of audio, every Monday morning. The need to keep it short was essential - there is nothing more boring than other people's children. But if you keep it tight, and the narrative bumps along, you do get that momentary jolt of seeing into a young person's world via the subjects they choose to talk about and the sometimes wonderful turn of phrase they have when articulating it.

Every Sunday evening I would sit down with Amy and we'd record the raw audio. Before recording we'd discuss two or three big moments that happened for her in the week and what we were going to say about them. The diary always starts with "Hello my name is Amy, I'm xxxx years old and this is my diary" and it would always end with "Thank you for listening to Amy's diary". In between we'd record Amy's narrative, using the days as chapter markers. "On TUESday...." or "On SATURday...."

If she lost track of things or used names or words that needed explaining, she went too far off topic, or needed a sentence to signify the end of a section, I'd prompt her. If she rambled on on topic I'd let her go, because that's when you get something that was purely her, and I could isolate it and chop out the stumbles and irrelevant stuff in the edit.

Then I'd upload the raw audio into my PC and cut it at home on Audacity, the free editing software, before emailing it to my producer for him to pick up and chuck into the BBC playout system on Monday morning.

I didn't quite realise how it would take off. There are a lot of people listening to the show who have grown up children themselves. They just love hearing a child's voice, and being reminded of the obssessions that children that age have.

When, after a year in the job on 1 Sep 2010, I asked, on air, for an end of year report from the listeners, I was taken aback by the universal praise we got for Amy's diary.

I went to a New Year's Day drinks party at my in-laws this year and that was the conversation starter for many guests (most of whom were in their sixties). "Oh I do love Amy's diary" they would say, "is it coming back in the New Year?"

My brother-in-law told me he was talking about radio with a friend of his and mentioned I worked in radio. The friend didn't know my name, didn't know the correct name for the station, but once he'd worked out Dave was talking about the local BBC radio station for Surrey he said "Oh yes of course! Amy's diary!"

That's when I realised we had a brand on our hands. Well, that and the number of Christmas cards Amy got from listeners.

This year we have formalised the time slot to 8.50am on a Monday (in the early days it would move around the running order) and introduced our secret weapon - Abi.

Abi is Amy's sister, she's just turned three and through watching Amy do her thing every Sunday, has picked up a very good understanding of what's required. Now when Amy finishes her diary, she adds "Now it's Abi's turn" and the listeners get 20s of Abi. "Hello my name is Abi, I am three and this is my diary..."

Abi is very talkative and quite headstrong, but also something of a performer. Yet she still has that ridiculously raw, unformed little voice that small toddlers have. In terms of pure sound it's just not something you hear every day in that environment.

I'm aware talking about my daughters is much more interesting to me than anyone else, by a factor of, ooh, a million, so I always play it straight when trailing the item.

My feeling is making a big deal about it is twee and dull - if you don't like it, it's around 75 seconds long, it'll be all over before you know it and hopefully there is nothing too irritating, and enough in there to stop you turning off.

Amy and Abi love it, of course. It would be interesting to see how long we can keep this going. Amy has grown over the past year, and I can hear the changes in her voice from her early diaries. I also get the sense that a lot of listeners are enjoying sharing in these tiny glimpses of her childhood. Now Abi is on board, it'll be fun to see if they develop an on air dynamic together.

For me it justifies itself as a bit of audio contrast, in the way that Thought For The Day is a deliberate pause to the rhythm of the Today programme. The moment Amy, Abi, the listeners or my bosses get bored with it, it will go.

If you want to have a listen to the latest diaries, scroll forward 1hr 50m in the most recent Saturday breakfast show on the BBC Surrey page of the iplayer.

.

Ricky Gervais, Jarvis Cocker, Ed Byrne and Peter Kay

The 2010 Student Radio Awards take place this week. I am usually involved as a judge, and this year I had the privilege of arguing over who should win the non-news speech category. I was also asked to contribute my memories of the first two* awards ceremonies.

Although some of the key moments of the first (in 1996) spring readily to mind, I had to ask where the 1997 awards were held. At this point they probably should have taken me off the project.

They didn't, so I made an appeal on Facebook and Twitter to see if anyone else could remember anything about either awards.

Despite several people coming forward, which at least established the 1997 awards' location (Oxford), it seems there is a general air of folk amnesia surrounding what happened. This, I think, suggests both were a spectacular success.

If you were at either event (or the third in '98 at Brick Lane), please add your comments below. This is a slightly re-written version of what I submitted to the 2010 awards organisers:

"Details of the first two Sudent Radio Awards are largely lost in the mists of time, with most of the participants now dead, or having faded into insignificance.

This was in the days before your social medias, your so-called Facebooks and fancy Twitterspaces. Hard though it may be to imagine, mobile phones were the size and weight of gold ingots, with about the same functionality.

There were no digital cameras (thankfully), and because the water in the last century wasn't safe to drink, most students survived on a form of methanol suspended in food colouring, known as Mad Dog 20/20.

As a result almost no records of these events taking place actually exist, and the ones that do are a little hazy. But ULU 96 and Oxford Brookes 97 did definitely happen, much to the surprise of almost everyone involved.

This much I know. In November 1995 I was elected Chair of the SRA. In December 1995 I wrote (when people conducted business by sending letters in the post to each other) to Matthew Bannister, the then Controller of Radio 1, suggesting the SRA and Radio 1 set up a student radio awards.

He wrote back, on a letter (I know!), two weeks later, saying it was a jolly good idea and that we ought to come down to Radio 1 to discuss it.

For a student with far-off dreams of working in the radio industry this was like receiving an invitation to the Emerald City.

Armed with the Secretary of the SRA and a nice man called Dan McEvoy (now a high up at 5live) who independently had the same idea as me, we converged on an office somewhere in Yalding House (or was it Egton? It was probably the now-demolished Egton).

There we were welcomed by the poshest woman I have ever met. In a faintly disinterested manner, she told us Matthew Bannister was sorry he couldn't come to our meeting, but he really wanted the awards to happen and so they would.

We went away and did everything we could to make sure student stations entered the competition and came to the event. Radio 1 put a genuinely fantastic team (not including the posh lady, who I never saw again) on the case, who provided patient, friendly and expert guidance whilst making sure the very first Radio 1 Student Radio Awards was worthy of the name.

The first ceremony took place at the University of London Union in November 1996. The Evening Session's Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq hosted. The gig afterwards featured the bands Shoot, The Longpigs and Space.

The compere at the gig was a chubby, cheerful northern fella called Peter Kay, who had recorded childrens' TV theme tunes onto a dictaphone, and spent most of his act playing them out through the PA and saying "Remember that?".

Jarvis Cocker, one of the most famous people in the country, was on the guest list that night. I remember seeing his name and asking the Radio 1 press person "Why is Jarvis Cocker on the guest list?".

She said "Dunno, we thought he might like to come, we invited him, and he said yes..."

Never going to happen, I thought. A few hours later I was standing at the bar and Jarvis Cocker walked past. "Jarvis Cocker!" I blurted, in amazement.

"Hello." he said politely, and walked on. The man who wrote Common People and who, the previous year, had headlined Glastonbury with Pulp, had just popped his head round the door at an event I helped set up.

Mind you the Ents Manager at ULU...

Me: "Is the ents manager alright with us coming here and taking over most of his union for a private function on a Friday night?"
Radio 1 person: "yeah he's fine. He's a really nice bloke actually..."
.... was Ricky Gervais, who was 8 years away from being in the same room as Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson, clutching a Golden Globe for The Office.

It was a good night.

The second Radio 1 Student Radio awards was the centrepiece of the 1997 Student Radio Association autumn conference, held at Oxford Brookes University. Word had spread through the student radio community (using some sort of rudimentary semaphore) about the success of the inaugural event and loads of students from all over the country piled into Oxford.

All the talk was of Oxygen 107.9, the student radio station which had broken out of closed-loop AM broadcasting and FM RSLs to win a permanent FM licence. We all know how that turned out. Oh well.

The star turn at the awards was Ed Byrne, a hilarious young comedian who went on to become the voice of Mowbli in the Carphone Warehouse adverts, and despite never having to work again, is a now an older, but still hilarious, award-winning comedian.

Ed was effectively hired to give us all a laugh before the awards started, but when Dave Pearce dropped out of presenting duties due to illness, Ed was forced to announce himself as the host, a job he did with considerable aplomb, given it had been sprung on him at the last moment.

There are rumours that Oxford Brookes marked the first sit-down dinner at a student radio awards, but I don't remember it like that. At ULU the refreshments were basically crisps, nuts and beer. I seem to remember us being seated theatre-style for Oxford Brookes.

Having trawled around for peoples' memories, that recollection appears to be in dispute.

As I say, it's all a little hazy now."

I'd like to wish all the students who have been nominated for awards this year the very best of luck. The standard in the category I judged was particularly high, and there is some genuine talent there, which I hope the industry will be in good enough shape to pick up before long.

--------------------------------------------------

*The Radio 1/student radio awards relationship had actually existed well before the "first" ones in 1996. I didn't know this when I first approached Radio 1, and neither did the people at Radio 1. At that time there was something of a scorched earth policy towards Radio 1's previous regime and everything it represented.

The previous existence of an older awards scheme became apparent when we were working on the new ones. The discovery that Radio 1, in its incredibly naff phase, had held a relationship with the Student Radio Association's predecessor NASB (National Association of Student Broadcasters) filled me with terror. If Radio 1 discovered the previous regime had also thought holding a student radio awards was a good idea, they might feel it was tainted by association and drop the new one like a shot.

Nonetheless I felt I had to bring it to Radio 1's attention. After all, knowing the awards had existed previously hardly meant we could launch the new awards as the first.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: "Er... I've discovered that Radio 1 used to have a student radio awards scheme which it ran with our predecessor organisation."
Radio 1 person: "And...?"
Me: "Well that means this isn't the first Radio 1 student radio awards, like we've been calling them."
Radio 1: "Oh, I don't think we need to worry about it now."
Me: "Er... okay."

And so the new awards were born. The first between Radio 1 and the SRA, and the ones that have grown into the extraordinary talent-sourcing behemoth they are today.

Have a Lovely Day

I'm not a very good shopper. The only "retail experience" I enjoy is at the supermarket. It's a once-weekly opportunity to indulge in some anticipative bonding with my digestive tract. The rest is just stress.

Today I was sent to Walton town centre with instructions to retrieve a pair of Mrs Wallis' boots, which were being re-heeled at Timpsons. On the way I was distracted by an ancient Top of The Pops trivia quiz game, sitting in the window of our local Sam Beare charity shop.

Everyone has their weakness. Mine is a limitless capacity for consuming pop trivia. Who doesn't want to know which member of Duran Duran was made ill by drinking water infected with elephant wee, why Trevor Horn never got to produce U2, what The Smiths' manager said as he watched Morissey record the lyric to How Soon Is Now and how the drum sound was created by accident on Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight?*

So I was in the Sam Beare shop like a shot. I grabbed the box and took it to the till, with the exact money counted into my immaculately moisturised palm.

At the till, the nice foreign (South American? Mediterranean?) lady set me on my way by saying "have a lovely day".

Have a lovely day?

A lovely day?

I am on my own, in a charity shop, in Walton on Thames. How lovely can it get?

Deploying the sharpness of mind for which I am justly revered, I replied "and you" as I left.

I think I did so mainly out of cultural embarrassment. After all, "have a lovely day" might be a perfectly normal thing to say in a shop in her country (wherever it is). And, to be fair, she was really nice, so if she was prepared to wish me a lovely day, I was happy to wish the same for her.

I did make several other instant assumptions, mainly that as a volunteer in a charity shop she was doing something she actually wanted to do, and therefore was well on her way to having a lovely day anyway. I would never wish someone a lovely day when there was a good chance they were nowhere near getting one.

Now, Timpsons pride themselves on customer service. Everytime I go into Timpsons I am struck by how ebullient and knowledgeable they are about heels and batteries and keys. It takes a lot to care about that sort of thing. It also takes a lot to care about how your customer feels about their interaction with that sort of thing. I generally think heels and batteries and keys are mainly annoying, so gearing myself up to deal with someone who straddles the world of heels, batteries and keys like a knowledgeable Colussus takes some effort.

Having retrieved Mrs Wallis' boots and paid for them, I still wasn't prepared for the Timpsons man to suggest, as I left his shop, that I might like to "have a lovely day", exactly echoing the phrase I had just heard in the Sam Beare shop.

The Timpsons man was not foreign. He was an honest-to-goodnes, salt-of-the-earth heel-repairer, key-etcher and battery retailer. And now he was staking an interest in the rest of my day. It threw me a bit.

It didn't feel right to suggest to a man I just met that he too should have a lovely day, so deploying the sharpness of mind for which I am justly revered, I replied "Cheers" as I left.

Was this churlish? Was I wrong not to wish him a lovely day too? Maybe he was having a lovely day at work, surrounded by keys and batteries and heels.

Or maybe, once he had taken off his maroon apron at 5.30pm that evening, he would be off to a wedding in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace, where he would enjoy the company and bonhomie of old friends, on a special occasion, in a magical setting. That would be lovely.

By saying "Cheers" was I reinforcing the inherent client/supplier relationship in every retail transaction? The idea that because I have money and you want to take it from me, you have to be obsequieous and I can act like an arse? You state, on the record, that you want me to have a lovely day and I am so self-obssessed, so uninterested in your poxy little life that the most I can bring myself to utter is an expression of thanks for a superfluous entreaty?

Well, really....

Also (and I have no idea why) I felt uncomfortable about wishing another man a lovely day. It just felt wrong.

"Have a lovely day."
"You too, boss."
"A day filled with love."
"For both of us."
"Kiss me, Timpson."

I wandered into The Works, attracted by the usual collection of books reduced from RRPs of £18 or £19 to £1.99. My kind of bookstore.

I picked up a book on grammar which I had once flicked through in a different shop, thought was brilliant, then refused to buy because of the cover price. Now it was going for a fiver, so I had it. I took it to the till. I paid my money. I took the receipt. The store assistant, as we parted, said "enjoy the rest of your day".

Oh, ffs.

Enjoy the rest of your day?

There is an unwitting hint of the directive in that sentence, which isn't entirely welcome. And once more I am left speculating as to why someone selling me a bargain-bin book in a discount store would choose to chuck coins in the fountain of my immediate future.

Once is fine. Twice is odd. Three times is unnerving. Did I miss the memo which introduced a new paradigm of retailer/consumer interaction expectation? Is this unique to Walton? Why would three complete strangers gun for me and my prospects in such gushing terms for no apparent reason? Do they know something?

I tweeted about this experience earlier today, and a dear friend suggested the people I encountered in Walton High Street were merely being friendly and polite. This is fair enough.

However, I like to consider myself friendly and polite (esp when dealing with strangers), but I have never briefly met someone and then speculated that they might have a lovely day.

 Especially without any inkling as to what the rest of the day might hold in store for them. Why would you?

*Answers on a postcard.

War, Walton and interviewing people in their nineties

 

 

Hazel Green (above), 93, one of the interviewees for the Walton Memories film

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

Earlier this year Melvyn Mills, the husband of my mum's best friend's cousin, was elected a local councillor in Walton-on-Thames.

Melvyn had long complained that the Walton Heritage Day, held down by the river every year in September, wasn't very good, or very well publicised. So to shut him up, the organisers put him in charge of it.

Melvyn decided the theme of the Heritage Day this year would be Walton at War, in order to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Blitz.

Because Melvyn lives next door to a TV picture editor called Simon, he decided it would be nice to raise the profile of the Walton Heritage Day by making a short film about the war. Excitingly the "film" is getting its debut (and very possibly only) showing on the double-decker bus which Brooklands Museum sends along to the Heritage Day every year, and which just so happens to be kitted out with a DVD player, brand new flat screen, sound system and window blinds. Wahey.

Melvyn has lived in Walton all his life and knows virtually everyone, so it wasn't long before he had a list of people who had lived in and around Walton during the war. Now all he had to do was get all of them to the same place at around the same time whilst fitting in with his full-time job, my schedule and Simon the TV picture editor-turned-amateur-cameraman's schedule. This summer Simon has been contracted to work for this year's Big Brother on a rotating shift basis, with very little downtime.

Eventually we chose two of Simon's rare rest days, I took two days out of my holiday and Melvyn took a couple of days off. Simon borrowed a £10K HD camera from a friend, I put a suit on, and Melvyn rounded up our interviewee subjects by asking them to put in an appearance at the Walton Day Centre for Retired People on the specified dates.

Melvyn worked very hard. People in their nineties don't do times, they do mornings and afternoons. When you reach a certain age, getting out of the house can be a long and exhausting process. Added to that, nonagenarians don't really care all that much about being on telly, or how nice or polite you are when you want something. 

In short, all our interviewees were absolutely within their rights to treat our whole operation as a rather presumptuous inconvenience.

Eve (below) had actually come along to the day centre to keep another interviewee company. She had to be persuaded to sit in front of the camera and talk to us. Once she did, her story of being bombed by the Luftwaffe whilst working at the Vickers factory in Weybridge was astounding. On 4th September 1940, 85 people were killed in three minutes. Eve told us of the speed of the attack, which happened in broad daylight - there was no air raid siren, just the sudden realisation they were in serious trouble.

She described watching electricity arc-ing across the factory floor, and as the ceiling caved in looking through a hole in the roof to see a German swastika on a plane as it swooped over. Eve told us of her escape, climbing over a body to get out and then being strafed by machine guns from the German planes as she and her friends ran towards the air raid shelters, seeing people around her being shot as they ran. At the time, she was 20 years old.

Other interviewees told us of losing loved ones, being bombed out of their houses, watching doodlebugs being shot out the sky, living in air raid shelters, putting babies to sleep in drawers because there was no furniture left in the house and trying to find a way of struggling through under immense duress. Needless to say, hearing their stories was a very humbling experience.

It was also inspiring to meet people who'd been around for so long and seen so much. It must be strange, carefully negotiating your way around a world which barely acknowledges you, with a lifetime's worth of memories echoing through your head.

The resulting material is being given the reverence it deserves - we have been playing the interviews out on BBC Surrey Breakfast throughout this week, and Simon is working frantically on getting the film together for Saturday. We are also in the process of putting the audio up permanently on the BBC Surrey website and I will be down at the Walton Heritage Day this Saturday (11 Sep 2010) to do some live reporting from the event. Do come down if you live nearby.

I would like to profoundly thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed, and went out of their way to meet up with us.

One thing I did notice over the course of the two days was that the media tradition of asking pre-recorded interview guests to tell us what they had for breakfast became less a technical exercise in getting the right sound level and more a research project into longevity. If you want to make it into your nineties in good nick I would suggest you first of all ensure you are a woman, and then eat fresh fruit every morning.

Although when I asked one of the liveliest 93 year olds I've ever met what she had for breakfast, she said "Two slices of toast and marmalade," before fixing me with a meaningful stare "and TWO cups of tea."

One year in the job

On 1 Sep 2010, I will have been presenting the BBC Surrey Breakfast show for exactly a year.

In summary: I have got better, it has got better and the listening figures have gone up.

The above belies twelve months of teeth-grindingly hard graft. That said, nattering on the radio is still at the dossier end of what constitutes actual work, so you're not going to find me complaining. It's been enormous fun and I've met some incredible people.

One of the things I am most proud of is that we have, on occasion, spoken to people who have contacted us about an injustice, or a problem they're having with local bureaucracy, and shone a light on it by calling those in authority to account. Sometimes, possibly as a result of our involvement, things get resolved very quickly and I am grateful our listeners have come to us, and reminded of the value of a strong, totally independent, local media.

One significant recent career developement is that over the past few months I have been able to pick up some television work. As well as the language programme for BBC World, I am also doing some investigative filming for another part of the BBC, the fruits of which should appear in October.

Radio has the advantage over television because of its intimacy, immediacy and unpredictability, but when it comes to impact (especially in a news programme), television can be hard to beat. It's good to be working in both worlds.

.

How my friend Chris saved BBC 6 Music

There were obviously a few significant strands to the campaign to save 6 Music. The grassroots efforts of the listeners, with their Facebook campaigns, twitter hashtags, real live demonstrations and flashmobs. Adam Buxton was the perfect poster boy for the campaign, and he rose to the challenge admirably, somehow successfully articulating the listeners' rage through his deafult filter of knowing lunacy.

Other important pop culture figures like David Bowie and Damon Albarn weighed in to save the station. Jarvis Cocker's impassioned "rant" at the Sony Awards in May (hear my interview with him about it here) left the BBC hierarchy in no doubt that the fuss over 6 Music was not going to die down.

In fact, the sustained level of support the Save 6 Music campaign enjoyed from the moment this story was leaked to The Times in February, to today's decision, is a tribute to the passion (and savvy) of its fans.

But I would argue the BBC's plan to can the station was fatally holed by an email my mate Chris wrote to Ed Vaizey MP, who was then the Conservative Party spokesman on culture. Ed's response gave the campaign hope and momentum.

Every day for the last eight years, Chris's company, CMU music, has sent out a free daily email for people who work in the music industry. At the last count he had around 18,500 subscribers. Within a week of the decision to close 6 Music being announced by the BBC, Chris wrote an open letter to Ed Vaizey. In the email, he explained why he thought the BBC should cherish, rather than close 6 Music, and asked Ed for his help.

The email itself, (published on Chris's personal blog) is worth reading. It is a long, beatifully-pitched and incredibly well-informed piece of writing. Ed may not have known about Chris, or his blog, before he received Chris's email, but he clearly felt it was a credible enough forum to send a strong message to the BBC and the BBC Trust about what senior Conservatives were thinking about all this. Ed's reply is also posted on Chris's blog.

Chris press released the email exchange to all his contacts. Within minutes he had a call from someone purporting to be from BBC News online who said (breathlessly, I'd like to think):

"Is this genuine?"
"Yes."
"Can you send us those emails?"
"Yes."
And he did.

The exchange was confirmed at Vaizey's end, and the story was taken up by The Guardian and The Telegraph (probably picking it up from a PA re-write) before gaining wider currency in the broadcast and online media. I cannot find the orginal story (if it was ever published) on BBC news online at all.

In seems in that period in early March, Ed Vaizey wrote a number of emails to outraged listeners who contacted him. You can see one of Ed's emails on the Facebook campaign to save 6 Music, but the email to Chris, as far as I am aware, was the first, and it was a damn good scoop.

I think Chris's initial contact may have gone some way towards persuading Ed Vaizey to come out in favour of 6 Music. It was certainly the very first shaft of light for 6 Music's fans. What was originally presented as a fait accompli suddenly looked shaky and the station's supporters found they had gained a powerful friend in a very high place.

The CMU website doesn't really break stories. I was having lunch with Chris a week or so after he sent his email to Ed Vaizey and asked what other exclusives he's nailed, expecting him to reel off a list.

The best, no, the only one he could come up with was when Anthony Hall resigned from the BPI over their "three strikes and you're out" policy on illegal file-sharing. Anthony sent a copy of his resignation letter direct to CMU, rather than the paywalled Music Week, ensuring maxiumum online exposure. Clever Anthony.

But that was it. Which makes the Ed Vaizey email and its subsequent impact all the more interesting.

So hats off to Chris and congratulations to everyone who fought the campaign. I worked at 6 Music as a freelance music newsreader and had a great time there, and I'm pleased it's going to remain part of the BBC's radio portfolio.