Boring 2012

Steward at Boring 2012 "I made the badge myself"

I first came across James Ward (who is not the gentleman above) via a couple of tweets from Caitlin Moran.

Caitlin is successful, brilliant and famous (my younger daughter Abi's middle name is Caitlin, as a tribute to her).

However, not that many people know about James Ward. My son is called James, but this has nothing to do with James Ward. He will be relieved by this, and disappointed.

I read James' excellent blog and got in touch with him.

We tweeted a bit. One night it became apparent we were drinking in pubs a stone's throw from each other.

I decided then we should never meet.

But we stayed in touch. I enjoyed one of James' early projects, London Twirls, and I watched as Boring Conference  became the thing it did.

James is endearing, cussed, shambolic and unapologetically amateur. In spite/because of this, the first Boring conference made it on to the front cover of the Wall Street Journal.

Given I hadn't attended the first two, I was very touched when James asked if I'd like to come along to this year's Boring.

Boring Conference 2012, York Hall, Bethnal Green, London

Thankfully he invited me early.

I will go to most things if a) I know about it far enough in advance (two months minimum) and b) it won't cost me anything. The former is more important than the latter, but the latter usually seals it.

I don't even have to want to go. Last weekend I opened a church bazaar in Limpsfield Chart, purely because I was asked in March (and also because I had turned it down twice in previous years and run out of excuses).

I knew Boring 2012 would be good, because James was organising it, and he has a way of lowering your expectations, but I still wasn't sure I could go. I have three children, and someone has to look after them. Any time I'm having fun away from the family is more childcare for my wife.

It's alright if it's a work thing, or a schoolfriend's 40th, but when the event in question sells itself with the strapline...

"Nothing interesting, worthwhile or important is ever discussed at Boring"

... justifying your attendance becomes an issue of trust.

Still, I got a pass, and having mentally committed myself to going in the week leading up to the event, I asked Matt Deegan to be my plus one. 

Matt is such an early adopter his twittername is @matt, he runs his own conference and seems to spend a lot of time talking at other people's conferences, so I thought he might enjoy going to Boring. 

He also doesn't have any children, so there was a good chance if I asked him on a Thursday whether he'd be free on Sunday, he might say yes. He did.

As we stood in the long queue (all 500 tickets had sold) outside York Hall in Bethnal Green...

... I asked if he knew James or anything about him.

"Not really." said Matt.

When we reached the front of the queue, after about 45 minutes, I said we were on the comp list. The lady handing out the white wristbands said "oh you could have come straight to the front, and I would have waved you through", which by that stage was superfluous information.

The wristband had writing on it which said:

"Boring 2012. If you don't enjoy yourself, at least you have a wristband", or words to that effect, and the legend on the screen at the front of the hall warned us the event wasn't going to be as good as last year.

The buffet was quite plain...

but I fancied a cup of water, so I tucked in.

There was an envelope on our chairs which had an incomprehensible photocopied sheet in it, a couple of badges, some Refreshers, a lolly, a few dull postcards and a raffle ticket.

I am doing some work with one of Matt's colleagues who just happened to send me an email as I was looking at my phone, so I sent him an email back with a "Guess who I am sitting next to?! Yes! One of your colleagues! What are the chances of that?" photo attached.

He said we looked quite bored.

Then things got underway. There was no published running order, so there was no indication of who was doing what or what to expect from them. Here is a very quick review:

James Ward on supermarket self service tills. Encouraged us to think of receipts as being more like certificates of achievement.

Peter Fletcher on letter boxes. As an ex-seasonal postie, he had some good knowledge. His diary entries from the time were poignant.

Ben Target - an untitled and unannounced piece of performance art which involved him rollerblading round the room in Rupert the Bear trousers whilst a recording of someone reading out tabulated metal weights was played to the room. It was boring.

Leila Johnston on IBM tills. Leila is doing something similar to James' London Twirls and at first it did seem, as the Guardian says, "stagey" and contrived. Then the presentation took an unexpected turn as Leila revealed she grew up in a town where IBM was the main employer, and how her childhood was enlivened by regular visits to arms fairs.

Ed Ross on toast. Some good research here, and I particularly liked the line "depending on the aspect ratio of your bread..."

Rose George on poo. Or "shit", as she prefers to call it. A brilliant talk. Rose has visited prisons in Africa where the effluent produced by those incarcerated therein is converted into free power for the nation. 14% of banknotes in Britain are contaminated with faecal matter. Now wash your hands.

Neil Denny on five random American breakfasts. Pleasantly untaxing.

Most of the above sessions were punctuated by problematic technicals, which necessitated James ad-libbing as MC whilst the audience sat there. We were encouraged to use the hashtag #boring2012 to tell twitter what an amazing time we were having. As a result twitter got quite confused.

For lunch we went to the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood (full of children, but not the sort you hear being shouted at in supermarkets, cafe staff lovely, impressive space) and Matt bought me lunch. Thank you, Matt.

We came back and the technical beasts appeared to have been tamed. Also the sessions threw off even the pretence of being boring, and became absorbing. Entertaining, even.

The highlights were Roo Reynolds (who got a short, coherent and informative review of Boring 2012 up hours ago. It also has links to all the speakers, so please go there and follow them on twitter, they're all very clever people).

Roo spoke about his collections, many of them cultivated online, and could well be my new hero. He's a former BBC-er and I think now works for the government. His hobbies include "Things Riding on Things", photos of the insides of peoples' fridges, jokes based on the punchline "No she went of her own accord", "Fuck Yeah Internet Fridge" and plotting the frequency of Out of Office replies to his weekly newsletter.

Andrew Male did a talk on double yellow lines, which started off as a conceptual joke, and became a painstakingly researched discourse on 50s counterculture and his own personal loss.

James Brown, the former editor of Loaded, spoke of his joy at discovering Antiques Road Trip and its format soup, which was made all the better by not including any clips from the programme at all.

The best talk I saw in terms of sticking to the brief came from Rhodri Marsden (the Independent columnist). Rhodri stumbled across this thing called Auto Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR (youtube it, but not alone), which is compelling and terrifying in equal measure.

ASMR is, superficially, stultifyingly boring, but is actually a quasi-fetishistic subculture which to me was like pulling up a tear in the earth and finding an entirely undiscovered world going about its business (think the Doozers, or even the Fraggles themselves, but with added, and rather intense, anxiety).

I say Rhodri's was the best talk I saw - I had to leave before the third and final group of sessions so I could look after the children, as my wife had to go to a confirmation service.

It meant I missed some wonderful-sounding talks, including Cathy Clugston, shipping forecast reader, on the shipping forecast (see Roo's list for more on that and the others), but such is life.

James had indicated on twitter a few weeks back that it would be nice to finally meet me at Boring, and I thought perhaps it was a good idea. But today he looked busy and quite stressed most of the time, and besides, I wouldn't really know what to say, so I didn't go up and introduce myself.

I would, however, like to thank him for the invite, and indeed all the speakers for a very different and inspiring afternoon, and I suspect this is the best way of doing so.


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Profile pics

All pics taken by Andy Newbold in Oct 2012.

The first BBC Radio 1 Student Radio Awards

I first wrote about this here in 2008, and three years later was asked to write about my recollections of the first two Student Radio Awards ceremonies for the 2011 awards programme. As you will see, my memories of the second event are particularly patchy. If you have some hard information you can provide, or photographs of either, please get in touch. 

The following post is a tidied up version of the history that appeared in the 2011 awards programme:

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 Facebooks and Twitterspaces. 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 the first two Radio 1 Student Radio Awards 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 actually 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. 

Matthew sent a letter back, 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. 

A month or so later, 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 had 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. And that, was that.

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 on the case, who provided patient, friendly and expert guidance as we worked towards making the very first Radio 1 Student Radio Awards 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 (now the UK's biggest-grossing comedian ever), who had recorded childrens' TV theme tunes onto a dictaphone, and spent most of his act playing them out through the PA, saying "Remember that?"

Jarvis Cocker, at the time 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. I couldn't believe it. The man who wrote Common People and who, the previous year, had headlined Glastonbury with Pulp, had just popped his head round the door to see what was up at an event I helped put together.

Whilst we were organising the event I had another interesting conversation with Radio 1, which went like this:

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..."


The ents bloke was called Ricky Gervais, eight years away from giggling helplessly in front of 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 a form 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. Oh well.

The star turn at the awards was Ed Byrne, a brilliant 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 brilliant, 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 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.

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NB: The Radio 1/student radio awards relationship 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 that 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.

.

Jonny Dymond

Jonny Dymond is a brilliant journalist. When I worked at Stage 6 in Television Centre I learned a lot from watching his lives and listening to his dispatches. He is also the author of the best biog I have ever read:

Jonny Dymond, Washington Correspondent, BBC News

Jonny is currently Washington correspondent for the BBC, magically becoming North America correspondent when he leaves the capital. Jonny is that rarity within the BBC, a white, male, privately educated Londoner.

He joined the BBC way back in the mists of time (1995) working first at Millbank as a researcher and producer, then at Newsnight and various election and budget programmes. He became a reporter at Westminster for the World Service and then Washington reporter in 2000. He covered 9/11 from Washington DC, then went to Istanbul to cover Turkey and the Middle East between 2001 and 2005.

He spent five years in Brussels as Europe correspondent leaving, with impeccable timing, just as Europe became The Biggest Story in The Whole World. In the States he files largely for BBC radio programmes, but is allowed onto television when no one else is available.

On the Mic - Surrey Life - October 2012

October's column for Surrey Life magazine, which is about a word, or the lack of it...

I think it’s time for a confessional.

Sometimes the right thing to say doesn’t arrive in our heads until we are half way through a sentence. We’ve all paused mid-flow, waiting for the perfect adjective to trampoline up from the memory deeps and present itself for dispatch. Most of the time we get there. Occasionally, it goes horribly wrong.

When the word we’re groping for doesn’t arrive, sparkling conversation can quickly descend into a series of panic-stricken eyebrow movements and non-sequiturs.

“It’s the, er, you know…” 

“Do I?

“Yes!”

“I…”

“It’s on the tip of my tongue!” 

“I think I know what you mean. As I was saying...”

So annoying.

Sometimes an interlocutor will spare everyone’s blushes by supplying the mot juste. Often they can’t, to mutual embarrassment. This is bad enough in real life, but on the radio, speaking in coherent sentences is the essence of the job. 

Yes there’s a lot of reading, research, button-pushing and other stuff you need to do, but topping the list is trying to make sure what comes out of your mouth isn’t a load of incomprehensible tosh.

The other day I managed to surprise myself.

It’s one thing to have the right word dangling in your subconscious, tantalisingly out of reach. It’s another thing to attempt a formulation which may not even be part of the language.

I needed to describe a person who was taking on the penultimate leg of a relay. I also needed to describe the person running the leg before them. Live on air, with thousands of people listening, I picked up the microphone and started to do so. Bad move.

To use “third-to-last”, didn’t seem right. The person in question wasn’t losing a race. The last person in the relay wasn’t in “last place”. So what word should I use? 

I had no idea. I realised, as a self-created linguistic tidal wave of doom swept towards me, I had asked my brain to dredge up a word I had never used before. Or heard before. Or even seen written down. It was perfectly possible this was because the word I had set myself up to use, live on the BBC, did not actually exist. 

In that moment of tongue-tied confusion my mind convulsed, my eyes widened and my mouth flapped open and shut like a particularly vacant goldfish. Every millisecond became an hour. It felt like a slow-motion car crash, my brain screaming “Nooooooooo!!!!” as the familiar brick wall of total humiliation approached. 

I’ve since listened back to it and all you hear is a brief giggle with the admission I had fallen into a beartrap of my own making. Thankfully a colleague was on hand to graciously admit she had no idea what the word for “the-one-before-the-penultimate” is either. The whole thing was over in half a second, and no lasting damage was done.

That’s the thing about radio. You make a mistake. You apologise. You feel bad. You learn. You move on. 

Antepenultimate. I know that now.

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November's edition of Surrey Life is on sale now, at £3.15 a snip. You can find some of my previous columns below:

September 2012 - on my BBC microphone

August 2012 - on the Olympics

July 2012 - on being on holiday with three small children

June 2012 - on joining a gym

May 2012 - on making live radio

April 2012 - on being ill

How I got to write a column for Surrey Life magazine

Leaving BBC Surrey breakfast

On Friday 19 October I'll present my last weekday breakfast show at BBC Surrey. I've had a good three years and it's time to move on. 

I am going to continue presenting the breakfast show on a Saturday, which I am thrilled about. 

This is what my boss said: "Nick has decided to leave Surrey weekday breakfast at the end of his current contract. His last show will be Friday 19th October.

"Nick has always put 100% into his presentation and I am very grateful for the passion and commitment he has shown over the last 3 years. 

 
"I am really pleased that Nick will continue to present Surrey Saturday breakfast and will still be a part of the radio station."

and this is what I said: "Presenting BBC Surrey Breakfast has been a blast, but I felt the time was right to get on and do something else. 

"I would like to thank everyone at BBC Surrey for the immense amount of work they put into the breakfast show over the last three years and I would like to thank the BBC for giving me this opportunity in the first place. 

"It's a real privilege to present a regular show on BBC local radio, and I have learned a lot. I would also like to thank everyone who tuned in. It's been great getting to know you."

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I haven't properly started looking for something to do after 19 October. That begins now. I'd like to continue working in media, so we'll see what happens. 

I'd like to thank Nicci and Sara for giving me the job in the first place, everyone I worked with on the show, everyone who gave me any feedback and everyone who listened. It has been a quite brilliant experience.

x

On the Mic - Surrey Life - September 2012

Here is my September column for Surrey Life magazine. An ode to my BBC microphone. 

I rather like my microphone. Not the studio one at BBC Surrey, but my reporter mic. 

It’s gun-metal grey, about eight inches long, perfectly balanced and heavy, with a rigid metal mesh protecting the business end. It has presence. And it’s very, very good at doing what it does.

My microphone was issued to me when I got a new job at the BBC, with all the ceremony a bored studio engineer could muster. 

For him it was just another bit of kit. For me it was a symbolic moment. I had somehow managed to wangle an on-air gig at the greatest broadcast organisation in the world. 

I went down on one knee, bowed my head and raised my palms upwards.

“Don’t be a cretin, Wallis.” said the bored engineer, putting the cold graphite wand in my hand. “And don’t break it.”

That was more than eight years ago. In that time I have used the same microphone to interview Bruce Willis, Halle Berry, David Cameron, David Attenborough, Mick Jagger, Madonna, Jarvis Cocker, Amy Winehouse, Dame Judi Dench and a couple of hundred other high-profile people. I have taken it into the penthouses and bowels of almost every five star hotel and crummy music dive in London. It has faithfully recorded the musings of politicians, actors, sports stars, broadcasters, doctors, nurses, farmers, protestors, firefighters, police officers, chefs, comedians, soldiers, teachers, students, parents, children and completely random passers-by. It has heard tales of heartbreak, outrage, injustice and joy. 

More than anything else it has become my passport to a conversation with the single most interesting person in the room. And it hasn’t let me down once.

All things must pass

Several hundred years ago, when I started out, reporters would struggle out to jobs with "portable" analogue reel-to-reel tape machines. These recorders were encased in sharp-edged, solid wooden boxes and weighed so much they had to be strapped to the side of a horse. 

Then along came DAT. DAT recorders had user interfaces inspired by the sleek, black obelisks in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It meant your machine might be switched on and might have recorded your interview in perfect digital quality, but there was no way of actually knowing this. Or ever finding out where inside the machine your interview might be. 

Now we’re in the future. When I arrived at BBC Surrey, I was presented with a heavy duty reporter microphone very similar to my own. Except this one had a solid state mp3 recorder inside it. No wires, no fuss. 

Three years on, we don’t even need to attach our micro-mp3 recorders to the insides of chunky specialist kit. The mic on a smartphone can do the job. And a smartphone, with the right app and a few sweeps of the finger, can edit, convert and dispatch an interview back to base for immediate transmission before slotting back into your jacket pocket.

Very cool. But I’m still using my old microphone. 

I like it. It doesn’t crash, freeze, run out of battery or make me feel faintly ridiculous when I’m holding it under someone’s nose (try interviewing someone with a phone and you’ll see what I mean). But that’s not really why I prefer it.

With modern technology nowadays, we can all be reporters. I like my BBC microphone because it makes me feel like one.

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October's edition of Surrey Life is on sale now, at £3.15 a snip. You can find some of my previous columns below:

August 2012 - on the Olympics

July 2012 - on being on holiday with three small children

June 2012 - on joining a gym

May 2012 - on making live radio

April 2012 - on being ill

How I got to write a column for Surrey Life magazine