Radio Nowhere

I am a radio man.

As a smallish boy, I listened to Radio Luxembourg, an English speaking commercial station.  

I listened mostly at night, tucked up in bed, with the sound swishing and sometimes disappearing altogether.  It was pretty well the only place I could hear Pop Music.

The BBC, prior to 1968, had the Light Programme (a sort of Radio 2 for Octogenarians), the Third Programme (Radio 3, basically) and the Home Service (Radio 4).  For anyone who wanted to listen to anything other than music from the shows or band music, there were the Pirates (until Harold Wilson got rid of them) and Radio Luxembourg.

1968 changed all that, giving us Radio 1.  Tony Blackburn played us the music of the time and it was great.

Step forward to 2014 and radio has ballooned.

We now have loads of BBC national stations along with countless independent (commercial) stations theoretically competing with each other.

I do watch some television, mainly sport, but radio is my favourite media outlet.

I listen to BBC Radio 2, Five Live and 6 Music at various and varying times.

Commercial radio holds no interest for me.

They all sound exactly the same, playing the same dreary generic music on an endless loop.

The presenters are almost all bland and accent free.

I did use to listen to local BBC radio in the form of BBC Radio Bristol but even that has become a trial.  Allow me to give my view as to why.

I came late to Radio Bristol.

I listened to some of its great presenters like John Turner who was, for a time, the voice of radio in our area.  Similarly, Keith Warmington, the Cornish schoolteacher/musician and the greatest political interviewer at the station was a must in the drive time slot. And Roger Bennett, the doyen of the breakfast show, Morning West.

Alas, none of these presenters are with us on the radio anymore, and sadly Roger Bennett is no longer with us at all.  And Radio Bristol suffers horribly.

The daytime schedule clunks along miserably with square pegs in round holes and some pegs which shouldn't be there at all.

The amiable breakfast show host Steve Le Fevre would be far better in a  relaxed afternoon slot, the mid morning presenter John Darvall's show is as dull as ditchwater, dear old Steve Yabsley continues with his madcap mirth and an afternoon show with Laura Rawlings specialises in D list celebs.

Only when the excellent Geoff Twentyman comes on at 4.00pm do we hear what a professional broadcaster is meant to sound like.

The weekend is the same with just Ali Vowles excellent Breakfast Show on a Saturday and, yes, Geoff Twentyman again (thank god) and generic rubbish, a three hour medical show, two amateur women (who unaccountably won a Bronze radio award) and wall-to-wall dross on a Sunday.

And guess what?  No one's listening.

Well, that's not entirely true. With listening figures tumbling through the floor, at least there is a healthy audience of pensioners, catered for perfectly with some of the oldest music on radio - a bit of a throwback to the Light Programme, really. 

I ask myself: what does Radio Bristol do that it's commercial rivals can't and don't?

The first answer is sport which continues to be excellent under the new editorship of Richard Hoskin and the vital involvement of Geoff Twentyman.  Apart from that?

Formulaic music, generic presenters (and endless stand-ins) and nothing that makes it sound like a local station.

I can't understand for the life of me how managing editor Tim Pemberton is still in a job.

On his watch, the reach of listeners has bombed, the quality of programmes and presenters has done likewise and it sounds like Radio Anywhere.

As I pay my TV license I feel I am entitled to at least something to listen to but as things stand there's nothing.

My grand plan for Radio Bristol is as follows:

Put Ali Vowles on the Breakfast Show
Bring in younger, fresher presenters who are local and understand the area
Have a more adventurous music playlist - don't just cater for the over 70s
Have a harder news show at lunchtime
Scrap the D list celeb nonsense in the afternoon
Have a Soccer AM type sports show on a Saturday morning, presented by local talent - there's loads of it out there, don't bring in some journeyman from Hereford and Worcester.

Oh that's just a start.

I haven't charged for my advice but I am open to offers.

Radio Bristol used to have something going for it but now it's just going nowhere.

Thoughts of a son of immigrants

I wake up to the sight of UKIP leader Nigel Farage's gurning face on my Guardian, his one man band political party having topped the Euro elections.

And I read about France, which has lurched alarmingly to the right, embracing an openly fascist party.

How did it come to this?

A recent poll of UKIP supporters found 51% of them felt immigrants should be helped to return to their countries of birth, plus their families even if they were born here.

If enacted into law, this would have issues for quite a few people including me.

My grandfather on my dad's side came to England from Norway.  He was too young to fight in World War 1 and too old to fight in World War 2 but during the latter he helped enforce the nightly black outs in Bristol, walking the streets as the deadly Luftwaffe bombed the city below.

My dad joined the Merchant Navy at 15, joining the Atlantic convoys who helped feed the British people, dodging the U boats.  

Some years after the war, my father met my mother in Rotterdam.

My mother's family lost three homes during World War 2 and all their possessions several times over.

In the 1950s, she married my father and moved to Britain where she stayed for the rest of her life.

No one in my family ever claimed benefits - in fact my grandfather worked well into his late seventies. 

They're all dead now but the fact remains that I am the son of people who came to this country. And in the eyes of many UKIP supporters, I should be repatriated.  Should it be to Norway, where I have never been, or the Netherlands?  And should my own children be 'sent back' too?  Where does the line of immigration end?

Obviously, I don't know what the reaction of neighbours was when Alfred Johansen arrived from Norway.  Were they concerned he would take their job or bring with him his own Scandinavian culture?  If his new neighbours had been an early version of the Farages, would they have protested and made racist comments about him?

Or when Neeltje Verburg arrived from the Netherlands.  Did they really want her sort in their neighbourhood, even though she spoke near perfect English?  And what if she started breeding?

We live, so say, in enlightened times but just how enlightened are they really?

Britain has returned MEPs who support the break up of the NHS, the return of grammar schools, who want to double defence spending, to ensure the very richest are taxed at the same rate of the very poorest and who blame nearly all our problems on foreigners (the main UKIP issue).

Whilst UKIP represents the hopefully temporary triumph of hate over hope, it is currently a step too far to compare them with openly fascist parties, but only a step.

At times of high unemployment and austerity political extremists gain support because of fear.  Look at the rise of the German Nazis for example and the National Front here in the UK before Thatcher came along and stole their clothes.  And now the rise of UKIP has effectively destroyed the fascist BNP.

Laughably, Farage presents himself as somehow anti-establishment,  as befits a privately educated former city trader.  The beer-swilling, cigarette-smoking man-of-the-people image he presents is a million miles away from the reality.

The media, and in particular, the BBC has a lot to answer for here, embracing as it has personality politics, ignoring it's public service ethic.

Papers like the Daily Mail present politics as they present Britain, where everything is broken and nothing works and we're being engulfed by benefit-scrounging foreigners. 

UKIP feeds from this discontent like flies on a cow pat and in a country and a world which has suffered terribly since Farage's friends in the city establishment almost destroyed our economy people reach for simplistic alternatives and someone to blame.

In my view, the political parties need to react positively to what is happening.

Cameron's Tories will, I am sure, react by moving to the right and by saying all the 'right' things on immigration to, as they will see it, appease those who have moved to UKIP.

The parties of the centre and centre left need to argue a very different case.

The reality remains that the UK remains 89% white and we are not being swamped.

The overwhelming majority of people who come to the UK do so to work, just like the overwhelming majority of Brits who go to Europe.

Someone needs to make the case that it benefits all of us to have an internationalist attitude and that pulling up the drawbridge now will be self-defeating.

Yes, UKIP's 'victory' was where two out of three people didn't bother to vote and seven out of 10 who did vote did not vote UKIP.

We really do need hope, not hate, and whilst hate has won this time we need people will positive ideas and vision to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The Gas are going down

Bristol Rovers got relegated today.  How can this be?

I fell out of love with the club back in 2006 when all manner of things happened.  The one that pained me most was when the Evening Post sent a junior report to tell me that I was to be removed from a weekly football column I shared with a close friend.  He intimated that pressure had been exerted by the club but would not be more specific than that.  It took me years to find out the real story, which even now I cannot relate because of the fear of those who are litigious in nature.

The upshot is that for as long as I can remember, the club has been in a mess.  Not just on the pitch but off it.  I felt that Bristol Rovers, with its sizeable fan base, should be in a much better place than it was.  And I felt that, with the right amount of will, it could be achieved.  

Move forward to today and Bristol Rovers now find themselves in the Conference.  How can this have happened?

I have, for some time, argued that the club needs to have a long term plan, that it must stop spending money it doesn't have, that supporters should have a greater running in the way the club is run.

On the first point, it could be that the club really does have a long term plan.  The problem could be that they have not been entirely successful in telling supporters what this plan is.  All we see is a football club that bumbles along from one crisis to another.  There was always a fear that one day the club's luck might run it.  Today it did.

The second point it trickier.  A senior official once told me it was impossible to run the club on a break even or better basis and that it would always, in effect, need to be propped up by directors.  And there is merit in this.  Supporters want success and are not generally bothered what it costs, as long as someone pays for it.  This is all very well but sometime you reach a stage when the debts overwhelm you and the wolf comes to the door.  You would not run your home or your own business on this basis so why run your football club like it?

Finally, supporter representation.  We have tried a variety of ways of involving supporters in the running of the club.  Sadly, we have ended up with a situation where two men with no previous history of involvement at the club have found themselves on the board courtesy of supporters donating a million quid to the club and have not the faintest idea how to represent them at all. Or maybe I should say they don't have the faintest interest in representing supporters?  Yes, I should.

There were grown men crying on Radio Bristol tonight and even the manager sounded like he was in tears.  But when the chairman was interviewed he kept saying, over and over again, that you need to take the emotion out of making decisions.  Really?

Take emotion out of football and what do you have left?  Emotion alone should not lead to poor decisions, it could if used correctly enhance them.

The chairman has already said, within an hour of relegation, that next season the club would have the top playing budget in the division and that Darrell Clarke would still be the manager. Does that mean the board was already planning for life outside the football league or did he make his comment based on emotion?  Can't have it all ways.

I know what I'd do at the club but I've given up trying to tell people.  It could be that my ideas, and those of others will far more knowledge and ability than I, won't work but they have to be better than what we have at the moment, don't they?

It shouldn't be my way or the highway at the Rovers but that's been the effective, or rather ineffective, mantra from the last 20 years and I don't see it changing.

It's very, very sad but if people really do want something different and something better, then writing a few things on a minor internet message board will not be enough.

None of us who were there before and failed to persuade people of our ideas will be trying again.

So if you want to change things at Rovers, good luck.   I won't be with you in your efforts, not even in spirit because I think you will be wasting your time and you will end up as cynical, disillusioned and defeated as I am.

David Moyes

So, David Moyes is sacked after a mere 10 months in charge of Manchester United. 

I’ve been listening to BBC Radio Five Live all morning and most people seem to support the decision.  Manchester United supporters have, in the main, been scathing about the fact that their team is unlikely to finish in the top four, as is it’s divine right.  The football has been boring – it’s not the way we play.  And the tactics?  Well!

Even worse has been ‘The Big Club’ card.  Moyes might have been okay for a little club like Everton, went the mantra, but he was out of his depth at the biggest club in the world.  I don’t know how more patronising some people could have been.

Apart from the spiky broadcaster Terry Christian, there was little criticism of the Glaser family whose debt fuelled purchase of the club has seen £800m spirited away to meet interest payments.

United’s decline is entirely down to David Moyes.  He had to go?

This outsider suggests he did fail but not in the ways described by some.

Since the new owners came in, Manchester United are no longer big spenders and their outlay is similar to that of Stoke City.  In this final season Sir Alex Ferguson created a near miracle winning the league with an ageing and declining team. And a team that had not enjoyed much in the way of spending on it.

Moyes had a shopping list of players last summer but the new CEO Ed Woodward failed to sign any of them, apart from Fellaini for a grossly inflated £27m.

The signs of decline, noticeable under Sir Alex, were writ large under Moyes and it was obvious long before today that he would not be manager for the long term.

In the most crass way possible, ‘sources close to the club’ started briefing journalists that Moyes was to be axed and these rumours were not emphatically denied by the owners.  (In politics, ‘sources close to the minister’ are usually ministers themselves, so draw your own conclusions as to who these sources were.)

And now he’s gone and the airwaves are clogged up with chatter and prattle.

Moyes was a cheap option, as he had proved at Everton over a very long period of time but they didn’t give him long enough to see if he could do it at Old Trafford.

This was a sacking about money and the fear of having less of it by owners who run the club as a cash cow.

I cannot see the new manager being handed a fortune to revamp the squad but even if he was what would it prove?  It certainly wouldn’t guarantee anything, that’s for sure.

So many of the fans seem not to look beyond what happens on the pitch.  That’s normal at most clubs.  But what happens in the boardroom does directly impact on everything that happens at the club.

And what’s happening with the board at Manchester United is why things are going wrong on the pitch.

I can understand, from personal experience, why it’s easier to just watch the football and ignore everything that goes on off the pitch but if you do that you have to accept you have less right to criticise what happens on it.

Suicide isn't painless

There have been times in my life when I have thought, ‘Is it worth it?’

I have always managed to convince myself that, on balance, it is worth it.

I have had fleeting thoughts, no more than that, of ending it all but more often visions of just walking off into the sunset to do something, nothing, else.

The latter, being the more sensible choice, is no kind of choice at all because I soon realise the practical consequences of not having anywhere to live or anything to eat or wear.

That confirms to me that I am not desperate or sick enough to walk away from life in general and my life in particular.

Others are not so lucky.

Sadly, I have known a good few people who have ended their own lives.  Having given it some thought, there is a frighteningly large number of people I have known, or have come across, who have felt there was no alternative but to end it all.

People I went to school with, the children of the people I went to school with (in one instance, the same family), people I worked with and a few others too.  And in all bar one instance they seemed to be those with the most to live for and the last people you’d expect to kill themselves.

These things have stuck with me.

Life has a lot wrong with it and there have been long and frequent periods of mine where I have wondered what it was all about.  But something always told me that there was something worth hanging on for but I’ll accept there were times when it got close.  Despair was not total, though.

I am not an expert on suicide but my guess is that there are numerous reasons why someone would take their lives.

Mental illness is surely one.  The grey dog of depression, along with all manner of other debilitating conditions, takes away rationality.  As the illness is not taken seriously by society, little is done for those with low to middling mental health issues and only slightly more for those with crippling conditions.

And the society in which we live is another.  We still live in the stone age when it comes to sexuality and bigotry remains institutionalised.  It is still seen as something important when someone ‘comes out’, which I find incredible.  (I remember a friend’s son announced he was gay and a well-meaning person said, ‘I’ll bet you were disappointed to find that out!’)

And there are those which we will never know.

A friend of mine, many years ago, threw himself in the River Thames and drowned.  A brilliantly talented musician, very good looking and not a care in the world.  Two out of three, anyway.

We don’t need platitudes and statements of regret from the people who run our country, we need solutions and answers.

No one should feel that their life was worthless and meaningless enough to end it all.  Often I feel mine is both but there is enough hanging on for, isn’t there?

Investment in mental health services, general accessible 24 hour counselling available for nothing paid for by the taxpayer are both essentials if we think life is about more than just money.

Sadly, our society still remains rooted in the quagmire of Thatcherism where greed is good and sod everyone else as long as you are okay and the current Conservative government, enabled and assisted by the principle-free Liberal Democrats, makes things worse by the day.

One person who takes their own life is too many but sadly the powers-that-be talk sympathetically, but rely on society forgetting about it shortly afterwards.

The killing depressive?

Another day, another fatal shooting incident in America, this time with a soldier suffering from anxiety and depression.

The local mayor was on BBC Radio Five Live expressing his understandable shock and distress at this terrible tragedy, adding that he did not know what you could do to avoid these things happening in future.

Well, I’ve got an idea, hardly a new one: sensible gun controls!  But in the land of the free, it’s everyone’s inalienable right to possess something that can kill you.

President Obama’s sigh-ridden response said as much but he can’t just come out with it.

Also disturbing to me was the reference, without qualification, that the alleged killer was suffering from anxiety and depression.

The suggestion, quite plain to my sensitive ears, was that mental illness was the reason this man killed people before turning the gun on himself.

Lazy, lazy reporting.

I would say we have come a long way in this country in trying to unstigmatise (is there such a word?) mental illness.

A good number of famous people, like Alastair Campbell, Stephen Fry and Marcus Trescothick have stepped forward to reveal their personal lives.  And the effect has been positive on all of us non celebrities who have ploughed on regardless in a world that doesn’t recognise mental illness and mostly doesn’t care.

I hope today’s latest horrific and tragic murder is reported more sensitively than the BBC have so far managed today.

To me, their reporting was put together by a thoughtless editor and producer who ran the item without thinking it through.

Whatever happened, I found it profoundly depressing (literally) to listen to.

Would this man have killed without his mental illness?  Was it the illness that caused him to kill? Or was it the causes of his illness that caused him to kill? 

It’s never as simple as it seems, unless you work for the BBC.

It's next month, already!

My ‘retirement’ from the Civil Service is now next month, rather than at some vague specified date deep into the future.

Having been with the same employer for over 39 years, this is undoubtedly somewhat daunting.

For instance, I have to carry on working in some way, shape or form.  My pension is nothing to scoff at but it won’t be enough for me to continue to lead my current modest lifestyle.

So am I ready to retire?

Not in the perceived way of doing these things where I have always envisioned retirement as being a greying, bespectacled man in cardigan, slacks and slippers sipping tea from a cup and saucer, sat in an armchair.

I’ve never seen me doing this, mind you, because I never really planned in my mind for a time I wouldn’t be doing this.

There are certainly some priorities.

The first one, and this will become more pressing as time goes by, is getting a job.

I have a fair idea of the application process although the interview may be a little trickier given that I have spent much of my life being the interviewer.

I will need to find something that’s bearably interesting too, as well as being able to offer me more time off than I get now.  The last thing I want is to be working the same number of hours in order to earn the same money (or less).

In an ideal world, I would like to carry on exactly as I do now, albeit without the work bit.  More golf, walking, cycling, reading and writing.  Hopefully a good lottery win – a few hundred grand is all I ask for – can more than make up the difference!

Whatever happens, it’s beginning to hit me now.

I’m almost out of the door now and, frankly, I cannot wait.