BBC Radio WM

Balls

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Dear Diary, I am 57 years old and I have just watched a football match for the first time. “Dear William,” replies Diary, “you were eating chocolate cake at a Royal Television Society awards dinner while they played some match on screens that you didn’t look at. It doesn’t count.”

So it remains that my only experience of football is the first bit of a game at some ground where a team played another team and as I walked in, the entire crowd sensed my expertise and turned to me like a wall. As soon as I was done with whatever radio work I was doing, I turned away from them and escaped.

I do wonder if I’m missing out by having this total absence of sport. During that RTS dinner, a waitress standing behind me yelped – actually yelped – with excitement at whatever was happening on the screen. I asked her what I’d missed, she explained and I understood, I just didn’t feel it. I was excited meeting Ellie Simmonds at the dinner, but while I wouldn’t say this to her, I was thinking yeah, yeah, sport, amazing, now what about Strictly Come Dancing?

It’s possible I did say that.

It was not the longest conversation I’ve ever had, but it was work. My wife Angela Gallagher and I were tasked with briefing each of the presenters at the awards, which took six to ten seconds per person, then fetching them from their tables when they were needed to get ready. It was probably a total of twenty minutes spread out over the evening, but it was work and so it was bliss. A really gorgeous dinner, a really great crowd, and instead of sitting there at a table all evening, I got to run around the whole place in a tuxedo. Since I believe fervently that it is better to be crew than passenger, it was wonderful.

And I got to see Angela at work. I can’t explain this, but given a task, Angela switched from dinner guest to a kind of producer-mode. It was like a light switch had been thrown and seeing her in action, even on the same task I was doing right there with her, even in this smallest part we were of the event, it was fantastic.

It also wasn’t sport and when you and I started today, I’d intended to tell you a sports story in which I sound like an idiot. Let me see if I can turn that around at all.

Follow. It’s some time in the 1980s or 1990s, it’s a Saturday or possibly a Sunday, and I’m working at BBC Radio WM for a man who actually scared me but I can’t remember his name. It’s possible that I am not as scarred by this event as I thought. But at the time, as much as I love radio work, I would head for BBC Pebble Mill with a stone in my stomach, I was so afraid of all I had to do. Looking back, I think that’s close to laughable because I was as ever the smallest cog in something, but radio requires constant concentration, minute by minute and sometimes second by second focus, for hours.

Quick side story. At this time I was spending my week writing manuals for some corporation or other. And I remember the contrast used to tickle me. In their office, there would be discussions about how tight some deadline was, and that deadline would be four months away. At BBC Pebble Mill, the deadline would more typically be the length of time it takes to open a fader, to slide a control up and take a microphone live. Both deadlines were real, both entirely valid, but the contrast delighted me. Plus I remember standing with a woman who mentioned how it had been raining when we left the office the previous evening and to me, having then done a shift on an evening newspaper, then a breakfast show spell on a radio station and then a day writing manuals, the previous evening felt like a century ago.

Anyway. I’m just putting things off now.

On this particularly memorable Saturday or Sunday in the 1980s or 1990s, I was driving the desk for a sports show and for the first time, I was on my own. There was a lot of this sports stuff going on and so much so, all of it apparently so crucial that the presenter who scared me was out at one of the games or matches or whatever they’re called in whichever sport it was. Tell me I’m not detail-orientated.

That presenter was the producer and via talkback from whatever ground – that’s the word, ground – he was at, he was still producing, but I was the central small cog. My job was primarily to switch between that presenter here and this reporter there, to switch over to the news, I don’t know, lots of different sources and I was the one putting them to air. I love this work and I still think an old Mark III BBC Local Radio desk is a thing of wooden beauty.

All is going well. But then even though every possible presenter was out reporting live from every possible venue — maybe that’s the word — there was also other sport going on around the world and some of it was apparently significant. So another job I had was to tell this scary presenter what the latest results from them all were. This was before anything useful like the internet or mobile phones existed, there was then no way for this presenter to know any of these other results if I didn’t tell him over talkback.

And there was no way for me to know the results either, except that like every station and every newspaper, we had a TV with Ceefax on. I would later write for Ceefax and relish it, but right then it was just this thing that showed me sports results.

Including what turned out to be a world-record-breaking cricket score.

I must’ve read out more than a dozen scores down the line to the scary presenter and he would then casually slip them in to his on-air commentary as if he were hardwired into sport everywhere. He was scary, but I think he was very good, too. Until the time came when I read out this world-record-breaking score and he did not know what to do.

It was such a big score, I mean, it broke a world record. And he was hearing it from me. Only from me. You’re on his side now, or you certainly should be, because even I wouldn’t trust that I was reading a score correctly. On that day, whenever it was, BBC Radio WM became the very last place to report on a world record in cricket, and BBC Radio WM was the only place to say live on air that they didn’t trust the eejit back at the studio.

I was that eejit. And as it turned out, I was completely accurate and correct: I could not explain to you what the score meant, but I was reading it entirely correctly.

Yeah, no, even I was and still am on the side of that scary presenter in this one.

Ten seconds and one hundred years of the BBC

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Some time in the 1980s, I was working on the BBC Radio WM breakfast show and there must’ve been some news thing going on about Doctor Who. I can’t remember what it was, but I can very clearly picture me in what was called Area 3 at BBC Pebble Mill, working the phones – and at about 07:00 phoning Doctor Who writer Johnny Byrne to get his reaction.

His reaction was that he had been asleep and was extremely unhappy at me for waking him. And I think that actually ended the conversation we’d been slowly having through letters after I’d written to him enthusing about his script for The Keeper of Traken.

(Just as an aside, I finally got to read that Doctor Who script of his in August. This year. Specifically August 26, 2022, where episode 1 was the 335th script I’d read this year. And August 26 is 41 years, 6 months and 26 days after the show aired. It took me 15,182 days to get to read the script whose finished show I’d so enjoyed. And I have got to stop using WolframAlpha to tell me these things.)

Anyway.

On Tuesday this week, I was called up by BBC Radio Leicester and BBC CWR to talk about the 100 years of the BBC. I was better on the Leicester one, but what strikes me is that this BBC phone interview was at about 07:30. It was arranged in advance, plus I’d been up working for hours anyway, yet still I had this moment of quantum-entanglement-like connection with distant me phoning Johnny Bryne all those years ago.

And to me, the real answer about the best moments of the BBC’s 100 years, was in the moments before I went on air. I’m prepared, I believe I’m professional, and I like how I will have been listening to the show for an hour beforehand and so can pick up on related points. But when I’m on the line waiting, I can also feel the atmosphere that’s in the studio and in whatever their equivalent of Area 3 is.

You know when you work in local radio that it’s not national, it’s not global, and it is transitory. Yet you also feel that it is important, even if it’s only that it’s important to you. I got my lifetime belief that the show comes first from working in local radio, I got my whole sense of time as something to fill and use with pace and rhythm from it, to this day I think about the top and the bottom of the hour because of radio. I cared about that work so overwhelmingly much that there could be no other thought about no other thing while you were doing it.

In the seconds talking with a producer before she put me to air, in those ten seconds, I could hear the exact same care in her voice. I recognise what she’s asking me about is really her checking sound levels, listening for the line quality and being sure I’m not a nutter, I recognise the procedure but more than that, I recognise the atmosphere of the entire studio.

I can point out that today the BBC bows to political pressure like its being bullied in a schoolyard. I can despair at how it always reports strikes by focusing on disruption instead of the desperation that strikers have been driven to. And I could cry about the whole thing of artificial balance, where the BBC won’t have an economics expert say Brexit is going to be bad without then giving equal time and weight to a tosser lying that it will be great.

But those few seconds before I was on air talking about how great the BBC truly has been over the last century, those few seconds reminded me of exactly why the BBC truly has been great.

My contribution to the BBC is barely a single pixel in that century, but the BBC’s contribution to me is life changing.

It’s sobering to now be someone being phoned by BBC Local Radio instead of being one of the people doing the phoning. It’s sobering because I don’t know how that happened, it feels like I was just there making those calls a few days ago, and I think that maybe I miss the me from those years ago. Not sure. I don’t want to go back, but for a brief instant to be handed a slice of what used to be, and to somehow get to represent the whole BBC for one moment, was special.