Radio

On the day of the Royal Wedding last April I found myself working first thing in the morning, covering for absent colleagues who had elected to take the bonus Bank Holiday off. As well as affording me the chance to witness the normally unlikely spectacle of the South Bank of London virtually devoid of people at 10am, it meant I arrived back home mid-way through the ceremonies. As expected my wife and mother-in-law were both watching events on television. On Sky News.

They are both foreign you see, so to them the most natural assumption was that such a newsworthy event would be on a news channel. Being British myself, I quickly put them straight and flicked over the cable box to BBC One HD where it remained for the rest of the day. For virtually anyone of my upbringing this was the only place to watch an event of this significance. No matter that the view the following day was that ITV’s coverage was usually superior, the BBC was an automatic choice.

Hence there is a strange irony in the fact that I’ve spent the last seven weeks (and last weekend in particular) heavily involved in broadcasts that many would normally expect to find on the BBC, and yet due to the modern era of rights issues were confined exclusively to commercial networks. The events covered two sports – Rugby Union and Football – and the differing attitudes between the audiences for both sports was a subject of endless fascination.

Let me start by reflecting that the past seven weeks being at the heart of radio coverage of the Rugby World Cup will long rank as one of the most exciting privileges of my career. Right from the start, the sense of event we gave the competition on air, and the reception the coverage received made it plain we were involved in something rather special and were providing a service and entertainment to an audience who were appreciating it enormously. Granted it is sometimes possible for your spirit to waver when you are rising from bed at 5am in order to travel to work to broadcast Tonga v Japan commentary to a small online audience, but somehow we powered through. We had demonstrated a commitment to the tournament and a willingness to devote airtime that no other domestic broadcaster of the event had done before. Perhaps best of all it wasn’t on the BBC.

Part of the fun, particularly for the big games such as England v Scotland was to scan online reaction and in the first instance reflect on the bemusement of people turning their radios on to listen and expressing confusion that they were not hearing the commentary where they would expect it. There was an inbuilt assumption that the coverage could be found on the BBC, and no matter how much pre-publicity had been circulated about the correct channel to tune into, some were left wondering if radio had chosen to ignore the matches completely. The BBC can and indeed should take some pride in noting that for many there is an automatic assumption that an event of major sporting significance will be broadcast in some form across their networks, even if modern day circumstances mean this is less and less likely to be the case.

Once the Rugby loving audience had located the correct channel for the coverage they all appeared to be extremely satisfied with what they heard. What helped was not only the quality of the on-air personnel we had assembled to cover the matches (big names such as John Taylor, Brian Moore and David Campese) but strangely enough also the high degree of criticism levelled at the ITV television coverage which seemed to be judged as rather poor by a large number of people. Not having watched much of the TV coverage myself, I’m in no position to judge, but a great deal of the social networking traffic during the matches, and indeed the comments we received directly in the studio, were of the nature of “the TV coverage is rubbish, I’ve turned the sound down and put the radio on instead – far better”. For what is supposedly the ‘inferior’ medium of radio this is high praise indeed.

Compare this attitude then with that of football fans, not the ones for whom consumption of sporting debate around the matches is a habitual part of their appreciation of the games, but instead those concerned solely with the actuality of the matches. The ones who tune in for the coverage, wherever they can find it. Over the last season and a half I’ve been privileged to be at the helm for something unique in modern day broadcasting history – huge high profile Premier League matches which have been wrenched from the bosom of the BBC and handed instead exclusively to a commercial radio network, and in the process it seems taking some of these radio listeners well and truly out of their comfort zone.

A perfect example of this came on the same day as the Rugby World Cup Final when talkSPORT followed its exclusive coverage of the Kiwi victory with the exclusive national radio commentary of Manchester United v Manchester City – a must-consume match for even the neutral fan. By keeping half an eye on message boards and on social networking sites, it was possible to trace a graceful arc of discovery amongst those who had still not cottoned on that the Sunday lunchtime games were not where they might expect.

Reactions ranged from anger at the way the BBC had “chosen” to ignore what was surely such a high profile game (presuming incompetence on the part of their controllers until put straight on the matter) through once more some astonished puzzlement as to where they might find the commentary given that it wasn’t on the BBC as they had expected, right the way up to indignant anger that such an important event was not on the BBC and was thus being soiled (as they saw it) by a commercial network.

It is the latter category of listener, or should that be commenter, which to me is the most fascinating of all. There were people genuinely incensed that the game was on the “wrong” channel, wondering if there was some kind of law which would ban commercial radio from taking the relevant rights. People half-seriously complained of having to lower themselves to tune elsewhere, as if moving over the commercial world was somehow rather dirty with some extremists announcing that they point blank refused to tune in to a radio station which was not their regular choice and would instead be “forced” to follow the match through live text updates.

I was reminded of the tales older friends of mine spin of the early days of commercial television, where in some circles (and in an attitude which was by no means confined to one particular social class), the newly forged ITV was seen as the grubby inferior. Programmes on the alternative channel were to be avoided at all costs, with tales abounding of some homes refusing to perform the necessary retuning of their sets. ITV they said, was not something we would choose to have in our homes.

Such attitudes these days seem quaint, antediluvian even, especially in this modern multi-channel age. Nobody would seriously admit to avoiding all programming except that of the BBC without inviting ridicule. Yet amongst radio listeners it seems this tribalism, this unswerving brand loyalty is still prevalent.

Maybe it is just a hard core of nutters, and football fans in particular  – given that as we saw above this attitude simply did not exist amongst the Rugby Union crown – who are so dogmatic in their choice of radio listening. Goodness knows how any of them would cope in a market such as America where radio rights for teams are traded back and forth between competing radio stations in a local market, each hoping for the edge over their competition which it will give them. Never mind, given that the big Manchester derby turned out to be one of the greatest matches ever, as City’s sixth goal slid into the net, I found myself wondering just how many of the refuseniks had succumbed to temptation and tuned in anyway. Who knows, they may even have enjoyed what they found. Wouldn’t that have been a scandal?

My father was always going to speak at conferences, as I recall. Or at least attend them. Several times a year he would announce he would be away at some mysterious location for a night or two, leaving my sister and I to run our mother ragged until he returned home with what we always hoped was a present to compensate us for his absence from our lives.

I think the first radio conference I ever attended was a student radio one sometime in 1992, the highlight of which turned out to be a talk from a big burly man from the local BBC station who had a rather unfortunate Robin Williams fixation but who bellowed enough anecdotes to make me utterly convinced that his job was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and who left me dreaming of the day that I’d one day get to express that same enthusiasm to other bright eyed industry hopefuls.

Even as a grown adult though, most conferences are for the big guys – the bosses and management. For people whose lives appear to revolve around summoning people for meetings they are surely the equivalent of an ice-cream sundae. A huge auditorium sized meeting for people who like to have meetings.

So I’ve never actually been to one in any of the jobs I’d had. Until this week, when the best £99 I’d spent on the credit card all summer meant I was in the audience for nextrad.io. This, stated the organisers, was a conference for the people at the coalface. A chance for the ordinary people in radio to be treated to a series of talks by some of the most enthusiastic people in radio. Thursday morning saw myself and a 100 or so other nervous looking radio presenters/producers etc. from all over the country eyeing each other up diffidently over coffee before assembling in the intimate surroundings of the main theatre at the Magic Circle for the first of the day’s series of mini-lectures.

This being the 21st century and most of the attendees being geeks of one form or another, tapping away on laptops and tweeting the proceedings was more or less de-rigueur, leading at one stage to the hashtag #nextradio trending nationwide, presumably to the bafflement of most casual observers up and down the land. I took time out to be personally more amused by the fact that the theatre afforded no place from which to source power and speculated that most people would have run out of battery juice by lunchtime, which proved indeed to be the case. I have to confess I did spend the first half an hour trying to figure out the wireless password for the venue, tweeting my frustrations from my phone. This prompted host and organiser James Cridland to announce for my direct benefit that it was printed inside the programme which I clearly hadn’t read. Naturally I hadn’t, I was too busy staring at people diffidently over coffee as we arrived. Nonetheless this did mean that I not only now knew where to look for the crucial information but having had my name announced on stage was thus briefly the most important and high profile member of the audience. I’d call that a result.

The “less is more” policy of the organisers in timing the length of the talks given meant we zipped through a wide range of speakers, virtually all of whom had something interesting, relevant and thought-provoking to say, and it is worth dealing with some of the more notable ones.

The morning started with Matt Edmondson and his producer colleague from Radio One, waxing lyrical about the one hour show they put together on Wednesday evenings and how they take great care to expand the show beyond its broadcast horizons with as many multimedia elements as possible, such as comedy interviews with celebrities which populate the show’s website. I didn’t want to spend the entire day taking a cynical approach to everything but I did find myself questioning just how “new” a comedy show with every link carefully scripted in advance actually was and the way the pair boasted about how the show was an intimate club crammed with lots of running gags that you have to listen regularly to get made me wonder just how inclusive a listening experience it actually was. But I’m not their target market, so go figure.

They were followed by a short ten minute chat from Nik Goodman who played some creative ideas lifted from radio stations around the world to demonstrate there should be no boundaries to a good idea. The climax of his talk was the playing of Jacksonville, FL DJ Gregg Stepp apparently quitting live on air and walking out of his show on WFYV-FM after learning he was to be fired at the end of the week. The incident from October 2008 is now a famous radio moment, although I’m not sure most people in the room with me grasped that the whole thing was a stunt, dreamed up by the radio station itself in order to drum up publicity, the presenter in question having resigned several weeks earlier to take up another job elsewhere. Nonetheless the incident stands proud as a fine example of how to make an impact by making people wonder if they really were supposed to have heard what they did.

This is a SPOOF people. It wasn’t for real.

The legendary Trevor Dann gave a short presentation on the use of archive material, playing some famous radio moments from the past and bemoaning the way most radio is thrown away and forgotten the moment that it is broadcast. The BBC have their own archives but are apparently planning to open their doors to anyone who happens to have old broadcast tapes – causing me to think back once more to my cupboard full of Top 40 tapes and whether it will end up being worth anything to anyone one day. Maybe the answer is closer than I thought:

I also noted on Twitter that talkSPORT has an extensive archive which, although it has gaps, stretches back to the 1990s, although it is only since 2008 that we’ve had ready online access to previously broadcast material and I suspect I’m one of only a couple of people in the building who knows how to work the machine that retrieves the data from the boxes full of DAT tapes which comprise the older archive. Nonetheless it can be worthwhile, as I demonstrated once when doing research on David Beckham and turned up a tape of our present boss hosting the evening show in a previous life. Discretion prevented me from circulating it around the office.

A talk from the BBCs Brett Spicer attempted to turn us on to the way social media can help grow audiences and call attention to local radio. By this he means the circulation of important clips and moments via non-broadcast mediums, citing the recent example of “Angry Melvin”, an hilarious ranting caller from BBC Three Counties earlier in the year which briefly became a national sensation. Actually it is not just local radio which can use this trick to good effect. Check out the recent attention paid to “Jonathan in Swansea”, a caller to talkSPORT’s weekend overnight presenter Matt Forde which served only to further raise the profile of the most popular host that slot has ever had. All thanks to a random YouTube upload by an interested listener. The Nazis were all hippies, remember.

I took careful note of the presentation from Francesca Panetta from The Guardian on the subject of podcasts and the wide ranging ways on demand audio is used by audiences. As a speaker who actually did not work in radio at all and who was instead charged with creating audio content to enhance a newspaper brand, it was interesting to hear her take as an outsider on the way radio deals with podcasting. It often frustrates me that so many radio station podcasts are simply re-edited highlights of already broadcast material, something which strikes me as totally self-defeating. What motivation does a listener have to tune into your output when they know the notional “best bits” are going to be served up to them later. Podcasts should be treated as mini radio broadcasts in their own right, covering topics and discussions that possibly would never find a home on a radio schedule. Certainly that is the approach I take with my own podcast, one which has been a labour of love on and off for three and a half years now. It makes me no money and with downloads in the hundreds rather than the thousands is hardly helping me broadcast to the vast audiences I can achieve on a “real” radio station. Nonetheless, nobody is likely to invite me to broadcast a weekly show about chart news, but the podcast gives me the freedom to exercise the creativity the way I want to. If people are entertained by it and my reputation is enhanced as a result – that’s just a nice bonus.

Just after midday at nextrad.io came the moment I, and my two other colleagues in the audience, had been waiting for as our own boss took to the stage to reveal the secrets of how he added a million listeners in a year. Having been subject to these kind of inspirational talks by him at programming meetings for well over three years now it was fascinating to see the reaction of everyone else in the room as he talked up the success of our station and the reasons why we go from strength to strength. As a former actor, I always think he knows only too well the power of delivery and how to make the most of an oratory. That’s how he makes most of us want to give our all to him each day at work, and by the end you got the feeling half the room were prepared to as well.

The most interesting talk straight after the lunch buffet (during the course of which incidentally, the crudites and savoury dip remained untouched, revealing more than planned about the people in attendance I felt) was that given by Steve Ackerman. He is a brilliant, well regarded man who runs independent production house Somethin’ Else and whose building I’ve visited on a number of occasions as a contributor to documentaries they have been making. His talk wasn’t about broadcast radio at all but instead showing how his company had used radio drama techniques to create a series of audio-focused mobile games to benefit clients such as Wrigleys. It was during the course of this talk that I ended up in a heated twitter discussion with another member of the audience as I noted with some frustration that the innovative and fascinating applications being talked about were confined to the iPhone platform. I pointed out that as I didn’t own one and was unlikely ever to do so, I was never going to be exposed to the brands being thus assisted. Plenty of people in the industry (and indeed earlier on at the conference) bang on about how radio in the future is platform agnostic and how the listener should not have to care about the medium of delivery. If that is the case, why not this particular branded content too? My online correspondent wondered if ROI wasn’t the key, given that it is easier to make money from iPhone games than on other platforms. This did however raise the question as to what the purpose of creating the game was in the first place. We were told that it wasn’t there to necessarily make money (and indeed the game in question The Nightjar is a free download) but to make people aware of a brand of chewing gum. If it doesn’t work on my phone, it follows that the gum is never going to be bought. We left the issue to be chewed over, so to speak.

As the day wore on, some of the later presentations began to be a bit of a blur, perhaps an inevitable consequence of trying to cram so much in. Nonetheless my attention was grabbed once more by a talk by legendary programme director Dick Stone on the issue of show prep. As a knarled old veteran of on air work, I’d had most of what he said about internalising your content and not simply reading out loud things that are written down on more occasions that I care to count, but it was still worthwhile to be refreshed and reminded of the pitfalls of just reading out the weather forecast as it has been sent down from the met office. He also did note that offering presenters a critique of their work is vitally important and how it can actually be difficult to get through their defences. He understands why only too well, presenters having given so much of themselves on air that it is hard for them to accept criticism. If you’ve just done what you feel is the best job possible, it is a hammer blow to the ego to sit down with the boss and be told why it is rubbish, a feeling I remember only too well. If I took anything at all away from the conference, it was this lesson which I’ll remember if my career ever leads me to start running radio stations of my own.

The day wrapped up as it began with a talk from members of the Radio One interactive team. They told the story of radio’s attempts to use pictures as part of its output and climaxed with a demonstration of the exciting new Radio One website which is soon to be publicly unveiled, an exciting looking design which presents all selected content in a lightbox from the front page, removing the need for anyone ever to actually navigate from the landing page. Their talk reminded me of my own efforts to try to visualise some of the work I do, something I do with caution as it is all unofficial and my bosses sometimes frown on the drawing back of the backstage curtain that is the result. Nonetheless I’ve been known to stream our activities in the control room during major broadcasts as a Twitvid, something I’ve half a mind to do again during the Rugby World Cup.

5pm arrived and we all emerged, blinking, into the sunshine once more, thanking profoundly James Cridland and Matt Deegan for their organisational efforts before the hardier souls in the audience retired to the pub around the corner. I sloped off home, with the prospect of another early start for a Rugby broadcast looming although still with this odd feeling of euphoria. My mind wandered back to the Robin Williams impersonator from 1992 and his love for his job and his medium. There is nothing like being shoulder to shoulder with people who adore being on and working in radio, who know deep down they have the best job in the world and who armed with little more than a microphone and a voice have the ability to tap into people’s emotions and be a part of their lives like nobody else can.

That’s why if they do it all again I’ll be first in the queue for a ticket. Or maybe up on stage explaining just why I do nothing so brilliantly.

Oh yes, and I lasted the whole day online thanks to my netbook and carefully putting my phone in aeroplane mode to conserve the battery. Even the chap next to me with a Macbook only had 15 minutes of juice left by the end.

Yes, this is about work again. Deal with it, I’ll find another fixation soon.

Last night I did a terrible thing. I willed the England football team to lose. My role for the evening was producer of the show dedicated to covering England’s Euro 2012 qualifier match against Switzerland at Wembley. It was theoretically a bit of a raw deal, a programme which nobody in their right mind would actually choose to listen to. Who, aside from a few hundred ex-pats who couldn’t get internet coverage of the match anywhere else, would listen to us flip-flopping between two pundits in a studio and two more in the gantry at the stadium as we cheekily pushed the boundary of “not doing commentary” as far as we could without getting into trouble? Who indeed, given that the game was live on free network television or for those unable to be in front of a set was being carried live on another radio network.

Yet when England went 2-0 down midway through the first half, I permitted myself a smile of satisfaction. The thin dribble of tweets, texts and emails through to the studio became a trickle and then swiftly a flood. England were garbage, a huge numbers of people knew exactly what they wanted to be hearing at that moment, two blokes on talkSPORT arguing about why that should be. Far from presiding over a well meaning compromise, I was helping on air a must-listen forum for immediate reaction.

I tell the above tale of why I drifted home yesterday evening on a high, not to brag, but simply to note that I can understand completely the conclusions drawn in an article published in The Observer Magazine today, one which has been circulated far and wide during the day as a fascinating observation of just what makes this particular award-winning radio station tick.

Here Come The Boys by Carole Cadwalladr was always going to be an unusually in-depth piece after the lady who wrote it spent an entire day in the office a couple of weeks ago. Just about every single person who opened her mouth on air that day was grabbed for a quick interview, and the result is a fascinating and rather thoughtful account of what just makes the office tick, all written from the perspective of someone who would probably never consider listening to the radio station under any normal circumstances but who came away realising just what it is that makes it so popular. As many others have commented, landing in the pages of the Sunday supplements is surely the ultimate stamp of middle-class approval.

Nonetheless even the Observer journalist didn’t quite manage to resolve for herself the two issues which just about every otherwise glowing commentary of the station recently has found time to wrestle with: is it right that a radio station should proudly state it is aimed at men, and are the audience nothing more than van driving Neanderthals given all those commercials for building supplies?

“For men who love to talk sport” proclaims the header on the website, incidentally the only place the slogan is actually used but which is often seized on as the ultimate expression of its audience niche. During one particular flurry of attention we attracted a few months back, one rather angry young woman complained long and loudly online that it was “hateful” almost as if the website consisted of nothing more than a giant penis mocking her.

Here’s the truth though. Every commercial radio station in existence is aimed at one sex or the other. We just seem to be the only ones open about it. Ask anyone in advertising and they will tell you that in any average household it is the female who makes all the big purchasing decisions. Sure, it may be the man who opens his wallet, but the choice of carpets, curtains, food, entertainment, holiday destination and garden layout is dictated by the tastes of the woman. For this reason it is in the interests of music radio stations to build their audience unapologetically around the female of the species and serve her up to advertisers on a platter. When I was a presenter we were told that our show was aimed at the mother and her children and nobody else. One large London station went even further, and constructed for their presenters a profile of “Susan”, the 34 year old mother of two who was their target listener. Every word out of their mouths was to be aimed directly at her and what she might be thinking about at that time.

Naturally all these female skewed radio stations do create a rather large gap in the market, and it is one that talkSPORT unashamedly fills with great pride. Hence when the manufacturers of male grooming products, promoters of exciting action films or the producers of interesting new innovations in tyre technology want to hit their own target demographic it is to a certain sports based radio station that they turn. One whose profits in 2010 you will note were £6.4m, up 36% year on year on a turnover of £28.2m, itself a year-on-year increase (source: Media Guardian).

So that’s why the station is aimed firmly and squarely and unapologetically at the over 80% of its audience that sport Adam’s Apples. It makes them money, lots of it.

It often confuses people that when you break down the social demographics of the talkSPORT audience, the figures show that a majority are middle class ABC1 listeners, and not the “lower orders” of the C2DE that the snobs imagine form the core of the listening body. Granted the skew is a rather even 55%/45% but a majority it still is. So why then did the Observer piece take time out to note the prominent place in the advertising logs for organisations such as the Selco Builders Warehouse (a reference, incidentally, which will I can guarantee cause their marketing manager to be on the phone to his account manager at UTV Pitch to crank up his spend for the next period given that awareness of his brand has gone through the roof). Surely, the logic goes, it is only your local plumber and his mate driving around in the battered transit (insured through Budget Van Insurance no doubt and with windscreen chips and cracks fixed thanks to those nice people at Autoglass) who have even a passing interest in the best place to buy some essential building supplies.

Well yes and no. Your friendly local tradesman, quite possibly in the C2DE social bracket, is indeed in the market for some trade brand supplies. At the same time however the decidedly middle class boss of a large building firm, a self made man with an Essex mansion, swimming pool out the back garden and a Jaguar tucked away in the garage and who is most definitely ABC1 also has more than a passing interest in where to get his raw materials from. On Monday morning he may well have a meeting with his procurement manager with the aim of reducing some of their overheads in a tough market. Handily whilst driving in to work, the identity of a particular building chain has been planted in his head by a series of catchy radio commercials. Their price list may well be of interest to him as well, and he is after all in the market for 500 bags of plaster, not just a few lengths of copper tubing.

Looks like the boss of Selco Builders Warehouse has picked the perfect place to spend his marketing budget, wouldn’t you say?

Indignant posturing aside, the writer of the Observer piece did manage to neatly hit one nail perfectly on the head, noting herself at the start of the article how after spending a couple of days listening to talkSPORT she has gone from an almost total unawareness of the internal politics of West Ham, to feeling like she has been married to Avram Grant.

I had to smile. For a period last year I employed as one of my technical operators a very talented friend of mine called Talia. She’s a music freak, a great writer and the least sporty person you could meet, yet she’s also a brilliant radio person and someone I was very glad to have the chance to hire and give her a flavour of how to make speech radio. After leaving work one morning she commented on Facebook that she never thought she would see the day that she had an opinion on Wayne Rooney, but after listening to callers talking about him all night it was very hard not to.

Great minds always think alike.

Tonight is a very special night for a privileged subset of those people who work in radio – the annual Sony Radio Awards, which aim to celebrate all that is good and noteworthy about radio broadcasting. Nominees and invited guests will have assembled in the Great Room at the Grosvenor House Hotel on London’s Park Lane to be wined and dined and to subsequently applaud loudly as brightly coloured Perspex blocks are distributed to those whom the judges have deemed worthy of such an accolade.

You will note incidentally that in the above paragraph I studiously avoided referring to the awards as “The Radio Oscars”, something which always strikes me as outrageously biased towards the Hollywood movie awards of that name which are somehow held up as the Gold Standard of awards ceremonies. As the Oscars actually mean nothing to the vast majority of people and are only of interest to the kind of movie nerds who remain glued to their seats in the cinema until the last credit has rolled, I would suggest for anyone involved in radio that technically we should regard the Oscars as “The Movie Industry’s Sony Awards.”

You will further note I am not actually there tonight. I went last year and thus finally had my rite of passage that everyone in the industry secretly feels they are owed. This year therefore it is not my turn to be honoured with an invite from the MD, the summons to the ceremony quite rightly restricted to the members of the production teams from the shows of ours that have picked up well deserved nominations. Nonetheless I did devote nearly three weeks of my life to being an integral part of the team that assembled our entries so I have permitted myself a small degree of bitterness at having to watch most other people in the office get glammed up and then assemble at the comedically named Dr.Inks bar around the corner before proceeding the event itself. To counter the fact that they are tonight carousing at the company expense whilst I am sitting at home in my pants watching the online webcast of it all taking place, I thought it appropriate to assemble the inside story of what takes place at this most honourable of awards ceremonies. What really takes place.

This therefore is your guide to attending the Sony Radio Awards. In any year.

1) Turn Up

An easy one you might think, given that you’ve hired the tux from Moss Bros and have been sleeping with the invite under your pillow for the best part of the last fortnight. However it is only once your get there that you realise that Park Lane is an INCREDIBLY long road and that the Grosvenor House Hotel seems to be nattily located exactly bloody miles from any of the surrounding tube stations. No matter whether you decide to head for Marble Arch or Hyde Park Corner stations, you will still be faced with a walk of at least ten minutes just to arrive at the hotel, a journey made all the more miserable by the fleet of hired limousines zooming past, all hired by the great and the good who are considerably richer than you, a humble producer from the provinces.

When you finally arrive at the door of the hotel, a phalanx of photographers will crane their necks eagerly just on the off chance you are somebody really famous. As you are not, they will relax again and continue to scan the road. If you are really unlucky you will attempt to enter the building at the same time as someone who is a genuine celebrity – such as Hugh Bonneville or Ryan Giggs for example – in which case you will be temporarily blinded by flashes. Now would be a bad time to realise that the rigmarole of wriggling into your hired trousers meant you forget to do up the fly. Whatever you do, don’t let this happen.

2) Mingle

The journey towards your dinner table is actually quite a lengthy one and comes in several stages. You will first of all be required to journey past a roped off area, behind which is a backdrop being used to catch publicity shots of some of the really, really famous people who have been invited tonight. This is generally the point at which you start to wonder if you are completely out of your depth here, for the room suddenly appears full of very big names from the world of entertainment, all of whom are being greeted with air kisses by other big names from the world of entertainment. Despite the fact that you have the invite, this is actually the kind of party to which you are not generally invited. What the hell are you doing here? Run away immediately.

Fortunately this moment of panic passes quickly, and you soon regain your focus and note that most of the really famous faces here have actually very little to do with radio. They are the invitees of the sponsors and the organisers, the heavyweight entertainment names who will be doing the honours of reading out the names of the winners and then pretending you don’t smell of sweat and chablis when posing for a photograph once you’ve been presented with your award. A closer scan of the room reveals it is most populated by ordinary people like yourself. If you are lucky (and bear in mind there is around 1000 guests in the room) you might even locate the people you work with. Myself, I turned up at the very end of the drinks reception and so just shot down to the dinner table to find the friendly faces all waiting for me.

3) Get Drunk

This is the easy bit, for your will find that your table is veritably groaning with assorted wines and chilled bottles of beers. The cost per head of buying a table at these events may be astronomical but you do at least get your moneys worth. If you happen to be attending the ceremony with someone of director level from your company then you will generally find that the gold credit card is produced at least once more in the evening to ensure a top-up of champagne is brought around. This is far and away the best bit of the night, so kick back, loosen that ridiculous looking dickie bow and enjoy.

4) Eat The Meal

There is a reason why lots of wine is generally served in the build up to dinner events, the food itself is often indifferent and it is only the fermented grape that is preventing you from focusing too fully on this issue. This isn’t a knock on the hard working chefs in the kitchen of course, merely an inevitable consequence of having to prepare exactly the same meal for upwards of 800 people. It has to be something quick, functional, and easily decorated with either a spring of parsley or a suspiciously coloured sauce. Inevitably this results in some form of pork medallion.

To be fair, if you are going to attend an event where mass catering is the order of the day there are far worse places to do so than a five star Park Lane hotel. The meal I ate at last years awards was an order of magnitude better than the one I was subjected to at some sports charity event at Wembley Stadium a couple of years back. Fair play.

5) Applaud BBC people. A lot.

It is time for the gong giving to begin. After the traditional pleas for acceptance speeches to be kept brief and to the point the actual meat and bones of the evening gets underway. This is where you learn how each award lands in the general pecking order with the rather duller ones that will inevitably be handed to people nobody has heard of coming fairly early in the proceedings. This is also the point where you become conscious that despite efforts to promote the event as otherwise, the Sony Radio Awards are a BBC backslapping festival. Maybe they do make programming that is better than anyone else on the planet, or maybe there are a rather large number of gongs that in truth only the BBC is going to win. “Best Drama” or “Best Documentary” are, with the best will in the world, unlikely to be heading to Heart Bognor any time soon. So let’s laugh it up. The BBC are going to win a lot of stuff you never will.

6) Avoid The Temptation To Heckle

Yes, despite the love being shared around the room there will be occasions when you and your friends get a little bored. These moments generally come when someone from the BBC World Service is presented with an award. These dedicated folk appear to inhabit a slightly different plane to the rest of us and have been known to view the receipt of a trophy for their documentary on earth moving in middle Africa as the affirmation of a lifetime of dedication and having to turn up to work every day at a building called Bvsh House. Their acceptance speeches tend therefore to be interminable, thanking everyone from the boss right down to the Portuguese lady who empties the studio bins. This bores the pants off of everyone else in the room beyond a shadow of a doubt. Often this is the cue for a piss break.

7) Take A Piss Break

Radio is a very incestuous business. By that I don’t mean that everyone is related to everyone else (although sometimes the case) or that everyone has slept with everyone else (again, despite the best efforts of a handful of individuals). It simply means that if you have been around long enough you will have built up a considerable network of former colleagues and former bosses, many of whom you may be hoping to run into during the course of their evening having spotted their names on the seating plan. In practice, the Great Room at the Grosvenor House Hotel is so vast and the number of tables so large and confusing that the opportunities for mingling and pressing the flesh are rather limited to say the least. Naturally fate will determine that you will encounter one of your former bosses when you end up standing next to each other at the urinal during one of the aforementioned piss breaks. This is more or less inevitable. There is nothing you can do in this situation other than maintain eye contact with the wall, observe for future blackmail purposes whether they wash their hands afterwards and remember above all that it is only acceptable to break the code of silence in the gents if it is 2am and just before chucking out time.

8) Be Polite

Despite the copious number of awards for BBC networks and the 20 minute speech from the nice World Service lady, you can almost guarantee that there will be at least one token gong for a tiny local radio station who are getting the chance to show they can hang with the big boys. As bored as you may be with the parade of names and semi names weaving their way up to the raised stage that Chris Evans is bestriding, nothing can match the room-wide show of indifference for the breakfast team for Radio Saffron-On-The-Wold. Chaps and lady, you deserve your moment to shine, but the oh so parochial London-centric media has little interest in your school of the day feature and sadly never will.

9) Have A Sense Of Humour

Pretty essential this. Inevitably there will be a category for which you are sure you are a lock, where you felt your showreel entry was a work of genius and for which every member of the team who works on the show has been invited and is occupying a place at the table. The award instead will go to someone from the BBC. You have to laugh really.

Most importantly, when the organisers balls things up you must under no circumstances throw bread rolls. Take last year when host Chris Evans turned over two pages of his script and announced that Five Live were the UK Station Of The Year before he was supposed to. Whilst everyone else I knew sat around stony faced and a little pissed off that the fact that they were nominated was never going to get a mention, I found it incredibly hilarious. Well you have to laugh.

10) Enjoy The Drinks And Dancing

This is in the running order for the ceremony you will note, although it always starts about an hour later than scheduled. The upstairs bar is opened and it is easy to presume that everyone will be boozing the night away and swapping anecdotes about the time the desk crashed in the middle of that tricky interview with the leader of the opposition or the time you nearly dropped a reel of tape into a paddy field (World Service again). What you generally find is that the great and the good and the famous have far better things to do than mingle with you proles and have probably taken off to Soho House or the Groucho Club for a rather more refined atmosphere. An evening that began with you being shoved out of the way by Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s minders will end with you supping overpriced Perroni whilst staring at the cleavage of a sales lady from Heart FM. Showbusiness, it is all about glamour after all.

I Jest Of Course…

The Sony Radio Awards are actually a wonderful institution and one I can only hope I get to attend again. I’ve been writing the above whilst watching a webcast of Chris Evans crammed into a small flash window on the high def TV screen in front of me (at least give us the chance to resize it you bastards). Amongst other awards, we’ve walked off with Programmer Of The Year for my boss, Moz Dee and not only that THE BIG ONE – UK STATION OF THE YEAR.

So now I am insanely jealous of the invitees getting to celebrate something we didn’t last year. Getting drunk all night long to celebrate that they, along with me, works for the best radio station in the country. Officially. Much more of this over the coming days…