James Masterton

Change is happening in radio. This sort of thing tends to happen once every few months when the new audience figures come out. Managers are startled into taking action if a set of figures aren’t quite what they should be and so they shuffle things around a little.

Hence Jono Coleman is being booted from breakfast at Heart 106.2 to be replaced by, er, Jamie Theakston. Not that I have ever met him, but I can’t think of Theakston without smiling. Aside from the “nightcap” incident there was the time in 1997 when he failed to show up to turn on the Xmas lights in Bradford so Mark Page and I had to pluck a girl out the crowd to do it instead. The following morning we obtained the number of the Live and Kicking office and spent the entire show filling up their ansaphone with taunts about him not showing up.

Goodness knows why he is doing this. Being the breakfast show man on any radio station is the classic double-edged sword.

When you are one of the other jocks, you covet the slot enviously. Whoever has it is by definition the biggest star on the station, you suspect he gets paid far more than you and seems to be the cosiest with the boss. He also seems rather aloof, never participates in any social stuff but instead goes swanning around to all the best gigs for which you suspect he is being paid shitloads.

When you have the job, you long for the simple days of being the mid morning guy. Your life is knackered up by having to go to bed at 8pm, you lose contact with your mates and spend Monday afternoons in a filthy temper because you are so tired. You doze off in the afternoon and wake up in a blind panic two hours later because your watch says 5.15 and you are convinced you’ve overslept when in fact it is just early evening.

At work you have to be on your game every day. Those cozy chats with the boss are actually him putting pressure on you constantly to raise your game. If your show tanks, then so does the rest of the station. Meanwhile all the other jocks on the station hate you because you have what they think is the best gig, they think you are paid more than they are and because you never go out drinking with them any more because you are in bed at 8pm.

Oh yes, and whilst you do get forward to go to all the best public appearances and are pushed as “the face of the station” you don’t get paid any more for this and the events in question are almost always in the evening when you would actually rather be at home getting some much needed rest. Instead you are out pressing the flesh until 10pm at night and so have to work the following morning with less sleep than usual. This normally means the show suffers and if the boss is in a bad mood you can bet your life he will have noticed.

If you’ve “risen through the ranks” it normally means it is your last gig at that particular station. If you are moved off breakfast to a daytime slot it is normally because your time is up and you are simply being pensioned off to a less high profile slot until your contract runs out.

Anyway.

Breakfast shows on British radio are mostly shit, mainly because nobody has really had the balls to innovate much in the last few years. Across the whole of independent local radio they generally follow one of two formats:

- “The Morning Crew” zoo format so beloved by GWR, normally consisting of a lead anchor, giggling bird, whipping boy producer, “wacky” newsreader who joins in with the banter and travel reporter who appears on ISDN every 20 minutes.

- “Bird and bloke” format done by most of the others. Bird is generally the second banana on the show but is there to hold her own as co-presenter rather than just being the giggler as in the zoo format.

In many ways this is why it has been fascinating to see how Capital launched Johnny Vaughan as they had the chance to try something a little mould breaking. Instead it is actually a fairly standard Zoo format, compounded by the fact that the lead anchor is something of a superstar. The cast of characters around him might as well be (and as the ditching of Becky and the hiring of Zoe showed are) interchangeable.

This morning I was rudely awakened by the sound of a helicopter outside my bedroom window. Well it was due I guess.

Pulling back the curtains in the living room showed why it was there. Presenting now an illustration of what happens when a car and a van attempt a high speed docking procedure at the end of my road:

Five years I’ve lived in London now. Five years in a place which was always sold to me as a grim, dangerous place to live where street crime was rife and it wasn’t safe to go out at night. I never actually paid much attention to such doom-mongers. When I first lived here I lived in Tottenham and loved every minute of it. I’d walk down the High Road to the gym feeling perfectly safe and would think nothing of popping to the shops at midnight for a pint of milk or something. I’d happily tell people that the area was fine, the people were friendly and that nobody ever stabbed you without a really good reason.

In fact I only ever had one unpleasant experience, at the start of September 2001. Maybe I was tired and in a particularly bad mood that night but upon reaching the tube station on the way home I took exception to a young girl attempting to double gate me, sneaking through the barriers behind me on my ticket. The ensuing verbal confrontation deteriorated into her ripping the glasses off my face and hitting me, opening up a cut above my eye. Rather than fight back I was just intent on apprehending her and so the people in the tube station were confronted with the entertaining sight of me clinging tightly to her whilst she fought to get off, raining blows on my head and squeezing my arm to make me release my grip. She was starting to panic when one public spirited man intervened at which point she ran off. The police arrived but nothing ever came of it and I went to hospital to have a stitch put in the impressive boxers cut she had opened up by my eyebrow, resulting in the scar I sport proudly to this day.

Tonight however I was almost caught in the middle of something rather more scary. It was about 5pm and I was taking the bus to collect Mila from her dingy job in a corner shop in East Ham. Upon arrival in Canning Town two young lads boarded and immediately exhorted the driver to hurry up. Their reason? “Some lads are trying to kill us!”

Sure enough as the bus set off down the high street it was clearly being pursued by about five or six locals with angry looks on their faces. It didn’t seem as if they stood much of a chance as the bus accelerated down the road but the traffic lights were against us. One member of the gang on a bicycle successfully blocked the left turn we were about to make and although the driver made him move the delay was enough for the rest of the runners to have caught up.

BLAM

The sound of a bottle of malt slamming into the side of the bus. If they were attempting to shatter the windows it was a failure and the missile clattered harmlessly into the road. Meanwhile the whimpers of the intended victims grew louder as the pursuing gang climbed up the back and pressed the emergency engine cut.

The reaction of my fellow passengers was interesting. The three or four of us on the top deck were in a position to witness all of this from distance, although from the ringing tones emanating from their mobiles a couple were clearly trying to raise the police. Most of the occupants of the bottom deck (many female) decided that bailing was the best answer and when the doors opened they flooded out onto the road – bizarrely taking up position at the bus stop a few yards away as if to wait for the next bus to come along!

The open doors had afforded the aggressors the chance to board and confront their intended victims although this confrontation amounted to little more than some extended verbals and a dawning realisation that the whimpering victims presented little threat to their status or territory (I’m guessing here) and could be allowed to go on their way. As quickly as the situation developed it was all over, the gang disembarked (joining their female companions who had been videoing the whole scene on their mobile), the engine of the bus started up again and we went on out journey as if nothing had happened.

Looking back I regret my inner superman had not elected to fly down the stairs and confront the aggressors – its just that the scar above my eye was really hurting, you know?

OK hating this.

I think it was like this the last time I had to work my notice from somewhere. That was back in 1999 when I was being cast aside by the radio station I worked for at the time. Unusually I had been told at the start of August that my contract, due to finish at the end of September, was not going to be renewed. Despite this they kept me on air, doing stuff at breakfast and a big high profile Saturday afternoon sports show. By the middle of September the sheer pointlessness of it all had overcome me. Plans for the future simply didn’t involve me and without any motivation to impress the boss, I was simply turning up for a show and then dashing out the door before the news jingle had even time to finish at the end. Looking back on it, doing just three hours work for a full days pay wasn’t a bad way to live, but when you are staring down the barrel of career oblivion it is no fun at all.

Of course my current situation could not be more different. No career oblivion here, just the prospect of an exciting new job to come. It does mean of course that I’m increasingly irrelevant in the old one. From being the man around whom most of the office revolved when it came to computers, I’m now no longer answering calls. Instead I spend my day stuck on a spare desk, writing handover notes for my successors, playing minesweeper when that gets too boring and directing any queries that come my way over to the people who are taking over the helpdesk.

I shouldn’t feel too sad, after all there are better things ahead but right now I’m glad of the fact that I still have lots of holiday to use up before I go and so really only have to work three day weeks from now on. Working at the moment is like spooling out the tape, playing through the blank bit at the end of a cassette so you can turn over and start again.