James Masterton
Officially all the artistic sensibility of a salted slug
Believe in 1998 – Part One
4October 22, 2010
by James
in Chart Rewind
A confession. This next series of retrospective articles is a tiny bit of a cheat. Regular visitors to these pages will be aware that the overarching concept for archive Top 40 reviews is as an excuse to dip into the vast collection of old Radio One Top 40 shows that I have stockpiled on cassettes dating back to 1987. Just in case you are curious, this is what the full set looks like:
This particular Top 40 isn’t actually one of these tapes however. Having never done a chart from 1998 before this seemed a good opportunity to fill in that gap, yet the most interesting countdown of the month was one that my regular recording schedule didn’t actually capture. Hence I’m bending the rules a little for this one, writing about the songs as I’ve looked them up online rather than hearing them in the true context of a Radio One broadcast at the time.
At the end of the day though, you don’t really care how this is being sourced do you? Let’s just roll the tape anyway… Welcome to the UK Top 40, as would have been broadcast by Radio One on Saturday October 25th 1998. All links are to the songs themselves on We7.com unless otherwise stated, and there are playlists of the chart as we go along on both We7 and Spotify.
40: Melanie B/Missy ‘Misdemeanour Elliott’ – I Want You Back
We begin this particular trip back through the years with a record which I always hold up as a classic example of an artist being reduced to the status of guest star on their own record. First the bare facts. ‘I Want You Back’ made a small piece of chart history, being as it was the first ever extra-curricular Spice Girls single, the erstwhile Scary Spice having been plotting her solo record even during the promotion for the 1997 ‘Spiceworld’ album. The single was released at the tail end of September 1998 and naturally raced straight to Number One and then naturally enough straight back out again, this final Top 40 appearance being merely its fifth week on the chart. The odd thing is however that it was never intended to be quite this way. Our first clues that a collaboration between Missy Elliott and Mel B came earlier during the summer when PR snippets suggested that Mel B had been invited by the hip hop star to help her our on a single she was preparing for a forthcoming film soundtrack whilst the Spice Girls were on a European tour. Mel B you will note had very little to do with its creation, the track is credited entirely to Missy Elliott, Gerald Thomas and Donald Holmes and had the invited singer been any other R&B diva, you suspect that the track would have wound up as “Missy Elliott featuring…” and landed on one of her albums.
This collaborator however was Mel B, one part of the biggest pop group in town, and one can only presume that an explicit condition of her participation was that she received lead billing when the single was promoted internationally. Hence Missy Elliott is little more than a featured guest on a track she co-wrote and indeed produced herself. All the plaudits, chart credits and heck even the cover picture on the single go entirely to the shouty lass from Leeds, grabbing as well the track for her solo album ‘Hot’ when it emerged a few years later. To the best of my knowledge ‘I Want You Back’ has never appeared on any Missy Elliott album, which somehow seems wrong.
In a desperate attempt to confuse the record books and to give us all a reason to laugh at how naive she was back then, this looked for a while as if it was to be the only solo record Scary Spice made under the name of “Melanie B”. By the time she released her next solo single (a lame cover of Cameo’s ‘Word Up’ in the summer of 1999 she was insisting on being billed as “Melanie G” to reflect her ultimately short-lived marriage to Jimmy Gulzar. Needless to say the moment Goldcard Jimmy was kicked to the kerb, she was back under her maiden name for singles that came out in 2000 and 2001. Cheryl “Cole” take careful note.
One of the more overlooked Garbage singles, which is something of a shame as at the time it provoked more than its fair share of attention, thanks largely to its affectionate lifting of some of the vocals from the Pretenders single ‘Talk Of The Town’ during the coda of the song. ‘Special’ was the third single lifted from the band’s well received second album ‘Version 2.0’, landing on the chart after both ‘Push It’ and ‘I Think I’m Paranoid’ had both made the Top 10. Musically speaking ‘Special’ is an upbeat jangly indie-pop record that hits you like a blinding shaft of sunlight compared to the rather more brooding and angry tracks for which they are rightly famous. The single made Number 15, a higher chart placing than acknowledged classics like ‘Only Happy When It Rains’ and ‘Breaking Up The Girl’, yet I have to confess that as a casual fan this might be the first time I’ve listened to it since it was released.
Still, at least Garbage singles don’t tend to run into each other after a while. History has maybe been less kind to the collected works of Steps, tracks which on their own and in their own time stood head and shoulders above the competition but looking back tend to mash together as the disposable pop it always was. Not that there is ever anything wrong with disposable pop of course, and as a shining example of it ‘One For Sorrow’ stands up to close scrutiny. The track is a masterful creation by Pete Waterman and the PWL team, a textbook example of the “sounds like an ABBA track but at the same time nothing like them” style that they created for Steps. The tinkling piano line is straight out of ‘I Have a Dream’, the chord sequence used in the chorus is a direct lift from ‘The Winner Takes It All’ and yet at the same time the track is a distinctively original piece of work, a feat which deserves nothing less than the highest praise. Released at a time when sales at the top of the charts were going mental, ‘One For Sorrow’ arrived in the shops with a sale of almost 140,000 copies, yet this still wasn’t good enough to see it top the charts. Damn those Manic Street Preachers and their tolerating of stuff children wouldn’t approve of. Damn then.
It hurts to say it, but by the mid-1990s even a venerable chart institution like UB40 had jumped the shark, their only route to hit singles coming thanks to another visit to the well of cover versions and the ever diminishing returns of the ‘Labour Of Love’ concept. Nine years after Volume II of their interpretations of classic hits came Volume III and with it this lead single, a remake of a song first recorded in the 1970s by Jamaican star Johnny Osbourne. Naturally there is very little wrong with the track; give Ali Campbell a sweet love song to sing and the band will sit gently behind him like a well oiled machine and together they will make a record that washes over your ears like a mothers caress. The problem was that by 1998 we had simply heard it all so many times before. For ‘Come Back Darling’ you could read ‘Kingston Town’ or ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’. UB40 had made so many classic covers of already classic songs that adding one more to the list just wasn’t going to contribute anything to their creative legacy. Had they covered ‘Come Back Darling’ in 1983 it would have sold a million, it was that beautiful. In late 1998 it was a Top 10 hit single (their last to date, incidentally), and very little else.
36: Bus Stop featuring Randy Bachman – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
Years before his ill-fated attempt to drag the Eurovision Song Contest kicking and screaming into the 21st century with ‘Teenage Life’, Daz Sampson was a man on a mission to turn the charts into a non-stop pop party via a series of cover versions of classic songs, all dressed up with bubbling beats and incredibly bad raps for a new generation of wedding receptions and birthday parties. Bus Stop was the main vehicle for this and in a manner which is quite breathtaking in its unashamed dismantling of famous hit songs, Daz and his collaborators proceeded to dismantle such venerable singles as ‘Jump’ and ‘Kung Fu Fighting’, very often with the consent and participation of the original writers and performers. Thus for this second hit it was the turn of Randy Bachman who either needed the money urgently or was given an enormously preferential royalty rate, to cheerfully re-record the vocals to the Bachman Turner Overdrive’s most famous hit record. The original ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ has long been overplayed into the realms of cliche, but the Bus Stop version manages to be quite gloriously bad in a way that few other cover versions can aspire to. Of course it is intended to be nothing more than a throwaway party hit, so it takes a particularly hard hearted individual to get angry about the fact that for an entire generation of music fans this might well have been their first ever introduction to one of the most famous rock tracks of its generation.
Online streams of the track? Let’s be honest that was never going to happen. Enjoy the (sadly not properly embeddable) video and watch a future Song For Europe star throw the rap shapes that he was eventually to take to a worldwide audience.
35: Dina Carroll – One, Two, Three
Another single I genuinely don’t think I have heard since it was first released, and a track which sadly represented the moment the awesome Dina Carroll’s career fell of the rails thanks to record company dithering. The smooth soul of ‘One, Two, Three’ was destined to be the first single from her third album, following up the well received ‘Only Human’ released in 1996. The single itself came out on schedule in October 1998 and made a respectable Number 16 to remind the world she was still around. Its follow-up was destined to be a cover version of ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’ but when Dusty Springfield passed away early the following year the release was deemed either to be in poor taste or at risk of being branded a too-obvious cash-in so it was shelved. With doubts surfacing over the quality of the other tracks on the album the label decided to postpone release and reworked the production, moving Dina Carroll back towards the dance diva style with which she had begun her career (and which she confessed to me years later she was never particularly comfortable with). A further Top 20 single ‘Without Love’ followed but then for reasons that were never properly explained the album was shelved completely and Dina Carroll was dropped shortly afterwards. She attempted a comeback in 2001 after a period of ill health but in truth her time had passed and she moved to America to start a family. I was privileged enough to meet her in early 1996 when she did the promotional rounds for an ultimately cancelled nostalgia tour which was enough to elevate her in my eyes as one of my favourite 90s stars. ‘One, Two, Three’ was maybe a little underappreciated at the time, so it is nice to use this opportunity to call attention to it once again.
The debut, and far and away biggest, hit single for the three piece British R&B group The Honeyz, created by Dennis Ingoldsby of First Avenue management in an attempt to continue to mine the commercial vein he had tapped with Eternal. Initially consisting of Heavenli, Naima and Celena, the three girls were well served by the material they were given to perform, sugar sweet R&B ballads that were produced with just the right amount of respect for their crystal clear vocals. It meant tracks such as ‘Finally Found’ had an effortless magic to them and a quality that was almost wasted on the frantically moving pop charts of 1998. History hasn’t been kind to them and they hardly helped their legacy with an endless series of personnel changes which set the template for the Sugababes in years to come, but for me ‘Finally Found’ and its follow-up ‘Never Let You Down’ remain some of the best soul tracks of the turn of the century. Some day they will be ripe for rediscovery.
The biggest hit in the briefly flowering chart career of Chilean-born Swedish singer Deetah, this rather cleverly made single saw her rapping and singing over a backing track which is readily identifiable as the guitar riff from the Dire Straits track ‘Why Worry’. Some may quite correctly see this as an outrage, but it was a formula which was good enough to send the single to Number 11 in late September 1998 with a follow-up ‘El Paradiso Rico’, this time based around ‘La Isla Bonita’, following in May 1999.
32: Savage Garden – To The Moon And Back
This was naturally enough Savage Garden’s imperial phase, when after initially struggling to gain a toehold on the charts here the Aussie duo were guaranteed a smash hit with every record they put out. Having originally flopped when first released in September 1997 (it made Number 55), the brooding track was reactivated as the follow-up to global smash hit ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ and it dutifully made Number 3, a chart placing they would never better with any subsequent single. I still thought ‘I Want You’ was a thousand times better though.
31: Jennifer Paige – Crush (Spotify link)
I spent much of 1998 pointing out that music was in the middle of a golden age of pop music, the charts crammed with enjoyable radio-friendly pop hits that were all selling in quantities that would have been unthinkable just five years earlier. Pluck out any chart from this period and you land on a whole series of singles that would have graced any era in chart history with consummate style. We end the bottom end of the Top 40 with this single, the first of just two chart hits in this country for Jennifer Paige and one which rocketed to Number 4 with very little effort in early September, hard on the heels of its American release which had seen demand for the single reach fever pitch when one station began playing it on heavy rotation before a release date had even been set. The singer’s self-titled debut album proved to be her commercial peak as far as most of the world was concerned but she still continues to write and record to this day, her 2008 album ‘Best Kept Secret’ spawning a handful of minor hits in Europe. In Britain she remains very much a one hit wonder.
Does The Pope Shit In The Woods?
1Anyone studying the intimate details of my personal Facebook profile will come across one particular semi-comic line. Years ago when first creating the account, under “Religion” I put: ‘Self’. It is a gag that either nobody gets or one which most visitors treat with the contempt it deserves, but I leave it up there as a clear indication that I have very little time for religion of any kind.
It is odd really as I was brought up steeped in Anglicanism. My bookshelves as a small child contained the required illustrated bible stories tome, I had a tissue-leafed bible that I think was handed to me as a Christening present when I was a baby, every Sunday we were taken to Sunday school to learn how to be good little soldiers of Jesus and I spent the whole of my formative years in education attending C of E schools, from primary right up to secondary. My whole life until I was an adult was steeped in gentle religious indoctrination. As a teenager I even took a greater step forwards, attending a series of weekly confirmation classes with the vicar after school before taking my vows proper at a big ceremony in Wetherby, presided over by the local bishop. Thereon in I stepped dutifully up to the altar every Sunday, sipped the wine, chewed on my wafer biscuit and praised the lord as instructed by the man in the dog collar.
Except around about the age of 16 I stopped and simply declared that I was no longer going to volunteer my time on a Sunday morning to accompany the family to the local church. Dragging myself to sit on those wooden pews each week had become a personal burden, a tedium that had long since ceased to be enlivened by trying to guess which candle on the altar would burn down fastest or wondering just which shade of puce the face of the lead baritone of the choir would reach during the climactic hymn. I realised I didn’t actually believe a word of what was being spouted every week, had next to no spiritual emotions stirring in me to make such a belief system relevant to the way I lived my life and perhaps most importantly of all had just been exposed to gigantic and outrageous hypocrisy which made me realise that the whole circus was pure bunkum.
To explain, the Sixth Form institution I attended for A-level study was an historic joint venture between the Anglican school I attended and the corresponding Catholic school down the road. As a model of Christian unity and harmony, the two establishments shared staff, facilities and student rolls, with our lessons divided between the two sites which were a short 10 minute walk away. For those of us non-Papists, even entering the building was an eye-opener, with statues of the Virgin Mary at the end of every corridor and a lavishly decorated and extensive small church attached to the building, a stark contrast to the small but functional chapel for which room had been made at our site. It also meant we were subjected to some of the less pleasant aspects of that particular faith, the afternoon when under the pretext of a General Studies lesson we all crammed into the hall and were treated to a two hour anti-abortion lecture by two sour-faced former nurses in a performance that makes me shudder from the memories almost 20 years later. It wasn’t education, it was indoctrination and I wish that the rage I felt at their lies had been able to articulate itself as a direct challenge during the Q&A session afterwards. Somehow you feel such an intervention would not have been welcome, looked down upon as we were by yet another gigantic mural of the Holy Mother.
As you might expect a big part of the calendar was the annual “week of prayer for Christian unity” where the two student bodies attended a service of worship together and bizarrely recounted our baptismal vows together. When we enquired as to why this part of the service was included, it was explained that the practice of the united congregation taking communion together had been quashed by the local Catholic dignitaries who had threatened Vatican-level retribution if it continued. Falling back on the baptism part of the service was the last remaining common bit of worship left that was not going to cause an upset.
My reaction verged between outrage and pity for those involved. The fact that as far as I was concerned we were worshipping the same God seemed to be lost on the powers that be. I pointed out that despite being a formally confirmed Anglican there was nothing to stop me attending mass at a Catholic church and receiving communion therein. If this was somehow considered “wrong” then the whole idea of a service of Christian unity was an elegantly constructed facade to hide the continuation of centuries of hypocrisy. The answers I received from everyone I consulted on this issue all consisted of much muttering and shuffling of feet.
My suspicions were concerned. The whole thing was bullshit from start to finish. I ignored religion from that moment onwards and at first took a dim view of anyone who disagreed with this position. I was in good company at school, for despite being a Church institution, by the time of the sixth form the number of people who viewed themselves as dedicated practicing Christians could be counted on the fingers of one hand and they generally congregated in their corner of the common room looking intense and worthy and cultivating odd looking beards. Even at university it was far too easy to view those as being of a religious bent as a bit weird, the Christian Society (or whatever they were calling themselves that week) having developed a reputation as a bit too evangelical and weird and who had done their reputation around the site almost irreparable damage by officially boycotting the campus chaplaincy centre as the university gay society were allowed to meet there. Thus it was that when one summer morning the campus awoke to find that some enterprising souls had worked all night to plaster every available wall and pillar with posters proclaiming it was “national piss off a Christian week” I was able to chortle along with the best of them.
As one gets older it is possible to take a mature attitude towards other people’s belief systems. I still regard religion as a crutch for the emotionally weak and a tool for the devious to manipulate people based on a belief in fairy stories. At the same time though, the followers of the Great Sky Pixie are at least for the most part following a creed which encourages everyone to be nice to each other, which is hardly to be sneered at and there is no denying that a healthy faith in something inspires the kind of mass social gathering on which we as human beings tend to thrive. Living for years in the East End of London meant that it was a common sight to see public transport on a Sunday morning crammed full of Afro-Caribbean men and women all scrubbed and groomed to immaculate levels as they went to a local shed to talk to their dead ancestors. Roughly once a year the docks would be besieged by the faithful as the latest big name television evangelist staged an all-night prayer vigil at Excel or The O2, events which were so popular people were being turned away from the door at 2am.
Hence I viewed with some dismay the outpourings of bile, much of it from people with whose opinions I am normally sympathetic, directed at The Pope and the small matter of his recent State Visit to Britain earlier in September. His comments at the start of his trip, condemning what he saw as society’s “militant secularism” only seemed to antagonise the very people at whom they were directed. Clearly for many it was not enough that they should personally have rejected religious belief, those who harmlessly took the other view were to be crushed and banished from what was apparently decent society. I found those views to be quite revolting.
A recent edition of The Spectator contained a series of articles on what it termed “The New Thought Crime”, noting the alarming tendency of British society to react with violent fury against anyone who even dares to express the “wrong” opinion. The message is clear – Britain is a liberal and progressive utopia and you risk arrest if you dare disagree. The Jan Moir furore earlier this year was a case in point. As Melanie Phillips states in the Spectator article: “After [she] suggested that the death of … Stephen Gateley was linked to a louche lifestyle, she was subjected to a fireball of vilification on the internet … The Crown Prosecution Service then said the Metropolitan Police passed the article to them ‘to determine whether or not any crime had been committed’ but Moir would not be prosecuted. Prosecuted! For making what at most was a tasteless remark. What on earth has Britain come to when the CPS entertains this as a serious possibility?”
The Moir fuss incidentally made me view any prevailing trend on services like Twitter with deep suspicion. There is a self-appointed liberal and intellectual elite which has discovered the service as a way of defining and propelling a particular agenda, aided and abetted by lazy journalists who have taken to using online postings as a neat barometer of what clearly must be majority public opinion, even when this is manifestly not the case. When I see a point of view coming to the fore on Twitter I immediately stop and question it and find it to be wanting. So it was when messages of hate and opposition towards the presence of the Pope on these shores found themselves working their way up to the surface – I instantly knew I could not let them go without question.
Much of the personal abuse directed at the Pope would have been quite laughable had it not emanated from some supposedly educated people, some of whom I knew personally. The Pope, we were informed, was “a former Nazi” due to his having had the misfortune to be a young teenager during Nazi Germany and thus compelled to become a member of the Hitler Youth, a pseudo boy scouts movement designed by the Nazis to help groom the future members of the master race in the ways of the Reich. Never mind that any parent who DIDN’T enlist their child in the movement was likely to be viewed with extreme suspicion by the authorities, last time I looked members of the Hitler youth were children even during the Second World War and so didn’t really take an active part in the more generally condemned Nazi activities of invading of European countries and the gassing of Jewish people. Branding an old man a participant in the holocaust based on his membership of a club when he was 13 years old would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact people were actually putting this forward as a serious argument and a reason to bar him from these shores.
Perhaps more damaging were the allegations of the Pope’s former role in not responding adequately to the allegations of child abuse that appeared to follow one particular Catholic priest around with alarming regularity. It was a large and sharply pointed stick with which to beat the pontiff, casting him as the defender of perverts, the condoner of kiddy-fiddling and a man who assists paedophiles in escaping justice. It is beyond a doubt that the Catholic Church as an institution has been guilty for far too long in not facing up to the realities of the personal failings of some of its ministers, a cross (if you will pardon the expression) which it is now realising it has to bear and for which even the Pope is stepping forward and acknowledging that far too little was done to deal with allegations of sexual misconduct. Last time I looked however this inactivity was hardly born out of a malicious desire to see children suffer, more from an ultimately misguided adherence to the notion of forgiveness. In Christianity, those who confess their sins are automatically forgiven them and it is simply the job of ministers to do God’s work by providing that absolution. Maybe it was indeed wrong to allow certain priests to continue to conduct themselves in what is allegedly (I’ve not personally seen any hard evidence either way) an inappropriate manner in so many different places for so long, but it can be argued that each time the individuals in question were being given the option to seek forgiveness and turn over a new leaf in the true spirit of the doctrine which they preached. So it was wrong, people have said sorry, started to put their house in order and worked to correct the problem. Is that really a reason to stand on the streets spitting hatred at the man in charge? Of course not, it takes an equally disturbed mind to even contemplate such a thing.
Some friends put forward the argument they had read in the newspapers that such a lavish State visit by The Pope was an unwanted extravagance, public money that could more usefully be spent elsewhere in this time of austerity. This was a straw man argument if ever there was one. Britain’s level of debt and the need to manage the ongoing financial crisis has been a political issue for the last two and a half years. In that time however, State visits have taken place by the President of France (March 2008), the President Of India (October 2009) and the President of South Africa (March 2010), none of which were decried by the chattering classes as a waste of resources and an unaffordable extravagance. Objecting on financial grounds to the visit of The Pope was simply an invented obstacle. Given that the alternative would have been to send a message out to the world that Britain was financially crippled and simply could not afford to even arrange for a brass band to play a visiting dignitary down the aeroplane steps, cancelling the visit to save a few bob (especially given that the Vatican itself was bankrolling much of the cost of the mass public appearances planned) was simply never a credible plan.
In spite of the wafer-thin nature of the arguments against the visit, we were still subjected to the unedifying sight of placard-waving agitants taking the streets of London voicing their opposition to the whole event. Much of it was coming from the “religion is balls, we don’t want it here” school of thought, one to which theoretically I subscribe to and so therefore should have been supporting. However the sight of a series of micro-celebs and obnoxious anti-everything turds like the vile Peter Tatchell heading up a small band of rather bitter and small minded loudmouths to parade through the West End rather turned my stomach. Just like them I was an atheist, but my only wish was to somehow tell them that under no circumstances did they speak on my behalf. The visit of The Pope was an event that was set to bring joy, inspiration and a sense of excitement to many. Who was I to attempt to deny them that just because I did not share those beliefs?
Fortunately the few hundred miserablists were drowned out both in voice and number by the many thousands who crammed into Hyde Park on the Saturday and in Birmingham on the Sunday. Each one was there to celebrate, to feel blessed and if nothing else to catch a glimpse of the man their faith decreed was their spiritual leader. Even just to watch it all on television was an inspiring and moving sight. Just for once the people of Britain had risen above the complaints of a vocal minority, ignored the Thought Crimes of those who would insist that opinions different to their own had no right to exist and instead proved that it was right, proper and fitting that The Pope should be welcomed to Britain and to allow his message to be heard.
I’m not religious. I reject it totally and utterly as the fairy story and the outdated prehistoric superstition that it quite plainly is. I doubt very much that this is ever going to change, I hope to credit myself with far too much intelligence to be ever suckered in to any kind of creed, faith or cult. Yet watching the scenes on television made me just for a moment regret I was that person. The Pope’s visit was a party, a celebration and a festival to which I would never be able to anticipate. Right at that moment the Catholics and sympathetic Christians of Britain were the luckiest people in the land. I’m proud to have rejected the hatred and to have supported their right to enjoy it.
My Life In Boxes
0They say that changing your job and moving house are two of the most stressful experiences a person can go through in life. Touch wood it has been quite a while since I’ve had to change my job, but the reason for what has been by and large radio silence from this neck of the woods over the last few weeks is that I have indeed been occupied doing the latter.
A week and a half of becoming comfortingly familiar with the smell of cardboard, the satisfying sound of the reel of tape being pulled apart, the relentless swearing as you discover you have lost the scissors YET AGAIN only to realise that you are in fact sitting on them and finally observing that the labelling of said boxes is the only time when expressions such as “bedroom misc” and “bathroom wets” form a standard part of the English language.
No matter how much you survey your living space and visualise it all fitting into two or three well packed cartons, fate always determines that the packing process will take far longer than it actually does and that there will inevitably be certain combinations of items that just will not go together. I experienced this myself last month when dismantling the hi-fi, taking five goes to find a combination of black units that would all sit comfortably in a box together and enable the delicate mechanism of the turntable to rest gently on the top.
This house move was a particularly significant one as it marked for me and the other half a rather belated transition to that particular stage of adulthood known as “property ownership”. For the very last time I waved goodbye to what a former on air colleague used to cheerfully term “rented accommodation” and greeted instead to a world where I can do whatever I want to my interior and walls without reference to anyone else, even if I do now have to take on the burden of responsibility for fixing whatever happens to go wrong.
I’ve been renting rooms and apartments since the age of 23, so that’s 14 years of landlords and landladies of varying quality almost to the week. I think this calls for some kind of retrospective of places what I have lived in.
Frizley Gardens, Frizinghall, Bradford. September 1996 – October 1997
My first post-university foray into the world of independent adult living, paying £40 per week to a lady called Helen to be her live in lodger in the two bedroom flat that she owned. Found after I responded to an ad she’d placed in the local newspaper, I moved in after a two month delay whilst she did a favour for the daughter of a friend of hers. In certain ways we got along like a house on fire, she was glad of the company and security, let me borrow her car from time to time, invited me to parties at the local rugby club of which she was a member – that kind of thing. Gradually though I began to fall victim to a whole series of neuroses and obsessions that she had, and as time wore on it became clear that whilst she was happy to share her flat with someone, that someone had to conform at all times to a very strict set of rules. Thus Friday evening was cleaning evening, and woe betide me if I didn’t leave the bathroom in the exact sparkling condition she demanded. The kitchen was to be scrubbed spotlessly clean after serving oneself even just a glass of water and to cap it all she was one of those serial re-arrangers with the design and layout of the living room switched around at roughly two month intervals. Having inherited a sum of money from her mother, she spent a good part of the year going travelling so I often had blissful periods of sole occupancy of the flat, the only downside being the short notice I had of her return each time and the urgent need to scrub the entire place clean to her exacting standards.
It reached a stage where I couldn’t relax at home in the afternoon for fear that the door would open and she would find a new way to find fault. After suffering another family bereavement, her emotional state deteriorated and after a screaming row over a saucepan that had apparently not been cleaned to her standards I knew for my own sanity I had to get out of there. A quick scan of the local newspaper threw up an advert for a room in a house just around the corner, and it was there I found one of my favourite ever homes from homes.
Beamsley Road, Shipley. October 1997 – September 2000
Andy was the landlord’s name. A rather scarily obese 50 year old single man who owned a vast three storey four bedroom house. At the time I met him he was cheerfully long-term unemployed, his ever changing array of tenants providing him with more than enough income to pay the mortgage and allow him to feed the army of cats that patrolled the house. What was clearly a large redundancy payoff from his last job had paid for the house to be done up a treat, so it had a modern kitchen, sparkling new bathroom with whirlpool bath, double glazing throughout and even a gym down in the basement. It was like living in a fun hostel. In marked contrast to my previous residence, cleaning was something left to the neighbour who popped around once a week. Dishes left in the sink were magically washed, bills were all paid by our host and he was happy for cable TV to be piped to all the bedrooms. My attic room was spacious enough for a large double bed (to the joy of many girlfriends), and all the belongings I began to amass – as well as being a playpark for three of the house cats who immediately adopted me as their best friend and spent most weekends napping on my bed.
Best of all however was the company my new friend kept. For reasons I was never able to quite figure out, he was best mates with pretty much ever stripper in Bradford. As a result the kitchen was a daily parade of glamorous women who would pop round for a cup of tea and a chat. I grew a new circle of fascinating new friends with the special added bonus that I had seen all of them naked at one time or another. Many of them had been lodgers themselves on occasions in the past, and the local taxi firm whom I engaged to convey me to work on the radio at 5am every morning were quite shocked that I had ended up there. “You live here?” asked my driver one morning shortly after I had moved, “this no possible, this house with girls with big tits.”
Over the course of three years I had an entertaining array of different housemates. First there was Paul, the local TA Sergeant who had custody of his young son once a month but who spent the rest of the time seducing the strippers, there was Colin the trainee accountant from Glasgow whose need for conversation led to him spending most evenings in everyone else’s room in turn to drone on about his day and who I later discovered was the scariest driver on the planet. There was Katy the croupier from the local casino whose working hours dovetailed with mine in an entertaining way that led to us often fighting for control of the bathroom at 4am – her as she was going to bed and me as I was just getting up. Finally there was Dave, an affable and rather heavily built engineering wizard whose big claim to fame was an appearance with two university friends on Robot Wars which we all gathered round to watch with glee, only to see their robot blow up after 30 seconds. He had a girlfriend of similar stature who would visit from time to time, one visit managing to scar me for life after I lay in the bath one Sunday morning and was forced to listen to them noisily copulating on the ceiling above.
Truly I could have lived there forever, and it was only the call of the big city and a job-enforced move to London that meant I reluctantly packed up my possessions (now numbering enough to be loaded into a rented Transit) and headed off for a brand new life in the capital.
Greenfield Road, Tottenham. October 2000 – June 2003
This will scarcely come as a shock to anyone who has gone through the experience, but for the uninitiated let me tell you that finding somewhere to live in London is the most painfully soul-destroying experience on the planet – particularly when you are a complete newcomer to the city and are groping your way in the dark about which are the good and bad areas to try to set up home. A week before my new job was set to start I came down to stay with my sister and battled against the odds as I scoured the pages of Loot every day for shared houses that were within my budget and in places where I was less likely to die. I spent several days touring cupboard rooms in grotty garden flats, walked for 20 minutes from railway stations to knock at a door only to find the room had been taken five minutes earlier, and spent one particularly enjoyable evening in the company of a group of people in a shared mansion in West Hampstead only to spend the next 24 hours feeling miserable as they never called back to invite me to move in with them.
Still homeless, I started my first week in a new job sleeping on the sofa of Cheeseford only to discover that all good things come to those who wait – an advert on the Tuesday took me to the South Tottenham terrace and the front room bedroom that would be my first London home. They say your first London rental should only ever be a short term one, but I stayed there for three years, content with the reasonable rent, short walk from Seven Sisters tube and the relaxed quiet atmosphere in the house. Flamboyant intellectual Marina (a PHD, as she was forever reminding us) owned the house but only seemed to spent brief periods there, either living on the other side of town on work assignments or researching overseas for the books she was forever writing. The only constant housemate in all this time was Sudhir whose means of support during his studies for a sound engineering qualification were never clear to me but who was always happy to share his pizza when he accidentally ordered too much.
The idea of living in Tottenham seemed to horrify many people I spoke to, but I embraced it with a combination of wide-eyed innocence and genuine emotion. On my first Saturday evening there I wandered down West Green Road, almost enchanted by the array of barber shops operating as social hubs, foodstores and greengrocers with exotic looking produce spilling out onto the streets, fried chicken shops competing side by side with all-night bagel vendors and what seemed like an endless parade of Greek and Turkish diners. Maybe if I had known to look harder I would have spotted the barely disguised drug dens, the emaciated looking prostitutes and sensed the air of suspicion that my innocent looking white face always prompted. Quite simply though I had little reason to care. I had a home, I had an exciting new life and I had gone from a small boy at a tiny farm village school to someone who took the tube to work every day.
Greenfield Road may well be the only residence that I actually outgrew. My salary increased as my career in London media progressed. I could afford bigger and better and it was time to take the step to the area I’d coveted for so long.
Barrier Point Road (I), Royal Docks. June 2003 – August 2007
Living in a posh Docklands flat had always been my dream. Even on my very first day of househunting in the capital I’d phoned up in response to an advert from a man advertising a docklands flatshare. I took his blunt response that the place had been taken already as a signal that I was not yet worthy of such a status symbol and considered it no further. In the intervening time I would sometimes spend weekends riding the DLR out to exotic sounding places such as Mudchute and Prince Regent and stare wistfully at the rows of buildings that it seemed I would never quite be able to enter.
My casual search for new digs, one that I was embarking upon with no pressing need to, led me to make a posting on a flatmate matching website. Amongst the many invitations from people needing warm bodies to help pay the rent came one from a lady who had a room near the Thames Barrier that she thought I might be a perfect match for. A bedroom in a barely three year old luxury block not far from Canning Town, it was glamour far beyond my wildest dreams. I had a balcony, a private bathroom, a sparkling new kitchen and even an onsite gym. I remember rushing away from the viewing and texting Mila, at that time due to come and stay for a fortnight that summer, telling her “I have found us an absolute palace”.
To start with this flat was indeed perfection. A glamorous location, newly developed transport links, gorgeous furnishings and a laid back flatmate who would sit on the balcony and strum on his guitar whilst I sat and surfed the net in the evening. I would catch myself walking up the drive and joyfully muttering “I live HERE” in wonderment. I appeared to have reached the stage in life where I was “allowed” to life in such a palace.
Then in the new year things changed a little. The aforementioned flatmate got a new job elsewhere and moved out, leaving me with the run of the place for a few weeks. At that exact time, the lady who would one day become my wife had made the decision to up sticks from her home country and come to live here with me. Not necessarily wanting a change of scenery, I tentatively asked the landlady if I could move my lady into the room with me, offering to pay more rent for what was theoretically more wear and tear on the place. She happily agreed, and even assured me that I didn’t have to do any work finding a new tenant for the spare room, as she would do the looking. To cover the change in rent she sent me a new tenancy agreement to run from the start of the year and all seemed well.
Weeks rolled by with no sign of any new resident forthcoming. Then one day in early spring a letter arrived from the landlady. She advised she was struggling to let the second room on the basis that it would be sharing with a couple and had decided to start from scratch. On that basis she was giving us notice to leave, no hard feelings, just circumstances. Sad though we were to leave The Palace (as it had now been Christened), we accepted that this was just the way things had to be. As luck would have it a newspaper ad led us to a flat in the same building into which we could move with a couple of weeks to spare.
It became clear that my landlady (still to remain nameless) wasn’t all that skilled at this property rental thing after all, and had little idea of the way to behave towards tenants departing on good terms. The agreement we had signed was a boilerplate document clearly sourced online and contained a great many quotes about how the property was to be left at the end, with all manner of industrial level cleaning of carpets, curtains, bathrooms and furniture mandated to take place. In a sense this was a little unfair as I had arrived at the property as a replacement tenant under an existing agreement. It was only circumstances that meant I was leaving as the sole resident, yet under the letter of the agreement I was required to polish the flat up to a standard far above that in which I had found it (when I arrived for example, the toilet had not been cleaned for months, the living room was cluttered with unwanted furniture and I never did receive the promised wardrobe for my room, making do with a hastily provided steel clothes rail). Nonetheless I had until this point always been a good tenant and so made sure that the things that did need cleaning were indeed scrubbed to perfection. My mother and I spent an entire weekend polishing every fitting in the house and a professional cleaner was invited along to steam clean the cream sofa as per instructions.
It was during the last week that things began to go a little weird. We had handed over the spare set of keys to the landlady so she could show prospective tenants around, but it became clear she was randomly entering the flat to check on progress. Furniture was rearranged, notes were left from us about things she wanted doing, and this culminated in our final week with our arriving home to discover the entire flat had been rearranged, our few remaining possessions tidied into a corner and worse still some personal documents tampered with, our copy of the tenancy agreement from which we had been working having now gone missing. Mila was so distressed by this invasion of privacy that she refused to spend another night in the place. Thankfully by then we had the keys to the new flat, so we stripped the bed, marched through the underpass car park and installed ourselves in the new place a day or so earlier than planned.
The landlady’s cavalier approach to the quiet enjoyment of her tenants was demonstrated one last time during that weekend of final cleaning when the door flew open to reveal a rather startled estate agent, there to show some potential tenants around and who had no idea that there was anyone still living there and with access. This was clearly a detail which our increasingly deranged had omitted to mention. He was incredibly apologetic, knowing full well he was in breach of the law, but just as I had been through the entire process I was co-operative and friendly and allowed him in anyway.
The last day of the tenancy arrived and the landlady and I met face to face for the first time since I had moved in, not that I really had any choice in the matter – when I arrived at the flat on the penultimate day before the tenancy expired I discovered she was already there, assembling new furniture in the bedrooms and placing items of whose ownership she was unsure outside the front door. Technically the place was still mine for 24 hours but details like this clearly were unimportant to her. She gave the flat a cursory look around, reassured herself that all seemed to be in order and took the final set of keys off me and read the electricity and gas meters in my presence, promising to forward on the final bills.. A week or so later I tentatively emailed her to ask when I might be seeing some of my £750 deposit again. Her reply was nothing short of extraordinary, which is why I’ve kept it to this day:
Further to a closer inspection on Sunday 30th May, please note the following points that need to be sorted:
1) Kitchen
- Dishwasher is not working – Needs to be fixed
- Oven not professionally cleaned as requested – This needs to be arranged
- Oven hob needs to be replaced due to use of a scourer on this
- Oven extractor fan not cleaned, has marks all over where dirt/dust has become engrained in the material
- Kettle – Lid is broken and Kettle not descaled
- Iron missing
- Saucepans missing
- Scissors broken
Other stuff that was not cleaned and needs to be sorted:
Freezer to be defrosted & then cleaned
Drawers not cleaned
Cupboard by freezer not cleaned
Washing Machine not cleaned
Sink not cleaned – Still has brown stains
Toaster not cleaned
2) Bedroom
- Mould on windows needs to be removed properly (due to lack of cleaning)
- Carpets not professionally cleaned
- Mirror not cleaned
- Lightbulb not replaced
- Marks on bedroom wall need to be cleaned
3) Shower room
- Shower not professionally cleaned (as requested) Still mouldy and bad limescale (due to lack of cleaning)
- New Ikea circular white bath mat missing (was in cupboard)
4) Bathroom
- Sink & Bath not cleaned (had a film of dust on!!)
- Mirror not cleaned
5) Lounge
- The sofas have been damaged during the professional clean.. Can you please advise full name of company, contact & telephone number of cleaners – as they need to come back and re-clean. The cleaning has made the fabric extremely hard and they have not cleaned the undersides of the cushions.
- Carpets not professionally cleaned (as requested)
- Curtains have come off hooks
- Glass table top has come off the actual table – Need to get new suckers
- 2 x Lightbulbs not replaced
- Marks on walls under pictures need to be cleaned
If you can get back to me with regards to the sofa asap, that would be great.
You also need to confirm payment for the Gas / Electricity & Telephone. Can you please advise who the Gas supplier is.
Can you also let me know about the missing Iron / Saucepans etc..
In the meantime, I will contact TDI cleaning company to arrange for all the things not professionally cleaned as requested i.e. Shower, Oven & Carpets (the curtains in your bedroom look OK), as well as clean up all the other things not done.
I then need to find out the cost of replacing and fitting the oven hob and fixing the dishwasher.
Finally, I need to organize silly little jobs like replace lightbulbs, get curtain hooks etc…
That’s it for now and I look forward to hearing from you.
I should explain here that when I moved in, nothing in the way of pots, pans or utensils had been supplied. Nor was there an iron or ironing board save for that owned by my housemate and was even accusing me of removing items that she clamed she had put in the flat before I left (without my knowledge or consent naturally). Whilst quibbling over little details such as lightbulbs is par for the course for any picky landlord, she appeared to be completely ignorant of the concept of “fair wear and tear”, indicating as you can see that I would have to pay for a completely new cooker hob as she believed it was badly scratched (it wasn’t, and she failed to ever prove that it was). Furthermore she was no claiming that items such as bath mats which she believed she had put in the flat the previous week during her illegal entries had been blatantly lifted by myself. In essence I was now accused of stealing property I didn’t even know existed. I sent a reply, rebutting many of the points she had made and indicating where was was in error. Her response was to escalate matters further and to effectively accuse us of trying to wreck the flat totally:
The flat in your occupation
On a number of occasions that I visited the flat, I was disgusted to see the way that you and Milla lived. Throughout your tenancy, you violated clauses no. 2.11 and 2.12 On at least two of the occasions that I visited – at 8 months and 9 months pregnant I had no option but to clean the flat myself. (I spent 3 ½ hours on one occasion and 2 ½ hours last week – Again this will be charged back to you). My 3 year old flat, had looked like a 30 year old flat. The lack of cleaning anywhere, was disgraceful and your neglect has been the only reason that I have lost out on 4 months rental for the other room whilst you were living there – This is why it was necessary for me to give you a notice on the flat.
You even admit yourself and I quote you in your email 1st June 2004 “having spent a great deal of effort and enlisting the support of most of my family to ensure the apartment was handed back to you in a presentable state…….”
It is interesting that the day after you have moved out, that people who were shown around the flat are now wanting to move in on a 12 month contract, yet I have been advertising for 4 1/2 months and couldn’t find anyone – what does this tell you about the condition in which you kept the flat?
It was a viewee that alerted me to the condition in which the flat was in – as I had described it as ‘luxury’ in the ad and he stated it was anything but luxury.
Therefore when you mention things are down to general ‘wear and tear’, this is absolute rubbish. All the things I have mentioned are due to your neglect.
For the record – The previous ‘incumbent’ tenant that you refer to was a co-owner of the property and the flat was kept in a great condition as I was there myself a few days before you moved in to show you around. I also seem to remember you saying what a wonderful flat it was when you moved in and that it will be a pleasure to look after – so to say now otherwise – again is utter rubbish.
I was starting to conclude that she was either barking mad or a little paranoid. The only time she had seen the inside of the property during the entire time I was living there was during the final week of our residency, during which time it was covered with dust and cardboard boxes as we packed everything and moved out. Understandably the place was a tip. Moving out kind of does that to a home. Barely two months earlier when being given notice we had been given the option to stay if we had ourselves found a tenant for the spare room, yet now apparently the reason the place was unlet was because we were apparently smearing faeces over the walls (precisely 2 people visited the flat during this time, both rejected it because they didn’t like the location).
Other parts of her letter (too long to reproduce here) included her belief that we owed her for her time as she had run around cancelling electricity and gas accounts (a job she volunteered to do, presumably not trusting me to do this) and for the times she visited while we were out to rearrange things to her tastes. To this day I simply cannot understand why she suddenly flipped like this. Never before (or indeed since) had any landlord had any issue with the way I treated their property and the state in which it was left. Her pursuit of me even extended to leaving threatening telephone messages, such as the one left a few weeks later where she accused me of re-entering the flat (which I no longer had keys to) to remove a clothes drier and that any further trespass would involve calling the police.
I took a deep breath and replied as kindly as I could:
I am writing in response to your email of June 5th continuing the dialogue about the termination of my rental contract with you. Please excuse the delay in responding. It is now clearly time for this dialogue to come to a end, however in a spirit of good will and in a wish
for clarity about the issues you raise, I am relying point by point and with some general considerations at the end.There appears to be some confusion over the state of the dishwasher, particularly as your assertion that it was dysfunctional contradict your claims that “recent food remains” were to be found inside. I confirm that at no stage was the dishwasher used while I was in residence. Your comments about the risk of mould are without foundation. It is my understanding that a dishwasher finishes all programmes on a drying cycle and hence the conditions for mould simply do not exist. I would also reiterate that repairs to a fixture such as a dishwasher are the responsibility of the landlord. I am sorry that you have discovered that it appeared to be out of order but you are fully appraised of the circumstances.
We will clearly continue to disagree over what constitutes fair wear and tear of the oven hob. The only way to avoid scratches on the polished surface of a hob would be not to
use it – clearly not the intention of any provision by a landlord. Having now moved into an identically funished apartment in the same development as your own property I am in a position to confirm that the oven hob here is covered in many small scratches as a result of use and cleaning. Your complaints as to the state of the equipment at 164 Barrier Point road are I’m afraid without merit.I am pleased you have sorted the kettle. We are all aware of the inconvenience of hard water in London. Previous kettles I have used have lasted often less than one year and indeed we were tempted on many occasions during our tenancy to replace the kettle but were reluctant to discard your property without consultation. It is entirely appropriate that you have made your own arrangements.
Iron, Pans and Scissors. Thank you for accepting my points on these. I have always taken great care to replace supplied items such as these in my tenancies and would never remove such things.
I refer now to your comments regarding the bedroom. Of course a room in which the only means of ventilation is by leaving the patio door ajar and which has no hopper window, is badly designed. Hence my new comparable flat has had an external extractor fan installed (but still has a mould problem). There were only one or two spots of mould left at the base of the windows. As they were not free of these black marks when I moved in, the room was left in a better state at the end of my tenancy.
I’m afraid we cannot agree about the carpets. These were regularly vacuumed (using the top of the range cleaner which we were pleased to find you had supplied) and as we usually removed our shoes when entering the flat, they remained in excellent condition. My contract only required for cleaning to take place if it was necessary to return the carpets to the state they were in at the start of the tenancy. In the absence of any dirt or stains I would regard any professional cleaning as unnecessary and indeed would almost certain be detrimental to the condition of the furnishing. It is my understanding that flat 164 is one of the few properties in the development to retain its original carpeting, most landlords and owners having discarded of it in favour of their own in very short order. Its excellent condition is a tribute to our care.
I maintain that the bathroom was left in a pristine condition and between us we appear to have restored it to a satisfactory condition.
There appears to be some confusion over the issue of bath mats and I do not know how we resolve this issue amicably. There were two sets of mats, each consisting of a floor mat and pedestal mat. Both sets were washed and dried prior to my departure. When I entered the master bathroom to place the set from there back in place, I observed that you had left a new mat in its packaging on the side of the bath. I am aware of no others that you had either supplied at the start of the tenancy or placed there prior to my departure and you can be assured that none are in my possession.
In arranging for the sofas to be professionally cleaned, I believe I have fully fulfilled my tenancy obligations in this respect. In my experience, such cleaning never restores furniture to its original ‘feel’ and further cleaning my cause the fabric to age more rapidly. I would suggest that you leave well alone, but any further cleaning is your responsibility and at your expense.
I have nothing to add constructively to your comments on the glass table. You were the
first person to have moved it as I was able to clean underneath without needing to do so.The mattress protector was the subject of some debate amongst ourselves when preparing the property for departure. In the light of many of your other comments I suspect had I discarded it I would have found myself accused of its theft. For the record, I am not in possession of any new protector that you claim to have left in the property. I’m very much afraid you are mistaken in your belief that there was one present in the room we occupied.
I will of course let you have the window key or any other item if I come across it. However having, as I stated before, never had cause to open the windows in the living room it is highly unlikely that this will appear amongst my possessions. I note that you did not raise the issue of window keys with Mr Platt upon his departure, even though none were present at that time either.
I’m sorry there has been some confusion over utility bills. Your unwillingness to believe my constant statements that the gas account had been left in credit has meant that I have now received a notification of its closure from British Gas and a cheque for £1.74 as a refund of this credit. I hope you feel that this was a worthwhile exercise. When you took a final electricity reading in my presence I was left with the impression that the closure of the account was something you were keen to take charge of yourself and I am pleased to say I have now paid the final bill which has been sent to me and which was in line with my expectations. I’m sorry you feel inconvenienced by any lack of action on my part but it is apparent that any action I took would have been simultaneous with your own.
It is a matter of some deep regret that you felt the need to pepper your previous correspondence with many insulting statements. I consider this to be most unworthy of you.
May I remind you of the extensive goodwill that we extended towards you in the final months of our tenancy, not least of which was our acceptance of the notice you gave at the end of March. Had we wished to object we had strong grounds to do so as you were in breach of the tenancy agreement by giving notice before sixth months of the January 2004 contract had elapsed. We were also happy to accommodate visits by prospective tenants and conduct them on a tour of the premises on many occasions when you were unable to fulfill your duties as landlord and conduct the visits yourself. I make particular reference to the events of April 29th 2004 when at short notice you advised that you were unable to keep an appointment with a prospective tenant for the property and despite the inconvenience this caused us, Mila and I made arrangements for him to gain access.
I regret that I must also issue you a reminder of the laws concerning the rights and privacies of tenants. I have reason to believe a serious breach of these rights took place on Thursday 27th May when we arrived home to discover that you had not only entered the property without prior notice but had interfered with our personal possessions, in the process removing from amongst them an original copy our of tenancy agreement. These activities caused my partner Mila so much distress that she felt unable to spend any further time in the property and we made arrangements to sleep elsewhere for the remainder of the tenancy. Myself and my companions were also witness to a further breach on the afternoon of Sunday 30th May when we arrived at the flat to discover you had entered some time earlier, had placed many items whose ownership you confessed to be unsure of outside the front door and were in the process of assembling new furniture in the bedroom. All this despite the fact that our tenancy did not expire until May 31st and the right of occupancy of the property remained ours.
I must also take issue with the offensive telephone message that you left on the morning of Thursday June 4th which accused me of trespass and theft. Despite returning the call immediately to point out your error, I note with some regret that you have not felt an apology to be in order.
It would be better if we could end our business relationship on good terms. From experience I know that I am a good tenant as other owners I have dealt with know. I treat owners with the respect, honesty and trust that I would expect if I was the owner myself, fully aware of the financial risk and anxiety experienced by owners of property to let. I’m delighted to hear that you were able to let the property in short order. This is I believe a tribute to the immaculate and first rate condition in which it was kept.
It is now time to agree the level of deposit that you must return to me. Please remember that this money and the interest it has earned that you have held as a safeguard is legally my property and I require your assurance that it has been properly managed and is instantly accessible.
I look forward to your response
Her response was not to offer a sum of money for the deposit return but to actually send back a set of calculations to demonstrate that actually OWED her money. To whit:
James, throughout your tenancy you have violated a number of the clauses within the Assured Shorthold Tenancy Contract which I must bring to your attention. Clauses you have ignored include: 2.11; 2.12; 2.13; 2.14; 2.15; 2.1.6; 2.20 and 2.25. I have been extremely tolerant, hence why I gave you 2 month notice period as agreed in the Contract and had to bite my tongue in fear of any repercussions whilst you were in occupation.
In the last 2-3 months of your occupation, the flat has been in an unacceptable condition and through your neglect, things like the oven hob, windows and shower were damaged.
Also through your neglect, the flat had not been in anyway in a presentable condition in order for the other room to be let out and because of this, I have lost out on over 4 month rental income and I feel that it is necessary for me to make the following deductions from your deposit.
1). Cleaning flat on 6th May 2004.
Due to your neglect of the cleanliness and tidiness of the flat, I must charge my time spent cleaning, as the flat was in a filthy state (please see pictures taken on 6th May):
I arrived at 1.30pm and left after 5pm.
I cleaned the following:
Limescale & brown stains off the sink & draining board – 1hour
Oven door (thick with grease) – 1 hour
Kitchen outer cupboards & radiator (removal of stains) – 20 mins
Shower sink plus mirror (removal of limescale & weeks of dirt) – 20 mins
Bathroom Sink (removal of limescale & weeks of dirt)– 15 mins
Bathroom toilet (removal of brown stains)– 20 mins
I have called a number of cleaning services who charge £25 per hour, which I think is a fair price for my time. I will therefore charge you £75.
Amount to be deducted: £75.00
2) Cleaning flat on 26th May 2004
Again due to your neglect of cleanliness and tidiness of the flat, I must charge my time spent cleaning the flat in order to bring the flat to an acceptable condition for a potential viewing:
I arrived at 12.15 and left at 15.00 hrs.I cleaned the following:
Shower room: Sink, toilet & Mirror & hoovered.
Kitchen: Scrubbed sink & draining board, cleaned all work surfaced and made tidy, hovered and scrubbed kitchen floor, emptied rubbish.
Lounge: Hoovered, cleaned all side tables, dining table, cleaned part of mould off windows in lounge.
Hallway: Hoovered
Bedroom: Made tidy & hoovered (so the viewees could see the floor)
Amount to be deducted 2 ½ hours at £25 = £62.50
3) Your neglect = Unable to rent other room
Due to your overall neglect and lack of cleanliness in the flat, of which you did not rent in full, I have been unable to rent the other room out at a cost of £520.00.
Because of your neglect, I have been unable to rent the other room out and I have lost out on £2080.00.
4) Oven hob
A white substance found on the Whirlpool Oven hob (it looks like paint) means that I need to install a new hob. The cheapest price I can find is £155.99 plus a fitting charge of £55.00
Amount to be deducted: £210.99
5) Dishwasher
I will honour the cost of fixing this. Therefore there is no charge.
6) Other items
Curtain hooks £1.54
Replacement lightbulbs 2 x £2.24 £4.48
New Ikea Bath Mat taken £2.90
New Debenhams Mattress Protector taken £19.99
Professional Carpet Clean (30 sq meters) £75.00
Professional Shower Clean & Oven clean £40.00
Amount to be deducted: £145.91
6) My time
Letter 1st June x 1 hour @ £15 £15.00
Phonecalls to utility companies x 1 hour @ £15. £15.00
Letter 3rd June x 2 hours @ £15 £30.00
Fuel cost to flat to sort problems on 3rd June £15.00
Journey time to & from Surrey Approx 2 hours @ £15 £30.00
Cleaning for 3 hours@ £25.00 per hour £75.00
Extractor fan,
Descaling Kettle,
Cleaning mould of bedroom windows
Marks on bedroom walls
Defrost & clean freezer
Clean kitchen sink / washing machine
Clean & Empty toaster & 4 x drawers
Amount to be deducted: £180.00
Therefore according to my calculations you owe me approximately £2,754.40. Can you please confirm how you propose to re-imburse my losses. I look forward to hearing from you.
The conclusion virtually everyone I spoke with about the whole sorry saga came to was that the burden of servicing the mortgage on the flat (originally co-purchased with a boyfriend and now owned outright by her) was close to crippling her. She had clearly spent the original deposit (illegally) and was now attempting to claw back whatever money she could. My only dilemma was how to proceed. Logically the way forward was to file a small claim for the money, safe in the knowledge that any judge with a brain would throw most of her arguments out of the window and award me my cash back. Clearly I’d be stung for some deductions (she continued to insist that the cooker was ruined, as you can see) so it really came down to how much of my time I wanted to waste on the saga given that I was never going to get the sum back in full. My decision was helped thanks to something that technically I was indeed at fault for. Her lack of competence at managing the property meant that in all the time we lived there she had never advised the council that there were now tenants living at the premises and she was no longer liable. Thus we never received a council tax bill, and she clearly never dealt with any of the correspondence that may or may not have reached her on the subject. I discovered that three months after we had moved out there were bailiffs hammering on the door of the puzzled new tenants demanding hundreds in arrears from their landlady. I calculated that the amount of tax I almost certainly should have paid, plus perhaps the cost of replacing the cooker, was actually more than the deposit. Taking her to court would be something of a pyrrhic victory given that anything she was ordered to return I would probably have to pay out anyway – and as you might guess, after ignoring her demand quoted above we never heard any more about the matter. Putting it aside as an unpleasant memory, I moved on. Literally.
Barrier Point Road (II). June 2004 – August 2007
In contrast to previous experiences, this particular residence could not have gone any smoother. A one bedroom flat in exactly the same development, it had more or less exactly the same layout as our previous flat only this time it was owned by someone who knew what they were doing, a professional landlord who just happened to own a business that supplied furnishings for rented properties. Thus anything we needed for the flat, any appliance that needed replacing, we simply phoned up and he supplied it without demur.
I threw parties in that flat, got married and played host to two sets of parents and various sofa-surfing homeless mates for short periods. I even learned some elementary gardening skills, thanks to a particularly vicious weed that had taken root amongst the stones on the balcony, fed by the rainwater that never quite seemed to drain away as fast as it should. In truth I could quite happily have lived there forever, but for the fact that after three years of not bothering us, the landlord requested to increase the rent and wanted to do so by such a large amount that we felt it best to try to find somewhere else.
We left with a great deal of goodwill and with the place looking spotless. Although I had to nag, the deposit for the flat was returned in full within a few weeks of us moving out. Clearly in three years we had somehow managed to “neglect” this flat less than we had the previous identical one in the space of a few months.
Wards Wharf Approach. August 2007 – August 2010
Staying in the same area wasn’t really a deliberate plan, happy as we were there, and indeed during the two months of our notice period at the Barrier Point place I’d viewed flats as far flung as Stratford, Catford and Hither Green. After starting to despair of ever finding something as nice as the place we were currently occupying, and after putting down a deposit with an agent for a flat close to the centre of Canning Town only for the owner to announce she had found her own tenant instead, I contacted an independent agent via an online ad and was shown a series of flats – one of which just happened to be in the development across the other side of the park from where we lived.
Moving day must have been the strangest job the man with a van I booked had ever undertaken. We carted all our worldly goods down four floors in a lift, drove 2 minutes down the road and then unloaded them again into another lift. This new place although having only been built a few years before was showing a few signs of wear and tear. The people it had previously been rented to had clearly not shown it too much love. The carpets had stains, the oven needed about five cleans before it was deemed fit for human cooking and the dishwasher was completely knackered after several years of being clogged up with grease. A little bit of work however (via a trip to Ikea for a new cover for the sofa and various other household implements) and it became a home as well. Even if by this time one bedroom docklands flats were clearly slightly too small for the amount of what is best described as “personal crap” myself and the other half were accumulating.
We lived there until this summer when we finally stepped onto the property ladder properly and bought a three bedroom house. Once again moving out was a breeze. The flat was cleaned to a far higher standard than it had been when we arrived (no gruesome stains in the toilet for a start) and after a few clicks online the now £1200 deposit was returned in full, the cash neatly paying for the pair of sofas that now grace our new living room.
I don’t doubt for a minute that the time will come when my life ends up in a set of cardboard boxes once again, but barring any serious financial accidents in the future I think I can safely say I’ve dealt with my last landlord. I’ve had the good the bad and the crazy over the last 14 years, but with one particular exception I don’t think I’d change a single moment of it.
10 Reasons Why I Suck
3For someone who spends a disproportionate amount of his enthusiast-reserved time dealing with rundowns of charts and rankings of this, that and the other, I’ve never been much of a fan of the Top 10 list as a source of creativity and or comedy. List based writing and humour has its place I guess, but to me it has always seemed a rather artificial constraint, requiring you to either stretch a particular concept to breaking point in order to make up the numbers or restrict you to a particular number of elements just to stick to the format as it were.
Or maybe I never had an English teacher at school who set us a “Top 10 of x” exercise as homework, you work it out.
Sometimes you get a good reason to break the habit, and such an occasion presented itself midweek. It was Tuesday evening and I was in the middle of a crap week at work, having to do all manner of extra shifts in the studio owing to a lack of otherwise available staff and burning the candle at both ends to do so. Furthermore I was bored. Tired of the office, tired of the conversations around me and crying out for some degree of distraction.
So I did what any rational and connected individual in this kind of position does in 2010. I complained loudly on Twitter just how bored I was. Answer there came from the incredibly profound lady who writes Queen Margot and the Supper Club, a blog which for some odd reason I’ve neglected to link to until now.
Now that was a challenge and a half. Suddenly I had new found motivation and a means of mental exercise to dial out the unspeakable crapness of my evening. It seemed a shame to waste the final list to the necessarily small audience paying attention to my 140 character ramblings, so it is with no small amount of egotism I present to you the full version of:
Top 10 things that James is rubbish at.
1) Ironing.
No man on the planet can actually do this to any degree of competence or accuracy. I’ve been known to stand cursing over a board in a steam filled room, watching as my electrically powered lump of stainless steel glides uselessly over a particularly rumbled shirt and leaves it as stubbornly lined, creased and (apparently) unwearable as when I began the exercise about 12 hours earlier. The pain is generally only ended by a wife-shaped female who loudly asks why on earth I don’t just leave it for her to do it (“because you’d take exception to any suggestion I might make that my ironing is your responsibility” is the truthful answer) before snatching the iron from my hands in order to render the errant shirt crisp, smart and looking like I’d just got it home from the shop in a matter of 30 seconds. I’ve timed this. It happens.
2) Throwing.
All girls throw better than me. All of them. My younger sister once explained to me that a large part of athletics lessons in PE at school for the girls are taken up with explaining the correct way to perform such athletic disciplines as running and throwing as this is apparently something that does not come naturally to the female of the species. When running, the female’s natural instinct is to flap their hands up and down by their sides rather than the tucked into the sides pumping action that we blokes do without thinking. Similarly the throwing action comes rather more easily to men than it does to women. The “throws like a girl” motion is actually genetically inbuilt rather than a measure of a person’s competence. Except that is when a man does it. I never learned or was taught to throw, an issue which only tended to rear its ugly head when playing cricket in the summer. The joy of fielding near the boundary was only tempered by the fear that a well aimed shot would come winging its way towards you, leaving you with the onerous task of returning the ball to the wicket in a timely and accurate manner so as to prevent the unnecessary concession of runs to the opposition. For the whole of my school career, I was the chap who palmed the ball and then tossed it to a nearby colleague so as not to send the ball winging its way at 90 degrees to the other boundary in a failed attempt to return it.
3) Art.
Again this was something that always used to bother me at school, the assumption on the part of every teacher that every child was blessed with the ability to visualise a scene and commit it to paper accurately and in a manner that was pleasing to the eye. The drawing of pictures was some kind of treat to be dished out, a way to fill up a few minutes at the end of a lesson or a way to distract those of us who had finished some exercise ahead of the slow ones at the back. “Just draw a picture to go with the text” was the instruction that was conveyed from the front in classes as random as Religion Education and Home Economics. Except this wasn’t a treat. This was torture. From the age of three when the boundaries of the shapes in my colouring book were little more than an aspiration, my creative abilities have generally confined themselves to the pen and keyboard. I’m no more able to draw a human smile than an elephant can perform heart surgery. Art lessons were nothing less than a hideous torture, an hour a week when the full scale of my personal inadequacies had to be laid down and worse still GIVEN A MARK OUT OF 20 by a lady with a blonde perm and a lisp. On one particularly memorable occasion we were set a homework task of drawing ourselves as we might look in 20 years time. I abandoned all pretence of creativity and turned in a neatly drawn picture of a coffin. This wasn’t to make some kind of deep impressionistic statement, more down to the fact that it had geometric straight lines and I could just about do those without ballsing it up. A year or so later my art teacher and I came to a gentleman’s agreement. She would stop wasting my time trying to teach me to draw as long as I agreed to stop wasting her time trying to learn.
4) Self deprecation.
After all when you are this awesome, why bother?
5) Pretending I know anything about football, beyond how it is supposed to sound on the radio.
Oh yes, I will freely and happily wax lyrical about the broadcast of football matches and what it means to those of us doing it and those people at home or in their cars listening. I appear to have spent most of the summer doing so after all. Discuss the finer points of tactics? Explain the ins and outs of the whole Gerrard/Lampard axis that so bedevils the England side? Asborb the complex nuances of the argument about whether Manchester City’s bottomless pit of funds amounts of trying to “buy the title” in the same way Chelsea did seven years ago? Completely beyond my ken. And pretty much everyone I work with knows this.
6) Fashion.
My original tweet on this subject summed it up thus: To me being dressed properly extends as far as “genitals not on public view”. I think here I’m reflecting back on myself the way I view the world. For reasons that escape me I’ve grown up flatly refusing to judge anyone on the way they are dressed, to the extent that I am completely blind to the way people attire themselves on a day to day basis. I know from experience there are people utterly obsessed with the subject, scrutinising everyone they know for the cut of the fabric of their top, the style of their shoes and the extent to which they have accessorised. You know what? I really could not give a shit. The person I work with is the same person from day to day, regardless of what motif they have on their top or what colour their trousers are. Hence if I don’t care what other people are wearing, I see no reason why they should care what I am wearing. I’ll be berated by female companions for wearing shoes that appear to be a bit tatty or are unpolished. “Who cares” I will reply, “nobody will be looking at my shoes”. I mean why should they really, the shoes I am wearing are there to keep my feet dry and warm, that is all. I can think of nothing less interesting than staring at the floor to note what someone has on their feet. Yet I’m told people do this. In short, if you are about to get dressed after reading this and are worried about how you might look to me if you meet me, then please don’t. If I met you yesterday I do not have the first clue what you were wearing when we spoke. I did not notice and do not care.
8) Counting in the correct order.
7) Paying credit card bills on time.
In all fairness I don’t think anyone is are they? Plans to settle these oh so cumbersome debts are inevitably thrown into disarray by the way credit card companies have a habit of randomly changing the due date on your bill on an almost monthly basis. Just because they can. I’ve got one particular card which I have had since 1996, a period when I can vividly remember receiving the bill on the 10th of the month and then paying the appropriate amount into the bank around the 5th without penalty. That self same card still sends me bills on the 10th of the month, with payment due on the 22nd, a deadline which I consistently fail to meet owing to its on the nose proximity to my actual payday. Somewhere along the line in the intervening 14 years I have lost over two weeks breathing space in which to settle my debts. Deep down I know I should be annoyed about this, but I don’t have the time. Those £12 late payment penalties won’t earn themselves you know.
9) Finishing what I started.
Live Football. Breathe Football. Part Six.
0Finally!
Funny sometimes how you can pass by the same thing every day and never really notice it, so much is it a part of your routine. Walking down the road towards the office that Sunday evening it struck me that it was more or less exactly eight years to the week that I had first made this journey, feeling my way around an unfamiliar part of London to the nondescript brick office building which contained the national radio station who’d hired me for a couple of hours on the weekend. My first day at work in a job that would ultimately take me to this moment right now.
Eight years of walking past the same landmarks. The pub on the corner, the speed humps in the middle of the road, the startlingly large wind turbines on the roof of the telephone exchange nearby, the corner shop which amusingly shares its name with one of our most celebrated production colleagues, the bin store whose purpose it seems is to afford easy access to the flat roof of the nearby building for the local graffiti taggers to go to work, and the artificially turfed football pitches that sit across the road from the radio station front door.
After eight years you can be forgiven for allowing all of that to blend into the background noise of life, part of the routine of your journey to work. On nights like these however I tend to take them into account as if to memorise every step of the journey, because part of the magic of this job is that every once in a while you do something that isn’t so routine, something that your mind tells you is a very big deal indeed.
This you see was no ordinary Sunday evening. This was the night of the 2010 World Cup Final and I was there to see that it all happened the way it should. I wanted so much for this to be something special.
In a sense there was an air of routine about it anyway. This was after all the 64th match we had broadcast in similar circumstances over the course of a little over four weeks. It was coming just 24 hours after the 63rd, the third play play-off match which was broadcast out of a sense of duty rather than out of any assumption that there was widespread public interest in the result. Still, when the time comes to look back in one’s dotage and to reflect the high points of a life well lived it surely means a great deal more to say “I did the World Cup Final” rather than “I did the Paraguay v Japan second round game that was settled on penalties after a dour 0-0 draw”. History can put things in their proper context for us all.
The truth of the matter is that most of the time these theoretically massive nights rarely live up to the hype. I’ve worked on a few spectaculars in my time – Liverpool’s second half comeback in the 2005 Champions League Final springs to mind, an evening when every one of us in the studio sat breathless as we watched something rather memorable and rather moving unfold in front of us on a evening none of us really wanted to end. It is fair to say however that the 2010 World Cup Final will by no means end up being one of them. An angry, almost bitter game which saw the two sides content to kick lumps out of each other rather than stroke the ball around. A match which seemed destined almost from the first ten minutes to go to penalties, settled almost at the death by a single Spanish goal at the tail end of extra time and one which thankfully meant the most deserving side would win the game in open play rather than trusting to the lottery of a shootout.
So really the mental hype was for no avail. No matter how much we wished for it or how hard we tried, nobody will ever reminisce about where they were when they heard the 2010 World Cup Final live on the radio. For every one of us on the show, out part in it will only be remembered in a brief line on our CVs or mentioned in passing when remembering our days on the radio. After all the time we had put in building up to that moment, we could be forgiven for turning around to fate and complaining that we kind of felt a little bit cheated. There wasn’t even a technical failure, a new noise from the crowd or even a dramatic in-game interruption of any kind to put some kind of memorable flag on the event. We just turned up, switched on, talked and then went home. In a dramatic novel this would have been the chapter discarded for space reasons for simply not advancing the plot or developing the characters in any meaningful way.
With no particular incident of note in the game and nothing really to argue about save the actual scoreline itself, the post-match segments of the game felt a little flat. Compared to 2006 when everyone was reeling over the Zidane red card and whether one of the greatest players of his era was going to end his career labelled a cheat – a debate that took us through well into the small hours of the morning – the climax to 2010 was little more than a final exhaling of breath. In a sense I think we were all glad of this, at both ends of the line. Every single one of us was burned out, sated on football, trying to remember what life was like without an outside broadcast to plan and just about aching to get back to something resembling a normal routine.
I know for the team back in South Africa there were still a few tears to be shed. The group of people who had practically lived in each others pockets for close to five weeks were finally packing their cases, stowing the souvenirs and heading home. For those of us back home and in particular those of us in the studio that evening, this special, memorable and quite momentous broadcast was at the end of the day just another shift. Most of us had more work to do the following day, more shows to plan and another shift to turn up for. It all turned out that the day of the 2010 World Cup Final was a day just like any other.
Know what? I would not have missed it for the world. If I’m still here to say the same thing in 2014 you can either say my career will have stalled badly on the same track or I can once again view myself as the luckiest producer in radio. I did the 2010 FIFA World Cup on the radio. What did you do last month?
Live Football. Breathe Football. Part Five
0Let Me Illustrate
Do you remember a time long ago when you had to wait until people returned from trips away in order to be subjected to their endless holiday photographs? Our new brave digital age means these waits no longer exist, and at times it appeared that the remote team in South Africa spent most of their free time (and, it seems, some of the time they were theoretically supposed to be working) taking pictures and uploaded them online.
If nothing else it gave those of us stuck back in London a chance to see how the other half lived and what their working environment was like. My esteemed colleague Stan Collymore was the most enthusiastic digital snapper, and it seemed that every time he attended a big game he was abusing the press room wifi connection to treat his Twitter followers to extensive views of the stadium and his personal broadcasting position.
Hence pictures such as this, showing you just what a commentator sees during the game:
(click any of the photos above for the full size version)
Then there were the pack shots of our entire team for the big games – this was just prior to the now infamous England v Algeria game.
When not in the stadium, our guys were broadcasting back at what became known as “The Lodge”, the sprawling Johannasburg guest house where our team were based for the duration of the tournament:
Why they felt the need to share Adrian Durham in a pair of shorts I wasn’t really all that sure.
As a kind of reaction to this, I amused myself during the other games by constructing my own travelogue of our experiences back in the studios.
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This was the thrill of the activity in the control room, taken on the evening of the first Saturday during England v USA. As you can see, producing the actual football matches involves a great deal of craning one’s neck to see the screens hung from the ceiling and waiting for things to go wrong. |
| The mountain of sponsored features that had to be worked through for every game included a vast sheet of in-game reads and I felt that these too should be preserved for posterity. |  |
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…and this was the main on air studio sitting empty and folorn for a large portion of the time. A major overseas event such as the World Cup meant that the usual broadcasting facilities were almost underused at times. On many of the earlier days in the competition we were on air from South Africa from 10am right the way through until 11pm. I was almost shocked people didn’t start having meetings in Studio One just to make use of the office space. |
Of all the media that was sent back from the remote base however, I think this one was my favourite. Join Alvin Martin for a guided tour of the Lodge, and a chance to see not only how the other half lives but also just what kind of state Moose keeps his bedroom in. Ugh.
Live Football. Breathe Football. Part Four
1Hoping For A Double Deflection
OK so we are notionally covering the whole of the World Cup. The big selling point of talkSPORT’s dedication to the tournament was our proud boast that we were to cover Every Game Live and most importantly, communications issues aside, without any interruptions. This was actually more than the other side could boast, their agnostic commitment to other sporting events meant that they were forever dipping out of matches to cover horse races, or dumping even big knockout games onto digital platforms because of scheduling collisions with Wimbledon or Grand Prix races etc. Having said this, when it came to the early stages many of the games were just a background distraction to the only World Cup story that mattered – the fate of the England team.
I think it is now approaching seven years since I’ve watched a competitive England international match from the comfort of my own home or at the very least outside the confines of the office. Instead I’ve always been a work, be it at the controls of the desk or masterminding the production and presentation of the coverage. From this first hand point of view I can tell you without fear of contradiction that nothing even comes close to inspiring argument, debate, opinion and passion amongst both our presenters and the wider listening audience than the fortunes (or otherwise) of the England football team. An England match is like a ratings gift, an instant tune-in point for many who cannot otherwise watch it and an immediate focus for reaction afterwards. I’ve produced shows on the most mundane of England fixtures that can and indeed have stretched deep into the night. If it is England then it matters to a vast hungry audience who at times do not even seem to need the prompting of our phone number.
It is actually a matter of some considerable regret to me that my spell at the coal face of sports broadcasting hasn’t coincided with a major tournament run for any of the other “home” nations. World Cups and European Championships are the domain of the England fans with the only token Scottish contribution coming from those who seek to gloat at their misfortunes or the odd brave soul who will confess to being an England follower from north of the border and can offer a neutral’s post-match perspective. I’ve no doubt that the commitment of Scotland fans to their side in a major competition would be every bit as noisy and vociferous whilst the team were playing – but would the after-match reaction to a bad result be quite as soul-baring, would the sense of disappointment and frustration be quite as palpable, or do Scotland fans have a more realistic view of the level at which their side can play? I’m hoping one day I get the chance to find out.
As will be evident to anyone reading this now, England’s 2010 World Cup was only just above the level of abject failure. Whilst they didn’t quite suffer the first round humiliations of other European football powerhouses such as Italy or France (although it was at times a close call), their first encounter with a side that was what we in the business call “any good” saw a total on field humiliation and an inglorious tournament exit at the first knockout stage. Here lies the broadcasters dilemma, for when England are progressing it is a quite wonderful thing with our hype and expectation able to continue for a few days more, but when England are woeful and on their way home it makes for some absolutely compelling, spellbinding radio.
We are used to England stuttering their way through the early rounds of tournaments, so the opening weekend 1-1 draw against the USA was not the total shock it might have been, especially given the scoreline was down to Robert Green’s infamous goalkeeping howler which gifted the Americans their equaliser. No, it was the second game – the Friday evening goalless draw against Algeria that exposed the poor form and baffling lethargy of our supposedly world-beating superstars – which kicked frustrations into high gear. England were bad, shockingly bad and the phones were ringing off the hook even as the referee was blowing up for the merciful release of full time. The listener reaction however was nothing compared to the anguished howls coming from our presentation lineup, people whose jobs required them to have an opinion on just about everything and who were in no mood to hold back that evening.
What else could have prompted me to find a keyboard and Tweet the following within minutes of the final whistle:
Actually no, sorry that was during the game when the suggestion that the match could turn into a Friday evening party in front of the big screens in the office was scuppered by a lack of food. No, the post-match Tweet was this one:
This was no exaggeration. Just about every voice we had available was live on the desk almost apoplectic with fury over what they had just witnessed. Mark Saggers was anchoring in the stadium on one line, sat next to him was Stan Collymore who had just been commentating and was theoretically supposed to be catching his breath before doing the phone-in, Adrian Durham was live on the line from our base in Johannesburg where he had been watching the match after presenting earlier in the afternoon and even Andy Townsend who had himself been commentating on the game for ITV made a point of striding over to our position in the press box to croakily sum up what he had just seen. It was breathtaking to hear. Grown men echoing the views and emotions of so many people across the country, almost shaking with fury at England’s failure to overturn a side who were regarded as the whipping boys of the group and should have been brushed aside with ease. This is that ten minute spell of magic:
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Looking back I can enjoy this rather more than I did at the time. Wearing my producers hat I spent most of the above broadcast bellowing at the producers at the remote end that we were actually supposed to be discussing the match in line with a sponsored feature and that I wasn’t hearing very much of that on air. Try telling that to four men who have a great deal to say and are going to say it on their terms however, there are times when I have the cape but simply cannot fly.
Possibly even better was to come. England negotiated their final first round game against Slovenia with a much needed win, but Landon Donovan’s now infamous last kick goal against Algeria in their final group match meant that England had only qualified as group runners-up and were dumped into the lions den with a second round tie against old foes Germany. The first stage of the match was a roller-coaster of emotions even for the supposed neutral, England going two goals down but then showing some hitherto unseen spirit to fight back and only be denied the chance to equalise by a crushing refereeing mistake. As Germany’s fourth goal sailed in however it was clear that we were watching something that was pretty much new to all of us covering the game – a huge and quite humiliating defeat.
I’ve been in the studio for England’s exit during the later stages of several major tournaments – most notably Euro 2004 and World Cup 2006. Both were little more than unfortunate, defeat on penalties after a brave and battling performance. We hadn’t gone though but nobody could truthfully say that we deserved to go out. Reaction on the telephones afterwards was sad and numb. It was as if we’d cut the pack, drawn straws or flipped a coin to decide the game. Fate was against us and that was all that could be said.
This time it was different. This wasn’t bad luck it was bad play. The German side whom our pundits had spent the week reminding us were “not that good” had proved that they were not only good but a whole new level above our homegrown heroes. This time the presenters didn’t need to use fired up words and emotional language. Even with ten minutes to go before the end of the match we had calls six deep on the switchboard. Our audience knew it was their turn, knew it was their moment to explain where we had gone wrong and they simply could not wait for the cue to call.
It was that simple sight which summed up why I’m so proud to do this, why I knew we were creating magic with every moment on the air. We had built a platform for people to express themselves about a game they loved and set the stage for a major event in the lives of many people. For those who could not see the game in person we had helped them to hear what was taking place on the pitch. Even for those who were not with us during the match, we were there for them at the end having shared the experience with millions of others and were ready to let people react in disbelief.
Nice as it would have been for my abiding memory of this World Cup to have presided over England’s march to the final and ultimate crowning as World Champions, it is a close second to be able to say I was there to see what happened when England were utterly rubbish and get a glimpse of just what that meant to both the fans amongst our presenters and the fans who make up the millions flocking to us to have their say at that moment. Roll on our next England game.
Live Football. Breathe Football. Part Three
1Bzzzzzzzzzzzz
Amazing wasn’t it? The most significant aspect of the opening days of the World Cup and one which caused both broadcasters and organisers the biggest headaches was nothing more than a cheap plastic trumpet.
The thorny issue of the vuvuzelas and the cacophonous noise they made was first flagged up by our team on the ground about two days before the tournament began. They had attended a pre-tournament celebration parade in the middle of Johannesburg and had sent back several minutes of on the spot audio in which they had to bellow to be heard over the drone of the assembled crowd all blowing away with un-abandoned joy. They wondered out loud just what it would be like inside a stadium filled with several thousand of these rather odd instruments, all being blown at once and pondered just how the players would cope with the din, unable to hear calls for crosses or at times to be able to think clearly, so unrelenting was the noise they made.
In actual fact the concerns of the players, if they ever had any, swiftly faded into the background. They were nothing compared to the complaints of what for we broadcasters were the most important people of all – the listening audience. Because by and large they hated them.
First clues that something was amiss came in the opening couple of matches. Mixed in with the grumpy texts and emails about the fact that the online streaming had been shut off the moment the games got underway (rights issues sadly and out of anyone’s control) were the messages about the buzzing drone that at times cut through absolutely everything, even the commentators.
“Cannot stand to listen to this noise any longer – switching off”, appeared to be the main thrust of the messages. A knee-jerk overreaction perhaps but one which raised a problem that was almost unique in my professional experience. The noise of the crowd made the games almost impossible to listen to. It wasn’t just commercial radio that was bearing the brunt of the complaints either – listeners to the other side and viewers on television were almost unanimous in their demands: cut the nasty noise or we find something else to entertain ourselves with.
Now the glib response to such complaints would be to dismiss them as mere cultural ignorance. The noise of the vuvuzelas was far from unique to the World Cup after all. Taking them to games and tooting them throughout is as much a part of the culture of African football as scarves and synchronised chanting are in the UK and Europe. Anyone who watched the coverage of the African Nations Cup at the start of the year would have been instantly familiar with the sound of a million bees buzzing around the stadium. What we were witnessing at the World Cup was something perfectly normal to African football. The truly enlightened would surely have no problem with it at all.
Except that the World Cup is no ordinary football event. It is a sporting and cultural festival that attracts widespread mainstream coverage and an audience on radio and television that would not under normal circumstances sit down to enjoy the a game of football. The World Cup is as much an event for the casual fan as it is a hardcore appreciator of the game – and it was this casual audience that was in danger of being alienated by the noise of the matches themselves.
Consider for a moment just how the television companies must have reacted to this feedback. A game of live football, for so long an instant source of event-driven ratings and a more or less guaranteed source of popular entertainment was suddenly something of an audience turn-off. The assault on people’s ears was enough to ensure they were unable to enjoy the spectacle, unable to take in the game and most worryingly of all were actively indicating that they would rather switch off completely than endure it a moment longer. Even the more dedicated football supporters were rather perturbed. The truth of the matter for them was that the vuvuzelas were practically the only thing you could hear inside the stadium. The subtleties of crowd reaction, their willing on of their teams and their cries of disgust at a particularly bad error were all but drowned out. For many that made the ebb and flow of the game almost impossible to follow, regardless of the skill of the commentators.
So what the hell could broadcasters do? The BBC immediately hurried forward with a detailed technical examination of the noise, explaining just what the note was and what its harmonic range would be – and for that reason how hard it was to filter it out without losing some other more important audio detail. On the radio there wasn’t really all that much that could be done – I mean if you are commentating on a football game at a stadium then the noise you will hear will be whatever is in the stadium, there is simply no adequate way round it. When asked, my view was straightforward - a commitment to bringing the audience the sights and sounds of the tournament extended to a full reflection of what was taking place in the stadiums and on the pitch itself. To tamper with that in any way, to try to pretend that something was not there when it clearly was would be absolutely unthinkable.
As it turned out, the fuss over the vuvuzelas appeared to be a one week wonder. Maybe we all got used to then and they faded into the background. Maybe the crowds just got bored of blowing them all the time – indeed it could be our imagination but the intensity of the noise appeared to rather die down once the group stages were over and South Africa in particular were eliminated. Could it be that when the new domestic season starts it will be a shock to the system to hear a football game without the noise of a thousand bees in the background? Time will tell – and any foolhardy souls breaking out their trumpets at Premier League games might find cause to regret that their instrument of choice is shaped in such a way that it can be fitted anally.
I’ll tell you one unexpected benefit the vuvuzelas did have though. During England games it was more or less impossible to hear the sodding England Supporters Band and their once every two minutes renditions of the Great Escape. For these small mercies we can all be thankful.
Oh yes – England. Now that is another story altogether.
Live Football. Breathe Football. Part Two
0Communication Let Me Down
Before the World Cup kicked off there was a fair amount of nervous talk about the implications at staging such an event in an African country (albeit one of the most developed ones of all). Would safety be an issue? Would the stadiums be up to scratch? Would the transport infrastructure cope?
I can happily confirm to you that all of these were totally the wrong questions to be asking. What really should have been foremost amongst peoples concerns was the issue of “will we be able to get a connection to the games themselves?”.
For the outside broadcaster, ISDN technology has for years been nothing short of a bloody miracle. The concept of a little black box that can convert your voice to a string of numbers, squirt them at high speed down a telecoms connection and then have them reassembled intact at the other end with barely a second or so of delay is quite simply genius – when it works. Part of the dark arts of sports producing is knowing the exact amount of love to give a terminal adapter and codec unit, how many times to retry the connection, what standards and indeed often what brands of kit will talk to others and most importantly of all how not to panic when things just don’t seem to be working and the minutes before airtime are steadily ticking away.
Call it instinct, but 60 minutes before we were due to be live in the magnificent Soccer City football stadium in Johannesburg on that Friday lunchtime, I knew exactly the reason my attempts to connect to the commentary positions were were failing. The connection was taking longer than usual to establish and the boxes at our end were simply assuming no answer and timing out. I delved into the little used configuration menu on the Nicral unit and found a setting for “Long Dial” which I enabled. Ten seconds later the little red light winked into life and crowd atmosphere flooded over the studio speakers. The first worry was out of the way.
For purely selfish reasons I’m very fond of talking up the work of the sports producer and how pivotal we are to the entire operation. Truth be told there are some aspects of the job that aren’t really all that hard work. I mean how much effort is it really to say to two commentators: “right, I want you to describe what is happening on the pitch for 45 minutes… and GO”? When all is well, we have nothing to do. Our job is to be there when things don’t go to plan, when the timings of the game are disrupted, when entire running orders need to be reworked at the last minute or worst of all when we lose the link altogether.
The initial connection to Soccer City may well have been established, and indeed seemed perfectly happy whilst we were chatting off air and rehearsing the big opening. Come 1pm however and it was a a different matter.
BOOM! CRASH! THUNDER! Went the grandiose station production, announcing that this was indeed the 2010 FIFA World Cup and was absolutely Big Game Radio. Then the lights began to flash:
“…ood afer… I…. ark… Sag… ….come to the mag… …ity…. asberg…”
Cometh the hour, cometh the technical issues. The sheer volume of noise coming from the stadium, added to the enthusiastic bellowing of our commentary team, proved to be too much for the apparently fragile connection to handle and it steadily became more and more intermittent. I shouted at the tech op to cut to a trail, yanked the presenters off air and advised the staff back at our main base that they were going to have to run with things for a few minutes whilst we got it sorted.
Never have I been more glad to have the back up of the rest of the office as the control room was flooded with senior producers who fussed over replacement material and briefed the remaining presenters whilst I made some frantic telephoning to the stadium and asked them to reset everything and possibly maybe turn the volume down a little.
So it was that our live coverage got off to a rather inauspicious start, fifteen minutes later than planned as the line finally became stable and the big build up got underway. Naturally relaxing even for a moment was a danger, and sure enough about 30 minutes into the second half another crisis presented itself as the commentary fell off air altogether. Not just the commentary it seems as absolutely every link we had to South Africa chose that particular moment to hiccup and reset, leaving the little black box that controls everything looking like Santa’s grotto as every red light it had available winked in alarm. Suddenly I was left with nothing, no stadium, no presenters and nothing to fall back on. Apparently at that very moment something deep within the telecoms network in Johannesburg decided it had had enough and was going to go offline for a few moments, blacking us out totally.
Fortunately the interruption was brief, a minute or so later we had re-established the connection and the commentators were faded back to air as if nothing had happened at their end. At my end however I had caused the office a brief moment of hilarity by filling the silence with the first thing that came to hand – a trail proudly boasting of our LIVE UNINTERRUPTED COMMENTARY which for one very brief moment was the emptiest of empty boasts.
The aftermath of the game prompted a few worried conversations afterwards as everyone wondered whether the flaky communications was going to be an ongoing issue throughout the whole tournament. We were at that point just 24 hours away from the first England game of the World Cup and were facing the prospect of having that too fall off the air dramatically. I did my best to assure everyone that I did not think it was going to happen. In my experience the first day of a major event such as the World Cup is always plagued with teething troubles as the final kinks in the system are ironed out. If we were suffering problems then you can bet that hundreds of other broadcasters around the world were going through the same thing, all of whom would be banging on the doors of the organisers and advising them to get things sorted at their earliest convenience – and preferably sooner.
Sure enough the problems were not confined to the radio, and on the Saturday afternoon whilst preparing for the England match that evening I turned up the sound of the BBC1 commentary on the earlier game and heard the voice of Jonathan Pearce cutting in and out as his own feed from the stadium broke up and at times vanished altogether.
One final amusing postscript to these first day challenges came that evening at the stadium in Rustenburg for the first England game. Still reeling from the challenges of the previous day, the team onsite informed me down the line that they had run into ITV anchor Jim Rosenthal in the press room who had chuckled at their plight and dryly commiserated with them about the technical problems we had suffered. He who laughs last and all that… five minutes into the match came the now infamous ITV technical failure which saw their HD channel cut accidentally to a commercial just as England’s first goal against the USA was scored. After informing the team down the line of this disaster and the shitstorm that was inevitably brewing amongst those watching back home, I am told that a whole band of British radio producers instantly began counting the moments until they ran into Big Jim again, if only to commiserate with him sincerely about the terrible technical problems he and his employers were experiencing.
Live Football. Breathe Football. Part One
0….and RELAX. The uncharacteristic radio silence emanating from Masterton towers over the past few weeks is naturally down to a certain football tournament taking place in South Africa at the present time. Working for a sports radio station and also being one of the main live sport producers on said sports radio station means that the arrival of the World Cup brings with it a working schedule which at times feels like it will take almost four years to recover from.
Hence this rather fragmented series of writeups, the product of two and a half weeks of random jottings that somehow I’ve not had the opportunity to collate together into a coherent posting until today – the first day for 19 weeks that I haven’t had a live football match to magic into existence on the radio.
Magic? Well it certainly feels like that at times.
The Phoney War
We had been talking about it for months, the plans for the World Cup, speculating on who amongst the programming and production staff would actually be travelling out to South Africa, what the schedules would be, which superstar signing would be next to pull on on the grounds that he was playing in the tournament (thanks Jamie!) and just how big a party we were all going to deserve at the end of it. The fact that the World Cup was about to start for real was actually only hammered home by a brief online tweet from the man responsible for making sure everything at the South Africa end happened the way it should.
Without seeing it all in place it is hard to convey just what a huge logistical operation a major event like this is for one small radio station. Aside from the huge crate of broadcast equipment which had to be logged, inventoried, tagged and painstakingly declared for customs at both ends of the journey, the movement of people and where they will all be from one day to the next is a whole new level of stress on top of that. Commentary teams have to be driven, bussed and flown from one stadium to the next in the early stages, with hotel rooms booked, accreditation sorted, communications links prepared and all naturally with a contingency plan in place just in case the worst happens.
On top of this, everyone back at base has to be fully briefed and up to speed on the way management want everything to sound. A week before it all kicked off, this briefing took the form of the distribution of the carefully compiled document which quickly became known as The Bible:
This is my now well-worn copy, containing details of the staff out in South Africa and their contact numbers, ISDN numbers for our main broadcast base, our positions inside each stadium, the emergency contact for the host broadcasters, details of all sponsored features around the games, the full programme schedules for the next four weeks and most crucially off all the staffing rotas back at base, a day by day run down of who was working on which game and what duties they would undertake. Anyone expressing confusion as to what they should be doing and when was generally beaten up with a copy of The Bible which contained the definitive picture of who was where, regardless of what people claimed they had been told.
It was at this point at the start of the first full week in June that we entered what came to be known as the Phoney War. Most of the broadcast staff had flown out to South Africa at the weekend, ready to start our World Cup programming on the Monday and to properly build up the excitement and anticipation for the forthcoming festival of football. These four days were in actual fact the most challenging of all for everyone involved because naturally they involved four days of pretty much nothing happening. The team’s solution was to throw themselves headlong into as much South African culture as they could, resulting each day in several packages being sent down the line of our presenters and commentators visiting townships, historical monuments, safari parks and on one memorable occasions standing awestruck as a celebratory parade passed through the centre of Johannesburg. It was this parade in particular that exposed us for the first time to the devastating effect of a cheap plastic trumpet, something which was to become a recurring theme and indeed a headache for just about every broadcaster involved. More on that later however.
For my part I was dizzy with both anticipation and frustration, because essentially I had nothing to do. My role was master of the live matches, games which did not start until the Friday and for which all the preparation was pretty much complete. I was simply counting the hours until 1pm at the end of the week when the output was mine to control, our presenters could welcome everyone to Soccer City and the opening ceremony could get underway. Little did I guess that the problems were only just beginning.
