From: Mr J I D Masterton <hid009@central1.lancaster.ac.uk>
Subject: Did I do the right thing?
Originator: wdp@gagme
Organization: _
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 07:35:32 GMT


I suppose this will end up being one of the more unusual postings to
appear on r.r.b but I am posting this for two reasons: One because I
feel the tale needs and airing and Two because I would just like to know
if the net feels I did the right thing...

Over the next few years in the United Kingdom the government intends to
create a network of small, commericially operated community radio
stations with a target audience of just a few thousand over large towns
and cities. Many organisations have shown an interest in this and for
several years have been making test runs using what the Radio Authority
in Britiain calls 'special event licences' enabling them to operate low
power FM stations for a period of 28 days.

One such organisation exists in Harrogate, North Yorkshire near to where
I live and as a student broadcaster I was very keen to be involved in
this project. I had done some work for them in the summer of 1991 where
I presented a 3 hour Drive Time slot for a week. The station got in
touch with me again earlier this year and asked me if I was interested
in becoming involved again when they went on air for another 28 days in
July 1992.

I immediately said yes and was offered the Breakfast slot for all 4
weeks, demonstrating I hope the faith they had in my abilities as a
presenter. July came around and I turned up at the station for a
production meeting to finalise the schedule. Nobody had said anything to
me about a format so I constructed one of my own and presented in to the
man who was in charge of programming. He glanced over the sheet, smiled
and said "Yes James, that's fine. Stamp your own personality on it won't
you." and it was with that advice ringing in my ears that I went on air
the following week.

I should stress at this point that the entire organisation was very
informal with only a few men at the top having specific jobs in
authority. The rest of the infrastructure was left to be run as best it
could with all the other volunteers working together. I stress that
nobody was being paid for the work they did in the station and so I was
taking a month off work to get up at 5am every weekday and do a 3 hour
radio show with no reward save for the on-air experience it would offer me.

The show I did was a lively, informative and entertaining mixture with
me and a friend of mine assisting to read news, review the papers chat
about television and whatever happened to be going on in the world at
the time. I did this deliberately as the one instruction I had been
given was that they wanted the show to be 'talk based' - as a result I
averaged about 8 records an hour - damn hard work when there are only
two of you in a studio built from a portacabin.

All would have been fine, had it not been for one of the station
managers who, incidentally had no knowledge of radio programming and
whose worth to the station was one of manager and engineer, ringing me
up each and every night to tear the show to bits, forcing me to go to
bed in a bad mood for the next morning. 6am each day I would open up the
studio and 10 minutes later he would be there making suggestions and
telling me what I was to put in the show that morning. As you can
imagine this irritated the hell out of me as the last thing I needed as
producer/presenter was somebody telling me what to do whilst psyching
myself up for the mornings broadcast. We would have been on air for 15
minutes some days by the time he vanished and went to work. You guessed
it - he did not even listen to the show as he drove out of range of our
signal - yet still felt qualified to criticise me. In all this time I
heard nothing from the two men who were officially the programme
controllers who seemed to have absolutely no complaints.

The final straw came over the issue of news. The bosses of the station
wanted the breakfast slot to compete with the large local stations in
providing a complete news, weather and travel service. This was a
ludicrous folly as we had no staff save the few volunteers to collect
news, they did not show up until 10am and as I have said, first thing
there were just the two of us in the studio, neither of us having the
time to get news from anywhere. One of the bosses suggested we monitor
the local BBC station and use the news from that. Except that for our
small town there was no news and neither of us had the time to listen to
other stations 30 minutes before we were due on air. The idea was a
ludicrous folly.

My arguments on this point were appreciated and so a compromise was
reached where the news team, who worked through the day getting
interviews to broadcast on the evening drivetime slot would leave me the
taped interviews to rebroadcast the following morning. To me the idea
was slightly silly as the tapes had already been played once and there
seemed no point repeating them the following day, but it filled in
airtime and kept them happy so I agreed. The problem was the news team
were not leaving me the tapes in the studio, I would come in each
morning and find nothing. In the minds of the station managers this was
my fault and I got shouted at for not playing them. Similarly we were
suppsed to receive travel bulletins by fax. These often did not arrive
until 9:30 when most drivers were at work. Again this was seen to be my
fault and I was criticised for not providing an adequate service.

In all of this I carried on presenting a show which received nothing but
praise, not only from my friends but people in the town who kept coming
up and congratulating me. They (the listeners and the people who
counted) had no complaints. The only complaints came from the bosses
who, as I said, knew nothing about radio presenting and were not even
listening to the shows. This farce carried on for Monday, Tuesday and
Wednesday of the first week. On Wednesday night I got a phone call from
one of the bosses containing the phrase: "This slot is not working out
quite as we had intended it."

At which point I blew up. If they had intended the breakfast slot to
have a format NOBODY TOLD ME! To me it was symptomatic of the lack of
organisation in the station. I did not get up at the crack of dawn every
morning to be stressed like this so on the Thursday morning I forced
myself out of bed, played back to back music for 3 hours before telling
the bosses to find themselves another breakfast show presenter. A few
days later I phoned one of the programme organisers (supposedly in
charge of programming) to ask if I was needed at all. He replied: "I
don't know James, it is out of my hands..."

I have not been in contact with them since. I have no regrets over what
happened. I feel I was justifiably proud of the job I was doing and I
was extrmely offended at the way I was treated.

All I want to know is this..... Would anyone else have done the same thing?
-- 
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|	James Masterton		|	You don't have a lot		     |
|  hid009@cent1.lancs.ac.uk	|	But it's more than you've got        |
|				|	And you can turn it into more        |
| 'If I knew what I was doing	|	Than it seems			     |
|    I would not be here'	|			Jim Steinman, 1989   |
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