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Chapter 6

Local/Commercial Radio

RICH SHAYERS HAD CONVINCED me to do something more worthwhile than providing a soothing backdrop of music and companionship for those in need⁴⁵ – so I’d accepted his offer of a job DJing for a fledgling station. The set-up reminded me very much of the buccaneering can-do spirit of Radio Caroline – maverick disc jockeys flouting regulations to give listeners something new and fresh. My job wasn’t on pirate radio – that would have been a criminal offence. It was the in-store radio station for a branch of record shop Our Price.

It was a pilot scheme way, way, way, way ahead of its time (indeed, it folded within weeks). But the team! It’s my privilege to say that these were some of the most dazzling young broadcasters I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. They were scientific in their understanding of good radio – they were radiologists.

Check out this roll call.

Paul Stubbs. An aficionado of US shock jocks and personality DJs, he sadly never knew what he had. He left the business shortly after Our Price and now works for Hertz car rental. Still follows the US game and is a fountain of knowledge on call-ins and quiz ideas. Invaluable.

Phil Schofield. Phil was always the baby of the group and had a snotty-nosed quality that we bullied out of him. Now better known as the presenter of TV’s This Morning, Phil was back then a bit of a know-it-all and was brought down a peg or two by off-air pranks such as having his new shoes filled with piss. There was no smoking gun/dripping willy, so Stubbs got away with it. It was a tough time for Phil and he never talks about it. Phil, if you’re reading, why not give me a call?

Jon Boyd. That voice! Warm, reassuring and deliciously transatlantic, Jon later turned his back on radio and has made quite the name for himself as a voiceover artist with, by his own admission, a pretty limited range. His voice can be heard in the lift of an art gallery in Bath. He tells me he takes women there and then mimes the words ‘Doors Closing’ or ‘Third Floor’ over the sound of the recording. Freaks them out. Cracking SOH.

Brian Golding. ‘Bonkers’ Bri combined a wacky sense of humour with a genuine mental illness and went on to co-host Drive Time on Signal Radio before killing himself in 1991.

As a team, I think we all knew then that we had something special, and that sense of worth was a shot in the arm for a young, thrusting Alan Partridge. With that shot – easily as powerful as an intravenous drug like ‘heroin’, ‘smack’ or ‘gear’ – I was driven to go out into the world of broadcasting and succeed. Nothin’ was gonna stop me!

1984–1987. Not much happened here.

It’s 1988 and a young, side-parted young radio reporter is pinning a pretty rude lower-division football manager down on his team’s disgraceful disciplinary record.

‘Six red cards in as many games,’ says the reporter. ‘Why do you continue to tolerate this culture of hooliganism?’

The manager tries to worm his way off the hook by disputing the figures. ‘They’re yellow cards,’ he says, ‘And that’s actually a pretty good behaviour record.’

But the reporter has the figures written down on a notepad and won’t be deterred. In the end, the manager loses his rag – ‘You bloody idiot’ – pulls the top off the microphone and throws it at the reporter, but it doesn’t hurt anyway because it’s made of grey foam. The reporter broadcasts the story that night. It was, everyone agreed, great radio – and although the reporter had to issue a full apology and retraction for the red/yellow card error, it burnished his reputation as one to watch.⁴⁶

That reporter was Alan Partridge. The manager? The name escapes me, but it must have been fairly local because I remember being pleased I’d driven there without stopping for a toilet break. I can’t remember what he looked like either or what colour his team played in, just that he had a strong regional accent and used such a hilarious mix of tenses – ‘he gets the ball and he’s gone and kicked it’ – that he sounded like a malfunctioning robot at the end of a space-fi movie.

So what had happened to me? How had I gone from the cossetted glamour of Our Price radio to the snarling, balls-out toughness of sports reporting? Well, I’d always been a keen sports fan. It seemed to me that the world of sport – with its reliance on stats, facts, trivia and rules – provided modern man with certainty and structure. Just as a well-fitting jockstrap cups the cock and balls of a sportsman, so sport cradled me. You know where you are with sport. It’s good.

And it’s all so logical. Watch a play by Shakespeare or go to a modern art gallery, and no one has the faintest idea what the hell is going on.

Take Shakespeare. Not a play goes by without one character whispering something about another character that is clearly audible to that character. By virtue of the fact it has to be loud enough for the audience to hear it, it’s inconceivable that it can’t also be heard by the character in question. It’s such an established technique in Shakespeare’s canon people just think no one will notice. Well I’ve got news for you – this guy did.

Sport, on the other hand, is straightforward. In badminton, if you win a rally, you get one point. In volleyball, if you win a rally, you get one point. In tennis, if you win a rally, you get 15 points for the first or second rallies you’ve won in that game, or 10 for the third, with an indeterminate amount assigned to the fourth rally other than the knowledge that the game is won, providing one player is two 10-point (or 15-point) segments clear of his opponent. It’s clear and simple.

But that wasn’t what catapulted me to local radio glory. No, what catapulted me to local radio glory was the fact I’d been uninvited to a wedding at the eleventh hour (reason not given), and had a day to kill. Happily, I received a call from a friend called Barry Hethersett, who moonlit as a radio reporter on Saxon Radio in Bury St Edmunds. He’d heard I was free that day and asked me to fill in on his slot because he had to attend the funeral of one his parents. I agreed and he gave me a lift to the station, dressed in a smart suit but wearing a buttonhole flower, which I felt was in bad taste.

I was introduced to the station controller, Peter Crowther, very much one of the old school,⁴⁷ and a man who could make or break careers like that.⁴⁸ Eager to validate my sports credentials, I’d dug out a prize-winning thought-piece (or essay) I’d written on sport as a schoolboy. Labelled ‘brilliant’ by one of the finest headmasters I’ve worked under, the piece took as its starting point the truism that there are lots of sports, each of them different from each other, before providing a pretty thorough breakdown of the main ones and peppering it with facts and figures. Faux-leatherbound, I brought it with me.

Crowther read the first page with bemused interest before – in a clear indication that he was still on the sauce – bursting out laughing. Very much one of the old school. But it was a laugh that said, ‘Boy, this guy’s good.’ I’d proved I knew the subject inside out.

Within the hour, I was broadcasting to the whole of east East Anglia, reading out sports reports direct from Teletext, ‘throwing’ to a pre-recorded interview with a 15-year-old cycle champ and then reading out greyhound racing results, which I later learnt had been made up by the still-laughing Crowther.⁴⁹

Hethersett – perhaps still crushed by the death of his mother or father – never returned to Saxon Radio. And they wouldn’t have wanted him anyway. I’d shown my mettle and taken to it like a duck to water. (Or, as former Olympic swimmer Duncan Goodhew says, ‘like a Dunc to water’, which isn’t that funny but forgivable as Duncan continues to be an inspiration to hairless children nationwide.)⁵⁰

Sports reporting was a dizzying but exhilarating slog.⁵¹ I was spending my Saturday and Sunday afternoons at horse trials, football matches, squash tournaments … I was becoming a familiar voice on radio and, yes, people wanted a piece of me.

I ascended the career ladder like a shaven Jesus ascending to his rightful place in the kingdom of Heaven. I was poached by Radio Broadland (Great Yarmouth), Hereward Radio (Peterborough), Radio Orwell (Ipswich) and eventually Radio Norwich.

There, my brief extended beyond sport to a bi-monthly⁵² magazine show called Scoutabout, which I took over from amateur DJ and Scout obsessive Peter Flint.

‘Fall in, Troop! Fall in!’ I’d shout into the microphone. And then as the specially commissioned theme music ended with a rom-po-pom-pom, I’d say, ‘Aaaaaaaat ease.’ And the show – a high-spirited hour aimed at Boy Scouts and to a smaller extent Girl Guides – would begin.

It was great, great fun, but my sports reporting was obviously my top priority. As such, I became a valuable and well-known asset to Radio Norwich. The controller there, Bett Snook, was a chain-smoking woman who sounded like a chain-smoking man whose chain smoking had called for an emergency laryngectomy.

She gave me some solid gold advice. ‘Dickie Davies, Barry Davies, Elton Welsby, Jimmy Hill, David Coleman, Tony Gubba, Ron Pickering, Ron Atkinson, Bob Greaves, Stuart Hall, Gerald Sinstadt. What do they have in common?’

‘They’re all sports broadcasters,’ I said. ‘Some more successful⁵³ than others.’⁵⁴

‘And what’s the difference between them?’ She sat back in her chair, smoking her cigarette using her mouth.

‘Some are more successful⁵⁵ than others,’⁵⁶ I repeated.

‘No, more than that. Think about it. They’re different types of sports broadcaster. Some are anchors, others commentators, some are analysts, some are reporters.’

I realised what she was getting at.

‘Alan, it’s all very well being Norwich’s Mr Sport [which I was]. But you’re spreading yourself too thin. Work out what it is in sport you want to be, and then be the best at it.’

So I did. And I was. I became the best sports-interviewer-cum-reporter/anchor on British terrestrial television.

In 1990, I was fortunate enough to see a steward badly hurt at an archery competition. In a funny kind of way – and at first, it was very funny – this single mishap provided the springboard to a career at what was, in my view, the biggest publicly funded broadcasting corporation in the United Kingdom. The BBC.

I’d been extremely reluctant to report on the contest, but had agreed to cover it live as Taverham Archery Club was playing host to the British Archery Championships that year and this was apparently a big deal for Norfolk.

‘Whether you regard it as an ancient art form, a woodland hunting technique or just a big version of darts, this is archery,’ I boomed. ‘And we’ll be following every twang, whoosh and gadoyng of what is shaping up to be a classic British Archery Championships.’

It was sports broadcasting with real panache, that much should be obvious, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. That was until, mid-way through the event, second favourite Chris Curtis accidentally discharged his bow and it issued a rod of arrow into the arm of a female steward. (And for the billionth time, I didn’t accuse Curtis of being drunk, I merely speculated that he might be drunk.)

Suddenly, I was hurled into the middle of a breaking news story. This was live radio and all ears were literally on me.

‘The poor woman’s wailing like a banshee over there and, as concerned officials gather round her to stem the flow of blood and presumably discuss what, if any, rule has been broken, I’ll do my best to describe the scene.

‘Basically, archers are standing round chatting – none of them have approached the stricken victim, but that’s what archers do. If this was in the wild, the archers would stand there high-fiving each other while the carcass was retrieved by a young bushwacker or loyal gun dog.

‘Not that she’s dead. She’s hit in her upper arm, which must come as some relief. If it’d been her neck, it would have been curtains for both her and the rest of the afternoon’s archery action, coming to you live from Taverham.

‘And while the lady steward squeals like an impaled but quiet pig, I can tell you she’s gone into shock – you can see that from here. The colour’s drained from her and she’s all a-quiver. And actually … like “a quiver”, she has an arrow in her.

‘Erm … it’s an unusual sight, certainly. A person lying there with a big rod coming out of them, like a human kebab or – if you prefer – some kind of lady lolly. And a not unattractive lady lolly, I must say. One that I’m sure every man here would dearly like to lick.

‘But that’s not to in any way trivialise what is clearly a distressing situation.

‘Er … St John’s ambulance are nearby. Not doing anything, of course, but I’m not sure they’re trained to administer medical care. They’re to a real paramedic what the Salvation Army is to a special forces soldier. Still, they look smart enough.

‘And the arrow’s out! The arrow is out! It’s been plucked from the woman like a pointy Excalibur. Well done that man …

‘Right. Next to shoot is Mark Allen …’

When I played the tape back to Carol the next morning, she agreed (in an uncharacteristically effusive show of support) that it had been ‘a powerful and moving broadcasting tour de force’.⁵⁷

And she wasn’t the only one impressed. With my commentary played out on BBC radio news bulletins up and down the land, I was thrust into the national limelight. Suddenly, I was hot property.

And so it was that, six months later, I was included on a round-robin circular memo to BBC reporters, asking for applications to join the team of a new Radio 4 current affairs show. I was a wanted man!