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Clocking Out

Published 27th May 2022

Life

For five years between 2003 and 2008 – with a brief, self-enforced break in the middle – I worked for a certain UK-based Cash & Carry company. I will not dignify them with a name. It remains one of the worst employment experiences of my life, rivalled only by the job I had making dental moulds for the NHS where I kept breaking all the teeth off.

My list of anecdotes from that time is long and unpleasant. Yes, I had the obligatory moment where I was told I was no good at the job, and sat sobbing in the manager’s office. But there were worse things afoot. How about the time a customer ordered a pallet of rice, and I witnessed them being referred to in a stupendously racist manner by someone in the order office? That seemed particularly awful – not just the racist abuse itself, but that the racist abuse was about someone who was literally giving us money and keeping us in work.

Or maybe there was the time where I passed an interview to move from the shop floor to the order office. I was given a start date, and all was well… until the job was pulled out from under me the evening before I was due to start, just because someone in management didn’t like me. Moreover, I hadn’t even been told by my manager that the move had been stopped. Someone else let me know, and I had to confront my errant manager about it myself.

Then there was the morning where I was given a sheet of instructions by that same manager, and found on the back the instructions given to him by his manager. The phrase “I am not convinced about John Hoare” is etched onto my mind to this very day. I mean, I’m not convinced about myself either, but I don’t usually have to see it written down by somebody else.

From the above, I may give the impression that I was awful at the job. This isn’t actually true. I may not have blown people away with my work, sure. But after I left, did something else for a bit, and then needed my job back, they gave it to me, and they sure didn’t do that out of the goodness of their hearts. I would suggest that the place was so badly run that doing the job well was a virtually impossible task. With years of hindsight, and experience of a half-decent work environment, I can see that now. But at the time, my self-esteem took a wholly unnecessary beating.

But with all the chaos above, there’s one incident which truly makes me realise that the place was a pathetic place to work.

I eventually did get that job in the order office. And part of that job was to talk to all the sales reps. The transaction wasn’t complicated: they tried to convince us to order more of their products, and I had to make sure we didn’t over-order and end up with stock we couldn’t sell. I remember having an argument once with the Cadbury rep about the outrageous withdrawal of Wispa from the market.

Occasionally, the reps would bring in some merchandise; I once got to try a flavour of Tic Tacs which hadn’t gone out on sale yet. This remains the highlight of my working career to date. This practice of accepting things wasn’t banned: nobody was going to order something they couldn’t sell, just because they got some free Tic Tacs. Not even me.

But one day, I had an idea. If the reps could bring in silly things like pens and the like, then maybe they could bring in something a little bigger. Like, say, a wall clock, branded with their company’s logo. Then I could put them all on the wall of the order office, and we could get an international time zones thing going. LONDON – PARIS – NEW YORK, and the like.

We could look like an important news room. In a scruffy order office somewhere in Exeter, sure. But we could have some fun. And our walls needed something interesting to put on them.

So I set to work asking the reps, and set the plan in motion. I believe we got to a grand total of two clocks on the wall before it was stopped from above. No reason given; certainly no worries about bribery, however idiotic that would have been when it came to clocks. Just a general air of “Obviously, we aren’t going to do that.”

And that’s what I remember most from working at that company. Not the sobbing in the manager’s office. Not the racism. Not the insults, given to me personally by hand. No: it was that I tried to have a little bit of fun in what could be a fairly boring job, and it was immediately stamped down on with no explanation. Because who would want to enjoy themselves at work?

Retail jobs usually suck. But the worst thing is: they don’t have to. Sometimes, fun is disallowed, because people are suspicious of it. Even something as harmless as a wall of clocks in an order office.

It crushes the soul something rotten.

*   *   *

In a transmission suite for a certain television channel in London, there is a poster on the wall. A poster of… a mirror globe. And if you walk just across the way to the opposite suite, there is a striking, stripy, numeral 2.

And last Christmas, a certain festive-themed Ceefax poster made its annual appearance for the third year running.

Just a tiny scrap of fun, to get you through the shift. It helps.

Bad Teenager

Published 14th May 2022

Life / TV Comedy

It’s funny, the things you remember. The things you remember when everything else surrounding is a dull haze. Standing out in the middle: a conversation with someone who I used to know at primary school, but saw less often now I was at secondary.

I can’t even remember how old I was. I got into Red Dwarf in 1994 when I was 13, so it must have been after then. A couple of years later? We’d talked about the show before, anyway. And then once, during a normal conversation, he suddenly informed me that he didn’t like Red Dwarf any more. He’d grown out of it, you see. The show was for kids.

I was confused. I mean, the show definitely wasn’t made for kids. Even forgetting its teenage audience, the show was clearly made for adults. But he was adamant. He’d grown out of the show, and – by heavy implication – I was a baby for still liking it. Oh well.

Looking back, that was the moment when I realised that some people won’t be honest with you about this stuff. That some people will worry more about how they look, than about what they like.

This guy’s contempt for a show he used to enjoy was just teenage posturing.

*   *   *

A few years later, I was standing in a bowling alley, attempting to be an American teenager. I was in a group. A… mixed group.

Somehow, the conversation got onto the Spice Girls. My best friend slagged off “Mama”. I was confused.

“But I thought you said you liked that one!”

Awkward silence. My friend was livid. But I fancy that even the girls thought I hadn’t really played ball with society’s expectations.

I never was very good at that pesky teenage posturing.

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All the News That’s Fit to YouTube

Published 9th February 2022

Life / Meta / TV Presentation

Content warning: sexual assault, but no graphic details.

Yesterday’s article about Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era brought up a problem that I have to contend with every so often. And that problem is: how to deal when a real, horrible thing suddenly intrudes on the silly kind of nonsense I usually write about on here. In yesterday’s case, what was supposed to be a shaggy dog story finding out how a production team adapted a newspaper, turned into a story about a 21-year-old woman being brutally stabbed to death by her husband.

When writing the piece, I had to figure out how to tackle that. Did it make the article inappropriate to publish? Did it at the very least require a warning? In the end, I decided no to both. The story is shocking, but was also ultimately quite short, with no gruesome detail beyond mentioning “multiple stab wounds”. Being over-sensitive can be just as awkward as not considering things enough. I decided to let it stand as it was, and while the piece does actually end as a joke, it’s a joke that acknowledges the awkwardness and hopefully puts everybody on the same page. A joke with a point.

But it did remind me of another issue I had a few years back. It’s something I never wrote about at the time; there is no way of discussing the actual case in question, for reasons that will become apparent. But a conversation on Twitter reminded me of it, and I think it’s an interesting thing to discuss in terms of the problems you can easily run into with examining old telly. So let’s try to examine it… without actually linking to the video in question.

Because this is a case of jigsaw identification.

The video I wanted to write about was a news bulletin. It was a news bulletin with something particularly interesting about its production, which is why I wanted to write about it; the actual news stories were mostly irrelevant to my point. But throughout the bulletin, there was a story about a woman who had been abducted, and then rescued. There was plenty of information given about the abduction: the woman’s name, place names, and the details of how it ended. It’s very, very easy to research what happened with this story after this news bulletin aired.

And when you do that, the woman’s name – so prominent in the bulletin – disappears. And it disappears for a very obvious reason: because she was raped during her abduction. This fact isn’t mentioned during the news broadcast – as much as anything else, it’s too soon for that information to come to light. But once it did, and the rape itself is reported, the woman’s name is entirely excised.

When I found all this out at the time, I was horrified that I’d managed to piece this together. These days, perhaps I’m a little less shocked; given that part of what I do on here is to drag out obscure things, I guess it’s not a surprise that I’d accidentally touch on stuff like this. But it’s a reminder of how easy jigsaw identification is, and you don’t have to be a journalist writing about current criminal cases to mean you have to be careful about it. You can run into these issues even just writing stupid things about old TV.

It’s also a reminder that we’re really not supposed to be able to see that bulletin, here in 2022. It was meant to be watched at that particular moment in time. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been uploaded; far from it, in fact. But the intent with that piece of reporting was not that any random person would be able to see it in 2022.

There are historic videos and articles like these everywhere online. They’re not intentionally doing anything untoward. But you can piece together all kinds of things using them that you really shouldn’t be able to. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution; any potential “fix” could create a problem ten times worse.

But it’s why, even when writing about old telly… you have to be aware of certain things you might not expect to have to deal with.

The Wrong Wavelength

Published 28th January 2022

Life

When I was a kid, I went through a period of being obsessed with light bulbs.

Not in a useful way, mind. I wasn’t really obsessed with how they worked, or how they were made. No, I was interested in types of light bulbs. I’d wander any given department store, investigating. What’s this, a 40 watt bulb? 60W? 100W? 150W? When do you use which type of bulb, Dad? Why? Why?

And if the wattage alone was exciting, then you can imagine the state I was in when I discovered that you could buy bulbs of different colours. And, of course, I wanted one in my bedroom immediately. Why would I put up with a boring white bulb, when I could have something far more interesting instead?

*   *   *

Nottingham, in the early 90s. A detached house in the beautiful leafy suburb of Wollaton. There’s a primary school just over the road. It’s as respectable a scene as you could ever hope to find.

But beware. Every night, one window of the house glowed a curious, inviting red.

40.

Published 23rd May 2021

Life / TV Presentation

I was born on the 23rd May 1981, at Peel Street Hospital in Nottingham. Six months later, that hospital closed for good. I don’t think the two instances were linked.

Third child of the family, I weighed 3.73kg, and popped out at precisely 2:46pm. Which means we can ignore the rest of the gory details, and figure out the really interesting thing: what was on BBC television at precisely the moment I was born?

On BBC1 was Grandstand – specifically, the build-up to England v Scotland at Wembley. Meanwhile, over on BBC2, the afternoon film The Wonder Kid (1952) had just started. Make up your own jokes.

*   *   *

I am blessed with an absolutely fucking diabolical memory. My entire childhood exists as ever-disintegrating glimpses of quarter-remembered events.

But TV was always there. I distinctly remember running around the school playground with a camera, shooting the ongoing football match. I mean, I didn’t have a real camera. We couldn’t even afford Sky at that point, let alone have the money for something like that. I had to improvise. This improvisation consisted of a plastic ice cream tub, with stickers all over it for the buttons, and a toilet roll tube sticking out the side for the lens. This was placed on my head, so I could look through the tube. Sadly, this did not make Kerry Carter immediately fall in love with me.

I also distinctly remember watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit on Central… and then catching it again a year or so later, and noting that the shoe dip scene seemed to have been further cut. “Why would that happen?”, I wondered, not realising that it was the start of a lifelong obsession.

Then, there was Going Live! A show which got me out of bed early every Saturday morning – for half the year, at least. That show was mine, and Trev and Simon were the best thing in the world. I may never fall in love with a TV show in quite the same way again.

And one day, I noticed something interesting. A certain name showed up in those end credits. Erm, my name.1

Going Live! credits - Camera Supervisor John Hoare

Even at that age, it got me thinking. What would happen if I wrote into the show, told them that my name was the same as that guy who did the cameras, and that’s it’s what I wanted to do when I grew up? Surely they’d have me on the show, and I’d get to meet everyone? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

I never did it. I’m not exactly sure why. I mean, I can tell you that I was a lazy little shit. I also thought that thousands of letters would be sent into Going Live! each week. I suspect I didn’t think it was worth trying. These days, my gut feeling is that it was more likely something amazing might have happened than I expected at the time, but who knows, really.

So I never got to go anywhere near the Going Live! studio, unfortunately. I had to settle for lurking behind the camera at a Nottingham OB for one of the ITV Telethon programmes, and yelling out excitedly when I saw the Central logo on the camera. I distinctly remember the cameraman turning to me, and giving me an indulgent smile. To be fair, that was great too.

But none of this – not even the ice cream tub camera – meant I really thought I’d ever work in television. As much as it was a huge part of my life, working on the other side of the screen seemed somehow completely impossible. Anyway, I was obviously going to end up as a computer programmer or something. No, not a software developer. A computer programmer, that’s what it was called.

*   *   *

Six days after I was born, on the 29th May 1981, the Did You See…? team filmed a segment going behind-the-scenes in the BBC presentation department. Delightfully, somebody has uploaded this segment to YouTube. And at 5:49 into the video, we get to spend a bit of time in NC1, where BBC1 network originates. Warwick Cross is your network director, and the man in charge.

I find watching that video an incredibly weird experience. Because sitting in Warwick’s chair is where I find myself, 40 years later. Some of the job is different these days, and I could write a book about exactly what. But that’s all for another day. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the following.

The hunch forward. The hum to the theme tune. The tiniest hint of world-weariness. None of that is changed, 40 years on. I do all of them. The genetic memory of how to be a network director lives on.

And as for what I might be transmitting on any given day? Who knows. Maybe football on BBC1. Or an old film on BBC2.

Some things never change, 40 years later.

  1. With thanks to Mark Simpson for the screengrab. This particular edition was broadcast on the 4th February 1989. ↩

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Epiphanies.

Published 19th September 2020

Life

I remember. That visceral childhood sense of an adult being unfair.

Take a random primary school assembly, in what was surely near the beginning of 1991.1 Our headteacher – an unpleasant woman who even the other teachers whispered about – was holding court. At one point, she announced that as the school had already done something for charity this school year, we wouldn’t be engaging in any more charitable activities. This caused a bit of consternation. Clearly, some students had been planning. Someone meekly put up their hand, and asked about Comic Relief that year. Surely we could still do something for that?

No, we could not still do something for that. And our headteacher did not give a friendly, kind response. You know, “I’d love to, and I’m pleased you want to do something, but…” The response was rather harsher. Shouting, even. Did the pupil not listen to what she just said? Our headteacher was angry. Angry at someone who, erm, wanted to help out a charity.

And sitting there, on that bare floor in assembly, I just knew that… it was unfair.

*   *   *

Four years or so later, I’m on my paper round. An iron railing looms into view. Oh God. Time for that house again.

Sometimes, things happen in life which justify all the bad sitcoms in the world. And my nemesis on this paper round really is a dog . A nasty, vicious dog, who – unless you’re very fast – will race to the gate and start barking like it wants to eat you. The saving grace of the house is that I don’t have to go to the door – a letterbox is helpfully placed at the gate. It’s a sign of how violent this dog actually was that delivering the paper is still a challenge.

I distinctly remember complaining to my boss back at the post office. He was unsympathetic. People have the right to defend their own house, you know. “Maybe”, I thought bitterly. “But if they want to do that, they could at least walk 20 metres down the road to pick up their own newspaper.” But whatever. I continued to dread, deliver, and dash.

Until one day, as I gingerly approached the gate, the owner appeared. To be fair, she seemed a nice lady. I handed her the newspaper. She asked if I ever had any problems with the dog. I admitted that yes, I did.

Not to worry. She had a solution. All I had to do was bring some treats, and the dog would soon grow to love me.

Bring some treats. Buy some treats, unless I wanted to become another juvenile crime statistic. With, presumably, my own paper round money.

I did not earn a lot of money on this paper round. And now somebody I was delivering papers to expected me to spend some of it on their dog, just to avoid getting attacked.

At the time, I didn’t get that this was an allegory. I do now. But one thing I did know: it was damn well unfair.

*   *   *

Back to my primary school. It’s assembly time again, with my favourite headteacher. And at the end of most assemblies, we usually sing a song, with us all squinting at a blurry projector. We had a standard repertoire of songs, including a version of “I Can Sing A Rainbow”, rewritten to mention all the colours of the rainbow correctly, according to science.

And then there was another song we used to sing. A song full of hope for the future, for our future, the future of children. A rousing song, a beautiful song, a song to stir our emotions and lead us forward into the light.

That song was “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”. Yes, that one.

Stripped of the context of the film, and placed into a brand new, intensely worrying one, you have to wonder just what was going on in her mind.

After all, there’s being unfair, and then there’s thinking the holocaust was a grand idea.

  1. It could be ’89, but I would have been seven, and that just seems a little too early. ↩

The Journey

Published 18th September 2020

Life

It’s 11pm, as I leave a certain broadcasting centre in West London. Time to go home. I take the tube; partly for cost reasons, and partly because of a rather nasty case of claustrophobia. The larger tube trains don’t set that off, you see. Either way, taking a taxi home after every late shift isn’t an option.

I get on the tube, and sit down. To my right are three people. None of them are wearing a mask. But hey, I’ve been the person saying that lung issues can be invisible, and that we shouldn’t leap to conclusions about people. Maybe they’re all exempt. I sit back with my book, and try not to think about it.

I’m soon at my interchange, and I quickly change lines. Annoyingly, my next train is at a different platform to normal; I have to run up some stairs. My lungs protest – I have some nasty scarring from pneumonia back in 2016 – but I manage to make it with about half a minute to spare.

We move off. At the next station, somebody comes aboard and sits in front of me. They’re wearing a mask. Good. I concentrate on my book. Until I suddenly become aware of somebody else sitting to my right… without a mask. But, y’know. I have lung issues myself – I manage to wear a mask, but it can be uncomfortable at times – but you wouldn’t know it to look at me. Maybe they’re exempt.

My stop. Thankfully. I can relax a little. I walk briskly out of the station… and into a group of people playing football with a plastic pint glass, and yelling. Well, we’re outside, masks aren’t really required, are they? I pick myself through the group – a little too close for comfort when there’s a lot of them, but whatever – and head for home.

But as I get to the traffic lights, two people cut across me. They’re not wearing masks, either… and they’re heading directly for the pub opposite. “You got your mask?”, asks one to the other.

The other bursts out laughing. “No!” And off they trot.

And that was my journey home from work tonight. A journey made by a key worker, who has zero opportunity to work from home. A journey made just at the point where a second wave of Covid has frankly already started. A journey made by someone who already has lungs which are shot to hell and back.

*   *   *

By the way, they were all men.

“Feeling Poorly Again, Are You?”

Published 2nd May 2020

Life / TV Comedy

My dad died when I was 13. Which is a rotten age to lose your dad.

Not that there is any brilliant time, of course. If he’d died when I was 18, I’d say it screwed me up for university.1 If he’d died when I was two, I’d be upset I never got to know him at all. Still, at 13, I was just starting to have the occasional adult conversation with him. There was the vague sense of the beginning of the relationship we could have had, where I really got to know him. To have him snatched away right on the cusp of that moment makes the sense of loss all the more terrible.

And over the years, I’ve learnt that one of those things we really could have connected over was comedy. I have flashes of my dad’s love for it. There’s the time when I crept downstairs well past midnight, and found him watching Carry On Again Doctor. There was the revelation I learnt from my mother recently that he loved Python. (Being as technical as he was, would have adored the Blu-ray.) And then there was making Hitchhiker’s references in official documentation he wrote for the Medical Research Council:

But one moment stays with me more than any other. And on my recent full rewatch of Bottom, it came flooding back. Specifically: the episode Digger.

*   *   *

I distinctly remember sitting with my dad in the living room. I didn’t watch the whole episode, I don’t think. I just remember the last scene, with Richie and Eddie sitting in the ambulance, Richie having nearly died in his latest attempt to actually have sex with a lady. My dad turns to me, a grin on his face.

“Watch this.”

I watched, as Eddie reveals to Richie that he ended up having sex with the Viscountess2 instead. Richie takes this about as well as you would expect, and asks Eddie to hand him the defibrillator.

Richie electrocuting Eddie

My dad chortles away. I also laugh, but not just because of what was on the telly. I just liked that my dad had let me in on what felt like an adult joke.

*   *   *

Because this is me, I feel the need to track down the date of the above event. We definitely weren’t watching it on commercial video – for a start, Series 2 was released on VHS in 1995, the year after my dad died. I can’t guarantee he hadn’t recorded the original broadcast of the episode to watch later, but unlike me, I don’t think he watched the same things over and over again, so it seems unlikely that he would have kept it. And we obviously weren’t watching the original broadcast on the 1st October 1992; otherwise, how could he have known what was going to happen?

So a bit of work with Genome reveals that the day this happened was almost certainly Friday 5th November 1993, which is the very first repeat of the episode. I think my dad remembered that moment for a whole year, and on a whim decided to share it with me.3 A moment of extreme violence about sexual frustration. I was 12.

He died less than a year later. And the stuff I missed out on still makes me sad, nearly three decades on. A sense of a lost part of my adolescence, when I could have discovered comedy with him. Instead, I had to do it by myself. And whenever I watch that scene, it hits me all over again.

As though Bottom wasn’t melancholy enough.

  1. Luckily, I managed to do that all by myself. ↩

  2. Lady Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dob, third Viscountess of Moldavia, to be precise. ↩

  3. One other thing strikes me about all this, years down the line. My dad was born in 1928; that makes him 65 when we were watching this episode. That is… outside the target age range for a show like Bottom. The show is often compared to Hancock’s Half Hour; my dad almost certainly watched both of them when they were first broadcast. Which shows a certain omnivorous taste for comedy that is deeply pleasing to me. ↩

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Teenage Archeology

Published 19th March 2020

Life

I’ll tell you one thing. There’s something about having scarring from my lungs from a severe case of pneumonia three years ago that – for some reason – makes me very, very, very keen to stay at home at the moment.

Which means I have to find something to do. And as preparation for a house move happening at some point in the next century, I have a load of boxes which need condensing down and packing up. And in these boxes are a huge variety of artefacts stretching right back to my schooldays.

Including rather too many magazines I created in my youth.

A page from The Wollaton Quarterly

So, while other people are creating amazing pieces of art to keep us all entertained during a crisis, I’m taking photos of some of my old shit and putting them on Twitter. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, here is a list of all my daily threads. I’ll keep adding links to this post each day.

Now, if this doesn’t help us all get through this crisis, what will?

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Night Network

Published 24th May 2019

Life / TV Presentation

As someone who passed their GCSEs through being reasonably clever rather than working hard, found out the hard way that I couldn’t do that with my A-Levels, and then had an absolutely disastrous experience at university for exactly the same reason, it’s perhaps not a surprise to hear that I suffer from the standard exam-based anxiety dream.

You know the one. The one where you’re going into an exam you haven’t prepared for, and don’t know any of the answers. To be fair, this is less an anxiety dream, and more my brain reenacting exactly what I did when I was 18, over and over and over again. 20 years later, I’m still having it on a regular basis. Which, I guess, is my punishment for wasting an opportunity others would have loved to have.

Still, many people have those kind of dreams. I work as a TV channel director, and people in our line of work have a whole raft of standard anxiety dreams specific to our job. I’ve had every single one of the following dreams, and when I’ve told other people in the industry, most replied with: “Oh, so it’s not just me, then?”

In an attempt at some kind of therapy, here is the kind of nonsense our brains decide to inflict on us.

1) It’s ten minutes before the late news is on air. I decide to go to the toilet… and suddenly find myself on a train leaving work. I ring up the playout suite to apologise, and inform them of my situation. Nobody is pleased.

2) Everything is going fine, for once. Ah, right, the live programme’s ending. Time to find the button we press to manually take it off air and go to the next event… what? Where is it? It’s not where it usually is! Help!

Eventually, engineering show up. The button had been moved overnight, and was hidden under all my paperwork. I feebly protest my innocence.

3) For some reason, control of the most important channel in the UK has moved to my childhood home. Time for my shift. I go downstairs into my living room, and the last shift has already left, leaving the room in the dark. They’ve also turned off all the monitors I need in order to run the channel. I spend ages switching them back on, then realise we’re coming up to a live programme. Studio talkback is now controlled through my family PC speakers, and the channel is now controlled through my family PC. I wake up in a sweat, and ponder what Freud would have made of all this.

4) I forget to give the continuity announcer sound, which means their live announcement won’t go to air. When I finally remember, I can’t find the required button because I rapidly start losing my eyesight.

And perhaps the worst:

5) I dream the entire shift, everything goes smoothly… and then wake up and have to do the whole thing again for real. Thanks, brain.

On the plus side, I did once dream of Kathy Burke sitting in a darkened studio, complaining that her weather graphics had crashed. I’m sure you could get a sitcom episode out of that.