Pop Shock

The shock of losing a colleague / national treasure to cancer is one thing, and the shock of losing another colleague / national treasure a few weeks later to a bizarre sacking is another.

It’s a dose of sadness in duplicate and the juxtaposition of the two events fires like a gunshot, ricocheting through my working world.

Once again, being sat inside the mechanics of showbiz leaves me in some kind of eerie vacuum. Unpleasant echoes, blunt and distorted, of the Rusty & Wonathan saga and of our fight against the closure of Little Sister Radio pulse through my head.

Here in the inner sanctum of The Nations Favourite we are indeed like a family, sometimes dysfunctional and always close knit. We work hard in ever-morphing small teams, we are passionate and proud of our many years of effort for The Corporation. Through these events we are being pulled apart and pushed closer together.

Right now, I feel bewildered and saddened by the new status quo and the uncertain path ahead. Trust is crucial and central to what we do, and must be so for our work to survive, yet it all feels hideously awry.

Personally, I absolutely adored working with Pop Pickering. A funny, earnest, untiring, delightful and sweet man from where I sit. And one of the longest standing voices of corporation radio who IMHO deserves accolades for his decades of dedication to broadcasting just as Jerry did. Rubbish at controlling a sheepdog, mind.

On the back of these peculiar events, I’m at work on a Saturday. Dispensing hugs with my right brain and routing audio with my left is becoming commonplace. Poor old Fettuccine is pacing around the studio in frustration, rankled but trying to get in the zone and carry on to the best of his abilities. He sums up his personal feelings in that lovely Simon Paul song – we lived so well for so long, where did it all go so wrong?

The on-air silence surrounding the whole topic is deafening. But within these walls no one can really talk about anything else. Like little radio robots, we go into entertainment mode, because the show must go on, but the warmth and the humour that runs through the core of all we do, is very absent.

Tonight, I am sad to say, the mics are on, but no one’s at home.