Stoppage Time

Last month I left my job. One I’d been doing for the overwhelming majority of my working life so far. I stepped through the door of what is affectionately known as talkSPORT towers as an enthusiastic youth in July 2002, I joined the company as a full-time employee in October 2004, and collected my P45 in December 2020.

In radio and indeed in general media terms that is pretty much a lifetime.

In the intervening 18 years I did the following:

• Almost immediately joined the Saturday afternoon team producing the live football coverage, a position I retained to the bitter end.
• Produced a music(!) show, guiding Gerald Harper through his Saturday evening Champagne & Roses show to an audience of practically nobody, a bizarre experiment which only ended when the 2003 Gulf War intervened.
• Worked closely with the football idols of some long-standing friends, and some radio legends of my own adoration. 15 year old me listening to Radio Aire deep into the night just after his GCSE exams would barely believe that a decade and a half later I’d be producing and conversing on air with James Whale.
• Took a football phone-in off the air by electing to swap over the hardware that the telephone system was running mid-show.
• Dealt with an entire presentation and commentary team in a Spanish stadium vanishing from the air five minutes prior to kick off.
• Studio produced the night Liverpool beat AC Milan to win the UEFA Champions League for the first time in 21 years, a broadcast that ran three hours over its scheduled end such was the sensation.
• Either produced or operated the coverage of almost every Champions League final between 2005 and 2020. Gave technical advice for the one I didn’t do from a Turkish hotel balcony.
• Watched two MPs have a punch-up in the control room over a piece of paper containing leaked email.
• Made the front pages of the national press (OK, the Daily Sport) when a newsreader giggled at exactly the wrong time.
• Staged outside broadcasts at rugby clubs, greyhound racing tracks, football stadiums, hotel bedrooms, from the roof of the building itself and most notably once in the middle of a crowded West End nightspot, playing bouncer to the hordes of women trying to touch up Will Carling mid-show.
• Produced every key match of the 2006 FIFA World Cup including every England game and the final itself. And was at the heart of our coverage of every subsequent tournament.

• Instructed colleagues in the office to roll tape on Mark Saggers’ line during an England match in 2010 and captured one of the all-time great spontaneous outbursts.

• For several years single-handedly produced the entire recorded Christmas Day output of the radio station, 18 hours of broadcasting stitched together to the second on the computer in my living room.
• Made radio history in 2007 when commercial radio shattered a 70 year BBC monopoly and broadcast live Premier League football nationwide for the very first time.
• Found myself somewhere near the studio during countless breaking news stories. Such as the night Michael Jackson died, or the evening of the Glasgow Airport terror attack, which took place 15 minutes before I was originally due to finish for the day.
• Taught nervous celebrities how to be radio presenters, or at last to give the impression they knew how to act like one.
• Accidentally defamed a former Liverpool football manager in an incident notorious as the most complained-about in the company’s history.
• Worked with some of the industry’s most difficult and demanding talents and declined to be intimidated by the reputations of any of them.
• Grew the radio station’s most valuable audio archive of interviews when I became the only one to note their potential future value.
• Saw my name written in the annals of radio history when broadcasts I made were nominated for awards.
• Didn’t win any awards of my own (bastards).
• Hired people. Plucked talent from obscurity at the start of their working lives, trained them, mentored them, guided them and started them on long-standing and successful careers. Which may actually be the most important one of all.

I began work at the radio station roughly three weeks before Wayne Rooney made his professional football debut. He announced his retirement less than three weeks after I departed for the last time.

My greatest achievement of all? I began working full time for talkSPORT when Kelvin MacKenzie was in charge of the entire operation. Such was his reputation that I genuinely believed I had quit a stable job for one where I was destined to last 15 minutes. I lasted 15 years.