I, Partridge by Alan Partridge Read Free Book Online Page B

also have a listenership that is almost exclusively poorly. And that makes song selection a delicate business. One wrong step and you could instantly offend a fairly meaty percentage of patients. Just take the number one singles from my first year in the job, 1975. Almost all of them were capable of upsetting someone. Art Garfunkel’s ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ (the recently blinded); David Essex’s ‘Hold Me Close’ (burns victims); The Stylistics’ ‘Can’t Give You Anything’ (the terminally ill); Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ (paralysed women, paralysed homosexual men).
    In my time at the hospital, I was broadcasting live during the deaths of some 800 patients. It’s a record that stands to this day. Industry awards and repeated praise from TV Quick magazine are all very well, but it gives me immense pride to think that the final voice those 800+ people heard may have been mine, as I read the traffic and travel or introduced a clip from my favourite Goon Show LP.
    I spent 94 wonderful months behind the mic at St Luke’s. But by autumn 1983, much like most of the patients on the Marie Curie wing, my days were numbered. I guess I always knew that as word of my competence leaked out across Anglia, my head might be hunted. And so it was that in September I answered the phone to local media mogul Rich Shayers.
    ‘Alan, you’ve done your time on hospital radio. It’s time to spread your wings.’
    ‘What, like a bird?’ I asked, keen to know more.
    ‘I’m starting a new station and I want you on board.’
    ‘Will I get loads of salary?’ I blurted. I was young and unsure how to phrase questions relating to remuneration.
    ‘Just swing by my office tomorrow and we can hammer all that out.’
    ‘Great,’ I replied. ‘I’ll bring the hammers!’ And with that, my career changed forever.
    But there was to be a moving post-script to this chapter in my life. And I’ll tell you about it now. At my leaving do, with the party in full swing, I stopped the music, climbed atop a chair and gave the hospital staff an emotional, heartfelt guarantee. I pledged, no matter how famous I became, that while there was still air in my lungs, I would come back and do my show for a minimum of one week every year.
    I may not have been able to donate money, but in some ways I was able to donate something far more powerful. I was able to donate chat (to a maximum value of one week each year). And with that, I picked up my coat and left the building, the warm applause of my colleagues still ringing in my ears like a big church bell.
    Sadly, circumstance has meant that I’ve not been able to get back to the hospital in the intervening 31 years. In the main that’s down to me – work commitments have made it simply unfeasible. But for the record I’d like to point out that the hospital is not entirely blameless itself. In 2001 it moved to a new site around the corner from the University of East Anglia. The studios from where I used to broadcast my show were reduced to rubble. And I think most reasonable people would agree that by allowing that to happen the NHS Trust effectively voided my promise.

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 need 45 – 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