What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (8 page)

ALTHOUGH I HAD WORKED
in many areas of radio I had never owned my own station. Once this possibility occurred to me, it became a minor obsession. This was in 1990, when the radio spectrum was being freed up, and frequencies were being put out to tender.

It was a second-price tendering system, which means the person who tenders the highest only has to pay what the next highest bidder offered. So if I tendered $100,000 and the closest other bid was $50,000, I only had to pay $50,000. That is not the brilliant gift it seems because, when you know that if you get it you’re only going to have to pay $50,000, why not tender
$200,000? Everyone else knew that and everyone did the same, so across the board, the bids were pushed much higher.

This was not good for a person in my position — which was that I had no money. Everyone had to pay a deposit, which the government got to keep for as long as it took for the sales to be finalised. Then Maori decided that they owned the frequencies so the whole thing stalled for months and months and months while the government negotiated with Maori over what it was going to do.

In the meantime, schleps like me, who really couldn’t afford it in the first place, had our money tied up without knowing whether we had won or whether there was going to be anything left for us to win.

I was sure I could run a successful station. I had acquired a lot of knowledge about radio and I thought I knew what people wanted to listen to. I would be starting in a community that I knew, the Wairarapa, where there was only Radio New Zealand’s AM station.

In the end, my tender wasn’t successful and my money was refunded and the frequency went to an outfit based in Wellington. It was nice to have my money back, but I would have preferred the frequency. I was just devastated because in the interim, I had, of course, purchased an old hall in Carterton from which I was going to run my radio station. I was certain I would win because I couldn’t think of anyone else in the Wairarapa who would bid the kind of money I did. It never occurred to me that people from outside the Wairarapa would be interested.

The only thing I could do was find a new frequency. It seemed impossible that there could be 20 frequencies available in the Wellington area but only one in the Wairarapa.

The government said that if I could prove there was another frequency available on the spectrum then I could have it for six months. At that point it would be put up for tender and I could
make a bid — along with anyone else who felt like it — for the frequency I had established. It was better than nothing. Not a lot better, just a little bit. I could make a lot of money. Or I could be left with nothing but a huge financial loss and several disgruntled, soon-to-be-ex employees. Naturally, I jumped at the chance.

I commissioned Broadcast Services Limited (BSL) to find me another frequency. They found an excellent one that didn’t interfere with existing frequencies. After securing the frequency, and at the same time as I was plotting to overthrow them, I was still working at Radio New Zealand, reading the news and doing numerous other odd jobs. Naturally they found out what I was doing and I was called into the office of Caroline Lane, who was one in a long line of people employed to eviscerate the organisation.

‘Have you considered buying our AM station?’ she asked me.

‘Is it for sale?’ I parried.

‘Everything’s possible in this environment.’

‘All right, I’ll buy it,’ I said. It had lots of advantages. I could simulcast it on my new FM frequency and if I didn’t hold on to that after the six months, I would still have a substantial station making good money. It solved my problem of how to fill up 24 hours a day of airtime; it gave me a staff and the infrastructure I needed. It was brilliant.

After mucking me around magnificently for some time, Radio New Zealand lost the services of Caroline Lane and informed me that there was no way they were going to sell one of their stations, but rather they would be a fearsome competitor.

Meanwhile, back in Carterton, the builders were in and my empire was taking shape. There was a tiny office for me in the reception area, a studio and a small control room, open plan offices and a couple of toilets, and a little area with a photocopier and a big car park next to it.

The costs involved were enormous, especially compared to what can be done with today’s technology. I was renting one tape machine from Radio New Zealand for $500 a month. You don’t even need tape machines now. I had to have a library with records in it in order to be able to play music. Now you’ve got a music programme and everything is available to you instantly on the internet. For $20,000 today I can buy a station’s worth of music plus the Apple equipment to play it on. Back then I could get a three-CD player with a shuffle function for $800. And it had to be a 24-hour station so people would know that whenever they turned their radio on your station would be there.

I employed Radio New Zealand technicians to sort out the transmission site. I bought a transmitter from Italy; I rented transmission links, UHF uplinks from my building to the BSL tower where I had to put my transmitter. Working out the payments to APRA, the Australasian Performing Rights Association, for the music we played was a nightmare. And although we were in competition, Radio New Zealand sold me their news service.

I had mortgaged my house, putting every cent I had into this activity and I was working as many shifts as I could, reading news and filling in for people to keep the cash flowing. There was also the matter of a wife plus two children under five and one on the way to worry about. Rachael had no idea how much money I was hocking myself up for.

There were so many technical things that I hadn’t thought of, like processing. It was all very well to have a state-of-the-art Italian transmitter, but I had to decide what kind of processing I would do to beef up the sound. Actually, first I had to find out what processing was, then decide what kind to have.

One day I got a call from one of the BSL technicians.

‘We’re up at the transmission site now,’ he said, ‘and we’ve just gone to fire up your transmitter and it’s slightly interfering with the Concert Programme.’

‘Yes?’

‘So we’re going to need to get a blocker to put on the line — an isolator.’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Well, we can rent you one for $600 a month or you can buy one for $40,000.’

‘Hang on,’ I suggested. ‘You’re renting me the spot for my transmitter. Surely if it’s interfering with another transmitter you’re renting to someone in an area you’re renting, it’s your responsibility to isolate the bloody things.’ They eventually conceded I had a point but I still had to find the money to fix it. It’s not like I had the choice of taking my business elsewhere.

I was bluffing my way through, but at the same time I did not believe it could possibly fail. With my drive and passion and energy it was bound to succeed. My dream was only to start it. I hadn’t actually imagined myself running the station day to day.

I had been keeping things reasonably quiet but there came a point where I had to let everyone know that this was happening, if only because I needed to start booking ads. I got my sales team together and held a press conference at the Solway Park Hotel and announced that Today FM was going to be launched. The poor quality of local journalism meant that came as a complete surprise to the other organisations. The Radio New Zealand station had known but hoped it was never going to happen so had been pretending I didn’t exist.

But I had to keep the fact that I had only six months of operation guaranteed a secret or nobody would have taken me seriously. I was terrified the local paper, the
Wairarapa Times-Age
, which had taken a slight stand against me, might find out. They didn’t.

I worked out how much we would need to bring in to cover operating costs and put together some ad packages that would cover it. They went down well and we soon had enough revenue to keep going.

I made sure we were part of the community. I wanted to get Mitre 10 in Masterton to advertise but knew my competition would say to them, ‘Oh they’re a Carterton station. They’re based in Carterton.’ To counter that, I did a noon news broadcast from Mitre 10’s shop window. I got Ricky Long, the local butcher, doing a talkback hour every morning. We had great giveaways and competitions, which had never been done locally.

Some people may have resented me. They saw me as someone who had ridden into town to suck all the money out of it. I would have been happy to do that, but the opportunity never arose.

One big advertiser had a car yard in Masterton. When we were up and running successfully, he called me into his office and implied that I was a carpetbagger and told me advertising was being discounted now — by the other station — but my prices had gone up. He just wanted to tell me off. I didn’t need this but I didn’t want to alienate an advertiser either so I sat there and let him.

‘Don’t you give five-year warranties on your cars now?’ I said as I was leaving.

‘Yes.’

‘Didn’t it used to be a three-year warranty? What if I brought the car in and it was a three-year warranty? Should I come in here and say you’re a bit of an arsehole because now you’re giving five-year warranties and I’ve been ripped off?’

He accepted that there was some truth in what I was saying and allowed me to leave his office.

Break-even point was about $13,000 a week, which was a lot for a little operation in the Wairarapa, and every month we had to toil to get there. In my head I was two different people: I was the person who was planning to sell the station or to buy other stations for the future, and I was another person who was trying to work out how I was going to handle absolute oblivion and humiliation in four months’ time, then three months’ time, then two …

But my biggest problem in the early days was what to do at six
o’clock in the evening when I was completely wrung out and had no more money to pay staff but still had to keep broadcasting 24 hours a day.

I phoned Doug Gold, who had got several frequencies in the first round in Wellington and created More FM. He was a brilliant radio person and a brilliant salesman. I would go to visit prospective clients only to be told, ‘We’ve spent our entire radio budget with More FM because I got a holiday in Spain.’

‘Look, Doug,’ I said, ‘here’s the thing. You’ve got no frequency in the Wairarapa. Here’s what I’ll do for you. I will give you the opportunity to tell all of your advertisers in Wellington that if they advertise in the evening their adverts will go on in the Wairarapa. Here’s what I want in return. I want to put an FM radio in my control room and I want to switch it onto More FM at six o’clock in the evening and switch it off at six o’clock in the morning.’

‘Yeah, good as gold.’

‘Do we need to write something? Do we need a letter of understanding or something?’

‘This conversation is our understanding. My proviso is that you don’t interfere with that transmission once it’s on, so all of our ads are played there.’

‘Absolutely.’

I had a car radio installed into my rack in the control room and at six o’clock we switched on More FM. There were a couple of problems when one of the neighbours was doing chores and his lawn got mowed in stereo throughout the Wairarapa, but generally it worked like a charm.

My staff was a combination of cheap newbies who just wanted to do anything to get into radio and experienced
old-timers
who weren’t being paid as much as they were worth. When I needed a local newsroom, I phoned up the Broadcasting School in Christchurch.

‘Who are your best people?’ I asked, because I knew they’d all be cheap.

‘I’ve got two good people who could instantly come out of there and take a sole charge position on a radio station,’ I was told. ‘The best of the two is Hilary Pankhurst’ — who is now Hilary Barry and a network TV news presenter.

‘Right, I’ll employ her.’ She moved to the Wairarapa and all of a sudden she was a one-woman news team, starting her morning with briefings at the police station. She was an object of total contempt to the Radio New Zealand station, who soon decided she was so terrible they needed to poach her from me. I needed to lock her in for six months and decided a company car would be the thing. But I couldn’t afford to buy a car. Fortunately, it was the time of the Film Archive’s Last Film Search where people were out looking for any old film tucked away around the country. One of their number came into the station to promote the hunt and I took him aside.

‘You know what we need to do?’ I said. ‘We need to get a car, sign write it with “The Old Film Search” or something like that.’ I bought an old Vauxhall Viva at a car auction and they helped pay for it. So not only was Hilary struggling with a new job, new town and new place names, working on a WordFirst programme on an old Compaq 64, but she was also having to struggle with a company car which was (1) a total embarrassment, and (2) a Vauxhall Viva, so it hardly ever worked. She had to get the police to push start her after the press conferences.