I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [104]
Radio North Norfolk? Say whaaaat, Alan?
Allow me to explain. It’d been a time of genuine upheaval for Radio Norwich. Since 2002, it had been a station in desperate need of stability. Which eventually arrived in the form of a steady downward trajectory of revenue and turnover.
Whoever was to blame – be it slovenly listeners or station management – morale was at a low. I, on the other, kept insisting on air that we were a damn good radio station and that the financial figures were bang out of order. I sincerely believed that and I was vindicated when we received the following email.
‘Please read carefully,’ read the subject line, which I thought was a strong hook, and it went on to say that Radio Norwich was to be sold to a fast-growing holding company called Gordale Media. We were hot property!
Now, that proved me emphatically right: people don’t choose to buy something if it isn’t good. It meant they liked us. We had something (or to use the corporate speak of the email, ‘assets’) that was worth buying (or ‘stripping’).
Lots of people were concerned about what they read but the tone of the email was, to my mind, unmistakeably upbeat: ‘exciting times’, ‘improved offer’, ‘going forward’, ‘increased efficiency’.
Those Gordale boys didn’t muck about. With little fanfare, they added Radio Norwich to their family of brands (six other stations were also in the Gordale hutch) and undertook an immediate review, making hard-headed decisions such as selling and leasing back the Radio Norwich studios and cancelling ‘waste’ such as refreshments and travel costs. And in personnel terms, did they ring the changes!249
Dave Clifton was left to stagnate on Radio Norwich, shunted to Norfolk Nights. I was plucked for a kind of special fire-fighting role – one that removed me from Radio Norwich altogether and airdropped me into Radio North Norfolk, a sister station with a far more refined listenership but in need of a kick in the arm, in what I saw as a kind of Red Adair role. There I was (in my mind): top off, sweat dripping from my rippling torso, my glistening skin marked with soot as I strode through the burning station, salvaging a listenership here, capping the verbal diarrhoea spewing from some of the younger DJs there, while salvaging the reputation of the station, and drenching the place in a kind of radio foam made up of sodium alkyl sulfate and a crude fluorosurfactant, as onlookers watched and looked at me.
A memo from Gordale convinced me that this was a hugely radical step, and would represent an exciting chapter in both my career and the future of Radio North Norfolk. These guys were visionaries. Gordale, it said, was ‘committed to making best use of its resources’ (love that phrase) and had decided that when the station’s FM licence came up for renewal in 2006, it would not be bidding. Instead, the station would become digital-only (only!!).
To the best of my knowledge, I’d never broadcast in digital before and was genuinely giddy at the prospect of my speech being delivered as a binary code. It would be transmitted as a series of zeroes and ones, reforming in the ear250 as a crystal clear facsimile of my real-life voice.
This was no half measure. Gordale passionately threw its weight behind the move, rebranding the station as North Norfolk Digital251 and spending a cool three grand on signage, mugs and t-shirts.
There was a shake-up in the line-up too. Pop aficionado and Jonathan-King-alike Ben E. Parry was quietly moved on and I was invited to take over his post-breakfast-to-lunchtime slot.
And while other people who’d heard about Ben were saying ‘No way’ and ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘He used to go to my swimming baths’ and ‘Imagine his wife finding that out