A car park space for ambulances

I'm working for Pure this week, which is always a joy, and at the moment there is a campaign on the station to find Stockport's Perfect Pub. Listeners are voting between two pubs a week and eventually we'll get to a final two and the accolade will be handed out.

I remember as an FHM reader when I was a thrusting twentysomething that the mag had a feature called The Lush, in which an unspecified number of the magazine's people visited a different UK town and took in five of the local bars and hostelries. If I recall rightly, they marked on the basis of convenience, welcoming of strangers, range of "strong lagers" to mix, the chance of a decent conversation and the likelihood of a beating. I lived in Huddersfield at the time, and they went to at least two bars whose doors I'd previously vowed not to darken again - and liked them. Maybe it was just me that night, then.

The worst pub I've ever frequented was in the Lowerhouses area of Huddersfield, one of the more dubious parts of the town. I drove through this estate every day to get to and from work, and there was one pub in the centre of the estate called the Masons Arms. I would never have visited in a thousand years but on this occasion, I had to because of work.

A well known (to the police) extended family lived on the Lowerhouses estate and were extremely notorious in the area. They were responsible for a number of burglaries, deceptions, thefts and the like, to the extent that the Local Intelligence Office at the police station, where I as a hack had to go each day to be given the overnight crimes, had photographs of every single member of this family on its wall, almost for decoration.

This family committed one crime on the Lowerhouses estate too many and local vigilantes decided to do something. The house the family squeezed into (we're talking a dozen adults here - a mum and dad, sons, daughters, nephews and nieces) was firebombed. The house itself didn't catch fire but those family members present were forced to flee.

As an agency hack, this had potential to do more than just trouble the local press and so we needed to find a way of flogging it to the nationals. So, a colleague and I were assigned to go and talk to the Lowerhouses locals and, of course, the best way to do this en masse was to head for the Masons Arms. we were given a bit of company petty cash in order to get a round in for willing talkers, and off we went.

Oh dear. This place was even more horrendous inside than even the grubby exterior could ever have made you imagine. However, it was evidently popular with the residents, and on the midweek evening we turned up, plenty were in. We got the inevitable "who the hell are you?" look when, as strangers, we walked through the door and ordered two pints of lager. But after ten minutes, we managed to get chatting.

We figured the best way to go about it was to be honest about who we were and what we wanted from the beginning, and this seemed to work. A round of ales later and a few tongues at the bar began to loosen. We didn't ask for names and didn't make notes; our best hope was to not look like journalists at all.

The goodwill lasted about half an hour, then gradually they began to turn on us. We quickly finished our drinks and did the classic hack's routine of making our excuses and leaving. I'm not especially brave in most situations, but I have to admit that throughout my time in that wretched tavern I was terrified. These were rough people and I doubt that they were especially law-abiding themselves, but we had gone in there to try to profit, in a way, from their desperation and anger and although for a while we got away with it, in the end they made it clear what they'd do if we didn't vacate.

The Masons Arms was undecorated, floorless, freezing and odorous. I look back now and wonder how the hell it maintained a licence and a safety certificate. The cracks in the furniture and the splinters sticking out of the pool cues suggested frequent punch ups. As we recalled what we were told in the office the next day, we knew we'd had a lucky escape.

We got bugger all in the papers and the Masons Arms closed down within weeks. I drove past it for two more years on my way to and from work and never saw it reopen. I wouldn't be surprised if it still stands there, crumbling and desolate, housing a thousand nasty memories for all those who unwittingly drank there.

To my knowledge, the extended family never changed their ways. I expect their mugshots are still on the police station walls to this day.

Currie favour

On the left is Debbie Currie, daughter of vampish ex-MP Edwina, who is obviously on the right. Debbie earned some brief fame when pretending to be a wannabe pop star as part of a Cook Report exposée on the music industry.

I was reminded of her yesterday when a colleague brought up her mother's name during a conversation, the nature of which now escapes me. It was probably about eggs, or something equally as predictable. Anyway, since the fake pop princess incident, Debbie has been in the papers for the usual kiss-and-tell reasons and stuff about single motherhood, and was chased a bit when details of her mother's (still hard to believe, and gross to picture) fling with John Major was revealed via serialisation of her diaries.

However, one of Debbie's first ever appearances in our beloved, ever-sympathetic press was down to me. At least in part it was.

That isn't necessarily a boast, as I hated hounding or chasing folk when I was a hack in Huddersfield; indeed, it was one of the many reasons I disliked the job and knew I wasn't at all cut out for it. But I must confess it was something of a buzz when the agency for whom I worked was assigned by a well-known Sunday organ to go after this young woman, and it was made easier by the positive reasons for it.

I can't pinpoint the exact year but I suspect it was 1996 or 1997. Debbie's mum was still a big attraction to the media and interest in her daughter had grown. She was an undergraduate at Huddersfield University, living in poky student digs near Great Northern Street, only a short distance from where Peter Sutcliffe took his one Huddersfield-based life at the end of the 1970s. It wasn't a pleasant place to live at all, and still had something of a red light reputation, but students had always occupied this short row of urban terraces.

All we had was some rumour that she had taken a particularly appealing part-time job with the local Kirklees Council to supplement her undoubtedly meagre grant. It was the kind of vocation that would lend itself to good quality photography. Our job as hacks was to stalk her, essentially, and then report to the paper's assigned photographer exactly where she was. He then would turn up with his gear, do his stuff, and we'd submit a handful of paragraphs of copy to accompany what was just a big photo story.

So, once we'd uncovered where she lived, we simply drove to the street and waited for her to leave the house, hopefully for her new place of work. As well as her student address, we'd established whereabouts in the borough this pleasing job of hers took place, so all we had to do was follow her and she would, hopefully, take us to it.

I was driving a battered V-reg Fiesta at the time, the 1980s model with an unmarked gear stick and considerable lack of comfort or style. It was all I could afford. My boss joined me in the passenger seat and together we waited in this not picturesque street, keeping a watchful eye on the house while still far enough away so as to not attract suspicion.

Eventually, Debbie left her front door and got into her car. We'd seen her before in a photo and instantly we knew it was her. The resemblance to her mother is astonishing, as you can see above. It was a similar reaction to when you saw Julian Lennon or Samantha Beckinsale for the first time. If it wasn't for Edwina's old bat status they could be mistaken for sisters, albeit sisters who were born when their mum was 16 and 39 respectively. So we had our girl. Now we just had to trail her.

It was difficult, as my Fiesta wasn't exactly a sharp mover, whereas Debbie didn't have an especially swift car but it was newer than mine and she was a bit of girl racer to boot. I don't think she knew she was being followed, even though her place of work was a bit of a distance and she may have noticed this rusty old white heap a car or two behind her every time she checked her rear view mirror. Nonetheless, she didn't half shift once she got going.

It was approaching rush hour in Huddersfield, and Debbie snaked through the traffic with aplomb. I was still a fairly new driver, with one serious rush hour accident behind me, and this was quite a test for my nerve at the wheel. We joined one of the A-road exits from Huddersfield and made our way east towards Dewsbury, thereby pretty much confirming the place of work we'd been given was correct.

Eventually we hit one of the Dewsbury suburb centres and Debbie parked in a schoolyard. We found a space on a single yellow across the road and (using a phone box; the agency couldn't afford one of those newfangled mobile things) rang the photographer, who was in the area and was just waiting for a precise location. Once he turned up, we left, our job for the day done.

A day later, we got a call saying the task had been a great success and a picture would be going in the paper. It was, and I assume remains, common practice for tabloid newspapers to inform people in the public eye that something is going to appear in their publication about them in the near future, to give them a chance to offer a comment or, at the very least, prepare themselves and loved ones in case the tale is damaging or unflattering. And so, yes, I was sent back to Debbie's unclean street - and this time I was knocking on the door.

Her flatmate answered and hollered up the hallway for her without asking who this scruffy bloke with a loosened tie was that wanted to talk to his chum. Debbie duly came to the door and I explained, carefully and politely, that she had been snapped doing her part-time job and would be appearing in a paper at the weekend. She wasn't remotely surprised, although she assured me she didn't know she had ever been followed on her way. I got a handshake and a smile. She was a very good sport indeed.

The photo was superb when it appeared, with our small scrap of copy underneath. I wish it was available online, I really do. She later ruined it by posing with fried eggs (a nod to her mum's past?) on her breasts during the pop industry sting, but the photo I recall was of someone just enjoying life, not seeking attention or notoriety.

In her white jacket and with the tool of her trade in her grip, she was the most exciting, interesting and attractive lollipop lady I had ever seen.

It's time to get up, and get on your way...

I have a week off - at least, so far I have - and the prospect of catching up on a spot of shuteye is a most attractive one. Yet when the next batch of dawn calls comes along, I'll relish it.

For the last three weeks the latest I have dragged my sorry arse out of bed on a weekday is 4.10am. The earliest is 3am. This is because of some breakfast show cover on Pure 107.8FM in Stockport and then 102.4 Wish FM in Wigan. The latter involved the 3am starts as Wigan is a bit further away from me than Stockport and the show starts at 6am, an hour earlier.

An alarm clock at 3am doesn't really wake you up. The six minute snooze to which I treat myself prior to the second alarm acts as the slow waking process - you are conscious but still beyond drowsy. After many years of doing inhuman shifts, my body now has an involuntary way of maintaining my consciousness levels until the second alarm sounds, and that involves a frenetic, unceasing waggle of my toes.

Once out of bed, I'm fine. I'm not a rush job at that time, I want to allow myself time to shower, shave, make myself some breakfast and give myself time to eat it. Some people on earlier-than-thou shifts are out of the house within literally two minutes of throwing aside the quilt. I can't do that. They must stink. And they must be hungry. And they won't have even begun to wake up.

Although it's a weekday alarm, I'm also aware that at 3am, as I'm tiptoeing round the house getting ready, that people elsewhere are still considering the prospect of going to bed. That does feel strange, especially when Saturday night comes round and I'm doing the nightclub gig, as I finish at 3am on Sunday and as I crawl, dog tired, under the sheets at the bed and breakfast ten minutes later, I'm aware that on five of the six previous days I was just getting up at precisely the same time.

Driving on a motorway between the hours of 3.30am and 5.30am is also a strange experience. At this time of year it's practically daylight by setting off time and, having tucked myself in no later than 9pm the night before, it's daylight then too. This means that early risers in a British summer see no proper darkness at all for five days of the week.

Being on a motorway, in daylight, when it's conspicuous by its emptiness, is good for someone in my job. As I'm freelance, I can't afford to be complacent. Long though it is, the drive is uneventful thanks to the sheer lack of traffic and it allows me to concentrate my mind, psyche up the performer within and by the time I get to the studio - no less than half an hour before I'm due on air - I'm ready. I'm wide awake, raring to go, aware that my upbeat persona, should it be such, is key to making sure that knackered people forcing themselves from their pits from 6am onwards feel cheery and happy as they begin their daily routines.

Sometimes, usually midway through a week of these hours, you hit the wall. Driving back home after coming off air at 10am can occasionally build the wall before you but if it does turn up, it's usually in the afternoon. 3pm for me in early mode is the equivalent of 8pm for a conventional career person, and at 8pm a lot of people are snoozing in front of the telly after a hard day's graft and with a bellyful of dinner. That's 3pm to me. Sometimes the wall is unavoidable, but on most occasions to have to clamber over it, as even an hour's kip can make you feel totally wretched afterwards.

Last week I was in bed by 9pm and up by 3.06am, each weekday. This was my routine when I worked full time on breakfasts and you do get used to it. You get used to the sound of the birds waking up and of milk floats humming along. In my case, a light would go on in the house opposite as regularly as clockwork while I was abluting as the bloke who lives there is on 24-hour medication and has to wake himself up before cockcrow to take a tablet. You notice stuff like that. You notice every over-sensitive security light down your street - the ones that ignite when a car has the temerity to drive past, or a cat starts a fight in the garden next door. As I leave my house at 3.35am, three lights down the street come on.

I love my sleep and I'll enjoy my good lie-in this week, but there is something special, if not necessarily attractive to those not in the know, about being out and about at that hour, beginning your day when most of the nation is comatose. It's the tranquillity of it, the knowledge that you are doing your job in order to help them get in the correct frame of mind to do theirs. Being able to leave work before midday earns you jealous looks from colleagues and envious catty comments from friends. People ask me, when I do breakfast shifts, how on earth I cope with the early starts. My answer is rather straightforward and surprises them - it's the easiest thing in the world. The nature of my job, the excitement that goes with it, the glamour that it exudes to the rest of the world (not that it truly exists, but you let them believe it) makes a 3.06am final warning from my alarm clock the most bearable of things. When I think of the jobs I could be doing following such an anti-social alarm, I'm grateful...

What a tangled web we weave

Most days we will read a court story in our morning papers. The criteria for getting a case from a mere magistrates court into the national press is three-fold, and only one needs to be applied to give it a chance of avoiding the Fleet Street spike. To wit, the story must involve a famous person; or it must be as a consequence of an infamous or wildly serious and well-publicised incident; or it must be a little quirky.

If it has all three (which is extremely unlikely, given that serious and quirky don't really mix) then all the better.

I spent almost five years reporting the magistrates court proceedings in Huddersfield when my career path had forced me to wear a tie and look shabby and underfed on a daily basis. And apart from the odd local sporting person getting done for shouting at a policeman or being a few microgrammes over the limit, nobody famous got done on our patch at all.

The serious stuff was quite rare too, certainly in my time wandering up and down the concourses from courtroom to courtroom. We had one especially notorious murder case - it was very familial in terms of the victim and the perpetrators - but magistrates are merely part of the process in the most serious cases and there was next to nothing the law would allow me to report.

The quirky stuff was the most likely to generate some lineage and a few pennies from the nationals. Way back in this blog, I talked about my favourite ever criminal court case, and it's available here for your eternal perusal, or at least until the day comes when infirmity, boredom, blindness or a call from a celebrity's lawyer forces this blog to close. Look at the last paragraph and you'll see I also mentioned, teasingly, a second great court story that was discussed on Have I Got News For You and was, rarely for me as I genuinely was a poor journalist, a proper scoop as it didn't involve an actual court case.

Let me set the scene. I'm sitting at a table on the concourse one early afternoon, waiting for a case to restart after a lunchtime recess, drinking coffee and chatting to one of Huddersfield's many solicitors, most of whom I got on very well with. As we talked, probably about football as opposed to anything deeper, someone in an official capacity (no names - even rubbish hacks such as I know about protecting sources) asked if I had a moment for a quiet chat.

We slipped into the empty duty solicitor room and this professional court user informed me that a bit of a panic was afoot in the lower ground area of the building, where the courtrooms that usually housed family and youth proceedings were based.

The upshot of it all was that a lad aged under 17 had arrived for a youth court appearance that morning, carrying a cardboard box. Upon his case being called, he left the box in the waiting area and trotted into court. Then, as he exited - thereby not being imprisoned for whatever his offence was - he collected his box and vacated the premises. Straightforward.

However, a panicky telephone call was then made by his mother to the court office over the lunch hour. The contents of his cardboard box had gone missing.

Stolen? Possibly. Let's be frank, you're more than likely to bump into an opportunistic thief in a magistrates court than you are in most places. However, it seemed unlikely as it turned out that the cargo within this box was also capable of disappearing by itself.

It was a tarantula.

A Persian blue-backed tarantula, to be precise.

So there I am, in this tiny, almost soundproofed office, being informed that a large arachnid was on the loose in the very building where the laws of the land were being upheld.

I telephoned the office and got the go-ahead from the news agency proprietor to make this story my priority. He started to research the type of tarantula in question while over the next two hours, I wandered around the building, collecting information about the defendant and quotations from the professional users of the court. Even while going from courtroom to courtroom, office to corridor, outdoor smoking area to phone booth, I couldn't help looking around for the spider myself.

The staff thought it hilarious, with the exception of the man who ran the court at the time. He was a talkative enough chap, but he was rigidly protective of his court's reputation, known as an obstructive individual among briefs and hacks alike and lacked a sense of humour. His priority, upon hearing of the unwelcome intruder somewhere in his building's bowels, was to extinguish it. Not find it, necessarily - even though it was a youngster's pet - but to exterminate it. From his taxpayer-funded budget, he ordered industrial fumigators to come in after hours and give the court's fabrics and foundations a thorough sterilisation. Finding a spider's corpse was less of an issue. This pompous, soulless reaction just added extra meat to the tale.

One lawyer, who was an out-of-town trial advocate and therefore didn't mind being named as he was unlikely to be back, gave me my best quote of the final piece: "We're all going to do our cases with bike clips on." Meanwhile, the ushers surreptitiously set up a crack spider-catching kit in one of the courts, where a trial was ongoing. It consisted of a box and a pasta jar, and came with swiftly-penned instructions on scrap paper, which read: 1 - FIND SPIDER. 2 - PUT SPIDER INTO JAR. 3 - PUT JAR INTO BOX. This apparatus was placed on a spare public gallery table, in full view of the courtroom, while the trial continued. Nobody said anything.

The only thing we didn't have was an actual sighting of the spider, which was somewhat crucial when analysing the story at face value. After all, the box hadn't been opened by the youth that morning, and the only evidence that it existed was provided verbally via his mother's frantic telephone call. I casually mentioned this mild drawback to a couple of court users and staff members prior to returning to the office.

Half an hour later, as the agency proprietor and I were sifting through the gathered information and quotes, working out what we still needed, the phone rang. It was one of the distinguished people who I saw at the court each day, claiming that one of the defendants in the trial court had seen the spider scuttle along the carpet as he gave evidence. When his case was adjourned for the day, he mentioned it to the court user who was now passing this bit of dynamite on to me.

It still wasn't ideal, but it was enough. What really helped was that the Persian blue-backed tarantula was a genuine breed of arachnid, as my boss had discovered when he rang a zoo curator for information, and it was more than possible that such a creature would be able to survive - pre-fumigation - in the various pipes and catacombs of a large building, living on insects and water pools from the air conditioning system. It all added up to a story with legs. Eight of them, you might say.

It was nearly teatime, so we'd done well on the timing front - I had the evening and the next morning to get it written up, ready to send for the unofficial deadline of midday for copy to be considered by the national papers.

So, at roughly noon the next day, a dozen or so paragraphs duly went off with the press of a button down the line and into the computer systems of every news editor on Fleet Street. It also went to the local and regional papers, but we held back on sending it to the broadcasting organisations for fear that staff hacks at the printed media may hear it and do their own version, thereby rendering ours unnecessary or, worse still, there to have bits picked off for free, with us unable to prove they had directly used our information.

We had no need to worry, as we stormed the papers the next day. Sometimes, when doing a story for the nationals, we'd write two versions - one suited to the tabloids, the other to the broadsheets. There were a good handful of page leads and every national newspaper (except the Guardian, who absolutely never printed our stuff) used it in some way. Furthermore, the Yorkshire Post put it on the front page as the light-hearted piece immediately above the serious main yarn of the day.

It was this version of the story, in the Yorkshire Post, which prompted the court boss to ring up our agency that afternoon and complain to me. Using lawyerly argument, he began reading the story out loud and adding the word "untrue" after each sentence, taking light-hearted stuff like "a giant spider is giving magistrates the creeps" literally, rather than in the spirit that such gentle metaphors are designed to exude. I knew I was in the right, but I didn't have the clout for such a debate, so I passed the phone to my boss who talked him down. The local broadcasting establishments picked up on the tale and I was interviewed by the great Ian Timms on BBC Radio Leeds, and even the national outlets were interested, with Radio 5 Live putting me on standby while they tried to get the court boss to talk. He did, but proceeded to talk about a lack of evidence that a spider ever existed.

I can date this story to the early summer of 1996, as on Have I Got News For You at the end of the week, the headline COURT SPIDER IS SENTENCED TO _______ was used on the Missing Words round. Ian Hislop correctly guessed 'death' and Eddie Izzard, guest captain on the other team (it was the series Paul Merton decided to sit out) "complained" that such action was illegal. That was it, as they moved on to the next headline. But it meant I'd had a story of my own discussed, albeit with considerable brevity, on a television programme I rather liked.

The tarantula was never found, alive or dead. To this day I cannot say for certain that it ever actually existed.

"Humiliation, that's what you need..."

Our village hall still has one of the original Roy Castle Clean Air stickers in its window, having proudly (and pompously) banned smoking within following the ex-Record Breakers host's campaign during his last months to get smoking banned in public places.

His dying wish was, of course, granted as law a couple of years back. My personal belief is that the smoking ban has ruined pubs and clubs, but that's another issue entirely. Each time I walk the dogs past the village hall and see that sign, it reminds me a great story from my time as a hack.

Castle was from Huddersfield originally, the town where I worked as a rubbish agency reporter between 1993 and 1998. Upon his diagnosis with lung cancer, he immediately began to embark upon his campaigns to research specifically into lung cancer and rid public places of the risks caused by passive smoking, as this was the proffered explanation for how he caught the disease. He had been a lifelong non-smoker but had spent many years playing the trumpet in smoky venues.

Part of the campaign was a Tour of Hope, as he called it. This was deliberately timed to coincide with his terminal decline to add extra poignancy and give him something of a positive send-off. His wife, Fiona, became a major figurehead and much praised individual as she dealt with media inquiries while having to watch her husband get closer to death in public.

The tour involved a coach travelling the nation, handing out leaflets and giving speeches and interviews and generally spreading the word that people should be protected in public places from other people's smoke. Press campaigns got Castle to stick dogends on his chemotherapy-assisted bald pate, which were helpful but a little disconcerting, but there's no doubt that the media responded and the publicity was vast.

The timing of the tour itself was deliberate, as was the final venue - Huddersfield. Castle was well-loved in his hometown even though he'd not lived there for years. He had been born in 1932 in Scholes, a tiny village on the edge of Holmfirth, and had done his early dancing at a tap class in the town.

Now, by the time the coach was due in Huddersfield, Castle was very weak. His declining strength had rendered him unable to dismount the coach at previous venues to carry out interviews and press the flesh. Therefore, his people had hired Simon Bates to act as spokesperson for Castle, and his job would be to say hi to the crowds and then do the individual media interviews.

So the coach pulls into Huddersfield railway station, one of the more beautiful stations in the country, and polite applause greeted Castle as he waved out of the window. Bates jumped off the coach, clutching the vehicle's microphone (the one that was probably used to say: "on your right, Cooper Bridge auto-spares where Peter Sutcliffe got his false number plates" as the party left the M62) and gave a brief but positive little spiel to quite a large crowd. He explained that Castle had not spoken on the last handful of stops around the country, but as this was his hometown and the last one of the tour before he went home, he would be doing so.

This brought some nice applause. Meanwhile, me and the assembled local hacks were behind a cordon, desperate to get some audio. Sue Cain, a skilled reporter from BBC Radio Leeds, flashed a winning smile at a security man which was enough to get her under the rope and her labelled mic was soon poking round the corner of the coach as Castle began to address the crowd from his seat, with the window open.

I can only remember his first line: "By, it's grand to be home!"

Anyway, he gave his speech and got wildly applauded, and then it was time for Bates to do the individual interviews. As a newspaper hack, I didn't need to talk to him individually as I could just make notes from his replies to one of the radio hacks. So as Sue interviewed him, I scribbled in my best Teeline the wise, earnest words of Bates. I can't recall him saying "But what was the year?" once...

Afterwards, a small throng of us were comparing notes when we noticed that Christa Ackroyd, famed host of Yorkshire TV's nightly Calendar programme, had turned up. It was the middle of the afternoon so she wasn't doing a live broadcast but she was swanning around through the cordons in a way the other folk representing media organisations were not allowed.

A few mumbles among the rest of us had begun when we noticed an elderly lady, in full overcoat and hat, approach her, clutching a notebook and pen. They were close enough for the conversation to be heard.

"Excuse me, are you Christa Ackroyd?"

She noticed the autograph book and immediately plastered on the smile she keeps for the proles.

"Yes I am."

The old lady nervously shuffled closer.

"You're Christa Ackroyd who's on the telly every night?"

"Yes I am."

By now, Ackroyd was trying to coax the woman into thinking she was quite approachable, quite normal and more than happy to be asked for her autograph.

The woman got braver.

"I wonder if you could do me a big favour?"

Ackroyd now had a look on her face which seemed to just say "for God's sake YES! Just give me the book!"

"Of course, my love."

The woman paused, shoved the book and pen at Ackroyd and asked:

"Would you get me Simon Bates' autograph?"

Well, I've never seen a face drop as quickly as Ackroyd's did. I can only compare it to those old films which feature the Golden Gate bridge suddenly collapsing into the strait and floating away, cars and all, to the Pacific. The gaggle of earwigging hacks of which I was part was in silent hysterics, trying to conceal our mirth by swiftly walking away to a safe distance before letting it all out. I have no idea whether Ackroyd took the book to Bates or just stormed off in a huff. I don't suppose either ending matters because the plot was just so perfect, although I'm sure she did the right thing as on the one subsequent occasion I did meet her, she was very civil and perfectly fine.

I got a smattering of copy in a couple of broadsheets the next day and Sue Cain became a good mate until I left Huddersfield. I think she's in Scotland now. Roy Castle died just weeks after his visit.

Hello, hello, turn your radio on

Have a look at this T shirt. It's the oldest in my drawer and I suspect the most robust and dedicated of radio anorak types would really like to own it. This is because it is for a radio station that only ever existed in somebody's mind and therefore only a handful were ever made.

I acquired it in the idiosyncratic surroundings of Harry Ramsden's Fish and Chip Shop in Guiseley, West Yorkshire. I know, the plot is thickening with the rapidity of Ramsden's own scintillating curry sauce. A T shirt, of a phantom radio station, handed to me at a chain chippy. Hold on, because there's more...

Performing on a makeshift stage at said branch of eatery was Berri. That is the same Berri whom you remember doing a sizzling dance version of Sunshine After The Rain.

Following her on to the stage were Menswear. That is the same drippy, posing Britpop outfit Menswear whom you remember - albeit dimly - having a hit with Daydreamer and one or two others.

It's about time I cut to the chase. When I was a hack in Huddersfield, I was still an amateur DJ on temporary and hospital stations, harbouring ambitions to make my hobby into my living. Knowing this, my boss at the press agency where I worked gave me a day off to attend the media launch of a proposed new radio station for the whole of Yorkshire, for which a licence had been advertised by the Radio Authority a year or so before. We had no professional interest in the press conference as Guiseley wasn't in our patch, so I went there purely to rubberneck.



The station was called YFM - we have a lot of 'initials only' radio stations in this country - and would be positioned as a big-sounding hit music station with a mammoth breakfast show and a very driven focus on the whole of the county.

These words were spoken by one Richard Park. Alongside him was Richard Eyre. The bid was from the Capital Radio Group and these two influential figures had their names put on to the bid to add some extra gravitas, and so each travelled up to Guiseley for the launch at Ramsden's, a venue chosen presumably because it was their notion of an epitome of Yorkshire-ness.

So I toddled along with the media pack and took a seat among the hacks. The two suited dignitaries gave their speeches, and had brought with them Neil Fox, still very much the "Doctor" of his on-air persona whose audience across the commercial sector on the Pepsi Chart in the 1990s was colossal. Foxy himself said a few words, then introduced Berri who mimed her way effervescently through her signature hit. Coffee and fags later, a tape was played of a sample of their potential audio, complete with specially commissioned sweepers (if you think the T shirt is collectible, I know of ultra-nerdy radio people who would dunk their own mothers upside down in a commode full of David Mellor's germ-ridden urine to get their hands on this audio) plus truncated intros and links, all giving the feel of what their radio station would sound like if allocated the licence. Menswear then went on stage and mimed Daydreamer and a single which would be released a few weeks later, Being Brave. I recall thinking they each looked about 12.

I managed a polite word with Richard Park and gave him a demo. I am utterly horrified at this thought now, 13 years later, but in 1996 I had no real idea who he was nor what the business was about. I thought, with naivety and yet some logic which I'll defend to this day, that he was a programmer looking to launch a new station and therefore would be needing good local presenters to work on it. He took the cassette and put it in his suit pocket. I'd like to think it wasn't placed carefully in a Ramsden's pedal bin as soon as I was out of sight.

I didn't expect to hear from him, but I did follow up the conversation by sending another copy to the bloke who ran Capital Radio at the time. I got a polite reply and the inevitable rejection. By the end of the year, however, I was on Hallam FM in Sheffield and my career, were it worthy of such a description, has stuttered and coughed its way to where we sit right now.

The T shirt, bearing the logo of the station which they wanted to launch, still fits me and I still wear it with (arf) some frequency. The hacks at the press conference all got one as part of the media pack, which also included background info on the licence, the bid, the personalities involved and other guff.

The next day in the Yorkshire Evening Post there was a woefully posed picture of Berri, Foxy (with headphones on, even though he is quoted as saying that any photographer who asks a DJ to pose with his cans should be immediately replaced) and the lead singer of Menswear "eating" an enormous fried haddock with the Ramsden's logo behind them. The story had become the picture, really, and it only got a paragraph of copy. I can't remember it being in any other papers, regional or local, and for obvious reasons existing radio stations didn't touch it.

It was all immaterial in the end as the licence was awarded to the Faze FM group, who launched a Yorkshire brand of Kiss FM on Valentines Day 1997. This later transmogrified into Galaxy, the brand which continues to occupy the slot to this day.

I'll let you know if I ever elect to place the T shirt on eBay. Meanwhile, I would be willing to wager that neither Richard Park, Richard Eyre nor Neil Fox have ever been to a Harry Ramsden's since, be it for promotional reasons or just a large skate and chips with scraps and lashings of vinegar. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if the odd member of Menswear was now working in one.