What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (11 page)

I couldn’t tell from their uniforms how legitimate these guys were. They were pretty rough. They could have been the real thing or they could have been a couple of opportunists who saw a way to make a bit of money. They clearly weren’t the sort of people who would have to fill in forms for their superiors if they killed you. For people like them, the easiest thing was to kill you and throw you over the bank. That’s much less trouble than trying to work out what you are saying and help you along in your journey.

But the person I really couldn’t figure out was the driver. It’s a bad sign when the local is worried, and he was sweating profusely. Suddenly there was gunfire in the background which seemed to spark the guys with guns into action.

‘What are you doing?’ one asked my driver in broken English, assuming he was a foreigner.

‘He’s my taxi driver,’ I said, for which I got pushed against the car with the bayonet end of the gun.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked the driver again. The driver answered him in his own language. I had no idea what he was saying but was pretty sure it was along the lines of ‘This lunatic has kidnapped me. Please kill him and let me return to my family.’

‘Where is your equipment?’ the gunman asked me.

‘I don’t really have any equipment,’ I said. And I showed him my pad and camera and the little mini-disc player I used.

‘No, where is your equipment?’

I wasn’t quick enough to answer before he pushed the taxi driver to the back of the car.

‘Open the boot,’ he ordered.

And now we were in some degree of trouble. Whoever they were, my cache of weaponry was going to look bad to them. Then my driver managed to take the situation and make it worse.

‘Gun?’ he asked me.

‘You stupid man,’ I thought to myself. ‘I’ve never shot a gun in my life. I don’t even know if it’s loaded. We’re going to take these guys on, are we? You’ve got one arm.’

So we were at odds. I thought we were in serious shit and he thought we could shoot our way out.

‘I need a cigarette,’ I said to the guy with the gun, in order to buy a little time. ‘Would you like a cigarette?’

He wasn’t interested. He forced me against the side of the car.

‘Open it,’ he said to the driver. As clearly as anything I can still hear the little click of the catch in the boot as it was opened. And I knew it was going to be the last sound that I would hear. I estimated we had 10 seconds tops before they saw our weapons. By now the bayonet in my side was hurting. It was a very blunt bayonet so he had to push very hard.

Suddenly there was a long whistling noise not far away. ‘That’s nice,’ I thought, ‘Jesus has decided to save me’ and there was a phenomenal explosion. I couldn’t tell how far away it
was but it was close enough to be a concern. We were all hit by shrapnel — not by bits of bomb but by bits of road. There was tarseal going everywhere. The windscreen of the car was smashed. One of the guys with guns was knocked over and then they both started screaming and ran back to their pillbox.

‘Get in the car,’ I yelled, ‘get in the car.’

My driver was distraught and moaning about his windscreen. In fact the car was completely rooted, but we were still able to drive out and made it safely to Mostar where there was more of a UN presence.

That incident had a huge impact on me. For better or worse, it was the start of me believing I was bulletproof. If I can get out of that, I reasoned, I can get out of anything.

I left my driver at the border and made my way to a nearby town where I found a hotel to stay in. It was a people’s palace — a communist hotel, built according to communist ideas. It was on the fringes of the conflict, out of range of 99.9 per cent of missiles so you felt relatively safe.

I went to check in. I wasn’t expected. I walked through a huge lobby with what seemed like acres of marble flooring. It was completely empty except for two chairs set against one wall. It was probably a 15-minute walk to the next pair of chairs. There was a marble concierge desk about 20 feet long, with no one attending it. I had yet to lay eyes on another human being. Then, about the length of a rugby field away, I noticed a woman standing to attention in a pristine uniform.

I told her I wanted to check in. It soon became clear there was one way of doing everything and that was how we would be doing it. This huge hotel was clearly entirely empty but she made a show of seeing whether they would be able to find a room for me without a reservation. There was no question of a discount because it was off-season.

I was booked in and established there was a restaurant on
the basement floor. I had a view of the Mediterranean from my room, which was small and, like everything else about the hotel, especially the staff, quite stark. After taking a moment to settle in, I went looking for the dining room. I appeared to be the hotel’s only guest. Occasionally I encountered someone in a uniform, standing stoically in a marble corner holding a mop or a duster.

I eventually made my way through a labyrinth of grand hallways and reached two enormous doors, with a little sign that said dining room. As I approached, the doors opened before me, not automatically but thanks to two people on the other side who had somehow discerned that I was coming.

I was in yet another aeroplane hangar. I was seated at the table furthest from the door. Immediately in front of me, but more than 50 feet away, in the middle of the room was a rostrum with a Hammond organ. That wasn’t a good sign.

I was trying to make conversation and be jovial with the staff but they seemed reluctant to acknowledge I was there. Service was very formal. The menu had just three items and the only thing I recognised was bangers and mash, which is what I ordered. It came with a large bowl of what appeared to be pickled cabbage and a huge plate with one circular spiral sausage and a plop of mash in the middle.

I had just started to cut into my sausage when the doors opened. ‘Fantastic,’ I thought, ‘some more guests.’ Instead, a very tall, very large woman wrapped in a black cape came in, carrying a satchel, and sat down at the Hammond organ. She shuffled her papers for some time, while I worked my way around my spiral sausage. Then she started to sing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. She was singing more or less in English, and it was surprisingly loud given that she was so far away, had no amplification and the acoustics were appalling.

I checked out the next day and went to start the long series of hops on planes that would take me home.

Getting through Customs at Zagreb was not easy. This was the location of the UN’s major headquarters for their Bosnian activity, where they brought on new staff and briefed people before they went into Sarajevo. The place was effectively in lockdown and security was very tight.

‘Do you have anything to declare?’ I was asked on leaving the country. What else could I do? I opened my suitcase and showed them the bullets I’d picked up, the hand grenades and the bayonet.

‘Souvenirs,’ I said. ‘Horrible, grotesque and macabre souvenirs.’

The Customs officer looked at me, acknowledged that they were horrible, grotesque and macabre, put them back in my pack and let me on the plane. Those were the days when you could carry bayonets on planes.

RUNNING NATIONAL RADIO TURNED
out to be much harder than I expected. I had gone back to various bits and pieces at Pacific after the Bosnia trip. At the Radio Awards at the Sheraton Hotel in Auckland I bumped into Sharon Crosbie, who I had worked with in my very early days and who was then chief executive of Radio New Zealand. I had a reasonably sized crush on Sharon, dating back to when I worked with her on
As It Happens
during my first period at National Radio.

She was a huge star and we got on famously. Not everyone got on with Sharon. She could throw spectacularly theatrical tantrums, often involving the flinging of objects, which is
generally regarded as un-Kiwi and something many people dislike. However, I was used to them from the BBC, where they were part of the culture. I found them quite stimulating.

‘You should really come back,’ Sharon said to me after
whatever
award I was nominated for was won by Paul Holmes. ‘You could have the job managing National Radio. Would you be interested?’

‘Yes,’ I said. It was perfect timing. There was no prospect of anything substantial at Pacific, so it was a good time to move on and an interesting project to move on to.

My agreement, you may have noticed, was given without any thought at all. I had no long-term goal — it would be a challenge to get the job and that was as far ahead as I had thought. The job was part of a changeover process in which National Radio was going from being essentially a government department to a more commercial footing. It was being managed by KPMG in Wellington. They were making the appointments but obviously Sharon had a say and the board had a say. After a few weeks I was approached by KPMG, sent an application form and was interviewed and eventually got the job.

When I announced I was leaving, Derek Lowe took it as a personal slight. As a pioneer of private radio in New Zealand, he reacted to public radio like bulls react to red rags. He was very pissed off that public radio was taking one of his breakfast hosts — even though he had taken me out of that role. In his view I was going to ‘a death camp for broadcasters’.

He could have taken some pride in the fact that I was going there to a senior management position thanks to knowledge I had gained from him about how to run a radio business. If he did, he didn’t show it.

The new structure was cumbersome. There was a board, Sharon as chief executive and all the senior managers: the head of news and current affairs, the head of finance, the
head of commercial activities — essentially the person who sold cassettes, the presentation manager for Concert, the presentation manager for National, and the person in charge of programme acquisitions. My role was officially presentation manager of National Radio, though I always called myself the manager. It was equivalent to being the manager. I didn’t have complete control over programme acquisitions and finance and news and current affairs, but I had control over the way news and current affairs was presented and how long a news bulletin was. I didn’t have control of the journalists, thank God.

I had not considered when I got the new job that the organisation was being torn apart from every angle, and that the objectives which had to be achieved were not the objectives of 99.9 per cent of the people who worked there.

So I arrived on day one wondering how to furnish my office.

On my first day, I went to see one of the senior management team. He was the manager of transition, employed and paid for by KPMG. His job was to get this ramshackle group of broadcasters, who thought they were managers, to move Radio New Zealand out of the past and at least into the present. Possibly into the future. For the 99.9 per cent, he was the enemy.

‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. He didn’t yet know that I was more likely to side with him than anyone else, but he may have had an inkling because of my commercial background and some things I’d said to KPMG in the process of getting the job.

He almost cried during that first meeting.

‘My hair is matted with blood from banging my head against the wall,’ he said.

‘That’s entertaining,’ I thought.

For the rest of the day I had no idea what I was going to do apart from furnish my office. Working in the room outside my office were all the people who had wanted my job and felt they should have got it. I could read their minds. ‘Who the
fuck is this little shit coming from Radio Pacific? What does he know that we don’t already know?’ The answer was nothing. I didn’t know anything that they didn’t already know about what they were doing, but I knew all the things that I needed to know about what they were going to do or what I thought they should do.

I went into my office and sat down. I had no radio. I couldn’t even listen to my own network. I had a chair and a desk and some empty filing drawers and cupboards. I positioned my jotter pad and checked that the stationery was all in order in the top drawer, which it wasn’t, so I went out and bought some stationery.

I went to see Sharon, who described the situation in slightly different terms than those used by the manager of transition.

The reality was that the staff hated the management team, hated what they were doing, did not believe they could do it but did believe they were destroying public radio. The worst part was that deep down most of the management team agreed with them.

To sum up: the staff hated the management team for what they were supposed to do; and the management team hated what they were supposed to do so much that they were trying not to do it — delaying making decisions and then making bad ones.

There were absurdities wherever you looked. Elizabeth Alley was a wonderful person and a talented broadcaster. She was in charge of purchasing programmes, and she knew a lot about programmes, but she didn’t have the budgets to actually purchase them. She had endless meetings about what programmes would be bought if and when the money became available.

We had a lot of meetings. Sharon sat at the end of the table and I was gradually moved to sit next to her, not because of my place in the hierarchy but so that she could kick me under the table or hit me over the head with a glitter wand she used to
have. This would occur, I felt, whenever I said something that sounded like it was getting close to the truth.

At these meetings we pored over documents that were tabled and discussed the ramifications of the restructuring and how the huge number of redundancies that were necessary could be kept from the staff because they would mutiny if they found out. It was obvious to me that they had to find out if anything was ever going to happen. Plan A seemed to be talked about for so long, I wondered if the others were hoping the government would change its mind before anything final had been done. That would also require someone to come up with an extra $50 million so wasn’t very likely.

Another constant irritation was that I was the only person at the table who understood that we had entirely enough money to do what we needed to do to meet our obligations under the broadcasting charter. Everyone else seemed determined to prove to the government that we didn’t have enough money.

I was turning into one of the things I loathe most — a bureaucrat. There was hardly any time to focus on presentation and the way the programmes sounded. I wanted to update the sound of National Radio. It has a fantastic role and it’s a brilliant opportunity. It’s commercial-free, which meant we had an opportunity to push the boundaries with news and drama. They had very talented journalists. I wanted to make more of the news. It was ridiculous that there were extraordinarily dull access programmes on, when they could have had extended news bulletins. There are times of the day when you simply don’t want to listen to fusion music. Not for a whole hour.

Then someone on the management team decided the bird call had had its day. There was a battle we didn’t need to have. It wasn’t like we were getting a lot of mail complaining about the bird. Fortunately, if I achieved nothing else in my time I managed to save the bird.

There was no reason why almost all of the suggested
restructuring
shouldn’t have happened. There were too many people. There were staff there wandering around with their heads up their arses. There was a belief that nobody else in the country could produce radio like they were producing it. Well, there were lots of people who could. I used to plead with the others to bite the bullet on the redundancies and then see whether that would leave us enough money to do what we were obliged to under the charter. But I was told we couldn’t make people redundant before Christmas. After Christmas I was told we couldn’t make people redundant while they were on holiday.

There were regular meetings with staff that management were rostered to attend. The only staff who went were the agitators, who had no shortage of fuel. There were weeks when management representatives were eaten alive. There were managers who avoided walking through the newsroom because of the hostility in the air.

Most of the staff who were agitators and who were
anti-change
didn’t realise that the reason it was being done so badly was because those on senior management charged with doing it were siding with them. But they couldn’t tell the staff they were doing that because that would’ve been embarrassing. They would’ve looked silly so instead they looked incompetent. There were faults on both sides but the greater fault was with the management for allowing it to happen.

When Dick Weir was made redundant, it was done incredibly clumsily, partly because there was a huge reluctance to do it, and so to do it properly was inconceivable. Everyone knew it was going to happen before it did, including Dick.

Someone decided we should display floor plans to show the staff how lovely the new building would look, in order to boost morale. I mentioned that the staff were not stupid and one of them was almost certain to count the desks and
realise there were fewer of them in the new building than in the old. However, the pictures were put up and the number of redundancies, which we had known for some time, became general knowledge and another storm blew up. That was really irrelevant by now because, given we had decided not to make people redundant before or after Christmas, we had got to the point where we couldn’t make people redundant at any time because we had used up all the redundancy money by continuing to pay the salaries.

While all this was going on, we were also supposed to be going digital. Staff had been assigned to make it happen and flew around the world looking at systems. Because not only were we going to go digital, which was obviously a good idea, but we were going to lead the world, which was a bad idea. We couldn’t afford the airfares we were paying for.

I tried to explain that we didn’t need to lead the world. ‘Digital world leaders’ wasn’t core business and certainly not relevant to the charter. ‘We don’t need to be new,’ I said. ‘Let’s find a system we can afford that’ll do the job easily. Let’s lead New Zealand now and make sure we can upgrade later.’

In the end, the troops were brought home, the process came to a halt and all this money was wasted. It would have cost less to buy a whole package that didn’t work and then ditch it than the money we spent getting halfway there.

But the ultimate example of things that were sacred and didn’t work was the ‘commercial arm’. This was essentially two things. Replay Radio, which sold recordings of programmes by mail order and the sale of news services. Apparently this would be our financial salvation by making up for the money we weren’t getting from the government. I thought a commercial arm was unnecessary because there was no requirement on us anywhere to make money and we could afford to do our job with the money we had. It was obvious, too, that the internet
meant we were just a few years away from a world where no one would be buying recordings of radio programmes.

I believed that it cost more to run this department than we made and I believed it was the job of the person in charge of the department and in charge of finance to prove that it was contributing to our bottom line. If it was a good idea, then at the end of every year we should have had money to spend on public radio, thanks to our commercial arm.

In the time I was there, no one was ever able to prove that.

At one meeting the commercial arm arrived with a report that had been
typed
on a
typewriter
. It contained a list of numbers where the bottom line was presented to everyone and to put to rest my concerns. This is the money we would not have without the commercial arm.

Unfortunately, I am no financial genius and needed things explained to me. ‘Is this number the turnover of the department, or does this represent a true net gain for Radio New Zealand?’ I asked. No one could tell me.