Where have all the workers gone?

© Simon Poulter 2018

I’m looking out on the Westway, that grim stretch of tarmac and concrete eulogised, somewhat, by The Clash as a totem of the West London they emerged from. It’s 8am on a Friday morning and something is strange: there’s hardly any traffic coming into the capital, despite what should be bumper-to-bumper rush hour. It may be the last day of August, but that’s not to say people aren’t back at work as, if the Tube is anything to go by this week, they are. It is, though, the last day of the school holidays, which might mean frantic parents are shipping bored teenagers out to Thorpe Park or Chessington World of Adventures for one last outing in the dog days of the summer holiday.

Taxi drivers have commented on this Friday phenomenon: one told me that he doesn’t bother coming in to London on Fridays as there’s just so little business. He blamed flexible working (or, in other words, “working from home”). In fact, so many of us are commuting only as far as the sofa or home office on a Friday that cabbies feel it’s just not worth the trouble. Now, I’m sure this is just an extreme view, but if I look at how my current employer has, to a point, tolerated home working, it may not be a surprise.

When I started my career, 32 years ago, there was no such thing for most industries. Journalism was a little different, as with a typewriter most freelancers worked at home and either brought their copy in by hand or posted it. But then came the digital revolution. I remember borrowing an early laptop my first magazine had purloined in 1987: for the 30 minutes that the battery lasted, it was quite a novelty sitting out in the garden bashing out album reviews. It was, however, the mobile phone that truly transformed workplace mobility. Suddenly you were in when you were out (something I loathed as I always considered the mobile ringing to be an interruption. Mind you, I had the same opinion when someone called me on my deskphone, too...). Today we have all of these devices in one - our smartphone. There is seemingly no productivity activity you can’t do on one. And with us bound to our phones like life support systems, we are never going to be able to switch off.

Commuting is hardly one of the most enjoyable duties, and on Britain’s overcrowded, delayed, strike-hit, standing-room-only trains, it is positively purgatorial. Which is what alarms me about the sight of people on public transport with their laptops, tablets and phones, feverishly working away on e-mails, presentations and reports. It begs the question - do they have unreasonable bosses, expecting them to be connected 24/7, constantly in crisis mode as ludicrously short deadlines keep coming up? Or are people simply spacing their days out to suit their own working style? (Another theory is that workers spend so much of their office time and IT resources on Facebook that they need the extra hours to do their work…).

Picture: TFL

The University of the West of England has just published a study which found that increasing numbers of commuters are now using their travel time to and from work to deal with the mountains of e-mail that corporate life, in particular, generates. This should not surprise: next time you’re on a train before 9am, look around and count how many are stooped over their mobiles. Some will be playing Candy Crush, sure, but others - and I’d suggest those with the most furrowed brows - will be frantically catching up with the overnight missives from other timezones…or insomniac bosses.

So, asks the university’s report, should all this pro bono e-mail be considered part of an employee’s contracted hours? When I used to commute daily from Amsterdam to Eindhoven in a former life, Philips paid for me to have a first class seat on the four-hour round trip, providing me with the perfect environment to work and even leave the office early to carry on working on the train home. It never occurred to me that this was ‘free’ work - it was just work, and I was able to do it in a convenient way, even without (in those days) onboard WiFi. The bigger issue, however, is how much work continues when you get home. In my line of work (PR), there are inevitable periods of ‘wartime’ when there’s a crisis to attend to, or a major launch that simply needs the hours put in, which could be done in the soul-destroying environment of an empty office at night, or in the comfort of home with warm food and a cold beer to assist.

Problems, however, begin when wartime becomes permanent, and expectations arise of being constantly ‘on’, day and night, at weekends and during holidays (I was once on a conference call where one of the participants had taken his laptop on holiday and we could all audibly hear the sounds of a busy Côte d'Azur in the midst of the August grande vacances). Here is where flexible working needs to be just that. Work/life balance is something major modern employers like to promote as part of their commitment to employee wellbeing, but how many proactively enforce it? Workplace stress and mental health issues have definitely seen a marked increase in the era of e-mail and digital connectivity, and far too many companies pay only lip service to enabling employees to keep their work life and home life in correct balance.

So step up accountancy firm PwC which has launched a scheme for new recruits in which they can specify (well, “suggest”) the hours they would like to work per week. The idea is to try and attract employees who may not - or cannot - be tied to the traditional 9-to-5 workday. PWC says that the scheme is in response to their own study which found that almost half of respondents would prioritise flexible hours when looking for the ideal on.

"People assume that to work at a big firm they need to follow traditional working patterns. We want to make it clear that this isn't the case,” says PwC's chief people officer, Laura Hinton. “In order to recruit the best people, we recognise that we need to offer greater flexibility, different working options and a route back in for those looking to restart their careers." Flexible working hours are not only good for staff, Hinton says, but also the economy, business and society. “We're likely to see a rise in people transitioning in and out of work throughout their careers and those organisations who responsibly support their people to do this will ultimately gain a competitive advantage”.

Which neatly brings me to some news of my own: today is my last day as an employee of Nokia, and I’m leaving after almost eight years at Nokia and the acquired Alcatel-Lucent combined. It’s been an amazing journey, taking in the ups and downs of corporate life, changes of CEOs and other executives, a lot of not commenting on rumours or speculation, and some major shifts in technology, as 4G/LTE arrived, the cloud and virtualisation began to replace hardware, and 5G popped its head above the parapet. And now it’s almost here for real. And, yes, working in corporate communications during this time has meant a lot of e-mails and conference calls around the clock, and at weekends, too. I’ll admit, it goes with the territory, but on the other hand, the tools are there and, to a greater or lesser agree, the freedom, too, to manage your own time appropriately.

I’ll have news next week of where I go next (and trust me, I’m extremely excited at the prospect). Strangely, it will involve technology that enables companies and their employees to work flexibly. And I’m sure they’ll practice what they preach.

Do you know the way to sack José?

I'm not even considering the fact that Tottenham beat Manchester United 3-0 at Old Trafford last night, nor even how they did it. Sorry, Spuds fans, this one's not about you. José Mourinho made sure of that. It wasn’t necessarily about how Manchester United lost at home, either. It is - because it always is - all about José.

Turning up half an hour early for his press conference the other day only to stick around long enough to deliver a handful of surly answers; then last night, almost theatrically applauding the home fans after the match was over, lapping up their adulation as if what had happened in the previous 90 minutes or so hadn’t mattered one bit; and then another post-match presser in which The Sulky One asked of the assembled [on time] journalists: "What was the score?" before angrily holding up three fingers and asking "What is this also? Three Premierships I have won, more Premierships than the other 19 managers put together. Me three, them two," followed by "Respect, respect, respect", repeated as he made his exit.

The fact is, if José wants respect, he’s got to show some himself. On Sunday Genovese fans maintained silence for the first 43 minutes of Genoa's home fixture to Empoli, one minute for every victim of the Morandi bridge collapse. Now that is respect. Respect is earned or deserved, not petulantly demanded from journalists asking legitimate questions about how Manchester United managed to lose at their supposed home fortress to one of the Top 6 by a three-goal margin. Yes, it's only three games into the season, and a season's results can never be gauged over just 270 minutes of football at the sunburned end of the term, but it's worth pointing out that in Mourinho’s first season at Chelsea the team conceded just 15 league goals all season. Whether by parking the bus or not, Chelsea were ultra-disciplined at the back, and ultra-watertight. Manchester United are already halfway towards that goal record, and we're not yet out of August.

Whatever it is causing Manchester United to be so poor, the root lies with Mourinho. Once again, he has adopted the truculent manner that led to "palpable discord" between him and his Chelsea players in that disastrous, four-month nosedive in defence of the 2014-15 Premier League title. It left Chelsea in 17th place at the point of Mourinho's departure...ironically, following another defeat to Tottenham. That was when Third Season Syndrome became a thing: it was the realisation that in Season 1 he builds, Season 2 he achieves and in Season 3 it all falls apart. Well, this is a blockbuster Netflix would probably pass over. Because Season 2’s pattern was ignored, mainly by the supposedly classless Manchester City.

Mourinho’s demeanour last night as he boorishly lectured journalists was nothing new. This wasn’t a sudden, Keeganesque implosion, one where sympathy might be afforded Mourinho’s mental state. No, because this is José. When he first appeared on these shores in 2004 to declare himself a "special one", the press went giddy. Sports desks ordered extra notepads from stationery departments at the lip-smacking prospect of a new and highly quotable Clough, funded by Roman Abramovich’s largesse, and with success with Porto behind him to underwrite the hype. And so he delivered Chelsea’s first league title in 50 years, and then another. Buying the league? Nah. We loved him, and sang ebulliently from the Stamford Bridge stands, “José Mourinho! José Mourinho!”. And then, within a few weeks of The Third Season starting, he was gone. One indifferent performance in the Champions League, and mutterings of discontent over Avram Grant’s role as Director of Football, and club and manager parted company.

The cycle was in full effect, and thus it would repeat itself at Internazionale and Real Madrid, coming back to Chelsea in what might seem now like an ill-fated marriage of convenience in 2013. But this was no Burton and Taylor giving it yet another go: the suspicion was always that José coveted the-then unavailable Manchester United job. So Chelsea just had to do. And so he dutifully added another Premier League title before it all went horribly wrong on the opening day of the 2015-16 season, and José jumped up and down like a enraged, tanned Basil Fawlty as Dr. Eva Carneiro and her assistant ran onto the pitch to attend the felled Eden Hazard. This was just 8 August. And it set the tone for the next four months, with Mourinho publically demoting Carneiro, and team morale disappearing before our very eyes. Week after week, the Mourinho mood worsened, some genuinely fearing for his mental state as press conferences and post-match interviews became increasingly monosyllabic. All leading up to the inevitable parting of the ways and Michael Emenalo's extraordinary admission of discord between manager and players. On that occasion there was suspicion that Mourinho had engineered the whole thing to get himself out of his Chelsea contract and onto the radar of Manchester United's HR department (despite there being no vacancy to fit his experience and talents).    The idea of Mourinho attempting 'suicide by cop' by appearing to invite Roman Abrmovich to fire him might seem extreme, but if there's one thing we know about José, there are no rules for him to follow. There are times when everything about him seems staged and contrived; even his march last night to the Stretford End looked rehearsed, at least in his mind, to calculate maximum effect when he faced the press afterwards.

There was a time when we believed that all of this egomaniacal behaviour was a distraction, that by pulling the supertrooper onto him, Mourinho would deflect attention away from his players. But if there's one thing we took out of that dismal four months in 2015, his actions did everything but. He was, by all accounts, a miserable sod to be around, and that appears to have replicated itself over the summer at United. Even if he managed, miraculously, to get Paul Pogba onside, that scowl and the apparently demeaning comments about some of his players will have been felt throughout the squad.

So, three games in to this season and we have already reached the level of petulance that provided the weekly narrative of those final few months of Mourinho’s time at Chelsea. Chelsea’s PR people must have needed counselling during that period and I can see United’s media team going in the same direction. Surely Manchester United must be alerted to the warning signs? Could he be sacked sooner than later? Logic says he won't go just yet: even in this insane world of football, three games - one of which won - does not lead to dismissal. But the look on executive vice chairman Ed Woodward's face at the final whistle yesterday was not one of stoic reflection. Even if, as the Daily Mail has revealed today, he and Mourinho had a "positive" conversation, drawing on United's first-half performance, rather than its second-half collapse, there surely must be those in the Old Trafford board room wondering whether history is repeating itself before their very eyes, and not necessarily in the best way, either...

The end may be nigh: Eric Clapton is releasing a Christmas album

It is exactly four months to Christmas Day. Sorry to lay that on your morning head, but if you head out early enough you should get the shopping done in time. Being the season when sentimentality hangs heavy, you might be drawn in your gift-giving to the novelty of celebrity Christmas records. You know, a Susan Boyle or, God help us, Bradley Walsh* annihilating the classics for a CD you might charitably buy Granny on the basis that hard-toffee bon-bons no longer agree with her dentures.
*See also, and in no particular order, David Hasselhoff, Anton de Beke, Roseanne Barr and Sir Christopher Lee

The last person I would expect to fall into this category of record making is, however, one of the greatest rock stars of his era, once the subject of graffiti declaring him “God”, who at 17 became the most feted blues guitarist in London, who played on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Sleeps, who almost replaced Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones, whose mesmerising guitar playing in Cream planted him permanently in the upper echelon of rock royalty, and so on and so on. Yes, Eric bloody Clapton is to release his “first full-length Christmas record”, Happy Xmas which, according to the official press release, will contain “holiday classics along with an original [i.e. new] holiday song, For Love On Christmas Day. Let me say again, this is Eric Clapton. Well at least God releasing an album themed for the Son of God’s arrival on this Earth is at least seasonally consistent.

Quite what the guitarist’s real motivation is to release such an album is not explained, beyond a statement in the press release about Clapton getting the idea that standards, such as White Christmas and Away In A Manger, “could be done with a slight blues tinge”. But still. This is one of the most exalted musicians of rock era, a point underscored by Lili Fini Zanuck’s brilliant documentary, Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars released back in February which charted the course of his complicated childhood in rural Surrey, his emergence as a teenage guitar virtuoso in my neck of the London woods, and his elevation to greatness via the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek & The Dominos in the space of a decade. What came through strongest in the film was that Clapton was a hard core blues obsessive, from his earliest trial-and-error attempts at Big Bill Broonzy numbers whilst sat on Ripley Green, to busking Robert Johnson songs in the riverside pubs of Kingston-upon-Thames. His amplified blues with Mayall set the tone - and the decibel level - that rivals could only aspire to. But now you’ll be able to hear his blues ‘tinged’ treatment of Jingle Bells, Silent Night and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

I shouldn’t, of course, pre-judge the record before it comes out on 12 October, any more than one should pre-judge anything sight-unseen or sound-unheard. But, really. Does the world need a Christmas record from one of the greatest guitarists of all time (an accolade universally afforded from across the professional spectrum)? Even with all the packaging extras in the “deluxe box” (such as “Pop-up Art derived from EC's original sketches”, “One-of-a-kind metal alloy Christmas tree ornament from Eric's hand-drawn ‘Bushbranch’ horse” and - wait for it - a “custom rubbery USB drive designed from Eric's Santa sketch that doubles as an ornament”), I really do feel that this album from one of my absolute musical heroes, someone who sprinkled much-needed stardust over my part of suburban south-west London in the 1960s and blazed a global trail as one of the UK’s greatest musical exports, is somewhat letting the side down. As Smash Hits was fond of saying, “it’s like punk never happened”.

Crete balls of fire

© Simon Poulter 2018

There is a stray cat, one of millions loose on these islands, stalking me around the house. I open the back door to let some morning sunshine into our kitchen, and it is there yelping at me. I walk up a level to the living room, then through the patio doors and there it is, yelping at me on one of the numerous terraces this big, multi-layered house we've rented in Crete appears to have. It's as if it has thermal imaging and can track me through the house's interior.

The cat's relentless meowing is then completely drowned out by the roar of a fighter jet, looping around over the Akrotiri peninsular, a stubby little knob of land towards the island's western end. It is home to Chania International Airport, the start and end destination for countless holidays as well as, it would appear, ageing F4 Phantom fighter-bombers of the Greek Air Force, screaming off to practice war. All this noise notwithstanding, I am incredibly, unbelievably, overwhelmingly and many other adverbs, chilled out.

In fact, I haven’t felt this degree of relaxation, this disconnected from life's tribulations in...well...I cannot actually remember when. Sure, I’ve had relaxing holidays in the past, but none I can remember where the compulsion to do anything other than lie in the sun and read a book has been magically removed. And that, as I reach the end of this amazing, blissful week under poster paint-blue skies, is the conclusion from my first ever visit to Greece and its islands.

Over the last 30 years I’ve tended to holiday in places like California, where every day is an endless road trip. Relaxation would be driving into the Mojave Desert with the latest supermarket sweep of (in those, pre-Brexit referendum days) cheap new CDs from Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, with which to simply gawp at the Great American Wilderness. On other occasions I've whizzed around south-eastern Sicily in search of filming locations for Il Commissario Montalbano or, last year, obsessively exploring northern Sardinia for places where The Spy Who Loved Me was shot. All fun stuff, I swear. Just not completely relaxing.

So, when my girlfriend - no stranger to the Greek isles - suggested Crete, and then found what has turned out to be a fantastic house to rent in a small, quiet hill town north of the ancient port of Chania, I had little reason to say no. Simply because I’d never been anywhere in Greece before and, frankly, it all sounded idyllic. And thus it has turned out to be. Profoundly so. And yes, I do mean all those salads and lovely little beachside tavernas that no Greek travel guide can fail to mention. Or this blog.

Now, I’m sorry if I’m coming late to the Hellenic party (and with my lengthy Balearic and Italian history, this substantial part of the Mediterranean has hitherto escaped me), but I have absolutely loved it here. Firstly, the sun has shined every day and the temperature has been at least 30 degrees. Tick that. Secondly, I have eaten more than my own weight in Greek salad and actually feel healthier as a result. This is a precedent that was set on our first day when, on the 100-mile drive from Heraklion (yeah, I know - we're staying near one airport and yet land at another on the other end of the island...), just past Rethymno, we stopped for lunch at a beach cafe so achingly cool the bottled water we guzzled didn’t even need to have come from a fridge. Being two hours ahead of the UK, we'd already lost track of time. It may have been mid-afternoon by the local clock, but we stayed for what seemed like hours (mostly because we'd ambitiously ordered salads each, which turned out to be the size of one of the smaller Greek islands).

© Simon Poulter 2018

It’s always a testament to a good holiday that you feel you’re on one soon after you arrive. From that beach lunch onwards, it’s been the same. Relaxed. Chilled. Whatever expression of insouciance you care to apply, that’s been us. The house in Chorafakia has a small pool and a choice of balconies, verandas and seating areas with which to while away the days. Technically, the house is made of two: almost by accident we discovered an entire basement apartment, complete with kitchen, bedrooms and a properly equipped living room, like a well-provisioned nuclear bunker beneath the other-purposed property of someone expecting to see out a particularly irradiated winter. For those days we chose to hang out there, the house was perfect (thanks, Vintage Travel), with a superbly provisioned welcome pack on arrival (which actually lasted the week), and a jolly ex-pat handyman from Devon on call to take care of one or two minor technical things that needed fixing.

There is so much to the well-storied Crete that seven days is barely enough to scratch the surface of the Chania end of the island, let alone anything else. Chania itself is a delight: the world's fourth oldest city, under permanent population for four thousand years, with its charming Venetian port mixed with bustling modernity. If you visit, lunch at Salis on the port's eastern end. You will not be disappointed. Equally, indulge a little tourism and take one of the glass bottom boat tours out to an island 20 minutes away, where you can watch the thinnest man in Europe attract various species of small fish to congregate beneath the tub. If you remember your swimmers, you can even dive in with him.

But, I guess, the main attraction of these Greek islands to most tourists are the beaches. If you have an aversion to vast, industrialised commercial resorts, the Akrotiri peninsula has the antidote, less than a kilometre from our patio - Tarsanas. It's just the kind of cute, sandy, family-friendly cove you'd expect from the guides - splendidly unpretentious, a delight to swim in, with an informal beach cafe and, overlooking it, the most romantic taverna you will ever find. Anywhere. Around the headland is Stavros, made famous by Zorba The Greek, the uplifting 1964 film about an unlikely friendship and starring Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates. Sitting on the beach on a busy Sunday, looking up at the huge, triangular rock that provided a backdrop for Quinn and Bates, a local cafe will bring drinks and food to your sun lounger, for a premium, of course, or you can lever yourself up to one of several other establishments offering good food and cold drink (yay, Mythos beer!) at significantly less than exorbitant prices.

© Simon Poulter 2018

As my post the other week [Package delivery] should have conveyed, sitting still on holiday is an unusual experience for me, less so being in the confined and relatively regimented environment of an all-inclusive hotel. Likewise, I’ve rarely been one to not bother looking at the time, or simply slap on the Factor 30 and bury myself in a good book for entire days at a time. But that is exactly what these two consecutive holidays (“Get him, turning into Colleen Rooney...!") have been about. And as much as the previous week in all-inclusive Majorcan sunshine was wonderfully 'holiday', these seven days in Crete have been magical. Dreamily so. The kind of excursion that you spend the next 51 weeks longing for. And I don’t think I could give any more stronger endorsement than that.

When Sky was the limit

It's not often one can claim to be a part of history, and when you do it can sound ever-so slightly high-and-mighty. But 30 years ago today I walked through the central London doors of a relatively obscure satellite TV company that would, within five months, transform European broadcasting forever and later lead an even more dramatic transformation of football into the multi-billion pound business it is today.

The company I joined on 15 August, 1988, was Sky Channel, a pan-European station reliant on mostly cheap-and-cheerful reruns of syndicated American shows like I Love Lucy and, what was then, WWF wrestling (with huge, loyal and at times passionate audiences in Scandinavia, especially when the signal dropped during WrestleMania...), continental Europe - particularly cable-dominated countries like the Netherlands and Germany - and, randomly, Swindon and Milton Keynes. Two months previously, Rupert Murdoch, whose News International was Sky's largest shareholder, had brazenly announced the plan to launch four channels simultaneously under the Sky Television banner via the ASTRA satellite system, thus bypassing the UK government which had declined him a licence to operate on a new 'official' direct-to-home satellite frequency. The idea of launching four channels on the same day might, now, with hundreds on offer, seem a little arcane, but in 1988 it was a novelty in the UK, which had only had a fourth channel, Channel 4, added to BBC1, BBC2 and ITV in November 1982.

My appointment, in August 1988, to the Sky Channel press office as a junior TV listings writer was a blessing: I was still only 20, but had been mostly unemployed for the best part of the previous 12 months following the ending of my first proper job after leaving school when the newly launched magazine, LM, went bust in May 1987. Although I’d supplemented my meagre dole money by working occasionally as a freelance music journalist for Smash Hits, Record Mirror, Sounds, the NME and even the Mail on Sunday, as well spending the summer of 1987 helping out the Sport Aid charity, I was desperate for the consistency of a salaried job...and I just hadn’t broken into the somewhat closed shop that was the London music press. When the Sky opportunity came along - via an insider who knew my former deputy editor at LM - I felt like a great burden had been lifted. Unemployment, after such a brief period of living the high life as a teenage journalist, was no fun thing. I'd gone from an 18-year-old interviewing pop stars and hanging out in TV studios to a bi-weekly bus ride into Kingston-upon-Thames to sign on, followed by a contemplative cup of coffee in Next (crashing my £14 a week dole money already in the process), before heading home for Neighbours. Now I think of it, it was a soul-destroying period, and one I've vowed never to repeat again.

The job I took at Sky didn’t, at first, suggest the great portent of the whole venture. TV listings - usually episodic details of daily screenings of I Dream Of Jeannie or Gidget plus some hoary old Western at 8pm - were essential pieces of publicity information laboriously printed on an ageing dot-matrix printer and physically mailed out to TV listings magazines throughout Europe. Once a month an entire monthly package was produced, which would take most of the weekend to generate on that wheezy old printer.

Amongst all this industriousness was the countdown to 5 February, 1989, the deadline Murdoch had ambitiously set to launch Sky Television, which would augment Sky Channel (later renamed Sky One) with Sky News, Sky Movies and Eurosport. From our office in Foley Street, a couple of streets away from that Reithian bastion, the BBC's Broadcasting House, the foundations of what is now the vast £24 billion Sky empire (currently being fought over by Comcast and Murdoch's Fox for full ownership) were being built. Within this environment I gained my first experience of working within a labyrinthine corporate organisation, as executives from across the Murdoch companies were shipped in, from Australian TV channels or the 'fortress' at Wapping, where the News International newspapers were based (occasionally I’d be sent down there on errands, enduring the intimidating atmosphere that only a few years before had generated bloodthirsty riots as Murdoch had taken on and, it would appear, succeeded in challenging the hardcore print unions on the introduction of new production technologies).

The familial ties between Sky and the News International stable was a constant source of sniping from the non-Murdoch media, whom we in the press office still had to court as we geared towards launch day. Needless to say, the likes of The Guardian and Daily Mail, we’re less than generous. The satirical magazine Private Eye still occasionally runs its 'I-Sky' column, noting "Sky plugs masquerading as news in Murdoch papers", and to be fair, some of the pieces run by The Sun, News Of The World, Today and even The Times were a little close for comfort. At the same time Sky had to endure an acrimonious rivalry with British Satellite Broadcasting, which had been granted the very DTH operating licence Murdoch had missed out on, and were offering a bouquet of channels not dissimilar to Sky's. BSB played up their Britishness and their links to its broadcasting establishment and the London creative elite. We at Sky, on the other hand, were cast as classless Murdoch proles managed by brash, course Australian TV executives. In fairness, that wasn't a bad description, and it suited us. Over at Wapping, the intimidating legend "YOU ARE ENTERING SUN COUNTRY" thundered over the entrance to the tabloid's newsroom. There was a similar "no one likes us - we don’t care" mindset over at The Sun's television stablemate.

The image of a Sky staffed by rough-and-ready types targeting council house Britain wasn’t helped by the equally tasty 'dish war' that broke out: Sky's use of the Luxembourg-based ASTRA satellite system meant that it would be available to [initially] UK subscribers owning a 12-inch dish optimistically described as being the size of a dinner plate to assuage fears about dish 'farms' sprouting on rooftops (fears that later proved well founded). BSB had their own, nine-inch square dish, dubbed the 'squarial', which would be ergonomically more pleasing than the Sky product. The fact that both aerials and their accompanying set-top boxes were being manufactured by my later employer, Philips, at a factory near Le Mans, was cleverly kept out of the press by a line of potted plants separating the two production lines.

Alan Sugar's Amstrad also got in on the business manufacturing systems for Sky, eventually becoming its exclusive supplier. Still, though, Sky and BSB took out full page newspaper ads denouncing each other's dishes, sometimes quite wittily, as well as attacks on each other's programming. BSB had tried to play up the BBC-influenced quality of its documentary channel, for example. Sky responded with a piss-take suggesting that all BSB would be good for would be nature documentaries featuring "humping rhinos".

It was around this time that Rupert Murdoch himself, and his BSB rival Anthony Simmonds-Gooding, were engaged in a fierce bidding war with Hollywood to tie up film rights for blockbusters to be shown on the respective movie channels. On one occasion, Murdoch allegedly pulled up at the gates of a Hollywood studio demanding to see a senior executive who happened to be entertaining Simmonds-Gooding at the time, purely to disrupt the discussion. On another occasion, the head of Sky's corporate affairs team, the former Sunday Times media editor Jonathan Miller, gave an interview with Time Out's Alkarim Jivani in which he vowed not to "get into a pissing competition with a skunk". Fun times.

While the politics of establishing a completely new way of offering television to the British public were being fought, Sky was setting up a new HQ fifteen miles to the west of Foley Street, in Osterley...right under the final approach flight path to Heathrow. Whereas BSB had been installed in palatial offices in Battersea (we were later to discover that their office furniture was from exclusive Italian designer brands and included kid leather sofas), Sky was moving into three ready-made industrial units, one of which housing the Sky News newsroom and studios, the other two production and corporate offices. Meantime, the company was busy signing up on-air talent for the news channel, poaching the likes of Kay Burley and Adam Boulton from ITV's TV-am, and seasoned hands like Bob Friend from the BBC. Sky News was, then, and remains today the editorial jewel in Sky's crown. I'm immensely proud to have been its channel press officer towards the end of my tenure at the company, even if it was lampooned by Drop The Dead Donkey with storylines that bore a suspicious similarity to actual events.

Actually, looking back now, 30 years on, I’m actually incredibly proud of the five years I spent at Sky. The company has (and still does) come in for plenty of criticism, but the magnitude of launching those first four channels in February 1989 shouldn’t be disregarded in this modern digital era of infinite channel choice. Like it or not, Sky revolutionised football, not just in the UK with the Premier League, but in the way the Sky-subsidised Premier League has changed European and even world football. Sky News is still one of the world's greatest news channels, easily rivaling the BBC for breadth and depth, and perhaps - and surprisingly - for balance, too.

In those first few months before the full launch, we used to say to each other "No one's ever launched four TV channels on the same day and at the same time," and at the time, no one had. When, at 6pm on Sunday 5th February, 1989, almost six months after I’d walked in to 31-33 Foley Street, Alastair Yates and Penny Smith introduced the very first Sky News bulletin, those of us at a launch event in a Park Lane hotel felt a tremendous sense of achievement, of battling the odds, a prevailingly anti-Murdoch press and even the British establishment (though it was fun to take a call earlier that afternoon from "Number 10" with, what turned out to be Woodrow Wyatt - not Denis Thatcher, as I'd thought - asking how "one operates this Sky box thingy as Margaret would like to watch the launch"). This was only the start of a bumpy ride: when Sky TV and BSB merged in November 1990 the companies were losing a combined £12 million per week (an executive had once predicted that the two ventures would "haemorrhage red ink").

I would eventually fall victim to some of the nastier politics of the frontier spirit that infected Sky's uncompromising agenda (including the dreaded, late CEO Sam Chisholm, who took a dislike to me). But the five-year journey that began 30 years ago today taught me many of the skills I put into practice still today. The phrase "startup" wasn’t used back then, but that is exactly what Sky was. In the years I spent in its midst I went from churning out inch-thick sheafs of TV listings to learning desk top publishing on the job. I helped launch The Simpsons, met my hero Spike Milligan, stuck my hand up the bottom of a puppet called DJ Kat, hung out with a then-unknown Johnny Depp (who spent the entire time smoking and being moody), met Hulk Hogan several times ("Hey dude! Call me Terry!"), spent a Saturday afternoon driving around Moscow with Jon Bon Jovi and was part of the production team of an expletive-laden live broadcast with Ozzy Osborne on the steps of St. Basil's Cathedral. And, in my last role at the company, managed the PR for an exciting, young 24-hour news channel during tumultuous events like Nelson Mandela's first walk to freedom, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the senseless bloodletting that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. All of this in five years.

30 years on I’ve achieved much, much more - working abroad for 17 years amongst it - but today's anniversary brings back very poignant memories of a period early in my career where in a business environment not dissimilar to the chaos of war, I gained so much. I didn’t go to university, but I sometimes think that the life and professional skills I picked up after walking through that door on 15 August, 1988 more than equipped me for everything that has followed. And everything I’m about to experience. More of which on these pages soon...

'Tis the season for speculation

We are now in the thick of the 'Silly Season', that summer tradition when nothing of any great note happens and, as a result, the media resorts to non-stories to pep up* an otherwise moribund news agenda. This summer has been somewhat different, however: the front pages have been consumed by nationwide political dysfunction, from Theresa May's aversion to coherent governance to Jeremy Corbyn's abject inability to provide any form of recognisable opposition. To distract from all this we've had Boris Johnson on manoeuvres and the ever-manic circus that is the 45th President of the United States. The only summer consistency has been on the back pages, with their bi-annual rumour mill surrounding the football transfer window, some of which came good, some didn't, but which always managed to fill the void evacuated at the end of the World Cup by actual news.
*Not to be confused with 'Fake news'.

Showbiz doesn't need a silly season, as most of it is silly all year round. But if it does allow a periodical lapse into speculative fantasy, it is over the unanswered future of the James Bond franchise. What we do know is that Daniel Craig has agreed to a fifth and final outing as 007 (for now known only as 'Bond 25'), which will commence filming, presumably, later this year for release in November 2019. What happens after Craig - who'll be 51 when the film comes out - hangs up his Walther PPK, is still open to speculation. As this blog has commented before, the lead character in cinema's longest-running action franchise is one of the most sought-after, which means there's been no shortage of names linked to it, from James Norton and Tom Hiddleston to Tom Hardy and even Gillian Anderson. But the one name that seems to remain fixed in the speculation is that of Idris Elba.

Ever since he first emerged as The Wire's sinister but sophisticated Stringer Bell, Elba has demonstrated an immense screen presence, not to mention a broad range of roles. He is supremely blessed in the charisma department. The question is, is he Bond? Could he be Bond? His tweet the other day - "My name's Elba, Idris Elba" - sent the media - and Bond fans - into a frenzy, reopening the debate about his Bond candidacy and even suggesting that he was not-particularly cryptically telegraphing the fact he had the job in the bag. The official line from Eon Productions is that there isn't a line...yet. Presumably they are focusing on producing Bond 25, still more than a year away from cinema screens. But given their responsibility as custodians of the Bond cinema legacy, and that it had been possible, since Spectre was released in 2015, that Craig wouldn't make another film, surely they've been giving some thought as to who will pick up the licence to kill next.

A few days ago it was reported that Bond supremo Barbara Broccoli had suggested that "it is time" for a non-white actor to play Bond. This, inevitably, has got a lot of people up in arms, not necessarily for racist reasons, thankfully, but for the fact that Ian Fleming's literary creation was somewhat specific and, in most people's minds, manifested perfectly by Sean Connery in Dr. No in 1962. George Lazenby's casting for On Her Majesty's Secret Service (before Connery returned again), was also pretty on the money, much like Timothy Dalton (who captured Bond's more brooding nature) and Pierce Brosnan. Roger Moore and indeed Craig both successfully challenged the idea that Bond couldn't be dark haired (or, in Craig's case, tall), but to date ethnicity hasn't been a matter of discussion.

Just as Jodie Whitaker's casting as the new Doctor Who caused a minor rip in the space-time-continuem, people are very protective of the Bond legacy. Personally I think Elba would be a brilliant choice: from The Wire to Luther, Elba has demonstrated a tremendous screen presence, underpinned by gallons of charisma. The actor certainly would fit the part from all those perspectives. My one doubt, surprisingly, is not the colour of his skin. It's his age. At 46, Elba is, today, older than even Roger Moore when he took on the role, which means that by the time photography would begin on Bond 26, he we will be closer to Daniel Craig's age now. The actor has, himself, also suggested that he may be too old to play Bond (especially with Craig suggesting the physical demands as being a reason to quit, as the series has modernised to compete with the more raw Bourne and Mission: Impossible series). Thus, it's still possible that Elba is simply undertaking a massive wind-up by his tweet. And given the usual tightlippedness surrounding any of the Bond films until they're announced, it's unlikely that Elba would be damaging his chances of being hired by telegraphing it so prematurely.

The reality is that the Broccolis have no need to project their next Bond, just yet. By the time 25 appears, it will be four years since Daniel Craig's last outing, and given his initial reluctance to do a fifth film, the producers, writers and, especially, director Danny Boyle, are going to have to pull something magical out of the bag to keep things fresh. Which is why some are suggesting that the next Bond might have to be an even younger actor - perhaps rebooting the series again with a Millennial-age 007, taking the approach of The Young Indiana Jones or The Young Montalbano. But for now, let's see how this all plays out. A post-Craig James Bond film is still a long way away: it's just that with precious little to write about, the Elba speculation is doing a nice job of filling up otherwise threadbare news pages. Not to mention this blog.

Package delivery

© Simon Poulter 2018

As I write, poolside in Majorca, London is hotter and, apparently, will remain so until October. This is, frankly, a ludicrous state of affairs: October should be when railways come to a standstill due to the wrong kind of leaves, not as a result of the line buckling due to heat. We’re familiar with the concept of the ‘Indian Summer’, but they used to be those first few days of September back in the classroom when you’d look longingly outside at lengthening shadows on a still-sundappled school field. Not closer to Halloween. That, though, was when weather was normal. When just-fading suntans amongst classmates were the result of two weeks on one of the Costas for some, or a rust-gathering fortnight in Wales for others.

I took my first package holiday at the age of 13, to Ibiza. Obviously before whistles, E and foam parties. In fact it was the first foreign holiday my parents had ever taken. Save for brief school trips to Delft and Boulogne, this was my first proper excursion to a foreign land, where the sight of policemen with actual guns and the mystery of a bidet were all part of the discovery, along with the prickly heat, insomnia and excruciating ear pain caused by my first flight. Being a package, that Ibiza holiday had other traditions to observe: negotiating the hotel buffet, a donkey trek, a first sip of sangria, and the smell of tanned leather in one of those glorious emporia selling everything from belts to leather book protectors.

This will be all-too familiar to many, if not most reading this. Even if ‘staycations’ in bijou Cornish cottages have transformed from the stuff of childhood nightmares (step forward, the ‘charming’ village of Delabole…) to being the preserve today of most of Hampstead, last year there were 70 million trips abroad made by Brits, including the 15 million who, every year, make a beeline for Spain. This year 25% more of us have chosen to holiday at home, taking advantage of the global warming that has kept temperatures in parts of the UK at Faustian levels, along with the effects of the weak pound on tourist euros, the earliest of Brexit dividends.

Well not me. I have returned to the package holiday. I have reacquired a British tradition that took off in the 1950s as post-war austerity lightened a little, and tour operators put together the first air-hotel packages to destinations around the Med. In 1950 one million Brits bought package holidays, a number that had stretched to 24 million by 1994. The common denominator over those 44 years, and to me now, remains simple: convenience. The Internet may have made holidaying a more bespoke experience (especially for me who has, for as long as I’ve been able to, constructed my holidays via take-you-own-risk jabs of a dart at hotel websites), but I’d actually forgotten just how easy packaged holidays are, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Yes, an all-inclusive hotel like ours in Majorca can, at times, be zoo-like, from the uncoordinated, unchoreographed melee that is breakfast to the gridlock of Aryan-blond German children making any attempt at swimming in the pool nigh on pointless. But relax and accept that being in Majorca during August (a necessity due to my girlfriend being a teacher) comes with certain conditions, and you can be - well, blissfully - chilled out.

I’m even enjoying the evening entertainment… Yes, even with my nailed-on, NME-cast muso sensibilities, I’ve accepted the 1980s variety night and the Blues Brothers tribute act as part and parcel of the family entertainment hotels like ours serve up throughout Spain and across southern Europe at this time of year. I will even fess up to enjoying an extremely dodgy band of ageing German headbangers doing classic rock covers at one of our resort’s main bars. They may have looked like Spinal Tap-meets-The Comic Strip’s Bad News, their lead singer’s German accent as convincing on Free’s Alright Now as The Scorpions’ Klaus Meine singing “I follow the Moskva, Down to Gorky Park, Listening to the wind of change…”) and the lead guitarist, soloing on his Flying-V out in the crowd frankly comical, but this is what holiday entertainment should be about. Cheesy, yes, but ridiculously good fun.

For my girlfriend’s teenage daughters, this holiday has everything they could possibly want: the opportunity to do nothing. Get up, sit by the pool, have lunch, swim in the pool, have dinner, sit at the pool bar, go to bed, mostly without looking up from their iPhones sucking up the free hotel WiFi. Much like being at home, except without evening entertainment from the likes of ‘Eva and Dan’. It’s here that I begin to deconstruct my own holiday history. Much of the last thirty years has been spent on endless American road trips, living out Godfather fantasies in Sicily and generally being a restless spirit in a hire car. Last October’s pre-50th birthday cruise around the Caribbean changed all that. Normally I’d drive right past any hotel with more than one lift, but there I was, amid several thousand mostly elderly punters queuing at 5 in the evening for the bottomless dinner buffet. I was holidaying amongst people. Too many, I grant you, but somewhat reluctantly I’d signed up for the mass holiday experience and I wasn't doing too badly with it. This trip is that, too, with the major difference being that I have allowed myself to become stupidly relaxed. I’ve so far spent entire days in the sea, floating about on a large pink lilo. No stress about wanting to do something, just bobbing about. The customary rock biography (Philip Norman’s excellent Mick Jagger, since you ask) is barely a few chapters in, such is the constant draw of the cooling pool, even if it is more clogged than the centre of Rome at rush hour.

Now, I know some of you reading this might be thinking: “What’s the big deal? This is our holiday every year!”, but you’ve got to remember, that hasn’t been me for a very, very long time. There’s a great deal of snobbery, especially amongst the middle classes, about holidaying. But really there’s nothing at all wrong with the package holiday. This one has provided everything I could possibly want - great weather, all-inclusive food and drink, a pool and the sea not even five minutes’ walk away, a badly needed opportunity to relax with my girlfriend and some fun bonding time with her kids. I’d say that was a perfect combination, wouldn’t you?