Guilty after 18 years

Petula Clark

Guilty!

LBC Listening Figures Sabotaged  

A true confession marking 18 years of Creative Radio, and CreativeRadio.com

By the year 2000 we were working privately for a number of companies outside of LBC Radio, where we were both working at the time.

Privately I wrote the quiz for Mike Allen on Talk Radio that just happened to air at exactly the same time as The Pete Murray show on LBC, that I just happened to Produce!

When the quarterly listening figures came in, they showed that Pete’s show was being slaughtered by Mike Allen’s Quiz hour.  I was hauled into the office. The boss said -  ‘What are we going to do about that bloody quiz?’  

I answered, ‘Why don’t we do a quiz of our own?’

‘Yep, good idea, you can write one.’ He replied

‘Will you pay me to write it?’ I asked

‘NO! you can write it in your spare time.’

Something I was not prepared to do, so there was no quiz.  This was the boss, by the way, who, when I told him that Petula Clark was on the show and that she wanted a cab, he said ‘Can’t she get a bus, I mean they stop outside the studio?’ – and he wasn’t joking.

So I continued to do work for Talk radio, whilst working at LBC, and poor old Pete’s figures continued to drop during the Mike Allen Quiz hour.