May 2008 Archives

It was a very warm afternoon way back in August 2002 and yours truly had just finished interviewing cricket legend Sir Viv Richards for BBC Midlands Today. As I prepared to do my piece-to-camera, I reckoned that Birmingham was on the brink of something huge.

The subject of the story was New Style Radio, which after years of effort by some seriously committed folks at the old Afro Caribbean Resource Centre in Dudley Road, Winson Green, had just won a broadcasting license to make it the city's first legal Black radio station.

With a potential audience of six million Midlands Today viewers, not to mention the hoards of readers of the numerous column inches the launch wracked up in local and national publications, it seemed as though the stage has been set. Surely now, with experienced presenters and journalists on board, New Style Radio could and would report on the Black community's news and accomplishments without fear of marginalisation or closure by the authorities.

Six years on, those early hopes have not been fulfilled, still don't think that there is a station that has the journalistic integrity and genuine interest in both reflecting and inspiring the Black community like New Style Radio could do.

Do you?

The station has encountered so much controversy in the intervening years. I've got too much class to go into what went wrong or to point the finger - but at least the station is still in existence.

Come on NSR, you know what needs to be done. Do it.

I received an email just now from a bloke I hardly know. Well, I don't think I know him. Anyway, he was going on about boycotting certain oil companies to encourage them to drive down their costs.

Valid point I thought, especially that the rising price at the pumps is a regular cry from my own internal whinger. Still, before my once revolutionary spirit even got a chance to begin stirring, along came that old sinking feeling - that this campaign would never work. Surely only folks with (now, now, be careful Veron!) let's say, time to spare that should be taken up with normal human interaction are interested in such things?

'Shame on you!' my internal whinger whispered and then shouted to me. 'The teenaged Veron would be ashamed of you!' To be truthful, the older version wasn't too proud of himself either.

Just when did the switch happen? Do you remember when folks were only too eager to picket/ blockade/ boycott at the slight mention of an injustice, sometimes well before they knew what the issues were? When did my 'get up and go' well, get up and leave?

Have we been pacified by the ease of our push-button world or just intimidated into inaction by the power of corporate Britain?

But just then, the fomer rebel in me began to rise, fuelled (no pun intended) by the glory days of protesting long and hard with the ambulance workers, anti-apartheid campaigners ... and those bunking off college pretending to have political issues with the poll tax.

'Yeah that bloke has a point,' the rebel shouted back, although with a shaky determination he hoped would last longer than the time it takes for him to log off.

Do you moan about things but bypass opportunities to do something about the issues that cause the moaning? Like I did, do you cringe when an emailer tries to fire you up with a cause?

Tell me, where have all the campaigns gone?

Anyway, I've got to go now. There's an email somewhere that I need to respond to.