Anoraks a-go-go

I just won a bet, and am happy to be collecting a whole Euro.

Let me explain.

In the reducing world of radio anoraksia (It’s reducing because ‘radio anoraks’ are dying or going senile faster than the average person of identical age), there still remains to this day so much anger.  Old people are always full of anger, true, and those who obsess about one particular subject very much so.  Old anoraks of trains or anoraks of stamps will typically be very angry with each other when debating the finer points of their mutual obsession.  Nowhere has that anger and bile ejecting hatred become more prevalent than on the internet.

The advantage of being angry on the ‘net over being angry by letter, via a magazine, or at a secret meeting of like-minded bodies is that you can be anonymous and instantly angry, gaining much ‘Dutch courage’ and ability to turn very dark and very cruel.

The ones that turn the cruellest are usually the ones that ‘believe the hype’.  By that I mean that anything and everything in the public eye has a façade which is one story and the truth which is another.  Very rarely does the whole truth get told, and over time it is lost forever.  This is the way of everything from tales of what goes on in the Royal Family or Government (look at how many ‘memoirs’ contradict) through to who is doing what behind the scenes of the X Factor.  Those who do, do, and those who don’t write about it.

All this is of course true when it comes to the world of offshore radio.  Even the naming of Radio Caroline has been proven to not exactly be how it is has always been presented by the founder of the station (see here).  By far the more exciting and romantic story prevails.  It also fits in to what the dough-eyed anoraks want to believe, of course, and that makes the truth even harder to run by them. In fact, anything that destabilises their belief makes them angry to the point of actual steam coming out of their ears.  The same thing happens when those who are unconditionally religious have ‘facts’ thrown at them.

In my short flirtings with offshore radio I too was involved in producing propaganda.  One that comes to mind and was an often quoted as fact, was a survey of listenership and demographics which I made up in the comfort of my own living room without any reference to interviewing anybody whatsoever about their listening habits.  Its purpose was to enhance an investment potential, but it got into the public domain and became the bedrock of newspaper articles and embedded itself as a ‘fact’.  Beyond this, following a joint Governmental raid on the Ross Revenge (the ship broadcasting Radio Caroline) I spent my time producing party-line propaganda designed to keep the listener base active and ready to part with their hard earned cash in order to help fund Caroline activities that were not quite what the ‘anoraks’ were being told they were funding.  Once again the propaganda I produced slowly mutated into ‘fact’.

Behind the scenes of Radio Caroline people would often be charged (by those ‘above’) with doing things but had to pretend they were doing something else, such was the strange yet quite exciting way everything was run.  Bizarrely, the most ignorant and kept in the dark were those involved in putting their necks on the line to supply the ship or to entertain the dwindling listener base.

Yet it is from these gentlemen that the books and stories will seep and will lodge themselves in history as the only story, putting only the romantic spin and ‘facts’ out to an audience that is never going to be receptive to the real truth.  Fair enough.  This is the way of the world.

AN Blogger on his way to Christopher England’s house

But, to bring this back to the point, the screaming shouty anoraks who want to believe the stories rather than the truth are the ones who literally hate me when I tell the truth about things I witnessed or things I did.

Some, as I’ve previously reported, even go so far as to create huge wordy blogs trying to counter anything I say, and when I’m not saying anything they want to counter they instead write cruelly about other radio anoraks, often laughing at the less articulate or less able-bodied than them.

Anything other than the ‘truth’ they’ve been fed is unacceptable to them!  Heck, how many ‘believers’ will not cope with Tony Blackburn’s recent revelations that the film footage of him opening up Radio 1 was in fact pre-recorded as a mock-up the night before?  It’s very hard for radio anoraks to cope with the truth as it comes out.

Recently, one main hater of Christopher England lost his way a bit.  His anonymous blog (anonymous because he, like any bully, can only practise his ‘art’ by being anonymous, and won’t put his real or even his regular ‘radio’ name to it) seemed empty and like the wind had been taken out of his sails.  Rather than pre-occupy himself with finding anoraks on discussion boards to mimic and be cruel about or even to mention me under one of the aliases he liked to give me, he seemed very quiet and like he was sulking.  When he did say anything he seemed to be sounding off about another blogger who also seems to have issues with anoraks and with the original blogger.  Maybe they were a spurned lover?  Who knows.  More likely one of the many that the sulking gentleman in question had previously bullied, as there did seem to be an organised effort against him at one stage.

Anyway, I was discussing all this with a man whose name I dare not mention here for it would start further confusion and rumours about how odd the reality of the ex-offshore radio anorak world is, and I said I knew exactly how to ‘activate’ the blogger within a week.  We shook (well, virtually, via text) on it, and so I came up with “Anti-Anorak Week” on England’s England.  All I did was copy articles I’d already written years ago and republish them back-to-back for a week (Anoraks love oldies on high rotation!).   I updated a few, but essentially they were all the same articles I’d published years ago, so nothing new.

Sure enough, the anti-England blogger awoke from his slumber and started to rant incoherently about me daring to take the pee out of anoraks when it was his job or something.  Included in this were screen grabs of what I’d written!  Screen grabbing my work?  Now, that’s got to be an obsession and a half!  Phew!

Still, it worked like clockwork, and I am now owed a whole Euro.  So, thanks for being not only predictable, manipulable, but also so damn easy to ‘activate’ Mr “Original AN Blogger”.  Even though you are now a complete parody of yourself, you’re still extremely lovely.