I used to be a somebody and now apparently I am a nobody. And who cares? Well actually I do.
And………. I am still the same person, I am still Allan Sharpe. I must admit when the decade changed to the 2010’s my first thought was, will I live to see the end of it, I would like to see Spurs win the League again, the European Cup before I die (Harry get a move on) and I would like to see England win the World Cup again, and not miss out on penalty shoot outs. I would like to see my off spring progress for as long as I can stay around.
BUT………I have not changed, Mr Somebody has not changed, except I am older, and maybe because I believed in certain things and held onto certain principles and values, that life has and is passing me by…....now.
It is not only, but also......... There is a lot of self interest, not only, in the workplace, maybe even in society. It does not matter what is happening outside your front door, don’t get involved, look after number one, sod the rest. Maybe that is why society relies on authorities to clean up the mess we see regularly on 24 hour news channels, instead of looking out of their window and doing something about what is going on. Maybe people have lost faith in the authorities and we are becoming more like Mad Max and survival of the fittest.
Nostalgia is bitter sweet, and I do get bitter and twisted about changes I see all around me, and changes that have happened to me. Don’t tell me you make your own luck, because I will smack that straight back at you on the half volley.
I spent most of my life trying to make the world a better place for some. I got thousands of people millions of pounds back in just refunds, when they were David against Goliath, I took hundreds of con men to the dock and put hundreds on the tv screen, my version of the village stocks and rotten tomatoes.
One of the best things I ever did was pick up a BBC TV telephone on my Watchdog desk to take a call from an old age pensioner telephoning from Spain, the Costa Almeria. The winter of 1988, Bert told me there were about 65 of them paying for an extended winter break to avoid the winter fuel bills at home, and the travel company had put them in a dump next to a building site. Of course I had to validate his story, and the BBC had stringers (researchers) all over the world to call on. So when the stringer phoned me back from Madrid to tell me the story was true and it was horrendous, the holiday from hell, I put the wheels in motion. Mike Embley and I flew out with a Spanish speaking cameraman and film crew on the Friday and we were filming that night and Saturday morning. We decided to make a send up of the holiday brochure. Our camera had seen the mould on the walls, the newspapers used as draught excluders, the refrigerators that did not work, the green water swimming pool with floating rubbish, the closed restaurant “where there is dancing every evening”. In fact the only dancing would be by mad men on their hats in frustration because the restaurant was part demolished. So Mike read the glossy brochure and then told the reality in front of the camera and we interviewed the poor old pensioners who the travel company ignored... "me I'm sick of it, up to here me, my wife on her hands and knees cleaning this stinking place up, that's not right, it's not a holiday , it's a nightmare"……….. until.
The camera always seemed to concentrate minds on problems. It was our style , my style, the doorstep kings’s style, big Al’s style, to take some of the unhappy viewers along to meet Goliath and get them an audience. So it was in the Costa Almeria, and when , with the camera rolling, we entered the local Airtours travel office, instant panic set in, a phone call to Head Office in Lancashire: “there is a BBC film crew here, from a programme called Watchdog”, “WHAT!!! What are they doing there?” “its about that block of apartments”, “GET THEM OUT OF THOSE APARTMENTS, do what it takes”.
And so it came to pass…………….. the coaches lined up within hours and what had taken 6 weeks before of ignoring the problem , suddenly became priority uno, mucho grazias. Yes and you guessed it, the pensioners were put up in the biggest 5 star hotel in town for the remainder of their holiday at no extra expense. When we filmed their champagne breakfast that Sunday morning before we flew back to Blighty, I had never had my hand shaken so much. It was a wonderful moment of the power of the media to obtain justice and redress.
The film was edited that following week with Mike and I and a film editor, it was a great film, showed the Monday after BBC1 7.30pm, maybe you were watching Coronation Street, I wasn’t.
TV was fun. It was hard , dedicated work, long hours. It was creative. We told a story in an infotainment way, with interesting pictures. Biased I am, but boring it was not. I hold the record viewing figures 10 million viewers for the Holiday Programme we broadcast live from Gatwick Airport. BBCTV in those days had the gear, the staff to deploy. It has suffered greatly since. Followed the decline of ITV, and will never be the same again as it was. Comedy, Drama, Current Affairs, the BBC set the standards. Now viewers who watch what they are served up, find other things to entertain them, like DVD,s computer games, and social networking. Viewing figures are in decline, advertisers know it, broadcasters are powerless to do anything about it. It's all because we have priced ourselves out of existence.
Greg Dyke used to say, there are no rules in TV, if your Mum likes it and understands it, you have done your job. We used to work on the basis of “the gosh factor” now we have an X Factor, instead. I think we pushed the infotainment boundary then by ridiculing the patently misleading and false brochure description of holiday accommodation that was uninhabitable. It still makes me smile and giggle to this day when I think about it, I guess that is the sweet part of nostalgia. Shame those days have to end my friend, shame no one else has picked up the baton and carried the torch on. Shame our priorities have changed, well for some at least and shame the accountants run things now.
It did not have to be like it was, we showed it could be done better.
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