Day 53 - "Buzz Aldrin and Marshall Tito"

Spanish Practices

Day fifty three. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today back to the sixties and why the Spanish might face chaos

Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 53 Buzz Aldrin and Marshall Tito

It is day 53 of our Spanish Lockdown, phase zero hasn’t brought any real change to our situation here. Except Chris has been able to go to the pool supply shop that is now open. He came back with a boot load of chemicals, but the rules about car travel and distance continue and of course the beaches are closed unless you are walking along the beach.

Phase 1 on Monday might not happen if we do not make the criteria – based on number of deaths and infection rate. But if that phase starts, we will be in a similar situation as the UK is now.

Spain can only dream of doing what Britain plans this Monday. The Spanish press has been full of the news that Britain as a country has had more deaths now than Spain or Italy.

After having quite a simple childhood that lacked continental holidays with the only foreigners I came into contact were my Spanish Aunty Isobel and her sister. It is no wonder that going out to work was a bit of a shock, working at Marconi was really a bit of an extension to school, we were all white working class lads, not a single woman in our group.

Britvic soft drinks was slightly different, a mixture of people worked there including the ferocious Zardar, I am not sure that was her real name. She was an enormous woman with hands like a navvy. Most of the men were scared of her, she could lift the bins full of broken glass, with just one hand. She came from the “happeest country in ze world.. Yugoslavia, and the most vundeful leader – Marshall Tito, well I suppose it did take almost ten years after his death for civil war to break out in former Yugoslavia, so he clearly had a unifying control over the country.

It wasn’t until I got into radio that I started to meet I suppose you would call more educated people, including the kind of colleagues who would smile and be your friend and whilst your back was turned would slag you off and steal your work.

We had one such freelance at Essex Radio, I will call him Brad, that was a minor publicity agent who got himself some freelance work working on the Essex Radio Helping Hands Appeal. Before you know it he had managed to get out Italian Maintenance Man to get him a desk, a phone extension and an in and out tray.

I shared a desk with the Junior Sports Reporter who was quite unusually a woman, she was kind enough to let me have a drawer and she had the top drawer, in return I purloined and electric typewriter for us both.

Her name was Helen Rollason, she was a petite attractive woman, who could pass for a young looking Valerie Singleton. I used to joke with her that she should be on TV. ‘Don’t be daft.” She said, “Who ever heard of a woman presenting Grandstand.”

Years later I helped her put together a professional demo for Radio 2, where she became the first woman to regularly present sports bulletins for the BBC, I was so thrilled for Helen when the day came when she also became the first woman to present BBC 1’s Grandstand. Her early death from cancer was an absolute tragedy, and I still think of those times now of sharing that desk.

Back to Brad with his own desk,but had now run out of work as the charity appeal had ended. He was looking around for other things to busy himself with and decided that my job would be just the ticket.

I engineered shows, playing commercials, records and producing features for Essex Radio. Brad decided to pick on the, you might say weakest, certainly the nicest man in the radio station our Sunday Radio Vicar Peter Elvey.

So it was decided that Brad should engineer the Sunday Show and Special Religious Interview that went out every Sunday lunchtime. There is a skill to engineering or driving live radio shows, Brad did not have that skill and you would often hear records crashing into commercials, moments of dead air and missed microphones.

Brad’s demise as an Engineer came one Sunday lunchtime when Peter Elvey had gone over to the United States to interview Buzz Aldrin about his Christianity and taking communion whilst on the moon.

Brad played out the tape, which needs to be timed to fit before the network news at one o’clock. A mathematical skill I hated and used to check over and over again as the time got closer to the news.

Brad was full of bravado – he had told everyone that this was one of the easiest jobs he had ever done. Brad also mistimed the Buzz Aldrin interview by a whole minute. For something so important you would make a decision to quietly drop the news bulletin, not Brad.

Peter Elvey had got to his last and most important question to Buzz Aldrin.

He said. “Now Buzz NASA didn’t want you to be open about your Christianity, I know you took Holy Communion on the moon, and I just want to ask you what that was like.”

“Well Peter I can tell you it was..

Clip Essex Radio News Jingle

Brad cut Buzz Aldrin off and that was the last time he did one of the easiest jobs he has ever done.

Meeting a wide breadth of people at Essex Radio really opened my eyes to the world. It was the start of a pathway that has brought us both here living in a foreign country, trying to make sense of the way things are done here, I hope on Sunday that we get the news we are waiting for, a tiny bit more freedom, a chance to go and buy Marmite together and sit and have a coffee with friends once again.