Capital Radio - Chris Tarrant

Capital Radio DJs have been "in on it" from the start. One of the first things I heard in the summer of 1990 was from a Capital DJ who said, "If he listens to Capital then he can't be all bad" (supportive, you see. We're not bastards). Much of what came over the radio in 1990 is now so far away the precise details have been obliterated by time. No diary was kept of the details, and although archives if they exist may give pointers, the ambiguity of what broadcasters said would leave that open to re-interpretation.

In spring 1994, Chris Tarrant on his Capital morning show made an aside to someone else in the studio, about a person he didn't identify. He said, "You know this bloke? He says we're trying to kill him. We should be done for attempted manslaughter".

That mirrored something I had said a day or two before. What Tarrant said was understood by the staff member in the studio he was saying it to; they said, "Oh no, don't say that" to Tarrant. If any archives exist of the morning show (probably unlikely) then it could be found there; what he said was so out of context that he would be very hard put to find an explanation. A couple of days later, someone at the site where I was working repeated the remark although in a different way; they said there had been people in a computer room when automatic fire extinguishers went off and those people were "thinking of suing for attempted manslaughter".

Finally, this isn't confined to the established radio stations. In 1990 after I had listened to a pirate radio station in South London for about half an hour, there was an audible phone call in the background, followed by total silence for a few moments, then shrieks of laughter. "So what are we supposed to say now? Deadly torture? He's going to talk to us now, isn't he?", which meant that they could hear what I would say in my room.