#enders analysis

Another day, another meeting. Though this one was most unusual. Not a word had been spoken during the past hour. I was sat in the basement Meetings Room. I had a pile of papers in front of me to discuss. I had thoroughly prepared. However, after arriving early, I was still the only person present. My boss had insisted upon this meeting. So where was she? There was no phone call or message to inform of a delay. One really is the loneliest number. Having waited an hour, I returned to my desk upstairs in the team office. Strangely, nothing would ever be mentioned to me about that meeting. It was as if it had never not happened.

Once is an accident. Twice might be a coincidence. Three times is an act of passive aggression. This should have been the last of three meetings demanded of me in an email from my boss’ personal assistant. Their purpose was to brief Claire Enders about the processes by which British radio stations make payments to songwriters for playing their music. She was to be grilled as an ‘Expert Witness’ during a landmark hearing of the obscure ‘Copyright Tribunal’ that had all the trappings of a court proceeding. However, she never arrived for any of those three meetings, never explained her absences and no subsequent attempt was made to reschedule them. For three hours across three days, I had been waiting in vain. The email to me had read:

“We have put in the diary 1pm on Wednesday 13th September for you to spend the afternoon with Grant. We have also blocked off 10th/11th October for your second session with Grant.”

Claire Enders had responded to me and two colleagues who were tackling non-radio issues:

“The initial format I would favour is seminars each w GG [me], JB and AE to outline the key issues covered by each and how we have dealt w them. I will take notes. Ideally, each of GG, JB and AE should this week prepare a set of materials for the topic covered which includes all pleadings and relevant points and witness statements divided by topic. I will... [continues]

 I was seated in the London Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane watching a performance, hardly my usual weekday evening entertainment. It was my first time ‘at the opera’ and I had absolutely no comprehension of the storyline unfolding on-stage. Instead, my mind was wandering to a recent rewatch of the 1976 horror film ’The Omen’. It was ostensibly about the cruel, devilish offspring of a United States ambassador to London who delights in plotting terrible ends for the adults around him, his elevated status immunising him from scrutiny. Viewing it again, I had wondered if the movie had been written by American screenwriter David Seltzer as an allegory for the subset of wealthy, privileged heirs who zealously execute their destructive ambitions to make life hell for the ‘little people’ around them. In Hollywood? In London?

During my career in a media industry dominated by the privileged, I have observed many such ‘fortunates’ seemingly glide effortlessly through their gilded lives, exercising a steely determination to wreak havoc and mayhem on us ‘unfortunates’. One colleague at a London ‘indie’ record company was driven to suicide by his manipulative, lying boss who subsequently was promoted to the top of the industry with impunity. I had mentored an excellent daytime radio presenter with incredible ratings who was sacked by a new station boss lacking any radio production experience, ostensibly because the DJ in question was black. Sadly, he never worked in radio again. I have witnessed the ease with which talented Brits’ careers and lives have been destroyed by managers wielding their power of destruction in a sad indictment of Britain’s rotten class system.

The British political system stinks in exactly the same way. Think chancellor George Osborne’s imposition of a wholly unnecessary ‘austerity’ policy in 2010-2016 that reduced so many to poverty in order to further enrich the already rich. Think the entire ‘Brexit’ scam dreamt up by Old Etonians to wilfully impoverish the entire non-privileged nation. While the rest of us lose sleep fretting about how to pay our red reminders, those lacking such money worries are granted sufficient time and energy to plan and plot ways to destroy others’ lives. I have no idea why some who inherit so much wealth seem to delight in destroying the lives of those of us lacking silver spoons.

Why was I at the opera? I was three weeks into a new media analyst job in London when my boss kindly offered me and a work colleague two tickets each to attend English National Opera’s performance of Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’, described by the ‘Financial Times’ as “so entrancing that analysis can only belittle its impact.” This unexpected invitation to such a posh event had necessitated the hasty purchase of a designer formal jacket for me, my most costly clothing purchase ever, and a smart dress for my wife, rendering the invitation not as ‘free’ as it had initially appeared. I had never had to dress up like this to skank beside the speaker columns of Jah Shaka’s reggae sound system nights! However, having just started with my latest employer, it seemed churlish not to accept such an apparently generous offer.

So, there we were, my wife and I sat together for two hours (without interval) on the venue’s plush front row seats in our finery, accompanied by my work colleague and her partner. I had no inkling my boss would be attending too, but there she was, sat between us two couples as if an enthroned queen flanked by loyal courtiers. It was all very civilised. A night at the opera! How innocent the occasion appeared. I wondered whether there would be further ‘refined’ cultural events I might be invited to attend, their expense normally off-limits during two decades living in London. At the end of the performance, we said our goodbyes and headed home our separate ways. For one night, I had been a guest in posh peoples’ world. I was not reflecting upon why my new workmate and I alone out of the larger analyst team had been offered invites.

My young female colleague had arrived at Enders Analysis unannounced soon after me. ‘HT’ was likewise employed as a media analyst, having just relocated from a plum job at the German office of a global entertainment business in order to join her boyfriend in London. Until her appearance, I had been hastily installed at a spare desk in a cramped, noisy upstairs office shared with other analysts. It was less than ideal to be in such close proximity to the incessant banter of loud, patronising former private schoolboys. Then, Claire Enders instructed HT and me to work together in a previously unoccupied large basement office that was eerily spacious and quiet. We were given our first client project that would utilise our combined knowledge of the music industry and copyright systems.

We quickly found other things we had in common. We were both ‘outsiders’ compared to the company’s all-male all-Brit analyst staff that, mostly toff, appeared to have scant hands-on industry experience. HT was North American, while I had relocated there for six years and had worked for a large American media public corporation. We set to work on our first little client project which pleasingly necessitated little contact with our colleagues sat two floors above us. Our basement room felt like a private oasis of calm compared to the strident, booming male voices prevalent upstairs. 

For lunch, the men upstairs would frequent a local ‘greasy spoon’ café whose food had made me ill after accepting an invitation to accompany them during my first week, or they visited a ‘Spaghetti House’ restaurant. Cooked lunches had never been my thing. I preferred a sandwich or wrap, so I would accompany HT to the local ‘Pret A Manger’ or ‘Eat’ to buy takeaways. Frankly, after my initial attempt at social lunching with the lads upstairs, during which they had grilled me about which school I had attended thirty years ago, enquiring whether it was a ‘private’ grammar school, I was relieved to have an excuse to escape their company.

London’s Mayfair district proved a bizarre place to work. Not only is it the most expensive square on the ‘Monopoly’ board, it remains home to the city’s richest residents, costliest townhouses and most exclusive shops. Around the corner from our office was the shop window of ‘The Spy Shop’ in South Audley Street, displaying secret camera apparel and surveillance equipment hitherto only seen in James Bond movies. Shopfronts with beautifully lit showrooms had inordinately expensive huge shiny new cars inside to tempt a passing resident to pop in impulsively one lunchtime and casually lay down a volume of cash that could have bought me my first house.

HT and I would regularly walk past the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square where former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko would be poisoned later that year. When the weather allowed, we sat in the Square on a bench to eat our takeaways, overlooked by the United States Embassy and opposite the statue of American wartime president Franklin Roosevelt. HT laughed when, reading the plaque beneath the monument, I pronounced his middle name as ‘Del-AH-no’. The only person I had come across before with that name was Jamaican singer Delano Stewart whose song ‘Stay A Little Bit Longer’ had been one of my first reggae purchases in 1970.

Other days, we would walk further to the ‘Eat’ shop on Berkeley Square, sit inside if it was wet or otherwise find a bench in the calming Square, chatting about our working lives before having been thrown together by our present employer. On one occasion, we walked after lunch to the Myanmar embassy on Charles Street to pick up visitor visas for HT and her boyfriend to take a vacation booked there. I kept my opinion to myself about supporting an oppressive regime through international tourism. These carefree lunchtimes made my job bearable at a time when I was already finding our employer’s master/servant management style worryingly reminiscent of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’.

After a few weeks in the basement office, we completed our first project successfully and I was hoping that we would be asked to work together in the service of a further client, given how successful and productive we had been. However, it was not to be. I was sent to the offices of a law firm to work on a project that would occupy the rest of my year. Despite her expertise on the issues with which I was now tasked, HT was elsewhere working on other projects. At my new location in an office block above City Thameslink station, I now ate lunch alone in a cheap nearby takeaway. Those carefree spring and summer days munching our food together became a distant memory. I no longer had a lunchtime respite from the oppressive work environment in which I was immersed.

Months later, on a rare occasion when I returned to the Mayfair office, HT buttonholed me and asked if we could chat privately. She seemed uncharacteristically worried and upset. She told me about two distinct issues that had understandably shocked her. Our boss, Claire Enders, had contacted her boyfriend after the opera event we had attended and the two had talked without her prior knowledge. Secondly, her boyfriend had come to believe that HT and I were having some kind of workplace affair. I was astonished. This was all unknown to me, I explained. I had certainly done nothing to propagate such a falsehood. Whether she believed me or not, I never discovered. Mine was an innocent friendship with a woman who was closer to the age of my daughter than to old-man me. What could I do to rescue this situation? Apparently, nothing.

Weeks later, I learnt indirectly that HT had quit work, though there had been no goodbye or official announcement. She had simultaneously broken up with her boyfriend and returned to her home city in North America, presumably to rebuild her upended career. I was shocked and saddened. What had precisely happened I would never know, but it might appear to an observer that my positive working relationship with HT, unbeknownst to me, had proven a catalyst for forces that I had neither anticipated nor understood. Nobody else in our workplace seemed the least concerned about HT’s disappearance after her few months there.

Much later, in March 2007, Claire Enders asked me to contact HT to request some information about a project she had done during her time in our office. I refused, explaining that I did not feel HT would want ever again to hear from anybody at Enders Analysis. I did wonder why I was being singled out for this task rather than any one of my colleagues. It felt like a concerted effort to rub salt into the fatally wounded relationship between myself and HT. Enders persisted and so I eventually did write a cringingly inappropriate email begging for information. I received no reply and understandably so. I never heard from HT again.

Perhaps this was just a strange workplace misunderstanding into which I might have read too much, you could be thinking. Mmmm. Later that year, a young female intern was given a temporary desk in our now crowded basement office of all-male analysts in Mayfair. Such interns were usually the offspring of high-flying media owners whom Claire Enders had befriended and they often displayed almost zero interest in our work. This one was unusual because she was a student friend of Claire Enders’ daughter at St Andrews University, the alma mater of British royalty and the rich.

Everyone else in the office rudely ignored her presence so I chatted with her and discovered she was a big music fan. I lent her my ‘C86’ NME cassette, a compilation of my original Scottish ‘Postcard Records’ singles that I treasure, and a reissued Ella Washington CD of soul recordings for ‘Sound Stage 7’. When she admitted she had no record player in her rented London accommodation, I lent her one of my vinyl turntables, barely touched since my pirate radio days. We chatted regularly in the office environment and that was it. She was around the age of my daughter.

After a few weeks’ work, the intern confided that Claire Enders had started to allege she was self-harming. I had seen no evidence to support such an accusation and was shocked that such a serious assertion had been made. I could offer no explanation as to why this was happening. Then, at home in my kitchen one evening after work, I received a call from the intern’s parents who asked if I could elucidate why their daughter was being falsely accused of self-harm. I could not. Then the parents alleged that they had received numerous unprompted calls from Claire Enders insisting they act to resolve their daughter’s supposedly poor mental health. They told me they were considering a referral to the police to stop these unwanted calls. Their daughter left our workplace immediately afterwards and later returned by post the articles she had borrowed from me.

By now, I had witnessed sufficient strange behaviours in that workplace to understand that the environment there was not what I considered ‘normal’. I hung on to the job for almost three years before being edged out myself in similarly bizarre circumstances. Afterwards, I discovered that Claire Enders is the offspring of a former United States ambassador born “into a family of wealthy patricians” who, attending Yale, was “a member of one of the secret societies which are said to guarantee success in life”, according to ‘The Independent’. His 1996 ‘New York Times’ obituary said his “career was highlighted by cold war intrigues in tropical climes”, having survived three assassination attempts whilst stationed in Cambodia. Why was I reminded of 'The Omen'?

During 2008, I was given so much work at Enders Analysis that I only managed to take a single day’s holiday the entire year to attend my daughter’s graduation ceremony. Having explained the reason for my absence, Claire Enders regularly suggested she could find employment for my daughter through her contacts. No enquiry seemed necessary about her studied subject or what might be her interests or ambitions. This is how the job market appears to work amongst the privileged. You can always be found a highly paid job bossing around ‘little people’ in some workplace, regardless of having no relevant experience or understanding of the industry. Admittance requires only proof that you too are proposed by one of the chosen few. After the things I had witnessed in my workplace, I would have preferred my daughter be unemployed than participate in the ‘gravy train’ of the upper classes. No interloper will be infiltrating my harmonious family!

After my first night at the opera, I was never invited by Enders to another social event. Neither have I had occasion to wear my expensive jacket again.

Euro 2024 and Olympics boost summer sports TV to defy business trends #Cricket #EndersAnalysis #Football #Formulaone

 The first of April proved not such an innocuous date on which to have started my new job. Within weeks, I began to wonder if I was the fool to take on a position as ‘media analyst’ that I had never known existed, let alone submitted a job application. The previous year, I had been minding my own business, providing a steady stream of stories as uncredited news editor to weekly print publication ‘The Radio Magazine’, when an e-mail arrived from (unknown to me) Claire Enders asking if I wanted to write an analysis of Britain’s largest commercial radio owner ‘GCap Media plc’. Having tabulated radio industry data for myself since 1980, I was happy to pen six pages demonstrating that this group had already hit the rocks, ending my report:

“Someone should have done [GCap chief executive Ralph] Bernard a big favour and bought him a sign that Christmas to hang in his office that said: ‘It’s all about the content, stupid!’”

Published by ‘Enders Analysis’ that November, I was left to presume the response to my critical analysis had been positive because I was asked if I desired a full-time office position writing similar reports about the media industries. My employment would replace radio industry veteran Phil Riley who had anonymously freelanced occasional radio reports for the company until then. It was an offer too good to refuse as the salary for working in a comfy central London office was considerably greater than my pay from American public corporation ‘Metromedia International Inc’ had been a decade earlier for having schlepped around Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Berlin and Prague for several years. Persuasion proved unnecessary as funds were required for my daughter attending a London university.

Having agreed the April start date, the prior month I started to receive emails from Enders Analysis requesting my help with radio industry information it needed for a tribunal case it had taken on. I thought this was rather cheeky but, not wanting to appear unenthusiastic about the job I had yet to start, I responded helpfully. Then I received a further message from Claire Enders asking me to drive to the office for a library of legal documents concerning the tribunal to take home, read and analyse. I had to apologise that this task was not possible … but only much later did I realise this request as a harbinger of things to come.

Why my refusal? Firstly, I was still employed full-time (in addition to my freelance work for ‘The Radio Magazine’) by ‘Laser Broadcasting Ltd’, managing applications to regulator Ofcom for local commercial radio licences, a job from which I had given notice but which did not terminate until the end of March. Secondly, my rented semi-detached London home lacked a spare room in which to store a document library. Finally, I did not own a vehicle, let alone one large enough to transport thousands of documents. Only months later, once the tribunal was in session and its documents could be seen filling an entire wall of a courtroom did I realise an assumption might have been made earlier that I too resided in some inherited multi-bedroom castle, country pile or stately home … and owned a truck.

Come April, I started work in Enders Analysis’ cramped Mayfair office but was soon assigned full-time to the tribunal project which occupied me until the end of that year. During those long months, I continued to follow radio industry developments in order to write weekly news stories for ‘The Radio Magazine’ though, disappointingly, there was no opportunity for me to pen a single radio analysis for publication by my new employer. I joined a subset of Enders’s dozen staff deployed to work on the tribunal case from conference room 9.16 at the City offices of law firm ‘Denton Wilde Sapte’ (established 1785) that was representing Enders’ client in the tribunal. For several months, I hardly visited the Mayfair office, instead commuting to the lawyers on a direct rail route from home.

I had been diverted into this project once Claire Enders discovered I understood the complex system of payments made by UK commercial radio stations for playing music within their programmes, as well as the multiple agreements that had applied since the broadcast sector’s launch in 1973. At ‘Metro Radio’ in Newcastle, my work responsibilities had included ensuring accurate reports were submitted regularly to music royalty collection agencies PPL, PRS and MCPS. A decade later, planning the launch of ‘KISS FM’ in London, I had created the entire music reporting system and hired personnel to collate and submit the required paperwork in an era before usage could be tracked digitally.

The Denton Wilde Sapte lawyers with whom we worked were courteous, professional and demanding because they needed to understand how these systems functioned both theoretically and in reality. I was the only person there with experience of having been responsible for their administration or of having worked in commercial radio, requiring me to respond to multiple queries and to analyse radio industry data and documentation that I had collected during the previous two decades of my career. Those lawyers would have been earning more in a single day than I was being paid in a month, sending me emails at all hours of the day and night requesting data, but there was never any friction as they had been steeped in ‘client service’.

Although the Enders team in the conference room were contributing to a common project, it quickly became apparent that ‘teamwork’ was a somewhat alien concept. Had there been a ubiquitous whiteboard in that room, it might have shown the clear hierarchy between Claire Enders and each employee, but nothing between members of our group. Not only was there no apparent camaraderie but, at times, it appeared that some colleagues believed they were in competition with each other for the attention and approval of their boss. It felt like some kind of video wargame where the objective is to crush your opponent, where the individual is ‘king’ and where ‘collaboration’ has been outlawed. This atmosphere was worsened by Enders’ tendency to bark orders verbally to her staff, rather than negotiate tasks with them to guarantee they remained ‘onside’.

Until then, I had not realised that projects in which I had been involved and previous jobs I had performed had all required productive teamwork, without which they would have failed. Whether it was a student newspaper, a student union, a commercial radio station, a community radio station or a magazine, all had forced those of us involved to discuss, agree and focus jointly on common objectives to be achieved. Yes, I had come across the odd team member who had not prioritised the group’s success above their own. Yes, I could cite examples of projects I watched fail because of the selfishness of a manager who had pursued purely egotistical objectives. However, this was the first occasion that I felt like a complete outsider to my ‘colleagues’ who seemed happy functioning as individuals.

Whilst enjoying the work I was being asked to do because it tapped into my specialist knowledge, I disliked the working environment into which I had been dropped. Everyone else present seemed to view it as perfectly normal. I did not. I could not complain. I was the ‘new boy’ amongst men who viewed themselves differently from me, something they had communicated on my first day, interrogating as to which private school I had attended three decades earlier. Er, none. Now, each morning, I was having to steel myself to go to the office. I had never had a job at which I hated arriving as much as this one. It was a struggle to get through the day. At lunchtime, a local sandwich shop would provide respite to sit alone in a less febrile environment.

At the end of the day, I would rush down to ‘City Thameslink’ railway station in the basement of the law firm’s tower block, sit on an uncomfortable wooden bench on the southbound platform and cry, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for half an hour. Trains regularly came and went, though I stayed put until I knew I could make the journey home, crammed like sardines against fellow commuters, without sobbing uncontrollably. Sat there in that barely lit underground world, nobody approached to ask if I was okay, a forty-eight-year-old suited man in tears. Perhaps other commuters felt the same way about their workplaces but dared not let their emotions escape. Perhaps they assumed I had just lost my job. Whatever it was, I was always left alone on that bench.

I needed to arrive home in one piece. Occasionally, on the final leg, I would walk the route from the station down my suburban street with tears on my cheeks, but these had to be wiped away before I entered the front door. Nobody needed to know what I felt. There were bills to pay. We hoped to purchase our first home. I would get up at six each weekday morning and check ‘Google News’ for radio stories before heading to work. Often, I would not return home until late evening, after which I would eat and go to bed. I spent Sunday writing up news stories for submission to ‘The Radio Magazine’ on Monday morning. It did not feel much of a life but I convinced myself it must be better than the years I had spent unemployed.

It was a huge personal disappointment to feel this way about my new job. The office environment at Denton Wilde Sapte was pristine and its staff were courteous. Their ‘tea lady’ pushed a glimmering trolley around the office suites, freely offering an expanse of snacks such as salmon sandwiches and hot drinks ‘silver service’ style on exquisite porcelain crockery with immaculately polished cutlery. Many evenings after work, the firm hosted drinks receptions to celebrate a ‘win’ or an internal promotion or to welcome a new client. As portrayed in American television legal dramas, a short speech by one of the firm’s partners would be followed by wine and delicate snacks offered generously to all present on the floor, including us visitors. Some evenings, I would partake and sit on the building’s fire escape staircase, sipping my drink and looking down on London landmarks like St Paul’s Cathedral’s illuminated dome. It might have seemed an idyllic existence “but I know that this will never be mine.”

During the tribunal’s early stages, Claire Enders expressed concern that our number was insufficient to sort the huge volume of legal documents into a coherent filing system we could then reference. I thought I was being helpful by suggesting that her personal assistant could be drafted in to provide an additional pair of hands. Next moment, I was ordered to meet the assistant at London’s Victoria railway station and bring her to the lawyers’ office by Tube. Strangely, the assistant only ever worked for Enders from her own home in Brighton and, meeting me for the first time, appeared unhappy to be suddenly relocated to London for several days. I was henceforth blamed for this inconvenience, ensuring our relationship remained frosty during the years I had to communicate with her.

Why this assistant could not have travelled by Tube from Victoria to 1 Fleet Place on her own initiative I had no comprehension. A pattern later became apparent whereby Claire Enders seemed to regard us analysts as her London ‘help’ who could be dispatched at the drop of a hat for errands such as picking up prescriptions from her doctor or buying a birthday present for her daughter. Was our status that much different from her parallel household staff in Scotland who could be ordered to collect and drive her home to the family seat? Evidently, we were all 'Parker’s, ready to be summoned by a tinkling bell. “Yes, m’lady?”

Working at the lawyers’ office one Friday, I sent an email to Enders Analysis colleague Ian Maude, asking him to write something for submission to our boss by an urgent deadline we had been given. Over the weekend, having received no response from him, I presumed this task was in hand. Until … Monday morning when Claire Enders stormed into our conference room and immediately tore a strip of me in front of the others for not having informed Maude to complete this work. Once the shouting ended, she stormed out without even asking my version of events or giving me space to respond. I realised how easy the ‘new boy’ must have been to blame for my colleague having missed our deadline.

Later that day, Maude unusually suggested the two of us go for “a drink” after work, implying he wished to recompense my betrayal. I refused. I was still furious. Never before in any job had I been addressed so disrespectfully by a boss for a wrong that was not even mine. Never before had I felt what it must be like to be employed in servitude to the privileged elite. During the following months, Maude regularly repeated his invitation. I always refused. I had learnt that it was ‘every man for himself’ in this workplace.

Months later, after another sub-group of Enders Analysis staff had completed a different project for ‘HMV Records’, it was suggested we go for a celebratory drink after work. Although by now I was wary of some of my co-workers, I felt it would appear anti-social to refuse. We stood together outside a busy bar in a pedestrianised alleyway off Park Lane. Ian Maude offered to buy the first round. I requested a ‘Bacardi & Coke’. When it arrived, my first sip tasted strange. I had favoured this drink since 1976 when the girls in my summer job workplace ‘Associated Examining Board’ had taken me one lunchtime to a huge darkened basement bar in Aldershot and insisted I drink the same as them at our trestle table. Three decades later, stood in Mayfair, after my second sip had made me unexpectedly dizzy, I realised my drink had likely been spiked.

“Some will eat and drink with you …”

 “CRUELLA DE VIL”, our teacher had chalked onto the blackboard at the front of our classroom hut. We had been reading aloud excerpts from the 1956 children’s novel ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ and were completing our lesson with content analysis for ten-year olds.

“What does her name sound like if you say it quickly?”, asked our teacher. I stuck my hand in the air.

“Cruel devil,” I blurted.

“Correct, Grant,” she replied, “and we have seen how that could be a description of the way she behaved in the story.”

Our teacher’s message for the adult lives ahead of us might have been: beware of wealthy women bearing gifts! They might end up bearing down on YOU before you know it … and skin you for their own ends. I vowed to file away that advice for the future. The year was 1968.

Four decades later, a work colleague returned to the office to recount what he considered an entertaining encounter earlier that day with a client:

“When I met her, she said ‘YOU must be Grant Goddard. I am so pleased to meet you at last’ and then she seemed disappointed when I told her that I wasn’t him.”

My young colleagues laughed aloud at this case of mistaken identity. I did not. This was not the first occasion that one of them had been dispatched to meet Carolyn McCall, the 45-year-old chief executive of ‘Guardian Media Group’ [GMG] that employed 7,200 staff with £700m turnover … and where a similar conversation had ensued. For me, it was another humiliation, not some kind of ‘Famous Five’ jape.

I had previously spent several weeks researching and designing a 48-page PowerPoint that analysed the state of the UK commercial radio industry for presentation to a conference hall of GMG’s radio staff organised by McCall in Manchester. My boss, Claire Enders, had asked me to accompany her by train there where she would present my work. Although I would not be on stage, nonetheless I was looking forward to meeting McCall and some of her radio team. One dark, cold November morning, wearing my best suit and tie, I caught the train to our central London office, sufficiently early for me and my boss to travel north together.

“I have decided to take the intern with me to Manchester instead of you,” Enders announced to me in front of my colleagues, before the two of them rushed out the door to an awaiting taxi. Evidently, the intern had known to arrive early that day.

No forewarning. No explanation. No apology. I was baffled … but not surprised. This was the latest in the succession of humiliations I had encountered since joining this, er, unusual workplace nineteen months ago. I decided to pass the rest of that day sat at my desk wearing headphones, listening to my music and purposefully doing absolutely no work, a silent (and wholly unacknowledged) protest at my treatment. I felt even more humiliated than usual because the office’s parade of ‘interns’ were, in reality, merely the pampered offspring of posh media bosses whom Enders had befriended. Sat at a spare desk in our office, their mere presence would look good on CV’s already boasting a private education, despite their evident disinterest in our work.

On a separate occasion, an initial meeting had been arranged with the new chief executive of the UK’s largest commercial radio group, Global Radio, whose wealthy father had financed its acquisition, following his offspring’s lack of success securing a significant role within the industry. I was to accompany Claire Enders to meet Ashley Tabor at his office and had prepared a list of questions to ask about his plans to resuscitate the sector’s recent dismal performance. We travelled together from our office by taxi and, only once our destination was reached, did Enders turn to me and say:

“I think this meeting should be millionaire-to-millionaire so you should return to the office.”

Not only was I humiliated to have to make the return journey back across London but I had to pay the bemused taxi driver for the privilege. Although I was employed as the analyst specialising in the radio sector, Enders never debriefed me on what had been discussed at this or her other meetings with senior radio industry personnel. There seemed to be no notion of teamwork in this workplace. I was forced to gather my own intelligence about the industry whilst not meeting its bosses. It was reminiscent of some kind of ‘gentlemen’s club’ where entry was denied to those of us without wealth or influence. Meetings of the privileged elite appeared as much social events and opportunities to propagate gossip as they were business discussions.

On another occasion, I was required to produce a company presentation for the management team of Disney whom I met, accompanying Claire Enders, in the boardroom of its Hammersmith office. Disney was considering launching a national sports radio station in Britain and seemed to believe it could achieve this objective without concern for Ofcom’s regulatory regime that prescribed every commercial radio station’s format and content. I was required to be the harbinger of disappointing news to Disney’s highly paid, but seemingly oblivious, managers that it would prove necessary to proceed within Britain’s media ownership regulations, regardless of how much cash might be on the table.

After the meeting closed, Claire Enders and I adjourned to a side office with the female Disney executive who had invited us to make the presentation. I anticipated that we would be discussing further the regulatory issues I had raised. How wrong I was! For the next half-hour, I sat there while Enders suggested multiple routes for the young woman to bag a wealthy man, proposing potential candidates. Not for the first time, I felt akin to a servant whose presence could be safely ignored because ‘the help’ were paid expressly to turn a blind eye to the intimacies of their masters and mistresses. Neither woman displayed the slightest embarrassment in discussing such personal matters in front of a silent middle-aged man who self-evidently was not of their breeding or status. I was as good as invisible. For me, it merely offered an insight into Enders’ modus operandi.

On a different occasion, I recall a weird taxi ride across London to a client meeting, accompanied by Claire Enders alone, during which she just kept repeating the phrases “I’m a self-made woman” and “I am, you know” to nobody in particular. I stared out the window and remained silent. I had no idea what had prompted this line of monologue. It felt somewhat like it might to be locked in a tiny room with a tragic escapee from a mental health facility.

During that journey, I was reminded of the occasion sixteen years prior when I had attended a public meeting concerning the award of the commercial television franchise for south and southeast England that had been operated by ‘TVS’ for the last decade. Contributions were made by a succession of those seated within the tiered lecture theatre, before an American woman in the back row behind me stood to unleash a loud stream of consciousness that seemed to leave the audience baffled. An audible gap followed, as might occur after an outburst by a wordy aunt on speed at a family Christmas dinner, before the debate resumed in earnest. Afterwards, I pondered whether I might cross paths with that woman again. TVS lost its franchise the following year.

Shortly before I discovered my time working at Enders Analysis was finally up, I was invited to make a presentation to the ‘2008 European Radio Symposium’ to be held in Portugal. I spent two months creating a 39-page PowerPoint and had booked my flights and accommodation when, a few days beforehand, Claire Enders insisted that I undertake an unrelated project, unconcerned with radio but with an immediate deadline. I was forced to explain to the conference organisers that I had become unexpectedly unavailable and then pass my work to a colleague who knew nothing about radio to travel to Portugal instead to make my presentation.

I have never understood how ‘humiliation’ could be perceived as a productive means of managing personnel within a business. Given how my colleagues at Enders Analysis appeared accepting of this situation, I can only guess that their experiences attending private schools might have conditioned them to regard such treatment as ‘normal’. For state-school-educated me, it was as abnormal as any workplace behaviour I had ever witnessed. There were times when I wondered if my own mental health might be damaged by the experience of working within that environment. It had been such a long, long time since my great grandparents had lived and worked as servants in a ‘big house’. I had no desire to emulate their lives.

Following my abrupt exit from Enders Analysis after almost three years, I applied for every ‘media analyst’ vacancy I found, for none of which I was called to interview. After rejection by one small analyst business beside Charing Cross station, I requested a meeting with its chief executive to explore freelance opportunities. I showed him my published work and the regular coverage it had attracted on radio, television and in the press. He listened and then told me:

“Even if we were to hire you, you would have to take a backroom position. We could not send you out to meet clients.”

After that damning verdict, I gave up applying for jobs as an analyst. Apparently, it was evident to employers that I lacked whatever was ‘the right stuff’ necessary to be in the presence of the posh masters commanding Britain’s media industry.

I never did get to meet Carolyn McCall.

1976. With trepidation, I knocked on the door of the Durham student newspaper to volunteer, opened it and encountered a cacophony of shrill, loud voices in an office no bigger than a two-up-two-down front room. A dozen people in close proximity were conversing at sufficient volume for their voices to project into a distant corner of a non-existent adjacent room. Never had I heard so few people generate so much noise. Not a chummy American loudness, but a commanding-the-troops ‘I’m in charge’ harshness. When one woman spoke, it sounded exactly how I imagined a horse might talk. I had stumbled into toff-land, the privileged world of the privately educated, a parallel universe of entitlement I had observed in television historical dramas but not realised still existed in the late twentieth century. Did I grow accustomed to their gratuitous noise pollution? No.

2006. With trepidation, I started my first day’s work at Enders Analysis. Its location in elite Mayfair, opposite the rear entrance of Park Lane’s Grosvenor Hotel, conveyed ‘class’. I was given a desk in a cramped room shared with colleagues who spoke loudly in plummy accents. The previous occasion I had endured transportation to toff-land, thirty years earlier, at least my commitment had been voluntary. Now I was indentured to spend forty hours a week in this socially hostile environment. Each occasion I opened my mouth seemed to confirm my appointment as the ‘accidental analyst’ to a job usually pre-ordained for yet another privately educated chap. Within days, the questions started.

“Why do you arrive at work so early every day?” asked Ian Watt one morning.

“My wife has to start work early, so I leave home with her,” I replied.

“Your wife is a banker?” my colleague suggested. I struggled to maintain a straight face at such a bizarre presumption.

“No,” I responded with hesitancy. “She works in an NHS hospital.”

There was a gap. I sensed a sharp intake of breath.

“Ooooohhhh,” said Watt with evident disappointment that betrayed a palpable disregard for public service, whether someone worked in a hospital kitchen or the deputy chief executive’s office.

If boisterous office chit-chat (“I’m off on holiday to Brazil next week”) proved insufficiently distracting, it was accompanied by personal phone calls made from colleagues’ desks, sometimes communicating disturbing content. Do I really need to hear you phoning a credit card company to increase the limit on a card in your father’s name for which you had applied and use? We all carried personal mobile phones and could go outside to make calls but, for these colleagues, there was evidently no shame or embarrassment in broadcasting their latest Famous Five-ish japes.

One regularly phoned his wife and, instead of a loving message, he would bark orders to her at the top of his voice as if she were a half-deaf scullery maid in his medieval castle. The tone of his phone calls disturbed me sufficiently to glance around our room to determine if the others had similarly felt they were being forced to eavesdrop on a suspected witch undergoing torture by the Inquisitor. None of them looked up or flinched during his tirades, as I did. I felt so alone in this workplace, observing that such humiliation of a fellow human appeared not only acceptable in toff-land but might be practised by my other colleagues.

“My wife is an opera singer,” he would turn around to tell us once his aggressive phone diatribes ended. I was uncertain whether this occupation was some kind of toff codeword for ‘slave’, or perhaps his entire household was staging a never-ending operetta in the ballroom where he had to phone in his part as the angry, posh analyst husband from Mayfair. His behaviour made me contemplate walking over and committing workplace violence but I was restrained by my poor chances in a pistol duel at dawn.

I soon discovered that ritual humiliation appeared to be my new workplace’s predominant management style. Within weeks of starting the job, I attended my first one-day radio conference at a Mayfair hotel a few hundred metres from the office. During the opening morning session, I received a text from a colleague telling me to return to the office because our boss needed me to do something unspecified urgently. Reluctantly leaving the conference, I returned to the office to be told that our boss was not there but would return soon. By the time the conference ended, I had wasted most of the day sat at my desk waiting for something, anything, to happen that required my presence.

If your private schooling imbued you with the notion that Miss Havisham was an ideal role model, such behaviour must simply propagate down your family money-tree. Many more humiliations followed, all of which I accepted with the uncomplaining resignation that a servant is forced to adopt to remain in the employ of an unhinged ‘big house’. The consequence is that the master progressively ups the ante in order to prompt a reaction, any kind of reaction, to their extensive repertoire of humiliations … and so it was.

2008. In front of my colleagues, boss Claire Enders told me she did not appreciate my work clothes. My suits were too baggy and my shirts were too patterned. I had not changed my dress style since starting work there, so I recognised this as her latest attrition. I wore a black or grey suit, a ‘designer’ work shirt, a subtly patterned tie and black shiny shoes. Once a month, my wife accompanied me on a Saturday hike around local men’s outfitters to peruse and purchase sale items. As a result of my daily cross-country run, my shoulders were broad but my waist was narrow, making any suit look ‘baggy’ on me. It was not my fault that many of my work colleagues were Billy Bunter-like!

In response, I resorted to wearing a plain white shirt and black tie every day under one of my existing suits. Then, in front of my colleagues, Enders complained I looked like an undertaker and ordered me to go to gentleman’s shops on Jermyn Street to buy new clothes. My patience with these workplace humiliations was wearing thin by my third year there. I neither agreed nor refused. As the only parent in the analyst team financially supporting their child’s university education, I could not suddenly throw my earnings at hideously expensive clothes. I had kept to my employer’s dress code at all times. I hoped that this latest humiliation might blow over … but I underestimated the persistence of my protagonist.

One week later, colleague Ian Watt told me he had been instructed to take me to Jermyn Street to buy new, more suitable clothes. We took a taxi, something I never afforded. During the one-kilometre journey, Watt wittered on about stuff while I shut my ears and stared vacantly out the window. I had decided to go along passively with his mission, as if he were demonstrating his superior breeding to a servant or slave … or wife. I did not lose my temper, argue or contradict him. I was merely a lowly bit player in his ‘Downton Abbey’ roadmap of British society. In my head, I was amused at the ridiculousness of this situation.

Inside the Dickensian shop (“Suits you, sir!”), Watt chose a new wardrobe for me. Bright pink shirts, elastic braces, ugly black shoes. I offered no opinion about his preferences. All I would have needed was a red nose to join a touring circus. He took my ‘outfit’ to the cash desk and unexpectedly asked me to pay. I refused. There was a standoff. Frustrated at not fulfilling the ultimate humiliation of making me fund my own unrequested makeover, he stormed off to replace most items on their shelves, before proffering his credit card to pay for the remaining two. During our taxi journey back to the office, I remained detached even when I heard him bellow at me:

“If you had attended a public school*, even a minor one, you would know how to dress!”

There, laid bare, was his contempt for me. It mattered not one iota that I had started working in radio more than three decades earlier and had successfully launched commercial stations attracting millions of listeners in the UK, Europe and Asia. It mattered not one iota that I had earned more mass media coverage for Enders Analysis with my published reports about the radio industry than all my analyst colleagues combined. All that mattered to him was the type of school I had attended many moons ago. The five-figure sum that his parents must have paid each term for his private school education seemed to entitle him to treat me like … you know what.

Unlike Pip, I harboured no desire to be accepted as a ‘gentleman’ by London society. You could stuff your flouncy shirts, your waistcoats, your pocket watch, your braces, your uncomfortable shoes, your sickening attitude to people like me. I knew who I was and was perfectly content in my own skin. Born in a council house, I attended school on a council estate and was obliged to become male head of my single-parent household at the age of fourteen. That is who I was. I refused to lick your … overprivileged ego.

Back at the office, the clothes bought in Jermyn Street sat in a bag beside my desk. I refused to even look at them. Naturally, further humiliations followed until, within months, I was forced out of my job. When I left for the final time, I placed the bag of new, unworn toff-wear on my empty office chair. There were no farewell drinks. There was no gratitude. There were no goodbyes. One day I was at work, then I had gone. Exiled from toff-land.

Several months later, I received an unexpected call on my mobile from Ian Watt. There was some work Enders Analysis wanted me to do. I knew from experience that Claire Enders could humiliate to the bitter end former employees who had been edged out of her workplace by asking a staff member to renew contact on her behalf. Watt droned on for a while and, though I was sorely tempted to shout an expletive at the same volume he reserved for humiliating people like me, I simply responded ‘no’ and put the phone down.

I don’t wanna go to Jermyn Street … ever again.

[* In British English, 'public school' confusingly means a private secondary school requiring fees.]

“How is it that jobs just seem to fall into the laps of posh people?” my daughter asked the other day.

A rhetorical question? A truism? Both? Those of us who work in industries populated largely by posh people whom we do not resemble may have observed two phenomena. Posh people are often appointed to posts for which they appear to have no relevant experience; and posh people are regularly promoted effortlessly without apparent need to demonstrate above-average talent or previous successes. Obviously not ALL posh people, but enough for such occurrences to be more than random chance.

Recently, I switched on BBC Radio Four mid-programme and heard a posh woman explaining her lengthy career. “I could have been anything,” she said confidently.

That single phrase encapsulates the social divisions so evident in Britain. If you are posh and your parents invest a small fortune in your private school education, it is drilled into you from an early age that you CAN and WILL do and be ‘anything’ in life. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to endure soul-destroying verdicts from state schools, careers services, Jobcentres and potential employers telling us of things we are not good enough to do and be in our apparently second-class lives. ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ proves not so entertaining a system when you have to make do in life with the scraps of opportunity that institutions occasionally chuck your way.

It used to be that posh offspring would join their families’ businesses or spontaneously be appointed ‘captains of industry’, as if managing a British industrial conglomerate was no different than taking daddy’s yacht out for a jaunt on a weekend. However, Britain’s post-war, post-colonial de-industrialisation (hastened during the Thatcher years) considerably narrowed such straight-ahead career opportunities. For a while, only politics, government, medicine, law and accountancy were considered suitable professions for posh people, whereas now those ambitions have had to be diversified into occupations such as … the media.

In 1973, Jenny Abramsky had joined the BBC as a lowly programme operations assistant, following an education at a London comprehensive (state) school and the University of East Anglia. After 26 years progressing through the ranks, she was finally appointed director of BBC radio. Following her retirement in 2008 from managing the largest radio operation in the world, it would be difficult to imagine a job description for her successor that would not have demanded similarly extensive experience in radio broadcasting. It is a sign of how times have changed that the BBC’s choice for the job was Tim Davie who had never worked in radio, but had attended private school, Cambridge University and was deputy chairman of Hammersmith & Fulham Conservative Association. It was transparent even then that the radio job was merely a stepping stone for Davie’s ambitions … and so it came to pass.

Occasionally a glitch in The Matrix does occur, maybe once in a lifetime, when mysterious forces within the universe collide to produce a job opportunity that would not normally appear on the precarious, non-linear career timelines endured by the non-posh. In 2006, I was unexpectedly offered an unadvertised post as a ‘media analyst’, a job title I had to search for on the internet to understand what it entailed. As the salary offered me was greater than any previously earned in Britain, it proved hard to resist.

On my first day of work at Enders Analysis, I was invited by my new colleagues to join them for lunch in a local ‘greasy spoon’. I had already spotted some clues: the office was located in Mayfair, a London district too expensive to even window shop; and the water cooler chatter was about made-to-measure suits by a tailor in Hong Kong.

“What school did you go to?” one of my new colleagues asked.

Decades had passed since I had last been asked about the school I had attended. I was now 48 years old, but I did not want to appear reticent to my peers on the first day.

“Strode’s College,” I replied.

My colleagues looked at each other as if I had mentioned a rarely-visited, faraway Pacific Island populated by savages.

“What sort of school is that?” one of them eventually followed up.

“It’s a sixth form college,” I replied.

This response evidently did not satisfy them. There was a more critical question they were burning to ask, a question that normally was not required of a new recruit. One of them dared to raise it with me.

“Is that a public school?”

In the 1984-ish world of British language, the phrase ‘public school’ means a private school where parents have to pay for their children’s education. What Americans call a ‘public school’ is known in Britain as a ‘state school’ because it is funded by the state. Although every child in Britain is entitled to a free education, a tiny proportion of parents choose a private schooling that they confidently expect will propel their offspring into an elitist trajectory.

It might have been my first day communing with my new ‘colleagues’, but my patience was already starting to be tested. I decided to respond obliquely.

“It used to be a grammar school,” I replied.

“So had it been a private school then?” one of them asked.

This question itself betrayed a flawed understanding of Britain’s school system viewed from the perspective of someone who graduated from private education. Grammar schools can only be state schools by definition. It was up to me to explain such fundamentals in the most black and white terms.

“No, it was a state school as a grammar school, and then it was a state school as a sixth form college,” I replied.

The fact that this humiliating Q&A was the first conversation with my new work colleagues turned out to be indicative of how my future in this job was going to proceed. I was not embarrassed about my education, a state-funded experience I shared with 94% of Brits. What I found difficult to process was my colleagues’ apparent belief that, thirty years after my departure, the status of my school continued to merit far more concern than anything I had done since.

Once the horrifying truth had been extracted from me that I was not ‘one of them’, their lunch chatter switched to other topics. Although I was employed as a media analyst, there were no follow-up questions about my relevant experience for the job, about employers I had worked for previously or about any successes I had achieved. It seemed as if my long career in radio counted for absolutely nothing with them. Of more importance was the type of school I had attended, a fact that certain colleagues were quick to remind me of later in this job.

Despite this rather rude introduction, I continued to join my colleagues for lunch in the same diner on following days in order not to appear unsociable. The cooked food was consistently terrible and caused me diarrhoea. Why did they go there? It soon became apparent from their chatter that one of them, my line manager, lusted after an East European waitress employed there who was probably a third of his age. Instead of castigating him as a ‘dirty old man’, his colleagues appeared to enjoy indulging his fantasies and encouraging his unwanted attentions by spending most lunchtimes being served food by this poor servant girl. I soon chose to duck out of their pantomime and went my own way to Eat or Pret A Manger for a cheaper, more wholesome takeaway sandwich.

During my first week, I had to ask my line manager’s advice about a paragraph I had written for a report. A quick visit to his adjacent private office should have lasted no more than a few minutes. Not so. I exited more than half-an-hour later, reeling from his account of sexual abuse suffered at private boarding school. One moment we had been talking about my punctuation, the next he had drifted into dark memories of bullying from many decades ago. I had not asked a question that might have prompted him to regale me with these horrific stories. Why had he considered it appropriate to burden the ‘new boy’ with such accounts?

Some months later, the whole team was required to attend a seasonal lunch at a basement restaurant in Mayfair. I hated these affairs as my colleagues would get drunk and talk even more loudly, but it was impossible to avoid such ‘team’ occasions. Sat facing each other along a long bench table adjacent to the kitchen, mid-meal I noticed under our table a liquid had started to flow around my shiny black shoes. In my lone sobriety, I raised the alarm with my colleagues, but was ignored until a chef appeared and shouted that a pipe containing used cooking oil had burst and was flooding the restaurant. Suddenly all us customers had to negotiate an extremely slippery floor, climb the stairs and exit onto the street.

On our way back to the office, I was walking alongside my line manager when he suddenly said: “Would you mind if I asked your advice about a personal matter?”

Considering some of our previous, scary conversations, I was half dreading what I might be about to hear. Why did he consider me to be someone suitable to share his private thoughts? His life experiences and his concerns seemed light years away from mine.

“The problem is my mother,” he explained. “She is spending money like water and nothing I say can seem to stop her. I am extremely worried that, when she dies, my inheritance will be insufficient for me to live on.”

“And how much do you think you will inherit when the time comes?” I asked with a great deal of trepidation.

–του John Gapper / Financial Times | Μετάφραση για το dim/art: Γιώργος Θεοχάρης– Πριν από δέκα χρόνια, όταν ο Jeff Bezos παρουσίασε το Kindle ereader στη Νέα Υόρκη, δήλωσε ότι «το βιβλίο έχει εξελιχθεί τόσο πολύ και κάνει τόσο καλά τη δουλειά του που πολύ δύσκολα θα εκτοπιστεί». Ο ιδρυτής της Amazon είχε δίκιο: αυτή την άνοιξη, παρά την ψηφιακή αναταραχή που προκάλεσε το Kindle, η Amazon θα…