Archive for April 2020
Coffee Break with Marcus and James: April 2020
By MARCUS STEAD
MARCUS Stead and James Easton return with another Coffee Break podcast, taking a look at the lighter side of life.
Topics discussed include rude website URL names past and present, Brian Clough’s 44 days at Leeds United, Admiral retro football shirts, things you notice when watching old episodes of The Bill, home cooking experiments, darts gamesmanship, how much money you can save by taking a packed lunch and a flask of coffee to work, and the appalling way the FA has handled the pandemic situation.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud and the TuneIn app.
Coronavirus Update: 22 April 2020
By MARCUS STEAD
THE LOCKDOWN in the United Kingdom is set to continue for the next three weeks. Schools will not be reopening any time soon, and there is a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals.
In this week’s podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins assess the situation in Britain and around the world, and also look into the effect the lockdown is having on people’s personal relationships and social lives.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud and the TuneIn app.
Marcus Stead discusses COVID-19 on Radio Sputnik: 17 April 2020
By MARCUS STEAD
On 17 April 2020, I appeared on Radio Sputnik to discuss the likelihood of the COVID-19 lockdown ending in the medium term. I said that the scientific community still knows very little about how the virus works, and that any easing of restrictions brings with it a strong risk of a second wave of infections. Furthermore, I argued that Sweden’s ‘light lockdown’ policy was not an example to follow, due to a spike in new cases and deaths in recent days.
Coronavirus Update: 14 April 2020
By MARCUS STEAD
Marcus Stead
AS THE number of global COVID-19 cases passes the two million barrier, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins assess the situation and conclude it is highly unlikely that life will return to normal any time soon.
The figures from Spain, Italy and France suggest the threat to life posed by the virus remains very real, and that the scientific community knows very little about how COVID-19 actually works.
After you have had the virus, do you have immunity for one month, three months, six months, twelve months, a lifetime, or not at all? We simply do not know.
Later in the podcast, Marcus and Greg deliver a scathing verdict on the Welsh Government’s attempts to bully and silence journalists and NHS staff, as was revealed on David Morris Jones’s excellent Penarth News hyperlocal site, which has recently been revived following a sabbatical.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud and the TuneIn app.
Peter Walker: A Life Well Lived
By MARCUS STEAD
Peter Walker MBE. CREDIT: Glamorgan Cricket
PETER Walker, who has died aged 84 following a long battle with Alzheimer’s, led a full and extraordinary life that saw him excel as a cricketer, broadcaster and media executive.
Born in Clifton, Bristol in 1936, Walker partly grew up in South Africa, and at the age of 16, he told his parents that he and his friend Roddy wanted to go on a 10-day camping trip to Louren o Marques, the capital of Portuguese East Africa during the October school holidays. But they had something far more adventurous in mind.
For the previous two years, Walker and Roddy had regularly discussed skipping school to pursue their ambitions. For Roddy, this meant travelling to Moscow to meet Stalin, for Walker, to get a trial with Glamorgan County Cricket Club.
They clubbed together to buy themselves a compass from the army and navy store in the belief it would be enough to guide them north until they reached the 6,000 miles to the Mediterranean.
So, in October 1952, Walker’s father, who previously worked in Welsh newspapers, pressed two R10 notes in his hand and waved his son goodbye on what he thought was a short ‘camping holiday’. He wouldn’t see him again for 15 months!
As they got off the train at LM, they saw the run-down Hotel Central and went into the bar, where a well-built Swedish sailor overheard them speaking perfect English, introduced himself: “My name’s Bengt, do you fancy a beer?”
Bengt told them that the ship was due to sail at noon the next day, but that their crew was short, as four of them had picked up a dose of pox from a Korean brothel. They asked him if he thought the crew would take on two people so young. Bengt said he’d call into the ship agent’s office, and they arranged to meet up for breakfast the following morning.
After a restless night, true to his word, Bengt returned to the hotel, and the answer was yes – provided they had letters from their parents to prove they had consent. Walker and Roddy duly forged the letters, which the agent then barely looked at before signing them on to the tanker, called the Soya Andrea. Roddy was a saloon boy and Walker a deck hand. As the coast disappeared into the distance, they watched on and wondered what the hell they had done.
The next few years were packed full of adventure for Walker. There were times where his daily diet consisted of a cup of coffee and a doughnut. On one occasion, he was forced to sleep on a rope in the docks of New York.
Upon arriving in Cardiff, he knocked on the door of Glamorgan’s offices in Cardiff’s High Street. Inside was the club’s fearsome captain, Wilf Wooller, and the coach, Phil Clift. “I think I can play county cricket” said the young Walker. “Well, you’d better come round to the Arms Park and have a net” came the reply.
Walker was a tall right-handed middle order batsman and a left-arm bowler who varied his pace between medium-paced seamers and slow spinners, and he quickly gained a reputation as a spectacularly good close-catcher, especially when fielding at short leg. But that really began by accident.
The year was 1957. Walker made his Glamorgan debut, and his second match was against Warwickshire at the old Arms Park, a large ground with a massive boundary. Captain Wilf Wooller, a man of charm, arrogance and extreme discipline, who was not to be argued with.
To Wooller’s annoyance, Glamorgan were bowled out for 176 on a good pitch. It was a blazing hot day and by mid-afternoon, they were fielding and game was slipping away fast. Walker had to run from third man to third man between overs, a journey of some 200 yards each way. His diagonal cross-field route took him past his profusely-sweating and annoyed captain, and, eager to please, Walker asked, “Where would you like me to field, skip?” Wooller turned a baleful eye, and in a phrase that was to change Walker’s life, said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake Peter, spit in the air and go where it lands.”
Wooller immediately lost interest in Walker’s whereabouts, and, as a junior player, he did as he was told, moved to the edge of the pitch, lifted his head and spat in the air. It landed at short square leg, a position in which he was to field for the majority of the next 16 years, where he became one of cricket’s great catchers in the years before helmets.
As a batsman, Walker made 1,000 runs in a season eleven times, often doing well when his colleagues failed. He made just 13 centuries in 17 years of first class cricket, and had an average of 26.03, reflecting soundness rather than flair in an era of unpredictable surfaces and uncovered pitches.
As a bowler, Walker was a left-arm medium pacer, in later seasons preferring left-arm spin. The high water mark of his playing career came in 1961, when he had one of the finest seasons ever seen by an allrounder, scoring 1,347 runs in 35 first-class matches, taking 101 wickets and 73 catches. Only two fielders have ever taken more in one season. He came close to reaching similar heights in 1959 and 1962.
Walker played three Tests for England against South Africa in the summer of 1960, all of which England won, where he batted well down the order and hardly bowled at all. He probably did well enough to expect further chances, but this was an era of batting riches for England and spin bowling competition from David Allen, Ray Illingworth and Fred Titmus.
Walker was part of the Glamorgan team that captured the County Championship title in 1969, and retired in 1972, when he was overlooked for the captaincy, to focus on his already-established career as a journalist and broadcaster. His early work as a journalist saw him cover the Aberfan Disaster of 1966, which had a profound effect on him.
After retiring from playing, Walker became part of BBC Two’s coverage of the Sunday League, where he eventually succeeded Frank Bough as the regular presenter. In one of his earliest appearances as anchor, the match was staged at Tewkesbury. As always, they came on air five minutes before the match start time of 2pm. Walker had mentally prepared what he thought was a marvellously descriptive piece about the area, and handed over to commentator Jim Laker just as the bowler was about to bowl the first ball. Walker said, “And now for commentary, here’s Jim Laker”, and sat back smugly, until Laker responded, “Thank you, Peter, you’ve said it all”. Laker didn’t speak another word for the next 15 minutes!
He became an established face and voice of the BBC’s Sunday League coverage for many years, and was part of the BBC’s commentary team for England matches for a period in the 1980s. After being dropped from the BBC’s network cricket coverage, he continued to work on BBC Wales’s coverage of Glamorgan matches until 1997 in the Sunday League, NatWest Trophy, Benson and Hedges Cup, and games against touring international teams.
Walker became a respected part of the team at BBC Wales, where he read the sports bulletins on evening news programme Wales Today well into the 1980s, in an era of journalistic heavyweights such as Vincent Kane and editor David Morris Jones, all a far cry from the current incarnation of the modern BBC Wales, where the ability to speak Welsh and connections to Plaid Cymru are the keys to a long career, regardless of your lack of talent.
To colleagues, Walker was kind, encouraging and supportive, and gave opportunities to a number of sports broadcasters, including former Glamorgan cricketer and Cardiff rugby player Alan Wilkins, now a well-known sports anchor across Asia. Walker’s can-do, positive approach to life helped him in his successful battle against cancer in middle age.
Among Walker’s other journalistic achievements were a series of long-form interviews with John Arlott staged at his home in the Isle of Wight following his retirement from commentary, which were produced by Adrian Metcalfe, another ex-sportsman turned TV commentator and executive who is also sadly now very ill with Alzheimer’s.
Walker was founder and managing editor of Merlin Television, which became the biggest independent production company in Wales. The company made an unsuccessful bid for the Channel 3 (ITV) franchise in Wales and the West from 1993 in a haphazard and farcical bidding system, but lost out to incumbents HTV, who underwent a brutal level of cost-cutting to hold on to the franchise.
A shrewd businessman, Walker eventually sold Merlin Television in 1996, and well before then invested heavily in property, long before it became fashionable.
Walker’s blunt, forthright, delightfully un-PC personality made him an interesting guest on TV and radio as he approached old age. During the 2000s, he became somewhat disillusioned with what he called our ‘marshmallow society’, by which he meant he felt young people were too mollycoddled from the harsher realities of life he experienced as a young man, which instilled in him a level of resilience and mental toughness he thought was lacking in the younger generation of Glamorgan cricketers.
As a season ticket holder at Sophia Gardens from the late 1990s until the mid-2000s, I saw Walker at matches quite often. But my favourite memory of seeing him in person came at Radyr Golf Club in January 2002. Just days earlier, Cardiff City had beaten Leeds Utd in a third round FA Cup tie that ended with crowd trouble. It was pure coincidence that BBC Radio 5 Live were staging ‘Any Sporting Questions?’ (effectively a sporting equivalent of ‘Any Questions?’) at the golf club just a few miles away from the ground that week. Walker appeared as a panellist and expressed forthright views on the ills of modern society, and went on to tell an anecdote involving Fred Trueman and an Indian waiter that would probably land him, and the radio station, in hot water if he repeated it nowadays! Quite what Walker would have made of today’s twentysomething permanently-offended ‘Snowflake’ generation we can but wonder.
Walker remained involved in cricket, becoming the first chief executive of the newly-formed Cricket Board of Wales. In 2009, Walker was elected President of Glamorgan CCC, but he resigned the following summer after clashes with chairman Paul Russell over the way the club was being run, the final straw being the removal of Matthew Maynard as director of cricket in favour of Colin Metson. In the live television interview on BBC Wales that day, Walker behaved with typical good grace in wishing the club well for the future, and said he looked forward to returning to the ground as a supporter.
At the end of 2010, Walker was awarded an MBE in the New Year’s Honours for services to cricket, and he received his medal the following year, after which he largely retreated from public life as dementia began to take hold.
A week before his death on 5 April 2020, Walker suffered a stroke.
Coronavirus Update: 06 April 2020
By MARCUS STEAD
ON THE EVENING of Sunday 05 April, Her Majesty the Queen gave a very rare address to the nation, and just over one hour later, it was announced that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been admitted to hospital for tests after suffering from the coronavirus for more than a week.
Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins reflect on a dramatic evening. They also assess the latest statistics, which make very grim reading, and debunk some of the more absurd conspiracy theories about the virus.
Marcus and Greg both think the value of the antibody test has been massively overstated, and with specific reference to Singapore, they discuss just how difficult it will be to get out of the lockdown situation.
Singapore briefly came out of lockdown, and there was an almost immediate surge in cases, and on Saturday, new cases in the city state reached a record high.
Marcus Stead
The podcast concludes on a lighter note as Marcus and Greg discuss how they’ve been keeping themselves occupied during the lockdown.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud and the TuneIn app.
S4C receives funding boost despite tiny audience
By MARCUS STEAD
LITTLE-WATCHED Welsh language broadcaster S4C will receive a funding boost following an announcement from the Treasury that it will get back the VAT it pays on costs, worth £15 million per year.
S4C’s tax status was changed in 2019, requiring it to pay VAT on costs. At the time, the Departure for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) agreed to foot the bill until the rules were changed so that S4C would again be allowed to recover its VAT payments.
The channel, which has been without a chairman since Huw Jones’s departure in September, has had a decade of upheaval with regards to its funding model. Jones is likely to be succeeded by Rhodri Williams, who will be paid a generous £40,000 per year for ‘up to two days’ work per week’.
Williams, the UK Government’s preferred candidate, ran Ofcom in Wales from 2004 until 2018 and is already a member of S4C’s board.
Until 2013, funding came a combination of a fixed annual grant from the DCMS, which stood at £90 million in 2011, an agreement with BBC Wales whereby it would provide S4C with ten hours of programming each week free of charge as part of its public service remit, estimated to be worth £19.4 million annually, as well as generating a meagre 2% of its income from advertising.
From 2013, responsibility for S4C began to transfer to the BBC, which saw the DCMS reduce its funding by 94% by 2015, with the BBC providing around £76 million of funding to S4C by this date, resulting in a cut of around 25% to S4C’s annual budget.
As part of the BBC charter renewal from 2017, it was agreed that the BBC would provide £74.5m a year funding to S4C from the licence fee until 2022.
The UK Government announced in 2018 that it would continue to provide £6.72 million annually until 2020, with the aim of S4C being funded wholly from the licence fee from 2022, meaning further savings will need to be found elsewhere at the BBC to fund the service.
In the current financial year, S4C will receive approximately £81.3 million (excluding advertising revenue), of which around £6.8 million comes from the UK Government and £74.5 million from the licence fee pot.
S4C’s most-watched programmes on week ending 23 February 2020
Despite the subsidies, S4C fails to attract a sizeable audience for almost all of its programmes. On week ending 23 February, figures released by BARB (Broadcasters Audience Research Board) showed that the only S4C programme to attract more than 30,000 viewers was a single episode of soap opera Pobol y Cwm, with 30,907 viewers, which is part of the programming quota it receives for free from BBC Wales and, having started in 1974, predates S4C itself by eight years.
BARB publishes the most-viewed 15 programmes for most channels each week on its website. The 15th most-watched programme on S4C that week was the channel’s live Welsh language coverage of the Six Nations rugby match between Wales and France, which attracted 17,608 viewers, which means that around 100 hours of programming shown that week was watched by an even lower number of people.
In Focus with Marcus Stead Episode 2: Jeremy Jacobs
By MARCUS STEAD
Jeremy Jacobs
In this edition, Marcus Stead talks to Jeremy Jacobs, a familiar voice to radio listeners in southern England, who has worked as a football reporter for Capital Gold Sportstime, BBC London and BBC Kent, as well as having read sports bulletins on a range of commercial radio stations.
Jeremy is also a widely-respected conference and events host. Sales is another of his passions, and he now can teaches others what works in today’s world and shares insights about the future of sales. His methods work and are constantly evolving. For more information about his work, visit: thesalesrainmaker.co.uk
In this wide-ranging discussion, Marcus and Jeremy look at the impact the coronavirus pandemic is having on the NHS and the economy, particularly within the M25.
They assess the effect it is having on small and medium-sized businesses, and ask whether enough is being done by the Government to help business owners and the self-employed.
Marcus Stead
Later on, they discuss the Football Association’s decision to suspend leagues at semi-professional level. Jeremy, a passionate Margate fan, is far from happy with the way the FA has handled the situation.
Towards the end of the podcast, the conversation turns to the way in which the pandemic has forced individuals and businesses to explore new ways of working, and they look into the ever-changing world of sales, and talk about how Jeremy is adapting to a rapidly-evolving environment.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud and the TuneIn app.
Marcus Stead 
Coronavirus Update: 29 April 2020
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By MARCUS STEAD
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation warns that having the virus once doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t get it again. And there is a rare but serious new syndrome in children that could be linked to COVID-19.
Marcus Stead is joined by veteran campaigner and blogger Greg Lance-Watkins to try and make sense of this deeply concerning global situation.
The podcast is available via the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud and the TuneIn app.
Written by Marcus Stead
April 29, 2020 at 2:40 am
Posted in Comment, Health, Opinion, Politics, Review