Tower Block Dreams: Ghetto on Sea
Content warning: violence.
High time we had another documentary and this one is the middle episode of three of the series Tower Block Dreams (2004) about underground music and radio in London and Southend. This one, as you can tell by the title, is the one set in Southend-on-Sea, in Essex, and about the pirate radio station there called Y2K FM.
Britain is well known abroad for the BBC, where you can no longer get objective reporting and which I personally think should be either killed off or forced to compete commercially. Even before the BBC's descent we had a long and legendary history of pirate radio which actually marked the cult TV world. I touched on this in a previous post about an episode of Danger Man set on a pirate radio station on one of the Maunsell sea forts in the Thames Estuary. I won't bother you by repeating the history but you can read that post here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2018/11/danger-man-not-so-jolly-roger.html
This documentary picks up on the subject more than thirty years after the Danger Man episode. It focuses on two men: Killer (who manages the pirate station) and Gambit (who is an emcee at the station. We see their business of running the station and aspects of the rest of their lives, and I am absolutely convinced that those are their real names. The documentary technique is more directive than the one where the documentary maker just puts the subject in front of a camera and lets them speak, in that there are some questions asked, but the documentary does feel a bit stream of consciousness.
One thing that really hits me is the very idea that a pirate radio station would have a manager. We see what can only be described as a staff meeting, where Killer threatens the DJ with cutting off their fingers if they steal anything from the station. It's also striking that the DJs only subscribe �5 an hour to be on the air. Call me an anarchist but I would hope a pirate radio station could manage without a hierarchy. In fact it's interesting that there is a clear capitalist motivation going on here: these lads are essentially running businesses off the books but not questioning the system that creates their situation. It's also clearly quite stressful because they're expecting to collect subs from a bunch of DJs who obviously have some difficulty not drinking or smoking the money they get together!
We see connections with the rest of the underground economy, such as drug dealing. Of course the pirate radio world bleeds over into the world of organishing raves and into the more obvious industry of record shops. Seeing this we see the clear racism of the police, arresting the Black people outside the record shop but ignoring the white dealers.
In fact, frankly the law comes out of this looking something of an ass. One of my favourite bits is where we see Killer driving to and from his court appearance for driving without a license and insurance. He pleaded guilty but honestly what is even the point of banning someone who drives without a licence from driving? Because obviously banning pirate radio stations is another law which has really succeeded.
I have a criticism of the show which may be slightly unreasonable given that it actually covers a lot of ground in an hour, but I would have liked to get to know a bit more about Killer's background. We see a bit of Gambit's because we also see him coming out of a court appearance and saying that they think he's got problems and they want him to attend counselling while under probation for eighteen months. He mentions having a lot of problems in his own head that prevent him progressing. He mentions his dad dying when he was fourteen and his mother moving in another man a month later, which sounds like it started the problems: he describes not being able to trust people and is actually homeless. However we don't hear any of this about Killer. They are obviously both intelligent and able to think things through, and in fact both have really good vocabularies. I realise that this would probably be outside of the scope of the show, though, but I'm just being nosy. I have searched around online and not been able to find out what happened to either man after this show. At one point we see Killer's girlfriend commenting how he flips at the slightest thing and is completely unstable, and frankly it feels like it really wasn't going to carry on well for him.
The significance of the reference to tower blocks in the title is that if you want to broadcast to a wide area apparently you have to erect an aerial as high as possible and the way pirate radio has tended to do this is to put their aerials on scaffold poles on the top of blocks of flats. This brought back a memory for me personally: as a theology student in the early 90s at the height of UK rave culture (which I would never have had the confidence to get involved in) I used to listen to these pirate stations playing dance music. They would often disappear as their aerials got taken down by the council of competitors, so this really brought back some memories of finding the station I had been listening to had disappeared and having to search all through the FM band to find another one. They were all quite different to Y2K FM, almost never involving announcements of linking, except for the odd announcement of where to meet to go to a rave.
I've also been thinking recently of the famous Castlemorton Common Rave of 1992, which was Britain's biggest ever illegal festival and led to a change in the law. Again, it made the constabulary look more than a little silly, because it resulted from the police stopping some travellers in Gloucestershire who were on the way to an existing festival. Now I've never been a police officer but I'm fairly sure that in police school they tell you that some things are best ignored to stop them escalating into something bigger. In this case the travellers all went into a phone box and let all their friends know they were instead going to Castlemorton Common in Worcestshire and history was made. It was on the TV every night and the plod ended up looking a bit silly.
A fascinating insight into the world of pirate radio, and I just want to know more than it was willing to tell me, as usual.
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