Tales from Mediaville (Part 1: the Press Cuttings Bureau)

My first foray into what is commonly – if not affectionately – referred to as The Media came via a discreet advert in the Evening Standard classifieds. “Graduate/First jobber. No experience required. Must be able to work nights”. Intrigued if slightly spooked by those ominous last two words, I submitted my application, emphasising my commitment to – and tenuous relevant expertise in – burning the midnight oil. To my amazement, they took me on after the briefest of interviews, seemingly set up only to confirm I was employable, sentient and/or proficient in English. I was to start the following Monday in a small converted warehouse, accessed via a cobbled courtyard on Worship Street, in the shadows of London’s altogether more visible financial district.

I had graduated three years previously in the summer of 1997 with some humanities degree that pointed at nothing, and a sense of desperation that meant I was open to anything, poised to spend years in airless internet cafés on Tottenham Court Road hawking vacuous CVs to anyone prepared to read the topline.

Having previously worked in department stores, shady European language schools and undefined back offices of the Valuation Office Agency, I couldn’t legitimately claim to have always yearned to work in The Media, even though in the pre-digital age it still retained an aura of glamour, from foreign correspondents covering coups in Fiji to sarcastic columnists dining out with the great and the not so good. These were my people, despite knowing nothing beyond the news I absorbed. I suppose at some naive, subconscious level, applying to any job with a whiff of media granted instant access to the heroes of print and screen and constituted a short step to joining their ranks and the perks that would follow. A ‘naive, subconscious level’ about to receive a brutal awakening.

Despite the rusty, clanking gate outside, the warehouse had clearly had a refit. There were computers at desks where presumably heavy machinery had once stood. Even at 11pm there was the bustle and humming associated with a labour-intensive factory. There were no greetings or welcome packs, just strategically positioned monitors on silent, broadcasting rolling news from that summer’s novel exercise in socially experimental voyeurism Big Brother. I was guided to a desk on some blue carpet where someone called Trevor gave the briefest of training. “Drag the cutting on screen 1 over to screen 2. No ads, letters, blurred articles or page 3 girls”. I never saw Trevor again.

The company was a press cuttings agency called BMC News, a subsidiary of Xtreme Information – or perhaps it was the other way around? I could never be sure. They distributed daily morning national news to clients around the capital. They recruited people like me to test the clipping tools, and prepare the distributions to ensure breakfast bulletins were despatched accurately and on time, so as not to keep some impatient, rainsoaked courier on a motorbike hanging around.

You learn a lot about The Media working in a job like that. I familiarised myself with Fleet Street reporting patterns in a way I perhaps hadn’t casually reading the paper on the tube to school. I became attuned to key word searches and to the sophisticated software that scanned the press. Less fortunate colleagues elsewhere in the warehouse were still reliant on scissors and glue. Working in a team of four I quickly became aware that these were not people I would or could ever meet anywhere else.

There was Terry who had fled the religious oppression of Northern Ireland to find sexual emancipation in Vauxhall, Amanda who similarly had fled the austere cultural landscape of Cleethorpes to immerse herself in fashion school by day and press clippings by night, the glass eyes indicative of snatched sleep only when time permitted. Then there was Jim a dome-headed part time fiddle player in a band working the Camden and Islington chicken and basket circuit, who carried that same haunted look as former Conservative cabinet minister Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

Elsewhere there were freaks and grebos and goths, dishevelled bodies in unkempt Carhartt tshirts, people who sat there in silence or catatonic states or immersed in their headphones, people of similar age and usually lefty/alternative values. Yards away a very bearded man sat in isolation chain smoking at his computer, typing like a tortoise, periodically pausing to swig from a small flask. The rest of us invariably popped out at 3am for our snacks and refreshments. The 24 hour café Pollos opposite Liverpool Street served up sandwiches and every conceivable variant of caffeine. On the weekend shifts you would be queuing alongside the wasted and the battered, people on their way to or from more exotic warehouses. Binmen, crack whores, jesus creepers, gangsters, railway civil engineers, there was nobody to whom Pollos did not provide some form of valuable service.

The Circle Line was often a struggle on a Friday night when you observed the rest of society closeup, with anything but work on its mind. I thought about how people on night shifts not only maintained relationships but formed them in the first place. I wondered too how my colleagues managed to ever sleep, and if they were ever disturbed by the crying babies, loud tvs and occasional bailiffs that punctuated the silence in my purpose built flat overlooking the Quaker territory of Southfields. I worried too about the longer term physical and mental effects of a life on the fringes, an economy never seen or acknowledged elsewhere. A parallel universe that seemed to operate outside the confines of the ordinary labour market, a working regime custom-designed to drive you insane.

I never really got to know most of them. The shifts were seven nights on, seven nights off. A state of semi-permanent jetlag despite never boarding an aircraft. Most would disappear home contraflow in the morning rush hour, others would flop out on the grass in Regents Park in the warmer months, whilst a hardy few would reconvene each Monday morning at The Hope, an early morning boozer opposite Smithfields meat market, down the road from Farringdon, the spiritual epicentre of the emerging digital media.

The Hope was an established drinking den for London’s old trades, an unlikely gathering of media workers and bloodstained butchers after our respective shifts. It was there that I really gained a glimpse into a dying, smokefilled workers’ pub scene I had never really been exposed to growing up in leafy Chiswick. Where are they all now? I’d hazard a confident guess the modern workplace is a very different beast..

The terms of my employment at BMC were vague. The contract appeared to be open-ended, and I lasted over eight months before deciding to never return. Over 20 years later, I imagine those jobs no longer exist but for a brief period in the new millennium I finally felt part of a team where an egalitarian spirit prevailed, something I would build on in later job roles. I’m not altogether convinced my skillset really expanded during those bizarre few months but I gained an insight into humanity that was priceless.