Strive Notes

Welcome to the third installment of THE Journo, Strive Notes’s…modern day ‘meet the press’.  Today I’m very pleased to feature the hard man of news from Manx Radio….Sir Stuart Peters.

Name: Stuart Peters

Title: Senior Broadcast Journalist. Producer and presenter of ‘Mandate’ – our early morning news and current affairs hour

Employer: Manx Radio

Beat: Isle of Man with a bit of UK and international content

Career Highlight: Getting the job in the first place! I was doing holiday relief as a freelance presenter and got a summons to see the (then) MD. I assumed I was in trouble! He asked me what I thought of politics in the Isle of Man and I said it was dull and boring. He then asked what I thought of the station’s coverage of it, and I said that (with all due respect) that was dull and boring too – why? At that point he said he’d been thinking of offering me a full-time job in the newsroom…

Overall though, it must be in my previous life and a conference I produced around 1990 for 7000 networker marketeers at the NEC Arena in Birmingham. My client loved gadgets, guitar music and technology, so it was more rock and roll than business. We had moving lights (VERY cutting edge back then), a huge sound and lighting rig, massive lasers, a stage set that Spinal Tap would have loved, a complete broadcast OB truck with cranes and Steadicam, blokes in the lighting truss on follow spots…it was sensational. We took the same show to Docklands Arena in London, and the management there said we had more crew and kit than David Bowie who had been in the week before.

Oh, and there was the weekend in 1999 that I went to war in Kosovo with the RAF filming for a documentary I was making – and hanging out of the back of a Chinook in a flimsy harness with a TV camera on my shoulder. The Director had wobbled about going into a war zone, so I said I’d do it my bloody self! We fell out shortly afterwards so I didn’t even get a credit!

Your first job in media: 1971 – Production Assistant at John Yates Publications in Manchester. Worked on two august and worthy trade organs – Pet Shop Trader and Decorating Materials Trade. Within a year I was advertising manager (my boss was fired during one of the proprietor’s famous rages). But at 17 I had no power, and I was still only earning £6.50 a week, so I left to become a junior at BDH Advertising (on eight quid a week!).

Your dream job: Something easy and relaxed – like being the token Brit jock on an FM rock station in the USA. Or Jeremy Clarkson or Ron Jeremy’s stunt double…(to avoid confusion, the name Jeremy is unimportant to this answer).

Oddest story covered: Probably the King of Mann. Fat American windscreen fitter checks his genealogy online and decides he’s a cousin of Queen Betty and a descendent of Manx royalty. King Ralph but without John Goodman. Nice bloke too. He made me a Knight.

I hate it when a PR: Invites me to a launch at the British Museum in London, of a device that’s going to prove invaluable to Tube passengers. Target your mailshots please.

I love it when a PR: Takes 30 seconds to check my listing and 30 seconds to convince me that their client’s product or service IS available on the Isle of Man, that they have a good spokes lined up and have booked an ISDN studio.

Filed under: Media