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How 9/11 Saved Ray Stubbs From a Crank Call

Tony Horne explains how 9/11 impacted on live radio and how it made a broadcaster out of Simon Mayo.

By Tony Horne

10 Sep 2011, 16:00

I wonder how many of these pieces will begin with the words “It was a day I will never forget”. Anyway, it was certainly that, though as for the actual day, was it a Monday? I can’t be sure.

I had done my breakfast show on 105.4 Century FM right across the North West, and it was getting towards the hour when I was trying to get into the zone for the next day. The chase for ideas and prepared spontaneity was on. At the time my own context was this: my eldest Molly was seventeen months old, my wife was taking flying lessons, my mother-in-law seemed to be living with me and I was writing about ten comedy scripts a day for an impressionist called Mike Maguire who worked on my radio show.

You’ll have heard his work once in January 2001 when we made international news on our thirteenth show at the station by spoofing Sven as Kevin Keegan, just days before this virtually unknown Swede started the England job. We still were performing such childish pranks on a daily basis. We’d done them all from Richard Madeley to Yuri Geller, who curiously didn’t see it coming.  He’s a psychic, you know.

At the time they were big news, guaranteeing us big exposure.

Around half one that afternoon, some sixteen minutes before the first plane hit, I was on the phone to my best friend John Cross, a football reporter at The Mirror. He couldn’t help me. I rang my other only friend David Hart, Communications Director at the Great North Run. He could. ‘But you didn’t get it from me,’ he told me.

We had truly scraped the bottom of the barrel in our wacky radio prankster phase. There was nobody else left to scam except this man.
We were down to our last few celebrity phone numbers that one by one people had leaked to us over the years.

‘A plane has crashed into the Twin Towers,’ shouted my wife from the kitchen.
‘Oh, my Dad will love that,’ I replied.

That was my initial reaction. Disgraceful, I know. My father was six hours behind in Lima, Peru where he worked as a loss adjustor. I regret to say that plane crashes were his bread and butter and fascinated rather than aggrieved him. I began writing the script for the crank call, thinking little of it, even though in a wild set of circumstances I had been in New York just six weeks before and whilst in the queue at Times Square, I had run into my American girlfriend of 1993, some eight years on. What were the chances of that in New York City? None, if you realise she was from Kansas, and only Dorothy had ever left there.

‘Oh my God, a second plane has crashed,’ shrieked my wife from the superior intellectual plane of having flown twenty hours solo herself. ‘That is no accident.’ At which point, I did what everybody else at that point. I stopped, stared and stayed put. I never moved until 11pm.
 
I had heard of Bin Laden twice before. An excellent piece in The Sunday Times had fingered him some time earlier. The article had been brutally clear, to the tune of “this man will strike”. I dismissed it as scare-mongering at the time. Clearly, this was a brilliant piece of informed journalism, way ahead of its time. Equally, John Simpson had told of an encounter the two had shared when Bin Laden had offered a peasant something menial to finish off Simpson in the years before either had come to the fore. We’re going way back here. Simpson never forgot his image either.

I wrote down everything I absorbed for the next day’s radio, and can still remember much of it today from Bush’s appalling “We’re gonna get those folks” to comments made on a website entitled The Professional Pilot’s Rumour Network alleging that Al Italia crew had had their IDs stolen the week before...could this all be linked?!

It was an incredible intake of breath for any journalist, and dare I say it, a pleasure to get on the air the next day.  Sadly, it is what you live for.
My radio show changed forever too. I knew people wanted to talk, and I didn’t stop talking for about a week after and never wanted to play the hits again. But when I flicked around, the other commercial stations were banging out the big tunes with their stand-in disc jockeys on. They couldn’t handle it, and didn’t know what to do. It was a time for your big radio personalities to lead and talk from the heart, if indeed they had one. That often socially dysfunctional animal that lies behind the friendly voice on the radio had in many cases reached the summit of their talent and could go no further.

Conversely, many say that Simon Mayo came of age on 5 Live at this point. I vividly remember a discussion he held on “what do you tell your children?” I confess that I stole it when the time merited it at every subsequent disaster.

I never made that crank call in the end. Goodness, how on earth did we all make the gear change some ten days later back to “normal programming”? You couldn’t really get on the air after all you had done and introduce anything like that with a clear conscience. I don’t think I ever recorded any more ever again to be honest.

A decade on in the week Molly Horne starts high school, that person who never got that call has ended up being a very good friend to me, always so kind with his time and advice, forever pleased to see me. So, whilst I recognise that this is probably not the time or the place to put my cards on table and make a public apology, but Ray Stubbs, your phone was about to ring, and me and my daft mate who could do a few voices, were going to be at the end of it.

I had meant to tell you before now...