It wasn’t Dougie Mack ringing Traffic at 2030 on a Friday night saying he’d forgotten to download the ads, and could Pip just nip back in and re-send them… even though it meant a 50 mile round trip.
It wasn’t Nicola getting absolutely stressed with EVERYTHING, Matt getting stressed with nothing, and Sophie thinking it was OK to sell 48 per day 60″ spots when the station was already running 16 minutes of ads every hour. (ahhh…..Design For Life – or “how Juice 107.2 made a happy traffic manager very old”).
It wasn’t that ingenious (but highly illegal) reverse billing system they dreamed up with the main Car Dealership in Brighton, solely designed for him to avoid paying VAT on a Contra. And it wasn’t the MD asking Traffic not to mention it to Newcastle if they could possibly avoid it.
It wasn’t those two little Diamonds, Ellie and Rachel who did whatever a faceless voice from 200 miles up the road told them to, even if it meant waiting until 2100 for Bristow to turn up with an ad he’d been making.
And it certainly wasn’t Dougie ringing Traffic up with a list of “Not Found”s from Enco, some of which had been like that for over a week, ‘cos Stewsta had forgotten to load the copy.
Traffic Manager, Phil (Pip) Schieber.
Non-stop Juice was a major part of my life for a good few years and I’ll never forget them.
No other radio station taught me as much as Juice, and I cannot think of any other team that gave me so many opportunities. Opportunities such as, creating Travel Nick (and allowing me to go on air with no formal radio training and initially not having a clue what I was doing), having breakfast one morning with David, Jay and Sarah on the seafront and David saying how he wanted to brand my 4×4, 4 hours later I was driving down the A27 with a big grin on my face in convoy with Jay’s branded 4×4 and working alongside Sky Sports at the Kronenbourg Cup on Brighton Seafront.
Non Stop Juice gave me my first taste of Outside Broadcasts and what chaotic fun they are. Running cables, putting up aerials, getting stressy when it didn’t work and memories of my first OB at Creation for Design For Life will always be there. The buzz of experiencing something like that was phenomenal and even now I still get the buzz and thrill of doing OB’s.
Seeboard Power Cuts – what more can I say. Sitting in the pub with David, Chris and Jay just about to have a pint when the phone rings….. “The station’s off air, Seeboard have had a big power cut and we’ve lost all power”. I can honestly say that Temptation by Heaven 17 will never be the same (it’s the only song we had on mini-disc in the radio car and we had to loop it until we could sort something else out).
The Emergency Backup Mini-Disc – “Red Alert Red Alert It’s a Catastrophe…” still brings a shiver to my spine every time I hear it. I made the back up disc for the times when Enco messed up or there was a problem. It would play out and it was, in a way, my own personal show, but one that I didn’t like to hear very often.
My biggest memory of Juice and the impact it had on the listeners was a Juice night at the Liquid Lounge in Worthing. Having been introduced to the delights of Sambucca through Mr Jackson we were both sitting there rather mullered when Jay introduced me to a group he’d been chatting with. All he said was “This is Travel Nick” and immediately I was surrounded with people buying me drinks and saying “Oh wow! you’re Travel Nick, I’ve heard you on the radio!”, to which Jay became rather annoyed saying “You’re more famous than me you *****r”.
I am quite privileged as I have a lot of the old shows on my computer which I managed to record as pieces of history – not only history of the station, but a key part of Brighton & Hove’s history. I seem to spend all my time listening to them all, over and over again.
On a final note I want to say thank you. Thank you to David for giving me the greatest opportunity of my life, thank you to Jay for “bringing me on-board”, thank you to Simon, Dougie, Chris, Pete, Mike, Mick and all of the team for making those years such fun, and thank you to everybody who worked for the station, be it sales, Juicy Crew, news and reception for the great times we had together and making Juice so fun, sexy, memorable and so special x
Nick Packham aka “Travel Nick”
