Sort Your Head Out: Sam Delaney on West Ham, Westminster and Everything In Between | Season 2: Episode 8 (Part 1)

This week Andrew and Max sit down with a man who's done a bit of everything - journalist, author, broadcaster and podcasting powerhouse Sam Delaney.

Before any of that, Sam was a parliamentary researcher working alongside Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, until a switch into journalism took him through Loaded, Heat magazine (as editor-in-chief), Comedy Central UK, talkSPORT, BBC London and his own show on RT. He's written five books spanning advertising history, fatherhood and men's mental health.

On the podcasting side, Sam co-hosts the hugely popular Top Flight Time Machine (25 million-plus downloads and counting), runs The Reset (a deep dive into men's mental health) and, keeping things claret and blue, co-hosts You Irons alongside The Athletic's Roshane Thomas and George Pointon.

In this episode, we cover the lot: his path from Westminster to the media, the highs (and stress) of running Heat and Comedy Central, fatherhood and Night of the Living Dad, the state of men's mental health today, and of course his own West Ham story. We finish with the quickfire round — first game, best goal, worst heartbreak and what "the West Ham way" really means to him.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

You're listening to the West Ham Syndrome Podcast, the show where we look at West Ham United beyond the match day, with your hosts, Andrew Jenkin and Max Portman.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hello and welcome to this latest episode of the West Ham Syndrome Podcast, where we look at West Ham beyond the match day and explore what makes West Ham the club we both love and adore. With the fixture list coming out last week, as well as the first round of Carabao Cup fixtures being drawn, it seems we've got a very, very interesting start to the season playing Portsmouth at home in the Carabao Cup, and then a tough start in the league campaign with a trip to Turfmore and Burnley. Obviously, not going to bore you with the whole fixture list, but certainly some tasty fixtures in there. I suppose a couple of to highlight would be the uh the return of the the Millwall derby in September and February. But before we get into all of that, let me introduce my good friend and co-host. He's the Frank Lampard Senior to my Harry Redknap. It's Mr. Max Portman. How are you, mate?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

I'm good, thank you, mate. Yeah. Interesting fixture list, yeah. Starting off with Burnley. Millwall game we're looking forward to. Not going. Went to that do you remember that Millwall game where it turned into a riot at Upton Park? Yes, I do. Yeah, I was at that game. Yeah, it was I was as well. Yeah. Yeah. Did you uh do you remember they kettled us all and it was a nightmare? I want do you remember you used to have those garages behind the Bobby Moore? Yeah, yeah. That's how I snuck out. I snuck out of there where the now the long live the Bowloon wall is, and then snuck out there by the old cinema. That's how I managed to get out of the kettle.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Yeah, I don't think I don't remember being kettled, but I don't know. I can't because that was the Xavon Heinz scored the the third one, didn't he? Yeah, Dennis Last scored the brace, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

God, that wasn't a great team, was it? No, no, no, that was a bit mental game, yeah. Yeah. Mostly everyone loves the pitch invasions more than the actual game, if I'm not mistaken.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Well, I think that's part, yeah, that's part of the problem, isn't it? It's sort of yeah, the bigging up of that hooliganism aspect is always stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

We're just no doubt going to come back this time again, in it, so it's a shame, isn't it, in some respects.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

I've just realised though, I mean, uh so first first question, obviously you're looking forward to the the Millwall fixture. Any other fixtures that you're particularly excited about? Wrexham, believe it or not. Wrexham will be good, won't it?

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people are quite looking forward to Wrexham. I know about going away up to the race course, but I'm looking forward to seeing what they're all about. Looking forward to um Birmingham. There's a few uh Chlon, that'd be a good, first good home game of the season. You know, I'm just looking forward to getting up there a bit more this season. Hopefully the teacher prices will drop. So expensive in the Prem, innit?

SPEAKER_01 2:30

That's the only kicker. Yeah, absolutely. Well, the season ticket, I mean, season ticket sales have been impressive, and uh probably hoped back to the whole you know, the West Ham syndrome, which is fans will turn up and thick and thin to watch their team, doesn't really matter what league they're in, which is kind of a nice, nice full circle for us in some respects, isn't it? Yeah, maybe we can't finish after 26 episodes. It's a bit of a blur, innit? So well, that's true. I think you know I've also just realized, obviously, with with lots of new exciting things, obviously, that we've had the news just as we were about to record that Fernandez has signed for Spurs, which is disappointing, but 85 million's probably had to had to be taken. But my the thing I have just realized, Max, is that I realized that the shirt was going to be released and I haven't had a look yet. So we can do a live reaction to the new kit. Yeah, just going to go to the website here. I like it. First thought, I like that. I'm not sure about the collar for my first initial reaction.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

I'm not sure about the collar. What were the checks? Yeah, that's a bit of an interesting one.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Well, you mean it's because it's like a crew cut kind of shape.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

No, I don't mind the crew cut. I think it's the sort of the pattern of it. And I'm not quite sure about that kind of V, sort of the dark bit across the V, but across the top of the chest. But I like it. I mean, it's that's not yeah, it's a bit different, isn't it? Good to see. I I've been excited about the prospect of new balance. Yeah, and they've not disappointed, in my opinion. No, anything we can read into the players they've selected. It doesn't look like Kyle Walker Peters is going anywhere, does it? No, uh Jared Bowen is also a positive thing. Oh, I haven't seen him in any of the pictures. That's good to see. That's good to know.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Theon Morgan, I mean, obviously, she has a great social media following. I'm not sure if you've seen any of her get ready with me for a match day games, which is what is really interesting, actually, and when she does her training and how she actually, you know, what the life of a professional footballer is. So yeah, I think it was really clever capitalizing on her, you know, social media success.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Yeah, yeah. We're more upset, aren't we, that we didn't get invited.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

So well, you know, you would have thought as as now almost part of the mainstream media, we would uh you know be getting. I I still can't find these um Jared Bowen pictures. Uh are you gaslighting me? I'm not gaslighting why would I gaslight you? Okay, okay. Well, I'm sure I'll I'll be able to find them. But we should probably get into the the bulk of the episode, shouldn't we? I'm sure there's plenty of stuff we could we could discuss, and maybe we will save that for another time. But let us introduce you to today's guest. And boy, have we got one for you. I think the question we need to be asking is what hasn't our guest today, Sam Delaney, done in his career? Sam has had an incredible career so far working for some big hitters within the Labour Party, such as former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former leader Ed Miliban as parliamentary researcher before moving into journalism and media, where he served as editor-in-chief of Heat magazine and in media as editor of Comedy Central UK. He's also written for every publication you could ever think of and his own TV show on Russia Today. He's also produced long-form documentaries, produced and appeared on radio and covered major news events as a journalist and a broadcaster. He's also a published author with five books covering a range of topics from politics to advertising, parenthood, and mental health, which we'll be discussing in the episode. He's also about to publish his first fiction book, A Political Thriller, based in London. But since 2018, and perhaps where I've become most familiar with Sam's work, is he's really been embracing the podcasting world and perhaps an earlier doctor, starting with the very, very successful top type flying machine with Andy Dawson that has over 25 million downloads, the reset, in which Sam discusses men's mental health issues with a variety of guests from a huge array of backgrounds. And finally, to keep in the West Ham theme of this podcast, You Irons, which he hosts with West Ham's athletic correspondent Roshane Thomas and George Poynton. But when he isn't doing any of this, Sam is still a London lad living at home with his wife and two kids. And we'll be covering all of that and more in this interview. Sam, thanks so much for joining. It's great to have you on. First off, how are you? How's uh how's your summer going?

SPEAKER_03 6:26

Yeah, good. I'm glad the heat wave's over. If it comes back again, I think I'm just gonna jump on a plane or a train, get somewhere cold because I absolutely hate it. But other than that, it's all right. And I'm I'm off to Greece with the family next week, and I've just bought a couple of new shirts. I was just telling you they're off air. A couple of new West Ham home shirts, so me and my son can show our colours by the pool, after which I will probably never ever wear it again. But these are the things you do in summer.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

That to me, you know, that is a true sign that you're on holiday when you've got a new shirt. You're by the pool. Yeah, no, fantastic. We always start these interviews with the same question. I'm sure all of our listeners will be familiar with you and your work, but for those that that may not know you in the West Ham sphere, what what kind of triggered your love for West Ham? Where did that all start?

SPEAKER_03 7:11

Well, I'm actually from West London, and I so it wasn't area and it wasn't really family because I didn't live with my dad and he didn't really have a team anyway, but I didn't have that influence. I had three older brothers, one supported Spurs, one supported QPR, who were kind of like a local team, and the other one supported West Ham. So it was partly the one who supported West Ham had that influence on me. I don't really know where his West Ham allegiance came from, but the biggest influence on me was we lived on an estate in Brentford, right near Griffin Park, and our neighbours, the Joneses, the son Alex, he was my best friend. He lived next door to me. We were in the same class at school, we were thick as thieves from as early as I can remember. And his dad was from Bethnal Green, so he was, you know, sort of he'd married and moved to Brentford, and he was a huge West Ham fan, and so was Alex. And I spent all my time around at their house from like the age of kind of well, as soon as I could sort of walk, because we were almost exactly the same age, and so they sort of got me hooked on it, and he actually took us to some games at Upton Park when we were quite young, and then that was it, really. And then we I went to school in the local area and we met a couple of other kids who we kind of converted to West Ham, and we became really, really tight as a group, partly because you know the school in that time was full of a few Spurs fans, quite a few Chelsea fans, and a lot of Liverpool and Everton fans in that era in the 80s. And then when we went, we all went to secondary school together as well, and there was a lot of Chelsea fans at our secondary school, and so it kind of really bonds you, and you become more and more passionate. And you know, from a very young age, I was getting on the 26 stops on the district line every second weekend to go to Upton Park with my mates from very young age and never stopped.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Yeah, I was gonna say I'm also a West London Amor Sam. I'm from Queen's Park, so I should really, by all rights, be a QPR fan, but you're from where, did you say?

SPEAKER_03 9:04

Queen's Park. Yeah, okay, cool.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Yeah, so um naturally I should be a QPR fan by all rights, but like yourself, dad's from Ilford, so naturally you end up supporting the team your dad ends up following. And now the question I was gonna ask you was um being growing up in the 80s, as you said, Liverpool and Everton being the big teams at the time, was 86 then that great season for you because then you could stick it to everybody else by saying, Yeah, we're not shit anymore, we almost won the fucking league.

SPEAKER_03 9:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like it was really I mean, I'd been supporting West Ham for quite a few years by then. When we first started supporting them, I suppose it was like that 1980 team was my earliest, earliest memory. So Trevor Brooking was if you're a West Ham fan, people would just go, Oh, Trevor Brooking, that was when I was very smart, so I remember they're just you were associated very much with one player when I was a kid, and then I became obsessed with Tony Cottie after he scored on his debut, and then in that 85-86 season, by that stage, you know, me and these mates that I'm talking to you about, we were like very, very seriously into West Ham, and we were like 10 years old, and we absolutely loved it. But as is well documented, you know, that season there was a TV dispute, which meant that a lot of the games went on TV. I reckon I went to about maybe half a dozen games that season, most of them were with like my friends' dads would take us, so it was a thing if someone's birthday, one of the dads would take us all along through a game. So I went to a few that season, but it was frustrating that you couldn't see much of them on TV. And as lots of people say, you know, you read about Frank McAveny every week in the paper, you couldn't believe the fact that there you had this guy who was like the top scorer, but like a lot of us hadn't seen him other than in kind of blurry black and white print in the newspaper. But it was an incredible memory, and then that season ended, and then I started secondary school a couple of months later. You know, so I started secondary school just after that season, then so in like the autumn of 1986, and we kind of swaggered into a school that was full of a lot of Chelsea fans, and we we yeah, we could sort of hold our heads up and give a lot of it back to all these children. Chelsea were pretty shit at the time, and you know, again that that's in the face of adversity, it kind of makes you a siege mentality, makes your passion a lot stronger, I think.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

No, I agree with 100%. I went to school in South East London, and obviously that's been all country in it. Yeah, so naturally I was done for, but I went stuck went to Secretary's rule for the first year in 2005. So obviously that's the FA Cup final season.

SPEAKER_04 11:29

Oh, brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

That's why I used to swagger in every time after an FA Cup game, like come on, let's have it now. And they'd be like, Yeah, you're gonna lose next game. Go, no, we're not, and then yeah, and then when Liverpool did do us, then I couldn't swagger into school on that Monday.

SPEAKER_03 11:43

That's the day when you wake up a little bit ill.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Moving on to the next question. So we mentioned in the intro that you've done so much in your career, and no doubt you've got still got so much more to give and so much more to do. But let's go back to the beginning. So, you did a politics degree at the University of Sussex, we're good academics here, we do our research before you went into Westminster to start your career as a parliamentary researcher. So, where did that interest in politics come from? And you know, you worked in there for a few years, but what made you leave the political machine?

SPEAKER_03 12:18

I I actually worked there before I went to university. Oh wow. I took a year off, like in between doing my A levels in university because for various reasons, but one of them was I wanted to go to the World Cup in America in 1994. So I thought if I work this year, then I'll get the money together to get there. And my oldest brother, who's 10 years older than me, he was earning good money at the time. He'd left school at 16 and he was doing really well. And he said, Listen, go to World Cup, I'll sort the tickets, and I've got a mate who will like put us up out there in LA. If you can get your plane ticket money together, we'll do it, right? And pick up a couple of bar bills while we're there, we'll do it. So I thought, right, I'll take the year off. And then I was quite political. I'd done like politics A level, I'd done, yeah, and then I I knew I wanted to do a politics degree. I was really interested in politics, and so I'd done a little bit of campaigning during the 92 election just for like a local party and leaflets and all of that. And then through that, I met like a senior MP, and they said, Look, you can do a placement, you get a little bit of money, not much, but it's great experience. So yeah, I went and did that, and I did it for the best part of a year. It really interesting because I was working inside Parliament, you know, like I was walking around, I was only like 18. I was like wa wandering around the House of Commons, the House of Lords, every day. I mean, only it wasn't important stuff I was doing. I was like photocopying and making cups of tea and delivering documents from one office to another and all of that sort of stuff. But I met some people and and got to know some people who, you know, really interested and went on to have really big careers in politics. And then but then towards the end, I thought this isn't paying me enough money. So I for the last few months I kind of quit and worked in a call centre in order to get the last bit of money together I needed to go to the World Cup. So we went. We went and me and my brother went out and we went to the semi-finals and the final, that yeah. So it was really good. And like, you know, at that time I was quite party political, which I'm I I'm not any longer. It was the Labour Party I worked for. I wouldn't say I was like aligned with them or any party now because, you know, like a lot of people, I just became sort of disillusioned with politics. But at that age, from the background I was from, which was grew up in a council house and went to a comprehensive school, I sort of felt as if the sort of things that had given me opportunities in life had mainly come from Labour government policies. That was what I felt at the time. It's why I worked for them. You know, I see the world a bit differently now. The other thing that made me laugh a bit was when you said you've had an incredible career. And I remembered a troll got in touch with me about a year ago. I announced something I was doing, something or other mental health-related thing on social media, and someone took exception to it, like trolls do. You know, they think, Oh, I don't like what this guy who I've never met is doing, so I'm gonna I'm gonna go to the trouble of finding his email and telling him what I think. And I always remember they opened it going, of all the rubbish you have done in what you laughably refer to as a career, right? And I thought, fucking hell. But I did I thought about it, and it's important to consider feedback. So I did wrote back right back to the troll, and in my opening line, I said, one thing I'll correct you on is I've never referred to my working life as a career, because that really would be laughable. And so I just want to correct you on that. I don't see it as a career. I have worked for money to pay the bills, but I've never really forged anything you could call a career.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Oh well, you know, I think that's all uh subjective, isn't it? It's uh I mean you've certainly done a lot in your working life then.

SPEAKER_03 15:49

I've done a lot of different jobs, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Yeah, absolutely. Just just quickly, so you're talking about the the World Cup, they're obviously recording this on Thursday. I mean, how do you see the difference from the World Cup in the States? You know, what is that?

SPEAKER_03 16:02

But 32 years apart. Well, when I was there, I just thought, oh, this is amazing, you know, because English football at that time, the Premier League was still in its infancy. And so really my experience of football had been forged in like the 80s and early 90s, where football grounds were still kind of shitholes, it was badly organized, the food was shit, ever the pitches were shit, everything was like a little bit scruffy. And then when you got to America, the main thing that I remember me and my brother thinking, it was all at the Rose Bowl Stadium. We went to a semi-final, the final, and the third place playoff at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and it was so well organized. Well, I can't remember what the capacity was. I think it was like 100,000 people. You didn't queue for anything, you know, the pitch was immaculate, everyone, the security was friendly. It was just the whole thing you could park right next to the ground for World Cup final. We even remember like it was boiling hot, and as you walked in there, these giant fans that that sprayed like a fine mist of cold water at you. Just get a beer, take it into Stan with you. We were like, the Americans know how to do service, which I still believe actually, for all of America's fault. You go there, you tend to get treated better in day-to-day sort of service industries. And I thought these guys have got it sorted. This is the best possible place for a World Cup. Now I look at some of the I don't know what the fan experience has been like. Maybe as fans who are out there would agree, but now all this stupid stuff they've done with hydration breaks and countdowns to kick off and the music and all of that crap and the bloody half-time show they're gonna do with Coldplay in the final. Forget it, it's gone too far. I regret showing them any encouragement.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, and I suppose I mean the ticket prices are another thing as well. I've got a mate lips out in in Texas, and he went to the uh the Norway, who were they playing the other day? Norway Ivory Coast, isn't it? Um on it was $500 a ticket, and I just thought you know, to him that wasn't actually that much. I just thought that's that's incredible.

SPEAKER_03 17:57

I don't know how the stadium I don't understand how the stadiums are filled.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Who has that money? You know, I know, I know, and then and I know in America there is a different kind of perspective, isn't there, of like paying for events and they're kind of part, maybe perhaps a bit more part of their culture, but even so it's still an extremely large amount of money anyway. Yeah, so let's let's just go back to you. I won't I refrain from calling it a career, Sam. I'll say let's go back to your your working life. You you moved into the world of journalism and sort of broadcast media. What what kind of inspired that career change from or or working life change from from politics beforehand?

SPEAKER_03 18:30

I I think that's what I always wanted to do. Like I say, I got this job because I was interested in politics and I wanted a politics degree, but I think and I knew it would be great experience, and it was, and it really helped me in in various ways as I got older. But even when I was there working at Westminster, I had an eye on being a journalist. That's what I'd sort of wanted to be since I was a kid, because you know, I was really obsessed with magazines. I read newspapers from quite a young age, you know, mainly football, you know, in the papers, but tabloid newspapers, then broadsheet newspapers, mainly the football pages I devoured and magazines I was obsessed with. And it was a big boom time for magazines as well. And I would collect magazines, I was like an anarch about it. I would buy them and I'd keep them stacked in my room and all the rest of it. And I kind of almost taught myself about magazines just by studying it. I mean, I was weird about it, you know. And then I was lucky as I was coming to graduate from university, it was the biggest boom time for the British magazine industry ever because Lad Mags in particular was huge. There was so much money in it. There were people investing in new magazines, the new magazines coming out every week. And the thing was, it just seemed so much of a laugh. And I really never really thought I'd be cut out for a normal nine to five. But I thought magazines, if you become a writer on a magazine, you can fix it so you're basically getting paid to just live the sort of life that you would otherwise choose to outside of work. That's what I thought. Plus, I liked writing, I thought I was good at writing. It wasn't like a oh, I'm gonna switch from politics to being a journalist. I always wanted to be a journalist, really, and I thought that working for a while in politics would contribute, you know, help me do it, and it kind of did, even though it was years before I started doing political journalism. Because to be honest, in the first instance, I just wanted to work on a men's mag, get free beer, get invited to parties, you know, and all the other stuff that goes with it, travel. But you know, it was good when you when you went in, it was like a surprising thing to people when you go in and they look at your CV or they ask you what you've done, and you chuck in that you, you know, I used to work with Gordon Brown, I was a researcher for him, and people go, Oh, you know, that's just like an interesting twist in your CV that people don't see coming. And so it sort of helped me in that sense, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

No, but that's the thing, in it, it's not what you know, it's who you know, as some people say.

SPEAKER_03 20:49

Yeah, yeah. I mean, somewhat. I mean, I can't say that I ever tapped up any of those people for any work, you know. I doubt they would have given it to me. Right. So it never it wasn't like that, it was more like I suppose people in the media think that that kind of world of government and politics, although by the way, the people I worked for weren't in government at the time. This was the mid-90s before Labour, it was like got elected, been in opposition for 18 years. So, you know, as a West Ham fan, I was well used to backing the losing side, and that's what I was doing both in football and political terms at that point in my life. And I was like, uh, and but I think people just saw it as a like surprising world that I'd worked in, so it might have said that I was capable of doing things that were slightly more serious, you know, even though I come across as someone who just wants to have a laugh, they sort of thought, okay, well, he was doing serious work in a political world, and therefore, you know, maybe this bloke we can take a punt on him. Because I didn't have any journalism training or anything like that. You know, a lot of people went to journalism school or whatever. I I didn't do that. So, but the fact that I had this work experience behind me plus a degree, I suppose when I first started trying to get my foot in the door in journalism. That made people think, oh, okay, might have something a bit extra.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

And do you remember the first magazine or thing you ever wrote for after uni?

SPEAKER_03 22:07

At uni, I wrote for the Sussex University magazine, which I think was called The Pulse, or maybe the Source, I can't remember. And I said, there's a band coming to play on the campus called Space, who were sort of like one of the fringe brick pop bands. It was the brick pop era. They had a couple of hits, they were fairly successful, and they they were scousers, and they were coming to play on campus. So I went to the magazine and said, I'll interview them. And I was surprised they said okay. And then I just sort of like, you know, just had to turn up and try and speak to their manager and borrow a tape recorder or someone and blag my way through an interview with them. But they were nice lads. And I wrote that up and I was really chuffed to see my byline in a printed magazine. But that was all I had to show, like, you know, when you start out being a journalist, you have to send your cuttings. I mean, in those days, you usually send them out, photocopies of your articles in an envelope to uh to magazines and newspapers. So here's my cuttings. Do you want to hire me? But I only had one cut in, it was that. So I kind of would have wanted to work, I suppose, on loaded or something like that, or maybe a football magazine like 90 Minutes or 442. But what I got was I got a job at Men's Health magazine when it was still quite new in the UK. It was a big success in America and they just launched it in the UK. And I got introduced to someone there and they gave me a job working like work experience. And you know, this is this is what I when I became an editor and a boss and was uh I was very conscious of the fact that like, you know, my biggest advantage in in all of this was that I lived in London, and it is a huge advantage because, you know, I lived at home with my mum in a council house and the rent was low, and I paid my mum a very small amount of housekeeping to supplement that, which meant I could afford to do work experience where they only paid me effectively my expenses, right? And I could do that for several months in order to like earn my place there, and then eventually when a job popped up, which I was waiting to happen, get the job. And I always thought about that when I became an editor because it was like a million people all over the country would have been just as capable as me. But if they didn't have that advantage of living in London, then they wouldn't have stuck around in that barely paid job for long enough for a job to arise. And I remember years later when I was editing Heat, there was this really brilliant young work experienced girl who was Scottish and she worked on the magazine for a couple of weeks. And I said to her, Oh, you know, where are you staying? Do you live in London? She went, No, no, I live in Glasgow. And I said, So how have you been here for two weeks? She went, My parents came down with me. We've been living in a hotel. And I thought, this is amazing. Like, it meant such a big deal to her to get this two-week work experience that he had like a six-month waiting list to do work experience because it was so popular at the time. And her parents, just to do one paid work experience, had had both taken the time off work to come down with her because she was only young and spend two weeks in a hotel. So obviously, her parents had a few quid. So, again, to get a foot in the door, you need those kind of advantages, which is a shame because what it means is that businesses or creative industries miss out on loads of talented people who are elsewhere spread around the country or in situations where they can't do it, you know. So I tried my best to rectify that when I was in a position to hire people, you know. But that was I always think you're lucky in those days in the media. Maybe it's still the case now, probably is, you're at a huge advantage if you happen to have a roof over your head in London.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

I was gonna say, funnily enough, I know I'm not in the media, but that's one of the advantages I have doing my PhD at the moment is that I still live at home with mum and dad. I pay them housekeeping to supplement them, but the private privilege is I'm in London. You know, I can get here, there, and everywhere. If I need to go to a conference up in Scotland or go and crash with Andrew, I just got to think of my train fair and Andrew will put me up at the other end, you know, that kind of stuff. So you're right, it's a huge advantage, and it's nice.

SPEAKER_03 25:50

You couldn't afford to like, you know, most people in starting jobs, there's no way on a starting salary, even if you're on a salaried job, in a starting salary you can afford to rent a place in London, you know. So rent these days, yeah. But anyway, sorry, that verges on a political rant. But it's just uh it's just something that I I kind of reflect on now because you know, you look back at the sort of big breaks you got, you don't see them as big breaks at the time. You just you live in one day to the next. Now now I'm like 51. I look back on some of the breaks I had that one thing led to another, to another, and you and you're sort of conscious of the advantages. Because I've got kids of my own, my daughter's 18, she's at uni. In a couple of years, she'll be working, and you sort of you think about you know, will she have the same opportunities as me? I don't know, we'll wait and see. I think it's much harder now. When I did get a job, I I was able to rent a really nice plat with my girlfriend in West London, which would just be impossible now. So it was an easier time. The nineties was a really good time to leave university and look for a job in as a journalist. So I was very tight timing was everything for me, you know.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

And talking about that time, as you said, you you hit the vein of you know, a real boom in the magazine publishing in period during the 90s and all that. So you as you said, you got to work for loaded, which you wanted to beforehand.

SPEAKER_03 27:03

I did I didn't really work for loaded much. I mean, I was a freelancer, I think I wrote maybe one or two pieces for them, not in their golden age. I mean, the golden age was like about '94 when they launched, about '97. And that was when it was an absolute perhaps my favourite ever magazine. And then like a few years later, it was in the noughties, and I was a freelancer. I kind of did a couple of articles for them. But I was never really part of that team. But through other things like working in TV and radio, I became good friends with all of the guys who were the launch team of that mag, which is funny for me because when I was a student at uni, I would pour over these mags and see these writers and editors like superstars, you know. And then they all became mates through meeting them because they all, like me, went from print into TV and radio and stuff like that. And you know, funny enough, one of them's been on the phone to me today sending over all the swapsies he's got available in his World Cup Panini sticker album. Which I tell you, when I was a student at the uh you know, at the University of Sussex would have been a big thrill to me.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:02

Now it's not really a thrill because he's hassling me, saying he's sending me all the numbers of the stickers that he's got doubles of, and he's bothering me to send back what I've got.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

You have to remortgage your house, wouldn't you, to complete a panini uh sticker sticker up and he must have a few quid because he reckons he's 80% done. I remember back in the day, he used to be able to, when you got close to the end, he used to be able to write off to them and ask for the ones he didn't have. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:27

I don't know if they can still do that. Yeah, but me and my son are doing it, and that's it. It's hard, like, because we can swap with each other. So, in some ways, my mate James, the fact that he's got in touch and him and his son have swapsies available, is quite good. Because it's different in the back in the day, you're going to school with them all in a in a rubber band and you'd have a stack like four inches deep, wouldn't you? And you'd get all your swapsies done in one go at playtime. When you're an old man and everyone's online, it's much harder to do that.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

I was going to say, have you seen all this stuff with Marks and Spencer's trying to start their own sticker album and it's caused a nightmare because they didn't expect the demand of it to come in so big.

SPEAKER_03 29:01

Is it a World Cup sticker album?

SPEAKER_00 29:03

Yeah, they've done a whole thing, they've got the men's and women's England team in there, and it's all fallen apart because I think they expected everyone to go for the Panini book, but everyone's now gone for the MS book. Interesting. And it's caused, yeah, a whole thing. They're like, no, sorry, we can't do it anymore because the demand's too great, and we never expected it, and we've kind of panicked here, lads.

SPEAKER_03 29:21

They bet off more than they can chew. They didn't realise the world they were getting involved in. They should have stayed out of it. I don't see MS being appropriate for this sort of answer.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

No, but the question I was going to ask actually was um you've mentioned about how all how it was different when you were coming up as compared to it could be to people coming up now. So, as you said, work for loaded, you was deputy editor of later, and then as you mentioned on an episode of Top Flight Time Machine, you did a stint as editor of Enter magazine, which was a virtual CD ROM mag. So yeah. I mean, you can tell us about that in a minute. But how do you feel the landscape with publishing has changed from when you started in the 90s to what it's like now? You've kind of touched on it a bit. Is there any more you need to like?

SPEAKER_03 30:03

It's just completely. I mean, it doesn't effectively it doesn't really exist anymore. Like a lot of creative industries have changed completely. Like, you know, I worked in TV, that's almost a funny enough, the one that still is kind of thriving is radio, and that was the one that, right from the beginning, people were predicting the death of. So I've worked in radio, TV, print journalism, various other bits and bobs. All of these industries have slowly kind of died off. They're either dying or dead, you know. Magazines, you still see magazines on the shelves in Smiths, but the figures they're selling, I don't know how they make their money, to be honest. But more than just the business side of it, magazines used to be right at the heart of popular culture. You couldn't be a successful band unless you had a relationship with the right magazine, and you couldn't launch a movie or or a book, or you know, or or even the way the language was shaped. You know, when Loaded first came out, they kind of introduced phrases to the like lexicon that we all spoke in that like people up and down the land from the north to the south were using things like Good Work Fella, and that came just from a magazine joke. And it was the same at Heat. There were so many like little phrases and ways of speaking that that came from the pages of that magazine. You know, so that they were like they were really at the heart of culture, they drove culture. And if you were working for one of those mags, you felt as if you kind of not had power, but the things that you wanted to write about and the you know, your your perspective on things would sort of have a very huge, profound knock-on effect. Magazines don't play that role in society at all anymore. And TV, you know, is is kind of almost traditional TV is almost completely dead. But radio, interestingly, is still thriving. People still tune into radio shows, radio show, you know, a station like Talk Sports still drives the agenda in football. It's quite interesting because right from the beginning of me working in the media in the 90s, I remember the whole time newspapers would be saying, well, radio's on its way out because it's too old-fashioned. It's the only thing that has survived, really, of the old school media industries that I've worked in. So, yeah, but magazines, I still love them. And I think there's still good, like independent magazines that have small readerships, but somehow, you know, still get to do something interesting and creative. But you know, it's a much smaller sort of cottage industry now.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Yeah, in two in 2007, you published your your first book, Get Smashed, the story of the men who who made the adverts that changed our lives. What was the sort of inspiration for that? Because obviously you've got an interest in in media and and I guess with with advertising as well. But what was the kind of the motivation for writing that?

SPEAKER_03 32:34

To be honest, to a large extent, I nicked the idea from a documentary I was watching one night called The Men from the Agency. What happened was I was writing at the time, I was a freelancer, but I wrote every week for a magazine that used to come out on Saturdays called The Guardian Guide, and it was free. It was a small magazine that came as a supplement with The Guardian on a Saturday, and it was really popular. Like a lot of people would buy The Guardian just for that magazine on a Saturday. Started off just as a listings mag with what was on TV, but they started introducing articles and they had really good writers on there. People like Charlie Brooker and Grace Dent, who've got who've gone on to have very famous careers in TV, and various other writers that I really liked. So I really wanted to write for them. And I got a foot in the door, and and then I just badgered them really to let me write for them. And in the end, they let me have a go, and then things developed and we got on well. And in the end, I was writing every single week for a couple of years in this magazine, very often the cover story, and that was great because it was so popular, especially amongst people in the media. So it really like helped me make a name for myself as a writer quite quickly because it was a small magazine, but all the right people were reading it. It was read by other journalists and editors. So one day I got a call from a book publisher, a big book publisher, and it was a woman who I'd met briefly through other reasons over the years, but she'd been reading my stuff and she went, I really like it. I've just become an editor. Would you like to write a book? And I didn't think it worked that way, which by the way, it doesn't. You know, this was another big kind of lucky break for me. It doesn't usually work like that in books industry. But she was a young editor who was looking for new writers to break, which would reflect well on her in her job. So she looked at my writing and go and she's ran out and said, Do you want to write a book? I said, I of course I want to write a book. Like my you know, most journalists have that as an ambition at some stage. And I said, What do you want me to write a book about? She went, I don't know. Come in and have a meeting. So I went in and had a meeting. We just talked over loads of ideas, and I was I was sort of terrified because I thought this is an opportunity I always wanted. Now it's here, and I actually don't know what to do because I didn't have an idea, in all honesty. I wasn't quite sure what to do. And so I was mucking around with all sorts of different ideas, and none of them were quite right. And then one night I remember coming in a bit pissed, and there was something on BBC4 called The Men from the Agency, and it was a documentary about one ad agency that existed in the 70s and the 60s, where at one point three people who went on to be very famous all worked at the same time. One was Ridley Scott, one was Alan Parker, who was another very famous film director, and one was Charles Sarchi, who went on to do various things, including being a huge kind of art buyer, creator, curator, and all the rest of it. And it was really interesting because it just told the story of this culture of how, like, working class lads in the 60s and 70s kind of advertising was the first meritocracy. Until then, big business had just been about who you knew, right? And it was mainly dominated by public school boys, and they all worked and they gave each other jobs and all the rest of it. And advertising in the 60s and 70s boomed because consumerism was big, and they realised we need to make ads that young people with spending power can relate to. So the best thing we can do is hire young people to make the ads. So it was suddenly you got a lot of kids like Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, in particular from very working class backgrounds. Alan Parker was from London, Ridley Scott was from the Northeast, and there were various other contemporaries of this, and they all got kind of fast-tracked into these jobs because they were just bright and creative. So it was quite inspiring, I thought, you know, because it it wasn't who you knew and it wasn't how you spoke, it was how good your ideas were. And that I really liked that. And so I thought, what an interesting story. So I rang the bloke. The next day I rang up the bloke who made it. I found his number and I made I rang the director, and I was very honest with him. I said, This is great. I've been asked to write a book and I've got an interest in this. And I said, Do you think there's more to it than just what you did? And he went, Oh yeah, this was a whole culture, it was a whole revolution in British culture and media and society. He said, We only had an hour, so I just focused it on this one agency with these three guys in it. He said, But we could have made a whole series, and I I said to him, Okay, I might do that in my book. Would that be all right with you? He went, sure. He was really cool about it, you know. So I I told this publisher that's what I wanted to do, and said, Okay, and then I interviewed everyone else about that whole subject, and it was like a fun book, really funny, it's full of kind of really good anecdotes, really like funny anecdotes about the things all these young kids got up to, you know, where like, oh, one minute I was living on a council estate, and the next minute I'm like 24 and I own a Ferrari, right? It was literally stories like that because I wrote a jingle for fucking cornflakes. And I found that so fascinating and inspiring and funny. And so, really, that's what it was. It was mainly like it was funny stories, but I also kind of wanted to tell a sort of an inspirational story about how people, if they just have smart ideas and a little bit of confidence about them, can make something out of that for themselves, whoever they are and wherever they come from. And that was an idea that appealed to me.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

That's really interesting, actually, because I actually have a personal connection to that through Alan Parker, believe it or not, because my uncle was the do you remember when Corona, the fitty drink Corona? Oh, yeah. Yeah, my uncle was actually one of the kids who advertised Corona back in the early 70s. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned Alan Parker made those ads. Wow. Yeah, yeah, took real shines. My uncle could think he was you know good acts of this kind of carry on. But yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:52

Well, Alan Parker was one of the things that he did was he cast real people rather than actors. So until then, if you look at adverts from like the 50s or the early 60s, right? Everyone in adverts is very formal and they all talk like this in BBC English. And Alan Parker said, if you want to make ads that are going to make ordinary people who actually go to the supermarket and buy these products, sit up and laugh and listen, right? You've got to make ads that are real people like them in. So he started casting he he he didn't cast actors. He would he would put calls out, normal kids and people who weren't professional actors to just act like themselves in the ads, and they were really, really popular. And they were like very different advertising now. So, like, I mean, every ad's really irritating. Like all those football ads where there's supposed football fans who we as football fans know don't look or behave anything like any football fan you've ever met. Alan Parker was like the opposite of that, he would make everything as authentic as possible. And then his first movie was Bugsy Malone. I don't know if you've seen that, but because his ads with kids in were so popular because he was so good at getting really funny performances out of kids, he decided he wanted to make a film. No one would give him a chance because he'd only made adverts. So he wrote a whole film starring kids because he thought then I can go to like movie studios and say, Look, I've got a track record of directing kids, let me do it.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

And Bugsy Balone is like an all-time classic. It is a great film, to be fair. I mean, obviously, we could have been anything that we wanted to be. That can't the amount of times I've gone to my nieces and nephews' um school and they've sung that they're leaving it temperately.

SPEAKER_03 39:26

It's a banger.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

It's an absolute banger. But the question I wanted to ask, on the other hand, was did you have any like favourite stories you got out of the book? As you said, you got about the Ferrari and all that. Is there any one you thought, in hell, I didn't see that one coming?

SPEAKER_03 39:40

Oh my god, like so many, so many. I mean, I don't know where to start. I mean, there was one, I think it might have been I wrote another book that was related to advertising, which was called Mad Men and Bad Men, and it was about the relationship between ad people and politicians that got particularly big in the 80s because Margaret Thatcher hired Sarchi and Sarchi and they were a very big influence on her, you know, and then everyone wanted to do it, and so you had all these crazy ad people working with quite stuffy politicians, and it was very funny. And there was a story by one guy, he had a meeting with former Conservative leader and Prime Minister Edward Heath, who was a very stuffy old-fashioned posh guy, and they invited him to their offices to have a meeting about making some adverts for the Conservatives, and him and all of his like assistants were very boring, they came in pinstripe suits, and these ad people were trying to get them excited about the ideas, but they were just didn't show them anything. They said the meet went really badly, so they invited them back for another meeting, and this bloke's boss said to him, You need to do something, lay on some food and some good wine. We've got to get these guys revved up a bit about our ideas. So this guy got amphetamin, basically some speed that he just had, because they were all like all these ad guys were like off their tits half the time, and he he got all this expensive canopies from somewhere like Fortnum and Mason, and he laid them all out in the meeting room. And before they arrived, he sprinkled a tiny dusting of speed all over like all over the sandwiches and the sausage rolls and all of that, and all these stuffy like old Tories come in and the meeting starts and they're stuffy and boring, and then they start eating loads. And Ted Heath was a big guy. I mean, he was like a big fat greedy bloke, and he's eating loads of it. And this geezer in the book is saying, I'm looking at him thinking, Jesus Christ, I didn't think he was going to eat so many of these. And he said, by the end of the meeting, we couldn't get rid of them. They're all going, come on, let's rewrite everything, let's come up with a whole new idea for the economy while we're here. He said it was like mad. You had like basically a c a conservative cabinet as if they were like on coke, and they were just like, they wouldn't leave the room. They wanted to talk about every idea that they'd ever had. And yeah, that was sort of that kind of demonstrated. And there was a lot of that stuff, drugs like Tim Bell, who's an advertising go-work, such and such. He he became Thatcher's right-hand man, and he had loads of stories just being in 10 Downing Street going into the loo to like top up with lines before going back in to meet with her. So it was a lot of like clash of culture stuff, you know.

SPEAKER_00 42:08

Ted Eve on Whiz going, do you know what, lads? It'd be a great idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring back the milk for the kids. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:15

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I had a I had a question for you, Sam. So obviously, you you've written a few books now. Have you ever have you ever thought about combining your love for West Ham with with some of your writing? Is there any particular period of time in West Ham's history you would you'd find interesting to write about?

SPEAKER_03 42:30

I would really love to write a book about West Ham one day. I'm not sure exactly what it would be, but I think if I did write it, it would probably be about growing up in the 80s and 90s and you know, about both the team and my own kind of experience of growing up and the role that being a West Ham fan played in my upbringing, really, you know, in the way in which it gave me a sense of identity, you know, because when we're young, men were all searching for identity. When you look back on your youth, there's there are struggles. As you get older, you don't you don't see them when you're going through them all the time because you you're resilient when you're a kid. And you but you you know, when you get to my age, you look back and you think of times where you weren't happy, let's say you weren't getting on with your mates, other things happen, like school's not going well, or you're not like you know, then you get to the age where you're like, you know, you you're obsessed with girls and that's not going well, or whatever, you know, you have your ups and downs. And I realised more and more that like without West Ham, I didn't have a dad around. I mean, this is not like get it get your violins out or anything, but life is tough for everyone at that age, I think. And I think it would have been a lot tougher without West Ham because I had a constant. Do you see what I mean? And I and I had mates who went to West Ham who would be my mates, whatever, because they were what because we had this shared love of the club and with shared ritual of going to Upton Park to watch them. And it meant that you had something that was permanent and that you grew to identify with. And that might all sound a little bit pretentious, but when I think about West Ham, I think about it I mean, I don't want to be over the top, but I think it's just been like it's played a part in my life. That's as significant as a role a loved one might play. Do you know what I mean? And I think people say family, and it sounds like a cliche. It's not quite the same as family, but it's a constant in your life that's always there and that you feel really proud of, even when times are bad. In fact, sometimes you feel more proud when times are bad. Like the fact that we've been relegated, but they just said that we've sold 42,000 season tickets. You sort of think, yeah, fuck you, Tottenham. Imagine if you'd gone down. Half the Spurs fans I know who are crowing, don't go. Or they say things like, I did go, but under Conte, the football was so boring I didn't renew my season ticket. And you think, yeah, that's not West Ham. That West Ham are not like that. And you know, it's like the classic is when we're losing 4-1 to Forrest in the FA Cup semi-final in 91, and everyone's singing Billy Bond's Cloud Blue Army. That to me is like it's those moments. Maybe it's a loser mentality, but it's those moments that make you proud to be West Ham. Because the whole point is we're the opposite of glory hunters. We step up even more when times are tough. So that's one of the things that sort of gave me a sense of belonging and pride and almost like security. So, anyway, these are the sort of ideas I would like to one day write about. I've written articles about this sort of thing, but one day I might write a book about it, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:15

But it's true, you're right. It's yeah, for all the shit that goes on in your life, your football club is somewhat always your constant, it's always there through thickness in, you know, you can have different girlfriends, different mates, you can have all the different things in the world, but you always stuck with your football club through, you know, better or worse. Different different jobs.

SPEAKER_03 45:32

Yeah. Now you're going for a bad time at work, we've all had that, and then but you turn up, like maybe you've been in the office, you've had a shit time, you hate your boss, or what they hate you, or whatever. And then like it's Wednesday night, so you leave the office, you go straight to the ground, you see your mates, and you're shouting and screaming, and it all disappears, doesn't it? All that sort of anxiety and stress disappears. And you know, I'm so grateful to have had it, even in the bad times, because I think I think at times in my life, had I not had it, what would I have done? You know, it would have made a bad situation much worse without West Ham there.

SPEAKER_00 46:03

No, I can't disagree with that, and I think you're really tapping into something there. And we'll talk about how you know football can play a really great role in men's mental health later on in the interview, because I think it's something I'd really like to discuss with you a little bit later on. But before we get to that, as you mentioned before, between 2009 and 2011, you served as editor-in-chief of Heat magazine, which at the time was really at the heart of the cult cultural zeitgeist difficulty. So, what is it like working, you know, talking about mental health? What was it like working in that high octane position at a time where printed media has still got that little bit of a stronghold for the internet really?

SPEAKER_03 46:37

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was it was very big. We were like, you know, some weeks, it was weekly. I'd never worked on a weekly before, I'd worked on monthlies, and even then I'd had a few years out of magazines before the heat job came along. So I was a little bit out practice even on monthly, and then suddenly that you get thrown into doing a weekly, it's relentless. It's a huge team, much bigger than anything I'd ever been involved with on a monthly magazine. Monthly magazines is like a leisure job. You know, you sit around getting pissed for two weeks, then in the next two weeks, you're like that you just stay up all night, also getting pissed, but in the office, right? Trying to send all the final pages in the last two weeks in a rush. That's the way it used to work. But on Heat, it was like, oh my god, you just like you don't have any time to breathe between one magazine and the next. It's hugely competitive because there was about six or seven other magazines doing the same thing as Heat was who you're competing with every week for readership. And just a change of like 10,000, 20,000 copies up or down can make a huge difference to business, can make a huge difference to your job security. It's like being a football manager. So it was a stressful job, but it was a lot of fun. And some weeks we would sell 500,000 copies. I mean, there is there was no magazine that would sell. I'd be surprised if there's many magazines you sell one tenth of that a week now, you know. But there was a very big struggle to like get the cover right. Who you had on the cover and what you said on the cover could make the difference of 50,000 to 100,000 sales one way or the other. You've got bosses breathing down your neck, they're looking at the figures constantly. I came from like a lad mag background. Saw the bosses hardly ever. You were just like, you could just coast and sort of as long as you made it funny, you were gonna kind of tick over all right. And when men's mags were really big, advertisers were gonna advertise in your pages whatever, as long as you didn't stop selling completely. It was very, very much more intense environment at heat. But oh my god, what a privilege to have done it. And it was like really amazing people work there, and Jesus, like the sort of stuff we'd just had our first kid, and like I'd come home to like a suburban domestic life, but the things that I had been involved with that day, or the messages I continued to get on my phone, sometimes like insane stuff from celebrities or their lawyers or their agents, or you know, like when I'm changing a nappy and putting my daughter to bed, it was so many weird and funny things would happen all the time. Well, I think the obvious question there was what are the weird and funny things that happen when you're I'm actually I remember having to get cash for a hooker. Well, I say a hooker, Heidi Fleiss was a famous Hollywood madam who like ran, you know, like an elite escort ring in Hollywood for like all the film stars and film directors, right? And she'd become very famous. I think she'd done a reality show on MTV, and then she came and did Celebrity Big Brother in the UK. You know, the biggest thing for Heat really was reality TV and reported on reality TV. And what would happen in here in X Factor or Big Brother, when someone left the house, when someone was evicted, there was a sort of a system whereby you would send someone down, one of your staff. I would never do it myself because it would be on a Saturday or a Friday night, but you'd send like a senior member of your team down, and when someone was evicted, they would all gather in a room. So the representative of Heat plus the representative of I don't know Now and Closer and various other mags, and they would all gather in one room, and then the agent and the producer of the show would come in and you would all bid in real time for who was going to get the first interview in the exclusive, right? And they would sell two exclusives, one to the Sunday papers and one to a magazine. So you wouldn't have to get involved in bidding against the Sunday papers. Although sometimes a Sunday paper would come to you and say, Do you want to team up on this? Let's pull our money and own this together, whatever. And you'd send them down, you know, and I and I would be on the phone telling them how much they could go to. So they'd go, listen, so and so we're we're a bit surprised because such and such magazine have just like pulled out hundred grand for, I don't know, like whoever it was, you know, Ollie Murs or something, right? 100 grand for Ollie Murs. How far can we go? And I'm sitting at home with my baby daughter in one arm and I'm like eating a takeaway curry with the other, and I'm like, go to 120, but that's it. They're probably bluffing, you know. And anyway, so you'd bid, we bid and this one particular time, she'd Heidi Fleiss had been in Sebig Brother, we'd bid for however much, we won the auction. The next day she was going to do a photo shoot before flying back to LA on the Sunday. She was doing the photo shoot, and she wanted cash surprise, surprise. So somebody who's worked in the escort industry, right? She wanted some sort of cash top-up for what we were doing. And I was out on a Saturday, my daughter was taking to a walking apart, and someone's called up and said, Listen, we're at the photo shoot. I I hadn't turned up to, it was at a hotel in Common Garden. And she's saying she won't go on unless we give her something like 10 grand in an envelope now. And I go, Oh, tell her to wait, we'll do it tomorrow or Monday. No, no, she's going back to LA literally tonight. If not, we won't have a cover for next week. How do I get 10 grand cash? Like, obviously, there's no one in the office in the accounts department of the magazine offices. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get every credit card I've got, and I'm gonna just try and max them all out at different cash points, and then I'm gonna come to the hotel with the money, and I'm had to call a couple of other people so they can max out their credit cards as well, so we could piece together 10 grand. And I've got my like one-year-old daughter in the back, you know. I'm going, we're not going to the park now. And I'm just riding around London, stopping at cash points, maxing it out, shoving it in an envelope, and then turning up a hotel to hand it over to this famous Hollywood prostitute, you know, so she would complete the photo shoot, so then we would have it for that week's magazine. But although it's funny, probably at the time, my head was in a really stressed place. Because I'm thinking, if I don't get this, then we've blown the money we've already spent, and whoever gets it, it was worth it in terms of the sales it would generate. It wasn't just spending money for the sake of it. So although it's all like mad bollocks, and then like I remember when I first got, I was very naive because I'd worked in magazines, I'd written about pop culture. I just was like a funny writer, really, writing about I used to interview bands and actors and directors and stuff like that. And then suddenly they gave me this job, and I was very good at the features side, but I knew nothing about the hard-bitten world of like news. And someone comes to me, one of the journalists comes to me and says, Listen, this famous model, Model X, has been having a long-term secret affair with this famous Premier League footballer. They've got a secret love den, they're both married, they've got a love child together, and they meet every couple of weeks at this secret love den cottage that they rent together, and no one else knows about, but we've found out, but we never know when they're gonna turn up, so we can't station a photographer there the whole time. So we've got this guy who we work with on cases like this, he used to be in the SAS and he's got access to a lot of like covert equipment. And so, what he's gonna do is he's gonna bury night vision cameras in the flower bed at the front of this cottage because we've got the address, and then whenever anyone turns up and walks in the house, the cameras will automatically activate, kind of come out of the soil and film them. And that's how we'll get our images of this love tryst, right? It's a very famous glamour model and a very famous footballer. And I'm listening to this, it's like my first week. And you've got to understand, till then I was just doing things like interviewing pop stars, right? And I'm like, what? Say that all again and says it. And I go, We're gonna play an essay. I thought this magazine was just like we ran funny pictures of celebrities and wrote a funny caption underneath. And then you're asked, no, you've got to like you're competing with tabloids here. So I I said, All right, what do you think? It was like the head of news who told me it. So I had to sort of went, No, this is a big story. Yeah, this is massive, we'll sell a million copies. Okay, do it, I suppose. Does it? And then I I sort of forgot about it. And then like a month later, I go, What happened with that? Well, he's not returning calls now, this SAS geezer. And I said, Well, tell him we want the cameras. And she said, Well, he he's just not returned the calls, or I don't know how we'll get the cameras back. And I'm like freaking out, oh fucking, I'll go and dig them up myself. Right, getting really angry, right? And then in the end, I think I was paying another ex-SAS guy, a rival one, go because the other guy was just trying to like keep the camera and like charge us more money to get it back off him. Turns out he's like really dodgy. So I've hired another bloke to go and retrieve the cameras, and it's like this is not the world I thought I'd be in. I've got two ex-soldiers who are like now kind of private detective mercenaries who are fighting over some love den in Surrey where allegedly there's been a love trist going on between a model and a footballer. At anyway, I remember calling it Project Penguin because we had to keep it really secret between me and just a couple of people and stuff. And the money just racked up and racked up for months as I tried to get these cameras back. I was throwing good money over bad. And that was the sort of shit that just happened to me every day. It was such a weird, weird time. Did you ever get it? No. No, you didn't get it. Never. I think the whole looking back, I think the whole thing was bollocks. And I don't know what the agenda was. Maybe she brought it to me thinking it was true. Maybe she brought it to me knowing it wasn't true and was fucking with me because I was the new boss. I don't know. Yeah, I'll never I'll never know. But to be honest, it's the sort of thing you think I might get sacked over this. Of course not, because they were used to it. Shit like that was happening all the time.

SPEAKER_01 55:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Got to spread your spread your uh bets, haven't you? Um so what was what was that kind of culture change like going from sort of a lad mag's background and the culture of running that to sort of more female-oriented market? I mean, was that a big shift for you to sort of get into that headspace or yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:04

Well, I'd had a few years just freelancing. I hadn't worked sort of in a lad mag for a few years, so the time had changed as well. Maybe the culture had changed somewhat. I think I've been working at Five Live on the radio quite a lot just before that, doing a lot of sort of football and sports stuff. So it was different. I mean, management was something that I wasn't really used to on that scale. I'm not a natural manager, I don't think. I thought that if I generated the right kind of creative atmosphere and led by example, that'd be enough. And it was to some degree, and I'm still kind of good friends with some of the people I worked with there, and they've been really kind about what that era was like on the mag. But at the same time, you've got to, in some ways, be like an aloof bastard in a room. I never had like my own office. I've sat out in the open playing office and stuff like that. And you know, yeah, there was about 40 people working for me, 95% women, and even like the small number of guys were mainly gay. Not that that made a difference, but there was certainly like a it was a fun place to be, and everyone was very funny. Like it was a it was like people were really funny, which I liked. But when I first got there, I suppose I had to watch my P's and Q's a little bit with some of the like laddy kind of humour. I mean, like I I tell you one thing that's relevant to this that's quite funny is that like when I first got there at the time I was a regular on Stop Hammer Time, which was one of the first West Ham podcasts is still going now. And I'd been sort of going in as regular guests with those guys for like a while, and we used to use an office in Mary-Labone for it. And obviously, I still go now, it's still a great podcast, you should listen to it. But one week they said we've got Frank McAveny to come on as a guest. We didn't often have players, and I was thrilled because it was so my ear, and Frank McAveny's such a hero. And anyway, I can't remember why this happened, but in the Heat offices, there was also a radio station called Heat Radio, which was a digital radio station, and we had a really nice little radio studio built into the magazine newsroom in the corner. It was really nice with a whole desk and then mics, and it was done really nicely. And I said, Oh, I really want to do this, but I don't think I'm gonna be able to get away to get up to Maribone to do it in time. And in the end, the bloke who was like the producer of the show who runs the production company that makes it, I can't remember how we came to this, but he said, Could we do it at yours? And I went, Yeah, sure. We've even got a fucking radio studio here. I'll get one of the producers to set it all up. So he goes, All right, that'll be good because it'll get the deal over the line because Frank's still a little bit like probably gonna be there, but we're not sure. But if we tell him it's at Heat's offices, it might get over the line. So I go, okay. And I've only been there about a month, and it was amazing because I'm at my desk and suddenly Frank McIvenney's walked into my office on crutches, right? And of course, he's looking around, and there's like a lot of girls, a lot of young, very attractive women working in that office. And we all know what Frank McAveny is like, what his proclivities are like, and he's come in like a fucking like the cat who got the cring, right? Like a kid in a sweet shop on his uh, yeah, hey, are you son? And I couldn't believe it, right? I'm fucking this is Frank McAveny in my office. I go, yeah, that's right. I'm Frank. I say, I know you are fucking hell. And he just comes into this office. I wasn't, I've never been the host of Stop Hammer Time, by the way. I was just a guest, but Phil and Jim who presented it like good mates of mine. So we all just they turn up too, the producer turns up, and it was just funny because I'm supposed to be editing the mag. There was one guy who is a big football fan in that office, who's a massive gooner, and he's about my age, and he was the uh and he'd worked there for years. He was the one who went, as soon as I heard you were becoming the boss, my new boss, this is exactly the sort of thing that I thought would happen. He went, as soon as yeah, I already knew this guy from before, and he went, As soon as I heard you were taking over here, he went, I actually probably thought within a few weeks there'll be Frank McAveny or someone like that is going to turn up in this office and he'll somehow manipulate the job to be more about West Ham than celebrity. So it was that that was one of the biggest thrills of my life, I think, looking back.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:03

Yeah, I bet that would be uh fantastic opportunity, and I bet that it was uh would love to have been a fly on the wall when Frank McCovenny walked into the uh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:11

He was wandering, he was hobbling around on his crutches and hey, sweetheart, all these. And you can imagine all that old school sort of banner with a kind of a millennial bunch of women and gay guys, it was a little bit I got a bit nervous that it might cause a situation. I thought, please don't pinch someone's ass. That stuff. It might have been fine back in the day in string fellows, but that won't go down well here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:36

But luckily he didn't. That is the end of part one of our interview with the amazing Sam Delaney. Spoke to Sam for two hours, so sadly we couldn't fit everything into one episode. But join us next week where we'll continue talking to Sam about Top Flight Time Machine, UIons, the show, Sam Delaney's news thing, amongst many other things, including his answers to the quickfire questions we ask all guests at the end of the show. But until then, Martin Godlerman, West Ham Stadium announcer, can tell you how to get in touch with the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:05

You can get in touch with the show by emailing the West Ham Syndrome, or lowercase, at gmail.com. The West Ham Syndrome at gmail.com and connecting with the show on social media at the West Ham Syndrome. Come on, you on