One thing I quickly learnt when I was working as a "producer" (answering phones) on the late night phone in was that people love to commit suicide live on air. I suppose there's a couple of basic reasons for this...
1) It's a cry for help. You want someone to stop you and help you but the only way you can think of getting that help is to do it on as public a platform as possible. I suppose the modern day equivalent would be writing a facebook post to tell everyone you've just taken an overdose... but of course, we didn't have facebook back then.
2) It's a cry for attention. You don't want anyone to stop you but you do want people to know what you've done. And maybe give a big old F-U to the world in the process. Like those people who throw themselves off motorway bridges, regardless of the consequences to others.
From the point of view of a phone-in show, suicides are a pain in the arse... but they also make riveting radio. Nobody's turning off the go to bed while that call's on.
I think it's fair to say that neither of the presenters I worked with during my time on the phone-in wanted to exploit someone in their darkest hour; they always genuinely wanted to help. We wouldn't automatically put someone on air if they called up claiming to have taken an overdose. The first thing I had to do was try to get them to take help. Work out where they were, if it was a genuine threat or just a wind-up, get a number we could pass on to the police, that sort of thing. If they wouldn't give that information to me, I would try to get them to call Samaritans. There were all kinds of rules: moral, ethical, legal. But ultimately, every situation was different. And a lot of people wouldn't call up and say they wanted to kill themselves, they'd only reveal that fact when they'd got on air. It was a minefield.
On many occasions, we did get people help. I lost count of the times I had to call 999 (the quickest way of getting through to the police back then... we never had a direct line, despite the frequency of this occurrence) and go through the motions of passing on someone's number, often while the presenter kept them talking. Or the times an on-air conversation would end when the police came knocking at the caller's front door... or pulled up outside their phone box.
Suicides always made the switchboards go wild. After we'd had one on, you could guarantee callers for the rest of the show. A lot would be offering help, advice and support. Telling their own stories of times that they'd felt a similar way and how they'd managed to turn their lives around. But we'd also get a few... less sympathetic... reactions too. At the time (budding writer that I was), I kept a notebook and I dug it out and found my Top 3 reactions to such a call. They're virtually word-for-word the things people said to me at the time...
1. "I'd like to complain. People do not want to hear this sort of thing on the radio. They want gardening tips, stuff like that. Cut this bloke off now or I'm writing to Offcom."
2. "This bloke you've got on now... he doesn't know anything. I lost a leg in the war. He's got it easy! Tell him to stop moaning. He doesn't know how good he's got it."
3. "Give him my number. One good night with me and he'd forget all his problems..."
Heartless bastards, right? Then again... after a while, I became rather inured to these kinds of callers myself. They stopped being stressful, they became just another niggle of the job. You develop a morbid sense of humour, like ambulance drivers or A&E doctors, I guess. It's a way of coping. At the time, I was really into Julian Cope, and so it didn't take long before I gave these callers a nickname. They were Peggies. "Another bloody Peggy on line 2 - I'll call the police." It wasn't that I didn't have sympathy for their situations, but at the end of the day, if things are really that bad... seek professional help. Don't call a bloody radio phone-in. You don't call a plumber if you've got an ingrowing toenail, do you?
40. Indeep - Last Night A DJ Saved My Life
A song that has been claimed and repurposed by dance culture over the last couple of decades, but I still have a certain fondness for the original, particularly the clunky rap towards the end...
