In Praise Of… Chris Ward

In writing these “In Praise Of…” articles every few weeks, I want to ensure that I spread the focus as wide as possible. Not just on-air talent, or programming people, but the wider community within radio and audio who regularly bust their gut, put in a shift and largely go unnoticed.

This week I want to raise a glass to someone who has diligently worked their magic in the background for a good few decades and still is a workhorse within radio. Chris Ward- a member of Global’s engineering team and (I think) still based in Birmingham. His patch though is huge and he is (very) often found in places other than Birmingham.

Chris and I first met way back in the days of Trent FM in Nottingham, when it was still in Castle Gate. I think I’m right in remembering that Chris was part of the engineering team at Mercia in Coventry, and moved to Trent. At that time the engineering team was fairly large (in today’s comparison anyway!) and Chris fitted in really well, really quickly. The building housed Trent, Gem AM and the group’s local commercial production house and so was a busy place with much to look after and Chris very quickly displayed his natural friendliness and willingness to help throughout the building.

With studios in Derby and Leicester to look after, he was immediately into the world of having a “patch”. Saying nothing bad about the other engineering team (since they were all helpful and genuinely great), Chris was the “go to” guy for anything to do with the playout system or the desk. Particularly after the move to Chapel Quarter with the digital desks. He had (and still has) and encyclopaedic knowledge of the systems, how you can bend and shape it to make it work how you want it to work, and an ability to talk in normal human speak, rather than engineer code.

Many times I would go to Chris with an idea, somewhere we wanted to do a show from, or something we needed to do that was out of the ordinary day to day. His attitude was always helpful when many might have been, “The answer is no, now what is the question”. For example, for a few years running we did an event for charity called “Dino & Pete Exposed”. The idea being to do the show live from a venue (a theatre) in front of a live audience, with a band or artist to play live and be a guest. The immediate response was to have a tech op in the studio playing music with mics and input from the remote location, but that wasn’t my vision. I wanted to build a studio on stage, play the songs from there, effectively moving the studio to the theatre stage to give an intimate feeling for the audience of actually being IN the show. Having set the challenge, Chris (with his small number of engineering colleagues, ie one other person), built a remote playout machine, got a broadcast desk from somewhere and built a studio on stage.

When I had 2 weeks to start the Hit Music Network- a forerunner to Capital network in the early days of Global buying GCap, Chris was simply superhuman. Obviously building a 24-7 network in two weeks required a LOT of logistics within programming, and I’ve posted about that before, but it also meant a LOT of extra work for the engineering team. Not just the building of the network, the commands and the configuring of the network, but the long term maintenance, upkeep and support for the network centre which would be live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Chris was invaluable, his usual unflappable self and super helpful. I would go so far as to say that without his ability to get involved, it just wouldn’t have happened. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him flustered, busy absolutely, but not flustered.

There are so many memories of Chris just enabling things to happen. Before the Global days, in GCap we held a number of events at the Arena in Nottingham. Multi-artist events, “Summer XS” and “Winter XS”- think of the likes of Hits Live etc. Whilst the event build was outsourced, the live radio element was done in-house and step in Chris Ward. He made it happen, liaised with the event company and sound crew and got us on air.

In 2012 the Olympic Torch Relay came through the country and Pete, from Dino & Pete was one of the runners. Of course we wanted to do the show from the roadside, in fact from current Radio X presenter and at the time swing presenter, James Hall’s parents’ house and from a camper van parked on the drive! Chris, ever the enabler, made it happen and we were live from 6am.

I remember one occasion- we happened to both be in Kenilworth at Capital Mid Counties, formerly Touch FM. It had not long since rebranded to Capital and I was on site as was Chris. It just to happened that we were both at the same location when the networking link- the backbone of the audio and data transfer around the group started to falter. I think it was some remote and random box in an exchange somewhere which had thrown a tantrum and decided not to work. Long story short, the networking went down group-wide for all brands about 3.30pm, meaning local shows (drive on Capital and Heart) had to begin early. It’s not as simple as just starting early, the logs are not configured correctly, the commands won’t do what you want them to, and with network playing up, there was a little issue with updating or recreating logs. On the remote site, without Chris and with new people to the network around, it could have just gone very badly wrong. Chris was again, unflappable. Helping all of his sites get on air, with workable studios and logs without a scintilla of panic. It wasn’t clear that everything would be back in time for 7pm network time either, but he stayed around to make sure all worked ok.

I mentioned that Chris is helpful and friendly, he also speaks “normal speak”, rather than “tech talk”. He isn’t alone in that, and there are many in station technology teams who can do this and it makes all the difference. He is also a really nice bloke, even when you are forced to ring him at the weekend at some ungodly hour because something has gone wrong- which I had the odd occasion to do. He might be out with his family, but he would try and help to fix it no matter what was happening.

The radio and audio industry is reliant on technology, and therefore the teams who support its use. Chris Ward is an unsung hero of those teams.