To broadcast on hospital radio you first have to go round the wards and collect requests from patients. This is at once the most horribly sobering and incongruously hilarious thing to do. It’s hilarious because what you are asking is so entirely out of place. People look up at you, as they lie there, dying, and you have to cheerily enquire what sort music they would like to hear this evening. Many of the ones that are relatively well will ask for something, but most of the time they just shake their heads sadly, sometimes they will actually laugh in a hollow, derisive way as if to say “Here I am with a few precious weeks left and you are asking me if I want to listen to The Beach Boys? Get out, just get out!”
I go through this whole darkly comic musical charade one a week and as a result I am now an expert on the various labyrinthine wards of my local hospital. It’s part of radio policy that you aren’t supposed to know what each ward caters for, but eventually you start to pick up clues. The amount of pink and scrunched newborns on the neonatal ward, for example, that’s a big clue. The lack of limbs (and profusion of iodene covered stumps) on the amputation ward, thats a big clue. What all the wards seemingly have in common, though, regardless of specialism, is pipes.
I am now an expert on the varieties of plastic piping that can come out of any one individual. I’ve seen so many pipes. Pipes from mouths, noses, sides of throats, pipes disappearing ominously into torsos, and each one filled with viscous liquids of interesting and organic colours ranging from your standard red to a hideous bile-y green. I don’t know if these pipes are syphoning things off or pumping things in - but they are probably doing both. At first I tried not to look at the pipes as I found them actively distressing but now I can’t stop looking at them. Equally, what you learn over time is that the pipes themselves are excellent conversational fodder. “Nice pipe” you can say to a patient who is trying to remember the name of that singer they like. “Thanks” they will say, and sometimes they will lift up their gown to show you some more of their pipes, or the raw, scared surface of their stomach “Heres the operation I had done at Guys” they will say proudly, and after the first few times you will be able to say “Oh! That’s interesting.” rather than just veering away and blindly retching.
Oftentimes the pipe-people, or patients as they prefer to be known, will try to communicate with you on a subject that isn’t music. This is a bad sign. Many of these pipe-people are old and heavily medicated and their conversation is surreal at best and often full of anger. You just have to vaguely listen to their ramblings and try to back away at the first available opportunity. The other day a woman spent a good ten minutes (though it felt infinitely longer) just rambling vitriolically on. I couldn’t pick much sense out of it. But I think she might have been asking me to avenge her death. She spent a good deal of time talking about the Medway Crown Court system, and how they had wronged her family. She had written down the names of wicked judges on a napkin and tried to get me to take it so I could track them down and - I suppose - kill them.
Another man, before I could even open my mouth to say “Hospital radio, can we play you a song tonight?” screamed...
“I’m not mad!”
Retrospectively, this should have been a huge clue. That and the fact that his feet were fastened to the bed with cloth loops.
There followed a five minute exchange in which he offered the immortal words...
“Have you seen the ghost what walks around this hospital? Some say he is massive and covered in black hair but others say he is small and completely hairless!”
“Have you seen the ghost what walks around this hospital? Some say he is massive and covered in black hair but others say he is small and completely hairless!”
Well, one or the other...
The most worrying thing is that these people aren’t even mentally ill, or rather, they aren’t first and foremost mentally ill. There is a whole other area given over to those who are. Diamond Ward...
Because one of my most persistent fears is that I will one day go completely mental and end up in a facility like Diamond Ward, I try to avoid collecting the song requests of its residents. On the few occasions that I’ve gone in I’ve seen myself reflected in their sedated, chemically-glazed eyes, as well as in their fondness for Joni Mitchell (who I love and who, if requests are anything to go by, is now the Grande Dame of acute mental illness) My decision to steer clear of the ward was cemented when a radio-collegue breezily recounted the following...
“I was in Diamond Ward and one of the patients had got into the hallway and was crawling on all fours, but backwards, with her back arched and her head towards the ceiling, just making her way along the ward towards the hall, screaming quietly to herself.”
I couldn’t imagine how someone could scream quietly and I didn’t want to.
“So I went and told one of the nurses “I think we could do with your help out here, one of the people in your care is traveling crab-wise into the outside world” and she just nodded at me and said “Oh, don’t mind her, she is just having her ‘funny five minutes’”
I would have said that once you have been admitted in to a NHS psychiatric facility and are crawling about exorcist fashion the phrase ‘funny five minutes’ doesn’t fully encompass the seriousness of your situation any more. But then, I’m no doctor.
The studio from which the radio show is actually broadcast is deep within the bowels of the hospital itself and while I want to say that it is much less unnerving than the wards, it really isn’t.
For one thing they built it next to the morgue.
On the other side of the morgue is the cafe.
I wish I were joking.
Sadly, you aren’t really allowed to reference the morgue during the show itself. It’s difficult to know how to close each broadcast and while I usually end on a Leonard Cohen song (to ease patients into the evening and also to finish off any stragglers) I spent ages trying to convince co-workers to let me end the show with the line “That’s it from the request show tonight, I’ve been Anna Savory and I’ve got to go now as I can hear movement from the morgue...” But there were no takers. Too disturbing, they said.
The irony of this, though, is that the phrase ‘too disturbing’ takes on whole new levels of meaning once you have been exposed to the radio station jingles, which are, really, deeply distressing. Call to mind the incredibly grating and nerve-jangling affairs that are professional radio jingles. And then try to imagine amateur versions of those. These jingles rub against your soul.
The jingle that precedes my show explains the fact that people (ie. me) will be coming round the wards to collect song requests, but rather than just saying “People will be coming round the ward to collect your song requests” a pre-recorded mock-cheerful voice proclaims “look out for our representatives around the wards who will be armed with their highly dangerous clip-boards and dodgy smiles”
If all of your essential organs didn’t twist in on themselves while reading that you may be unembarrassable! What exactly is a dodgy smile? And why does it make me sound like a colossal pervert? Why are clip-boards dangerous? That doesn’t even make sense! It is all said in a really jocular way as if to imply ‘Ha, ha, of course our workers would never leer in a faintly sexual fashion at you and then beat you to death with their clipboards’ But whose mind goes there anyway? Who needs to be reassured that that won’t happen? Why even imply it? Every time I hear the jingle it makes me long for the chance to compose my own.
If all of your essential organs didn’t twist in on themselves while reading that you may be unembarrassable! What exactly is a dodgy smile? And why does it make me sound like a colossal pervert? Why are clip-boards dangerous? That doesn’t even make sense! It is all said in a really jocular way as if to imply ‘Ha, ha, of course our workers would never leer in a faintly sexual fashion at you and then beat you to death with their clipboards’ But whose mind goes there anyway? Who needs to be reassured that that won’t happen? Why even imply it? Every time I hear the jingle it makes me long for the chance to compose my own.
Admittedly it would just be a few ukelele chords and then an 80s style female backing group singing “Look out for Anna, she’ll be starin’ at yah pipes” but in a way isn’t that vastly superior and more accurate than what is currently in place? I can’t really complain though, it’s entirely voluntary work, I could leave any time if I genuinely found the jingles too painful, or the patients too cryptically disturbing or Diamond Ward too unsettlingly familiar. But it is good fun, in a faintly ghoulish way, and also sometimes you discover new music... or new information about pipes.
Anyway, I must go now, I hear movement from the morgue.
