A MAN devastated by loss of a friend to suicide is doing a 7in7 half-marathon challenge May 3 to 9 to raise money for a Bradford mental health charity. Frank Cullen, who grew up in Wyke but now lives in Shipley, wanted to do the challenge for the Speak-In Club after a close friend committed suicide. It was shocking, said Frank. We had no idea what he was going through. I ve also had my battles with mental health. Three years ago I tried to commit suicide. I ended in a psychiatric hospital. I learned though that talking about your problems is best. I used to bottle everything up.
Commercial Radio was the ‘gold rush’ of the late 1980s, and everyone and anyone wanted a piece of the action. There were rock stars, impresarios, lawyers, sportsmen, public relations gurus, stockbrokers and socialites, all prospecting for a licence to print money.
These licences, awarded by the Independent Radio & Television Commission (IRTC), were cheap and they held the promise of easy money for the influential, the fortune and the favoured. The reality turned out to be a little different. The road to radio riches was eventually littered with casualties, but only after the initial euphoria had worn off.
The way it worked was that the ‘movers and shakers’ formed themselves into competing groups, appeared before hearings in the National Concert Hall in Dublin and eventually the licences were doled out. If you weren’t involved you weren’t really a player in the Dublin financial/entertainment scene of the time.