WELCOME BACK AND A HAPPY 2011 TO ALL FOLLOWERS OF A1 VOX!

It’s time to clean your pipes and get ready for some vocally uplifting New Year action – WAHEY – OO ER MISSUS!

I hope you had a gorgeous break and managed to stuff yourself stupid. And so another year begins..........................................

On returning to VOX towers I thought I had developed 'Turkey Brain' as I could clearly hear the cooing of a pigeon....................coming from the stationery cupboard!

I felt the need to arm myself with a broom and plastic bag, though why they would help me if a rat with wings decided to take flight round the office I still don’t know.

The noise seemed to get louder as if the bird knew I was about to attack it and cause death by Tesco asphyxiation.

Luckily Charles came to the rescue with the knowledge that the bird wasn’t actually ‘in’ the office but just as damn well close as it could get!

There appears to be a pocket in the brick work which makes a nice warm resting perch for cold feathered friends. They can work their way right in and apparently all that is keeping us from them is a piece of plywood behind the stationery cupboard – hence why said cooing seems to be coming from inside the room. Mystery Solved and the bird lives to see another day – Coo-phew.

“That’s a nice pair of Secateurs!”

Not a phrase one hears too often but I did hear it in the office this week as Chris and Charles looked over the merits of this common gardening tool.

We get a lot of random post through our door including a brochure for Frances Hilary - Covent Garden’s resident gardening store – hence Chris’ outburst. It is a lovely little find and gardening has never looked so good! Check it out if green’s your bag.

Roger Allam popped in to VOX Towers for some New Year cheer this week.

Roger is sometimes heralded as one of Britain’s least known but most brilliant actors. You have probably seen his face and heard his voice in a plethora of media platforms. He is best known for his stage performances especially as the original Javert in Les Miserables. It is his voice that can be heard on the original cast recording of the same show.

He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1981 and has been with them for many seasons ever since.

He has been nominated three times for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor, winning in 2001, for his role as Captain Terri Denis in a revival of Privates on Parade. He has also been nominated for, and won, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Roger diversifies his stage roles from appearances with the RSC to pantomime performances such as playing villainous Abanazar in Aladdin at the Old Vic theatre, co-starring Ian McKellen, Maureen Lipman and Sam Kelly.

Apart from treading the boards Roger has appeared in TV and film. In 2006 he appeared in Stephen Frears' The Queen, starring Oscar-winner Dame Helen Mirren, as the Queen's private secretary.

Roger has also re-teamed with Stephen Frears in Tamara Drewe, the film version of Posy Simmond's popular comic strip. Allam plays the self-centred and serially unfaithful crime novelist, Nicholas Hardiment, who is bewitched by London journalist Tamara Drewe, played by Gemma Arterton. The film received critical buzz at the 2010 Cannes film festival and the Mail on Sunday described his performance as 'wonderfully sleazy'.

A great tribute to Roger comes from the late, great, Arthur Miller, who in the closing chapter of his Timebends autobiography (1987) writes: "To play Adrian....in the 1986 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Archbishop's Ceiling, Roger Allam gave up the leading role as Javert in the monster hit Les Misérables because he had done it over sixty times and thought my play more challenging for him at that moment of his career. Nor did he consider his decision a particularly courageous one. This is part of what a theatre culture means and it is something few New York actors would have the sense of security even to dream of doing."

A marvellous accolade and to me sums up the magnitude of Roger's talent. An honour to have met him.

Millionaire Ivan Massow came to visit VOX Towers and we made sure we had the posh coffee on, though we needn't have bothered for this was one very 'un-millionaire' type of man. Simon Cowell watch and learn!

Ivan is best known for changing financial services in the wake of the 1980s Aids crisis when he campaigned to abolish higher insurance premiums for gay people.

Ivan was born in Brighton as Ivan Field, the son of a policeman, John Field, whom Ivan has described as "abusive". His mother left the relationship and remarried, before giving Ivan up for adoption at the age of 12, aiming to give him a better life. He was adopted by a bachelor businessman, John Massow, taking his surname. Later, after Massow had come out as gay, his adoptive father broke off all contact.

This guy did not have your regular start in life and a lot of people, having had this type of upbringing, would have ended up in the gutter. Not Ivan Massow – he worked hard against all the odds and continues to campaign for everything that he believes in.

Never one to mince his words, Ivan wrote a piece for the New Statesman magazine in which he attacked the predominance of conceptual art describing it as "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat" and "the product of over-indulged, middle-class [...], bloated egos who patronise real people with fake understanding". He called the ICA a "pillar of the shock establishment" and personally attacked Tracey Emin saying she "couldn't think her way out of a paper bag". Don’t hold back now Massow!


Something that a lot of people don’t know is that Ivan is severely dyslexic and left education with an O-level in metalwork and a BTEC in art and design. As a 'closeted' homosexual working within the financial services industry, he experienced the homophobia that typified the early 1990s mortgage and life assurance industry.

Massow saw how gay men were penalised for their sexuality when they applied for financial services. In a time of increasing HIV rates, gay men were seen as high-risk and required to pay much higher premiums than other customers, whatever their circumstances.

These premium increases could be as high as 600%.

In 1990, Massow started a financial services business from a squat in Kentish Town, North London, having failed to find funding for his idea. With his acquired industry experience, Massow was able to source ways for gay people to take-up mortgages and insurance at equal rates, rather than suffer the standard rejection of every insurer.

By using the industry's computerised ‘automatic underwriting' systems, he was able to smuggle his clients through using said tool. By 1997, Massow's firm, Massow Financial Services, had become the 10th largest Independent Financial Adviser in the UK and was valued at £22 million.

Our own Mr Nove conducted an interview with Ivan, just before Christmas and even though this guy has amassed a small fortune for himself you can see that it is his beliefs and seeing justice done that is more important to this self made chap than pound signs.

This can be confirmed by Ivans answer to the question: now he is better off, does he feel happier?

“No, because the most miserable times in my life have usually involved money. I had a partner in my early 30s who used to earn obscene amounts, but our lives became very shallow, aloof and dysfunctional.

I found no pleasure travelling in private jets, for example – there's a buzz doing it the first time, but afterwards it becomes an isolating experience. His love of excess destroyed our relationship and in the end I gave away my share of the businesses we owned just to leave as an expensive exit. Afterwards I'd never been happier”.

Just goes to prove the age old saying that money doesn’t buy you happiness. But being able to afford your partner taking you to the cleaners, and thus taking that ‘expensive exit’ when reality hits, is still a privileged position to be in me thinks!

So a very interesting man and someone that I feel will be popping up on our radars again and again.

This week sees the return of Brian Blessed to A1. Brian keeps in shape by climbing up large mountains. About the only thing on Earth larger than Brian Blessed is Mount Everest, which he has attempted to scale three times without ever quite reaching the summit. Lets see if we can find out how the 'King of Ham' spent his Christmas and New Year – until then – catch you next week 2011 Voxers!!!!

DIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!