I used to know some people who claimed to have smoked crack with craig charles. Does that count?

a number of older people who have been involved with the ship based pirate radio stations and the 1960s psychedelic music scene. Sadly not all of them are still alive and those who are were often very secretive about their former work and a bit ashamed of it as like all the entertaintment industry of UK it became exploitative and abusive. Some of them even joined the govt organisations that monitor the wireless bands and hold the BBC up to compliance rules to make amends.

I do sort of work with a ex-Radio Caroline presenter from the 1980s although as he always pre-records his show I don’t think I’ve ever seen the chap. He once did ring in to complain because I put him off air for about 10 seconds whilst wiring up electricity cables but there was not other alternative (I am not going to work on live 230V electric for a volunteer job, as it was I had to stand on a wooden crate to adjust the soundprocessing), and this was after the whole station had 3 times gone off air for far longer due to the bad electric wiring. the Station Manager answered the phone, as I as on the crate but I would have just told him “look mate, back on the Ross Adje mananged to put folk off air for far longer and nearly blew the ship up [1], this is small potatoes in comparison..”

Actually Adje (the last broadcast engineer on Caroline, who seemed to be of mixed English/Dutch ancestry) is someone I would like to meet if he’s still alive… he had the impression of being a bit of a “mad scientist” type and would make these films about the station and explain them in both English and Dutch at the same time

[1] what he did was try and save them money by getting two MF signals into 1 antenna, by using a giant trafo combine them by superimposing a strong voltage at 50Hz on them. Where did he get that from? well, 400V direct from the ships generator set. I am not an radio expert compared to him, but when I saw it on youtube my first thoughts were “isn’t that a bit dangerous?”. Well it worked at low power (500W), but when they turned the TX up to its usual 15 000W the whole lot went up, sparks, flames, shoufs of “brand op de brug!” (which you never want to hear on board ship) and they must have send a electromagnetic pulse across Europe that would have freaked out the Soviets big time. No wonder they got turned them over hard a few years later and the PTT engineers who closed them down had Walther pistols! (Lots of English people think it was the Dutch Navy, or various other military authorities but they only supplied the boat, there are times when telecoms engineers get firearms licenses from their governments and that was one of them).

@Finnfinnfinn 561260 wrote:

In the uk, everyone knows someone who knows someone who smoked crack with craig chales. Similarly, everyone knows someone who knows someone whos fucked russell brand.

LOL

Well, yes, I wouldn’t recognize any of the winners of any series of X-Factor. That’s because they are famous for winning X-Factor, not actually for doing something I think of as “cool”.

If they got thrown out of X-Factor for impregnating one of the judges or setting fire to the judges to make an impression, that might make me remember them, but “winning”, as in being able to appear on stage and lip sync, no way.