RTI’s Postcard from Poprad saves Village of the Damned

Everybody is grateful to the lads for taking up the fight. We felt abandoned until RTI stepped in.

14 December 2009, Luton, Poprad : Radio Tatras International, AquaCity’s cult radio station, took on one of the world’s biggest companies to save the UK’s Village of the Damned yesterday.

Postcard from Poprad’s two grumpy old men presenters take an irreverent look at the news each week – but in their last broadcast they took on British Telecom after more than 1,000 people in a UK village were cut off from the internet.

Co-presenter Leigh G Banks said yesterday. “The internet crashed on Thursday but BT told everybody that they couldn’t do anything about it for five days – well, I live in the Village of the Damned and it looked like the show was doomed.” So began a David and Goliath battle between RTI.fm, broadcast from Poprad at the foot of Slovakia’s High Tatras mountains, and the telecoms giant.

RTI.fm’s broadcast director Eric Wiltsher, a former BT engineer, said: “Leigh phoned me because BT had basically told him the fault was with his computer and that they would only send out an engineer if he gave them £90. Yet they must have already known that everybody else in the area was off line too.
“But as soon as he told me what the symptoms were I knew that it was a problem with the exchange not individual computers.”

Leigh said: “They told me they don’t have engineers working at the weekends and that’s what the real problem was. I was livid.”

The next eight hours became a nightmare in the Village of the Damned, a small Staffordshire village that was given the nickname when a series of scandals and tragedies were revealed in the 1980s. The local post office almost ground to a halt, farmers couldn’t update their records and the village school returned to traditional teaching.
“BT wouldn’t even admit there was a fault at first,” Leigh said. “Then something really silly happened – I asked the call centre for the head office number – and they didn’t know it. A giant communications company doesn’t even know its own home phone number?”

Eric and Leigh decided to show BT up on the air. Leigh said: “We went out on the air at 1.30pm UK time and we lampooned and insulted BT mercilessly – it was hilarious.”
And amazingly, half an hour into the show the Village of the Damned was turned back on. Leigh said: “Well, the question in my mind is, if BT could fix it immediately, why did they say they couldn’t, why did they try and charge me £90 to get it sorted out and why did they keep saying there wasn’t a problem?”

The village postmaster, Peter Thompson, said: “Everybody is grateful to the lads for taking up the fight. We felt abandoned until RTI stepped in.”

Eric said: “Postcard from Poprad gets more than two million listeners a week across Europe and in America and we are being picked up by new stations all the time. People like the show because it is a vehicle that allows regular guys and gals to express their views – and because we are not afraid to take on the big boys.”

Mr Jan Telensky, Managing Director and owner of RTI.fm, said: “This is typical of the boys, always ready to fight for the underdog. I’m really pleased for the people of the village.”
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Notes for Editors

About RTI
• Radio Tatras International (RTI - Station Of The Stars TM ) was launched on 09 April 2005.
• After years of debate with the Slovak regulator, RTI was forced to end its terrestrial service.
• The final program was aired at 11.00pm CET 25 January 2009.
• In February, due to popular demand, RTI returned via www.rti.fm
• 2009 has seen PostCard From Poprad syndicated to numerous stations, even the USA (TRX!).
• RTI now continues via a transmission system based in the UK.

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