Boy, I miss the fun I had with this little beauty, a phone scanner I bought in the early 90s after being 'turned onto' it by a cool experimental electronic artist, Robin Rimbaud aka 'Scanner' when he came in as a guest on an MTV Party Zone show I was producing (air date: 7 April 1995). This gadget created legal 'grey areas' as you could sit and listen to people's mobile phone conversations - f*cking awesome!! Jerky Boyz in FULL effect!!! I'm pretty sure Princess Diana's 'Squidgygate' nightmare came from a mobile scanner like the one pictured.

Forget much of today's glitzy semi-staged 'Reality TV', this was real, raw 'Reality Radio' beating any soap opera dead. Like messing around with a ouija board, it was fascinating - what you'd hear had loads to do with when you tuned in & turned on. Friday nights were heat with people getting charged up for the weekend, ready to "f*cking 'ave it LARGE!!" Sunday afternoons on the other hand, were incredibly dull yet made riveting transmission - old 'computer says no' type mono-tone moaners talking for ages about what they might buy if they got their sh*t together to venture to the corner shop or bolder still - the supermarket.

There's a film script in this piece of tech. My friends & I heard so many killer conversations - everything from people cheating on their partners, drug deals, a pop-group manager bitching how he'd been ripped off by a major record company, people involved in a serious Ladbroke Grove invident which we all read about the next day (pre-internet!). I remember being jet-lagged around 4AM so instead of vegging out to TV, let's get better entertainment from the 'AR800' and though the airwaves were sparse, I still got rambling Nigerians, luvved-up teenage ravers off their heads ranting and on the flip-side a drawn out relationship breaking up slowly across pockets of sombre static. The info. gleaned from this device could be devestating; once we heard these guys talking about a stage they were off to, giving out names, numbers etc. - need I say more?

Flying back from an MTV shoot in New York for Junior Vasquez, I tried the scanner at the airport, picking up baggage handlers plus a lawyer re-assuring a female client about her husband who was seriously harassing her.

So why do I miss the fun? In short, everything & everyone went digital leaving analogue isolated, making this specific model redundant if you got your kicks from eavesdropping. Anyway, you know that if you look hard enough, there's a new piece of kit on the block ready to give the ears that same thrill.