Episode 37 Inside Out

Now on BBC News, the week's

strongest stories from

the BBC's Inside Out teams.

Welcome to a very cold

Inside Out West Midlands.

Tonight, the conman

peddling dreams of breaking

into the entertainment business.

I am not a potential customer.

I'm a BBC journalist and I have

been investigating your

business and you're conning

people, aren't you?

You're conning people out

of thousands of pounds at a time.

And the hunt for an

historic shipwreck, lost

for almost a century.

It was just the most exciting moment

in life, to have found it.

We were hugging each other,

dancing around the prop.

And above a very ordinary shopping

parade in Birmingham,

an almost mythical music venue,

The Who played here,

Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath,

Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull,

Elton John played here

the night before it closed.

I am Ayo Akinwolere

and this is Inside Out.

Tonight, we are in Birmingham,

and later on, we will be finding out

about a festival celebrating some

of the extraordinary

things that happened

in the city 50 years ago,

in 1968, but first, being a voice

artist and doing things

like computer games,

adverts and audio books can be

lucrative, but one serial conman has

been cashing in on the dreams

of those trying to break

into the business.

Simon Hare has been

finding out more.

Hi, nice to meet you.

Come and have a sit down and we'll

go through everything with you.

Ed Harwell says he's a voice actor

who can get you into the business.

You are just where I was,

sort of ten years ago.

But ten years ago, Inside Out

was exposing his Nottingham

company Broadcast Support.

Back then, he was using his real

name, Carl Mould, and claiming

he could help people become TV

presenters but all he did was charge

thousands for poor quality

showreels and websites.

Five years ago he was jailed

for conning pensioners out

of thousands for mobility aids.

Carl Mould likes telling stories

and creating characters.

Even one for himself,

Edward C Harwell, filmed

here at the Custard Factory

in Birmingham, a hub

of creative businesses,

including his own firm,

Sun King Media.

You are following me, aren't you?

If I give you a story,

will you go away?

Mould is full of tall stories.

This is a promotional

video on his website.

10,000-20,000 a month is achievable.

My advice, get up early, work hard,

and join Sun King Studios.

Now it is my full-time profession,

I have absolutely no hesitation

in recommending Sun King Media.

Glowing testimonials,

but who are they and how

accurate are those figures?

Similar tales of high earnings have

enticed dozens of victims,

many of them pensioners.

David Taylor is a former

president of his local

rugby club in Manchester.

In his retirement, he has taken up

acting and he gave Ed Harwell

or Carl Mould £1,500 to help him

become an audio book narrator.

For 35 years I was in the prison

service, and the last 20

of which I was a prison governor.

You're probably going to say

I should have known better,

but we are all human, after all.

The secret is, you play

on people's desires,

and that is the bit

that

I am really ashamed of,

that I should have seen

through it, really.

I just feel a fool.

All David got for his money

was of foam-lined box described

as a "home recording studio",

a cheap microphone, and one

audio recording uploaded

to two free websites.

I have come to see two

voice-over industry experts.

Hugh Edwards is a casting director,

and Peter Dixon one of the UK's

best-known performers.

I work in all the genres

of voice-overs from commercials

to big entertainment shows

like X Factor and Britain's

Got Talent, of course.

It's time to face the music.

It is a skill that you need

to learn, and it takes

time and practice.

So what is their verdict

on what David got for his money?

That did not sound particularly

professionally well done,

the levels were too low,

I was straining to hear it.

You can do that yourself

by recording yourself or paying

maybe £100 to go into a studio

and have some and press record,

put it on YouTube yourself for free.

You can put it on Amazon for free,

you do not need to pay

anyone to do this for you.

That is appalling value for money

that he's got there,

it is saddening and sickening.

I was always told...

And what about those claims

of big money in return?

10,000-20,000 a month is achievable.

There are voices artists

in the world who do earn that,

but you're talking about the top two

or three percent.

We all know in the industry

that the audio book sector

of the industry is low-paid.

The sooner that this man who's

running this company can

be stopped the better.

People need to be

protected from him, soon.

I want to see the sales

pitch for myself.

Hello, I have got an

appointment with Sun King.

I have come to meet

Ed Harwell for what is billed

as a free assessment

of my voice-over potential.

Hi, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

Sit down and we will go

through everything with you.

Right.

What the Amazon group require from

us is an audio book or a showreel

that someone has worked on before.

Right.

Our work area within the Amazon

group looks like this.

But it is just Sun King Media's

YouTube channel, and talk of links

to Amazon keep coming.

We are affiliated

with the Amazon group.

We are approved content providers

and work in conjunction with them.

It is not long before there

are claims of how much I could earn.

I have people doing

pretty well out of it.

I will show you.

That is you, Edward C Harwell?

That is you?

Yeah.

And you got £11,000?

Dollars.

That is for one month?

Blimey.

It's not too shabby.

After a bit of prompting, Harwell

or Mould finally records my voice

for his professional assessment.

I am a broadcaster, but no actor.

Daughters of a deeply

royalistic man convinced

he was doing the King's work.

Brilliant.

Nothing wrong with that at all.

Oh, right.

Absolutely bang on.

You are just where

I was ten years ago.

I like to think I am leaving

some kind of legacy.

I wouldn't know what else to do now.

I have found my niche.

It has been a lucrative niche.

Inside Out estimates he has

taken more than £100,000

over the last 18 months.

The Custard Factory says

it was completely unaware

of what Mould was doing.

It is grateful to Inside Out

for bringing the matter

to its attention, and it has

terminated his lease.

And the people in the video,

we tracked them down

to the website fivesquid.com,

offering video testimonials

for just £10 or £20.

They and the website expressed

concern but said such testimonials

are provided on condition

they are clearly labelled

as a paid-for promotion,

something which Mould did not do.

The audio book company

within the Amazon group,

Audible, says narrators

are at the heart of its work.

It takes this misrepresentation very

seriously and its lawyers

are contacting Sun King Media.

It is time to confront Mould.

I have arranged to meet him outside

a bank in Birmingham.

I am not a potential customer.

I am a BBC journalist and I have

been investigating your

business and you're conning

people, aren't you?

You're conning people out

of thousands of pounds a time?

Really?

Yeah, you are.

You're uploading poor quality audio

to free to use websites,

you're making false claims about how

much money people can earn.

You're making false claims

about your relationship with Amazon.

You're not Ed Harwell, are you?

You are Carl Mould, serial conman.

Do you want to say sorry?

Sorry for what?

Sorry for what?

For conning people?

It is just rubbish.

Did you write all these

stories in prison?

Because you were on a creative

writing course in prison last time.

Is that the end of this interview?

How long is it going to go on for?

As long as you stand there.

Are you sorry?

Are you sorry for what you've done?

I am not sorry for anything,

I have not done anything wrong.

So you do not think you've

done anything wrong?

Absolutely not, no.

Inside Out understands he has

since left his offices

at the Custard Factory

but in a letter he told us that

if anyone was not happy

with the service he provided,

they could come back

and record it again.

We recorded a special

message for him.

Carl Mould, it's time

to stop conning the public!

Next tonight, an underwater

detective story.

It all started off with one man's

dream to find an historic wreck lost

for decades in a remote location.

Behind the doors of

the National Maritime

Museum in London lie

a

thousand stories of the sea.

During the Great War of 1914-1918,

Britain lost more than 5,000

ships across the globe.

There were tales of glory,

there were tales of tragedy.

There are some incredible naval war

stories that are remembered

and honoured in here today,

but there is one tale

you will not find in here,

about the first merchant ship to be

sunk during World War I.

The City Of Winchester.

A 6,000 tonne cargo ship

that was sunk by a German cruiser

in 1914, somewhere in the Arabian

Sea.

Its whereabouts remained a mystery

for more than 80 years,

until one man changed all of that

and found more than he could ever

have imagined possible lurking

at the bottom of the sea.

Steve Dover from Warwickshire heard

whispers of a World War I wreck

around the coast of Oman

in the 1980s.

It began a 12 year obsession

which started with him tracking down

which ship it could be,

buying it from the British

government for a pound,

and ended with him convincing a team

of divers to follow him

to the Hallaniyat Islands.

They are remote, the seas

are dangerous between the mainland

and the islands.

We got there, 35 divers,

in three boats, on-site,

and I pretty much knew that

I would find that wreck

on the first dive.

I was really, really confident.

But confidence on land can quickly

turn to doubt when you're

30 metres underwater.

I was so confident.

I had been organising and raising

funds for two and a half years,

12 years of research,

this was the moment.

Down the anchor line we went,

hit the bottom, nothing.

So we went along for a bit,

I got my compass out,

pretending I knew the way,

which I didn't.

And Pete was right by my side.

He points down to my

buoyancy compensator,

the jacket that you wear,

and underneath the flap

of the jacket was a tiny little fish

that had yellow and silver stripes

on it, it is called

a sergeant major fish.

What he knew as a marine biologist

was that this is a reef fish,

so he is signalling to me follow

this thing, follow this fish,

and the two of us were following it.

It was like a scene

from Finding Nemo and the fish put

on a final spurt and disappeared

into the blue, and this shadow

appeared in front of my eyes,

and that was the stern

of the City Of Winchester,

the wreck.

And it was just the most exciting

moment in life to have found it

and we were dancing,

we were hugging each other,

dancing around the prop,

the propeller at the bottom

of the rudder.

Not only was Steve's discovery

important for historians,

they caused ripples

through the scientific

community as well.

So what we have is this wreck

which over the course of 70 or 80

years has become a real haven

for marine life, and

because it is a metal hull,

and it is a very long metal hull,

all sorts of marine life is attached

to it that would not necessarily

want to attach to rocks.

One of the exciting things

about having a range of colourful

fishes is it attracts other life

as well, and that is why

we were recording pods

of dolphins every day.

What had begun with looking

for a 100-year-old shipwreck had

now opened up a whole

new world to explore.

The City Of Winchester was once

forgotten, but unlike all these

relics of sunken warships that now

are in a museum, it has

a new lease of life,

not just about the past

but supporting life for the future.

With quite literally the biggest

finding imaginable.

I have film of

humpback whales on the surface, of

one humpback whale actually giving

birth, and within the same time

period, we have got film of them

feeding. Humpback whales do not feed

and breed at the same time in the

same place.

This caused confusion.

Why were these humpback whales

acting so out of character? Could it

be that this was an altogether new

species?

Further studies were made

by the Ministry of foreign

environment in the country. It was

all followed up and in 2014, they

declared a brand-new species of

humpback whale as a consequence of

what I found, the Arabian Sea

humpback.

But the ecosystem that's

built up around the City

of Winchester is now in danger.

When I went back there last year,

after 17 years and dived around,

it was very clear there'd been

a great depletion

of fish life and species.

When I spoke to the islanders they'd

said to me that the fishing

rights had been sold.

You can't stop us and it's

on the brink I would

say of breaking down.

One day there will be no Arabian Sea

humpback Whales in that area

because they don't travel around,

they tend to like their home,

so if there is a threat

they're stuck there.

Steve's idea is for a conservation

area around the Islands

and the government of Oman

are considering his proposal.

There's also a strict 25 mile

no-take zone around the wreck.

The no-go zone combined will mean

the marine life will bounce back

to where it was in about 5-10 years.

This could be the lifeline needed,

to protect not just the whales

but this whole incredible ecosystem.

There is such a wealth of research

to do over the next decade and even

then we will not have found

all of the species and all

of the many many things that I am

certain dwell in and around

the waters of those islands.

So, the amazing tale of The City

of Winchester now has a new chapter

at the bottom of the sea.

And I wonder, how many other

stories are out there,

waiting to be discovered?

The Birmingham Flatpack Festival

will start soon and this year

it will feature a series of events

marking things that happened

in the city 50 years ago.

So we sent comedian Tom Price

back in time, well,

sort of, to find out more.

# If I only had time

# Only time #.

It's no secret that we in the media

love an anniversary,

and they don't get much bigger

than 50 years.

Well, OK, technically they do,

but let's not get bogged down

in details because 50 years ago,

1968, to be precise,

was a pretty big year.

In fact, there was so much

going on that Ian Francis, founder

of the Flatpack Film Festival,

held every year in Birmingham,

is organising a series

of events to mark the year.

A really interesting

time in the city.

All sorts of things going on,

new bands, counter culture,

student protests, so we've got

a whole programme of exhibitions,

screenings and events all over

the city as the first weekend

of the festival.

One of the events will focus

on an almost mythical music venue

which opened in the north

of Birmingham in 1968,

right here on Erdington High Street.

Yep, I know what you're thinking,

it looks like that sort

of place, doesn't it?

This is music historian Jez Collins

and we're meeting outside

what was voted the best club

in the world two years running,

known simply as Mothers.

The club was only open three years

but boy did it leave a legacy,

and I'm not talking about the fact

that it's now a supermarket.

It's absolutely incredible,

on Erdington High Street,

not many people know about it,

there's a little sign

above, but honestly,

this was the home of sounds.

The Who played here,

Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath,

Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull.

Elton John played here the night

before it closed and moaned about it

not having a grand piano.

John Peel was the resident DJ,

there's a gate behind us and he used

to park his Winnebago and sleep

there, and he'd DJ.

So a really important place,

not just in Birmingham but in terms

of rock music history.

They had a membership

that reached 45,0000,

which is just insane for a club that

could hold 300 people.

45,000 people became members

at the time it closed.

Apparently global stars Joan Baez

and Bob Dylan were members.

Well, I haven't been able to get

them here today, to be honest,

I didn't actually try,

but I have arranged to meet two

other former members,

Rob Moore and Syd Wall,

who are just as A-list

but a bit more local.

I hardly recognised

it when I walked in.

I can still remember

where the stage was.

Where was the stage, then?

The stage was over there.

It went from that corner

right over to here.

I went to most of these.

There's a couple that I didn't see.

The one that I wish I had seen

which I couldn't get to

was this Pink Floyd one.

Whatever happened to them?

Where did they go?!

When Zeppelin first played,

it was the first gig

of their first UK tour.

My brother has got

photographs of the gig,

and they are in the loft,

he said he can't find them.

Got to get in there!

Try and find them,

try and find them.

Syd's brother's photos aside,

regrettably there seems to be very

little archive of the club,

but, although Mothers closed

in 1971, in 2016 its name cropped up

in American courts when Led Zeppelin

were successfully defending

themselves against a charge

of plagiarism brought

about by the band Spirit,

who alleged their song

Taurus was the inspiration

for Stairway To Heaven.

Well, when Spirit came to play

here at Mothers there were rumours

that Page and Plant were here,

and part of that evidence

was that Plant and Page

were here and they would have heard

Taurus played and that planted that

seed in their minds that that music

hook turned into Stairway To Heaven.

Life in late '60s Birmingham

wasn't all glamour and

rock and roll, though.

In the south of the city,

American photographer

Janet Mendelsohn spent much of 1968

documenting Balsall Heath,

a down on its luck suburb.

Her pictures will form one

of the exhibitions in

the Flatpack Festival.

Why was she drawn to Balsall Heath?

It was a big subject in the media

for various reasons, really, to do

with housing, immigration.

There were lots of

photographers coming here.

But on the whole, the media covered

it in kind of a sensationalist way

and Janet's project was much more

about, let's show life,

the everyday fabric of life.

You've got pictures of this

crossroads here, so this

is a butcher's, grocer's here.

So that is literally that?

Yeah.

That corner there is that?

That corner there.

That's incredible.

A number of cafes.

It was a very busy spot.

Yeah.

And this treasure trove

of photographs, we nearly

lost it, didn't we?

Yeah, it was hidden

away for many years.

She went back to America, it ended

up in her attic in Massachusetts.

That's amazing to think that great

resource was sitting

in an attic in Massachusetts.

Yeah, we has no idea

about any of this.

A guy at the university got in touch

with her a few years ago

and she just basically sent two

massive boxes full of

prints and negatives.

And suddenly we've got

this incredible document

of what Balsall Heath

was like in the 1960s.

It's hardly surprising these

photos have generated such

interest amongst historians,

but there's also

a personal side to them.

Whilst researching the project,

Ian found a photo taken

in 1968 of the shop Uncles.

The owner, Mr Singh,

opened it shortly after arriving

in the UK from India but didn't have

any pictures of it from the time.

Surinder, tell us, how did

you and your dad feel when Ian found

this amazing photograph?

Taken aback, as you can imagine

we've never had a photograph.

Dad was tearsome, it did

bring tears to his eyes.

Just overwhelming, really.

What makes the photo even more

poignant is that the woman

in the alley is Mr Singh's wife,

Surinder's mother.

She died in 1977.

Mr Singh, how did it

feel to see this?

I was really glad, I was really glad

when I seen this picture.

I don't know if you know this,

but Ian has been looking

into the archives, there's

a new exhibition coming up.

And whilst researching

that new exhibition,

he's found some other photographs.

So, Ian, over to you.

You mentioned that the lady in the

alleyway was your wife, your mum.

I had a dig around and there

were actually a couple of closer

shots from the collection.

There's your mum.

Is it?

Fantastic.

Yeah, that's Mum.

That is a truly, truly great photo.

Isn't that gorgeous?

Look at that.

I love that.

And who is the child?

She's my daughter.

It's great.

Very nice.

We haven't got many pictures of Mum.

This is really nice.

Now in her 70s and unlikely

to return to Birmingham again,

Janet and the Singhs will probably

never meet, but we've sent her this

footage so she can see for herself

just what an impact her photos

are still having on people,

half a century after she took them.

Well, there we are, just a snapshot

of the plethora of things

going on in Birmingham in 1968,

50 years ago.

Hope you enjoyed it.

I'll be back next year with

a special feature looking at 1969.

That's how this works, right?

Has anyone got a history

book I can borrow?

Right, that's your lot for tonight.

Don't forget, we are on the iPlayer

and also on Twitter at bbciowm.

We'll see you next

week, have a good one.

Bye-bye.