Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (13 page)

Rising, defeated by this underwhelming cache, I was further buoyed to note some of the blue paint that had been on my jeans had now transferred itself to the kitchen floor. The only conclusion I could arrive at was that Wendy must have taken all the cleaning stuff with her – not the loopiest of hypotheses, given that she rarely entered a café or train carriage without saying,
‘This
needs a bleeding good clean in
here.’

I went back down to the little bedroom, popping my head in at the bathroom on the way just to see if it had dried out a bit in the meantime. It hadn’t. If anything, it was looking even more Jackson Pollock than previously. Gazing up at my overhead task, for the very
first time I began to wonder how on earth you actually painted a ceiling. In the first of these books you may recall that a few years earlier my hapless flatmates and I had disastrously painted a large council flat kitchen with black gloss, including the floor and Ascot water heater. The ceiling had been the responsibility of my friend Steven Saunders, who completed the task by standing on a table at one end and then just moving it along till he arrived at the far side. This worked very well, although for some time afterwards Steve’s right hand predated Michael Jackson’s single black glove look by several summers. I didn’t have a table or even a broad enough chair to gain the required altitude, but the room did contain a single bed. I decided to use that. Hauling it into the centre of the room – I planned to do the edges last – I clambered up on to the mattress holding the tin of paint in one hand and a brand-new broad brush in the other. To put the method to the test, before putting brush to paint, I straightened my arm to make sure the bristles would get a firm connection with the ceiling. They did, but only just. What I was after was a firm slap that would slather on the colour in long strokes. So, dipping the brush into the mix a full three inches, I placed the tin back down on the floor and began energetically bouncing off the bed, hitting the target above me in a series of wild arcs. After a minute or so I stopped and, panting a little, leapt off the bed to see how it looked. It looked absolutely fine, I thought, and what was more this was great fun. Yes, my exertions had caused some of the paint to fly off on to the walls, but that was all right, they were being repapered next week anyway. I carried on with my improvised trampoline act until all that remained to do were the edge areas, as per plan. Then, it being a Saturday afternoon, I decided to take a bit of a break and go upstairs to see how the football was getting on.

Two hours later I was still lying full-length on the sofa when Wendy came home.

‘Blimey,
it stinks of paint in
here,’
she said immediately, as though, when a man has been straining every nerve in his body refreshing the entire look of a nearby room, it shouldn’t. This was followed by,
‘Dan
! It’s all over your hair and hands, don’t lay on the settee like that, it’ll get
everywhere!’

I must say I wasn’t expecting her to place a garland of gardenias around my neck and coo
‘My
hero’
by way of gratitude, but I did think her tone was a bit off in the circumstances.

‘I
have just this second sat
down,’
I replied with some steeliness in the voice.
‘No
paint could possibly have got
anywhere.’

‘Well,
it has because I can already see a smudge on the arm from
here.’

Turning, I could just about make out this almost imperceptible speck if put my nose virtually against the fabric, yet somehow she could see it from way across the apartment. Wives, I have found, can do this. I was of course all too aware that the carnage in the bathroom was going to go over big now and so I thought I would get in early and lay the blame exactly where it belonged.

‘I
had a bit of a nightmare in the bathroom earlier. I did try to clean it up but there wasn’t any proper stuff in the house. It held me right up,
actually.’

‘Stuff?’
she said sharply.
‘Stuff
? You mean that entire shelf full of cleaning things in the
kitchen?’
And she turned to hotfoot it toward the proof. I knew I was expected to follow.

Arriving at the big cupboard where I’d spent so long gazing at all the bags of rice and peaches in heavy syrup, she pointed to a compartment down at floor level. There I could see the massed ranks of every kind of spot remover, stain soaker, vanishing foam and emergency rinse available on the modern market. It looked like the kind of inventory they keep in coastal warehouses in case oil tankers split in two and threaten the beaches. I swear it hadn’t been there when I had absolutely scoured the area earlier.

‘Anyway,
what do you mean you had a
nightmare?’
she snapped, heading off swiftly to answer her own question. I stayed where I was and yet heard her cry of horror as distinctly as if she had been at my side. Then she said something I will never forget.

‘Oh
fucking hell! It looks like
Psycho
in
here!’
There were several
‘Oh
no’
s’
followed by an
‘I
don’t believe
this!’
and a volley of
‘What
the bloody hell has happened’s before I heard her make her way to the bedroom that, if I’d had a chance to say it, I would have pointed out was still very much
‘mid
-project’.

It was as she first looked upon my labours here that for the one and only time in my life I heard a person say
‘Eek!’
like in a sixpenny comic. Now I was happy to concede the bathroom, but this seemed too much and so I strode down the stairs to put the case for the defence. As I arrived next to her in the doorway, where she stood with both hands up to her face in shock, I found that her
‘Eek’
had been expertly chosen. Something seemed to have happened to my brushwork since I’d left it. Instead of the lush uniform colour that I was convinced had covered the ceiling almost to the boundaries earlier that afternoon, up there now was a multitude of jagged slashes that ranged in hue from deep turquoise to an insipid eggshell blue, many of which seemed to peter out less than a foot from the light fitting at the centre. While wet it might have deceived the human eye, but once dry it bewildered the human mind.

After a series of almost frightened swallows, Wendy gathered her thoughts and came up with an outlandish theory:

‘I’ve
never seen anything like it. It’s insane. It looks like you were jumping up and down on the bed trying to do it. What
did
you
do?’

And at that point we will leave this abject tale. It can do no good to dwell on the decades of ridicule I have suffered over these honest attempts to muck in with the manly responsibilities. Indeed, I may have revealed too much already and am starting to understand why so many show business autobiographies draw a veil over the home life, choosing instead to gallop through encomiums received and charity golf matches taken part in. All I wanted to point out was that, though I was no match for my dad in most fields, when it came to fixing up the hearth and home I could effortlessly eclipse even his ineptitude.

So you can imagine what sort of tasks the pair of us were allowed to undertake when it came to renovating our new home in Scawen Road. In short, we were only permitted to be basic labourers for my wonderfully gifted brothers-in-law. Whenever things needed clearing, smashing out, dumping or lifting, we would be given the chore. Nothing as chancy as knocking down walls, but as Dad brilliantly described it,
‘Anything
that requires getting covered in
shit.’

It was while we were finessing one such duty in the house that a really strange thing happened, one even hardened cynics couldn’t pass off as a good omen.

You may remember that the place hadn’t been altered since it was built – a circumstance that had both positives and negatives. All the sturdy Victorian features remained in place, which sounds great, though this meant that the only bath in the building was a peculiar tank-like affair in the small kitchen. A lid covered this rudimentary fixture to make it serve as a worktop.

On the day in question, Dad was helping me clear everything out the old scullery, and this included pulling up an expanse of ancient lino that looked as if it had been on the floor since Edward VIII abdicated. As we tore up the oilcloth in great jagged sections, I noticed that some newspapers had been laid under it, possibly as a primitive underlay. Like most people I find old papers mesmerizing things to pore over and so, as my old man heaved what we’d already removed to the skip outside, I sat on the floor reading the ridiculous old ads and stiffly worded stories about long-forgotten aristocracy. I looked for a date on this edition of the
Daily Express
. It said 26 May 1951 – 26 May! That was Dad’s birthday. There was another edition of the same paper spread out a little further away. I picked up a page. This one was dated 22 June. My birthday.

When Fred bustled back in I was dumbfounded.

‘Dad,
look at this! It’s incredible. The papers under that lino – one’s your birthday and, look – the other’s
mine!’

Getting his nails under a long strip of the floor cover, he yanked it up.

‘Yeah,
well, don’t sit there reading fucking papers all afternoon – we got upstairs to do
yet.’

I couldn’t believe he wasn’t as astounded as I was. Or even a tad astounded.

‘Don’t
you think that’s
weird?’
I gasped, trying to get some sort of acknowledgement for this phenomenal coincidence.
‘Of
all the dates these could have been, they’re our birthdays! I think that’s
staggering.’

‘Yeah?
Well, I notice I’m doing all the fucking staggering at the moment, son – out to that fucking skip. Now grab a load and take it outside, will
ya?’

And with that he scooped up these, in my opinion, profound documents and shoved them into a rubble sack.

And that was that.

King Of The Mountain Cometh

S
onny Michael Rodney Baker was born on 10 December 1986. Now we had two children, the house was humming along, there seemed to be a family party about every three days and we all took a couple of good holidays a year – at least one of them at sumptuous top-notch resorts in America. Given my job, the bank allowed us a whopping £6,000 overdraft and we caned every penny I earned to make sure we were right up against that and quite often beyond it. Overdrafts have always struck me as tremendously mad things. My philosophy, handed down from Dad, is that financial responsibility doesn’t really exist, it is just another form of control. If you are any kind of a live wire you will generally find ways of grabbing hold of a few quid. When a bank says,
‘On
top of your own conker pile, you can have this amount of ours
too,’
I believe you should just head for the far end of that amount and keep on shoving. People will wag a finger and talk about
‘rainy
days’
and
‘bank
charges’, but I have to honestly say I’ve refused to acknowledge either of them. If an accountant – something I never had in those days – had said,
‘Do
you realize you paid £2,100 in bank charges last
year?’
I would have had to reply that I didn’t feel a thing. The storm of cash going in and straight back out was a fantastic way to live, untainted by any arbitrary cautions agreed upon at some dull fiscal meeting I must have missed. I’m aware there is a sizeable contingent of citizens that resent such gormless good luck, but I say it again: I cannot temper the facts of my story with a more popular philosophy or a fake retrospective unction. Utter recklessness has worked for me and, grate as that might, here we all are.

As a sop to those who might require the whisper of A Reckoning, let us now turn to how, in 1988 at the age of thirty-one, I went absolutely tits-up skint and became jobless for the only time in my life.

The
Six O’Clock Show
had been on air for over six years and toward the end of its run was caught up in what some might call a revolution in TV, others an ageist pogrom. Back when the show began it was understood that mass audiences of TV programmes were at least the peers of the onscreen talent and often old enough to be their parents. Today, if you go on YouTube and check out a show from the period like Yorkshire Television’s
3-2-1
, it is hard to concentrate on the weak shenanigans of host Ted Rogers and Co. because the studio audience appears to be comprised of a phalanx of ancient old waxworks and assorted gargoyles seemingly tipped out of the care home for the day. Even the contestants, repeatedly described as
‘young
couples’, look to have missed the advent of pop culture altogether and adopted a style so beige and acquiescent that society seems to have reverted to that pre-rock’n’roll era when teenagers dressed like their school teachers.

At a point just after the mid-eighties all this began to change rapidly as thrusting, monied young professionals – yuppies was the ubiquitous term – began taking over the vacant sites upon which had once stood traditional manufacturing industries and opening up thousands of businesses – most based in selling property and moving money, but a good deal of them creating and exploiting a new youth-dominated media era. In a neat little irony, many of the junior staff from the
Six O’Clock Show’
s early days had gone on to become altogether bigger players in the TV industry and now they found themselves in a position to slip a noose round the show’s neck and shove it off the precipice.

The
SOCS
was deemed too comfortable and corny – two of the traits that had made it such a success in the first place. Certainly I, so identified with it that I had no hope of surviving any rebirthing, could have no complaints if they decided to replace this
‘old
person’s young
person’
with the genuine article. Which is exactly what they did –by the power-suited, padded-shouldered, big-haired bushel.

When the show came to the end of its final forty-four-show run in 1988 it was announced that a brand-new, relevant, hard-hitting news show was to come roaring in to take its place. This show would not concern itself with the folksy, the silly and the intrinsically local. This show would reflect a New London: urgent, dynamic, young, going places. The very title was a statement of its vitality:
Friday Now!
That exclamation mark was actually part of its title, as if to proclaim,
‘Stand
back, old timers, the future is here and
you’re
in the
way!’

In September 1988
Friday Now!
was unleashed upon this perceived Brave New World and went straight down the toilet. The programme managed to struggle on for an entire year, presenting its happening, go-getter face to a frankly aghast public every Friday, and it was during this period that I finally had my Mr Micawber philosophy put to the test for the very first time since leaving school. In short – now what?

My chief problem was that I had never taken on an agent. True, I had never needed one; LWT seemed happy to chuck a number at me in the company elevators once a year and away we’d go. I certainly didn’t want someone to find me other work while I was rattling around this playground. Other work would have meant
other work
, and at least 50 per cent of that phrase struck me as vulgar. However, when I realized that, against all odds, the day I handed in my hat on the
SOCS
there would be no long queue of other programmes willing to cram cash through the letter box, I did ponder whether I ought to have taken more notice of how the industry operates. The question was, did I want to carry on doing this for a living? I mean, what did I even do? The generic term for it was
‘presenting’,
but what’s that? Jugglers juggle, magicians do tricks, singers sing, but presenters
 . . . 
present what?

It wasn’t long before I was given a vision of what my future could hold, disastrously
‘presenting’
on a thing that, without doubt, and in the teeth of stiff opposition, remains by far the biggest stinker I have ever been involved with. And agent be damned, this shocking outrage of a vehicle came looking for me.

I was sitting at home one day, flicking playing cards into a top hat, when the phone went. It was a producer I’d worked with at LWT who said he’d had a call from someone at Thames Television who wanted to know who
‘represented’
me. Well, for a moment I did toy with doing what I like to call the old Russ Conway. Popular pianist Russ was a huge star in the sixties but, as I hear it, could be rather eccentric. For a period in his career he was exclusively represented by Trevor Stanford and anyone wishing to talk turkey with Russ simply had to go through Trevor first. OK, that is par for the course when dealing with celebrities. The twist here was that Trevor Stanford
was
Russ Conway, so when interested parties would call
Russ’
business number – coincidentally identical to
Russ’
actual home number – the following conversation would ensue:

Interested Party: Hi there, who’s that?

Russ Conway: Trevor Stanford.

IP: Hi, Trevor, I need to speak to Russ about that lighting change he wanted at Bridlington.

Russ Conway: Is it anything I can help with?

IP: No, I said I’d get back to him direct.

Russ Conway: OK, I’ll just get him.

[Sound of phone being placed on side table, followed by a few footsteps.]

Russ Conway: Hello?

IP: Is that Russ Conway?

Russ Conway: Yes, it is.

And so on. Frankly, I think that’s a tremendous way to carry on. Even though everyone claims to have been aware that they were speaking to the same person both times, the business just went along with it.

After toying with the notion of hiring my alter ego, I eventually plumped for just passing my number on to the person at Thames. At a pinch, maybe my wife could take the call and say I was in conference but could spare a few minutes if they were brief. In reality I would have been two feet away with Bonnie and Sonny on my lap, watching that day’s gripping instalment of
Button Moon
. Anyway, Thames did call and ask me to attend a meeting they
were having about a new network series. I stress the word
‘network’
here, because up until now nothing I had done on TV had made it out of the London area. This meant an exciting opportunity for me to be disliked nationwide and I was thrilled at the prospect.

The series turned out to be a misbegotten heap of cock-eyed ordure called
The Bottom Line
– a consumer watchdog show, no less! Plonked into a big-shouldered suit, I joined three other shame-faced confederates – Emma Freud, Janice Long and Michael Wilson – and ran in a studio each week so that I could pretend to give a flying fuck about people who had not had their greenhouses delivered. And when I say
‘ran’
into the studio, I mean exactly that. At the top of the programme we were required to dash on to the set as if we were being chased by thousands of angry hornets. I think the idea of this pointless animation was that it would somehow con the audience into thinking we were so busy fighting for their rights out on the high street that we barely had time to deliver the show itself. The pounding theme tune went,
‘It’s
the Bottom, it’s the Bottom, it’s the Bottom
Line!’
which, after first hearing, we naturally transformed into:
‘It’s
the bottom, it’s the bottom, it’s the bottom of the
barrel!’

This clunky look at low-level cons and sellers of stolen goods even boasted a studio audience – poor souls must have written in for tickets to
Benny Hill
and got lumbered with us as a booby prize. Worst of all, given the programme’s brief, how long would it be until my own father popped up on the agenda?

The show tanked after just six episodes, but as you’re probably anticipating, if I hadn’t donned that cape and fought for truth, justice and a temporary pay packet, then my subsequent career in broadcasting might never have happened. First off, I got myself an agent: Alex Armitage of Noel Gay Artists, under whose umbrella I remain to this day. Second, while lying about in Emma Freud’s dressing room, the pair of us having the usual clandestine fits at the piss-poor fare we were about to drop on a public who had done little to warrant such a rotten trick, Emma mentioned that she’d been asked to expand her role at GLR, the BBC’s local radio
station for London. Having previously done two shifts at the weekend, she would now be taking over a daily slot.

‘You
should come on one of them, Dan. Talk about music and that. You’d be good on the radio, you
would.’

I filled Emma in on the only radio show I’d ever haunted, a woeful guest spot to promote my first television show
Twentieth Century Box
. The full and terrible details of that fiasco can be found in
Going to Sea in a Sieve
, but suffice to say I had taken to the medium like a duck to
 . . . 
well,
radio
. I literally thought no more about it but, happily for the upward arc of this story, Emma did.

Once the
Bottom Line
sank out of sight like a barge full of clinker, I had absolutely nothing to do and absolutely no money in the bank. I penned a few pieces for various publications but all the time letters would arrive from Barclays pointing out that no substantial deposits had been noted for some months now and could I pop in to see them? In fact, these letters were a salvation in themselves because they were written by one Mervyn Willcock, who is the sort of bank manager I suspect only I could run into. Mervyn was an extremely funny and accommodating man. His letters were always inventive, always amusing and, most crucially of all, always hinting that if I wanted to extend the overdraft a little further, that’d be OK with him. I think he must have found my bullet-proof optimism both refreshing and somewhat admirable, given the prospects facing me. His letters would be longish affairs, plainly typed out for kicks between a welter of more formal admonishments, and I was overjoyed to find when looking for photos for this book that I’d actually kept some of his riper missives. Typically, he would ramble into a fantasy world where everything was plainly his fault, but if I could at some time pop by his padded cell and remind him of his former life and correct him on some of the illusions he’d formed about our relationship, he would be eternally grateful. Another one, addressed entirely to Wendy, he wrote as a condolence letter following my death. This he had concluded would be the only possible reason I was ignoring him, and he closed it by saying,
‘If
there is anything I can do at this difficult time then please leave a lamp in an upstairs window so I may see it from across the Thames. Alternatively, could we think
about some kind of séance whereby I might speak directly with your late husband to hear his views about reducing your facility with us from beyond the
veil.’
In yet another, he contrasted with supreme wit the circumstances that had led him to be shivering in his office at Holborn with the colourful postcard I’d recently sent him from Estepona in Spain, where I was holidaying.

‘Factually
your card is a little incorrect in that the manager of our Estepona branch is a Mr Charlie
“The
Mad
Axeman”
Smith and I have written to him thanking him on your behalf for the superb service you are receiving
 . . . 
If, and here I have my doubts, you do have any potatoes or traveller’s cheques left, please let me have them and I will be only too willing to place them into your
account.’

Can you imagine such a magical human being working within the banking system today? But there he was and it was purely through his generous, dotty nature that I wafted along on little but fumes for a considerable period in the late eighties. I sincerely don’t remember feeling any pressure because my theory that you can continue to live well, albeit at a reduced rate, and wait for the next currency boost to reveal itself lived up to the test. Thus I would call Mervyn and say,
‘If
you were to go right round the bend, how much could you free me up at this
moment?’