Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (22 page)

Would I do it again, given the chance? Absolutely. I still have my glowing review from
The Stage
newspaper that singled me out as
‘a
natural
performer’
and
‘a
real surprise package’. This was only slightly tarnished when, after I had read it out to Terri Gardener backstage, he said,
‘Yes
, very nice, sweetheart, and I’m very happy for you, but let me tell you an expression we have in this game. The three most useless things in the world are a nun’s minge, the Pope’s cock and a write-up in
The
Stage
.’

You can’t buy experience like that with vulgar cash.

*

Rubbing along on the GLR job, coupled with some bits and pieces of writing and the odd voice-over, I managed to bumble through about eight months of not doing very much before receiving three big job offers in the space of eight days. The first was from producers at the fledgling BBC Radio 5, who were concocting a quiz show called
Sports Call
for the new national network. They were fans of the GLR programme and asked me if I’d like to host their venture. The two key words here are
‘national’
and
‘host’,
which, to be utterly vulgar about it, can be freely translated in the broadcasting game as
‘ker’
and
‘ching’.

The second proposal was never to come to fruition and remains the Great Lost Project of my career. It was a television game show called
Hoodwink
that was in the planning stages up at Scottish TV. I had had dealings with the station’s controller, Sandy Ross, previously when Jeff Pope, my chum from the
Six O’Clock Show
, and I had written a script called
P.E.
based on the sports master in Ken Loach’s peerless film
Kes
. Brian Glover, who played the character in the movie, had been a regular contributor to
SOCS
and, intrigued by what Jeff and I outlined, had even agreed to reprise the role for television. P.E. stood for both the character’s duties and his name, Preston Eppleside, and Brian particularly liked the idea that twenty years on from
Please Sir!
– the huge hit comedy wherein a modern young master is placed in a school full of teaching dinosaurs – we were going to turn that premise on its head by having his reactionary old ways adrift in the fast-changing modern education system. It was a funny, spiky little script and remained in the scheduling process right up until it was announced that the time slot it was pitching for was being given over to an extra edition of
Coronation Street
each week.

When Sandy later commissioned the
Hoodwink
show he said he immediately thought of me. This is not quite the unfettered compliment it may sound, because I was not to be the main star of the programme. No, this was to be the honour of a character called the Professor whose job it would be to determine and dole out the prize money at the end of each episode. The twist here was that the Professor was a chimpanzee. I knew that only a lunatic
would attempt to steal the show from a monkey each week and so I was quite happy to play, and I think the phrase is apt, his
‘second
banana’.

The way the show worked was that a group of individuals would work their way through a series of rounds whose machinations today I no longer recall because, like everyone else, I just wanted to get on to the chimp part of the proceedings. The winner of the preliminaries got the chance to come face to face with the Professor. At this showdown they would stare at each other across a table with five levers at the centre. The Professor, who of course was wearing a velvet jacket, cravat and tasselled smoking hat, had been trained to pull one of these levers at random upon hearing the word
‘Go!’
So, a question would be asked and the corresponding right answer would only be revealed once the correct lever was activated. The contestant’s job was to locate this lever before the monkey did. If the chimpanzee got the answer first, he would then get up on the table, reach into a large jar full of ten-pound notes, grab a handful and fling them in the air. Any money that remained in the jar after five questions had been asked would then be given to the contestant to take home. Now do you see why I call this the Great Lost Project Of My Career?

Hoodwink
first ran into trouble because the two chimps who were hired to perform as the Professor were held up abroad when shooting on the film
Gorillas in the Mist
overran. These chimps had actually been working inside gorilla suits on the movie because gorillas themselves aren’t good actors. I know this book tests your credibility at times, and never more so than now, but I promise you this is absolutely true. This extension of their time with Sigourney Weaver, plus the necessary quarantine period these busy pros would have to face on re-entering the UK, meant that
Hoodwink
had to be put in mothballs for a bit. This greatly inconvenienced Scottish TV, whose Glasgow studios had already been refurbished with specially enlarged and adapted dressing rooms for the prestigious primates, complete with one of those tyres on a rope that monkeys seem to insist upon. Again, not a word of this is fantasy. I was told that people working in the building couldn’t help but be curious as to who all
these special modifications were for, with backstage betting initially favouring both Sheena Easton and Robin Day.

It was during this lull in production that animal rights groups got wind of the project and, believing it to be underway, began circulating stories of untold cruelty on the set. In fact, the hairy stars of the programme were still, at that point, sitting in their air-conditioned trailers in Africa, sipping mango smoothies and poring over that week’s
Variety
. Once one of the major Scottish newspapers got behind the brouhaha, the jig was up. It was a sad and rueful Sandy Ross who rang me to say
Hoodwink
was now on permanent hold, where it remains to this day.

The third call I received in that eight-day period was from London Weekend Television.
Friday Now!
had tanked so badly that viewers were rushing out to buy special bargepoles so that they wouldn’t have to touch the toxic old stinker with them. The bosses at LWT had come up with an idea how to fix this. They had decided to bring back the
Six O’Clock Show
. Realizing that, if they simply announced this, it might expose all the previous trumpeting about the fast-paced modern age and its cutting-edge vitality as overheated hog-wash, they had come up with a new name commensurate with the show’s place in the buzzing zeitgeist. And so the
Six O’Clock Show
was now to be rebranded
Six O’Clock LIVE!
(which it always had been).

Could I pop up to Waterloo and see them?

When the next letter arrived from Mervyn at Barclays, I opened it with aplomb and even replied by return of post, informing him that the loud noise he would have heard the previous evening was in fact an enormous blast from the funnel of my ship coming in. What’s more, this ship had now connected at the dockside with a long sleek gravy train equipped with delicious biscuit wheels.

This was, as it turned out, not the usual hopeful bravado. Within eighteen months I would be so in demand that not only would brother-in-law Rod have got his money back in full but I would be in a position to tell my chums at LWT that this time around I would be the one saying goodbye to them. I was now entering the period
alluded to in the previous volume where, over the next five years, the British public would quite rightly become sick of the fucking sight of me. But, like Scarlett O’Hara tearing at the Tara turf, by God, I was determined to make sure that my days of wearing one shoe in a Norfolk bank were over.

Unfaithful Servant

T
he upward trajectory of my career between 1990 and 1994 was swift and expansive, but whether that in itself is enough to make interesting biography I’m not so sure. Finding you are immensely hireable and the media’s flavour of the month, albeit for forty-eight months in a row, is both enriching and pleasurable, but unless it is what you have striven for all your working life you don’t feel any real sense of triumphant vindication. As outlined above, I had been swinging down the lane with my hat on the side of my head since about the age of two, so promenading about in my thirties in a series of faintly ridiculous vehicles for television and radio, while obviously a wonderful way to make a living, lacks sustained dramatic interest. You can find yourself falling into the
‘And
then I made
 . . .’
mode, which quite rightly has the punters rushing en masse to bung your life’s story on eBay for a Buy It Now price of £0.01 plus free postage. On the other hand if I omit the parade of productions completely, or pass it off in a brief literary montage sequence, the casual student of my career may assume I remained in a darkened room during those years, teeth clenched and shivering from the effects of a powerful drug habit. So allow me to pepper these next few chapters with what I hope are some of the more interesting moments that arose from becoming nationally famous.

Before we get down to individual cases, let me state that I knew much of the work was of what I insist we agree to call here
‘variable
quality’
– although inevitably some of the more bug-eyed and slithering of the newspaper critics at the time described it in alternative language. Having been one of their number at the
NME
, where particularly in the singles reviews I had penned some pretty raw stuff,
getting a few laughs at the expense someone’s act, I knew I couldn’t have the brass neck to be outraged when someone decided my latest offering had the whiff of four-day-old fish. Dad took a different view. Whenever he read something that didn’t quite say my work should be enshrined at the Museum of Performing Arts for future generations to have something to aspire to, he would drop the paper to his lap and say,
‘Have
you read
this?’
Then, before I could ease his rage by making light of the harsh remarks, he would ask,
‘Do
you want me to go up there after ’
em?’
I must say, there were occasions it would have been terrific fun to know my old man had arrived at the
Daily Mail
or
Daily Telegraph
or some such organ and, not even bothering to announce himself at reception, barged straight in and smacked someone right under the earhole.

‘You
wouldn’t get away with talking like that about someone in the docks, I tell you
that,’
he advised me more than once.
‘They
would have gone straight in the drink. The trouble with your game is there’s not enough right-handers dished
out.’

I once arranged to meet Dad in a pub called the Rose of Kent in Deptford. I was a little late getting there and as the pub came in sight I saw a man, dressed in brown and running at top speed, holding on to the chocolate-coloured trilby on his head and looking as though he was in fear of his life. As he passed me, I heard the voice of my father, some fifty yards hence and standing outside the pub, shouting,
‘Danny
! Trip that ponce up! Trip him
up!’
I didn’t do as requested but instead turned to watch the chap run at full pelt into one of those twirling cab office signs that brought him crashing to the ground. As he sprawled on the pavement I heard Spud shout,
‘Serves
you right, you dirty bastard! You fucking
coward!’

On sitting down in the Rose of Kent, and after Spud had plonked a pint of lager-and-lime down in front of me, I felt I ought to ask what had happened. You never asked Dad about these things immediately and always had to go through a little verbal dance even when you did.

‘What
was that all about when I
arrived?’
I said, taking the first glorious sip of the L&L, a classic drink that has sadly been sidelined of late. Slices of fruit in the neck of the bottle are one thing. Lime
cordial is quite another. Anyway, I was getting no answer, so as required, I went at it again:

‘That
bloke looked terrified. Had he nicked someone’s
purse?’

‘Dunno,’
stonewalled Dad, arms tightly folded to signal noncommunication.
‘He
was a nuisance, that’s
all.’

‘So
was he just running from
you?’

‘I
wasn’t chasing
him,’
he snapped indignantly.
‘He
was running – but only because he didn’t have the spunk to have a
straightener.’

‘Well,
what had he done,
Dad?’

‘Nothing.
Talk about something
else.’

The correct procedure at this point was to say nothing. Usually, after about twenty seconds of silence, the dam would burst of its own accord. On the count of twenty, it did:

‘He
come right
unstuck!’
Spud suddenly announced with a broad chuckle.
‘I
don’t think we’ll fucking see him in here again – or over the
park!’

A few of the old boys up at the bar joined in the laughter as he said this. As it transpired, they were partly responsible for the contretemps too. Apparently the bloke was a council park keeper who had been working for the last few days in Deptford Park. Walking into the Rose for the first time, he had fallen into conversation with the regulars. One of them told him he should keep an eye out for me because I lived on the park and was often in there with my children or dog. Not much of an incentive to go to work, I’ll grant you, but I like to think, as my star rose, the locals thought of me as a novelty. For reasons only known to himself, the bloke, totally misreading the tone, launched into a first-rate trumped-up story about me. OK, let’s start with what led up to all this. I forewarn you, it is pretty small beer.

Two days previously I had been over the park with Sonny, then about seven, and a couple of his primary school friends playing football on one of the vacant pitches. We were just kicking about among ourselves, but it does get to be a bit of a drag when you have to keep chasing after the ball when it goes behind the goal toward either the flower beds or where other kids are playing.

‘Wait
a minute, kids, I’ll be straight
back,’
I said.

Legging it over to the
‘parky’s
hut’
– the small cabin where council employees made tea and compared rakes, etc – I put my head around the door and addressed the only man there.

‘Mate,’
I began breezily,
‘don’t
suppose there’s any chance I could have a net to put up at one of the goals, could I? I’ll give you a
tenner.’

The man seemed sympathetic but explained that the nets were locked away and if someone saw one of them out he would get into all sorts of trouble. He then told me that if I contacted Lewisham Council I could arrange to have them erected on another day if the pitch wasn’t booked.

‘Ah,
no
worries,’
I replied.
‘It’s
only a few seven-year-olds knocking about, nothing formal. Just on the off chance, that’s
all.’
And away I went, reflecting that I had been unfortunate to come up against one so rigidly
‘unapproachable’.
And that was the end of the incident.

For some reason our brown-uniformed chum decided to parlay this pallid exchange into something far more self-aggrandizing. Propping up the bar in the Rose, he responded to the news that I lived nearby roughly like this:

‘Yeah,
I know. Don’t talk to me about him. He came into our workplace the other day, giving it plenty.
“You!”
he shouted at me.
“Put
up some nets so my son and me can play
football!”
When I said I wouldn’t, he said,
“Do
you know who I
am?”
then started screaming and shouting and reckoning he was going to get me the sack. In the end I squared up to him and chucked him out. These telly people think they can do what they want. Right snobby fucker, he
was.’

The old boys said that this didn’t sound like me, the Rose of Kent being pretty much my regular then, but apparently the transient park keeper wouldn’t be swayed from the
‘facts’
as he presented them. A few minutes later, enter Spud. Greeting his chums at the bar he orders a Guinness and then one of the regulars says to the parky,
‘Here
, tell him what you just told us about that Danny
Baker.’

The man did so, with, I am assured, extra lashings of big-shot entitlement from me. Dad, who did not lack for theatre in his makeup, read the situation early. Simmering nicely, he let the man finish. There followed a pause.

‘Is
that
right?’
he said with a controlled smile.
‘You
done? Because I’m his
father.’

He allowed just enough time to enjoy the bloke’s look of absolute panic, then the chase was on. I like to think they went round and round the pool table to the accompaniment of a silent-film piano, but apparently the man just bolted for the door, knocking over several drinks in the process. I chanced upon him just as his already impressive sprint had found another gear, leading him direct to his cab office collision.

Another occasion when Dad took the direct approach to a perceived critic of mine – this time erroneously – has almost passed into show business legend. It was during my 1992–94 stint as a talk-show host on BBC1 – another case of an employer making a job offer based on a miscalculation of my abilities. Because I had garnered a reputation as a good talk-show guest, they assumed I’d make a good talk-show host. It’s one thing to be able to talk up a storm – listening is a different skill altogether, and it’s one of the things I really look forward to having a go at once I have retired.

On the night in question Spud was in the green room during the chat show, called
Danny Baker After All
. He rarely sat in the audience because, as he so rightly put it,
‘There’s
so much ballsing about, it drives you
mad.’
He had been to many of my programmes and, as was his wont, invariably formed a tight bond with both the catering and bar staff who serviced the guest celebrities. He knew most of them but even when a new bow tie was serving behind the little bar backstage he would make a beeline for him to conspire and discover what the
‘strengths’
of such a job might be. Ignoring whatever big names might be in the room, Dad would stand with what I suppose we must call his fellow workers. Nine times out of ten, he’d be exchanging phone numbers with them before the night was out.

‘He’s
a good bloke, that Chris in there, ain’t
he?’
he would say later in the BBC car taking us both home. I would reply that I knew who he was talking about but didn’t really know him.
‘Oh
yes, he’s one of the chaps, all right. He’s going to get hold of some vodka for
us.’

I would beg him not to enter into these negotiations while he was my honoured guest on the property, but it never made any difference.

On another occasion it might be,
‘That
Pam, taking the food around. Her old man was in the docks. I’m trying to place
him.’
Spud believed he must know every single docker there ever was.
‘She
said at Christmas she can put her hands on all sorts. Big hams, the lot
 . . .’

Making a weak joke about the actor connotations in what he said, I could see I was wasting my time. Dad had found a new contact and in his mind he was already selling the stuff on. A casual chat with one of the cleaners in the corridor might lead to everyone in his circle being good for mop-heads and Mr Sheen for the next nine months.

Green rooms rarely offer hard spirits unless, for instance, Bruce
Willis’
people request it in advance, but very soon into my tenure as show host the hospitality staff began providing a bottle of Hine or Rémy Martin brandy on the off chance Spud was going to be in. The night I featured Harry Enfield as a guest on
After All
 . . .
Spud was in his element holding court and, as usual, not taking a blind bit of notice of the outgoing show. Whenever I mentioned something that had happened on the programme on the way home he’d invariably say,
‘Must
have missed that bit – still, I’m taping it tomorrow so I’ll watch it
back.’
In defence of such an indifferent attitude very few shows aside from
Match of the Day
and
The World at War
interested him, and, as anyone who has ever attended a recording knows, they do drag on and on and on. The night Harry Enfield was in I asked him if he was working on any new characters for the forthcoming series of his successful sketch show. Harry, a quiet and genial man away from his work, answered that there was one explosive role he was currently enjoying performing very much. It was a character who would at first rationally mull over a subject before quickly getting into a rage about it, and then he’d talk as if he was confronting whoever was responsible. The catchphrase for this character was some variation on the bellowed phrase,
‘And
if it was me, I’d say to Carole Vorderman. Oi! Vorderman –
NO!’
Then he’d go on to
outline a series of rabid reasons for his objections. As we sat opposite each other in the studio, Harry decided to use me as an illustration for how the thing worked. Starting in his usual voice, Harry led me into it: