Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (26 page)

The kids were much more concerned. While Sonny and Becky burst into tears – possibly believing Dr Syn had just
‘got’
me – Bonnie ran across and hugged me around my thighs. This loving gesture actually managed to put extra pressure on the blood vessels in my legs and it was all I could do not to pass out completely.

‘Oh
my God, what
happened?’
Wendy eventually managed to blurt out in a voice that wobbled dangerously on the edge of convulsive laughter.

As with the balloon incident, the more I tried to recollect the accident in my scrambled mind, the funnier it struck the women present.

‘I
was trying to frighten the
kids,’
I stuttered hoarsely.
‘I
ran straight into the tow bar. I went
flying.’

Wendy looked down at my shins and the merriment monetarily disappeared from her face.
‘Oh
my God, your
legs!’
she gasped.

Looking down I saw two raw contusions with pure white gatherings at their centre and blood starting to ooze in thin lines from the narrow gashes within. I don’t think I have ever experienced more acute pain in my life and I stood rooted, trying to control the agony. A few seconds later, Bonnie, who had stopped her comforting, arrived back at my side. Knowing I liked a slice of pork and egg pie on occasion, she had quietly got me a slice from the fridge and put it on a saucer along with a fork.
‘Here
, Daddy, eat this
 . . .’
she said. Dazed and not wanting to hurt her feelings, I even lifted it to
my lips but in that moment simply couldn’t remember how you ate things.
‘I’ll
have it
later,’
I mumbled, but the truth is I don’t think I have so much as looked at a slice since.

Eventually Wendy handed me a clean flannel, some disinfectant, some plasters and a towel and told me to hobble across to the men’s showers to fix myself up. I agreed and turned slowly to make the trip to the cold concrete amenity block. As I took the first few steps away from the caravan I heard loud peals of helpless laughter coming from inside. Wendy subsequently told me that when the giggling dam burst, Bonnie flew into a real rage at her mum and aunt and for the first time in her life let fly at them.
‘It’s
NOT funny, you
 . . . 
you
 . . . 
you pair of
mares!’
she screamed and flung herself on the bed sobbing.

When I came back with my wounds bound I had to sit her down and explain that, though it seemed so terrible it could not possibly be funny, it really, truthfully, actually was. Daddy, when you thought about it, was a bit of a twit. And she allowed herself a short guilty snort of laughter.

Approximately eighteen hours later I arrived stiff-legged and at snail’s pace into the tiny studio the advertisers had set up for their screen tests. I had to do a few ad-lib links to camera and then several
‘cold’
interviews with paid extras about their home life and domestic chore routines. The gash in my left shin thumped like a bass drum throughout, but I suspect it was when I shared the story of how I came to be so injured that they really warmed to me and decided I was the man for the job.

There isn’t much to say about the three years I appeared on the campaign, other than that, for the seventeen days a year I was required to knock on stranger’s front doors, I earned an absolute fortune. The commercials themselves, and by extension their bumptious front man, were widely deemed to be the brashest, rottenest, most irritating things on television. Daz as a product, meanwhile, suddenly began overtaking all its competitors in the mysterious, yet apparently vital world of the forty-degree wash. It was almost as if these people knew what they were doing.

The thing that most astounds people who gingerly enquire what the hell it was like making such notorious bilge is that these thirty-second scenarios in which overwhelmed housewives invited me into their homes to look at their
‘whites’
were all completely genuine. The victims of the camera crew
‘hits’
upon their home were entirely unaware they were going to be on TV. What would happen was that a local supermarket would be staked out and anyone seen exiting with another brand of washing powder would be asked to try a
‘new’
product that came in a plain white box with no hint as to what it was. The only stipulation was that they had to be ready to receive a phone call two weeks hence to talk about the results. This phone call would in fact be up to twelve advertising people barrelling down on them, filming the whole nightmarish intrusion. Very few seemed to mind this, even when some of the homes we piled into looked as if they had not tidied up since a gas main exploded in their front rooms carrying off Granddad and the family cat. Every now and then of course somebody would open the door and say,
‘What
? No! Fuck
off!’
These never failed to cheer us all up, because it swiftly ticked another one off the list of our
seventeen
different locations in a day and also would undoubtedly get a good laugh when shown on the client’s Christmas out-take video.

One notable Doorstep Challenge, as the commercials were known, had me feeling more guilty than I usually did when barging into someone’s day. We were in Sheffield and I had knocked on this particular door four times without getting a response. The ad’s producer told me that someone was definitely in because as usual she had phoned ahead about half-hour previously to make sure we weren’t wasting our time. All the occupant knew from this was that they would be getting
‘a
call’
sometime in the next two hours so please don’t go out. I knocked again and from somewhere upstairs in the house I heard an agitated
‘Who
is
it?’
Followed by,
‘Oh
 . . . 
um
 . . . 
hang
on,’
delivered in the unmistakable timbre of somebody who’d been interrupted while having it off. Sure enough, a few moments later a woman opened the door, clutching at the neck of a thin dressing gown, ruddy of face and with her wayward bed hair suggesting she had very recently been throwing her head about a good deal.

‘Yes?’
she panted at me.

I could hardly bare to tell her.

‘Hello!’
I said brightly, but with my eyes begging her forgiveness.
‘It’s
the Daz Doorstep Challenge! Can we come in and see your
whites?’

That she didn’t kick me in the balls there and then bears testament to this saintly woman’s good nature. Instead she uttered,
‘What?’
a few more times, to which I repeated my ghastly catchphrase in the name of dogged continuity. At the end of this repartee between us there was a couple of seconds wherein she looked at me uncomprehendingly before saying,
‘Oh
, for fuck’s
sake!’
and slammed the door. As the crew marched back to the coach that ferried us all around, I think I stood there frozen for several minutes waiting for someone to throw a blanket over me. I believe it was then that I made the decision to leave the DDC band and return to private life. This I did at the end of that contract and I still have a letter from the Leo Burnett Agency thanking me for all the work and adding in a postscript that they were very impressed because they’d never known anyone walk away from as much money as their final offer to me contained. It had been £285,000 for one more year, but they perhaps overlooked the key fact that they’d paid me so much already that I just didn’t need the gig any more.

Far and away the best perk Daz duty brought my way was coming face to face with Bob Dylan at last. I can imagine many of you have just sat forward in your seats.
‘How
on
earth,’
you are sputtering, coughing up that last swallow of tea,
‘could
all that deplorable baloney about sparkling sheets and shining results even at low temperatures possibly have come to the attention of possibly the greatest talent the modern world has
known?’
Well, allow me to fill you in on that one. First, though, perhaps you’ll allow me a few moments of quiet triumph over all those who believed my Daz adverts were an irredeemable travesty that, as far as toxic waste goes, probably deserve to be buried deeper than all those spent plutonium rods that China never knows what to do with.

The story goes like this.

I didn’t discover Bob Dylan’s music until surprisingly late in life. Growing up, neither my brother nor my sister had any time for his tangled lyrical genius, preferring The Beach Boys and The Beatles respectively. This is all to the good, because I think exposure at too young an age to such prose might have made me prone to having a bash at the deep-dish stuff myself, possibly even moulding me into nascent student material, which, of course, would have been a disaster. It wasn’t until around the age of thirty that I discovered there was a Bob-Dylan-shaped hole in my musical palate and, upon investigation, received a nasty shock when I realized I had frittered my life away until that point. Even then, I stopped short of going to see him in concert, mainly because I dreaded someone would ask me if it was my first time and I would have to lie like an actor, resorting to improbable guff like,
‘Oh
, far from it. I was at the Albert Hall in 1966, don’t ya know. Yes, if you listen to the unedited bootlegs of it you will hear him dedicate
“Visions
of
Johanna”
to the little lad in the World Cup Willie T-shirt who knows all the words to the songs. That was
me.’

However, my brother-in-law Brian – who some of you may possibly have seen as the mannequin King Harold with an arrow in his eye at the London Dungeon – was the real Dylan deal. Brian knew every song, every variation and hungrily sought out any obscure recordings of his hero as only Bob devotees can. So when Dylan came over to play something called the Phoenix Festival in 1995, Brian asked me if I still had any connections in the music industry who could sort him out anything special. As it happened I did, and decided to go with him to the concert site on an airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon. We had backstage passes too and one of the clearest memories I have of a pretty boozy day was seeing Brett Anderson from the group Suede looking a bit grey around the gills as he sat in a food tent. I surmised the reason for this was that his band had been declared as headliners some time back before Bob Dylan had been announced and contractually had to be top of the bill, no matter who was later added to the strength. I don’t think they’d bargained it would be Bob Dylan. His name had added considerably to the demand for tickets and Brett’s outfit, good though they are on their
day, were now going to have to follow him. I didn’t know Brett, but seeing his glum expression thought that if I acknowledged what I believed to be his malaise it might cheer him up.

‘What
ho,
Suede!’
I said as I passed him.
‘Dropped
a bit of a bollock there, going on after Dylan,
eh!?’

Against all my hopes, this seemed to push him further into his shell and he never answered, simply sinking further down into his chair. Still, onwards and upwards.

About an hour before Dylan was due onstage an extraordinary and controversial edict went around the VIP area. Apparently, Bob didn’t want to see anybody backstage when he arrived, so the whole place would have to be cleared of everyone but essential staff when he mounted the stairs to start his set. This included all other performers, roadies and technicians, plus the hundreds of hangers on, liggers and drug dealers usually found in this privileged paddock. I don’t believe Dylan himself would have made such an imperial demand, but it’s typical of the muscle-flexing nonsense management entourages – the scribble that surround top talent – arbitrarily insist on to show their importance. It’s testament to the awe and respect Bob Dylan commands that some very big names of the UK music scene complied with this request, albeit accompanied by some grudging noisy protest. A row of heavy-set security men in black puffa jackets fanned out to gently shoo everyone to the fringes of the zone while a small marquee was erected and we all awaited the arrival of Dylan’s motorcade. As this was happening, one of the bouncer-types spotted me slowly walking away.

‘Hey,
Danny Baker, y’soft bastard, for fuck’s sake,
eh?’
he called after me in broad Glaswegian.
‘Danny
, where’s ya Daz? I’ll show ye me
fuckin’
whites, if ye like – put me on the telly,
pal!’
He seemed thrilled. Clearly, here was someone who didn’t recognize a single rock star at the event but knew his TV faces.
‘Danny
– y’want to go round the front, up
close?’
he then asked me. Bidding Brian and myself to come towards him, he turned to his equally bulldog-like compadre:
‘See
who it is? It’s the
fuckin’
Daz
man!’
To which his mate said,
‘Aye
, it is! Danny! Where’s ye
fuckin’
doorstep challenge, ye wee
cunt!’
Aside from being a tad over-familiar, this made absolutely
no sense as a question, but I sensed I was on to something good here and so swore something equally meaningless and insulting back at them. They roared with laughter.
‘Danny
, go with
him,’
said the first bouncer urgently,
‘he’ll
sort ye right out
 . . .’

This we did and the perk we had garnered ourselves was a trip round to the
photographers’
pit right in front of the stage – also completely cleared of people – where several of the thick-necked security had already taken up their positions. As we entered the pen, our minder chum called over his shoulder,
‘You
stand
wi’
us, Danny. As long as you’re no
goin’
ta attack the bastard, you’re fine. You wait until I tell my mam I was with you – I might have ta get a photo after
OK?’