It's Not What You Think (23 page)

10
Magnum

  9
Starsky and Hutch

  8
The Two Ronnies

  7
The Professionals

  6
Minder

  5
Happy Days

  4
Tiswas

  3
Morecambe and Wise

  2
Noel’s House Party
*

  1
Swap Shop

The Big Breakfast
was becoming the bigger and bigger
breakfast by the programme. The day wasn’t far off when we would eventually beat the powerhouse that was
GMTV
in the ratings war for viewers, something that had been inconceivable just a year before. After putting the wind up the opposition, our next target was to top the two million viewer mark. Could this really ever be done at breakfast time on a channel that twelve months previously had been watched by only 100,000 people at that time? Thanks to an overwhelmingly ambitious undertaking—
The Big Breakfast
wedding—the answer was yes.

We ran a viewer competition for a couple to get married live on the show. The happy couple exchanged vows in the garden of the house next to a huge
marquee which had been erected for the reception. Friends and family plus the whole of
The Big Breakfast
cast and crew made up the congregation. There were tears from the girls and cheers from the boys, not to mention our bosses as advertisers flocked to book spots on what was fast becoming one of the hottest shows television had seen in the last few years.

It was around this time that Channel 4 started to think about exploiting some of the new talent they’d helped discover. Having never been a primetime player on Saturday night, they thought I might hold the key to them breaking the two main channels’ stranglehold on the slot.

They asked me if there was anything I’d like to do as well as
The BB
and perhaps on a Saturday night—which heralded the birth of
Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush.
Although not until we had produced no less than four pilots at the cost of over a million pounds.

The first pilot was an unmitigated disaster, the second not much better. Now by this point most pilots would be shelved, but the thing was that Channel 4 couldn’t walk away—they were too far in. The cost of the pilots had snowballed and there had to be something to show for it at the end. We had to keep on going until we struck oil, which eventually, thank heaven, we did. The ratings for
Toothbrush
reached a peak of four million, another first for the channel and for a while the show became the talk of the television world.

Now how did we come up with it again?

10 Poo

  9 Bum

  8 Arse

  7 Titsville

  6 Arsehole

  5 Cock

  4 Nob cheese

  3 Shit

  2 Fuck

  1 Bollocks

What’s wrong with swear words in the first place?
More to the point, what’s wrong with humans when it comes to swear words? How come we get so hot under the collar about them when it suits us, yet use them all the time on other occasions? We really are a strange lot.

I swear mostly to myself, mostly when I am writing. For the last few years I have been ‘wondering’, which is really just writing in your head as well as physically getting a lot of it down on paper, about the next big TV quiz format. I have come close several times but nothing that I could honestly say would set the world on fire.

Whatever it might be, it has to follow of course the mighty
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
—the most successful quiz show of all time. Sure, there have been others since, like
The Weakest Link and Deal or No Deal
for example, but as good as they are—and they have made hundreds of millions of pounds for the people involved with them—they pale in comparison to
Millionaire.

I remember I was once shown the original pitch document for
Millionaire
that was sent to ITV. It is regarded as the Holy Grail of TV documents and made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when I first set eyes upon it, almost like the original lyrics from a Lennon and McCartney song. Allow me to describe what it was like.

Created in the days way before coloured inkjets and fancy PC applications, it read from four simple white pages of A4 stapled together in the top left-hand corner. The only words on the first page were:

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE

(A stripped, ten-part primetime quiz show for ITV)

‘Stripped’ means it is broadcast over consecutive nights. The next page said:

ANSWER FIFTEEN QUESTIONS AND WIN A MILLION POUNDS

There was then a pyramid drawing of how the cash built up in fifteen lots from £100 to £1,000,000.

£1,000,000

£500,000

£250,000

£125,000

£64,000

£32,000

£16,000

£8,000

£4,000

£2,000

£1,000

£500

£300

£200

£100

Page 3 explained the nature of the multiple-choice questions.

And finally, Page 4 was the curve ball—there were these things called LIFELINES in case a contestant wasn’t sure about an answer he or she had three ‘chances’ to ask for help. These were:

FIFTY FIFTY

PHONE A FRIEND

ASK THE AUDIENCE

And that was that—it really is breathtakingly simple but there is genius running all the way through it.

For a start there is no fat, everything that’s in there matters. Then there’s the contestant selection process, where ten become one via the keypad round—again, quick, simple and highly effective. There’s the junctions where on the journey to a million your money is safe and you get a free guess at £1000 and £32,000—I think this is a particularly clever twist. And the best bit of all? The fact that there is no time limit on the game—so contestants can roll over from one show to the next, thus creating cliffhanger episodes…unheard of in a quiz show before.

I think when it comes to the TV quiz format,
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
is perfect.

Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush
on the other hand was an ‘entertainment’ game show—an entirely different kind of animal. Whatever you do, be very wary if you’re thinking about coming up with one of these, for they are the hungriest of beasts, devouring energy and ideas by the truckload. The ‘entertainment’ part is the nightmare because it has to be written and rehearsed every week, whereas the straight quiz or game show like
Millionaire
is more or less the same week in, week out. All you have to do is change the contestants and the questions.

Even though most of
Toothbrush
was unrecognisable from one show to the next, we did still have to invent a workable game which would become the show’s regular finale, a mini
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire
, if you like. In our case it was a thing called ‘Light Your Lemon’, and when I say ‘we’ I mean me and my writing partner Will MacDonald.

I first came across Will as a researcher on
The BB.
He was ex Eton and Oxford and yet had managed to retain much of the child in him, something that Walt Disney said was a very important thing for a man to do. Will had agreed to come and work with me and was very much the brains behind many of the ideas that made
Toothbrush
the hit that it became. Will and I sat for days trying to figure out what we could have as our end game.

‘What is the most exciting climax to a competition?’ we asked ourselves, ‘one that already existed and how we could replicate that on television?’

After hundreds of cups of tea and countless bacon butties round at my house, we concluded that there was nothing more sudden death than the
simple tossing of a coin—heads or tails, what are you going to go for? It was a tried and tested method of settling the score once and for all, swift, dramatic and guaranteed to produce a result.

Next we looked around for a parallel that used this philosophy but in a more physical sense, the point at which we turned to the wonderful world of football and the penalty shootout.

A penalty shootout, we realised, is basically heads or tails ten times with the goalie and the kicker representing the two players and left or right representing heads or tails.

So this is what we did:

Our contestant would be the goalie and the questions would be the kicker. The questions would be the equivalent of left or right with an A or B answer and the contestant would have to decide which way to go. Each time the contestant guessed correctly, they would light up one of five sections on a cocktail glass—get five right and the last correct answer would ‘light up their lemon’ and they would be a winner. For every question they got wrong we would light up a section of an ice-cream cone—get five wrong and the last wrong answer would ‘flash their flake’ and they would lose.
The Weakest Link
uses a similar football penalty shootout format for its final round—have a look next time it’s on.

Will and I had come up with our end-game and if your end-game is good enough, it almost doesn’t matter how you get there. We were now free to have some fun with the rest of the show.

Ah, the rest of the show!

This is the bit that nearly killed us. Thinking of new ways to surprise the audience every week was so difficult. Will came up with the genius idea of secretly bringing somebody’s bedroom to the studio which went down like a storm. Next we floated somebody else’s bedroom out on a barge in the middle of the Thames. There was the week we turned a whole block of flats into a giant hoopla game and invited a pizza boy to throw pizzas through the windows to win himself a brand new Harley Davidson. The time we drove a gay guy in a wardrobe on a forklift truck to Trafalgar Square so he could ‘come out of the closet’. How about when we plucked a member of the audience out and then challenged them to run to a waiting helicopter and go and take a polaroid of Big Ben to prove that our show was live. My favourite though, second only to when I gave my own car
away, was when we sent the whole audience off to Disneyland. They all went that night, 400 of them! None of them had the first idea what we were going to do and we didn’t have the first idea whether or not we could pull it off. We just went for it and thankfully it worked. Friendships were made for life that weekend—apparently some people who were there still have reunions.

Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush
did us all proud, it won every award in the world there was to win. It was also my ticket out of early mornings and
The Big Breakfast.
For a time I doubled up doing both, but once
Toothbrush
was a hit, it was time to say goodbye to Gaby and the gang. My last BB show would end with me wandering across the lock on my own, clutching a brown paper bag—it was meant to be funny but after crying for most of the show’s previous two hours, laughing was the last thing any of us felt like doing.
The Big Breakfast
had set me well and truly on the way to stardom and a life full of all the things I’d ever dreamt about and now, with a deep and sincere sense of loss, it was time to leave it all behind. My departure from
The Big Breakfast
was one of the saddest things I’ve experienced.

10 Would you like salt and vinegar on that?

  9 Would you like a drink from the bar before we take off, Mr Evans?

  8 Would you like that wrapped?

  7 Would you mind if I stayed tonight?

  6 Would you mind if my friend also stayed tonight?

  5 Would you like them all in black?

  4 Would you prefer a coupé or a convertible?

  3 Would you like some of Minnie’s hotpot?

  2 Would you like some more of Minnie’s hotpot?

  1 Would you like to host the Radio 1 breakfast show?

It was a Saturday morning
in the early spring of 1996 when Radio 1 came knocking on my door.

After my period lodging with the legendary Zig and Zag, I had moved into my own swanky top-floor penthouse south of the river Thames that the producers of
The Big Breakfast
had rented for me. Seeing as I was still in business with them and doing quite well, they thought it might be prudent to let me hang out there for a little while longer—a situation I was more than happy to take advantage of.

Number 801 Cinnamon Wharf was a magnificent four-bedroomed affair with a huge high-tech kitchen opening onto the grandest of living rooms, which was a vast space flanked with spectacular glass walls and countless sliding doors leading out on to not one, but two, balconies on either side. The terraces must have been forty feet long—at least, each boasting breathtaking views across the London skyline with an impressive 270-degree panorama—Canary Wharf lay off in the distance to the east with Tower Bridge just a few hundred metres away to the west. I still think about Cinnamon Wharf from time to time. My mum still thinks about it every day.

‘Nicest place you ever owned,’ she goes on. Not that I did ever own it—although I could have done. After I’d been there for six months I was asked if I wanted to buy the apartment for £600,000 but said no. Big mistake, as its value today is well into the millions.

During this period
Toothbrush
was doing great business in the UK and it wasn’t long before Will and I were being flown first-class over to the States—all expenses paid—to be asked if we fancied a crack at the US market. We went to this big meeting in Los Angeles at Brillstein Gray Entertainment—the US production company responsible for hits such as The Sopranos and
The Larry Sanders Show.
They were based in a large, imposing building with palm trees and a waterfall outside, just down from Rodeo Drive—all very L.A.

The Brillstein of Brillstein Grey was a Mr Bernie Brillstein, a true Hollywood legend now sadly no longer with us—his funeral saw the whole industry grind to a halt. Bernie was a huge hulk of a guy—the absolute double of Santa Claus—and in many ways that’s what he was. Bernie made people’s dreams come true. In the Sixties, for example, he met a young Jim Henson and asked him to write down on the back of a restaurant receipt what it was he wanted to achieve. Thirty years later every one of his ambitions had been ticked off that list and both Jim and his Muppets had become world famous.

Bernie’s younger partner was a small jet-black haired fireball of a guy by the name of Brad Grey. Brad couldn’t have been more different, he was the gunslinger, the deal maker—a fast-talking Joe Pesci type who later went on to become the head of Paramount Pictures.

These guys meant business and didn’t waste any time in letting us know—we were hot and they wanted us and to prove it there was a firm offer of $11,000,000 on the table and I mean ‘on the table’, it was there in black and white for everyone to see. But it was for a minimum period of five years with twenty-two shows a year and would mean us having to move out to the US full time—not an option as far as we were concerned. We had plenty going on back home and on our own terms.

There was no doubt about it, when it came to television we were pretty much ruling the roost. Whereas most people didn’t even realise I’d ever been involved in radio before, the irony was that I still had far more experience in radio than I did in television.

When it comes down to it, I am a radio man through and through. I always have been and always will be. There’s something much more naked about working in radio that tends to attract very different people from those working in television. Put the majority of radio people in a television
studio and they would wonder what all the fuss was about. Put the majority of people from television in a radio studio and their knees would start knocking, in need of a meeting and a cafe latte.

Radio is a much smaller boat all round—there are far fewer berths available—especially when it comes to presenting a daily breakfast show on one of the national networks—the job I was about to be offered. Not only this but seldom do such berths become vacant. If the current ‘turn’ is any good, he or she can hang on to their slot for years if they want to. As with many things in life—getting the right radio gig is all about the timing.

So what was the time?

It was about half past ten as it happens and I was busy going through that night’s
Toothbrush
script before setting off for the studios to host the live show.

It was approximately this time in the morning when I would begin to feel the first nauseous pangs of show-day nerves beginning to rumble inside me. As the words of the script started to swim around on the page, a deep-seated sick feeling in the very pit of my stomach would remind me of all the things that could go wrong with a live show. A situation not helped by the fact that I would never learn a script fully. I don’t know exactly why I did this, it was either some kind of masochism or a subconscious ploy to give the show more of an edge, but whatever the reason, it worked, for the show—if not for my well-being.

I was sat in silence as is my ritual when I am trying to concentrate. I am so easily distracted and will look for any excuse to do something else rather than what I’m supposed to be doing. I have to instil this kind of strict regime on myself to stand any chance of processing even the slightest bits of information. I can also get very grouchy at such times and am best left alone for everyone’s sake.

The one problem with absolute silence, however, is that when it’s suddenly broken it can scare you half to death, which is exactly what was about to happen. When the telephone rang I nearly jumped out of my skin.

For a start I hardly ever received any phone calls as very few people had my number, and secondly my retro phone had a heart-stoppingly loud ‘bring bring’.

After checking I was still alive and hadn’t died of a seizure I picked up.

‘Hello.’

‘Er, hello is that Chris?’

‘Yes it is, who’s that?’

‘Hi Chris, it’s Matthew, Matthew Bannister.’

It was the same Matthew Bannister who had given me my first London big break in radio seven years earlier. He had now been drafted in to save the ailing Radio 1, the BBC’s station for young people which was foundering due to an identity crisis. This was mainly because most of its DJs were now old enough to be granddads.

Matthew is an all-round top man who, if he hadn’t worked for the BBC, would probably have worked for MI5. He is just the tiniest bit more posh than he’d have you know and although he speaks with an indigenous robust flat vowel there is ever such a slight trace of plum fighting to get out. He also has that weird habit of pronouncing words like tissue as ‘tissyew’ instead of the more normal ‘tishoo’—something I’ve never understood but for some strange reason quite like.

Everything that had happened to me since the early Nineties was very much a result of Matthew’s gut feeling with regards to my potential as a broadcaster. If you know anyone who doesn’t like what I do, you can tell them it’s mostly his fault.

‘Hi Matthew, what’s up?’ I asked.

‘Well, I just wondered if you fancied coming back on the wireless again to do our breakfast show?’ he said cheerily.

‘Ah, I see, I was wondering when you’d call,’ I replied, half joking.

I say half-jokingly because the fact was I’d heard about Radio 1’s problems and in the back of my mind I had secretly nurtured the idea of having a crack at turning things around. Not that I ever thought I’d get the chance. Like I said before, my life was now television—I’d generally accepted that my radio days were over but no, here was Matthew telephoning to offer me one of the biggest jobs in the land.

It was a no-brainer, I didn’t hesitate. This was another of those moments in my life that I had to grab with both hands.

‘I’d love to do it, when do I start?’ I said.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course I’m serious.’

‘Excellent, in that case as soon as possible. Can I come and see you today?’ Matthew replied, now laughing, at the easy nature of the conversation.

‘Alright but you’ll have to meet me at the television studios. I’m just about to leave for tonight’s show. I’ll put your name on the door.’

‘Perfect, see you there.’

And with that, basically, it was done.

How did I know it was the right move? Well, the truth is I didn’t. I don’t think anyone ever does, but it did make me want to go to the loo—immediately. I don’t mean to be rude or crass but this is one of my litmus tests. I have a very receptive nervous system when it comes to excitement and if something gets me going, literally, then I always sit up and take note before having to sit down and take care.

With both parties in agreement the next issue (or iss-yew as Matthew might say) was one that I had come to realise as being very important.

If someone asks you to do something that you don’t need to do—and that something involves any risk on your behalf—you must make sure the person asking you to do it is also exposed to an equal or preferably greater amount of risk. If they are not, they are in a no-lose situation and you are in a very dangerous one.

This imbalance means that if whatever you’re doing together doesn’t work, it is all too easy for them to walk away, leaving you high and dry to fight your own corner. This imbalance has to be redressed before any agreement can be reached. I now found myself in such a position. It was time for a little underwriting.

I asked my agent what he thought we should be charging for the contract—and then when he told me, I instructed him to double it.

This instruction wasn’t about the money, this was purely about the risk. If Matthew wasn’t willing to stump up the cash then I knew he was hedging his bets. I couldn’t take a job of such magnitude and one that was bound to have an effect on my highly successful television career on that basis. It simply would not have been worth it.

Matthew said he would sort the money.

It was time for me to go to the toilet again.