Parky: My Autobiography (35 page)

It was difficult to stay awake, never mind keep a straight face, as this catalogue of impending doom was laid at our feet. You might imagine we were asking permission to build a nuclear reactor rather than give people the chance to watch telly in the morning. Equally baffling was the assumption that morning television meant people
had
to watch, would be compelled to do so. You wanted to say, ‘You don’t have to watch the bloody thing,’ but that would not have gone down well with the IBA, or the media who kept a keen eye on proceedings.

One story suggested that the Famous Five were spending lavishly on first-class rail fares to places such as Darlington. David decided he would set the example and travelled second class, an exemplary sacrifice. However, he forgot to cancel the Bentley he had ordered to meet him at our destination. I shall forever treasure the memory of David walking briskly down the platform being shadowed all the way by his limousine and attempting to shoo it away with muttered instructions to ‘bugger off’.

It was at this meeting that a member of the public – at long last – put the crashing car/cyclist question into a proper perspective. During the inevitable debate he stood up and said, ‘Where I come from we’ve had breakfast television for years and never had a problem with crashing cars.’

Thank the Good Lord and hallelujah we thought. We asked him where he came from. ‘Hong Kong,’ he said, a place of water and sampans. It was as if Spike Milligan was writing the script.

John, now Lord, Birt coached us for our appearance before the IBA. It was at this time the phrase ‘mission to explain’ was first used. Little did we know the battle cry would soon become the epitaph. We won the franchise and rejoiced. Peter Jay brilliantly marshalled us through the final interviews and we celebrated at David’s home.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the IBA delayed the start of TV-am, allowing the BBC to nip in ahead of us. They had a two-week start, and a combination of Frank Bough’s woolly jumpers and Selina Scott’s seductive charm attracted a substantial audience while we were still recruiting key staff and working out who fitted with whom.

It’s fun recruiting star names, but the problem arises when you pair one with another. It was suggested that Mary and I do the weekend slot, which seemed a straightforward decision as we had worked together before, and it also made economic sense because we could share a taxi to work. Robert Kee was our most experienced and distinguished journalist and, once we had decided the first hour should be news based, he was the obvious anchor, along with Angela. This left David and Anna to carry the main show, an interesting proposition but not without its problems.

The five of us seemed to get on well together, there was a commendable lack of conflicting egos, but I always had the feeling that Anna was less comfortable with the deal than were the rest of us. I sensed she had doubts from the very beginning, not that TV-am might not work, but whether or not she really wanted to be involved in the hurly-burly. Her on-screen relationship with David wasn’t working, either. The promised ‘sexual chemistry’ was apparent only by its absence. In fact, Cinemascope would have been necessary to accommodate the gap between them.

The opening show featured an interview with Norman Tebbitt, the then Employment Secretary, the debut of
Through the Keyhole
, the weather presented by a bluff naval type, Commander Philpott, who would have been more at home on the poop deck of the
Cutty Sark
, and a visit from special guest, John Cleese, who turned up wearing pyjamas, which he thought perfect dress for a breakfast show. We just about got away with it.

The
Guardian
said our debut was ‘brittle, sharp, gaudy and feeding off its own adrenalin’ – not exactly a rave review but gentle compared with what came later. Pairings apart, our major problem was that we had recruited a lot of people on both the technical and editorial side who lacked the experience to bring a new company to the point where it could produce more than twenty hours of live television every week. We got by because there were stalwarts in every department – men and women who looked as if they lived with permanent jet lag – who kept us on air.

I cannot remember a single day at TV-am when there wasn’t a crisis of one sort or another. The ratings showed we were attracting only 500,000 viewers each week-day morning, compared with the BBC’s 1.8 million. Mary and I did better at the weekend, but the BBC didn’t have a breakfast show on Saturday or Sunday. The media started the drum roll of doom, there was unrest among a tired and confused staff, advertising starting falling away.

Anna was unwell and had a week off. I was paired with Angela and the ratings showed an improvement. The management believed we should continue to work together. We were told the suggested change was necessary because advertisers had asked for my partnership with Angela to be extended. Peter Jay was opposed to the idea and Anna refused to budge. This gave Jonathan Aitken, who, along with cousin Tim, was the company’s major shareholder, the chance to get rid of Peter Jay. A week after the change of pairing had been suggested, Peter Jay was sacked and Jonathan Aitken took over.

From that moment TV-am, as it had originally been conceived, started to fall apart. The advertisers took flight and our financial situation worsened. Anna and Angela told the media what they thought about the board’s decision to get rid of Jay and were sacked. I threatened to resign and spent a day or so thinking things over while the media camped outside the house and patrolled the river in hired boats in case I decided to make a swim for it.

I was asked by Richard Marsh to attend a meeting at the office where he would attempt to explain the board’s decision and inform me of important new developments that, he hoped, would make me reconsider resigning. There were pickets outside the building and an agitated and worried assembly inside – people uncertain about the future, which, to my consternation, they appeared to think hung on the outcome of the meeting.

What followed were possibly the most bizarre few hours of my entire life. Let me introduce you to the cast of characters. Jonathan Aitken was tall and languid with perfect manners and an elegant charm. This was Aitken the Golden Boy, a man of probity and substance, some time before he was unmasked as a liar and a scoundrel. Cousin Timothy had neither time nor inclination for the courtesies of life, nor was he diplomatic. ‘What’s up with you?’ he asked Richard Marsh, who presented himself to the meeting in some discomfort in the area of his groin.

Marsh said he had just had some minor surgery, which was causing him a little pain. As a matter of fact, he said, he was suffering the after effects of a vasectomy. He looked towards me for some kind of encouragement, knowing that I had had a similar and well-publicised operation a few years earlier. I kept staring out of the window into the well of the office where it seemed the entire staff had congregated and were looking up to the room in which we were meeting, wondering what we were talking about.

Sir Richard was urged to get on with it by a generally unsympathetic Timothy Aitken and he proceeded to tell us, or rather me because the Aitkens already knew, that he had been informed by the IBA that, following the dismissal of Angela and Anna, the departure of any other member of the original Famous Five would cause the IBA to rethink the franchise. He gave us this news in between moans of pain as he shifted his position in the telling. At one point he lay on the floor, stating it was the only position in which he could get relief for his discomfort.

The proposition therefore was quite clear-cut. If I resigned, there was a distinct possibility the franchise would be readvertised and TV-am disbanded. Is that what I wanted? It seemed to me I had to choose between the sacking of two colleagues or the collapse of the entire company and the possibility that five hundred people would be put out of work. If that was really the case, my decision was an easy one. I am not sure to this day if Richard Marsh and the Aitkens were bluffing.

Certainly, there were rumours that David Frost was next on the Aitkens’ hit list and the fact he survived gives some credence to the IBA threat being real. I knew of Jonathan Aitken’s antipathy towards David because I was invited to a meeting in which he gently raised the subject of how I might feel about David being moved aside. My reply was unequivocal.

While all this was going on, David Frost married Carina, the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter, and I was his best man. Throughout the wedding feast I found the Duke looking at me in a slightly puzzled manner. Whenever we had met previously, he had always mistaken me for someone else. ‘Let’s do some dry stone walling,’ he would say to me, or ‘Let’s go out and chop down a few trees,’ or ‘How are the horses?’ During my speech I could sense him staring at me, wondering what on earth a son of the soil, an estate worker, was doing as David’s best man.

David went to Venice on honeymoon and the next morning picked up the
Observer
, which carried the headline: ‘Aitken to sack Frost’. Anna and Angela were not pleased with events. Anna famously threw a glass of wine over Jonathan Aitken; both Anna and Angela accused me of weakness in not carrying out my threat to resign. When I accepted an offer to join the board, Anna saw this as the pay-off for what she regarded as my betrayal.

In fact, I joined the board out of curiosity and it is fair to say that what I saw hastened my own eventual departure from TV-am, and put me off big business forever.

Greg Dyke took over and, according to legend, saved the station with Roland Rat. David hung on but the rest of us gradually dispersed. Robert Kee, always an amused and civilised observer of the chaos of our lives, drifted away; there was no room for him in the new and thrusting company run by Dyke and later Bruce Gyngell.

When I had time to look back it was without sorrow or regret. It was a fascinating adventure in which those of us hitherto innocent of the ways of big business caught a glimpse of a treacherous and slimy world. There was anger and betrayal but also a lot of fun and fulfilment.

In the final analysis we achieved the impossible and turned a racing certainty into a seaside donkey. What we were handed when we won the franchise was the right to broadcast adverts between the hours of 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. every morning, seven days a week. In other words we were given the keys to a fortune. How could we fail?

But we did.

If I have a lasting memory of that episode in my life it is, at the darkest time, standing by the window of my office overlooking the canal below and glancing left to see David, in the adjoining office, gazing at the waterway.

He looked at me and smiled.

‘Who goes first?’ he said.

36

FROM ELTON JOHN TO SKINNERNORMANTON

I had been a castaway on
Desert Island Discs
in 1972 and had found it to be a profoundly depressing experience. I had expected more of an event. This, after all, was
the
accolade of broadcasting to be sought after and treasured. When the Labour politician Herbert Morrison died they found his list of music in his belongings. Morrison, a politician of substance in Attlee’s immediate postwar government and a man of high achievement, nonetheless sought, and was denied, the privilege and honour of being a castaway on Mr Plomley’s mythical island. Nor was he the only one who went to his grave unfulfilled through the lack of Plomley’s beckoning finger. All of which explains my disappointment when I found the experience such a dispiriting one.

The problem was Plomley himself. He seemed bored with the show, not the slightest bit interested in the guest’s story, more in favour of a long lunch at the Garrick with a bottle of wine before the interview took place in what seemed like a broom cupboard at Broadcasting House. What particularly disappointed me was that he couldn’t be bothered to play the music in the show as we recorded it, preferring to edit it in later.

When Plomley died in 1985 the show had been running for forty-three years. It had become so associated with the man who devised and presented it that there were suggestions it should not be revived. David Hatch, the then Controller of Radio 4 and later Sir David, took a more pragmatic view. He believed it was a popular programme not because of who presented it but because it was such a titillating idea. He decided to continue with a new man in charge, and asked if I could take over.

I told him my reservations and he confirmed he wanted me to do it my way; to pick the guests I wanted, to play music into the show during the interview, to explore opinions as well as life stories.

David predicted there would be trouble ahead in the shape of Diana Wong, Plomley’s widow, who now held the rights to the programme and was involved in the choice of presenter in that she was offered a list of names for approval. According to the
Evening Standard
, Diana Wong was in favour of John Mortimer getting the job, with the newscaster Richard Baker as her second choice. Her reaction to me was one of unequivocal rejection. She told the
Sunday Express
: ‘I don’t think he’s civilised enough’, an opinion that might have done serious psychological damage to a more sensitive soul. There was more. Commenting on my appearance on the programme thirteen years earlier, she said my choice of records was ‘embarrassingly awful’ and added: ‘I don’t think he’s very sensitive’, which was a bit rich coming from someone who had just given a severe kicking to someone she had never met.

I bit my tongue. I wasn’t about to get involved in a slanging match with Plomley’s widow, nor explain to the nation my opinion of the man I was replacing. I didn’t have to. The media obliged.
The Times
talked of Plomley’s ‘complete inability to conduct an interview’. Curiously, it argued, this was what gave the programme its charm. Derek Drescher, my producer on
Desert Island Discs
, who had also been Plomley’s producer, said, ‘People used to say that Roy was good at drawing people out but he wasn’t. If somebody wasn’t talking he was lost.’