Seize the Day Page 3

  Not only did I get flannelled up for cricket matches, but I also put in some hard batting and bowling practice at the Alf Gover indoor cricket school at Wandsworth. Alf, the one-time England and Surrey fast bowler, was still around then, having begun his career in the late ’20s, and was on hand to give invaluable advice to anyone who wished he could bowl as Gover himself had in the ’30s. His bowling action was once described as ‘a little disjointed and exciting; rather as if he were exchanging insults at extreme range with the conductor of an omnibus that had the legs of him by half a mile per hour’. Be that as it may, I was happy to be gleaning any words of wisdom from the man who’d taken four wickets in four balls against Worcestershire in 1935. My best for 210 was six wickets against the local police, but at the cost of many runs and an imagined persecution that lasted for my eighteen months at the radio station. In retrospect it was an unwise thing to do, but you can’t appeal against your own bowling, and one of the opposition subsequently booked me the following week for reversing all of 2 yards into a one-way street. The music press reported that I was robbed of a hat-trick against another local team, when rain stopped play after I’d taken two wickets in a row. It’s quite possible that I even wrote the piece myself. Many singers and musicians were drafted into the team on occasions, including Billy Ocean, Robin Sarstedt and members of Mud, Sailor, Kenny and Cockney Rebel.

  Not content with having cricket and football teams, NffB took the station into the realms of pigeon-racing! A squad of the finest flyers were donated, including a brace from the country’s leading owner, Louis Massarella, and a fine specimen from the royal loft at King’s Lynn, owned by Her Majesty the Queen. We certainly had to be all-rounders to work at 210; there was no shirking. A surviving press release points out that Steve Wright and I had virtually become stunt men. During one outside broadcast I had to participate in golf, cricket, basketball, judo, bowls, gymnastics, table-tennis, weightlifting and roller skating, as well as scale a sheer wall commando style and sit on the bottom of a pool in a frogman’s outfit; terrific for a non-swimmer! (ffrench Blake was clearly flirting with the spirit world, as this would stand me in good stead for the jungle in the future.) Steve had to fly with the Rothmans Aerobatic Flyers! The boss also got me signed up as a member of the local drag-racing team, made Steve and me broadcast in drag (of another kind) for the Silver Jubilee and made me do a show from the back of an elephant. The animal and I clearly had an understanding, as there was not a hint of defecation. Eat your heart out, Blue Peter. The punishment didn’t stop there: during the Reading Rock Festival, Steve and I clocked up forty-one hours of on-site broadcasts.

  On one occasion, after interviewing the much-vaunted teen group Flintlock, Steve Wright and I were invited to write some sketches for the programme in which they featured, Thames TV’s You Must Be Joking!, which later became Pauline’s Quirkes. With the aid of our younger listeners and the TV show’s producer Roger Price, who came up with the wheeze of getting us involved, we crafted live on air some material for the show, with Roger then inviting us on to take part. I don’t recall watching it, but I’m sure I didn’t miss much as we were a couple of amateurs alongside the talented on-air team that included the young Pauline Quirke, Linda Robson and Flintlock’s Mike Holoway. If I ever get my hands on the person that suggested the script that accompanied our appearances … it was a cringeworthy long-running gag over the misinterpretation of our names, Read and Wright. This’ll give you an idea, but I’ll trim it to about a hundredth of the actual length.

  ‘No, I’m Read, that’s Wright.’

  ‘He’s right.’

  ‘You just said you were Wright.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘So you see we’ve both been right all along.’

  There was also some kissing involved, which bizarrely got past the pre-watershed censors. Not, I hasten to add, between Wright and myself.

  The press proclaimed this fun excursion into writing sketches for television via radio as the first-ever TV and radio link-up of its kind, but it was in the heyday of people claiming firsts. It was the aim of Flintlock’s guide and mentor, the omnipresent, blue-blazered Newton Wills, to establish them as the new Bay City Rollers. A handful of girls were always outside Thames TV to scream on demand and Newton was always whisking the boys away from interviews in the ‘Flintmobile’ to their ‘Flint Manor’ in the depths of the country. Both were figments of the fanciful but effusively charming Wills’s imagination, which, as a wonderful PR man, he had by the truckload. I remember introducing one of their concerts at Reading, which was meant to be live. When the tape, five-part harmonies included, began, the group were still some 5 or 6 feet away from the microphones and their instruments! They were good lads, though, and I guess it was all part of a learning curve with a good laugh thrown in; much like life really. (Whose life I’m not exactly sure.)

  When we weren’t interviewing Flintlock, or Aerosmith in the cloying mud of the Reading Festival, the Read and Wright show would often broadcast from the roof or from the pavement outside the station, just because we felt like it. It was in amazement that we sat with tea and cake on the kerb and asked drivers to wave or hoot if they were listening to us. This was Neanderthal audience research at its finest and a quick fix for us, as it proved that someone was actually listening. We also had the habit of running out of the studio to listen to our own show going out on a transistor, again to prove to ourselves that we were really ‘on air’. Read and Wright were decidedly odd creatures. We also had a blast inventing a series of fictional characters that we then interviewed, doing all the voices ourselves. There was Greenfingers Hothouse, the station gardener with a cod Berkshire accent, Micky Striker, the Liverpudlian footballer who only ever scored off the pitch, and pop singer Zoot Furnace, who only ever mimed. The bizarre thing was that listeners would often turn up to get their autographs, imagining them to be real guests.

  Evidence of the swiftly changing standards on radio are borne out by the fact that there was an almighty debate as to whether Greenfingers Hothouse should be allowed to say ‘dung’ on the wireless. We skirted round it for a bit, using ‘manure’ and ‘something that’s good for the roses’, until finally pushing out the barriers of decency and plunging headlong into the ‘dung’. Laughable now of course in an age where even a certain ratio of fellatio is considered laddish and de rigueur. Those sweet old-fashioned things Read and Wright always referred to the radio as the wireless and were apt to come up with catchphrases and non-station jingles as well as regularly junking commercials in favour of playing more records! That is now a sacking offence. We regularly used to add our two bits’ worth to existing on-air commercials, especially for some reason, the advertisement for Yellow Pages. We realised we’d done it once too often when NffB came bearing down on us like a rhinoceros with sciatica who’d just been told that his annual holiday to Bermuda had just been cancelled. It transpired that Mr Yellow Pages himself was heading in our direction and NffB was going to make damn sure that we were in the front line to take the flak. The ‘I’m going to watch you boys get a flogging’ sadistic smirk soon faded from Neil’s face as Mr Pages declared how many more enquiries they’d had in the area since we’d started fooling around with his commercial. We even had to record a re-enactment of us being naughty with the advertisement in question. Now as all naughty boys know, it’s hellishly difficult to be mischievous when the mischief is being condoned and I suspect that we fell rather short of our usual mark.

  The motley collection of DJs on 210 gradually changed as members of the original team fell away. David English departed at an early stage. An actor, cricketer, Bee Gees manager and loveable bloke, he was wont to personalise the news, as will become clear in Chapter 12. The cool and laid-back evening jock Alan Symons, a former Radio Caroline DJ, disappeared over the horizon after NffB suspected him of imbibing certain substances on air. Alan defended his inability to string a cohesive sentence together by claiming that he’d got chapped lips! A bold attempt, but just not plausibl
e enough. Australian broadcaster John Flower handed in his notice in grand style. He began by committing the treasonable action of reading out the schedule for other radio and TV stations that he felt would be a better option than listening to his show on 210. I daresay he was technically right, but that, as every DJ knows, is a firing squad offence, or at least transportation, which was almost certainly his goal, with a big pay cheque into the bargain. John soon got into full flow as more heinous wireless crimes followed, capped with a glorious once-in-a-lifetime offer to his listeners in which he invited them to ‘stick their heads up a dead bear’s bum’. Whether he was implying that there were so few listeners that their heads would collectively fit into said ursine orifice, or whether indeed he knew of such a bear, fit to grace a travelling Victorian freak show, I never actually found out. Needless to say, that was the last we heard of John Flower, the bear and that unique offer to the 210 listeners. 210 was a family. Tony Fox fixed anything and everything that needed fixing, Tony ‘Jogger’ Holden took the listeners jogging, those that is that weren’t having their heads extracted from the hind quarters of the bear, and Mike Matthews did his programme with a pipe full of something that smelled of thick black shag, with his Labrador asleep at his feet. The fastidious Paul Hollingdale, when not on air, would be busy yet again, ‘polishing the studios to an even higher gleam’, with a yellow duster and a can of furniture spray, while Vera the cleaning lady would interrupt any programme to vacuum the studios, whether the microphone was live or not: ‘I can’t hang around, I’ve got to get back to get Ron’s lunch on.’ 210 was a second home and a cosy microcosm of all that was fun, exciting and at times perplexing. That era of local radio has long gone, to be replaced by stations linked together by virtue of being owned by the same corporate, run by accountants and without a heart or soul.

  NffB also handed a lifeline to TV’s former golden boy Simon Dee. Since his dramatic fall from grace, the ’60s small screen icon had been famously out in the cold, seemingly unable to find a way back into the business until Neil offered him a presenting job. It was small beer compared to the national glory that he’d once enjoyed, but at least it would give him a chance to prove himself. Steve and I seemed to click with him right away, as we displayed a mixture of awe at his one-time status coupled with our usual irreverence, which appeared to appeal to him. On the Friday evening before his Monday start, I gave him a lift to Reading station in my old Mini and while we sat in it for half an hour waiting for his train, he chatted about his enthusiasm for getting back into radio and how much he loved the atmosphere at what was to be his new workplace. Steve and I made him laugh, he said (presumably in a humorous way), and he talked about it being a great opportunity to show people in the industry what he was made of. When he eventually unfolded his willowy 6-foot-plus frame from my little tiny car, like a rather elegant heron, and we’d said our goodbyes, I reflected that I was going to be working with a guy who had been a seriously big name in the business, and that felt good. He was urbane, suave and utterly charming, but somewhere I guess was a well-concealed self-destruct button.

  Sadly, the anticipation proved to be greater than the reality. Mr Dee breezed in on the Monday morning, seemingly ready to take Reading, Newbury, Basingstoke and their environs by storm, when an innocuous comment by NffB appeared to knock the new boy off kilter. Neil informed him that his guest on the first day was Alvin Stardust. Now Alvin is one of nature’s gentlemen and a decent cove to boot, not a reticent monosyllabic interviewee, so when Simon refused point blank to interview him it threw the proverbial spanner into the works. This was a disturbing echo of the situation that had apparently led to his previous demise, that he should be the one to decide on his guests, not anyone else. In a nutshell Dee and Blake reached an impasse and a cold war began to escalate out of control, culminating in our new presenter, who was due on air within minutes, storming off and decamping to the pub across the road. NffB followed and tried to reason with him, but it proved to be useless. Before he’d even got on air the demons that seemed to invade at the moment of impact, swarmed on board like pirates of the Caribbean and he didn’t get to broadcast a single word on the station. It was a bad day for all of us, as it would have given 210 a national awareness and Simon a much-needed lift back to stardom. I found Simon Dee charming, genial, friendly, intelligent and extremely sartorial – he was always elegant and immaculately turned out – but he proved to be a troubled legend and was destined to remain cast in that particular role.

  More legends were to loom large and confirm my suspicions that the entertainment industry was a fascinating and exciting arena in which to work. Having acquired the publishing rights to the Buddy Holly catalogue, in September 1976 Paul McCartney organised the first Buddy Holly Week, a celebration of the great singer and songwriter that would become an annual event. A letter from the McCartney office dropped through my letterbox confirming that Buddy’s group, the Crickets, would be coming over, as would his former manager and producer, Norman Petty. I was lucky to be able to interview them. The Crickets agreed to meet me at Selfridges Hotel, where they were staying, and I imagined PR men, managers and record company representatives organising dozens of interviewers and reporters, allowing a few minutes each. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Buddy’s main men, Sonny Curtis, Jerry Alison and Joe B. Mauldin, welcomed me like a long-lost friend, invited me to join them for lunch and chatted freely about their days with one of rock & roll’s most enduring legends. I got the strange feeling that I was sitting in Buddy’s seat. At the Westbury Hotel, Norman Petty and his wife Vi were equally hospitable and open over afternoon tea in their rooms, leaving me with the feeling, after spending so much time with them all, that I was as close to the Holly legend as I’d ever be. A bonus was a telephone interview they organised for me with Buddy’s parents, Lawrence and Ella Holley. Over the next twenty years or so, I’d attend and become involved in many of the annual celebrations organised by Paul McCartney, including hosting a national rock & roll pop quiz, reading Buddy Holly poetry and performing live with Paul, the Crickets, Marty Wilde, Mike Berry and Joe Brown. The events were always enormous fun, but I think the musical highlight for me was performing an up-tempo version of Ricky Nelson’s ‘Believe What You Say’ one year, with Mike Berry’s Outlaws. It just felt as if it flowed completely naturally. It was a most incredible experience. Many people including Paul and Marty Wilde were very complimentary. You can’t ask for much more than that! Well … maybe a wad of cash and a ’30s Lagonda in mint condition.

  From the 210 days Steve Wright and I still text or chat when the mood takes us and I later worked with the station’s head of news, David Addis at Classic FM. Tony Fox, the afternoon show presenter, was my agent for many years, a lovely man who sadly left us too soon. I never fail to salute when I go past his old office in the Shepherd’s Bush Road.

  In tandem with a radio career, I was in the studio recording new songs, inspired by having had a minor hit in the Benelux chart with ‘Have You Seen Your Daughter Mrs Jones’, and ‘Are You Ready’ having done something in the Belgian chart. Another project gobbling up the waking hours was a book with Tim Rice, his brother Jo and Paul Gambaccini: The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles. None of us had a clue then that it would go on to become Guinness’s second-best seller of all time after The Guinness Book of Records, and sell millions of copies.

  As well as playing cricket with Tim and working on the book, I was also able to have him as a guest on my radio show, during which he let me have world exclusive plays of songs from Evita; jolly decent when you consider that every TV or radio station in the world would have gone to war to have some of those numbers before anybody else. Tim also wrote me a very complimentary note about my broadcasting career, which contained the following far-sighted paragraph!

  I honestly think that you are far and away the best on the station. Your Saturday morning show had some amazingly good records on. Why not call yourself Mic [which most people had called me up until now] not Mike? Nothing wron
g with Mike (a great name!) but there already is a bloke operating with that name … you know, the ‘Ugly Duckling’ merchant. I reckon you could become a big name in radio so this could be important.

  Of course he was right and I should have stuck with Mic (despite being pronounced ‘Mick’); it is after all short for microphone and may well have been a more suitable nomenclature for radio, but I wasn’t as far-sighted as he and didn’t think I would ever be broadcasting to a wider audience than the Thames Valley area.