Be Careful What You Wish For (35 page)

My idea was this: Paul and I set up a company and used HBOS’s money to buy the stadium from David Pearl, who we would give a ‘drink’ to for stepping aside. I would service the borrowings, give Paul a small margin on that, and would work very hard to find a new stadium location in the borough where we could move Palace. Kemsley and I would then be free to split the property value of Selhurst Park on a 70/30 ratio in our favour and Palace would get a brand-new stadium, paid for out of the proceeds of the sale of Selhurst Park, the development value of which was estimated to be at the time upwards of £32 million.

So that is what we did and I announced to the world and a very surprised Ron Noades that I had in effect bought Selhurst Park. The reaction from the fans was one of delight and given that all I had got Paul to do was help with the funding via HBOS – no different from someone getting a mortgage for a house – I was happy with what I had done, for a few moments, anyway!

But like everything in football, nothing seemed to run to plan. Firstly the company that was set up never formalised the relationship that was agreed, and then within a matter of months Kemsley was expressing disappointment that we hadn’t found a new stadium.

He was being ridiculous. He knew it would take substantial time to get a new location. Besides, I was paying the mortgage on the loan but he was being clever with me. Our relationship began to deteriorate and he suggested we moved out and shared a ground with Millwall. I suggested Tottenham do the same with Arsenal! To cut a long and
complicated
story short I agreed with Kemsley to buy the stadium out of the structure we had created. All I had to do was to find a new funder as I was not prepared to put up £12–13 million of my own cash, as by now I had already invested over £30 million in Palace and I wanted to do what everyone else did in property – use a funder!

This transaction bit me on the arse. I had done it with the best intentions and motives and with Kemsley running around telling anyone who would listen he owned Selhurst Park, I got to look a bit of a fool and a liar. In a desperate attempt to secure Palace’s future, get the stadium away from Noades, I had dropped myself in it and now had a major problem.

As the months rolled by and I still hadn’t secured funding, the world began to collapse as the financial crisis began and borrowing money became more and more impossible. After a confrontation with Kemsley outside a London casino where I told him I had enough of him ridiculing me about the ownership and reneging on our original deal, I agreed to sign a twenty-five-year lease and a bloody high rent and I personally paid him £1 million premium to rectify the position. I got vilified for this in certain quarters. In the long run this was to prove an absolutely massive thing for Crystal Palace FC, but not for Simon Jordan.

To be blunt, football-wise, this was a very dull and uninspiring time. Try as he may, Peter just didn’t get the team going. We were eighteenth at the end of October, November and December. Industry wisdom purports that where you are at the end of December is often where you end up at the end of the season and as a rule of thumb it does have the ring of truth about it. So this was not quite the Peter Taylor effect I had hoped for. It was more like Peter Failure, as he was fast becoming known amongst my cohorts.

* * *

As a welcome distraction from Taylor’s failure to lift the team on the football pitch, in late 2006 I signed up to do a television series on ITV. Having been with Max Clifford for a couple of years and done various media work it was perhaps a natural progression. I had in fact a year or so earlier had the opportunity to do
Dragons’ Den
but I turned it down, not really grasping its concept. Why would I put up my money for the BBC to get viewing figures? More fool me!

Prior to the ITV show Max got me to do something with Sega games as they had introduced a function in their computer game
Championship Manager
called something like ‘benefactor button’. Given I was indeed a major benefactor of a football club with a high profile I agreed to do it. It was a press launch and suffice to say I got them a lot of headlines due to my strident views. I got paid £5,000, which I donated to a children’s hospice in Guildford.

The hospice was introduced to me by Max Clifford and touched my heart. I subsequently had a long relationship with it. Every piece of media work I got paid for I donated, as well as the damages payments I received from every inaccurate story written about me, which were many. I also made personal donations and got certain wealthy and influential people to do the same. I involved the football club, getting the players to go there every Christmas and we had a ‘siblings’ day every year, where the children could come and raid our club shop and take whatever they wanted – and they did, the little rascals! They also stayed, had lunch and watched a game. These are the things that make you proud to be part of a football club as it is an integral part of the community and makes a difference to people’s lives.

The TV show I signed on for was
Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway
. Seven hour-long prime-time shows at 9 p.m. on Monday evenings. It was similar to
Dragons’ Den
but giving away money
not
just for business ideas but also for appeals based around life-interest stories. I did the show with Duncan Bannatyne, Jeffrey Archer, Kanya King and Jacqueline Gold, daughter of David. We shot seven episodes in six days at Three Mills Studios in front of a live studio audience.

Straight away it was obvious that there was not harmony between the five millionaires. Jeffrey was a little smug, Duncan abrasive, Jacqueline and Kanya were gentle and cuddly, and then there was me.

On making myself comfortable in my dressing room on the first day I decided to put on some music and have a cigarette. Jeffrey Archer marched down the corridor and ordered me to turn my music down and to stop smoking. As you can imagine the volume went up and I advised Archer that insofar as my smoking was concerned I was surprised at his objection. Given that where he had just come from cigarettes were currency! That went down like a lead balloon with inmate Archer. Yet over the course of the week Jeffrey was quite charming to me and even brought a set of first-edition copies of his books signed for my mother.

There were other confrontations. Duncan, who I got on famously with, was a notorious camera hog. All the others complained, whereas my attitude was more fool you for having nothing to say. Jeffrey acted up immediately and during one session of filming told Bannatyne to shut up and let others speak. Duncan was raging in my dressing room afterwards and Jeffrey popped in and foolishly announced that he found the show a bit difficult as he was nothing like us and not an entrepreneur. Duncan agreed with him and said there was a vast difference between him, me and Jeffrey. And then went on to qualify that in language not even I can repeat! That was the end of their relationship and incredibly I found myself acting as a mediator.

As the basis of the show was to give a million pounds away to people that came forward with business ideas, community projects or life-interest matters, every time a contestant produced a hard-luck story, plausible or not, or if children were involved, Jackie and Kanya immediately voted yes. To get the money required you needed three of the five of us to vote yes. Given most of the time the contestants, whether merited or not, had two of the three votes required, this took the intrigue and possible misdirection out of the programme and was the subject of many a heated debate backstage with Duncan and myself upsetting the girls.

The show was hosted by Richard Madeley and to be honest was not particularly good. And whilst there were some very deserving individual cases that got money, on the whole the majority of the contestants were poor and difficult to get any grasp on. If some bloke comes on and asks for £500 as he has ‘ponced’ off his mates for years and wants to get the money to take them for a slap-up meal, or a guy who has lost all his money on the horses has decided he wants to buy one rather than bet on them, it does not take you too long to tell them to piss off, and that doesn’t make for great TV. One person who stood out was a twelve-year-old boy called Liam Fairhurst who suffered with cancer and raised £50,000 from us for Clic Sargent, a cancer charity. He was a fantastic young man and went on to raise much more money elsewhere and be recognised in far more auspicious surroundings than a TV show. Tragically, Liam died two and a half years later. If nothing else, doing that show gave me the opportunity to meet that splendid young man.

After filming the television series I was sitting in my office at Palace. I was busily looking through paperwork on my desk, perhaps stealthily trying to avoid signing any cheques for players in the transfer window, when I happened across a file containing
information
on the
Telstar
play. In it I found a screenplay for a potential film version. Since the critically acclaimed run had ended in 2005 I had stored the stage set under the main stand at Palace, with a view to bringing it back to the West End at a later date. Reading the script I had other ideas.

I decided that I wanted to bring
Telstar
to the silver screen and would fund it all myself. Why not? funding a football club was so easy! Why not go into another expensive and notoriously difficult industry? With my friend Ray Winstone I had executively produced and part-funded the BBC1 drama
Sweeney Todd
, so I did have some experience. I set about contacting Nick Moran in Los Angeles, who was filming an episode of
CSI Miami
, and asked him if he wanted to make this film. ‘Of what?’ he asked.

‘Well we don’t have enough subject matter to make your life story, you buffoon,’ I replied. ‘
Telstar
, of course.’

At the time of deciding this I was invited onto
Soccer AM
for the second time. The first time I had taken Terry Hall in 2005 to announce the likely re-formation of The Specials. This time I took Nick Moran with me as I was going to talk about amongst other things the intention to make
Telstar
the movie. What I did was get myself into some hot water.

On this edition of
Soccer AM
the resident fans of the club who sat in the studio were Brighton and Hove Albion, Palace’s fiercest rivals. Having me on the show was manna from heaven for them and gave them an opportunity to hurl abuse at me, which I took in a good-natured way. But when we got onto the subject of
Telstar
, I described the film and its storyline and, totally tongue in cheek, used one of the scenes to make fun of the Brighton fans. They were taking the mickey out of me, so I thought I would do the same to them.

It was a fantastically powerful drama, about an innovative record
producer
in the 1960s. What I said was: ‘In one scene Joe Meek is found “importuning” in a public toilet with another man and this should no doubt appeal to the Brighton fans.’ Brighton is known as the gay capital of England. Tim Lovejoy, the presenter, cracked up laughing. He immediately covered Sky’s backside, no pun intended, by saying this was not the view of Sky. Fortunately, the meaning of the word ‘importuning’ went over the Brighton fans’ heads – traditionally they’re not the sharpest tools in the box.

I sauntered off after the show and right into a media melee with newspapers, radio stations and journalists demanding I qualify my comments. Fortunately I had Max Clifford to deal with it as certain factions had taken great exception to my tongue-in-cheek remark, demanding I be rebuked and disciplined in the strongest fashion. Perhaps the punishment they had in mind was to send me down to the very same toilet I had mentioned to be inappropriately dealt with by Brighton’s gay community? I refused to apologise. It was a joke and I am in no way homophobic. I even got contacted by the FA Homophobia Advisory Unit, whose chairman was none other than Martin Perry, the CEO of which club? Brighton and Hove Albion! This kerfuffle soon blew over and I put it behind me.

I had hoped for good things from Peter but the team was just flat, with no real inspiration. Yes, the second half of the season was better. In fact, we picked up thirty-nine points from our last twenty-three games, which was play-off form, and if we had not been so poor in the first twenty-three games we could have reached them again. But the football we played was unimpressive, and the fans seemed jaded. It had been two years of having a go at getting back into the Premier League and our time at the top was receding into distant memory.

Despite Peter’s history with the club he did not seem to fit. The supporters, despite a level of enthusiasm at the beginning, hadn’t taken to him as I thought they would. Behind the scenes he had reshuffled the staff. Bob Dowie had departed, inevitable given what was going on with his brother, and Peter, despite my unhappiness, had dismantled elements of our scouting network especially our representation in Europe. Due to personal differences, he took out our chief scout Gary Seward, someone I rated quite highly, and replaced the scouting network with a group of his incompetent mates.

Taylor and I rarely had a cross word until the back end of this season. As the season was clearly going nowhere I hoped that Peter, given his under-21 and youth development background, would look to blood some of the younger players who were emerging stars in our academy. There was no substitute for first-team experience, but Taylor flatly refused, citing that it was important for his reputation that Palace finished as high up the league as possible. This didn’t sit well with me at all and told me all I needed to know about where Peter really was in the great scheme of things.

As the season wound down I found myself playing in two more games where my burgeoning reputation as a not-bad footballer was cemented. In the first of two matches organised again by Geoff Thomas for his leukaemia charity, I played in the first-ever game at the new Wembley in March 2007. I played alongside such luminaries as Graeme Le Saux and Neville Southall. We won 2–0 in front of 20,000 spectators. Mark Bright scored the first goal and I believe he was texting the world before the ball hit the back of the net. And I, to my eternal delight, scored the second. Say what you like about me, that fact is indelible. No one could accuse me of not being a real pro: I played in this game, and, before the next
one
against Liverpool – a restaging of the 1990 semi-final, I had cortisone injected into the base of my spine.