Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (20 page)

The drainpipe to which his lead was attached was about two feet from the wrought-iron gate. Walking back until the lead extended to its fullest, Twiz must have noted that he had a five-foot run-up before any proposed launch and after doing the maths reckoned that, while he would never clear the gate itself, if he made himself thin enough once in flight he might just get through a large gap in the curlicue pattern at the top of the fixture. It was, as always, worth a shot. Because he was a brilliant dog he got his calculations absolutely spot on and flew through the opening like a dart. Unfortunately, because he never thought things through, he had failed to factor in what might happen beyond this. Arriving airborne on the garden side of the gate the silver chain by which he was tethered suddenly came to the end of its reach and yanked hard at the collar around his neck. Twizzle, as yet some five feet from terra firma, was left helplessly suspended against the ironwork. When Wendy came out into the yard to allow him back into the house, it was this horrifying sight that greeted her. Her first action was to go to pull the gate open and support Twiz from the other side, but we’d had it fitted with a padlock just recently to stop burglars coming in via the junkyard at the rear. Wendy knew the key to the lock was on the big bunch in her bag upstairs (probably) but there was no time to confirm that now.

She put her hands through the gate and tried to release the metal clip that affixed lead to collar, but working from behind was difficult and, once she did locate it, Twizzle’s dead weight made it impossible for her to get her thumb under the required catch to spring it. Next she scraped and tore at the knot fastening the leash to the drainpipe, but again the tension created by his drop simply refused to let it yield. All the time she was screaming for help.

Hearing the commotion, Adrienne, along with her partner John, tore up the road to our house with Wendy rushing through to let them in. While Adrienne called the vet, John set about trying to release the catch at Twizzle’s neck though, unbelievably, in what appeared to be the very last act of his life Twiz momentarily recovered just enough strength to groggily try and bite John’s fingers as he worked beneath his head. Then he slumped unconscious once more. John then decided to break the chain lead that held poor Twizzle
aloft. After about thirty agonizing seconds he succeeded, causing Twiz to fall heavily on to the paving stones out in the garden. He was totally lifeless, so much so in fact, that when Wendy brought the key to unlock the padlock that secured the gate, Twizzle’s prone body prevented it from opening and he had to be shoved aside so that the door could be inched open.

Our dog was not breathing at all and blood was issuing from his nose. About ten minutes later the vet arrived and did what he could, but it was hopeless. Looking at Wendy’s ashen face and red eyes he apologized for not being a miracle worker and asked, practically but rather tactlessly I feel, if he could use one of the empty rubble sacks nearby to transport Twizzle to his car. Wendy objected to this but the vet said he had another emergency to attend to and couldn’t roll up to that with a dead dog on the passenger seat – that might shake a client’s confidence. To this day my wife doesn’t know why she okayed this action, possibly through shock, but it was once our late-lamented lunatic had been decanted into this plastic shroud that something inexplicable happened. They heard growling. They had barely a second to comprehend the sound when Twizzle started to writhe and thrash around inside the bag like one of the Three Stooges with a wasp’s nest in his pants. The vet leapt back and Wendy fell clean over. From the top of the sack rose Twizzle’s head, his tongue licking away at the dried blood on his snout.

Wendy asked the vet with some urgency what was happening. The vet, she said, looked utterly panic stricken.

‘I
promise you he was dead, I promise you he was gone
 . . .’
he kept repeating.

Registering the outraged look forming on Twizzle’s face as he eyed up the vet, Wendy advised that
he
might do well to be gone now.

About twenty minutes later I arrived home, having, as Adrienne so correctly pointed out, missed it all.

Twizzle suffered no ill effects whatsoever after having been officially pronounced dead. Nobody could explain it and we don’t blame anyone if they find the whole story to be totally far-fetched. I now believe he had merely popped over an ethereal fence to the other side, as he had done with so many earthly barriers. Taking a brief
look around, he probably noticed all the
‘No
Chasing, No Fighting, No
Barking’
signs they undoubtedly have in Heaven, then, having weighed things up, decided to slide back to where all the action was.

One last note about Twiz. I wrote earlier that he liked very few humans outside our house. Well, it’ll come as no great shock to learn that the one person he absolutely adored above all others and would roll over to be tickled by any time of the day or night was Spud. And Spud LOVED Twizzle.

In old age, both of them, now calmer and at peace with the world, would sit for hours on park benches or walking slowly on the beach down at Dymchurch. My old man was never prone to outbursts of emotion, but the day Twizzle died – and I had to hold the old warrior while a vet gave the injection – when I told Dad he just sat down on the pavement swallowing hard, his eyes refusing to blink lest it release a welling pool of tears.

‘The
poor old
bastard,’
he said quietly a few times, followed by,
‘Do
you reckon they had to do
it?’

I told him they did
 . . . 
and this time he really was gone.

A tough old nut to the end, Twizzle had lived to be almost twenty years old.

Nights On Broadway

C
hris Evans gave up overseeing my GLR show in order to make his own programmes at the station. These went fantastically well and by 1989 this local network had a weekend line-up that achieved a creative peak many radio devotees coo about even now. I would do the early shows and on Saturday I’d hand over to Chris for his boisterous, often bawdy, reliably brilliant zoo format, while on Sunday I gave way to one of the few broadcasting geniuses I have witnessed first-hand.

This was Chris Morris, now a filmmaker, but then just about the most jaw-dropping ideas machine British radio has ever nurtured. While I was making up shows on the hoof, now comprising a growing element of bizarre audience participation, Chris M’s shows were meticulously planned in advance right down to the last daring cuts between live mic, prepared tape, original music, insane scripted links and varied regular characters all played by the host. He’d arrive a full hour before my show ended, and I’d watch dumbfounded as Chris would convert the studio to his needs, erecting extra mic stands, installing keyboards and loading up reel-to-reels. Quiet and intense away from the programme, once it started he would become a whirl of animation, spinning this way and that in his chair, arms waving, firing off several machines simultaneously, all the time reading from the pages of notes fanned out in front of him. That his entire output from that era has never been archived and made available to future generations to marvel at truly staggers me. Then again, nobody in radio today would give Chris Morris the absolute licence afforded him back then.

Like most of the over-staffed, management-choked flat-pack media, radio does not want to hear from mavericks who can just
‘do
it’. Self-contained talent is the enemy of those who require their jobs to be bolstered by an Everest of fatuous titles and who think creativity is a formula. Worse, they believe the more people in business suits who work on the formula in a series of deathless meeting rooms, the better the end product will be. Or perhaps they don’t, not really. In my experience, most of the dreary phalanx of managers and their ilk who clog up the simple show business world of
‘being
any
good’
are well aware their supposed
‘skills’
are completely worthless. It is an unspoken truth among their nervous ranks, and it forces them to create ever more blustering levels of unproductive desk-bound subservients whose only function is to mask the overpowering smell of horse shit. Anyone who seems to somehow be able to make programmes without their utterly unqualified interference is judged to be
‘trouble’
and gets suffocated under a welter of wordy PR and another round of empty self-serving meetings. It is not how fresh and original you are any more, it is how compliant, how malleable, how much you will tow the timid company line. To really seal your place on the vacuous inverted media pyramid these days, it is absolutely essential that you never draw attention to how many people in the room are 24-carat fucking imposters.
³

On my own programme at GLR I had backed off the bumptiousness, driven the play-list to new levels of disparity – typically playing Ry Cooder’s
‘Down
in
Hollywood’
followed by Charlie Chester’s
‘The
Old Bazaar in
Cairo’
– and had hit upon something that nobody else seemed to be doing, and that was to create a phone-in show that few people could actually phone in to. This inversion of the accepted format of throwing out topical or generic subjects that anyone might have a view on or example of, created an audience who listened to the show just to see if anybody had, for instance, eaten their dinner out of a hat. It remains my only piece of advice to
any hopeful broadcaster – eschew whatever tired first-thought news agenda is suggested to you by the pusillanimous committees above and challenge your audience to raise its game to that of the show.

Overwhelmingly, the sort of gargoyles who rise to power in media have a mortal fear of the frivolous and insist on stiflingly close supervision of programmes whose workaday dreary solemnity creates the illusion that they are serious thinkers when in fact they haven’t a single original thought in their banal, limited brains. Their greatest terror is that they will get into an elevator with whatever bubble-blower is just above them in the corporate pile, who will then turn to them and say:

‘Hmmph!
Caught a bit of your station the other day. Instead of discussing what’s in the newspapers, house prices and the danger mad dogs pose to us all, chap seemed to be asking can shoes be haunted, notable things you’ve had stuck to you and did anyone’s aunt ever dance with Emperor Hirohito. What sort of operation are you running over there?
Hmmph!’

However at GLR back then, possibly because the wages were so low they really didn’t dare flex any managerial muscle, everyone was allowed to create whatever radio world and persona they chose, free from editorial interference. I realize now how lucky we all were.

In the middle of my first six months on the radio I received an offer that could not have been further from the frenzied yet cerebral rock’n’roll brew I was bubbling up each weekend. I was asked to star in a pantomime – actually star, with my name above the title and everything. I had not been involved in any stage work since the age of seven when I’d given my highly regarded Mad Hatter in Rotherhithe Junior School’s Christmas adaptation of
Alice in Wonderland
. This had been a terrific hit and while nobody actually said it, I think I had found some things in Hatter that many of my peers overlooked. So now I was being asked once more to parade beneath the proscenium, eh? Well, well, well. I wondered if I still
‘had
it’.

The production was to be staged at the Broadway Theatre, Barking, and the offer was to play Idle Jack in
Dick Whittington and His Cat
. Quite why they had chosen me for the part, I had no idea, though
subsequent events would provide a few clues. The run was to be for just three weeks, twice daily, and I was engaged for the sum total of £4,500. In the event, they may as well have promised me a sack of rubies and a solid gold car because
Dick Whittington and His Cat
remains the one job in my life that I was
‘knocked’
for. That is, neither I, nor anyone else in the cast, saw a single penny for our efforts. It was, in short, a scam. Hooray!

If anyone had told me that I would one day use the hoary old turn of phrase
‘it
wasn’t the money, it was the
memories’
about a job where I was required at one point to wear nothing but a grass skirt, I’m sure I would have thrashed them about the private parts with a rolled-up newspaper. Yet I’m afraid I have to because, coin-free though my labours on stage in East London were to be, I had a truly wonderful time during my brief diversion into panto. The producer/director of it – and as it turned out the secret arch-villain – was a man called Paddy Dailey. In the seventies heyday of British comedy double acts there were four major turns. In order of importance, the list ran:

1. Morecambe & Wise

2. Mike & Bernie Winters

3. Hope & Keen

4. Dailey & Wayne

Only the first two are remembered much these days, and even Mike & Bernie’s star is now fading fast. Absolutely no one remembers Dailey & Wayne. Yet they had generated quite a bit of celebrity heat for a while, until Bill Wayne’s early death left Paddy high and dry. I certainly hadn’t thought about them in decades until I sat with Paddy in a café noting the appalled look on his face as I told him I had no experience at all in live theatre, had never been to a pantomime and had no idea what the expressions he kept dropping in regarding bits of stage business could possibly mean.

‘But
you know what I’m saying when I say we could do
“Syphons”
in Act Two,
right?’
he begged, as though even a pre-school toddler would know this most basic routine for a duo.

I told him that I had as much idea about
‘syphons’
as I’d had about his previous mentions of
‘counting
out’
and
‘the
walk around’.

‘Christ
. Listen, I’ll come round to yours on Thursday and I’ll learn you how they go. It’ll be a crash course, but you can record it and play it back when I’ve gone. If you can’t, then I hope you know how to entertain people by trick cycling or
something!’

I told him I couldn’t ride a bike either.

The day Paddy came round and began rehearsing me in all the ancient bits of business I would need to amuse a junior audience was one of the most satisfying of my working life. Every spin, slap, verbal misunderstanding,
‘cheeky’
response and slapstick pay-off he taught me felt like being allowed into a welcoming secret society. He even brought with him two soda syphons so that I might master the correct way to give and receive the series of water-jets required to build to the big moment when he finally got it straight in the kisser. I couldn’t wait to lay this gold on the toddlers.

The only time I rebelled against tradition was at the initial read-through. Also in the cast was
Blue Peter’
s Michael Sundin, sitcom actresses Sarah Dangerfield and Sally Hughes and, a particular thrill for me, Michael Robbins, best known as
‘Arthur’
from
On the Buses
. As we flicked through the pages of Paddy Dailey’s adapted script, all the seasoned pros seemed a little detached from its content while I gave all my corn such bursting enthusiasm that
‘Arthur’
said at one point,
‘Save
something for the night, eh,
boy?’
Looking back I can understand that playing down the bill to a local TV reporter at the Barking Broadway Theatre over Christmas had probably not been the dream they envisaged at stage school.

The moment I clashed with the piece’s author came very early on.

My entrance was about five minutes into the show. The Ship’s Captain (Paddy Dailey) is talking on the quayside to Alderman Fitzwarren (Michael Robbins) and his daughter Alice (Sally Hughes) about the tremendous difficulty he’s been having recruiting new hands for his upcoming trip to South America. Just as he says,
‘There
doesn’t seem to be one likely lad in the whole of this
town!’
the band strike up
‘Consider
Yourself’
from Lionel Bart’s
Oliver
and I (Idle Jack) stride on from stage right to deliver a powerful rendition of this borrowed standard. At its conclusion, the Ship’s Captain grabs my arm and the following dialogue ensues:

SC: You there! You look like a lively prospect! How would you like to go on an adventure?

IJ: Oh, I’d like that very much, sir!

SC: Well, before I take you aboard, I need to ask you a few questions to confirm your suitability, OK?

IJ: Fire away, Captain.

SC: Now question number one: name me a bird that can’t fly.

IJ: A penguin.

SC: A penguin? Why can’t that fly?

IJ: Because it’s a chocolate biscuit!

Well, I ask you? Do you see my objection? That feeble bit of word-play was to be my first joke of the night, my calling card in hoping to win over the restless hordes of under-tens waiting to see if an interloper from television had the chops to carry an entire production. I could imagine them hearing this pancake of a whizz-bang and, looking up in disappointment at their parents, pinching their little noses with thumb and forefinger as much as to say,
‘Oh
-oh. Told you we should have gone to
Cinderella
. This hambone is really laying an
egg.’

So I objected. Once the reading was through, I asked Paddy if he had a moment.

‘Paddy,
it’s this opening gag of
mine,’
I said, hoping not to completely crush his faith in his own abilities.

‘What
gag? Chocolate
biscuit?’
he replied sensing rebellion.

‘Yes,
I’m not entirely sure about it. I mean, it’s strong, of course, but is it strong
enough?’
I thought I’d let him down gently.

‘It’ll
be
fine,’
assured Paddy and he went to walk away. I stopped him.

‘See,
I know you probably only know me as the bloke from the
Six O’Clock Show
but
 . . .’

‘And
the other
one,’
he interrupted.
‘I’ve
put that on your billing
too.’

‘The
other
one?’
I muttered, suddenly derailed.

‘Yes,
the
Bottom Line
. The thing you did on ITV. I’ve included that on the posters as
well.’

I screamed inwardly. Did this man not want to sell
any
tickets?

‘Well,
anyway,
Paddy,’
I continued, thoroughly rattled now,
‘see
, I have done a bit of writing myself and I wondered, you know, if I could change it to something
 . . . 
a bit
cleverer.’

‘Clever?’
Now he looked affronted.
‘You
don’t think they’ll like the Penguin
joke?’

‘I
just think they might be expecting something a bit more up to date. Can I mess around with it and come up with a few
alternatives?’
I stopped short of providing him with some of my celebrated triumphs with photo captions at the
NME
.

‘Whatever
you want,
Dan,’
he suddenly conceded.
‘Just
do it my way in the first show, please. If that doesn’t work – change it to what you think
will.’

Great. I set to work on several different exchanges that I fancied would get the crowd checking their programmes to see if this was a new work by Neil Simon.