Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (23 page)

‘So
for instance if he was discussing what we’re doing right now, he would begin,
“Watched
that Danny Baker show last night. Yeah, quite liked it. Although, to be fair, he’s not a patch on Michael Parkinson. And some of his jokes were a bit personal. I mean, if I was a celebrity and I found myself the butt of one of his tortuous bits of logic and wordplay, I don’t think I could accept the jest in the manner intended. I mean, why should I [voice rising now] have to become a laughing stock just so he can help himself to the licence fee I pay with my hard-earned wages? It makes me sick to think I’m financing my own public lynching! I’m a private citizen, not Shirley bloody Bassey! And if he dared try any of his puerile babble while a guest in my house, I’d say, Oi! Baker. NO!! You may think yourself the heir to the late-night talk show crown, but
 . . .”’
and here Harry started to enjoy the audience’s reaction perhaps a little too much
‘“. . . 
to me you’ll always be a loud-mouthed, talentless, balding cockney
cunt!”’

Yes, he actually said that. Thus making the tremendously funny bit unusable. The studio audience, realizing they had been treated to something that would probably not be aired, exploded into shocked applause. The green room crowd had been appreciative too. All, sadly, bar one key individual. Spud had been in conversation with his chums behind the bar and had only turned to look at the TV relaying the show as Harry’s voice began to get shouty. Therefore he missed the reason for the
‘rant’
and got it into his head that Harry Enfield had gone nuts and was itching for a fight. Dad decided to give him one. Swiftly leaving the green room he made toward the studio doors and waited for Harry Enfield to emerge at the end of his segment. About three minutes later out he came and Spud, possibly – though not necessarily – inflamed by a few brandies, launched at him. Pushing Harry up against the wall, he put a hand hard on his chest and went into a real-life version of the character Harry had just been lampooning.

‘You
fuckin’
little
ponce!’
began Dad.
‘You
speak to a boy of mine like that, I oughta throw you down these fucking
stairs!’

By now security were running over to the scene. Harry managed to say that the exchange had been a joke. Spud wasn’t having that.
‘A
joke? What? What you said? How’s that a joke? His mother could have been sitting in that audience! I heard ya! See, he’s never been a fighter, but I fucking am! Go on, say that to
me!’

Hauled away by several members of the Corps of Commissioners – a platoon Dad had once been part of for about twenty minutes after leaving the docks – he freed himself and made straight for Wood Lane tube and a seething early journey home.

Oblivious to these goings on, when I came off air I walked breezily into the green room rubbing my hands together and beaming that that had all gone rather well. Noting a somewhat muted atmosphere, my first thought was that my initial upbeat review must have been the raving illusions of a deluded ego. Double-checking, I saw that even my old man had abandoned this one. The show’s producer, Bea Ballard, took me to one side and filled me in about what had befallen poor Harry even as the applause was ringing in his ears. Good man that he is, Harry Enfield then handed me a bottle of beer with a wry smile. Twenty years later, on the rare occasions that we meet, his initial is greeting remains:
‘Hello
, Danny. Your dad’s not with you, is
he?’

When I look back on the early nineties it is quite beyond me, and I suspect most of the country, how I came to be so in demand. This is no disingenuous attempt to court a counter-argument. It happens to certain performers every now and then, and usually not as a result of clamouring from the public. I certainly don’t recall any great swell in requests for autographs, public appearances or being asked to place my healing hands upon poorly babies, yet the cry continued to be raised within the industry,
‘Get
Baker! It has to be
him!’
So ubiquitous did I become during the period that
Spitting Image
featured a sketch where multiple puppets of me popped up on various programmes simultaneously, including the news and the epilogue. It is some testament to how well I can spend a pound note that during
this heyday hurricane I didn’t move house, buy a second home, or even a top-of-the-range car, or set up a production company, invest in any schemes or shares, fork out for a holiday home, or develop a spectacular drug habit to assist in hoovering up the bank balance. And yet I managed to knock the entire lot out on living well and having a good time, just as we had during the days of Mervyn’s marvellous letters – albeit now on a much larger canvas.

I remember one holiday – and always being close with the in-laws, there would often be a gaggle of us – where I had the idea that it would be wonderful to gallop about New York for a bit, having plenty of everything, then eventually take a sleeper train way down south to Miami, from whence we would drive to Key West. It was the sleeper train that excited me most. I knew that these were fantastically romantic transports, the Iron Horses upon which America was made, smoke billowing from the stack, whistling as they thundered over wilderness bridges, cow-catchers up front and cabooses to the rear. They had fringed lamps in all carriages, Mae West holding court in the restaurant car, Marilyn Monroe drinking from a hip flask in a top bunk. As soon as we pulled out of Grand Central Station I realized I had perhaps been getting a tad carried away. In fact, our first-class three-day Amtrack Express to Florida bore a striking resemblance to the 11.05 Virgin Rail from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly. Far from a cosy communal hotel, we were all in poky plastic-walled rabbit hutches where you pulled an impossibly narrow bed from out of the wall and the toilet door flew open at every shake, filling your rattling cubicle with the acrid smell of whatever blue chemical sloshed about in the small stainless-steel fixture within. As for the restaurant car, suffice to say it made Nandos in Walsall look like Maxim’s, Paris. The corridors were full of stoned students and through the fuzzy windows, rather than the herds of stampeding buffaloes I’d promised, were spectacular views of Philadelphia’s finest tyre factories and
breakers’
yards. We finally abandoned my fantasy on the rails in Savannah, Georgia, and chartered a private plane to get us down to the Keys as quickly as possible. So, yes, I can spend a few quid all right, but I am fantastically proud of that. It is a very working-class trait. I’ve said it before, I’ll
say it again, and may the record show these attitudes are affected by neither circumstance nor budget. Living
‘within
your
means’
is a filthy lie that only allows someone else to steal your pleasure during these few dozen summers below the sun. Eschew the middle-class habits of frugality, caution and making do, the cheap camping holidays and the parental lessons about the value of money. Knock the fucking stuff out. Buy the best prams, the best clothes, the best times for your children – and buy new ones for every child. When friends come round – and they should come round often – don’t budget and see if you have any half-open bottles of long-corked wines to finish first or any
‘value
packs’
of anything. Offer more than they could possibly eat, drink or laugh about. Buy the best. Live the best. Sort things out tomorrow. And Knock. The. Fucking. Stuff. Out. As another of Spud’s maxims ran:
‘The
only reason all these silver spoons have got a few quid is because they never fucking spend any of it – and where’s the pleasure in
that?’

Does This Kind Of Life Look Interesting To You?

S
o now let me recall some of the vehicles – others may prefer the term
‘get
-away
cars’
– that provided the war chest for such trips as the Great American Railroad Disaster. The projects themselves may not be memorable, but I’ll attempt to furnish at least one incident from their existence to justify inclusion and offer clues as to how such a celebrity feeding frenzy gets underway.

The football phone-in show
606
lay the foundations for pretty much everything else that was to come for me. Radio 5 in those days, long before its rebrand as Radio 5 Live, was a peculiar network with no clear idea of what it was supposed to be. The show
Sports Call
, which aired at lunchtime of a Saturday, had proved to be a big success, with the basic quiz element consisting of five individual rounds that anyone could phone in to, offering very good prizes for the winners. These were the days when most radio shows gave stuff away, ranging from VHS videos to holidays abroad. A few years down the line when a couple of stations were found to be handing out the odd CD to close personal friends a tremendous media outcry ensued, but it really didn’t amount to much and I don’t believe listeners were ever that bothered by whether there were six copies of
Die Hard 2
up for grabs on the other side of George Benson’s
‘Love
Times
Love’
or only five because the host had tucked one away into his backpack. With a certain degree of mischievousness, even today I love to say on air:

‘Remember
when we used to be able to give you tickets to shows, box sets and solid-gold cars as prizes? You know, before we got caught with our fingers in the till? Then a couple of you out there
blew the whistle and now look – NOBODY gets anything! Well, I hope you’re happy, Mother
Teresa.’

Anyway,
Sports Call
– a totally legit racket, by the way – was doing very well and the ad-libbing I was engaging in with contestants between the questions appeared to surprise the station controllers. They had a plan to extend their afternoon sports coverage with a phone in programme – amazingly still a novel idea in the era just before the dawn of the Premier League. Currently their sport stopped at six on Saturdays to make way for the
European Chart Show
– such was the ragbag of an agenda Radio 5 had back then. After I had finished
Sports Call
one week, the station manager, Jim Black, asked me if I could spare a moment to hear him outline their plan. Two things I remember from that conversation. The first was his greatest worry seemed to be that I would find it inconvenient to finish
Sports Call
at one, go home and then come back at six to do another show. I said most Saturdays I would be watching Millwall play, but if they didn’t mind sending a fast car to fetch me, that would be fine. The second thing was they were having great trouble coming up with a name for the show.

Various titles were mooted but, apparently, a decision had yet to be reached when the time came to send the schedules to
Radio Times
for printing. All that was provided was the time the programme was due to begin. Thus on Saturday evening, Radio 5’s line-up read:

6.00: News

6.05: Weather

6.06: Sports Phone-In

Devotees of the show today may note the word
‘sports’
there instead of
‘football’,
and indeed the idea was that every game, contest and outdoors hobby would get a look-in. On the very first show I took calls about chess, cross-country and fencing. However, I made it plain that the last thing I was interested in was commonplace opinions or descriptions of someone’s pastime. I wanted the rare, the maverick, the strange. For example, only an ocean-going crackpot would want to foist some old fossil harping on about his success at the local chess club on a fevered audience fresh out of a football cauldron. So any calls had to be about giant chess – a variation you
used to see often outside pubs and in the grounds of stately homes. To put heat under the subject I concocted a story about how, a few years previously, a queen piece from a giant chess set had taken flight during a gale and after crossing many counties had landed on a sow called Victoria, who had recently had a litter of piglets. Victoria had tragically been killed in the incident, a plaque erected to mark her passing, and authorities became alerted to the dangers of these unstable, outsized medieval bludgeons. Now, I contested, you simply never see these once-popular big boards and their huge black-and-white armies anywhere. What’s more, nobody aside from the pig had ever been injured by a chess piece, large or small.

The upshot of all that balderdash was a surge in people wishing to prove me wrong – particularly on the last boast. One caller held us all mesmerized as he told a story of chancing across a giant chessboard while on a mountainside in the Himalayas where he was challenged to a game by a group of monks. While holding a colossal bishop and lost in his pondering of where best to place it, he stepped backwards over a ravine and broke his leg. He was rescued and then tended to by the monks, who chanted by his bedside round the clock. The shattered leg, he insisted, healed in just three days. Now I don’t know whether that tale contains even a grain of truth, but it was brilliantly told and certainly beats some old bore droning on about whether Manchester United should play 4-3-3 or 4-5-1. Also I will never forget that our Himalayan correspondent was, as he told his metaphysical story, on his way back from watching Port Vale get beaten by Shrewsbury, which, for me, added further poetry to his claim.

The point was the show was highlighting the hitherto ignored chasm between football itself and football supporting. Overwhelmingly, football supporters do not talk obsessively about the sport in the manner journalists and pundits do, and in the way advertisers insist. Fans are not submissive, nor are they of a type; a bore is a bore, no matter what your interest. Most supporters I know, sat next to a stranger on a long journey who attempts to open intercourse with,
‘So
do you think the England manager got it right playing Coggins wide on the
left?’
would willingly hurl themselves
through the nearest window rather than endure such numbing small talk. However, if you start proceedings with,
‘I
know someone who used a dead lion as a goalpost – bet you can’t beat
that!’
then the motorway miles will melt away at high speed. To me, the giant chess game with the monks had far more in common with the kind of conversations carried out on football coaches than any of the dry analysis.

That is not to say the show did not provide catharsis and even assistance to the outraged and the furious. If funny calls were in the majority, sedition was a very close second. It was never my intention to make
606
a debating forum; it was a broadside, a clarion call and I would often help organize supporters to fight back against the bullying corporate encroachment already paving the way for the suffocating brand of the Premier League. I barred anyone involved with or representing any club from coming on air. These people seemed to get enough opportunities to skew the argument everywhere else in the media, so I declared
606
would be the
supporters’
voice and nothing but. One of these impromptu on-air salvos would result in a visit from some plain-clothes policemen who suggested strongly that I lay off one very famous team and its chairman, but that would be in 1998, when I’d returned to the show after a lengthy break, so let us return to that in due course.

On the very first
606
, our flag was well and truly speared into the battleground by one response in particular. My ban on club staff had not yet been announced and under the delicious umbrella question,
‘Just
How Crooked Are
Referees?’
we in the studio were both astounded and impressed when we received a call from Andy Townsend, then playing for Chelsea. Andy, in a way that would probably find him suspended from the game today, was driving home from that day’s match and began to heatedly outline the significant shortcomings behind the whistle at his fixture. When I asked him was this unusual, he roared with laughter and gave a few more examples of open bias he had known. Thanking him for his honesty, the show then moved on to the pros and cons of being trapped underneath those gargantuan flags that supporters pass around stadiums. The next day, though, it was Andy’s remarks that made the Sunday
back pages and
606
was instantly declared to be the only place to go for all football fans when in transit each weekend. Other sports were soon phased out, but the bizarre, unique and enraged content continued to grow and flow in all directions.

One other note before we move on. It’s long forgotten now, but
606
used to feature music – an ingredient that may have seemed super-fluous, but one that I tried to make vital. Between calls I would play ever more insistent records from all genres that I felt might make the show seem like it could influence the wheels of the audience’s trains, coaches and cars to turn a little faster. Once more I had been given complete freedom on air and the show blindsided a hierarchy not overly paying attention. By the time they became aware of what was going on it was too late to rein it in and the show was a hit. It was a tremendous thrill and a privilege, being able to spit on my hands and run up the black flag like that every week, but such a renegade style was soon to be extinguished as the industry lurched towards today’s model where, inexplicably, the further you are away from the microphone the more control you wield over what is ultimately said into it.

Radio 5, cock-a-hoop at having a show that people were talking about, then approached me to see if I would be interested in taking over their daily breakfast show, a moribund magazine affair called
Morning Edition
. In that one sentence you can see how this over-exposure thing achieves lift-off, can’t you?

This programme too went with some zip for a couple of years and even delivered a couple of lifelong friends in Danny Kelly and Mark Kermode. As newspaper reviewer and film critic respectively, I inherited both the chaps from the previous format and while I was always going to get along with Danny, given that he had joined the
NME
just after I left and his upbringing in North London almost entirely mirrored that of my own across the river, Mark and I were sort of slung into a spin dryer and blended. Until we later spoke about it I had no idea that
‘guest’
spots on the show were supposed to be self-contained and not designed to be interrupted. The first time Mark came in with, quite correctly, his written script and a bunch of audio clips from the films under
review, he said something in his introduction about how he hated John
Hughes’
films and frankly don’t we all? I couldn’t let this pass and as he attempted to press on with his five-minute spot I pointed out that to suggest such a thing about the director of
Home Alone
he must be some kind of notorious ratbag with extra lashings of pickled sourpuss. Appearing stunned, he looked up from his script and after an initial
‘What?’
set about me with a vim and wit every bit a match for my own. I like to think that, in that moment, Mark was freed from his previous role as robotic reader of fixed dialogue to the magnificent jousting free-form broadcaster he is today.

My favourite tale from the
Morning Edition
years happened in my absence, though it was then joyfully related to me by those who were present. Once the show started doing well, a meeting was called by a senior management figure at Radio 5 to see if anything could be done to make things better. I was naturally asked to attend, but explained that my daughter’s (imaginary) pet racoon had been a bit down lately and I was at home blowing bubbles through its cage in an attempt to perk it up. Early on in the meeting, the executive turned to the show’s producers, Nick Morgan and Oliver Jones, and said,

‘Is
Danny happy with the show and the station, do you know? I mean, can we do anything to help
him?’

Knowing me well, the pair of them were tempted to reply,
‘Yes
, never call another pointless meeting like this
again.’
Instead they elected to go with more diplomatic answers. The superior, however, seemed convinced that they had become disconnected from the station’s star turn and so pressed them further, leading to what I consider to be one of the greatest reported exchanges in show business history.

‘Well,
what are Danny’s interests? Are there any guests we could get on the show he would really spark
off?’

Now it just so happened that Frank Sinatra was in town to play one of his final concerts. Oliver, who has on many occasions been reminded that his sardonic wit is prone to being misunderstood, piped up,

‘Well,
Sinatra is playing the Albert Hall. Danny likes him. Perhaps he’ll come
on.’

This drew a laugh around the table. Except from the exec. He continued to look at Ollie.

‘Well?
Has anyone made the
call?’
he said in all seriousness.

‘No!’
the producer guffawed. Then, noting the furrowed brow of his superior, he attempted to explain the problem.
‘No
. It’s Frank Sinatra. Frank. Sinatra. We’re Radio 5’s new breakfast show. Frank Sinatra doesn’t even receive the
Queen!’

The suit at the top of the table was having none of this.

‘I
want someone to find out where he’s staying and ring him up. Ask if he’ll come on and do something for
us.’

‘Do
what
exactly?’
asked Oliver, aghast.

The suit was not to be swayed.

‘I
don’t know, perhaps he could come in at six to look over the morning
papers.’