It's Not What You Think (20 page)

10 Eight-track car stereo system

  9 LED/LCD digital watch

  8 Betamax video machine

  7 Spectrum ZX81 personal computer

  6 Atari Home entertainment centre

  5 The Sony Walkman

  4 Sega Megadrive

  3 Fax machine—£3,000 when they first came out and a salesman came to your house and treated you like God

  2 Telephone answering machine. You could only rent them at first—£1,500 a year from BT!

  1 The Squarial

As remote as I thought my chances of getting on the radio
in London had been, even more remote was any idea of me appearing on television. But these were heady times for the media in general—hundreds of new broadcasting platforms were being discovered every day, new and novel ways to reach an audience and with them new opportunities to make money. Where satellite radio had failed, satellite television had now taken its place and was looking for both content and people who could provide it.

With every new technological revolution there is usually a race between two or three formats to gain supremacy. This kind of war is usually highly brutal and bloody with everyone ploughing in hundreds of millions of pounds in an attempt to kill off the competition, all of them knowing that when it comes down to it the winner takes all. It’s a game of very high stakes and big balls, not for the faint-hearted.

The two main protagonists involved in this new stream of television were Sky with their big grey dishes and BSB with their funny-looking squarials—both companies keen to get their particular receiver screwed to our walls. The key to this was buying up the rights to various programmes, movies and events that would then tempt any potential viewers to choose their package over their rivals. As part of this process

BSB decided to go one step further and create a channel for younger viewers based on the success of MTV. This new channel would be called the Power Station and was owned by a guy called Nik Powell.

Nik had made a name for himself by being one of the three men who had started the Virgin brand, the other two being a chap called Simon Draper and of course Richard Branson. After leaving the Virgin group Nik had then joined forces with the ex Beatle George Harrison and Stephen Woolley to form a venture called HandMade Films with which he had several hit movies. All things considered he was quite a guy, he also happened to be married to the 60s pop star Sandy Shaw.

Nik had heard me on the radio and thought I would be perfect to host his daily breakfast television show. It was to be two hours long and very much a radio show on the telly, with videos taking the place of records and me popping up in between to provide some sort of additional colour. He asked me in for a screen test, took one look at it, realised I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and offered me the job straight away—along with a very handy signing on fee plus a salary of £25k a year.

£25k—wowzer, this would double my annual income and sure it meant I had to work on the telly for two hours in the morning and on the radio for two hours every night, plus a few hours’ pre-production on top, but I didn’t care. I had boundless energy pumping through my veins and each new opportunity simply fired me up even more.

Two hours a day of television, having never done any before, was of course a baptism of fire, but what a way to learn—and fortunately, once again, there were very few people around to witness my mistakes—and
there were plenty to witness. Although when I say my mistakes, I should say, our mistakes because guess who was producing me? Big Bird—Andy, was back on the scene, once again at the forefront of a new operation.

We had just the most fun making
Power Up
, which was the name of our show. We had a fully kitted out television studio and gallery to play with every day. This is where I would learn all the camera tricks, digital video effects and other television trivia that would give me a head start when it came to working on
The Big Breakfast
,
Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush
and
TFI.

Characters were instrumental in filling the show’s content as well as getting most of the crew on camera—as there was no one else to play them. There was almost one character per link: Mystic Mick and his Magic Brick would bring us news of the future. The Man in the Kagool would mysteriously wander in and out of the back of shot, the one-string guitar guy would shuffle on and play a song every now and again and our in-house pet squirrel Martin would be berated to leave the phone alone before being unceremoniously whipped off screen via an invisible length of fishing line.

All total nonsense, all very
Wayne’s World
—almost exactly the same in fact, based on the premise that anything that made us laugh might make the viewers laugh. Again I found myself in the middle of an ideas-eating monster—we just had to keep those ideas coming.

The viewing figures for BSB meanwhile were dismal to say the least but the breakfast show was just about managing to register some kind of blip on the research. Nik decided to protect his biggest asset and invited me to lunch at a pub on Parsons Green in Fulham. It was called the White Horse and Nik wanted to meet me there to offer me a new deal.

‘Look Chris, we really love what you and the team are doing and we want to make sure you’re happy.’

‘Nik, I couldn’t be happier.’

‘Yes but you’ve probably heard about the figures and some of the other shows that are moving to a straight music video format as a result.’

‘Yes I have but that’s all fine, we are rocking.’

‘Well, that’s precisely it, you are rocking and we want you to know that we are 100 per cent behind what you’re doing.’

‘Great, that’s good, thanks.’

‘And that’s why we want to double what we pay you.’

Yes he really did say that. ‘We want to double what we pay you.’ What was it with these London people?

I didn’t know what to say so I said this: ‘Nik that’s really nice of you but it’s not about the money for me, it’s about taking the programme forward and seeing what we can do next.’

It wasn’t exactly what I meant but it was sort of what I meant. Of course I cared about the money but only because I’d never had any. I was far more passionate about what we were going to do on the show every day that Nik was slightly taken aback. I didn’t mean to be ungrateful but here was a guy who had just doubled this kid’s wages and the kid barely seemed to bat an eye.

Whatever emotions I had suppressed whilst sat opposite Nik in the pub that afternoon, screamed out of me as I drove home later in the day. Woohoo! In the last eighteen months my salary had gone from £15,000 a year to the princely sum of almost £70,000. What a laugh. It was time to buy a new car and how about a place to live?

10 Terraced house in Warrington

  9 Studio house in Belsize Park

  8 Old rectory in Kent

  7 2-bed flat in Belsize Park

  6 Terraced house in Notting Hill

  5 Villa in Portugal

  4 Country estate in Surrey

  3 Farmhouse in Surrey

  2 Semi-detached house in Chelsea—I never went there, sold it to George Michael who never went there either, he then sold it to Puff Daddy, who I also think has never been there

  1 Lionel Ritchie’s old house in L.A.—by far and away the coolest house I have ever owned

I went to see and fell in love with something called a studio house.
It consisted of one big room with stripped wooden floors, a vaulted ceiling and a gallery bedroom. Within that room was everything except the toilet. From the bath you could watch television and from the bed you could see the bath. There was a small but perfectly formed galley kitchen, a real fire and French windows leading out onto a tiny garden. It was my fab London pad and I loved it—it was also the breathtaking sum of £105,000. The second part of the package, my new car, was a blue 1960s Jag, with chrome wire wheels—it was to die for. Life was sweet, sweeter than sugar and honey pie, but my main focus was still on the work—that’s where my future lay. Although my fledging television days were about to come to an end.

In the race for satellite television dominance it was becoming quickly evident that Sky was going to be the bride whereas BSB was going to be the bridesmaid. BSB’s days were numbered and it was only a matter of time before it would close down and admit defeat. To add insult to injury Sky would take BSB over and even adopt part of its name.

As British Sky Broadcasting was born, my salary having recently been doubled was now double nothing. The Power Station being part of BSB had to switch off and power down. Just before midnight on the final day of
transmission we all huddled together in front of the monitor in reception to have a few farewell drinks and witness the playing out of the last video. It was The Doors’ ‘The End’. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Thanks to Nik and Don Atyeo, our laid-back but brilliant Australian programme boss, not to mention all the crew who I worked with day in and day out, it was here that I had gained an invaluable education in the art of producing a low-budget, two-hour, daily television show. I still have several large boxes of video tapes to prove it, which I cherish as much as anything else I own.

You can’t buy experience like the hours I racked up on the Power Station let alone hope to get paid for doing so. And it was these same hours that would put me in pole position to host a show which intended to wake Britain up like it had never been woken up before.
The Big Breakfast
would be along in less than a year, but there would be more television shows, not to mention a marriage, in between.

The radio show back at GLR meantime was still flying and offers of additional work started to come my way, I remember one particular such offer, a voiceover for a McDonalds television advertising campaign. It was for several thousand pounds. I had no idea such vast sums could be earned for such little work. It was a 30-second ad that would take less than an hour of my time—but not so fast.

‘You’re not going to do it, are you?’ said a guy I worked with.

‘Why not?’ I replied.

‘Well, it’s for McDonalds and you know what they stand for. Your shows are cool and McDonalds definitely isn’t cool, at least not to your audience.’

Hmmm, this thought had never crossed my mind, I’d never had to consider such a dilemma before, maybe he had a point. The money would have come in handy as I still had a hefty mortgage on my house to pay but what he’d said had made me apprehensive. So much so, I decided to pass.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks later when the ad finally aired with the voice of none other than the guy who told me not to do it…and he was a bloody vegetarian.

The guy in question was Andy Davies. Andy used to sell ad space in the back of a computer magazine whilst listening to Emma Freud’s weekday
morning show, the show I was brought in to produce. He called up one day and asked if he could come in and sit in to see the show go out as he was a big fan, hated what he did for a living and would love to have a chance to help out if we ever needed a spare pair of hands. Good for him—that’s exactly what I had done several years before at Piccadilly Radio.

When I began my evening show I called Andy to see if he was still interested as we were short of people to man the phones. From there, again like me, he started to work on other shows and it wasn’t long before he was able to leave his telesales job and come and work at GLR full time.

When we set up the Saturday morning show Andy was very much the third member of the team—along with Carol and myself—going by the on-air name of ‘Handy the Producer’. We were the perfect radio threesome, although Carol and I were about to break away and form a splinter group of our own.

We had been on and off as a couple for a while now and although for the majority of the time we got on like a house on fire, there were several cogs to our relationship that kept on getting jammed. It was as if we were both reluctant to admit we wanted to be with each other on a permanent basis, especially having enjoyed such a wild time together for the last few months or so. Could two people still have as much fun as we were having if they were more of an item? Or would this change the dynamic too much? We had to either shape up or ship out, I think there is a point in most relationships when this happens and Carol and I had reached ours.

One day the subject turned again to the future and whether we were wasting our time or not when out of nowhere I suggested, ‘Why don’t we just get married.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘You and me married? That’s insane!’ She was laughing her now famous laugh hysterically.

To say that Carol was not the marrying type would be putting it mildly. She was fiercely independent and to my knowledge hadn’t been involved in any serious kind of relationship for a good few years, certainly not since I’d known her. But I genuinely thought it could work, maybe this was what we both needed. A reason to commit and there’s no bigger reason than marriage.

I think it must have been the gravity of the proposition that eventually cajoled Carol into saying ‘yes’. And we were both slightly mad, why not be slightly mad together?

Once we had made the decision to go through with it, we wasted no time in booking a slot at Camden registry office. Although we only told a couple of people about the actual wedding, we organised a party the same night where we announced our nuptials to the world in the form of fifty or sixty open-mouthed guests who didn’t know whether to believe us or not. Carol and I thought it was hilarious. We set up home together and changed the title of our radio show.
Round at Chris’s
had now become
Round at Chris’s and his Mrs.

10 A clear head

  9 Perspective

  8 A plan

  7 Self control

  6 More people than the other guys

  5 A smile

  4 A bottom line

  3 A walk-away figure

  2 A lack of ego

  1 A lawyer

The broadcaster TV-am was to be the final bridge
in my journey to Channel 4. Andy and I had pitched a show to them based on what we had done at the Power Station for a Saturday morning slot. We had called the show
TV Mayhem
and it was to be my second bona fide television experience as well as being my first experience of independent production, something that would one day make me a multi-millionaire. Andy was well ahead of the game and knew the value of owning your own content. Carol for her part, an experienced television production manager, came on board to look after the pennies, something she was uncannily gifted at.

The show itself was fab, unlike TV-am’s fortunes, which after a cracking ten-year period of popularity and profit were suddenly anything but. During the first few weeks of our run, TV-am lost its contract to GMTV in a franchise bidding war and although the network handover date was several months away, it was decided maximum revenue was now paramount and all costs at the station were to be slashed immediately. Big and Good Productions (named after ‘Big Bird’ and ‘Good Evans’) were last in so it was a safe bet we would more than likely be first out.

‘What do we do now?’ I asked Andy,

‘We take the money and scarper,’ he replied.

‘What money?’ I said, ‘we don’t have any money, they’re cancelling our show.’

‘Yes, they are but we have a contract for forty shows. They might not want to air them but they’re still going to have to pay for them.’

I had no idea what he was talking about, surely we couldn’t get paid for shows we weren’t going to have to make?

TV-am called us in for a ‘friendly’ meeting where they had intended to thank Andy, Carol and me for all our efforts with the new show, apologise for what must have been a big disappointment and give us a pat on the head. Andy was having none of that, however—that’s why he hired a lawyer to come with us to the meeting.

The expression on the exec’s face when we walked in was a picture, he had no idea what had hit him. Within fifteen minutes, TV-am had settled with Big and Good Productions and to the tune of several hundred thousand pounds.

Shit the bed again
…this media world was getting goofier with every deal.

For the next few months, as the GLR show rocked happily along in the background, other than having more fun with my new wife, I basically filled my whole day working, keeping fit and then going for a beer. I was now going to the gym five days a week and spending any spare time I had at home where I would constantly be writing new ideas, trying to come up with anything that might work on the television or radio.

I had decided to let business take care of itself. It was a ploy that had seemed to work thus far. I would do the creative work and let other people take care of the money. Besides it was becoming ever plainer to me that very few people in the media actually did anything discernible at all other than feed off the ideas guys in one way or another. It was ideas that made this business tick and as far as I could see anyone who came up with them was bound to be on to a winner sooner or later. Over at Channel 4 there was a group of such people about to do exactly that.

Breakfast television, which had been a disaster to start off with, was now big news—there was money in them there hills and Channel 4’s Michael Grade had decided it was about time they got their hands on some of it. Invites were put out to tender for their own early morning slot.

The pitching process for this much-coveted contract consisted of several rounds, culminating with two companies going head to head and
actually making programmes to be broadcast in real time, although not to the general public but rather directly back to the bosses at Channel 4.

The first I heard about all of this was when I was asked to go and see a company called Mentorn—one of the biggest independent television production companies at the time, responsible for producing such hits as
Challenge Anneka.
They had sailed through the initial bidding stages and were now, from a shortlist of ten, hotly tipped to get down to the final two. Mentorn now wanted me to be part of their bid as they thought I would strengthen their appeal—it was well-known that Channel 4 were looking for something different and had suggested new talent might be the key. Although flattered, I was surprised by their interest as I still hadn’t really achieved anything on television, but the radio show was gaining more and more notoriety and it was obvious that people in high places were beginning to tune in.

Mentorn wanted to be able to say that I would be the presenter of their show and no-one else’s. They were willing to buy me off the market in an exclusive deal to be part of the package to take into the final pitches and for this privilege they were willing to pay me £10,000.

Out of all my experience with the media and money thus far, this was the craziest I’d encountered to date. Ten thousand pounds for doing nothing except agreeing to have my name on a piece of paper. Television really was a strange world full of even stranger people but if they wanted to keep sending cash my way, that was fine by me. This was my third significant payment from a television company which, added together, now totalled more than I had earned in the rest of my working life.

But this is the most unpredictable of businesses and to everybody’s surprise, along with Mentorn’s disbelief, they were kicked out at the penultimate stage. No one was more shocked than the boss of the company, Tom Gutteridge, a relative giant in TV. They had been a shoo-in to get to the final and although I felt some sympathy for them I could hardly say I was devastated, having been involved very little with their bid either emotionally or creatively.

The ten thousand pounds, however, meant I could buy the next car in what was now becoming an impressive list of vehicles I had owned—a 1956 MGA Roadster in old English white with red leather interior. Thank you, Mentorn.

Back at GLR I continued with my trusty radio show, not really any the wiser and not really knowing what was going on with the whole Channel 4 breakfast thing. Not that this would remain the case for long as I was about to receive a phone from a man called Charlie Parsons offering me a job that would change my life beyond all recognition.

Charlie was a very respected programme maker, specialising in new styles of television. He had worked on
Network 7
, a diverse rolling alternative news show for Channel 4 on Sunday mornings where all the reporters were young, had trendy haircuts and wore black. He was also the creator of
Club X
and the infamous
The Word
, which he produced through his company Planet 24. Both programmes, though often annoying, were without doubt signature shows of their time and now Charlie wanted me to be involved in his bid for the Channel 4 breakfast show, a bid which unlike Tom’s and Mentorn’s had made it through to the final two.

Channel 4 approached Charlie because they knew he would come up with something different and he hadn’t disappointed them. He had his finger well and truly on the pulse; he knew how important it was to employ younger brains to come up with ideas for younger audiences. This was one of, if not the, key ingredients of his success. His development department was an exciting albeit exhausting place to be.

Charlie invited me for a cup of coffee. Immediately I liked him, instantly we met I could see he was different (hyper is another word you could use here) and so enthusiastic—about everything, even the word hello.

‘Alright, tell me about your idea—shoot,’ I said. I could see he was gagging to get on with it.

‘Well, it’s not my idea exactly, it’s an idea dreamt up by an old friend of yours,’ he replied with an intriguing glint in his eye. ‘Actually, it was Duncan Grey.’

My evening show at GLR, just like Timmy’s at Piccadilly, was staffed mostly by helpers—college students looking for some experience in broadcasting, some boys, some girls, the boys usually spotty, the girls usually absolutely beautiful for some strange reason. One of those boys was a young man called Duncan Grey, a very intense individual whose overriding expression was a permanent troubled frown. Duncan had found himself at odds with his recent Oxford University career and had decided instead to drop out in order to chase a life in the media. Everyone
who knew him thought he was crazy as here was a boy with a big brain, a born academic if ever there was one, but Duncan had other plans. He was fascinated by entertainment, obsessed with it almost, entertainment was where his big brain longed to be.

When I was first introduced to him at the radio station, I was at my desk one afternoon preparing that night’s show. I remember him barely being able to say hello: he was so nervous.

‘Who is this kid?’ I thought to myself.

‘This is Duncan, can he have a week on your show?’ one of the bosses asked.

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘why not?’

If I’d have had to bet, I would have said he wouldn’t last a day, let alone a week, not only on the show but in life—I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone look so unsure of why they existed.

As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong: he stuck around for almost a year and turned out to be an invaluable member of the production team. Now Duncan had gone on to work for Charlie…interesting. What had the bespectacled brainbox managed to come up with that had Charlie in such a froth—literally?

Duncan is a theorist, almost forensic when it comes to thinking about and preparing ideas; he had decided that kids were the key to a new audience. Whatever Planet 24 did, they had to make sure it was an out and out alternative to what was on the other two channels, basically shows for grown-ups—both pretty dull and bland as far as the younger viewers were concerned.

Duncan’s idea was simple, all the best are. He had suggested that the Planet 24 pitch should be based around a mirror image of what was happening in most houses at that time of the day. Indeed the show would come from a house, a real house with real rooms and even a real family, a different one every week. But the house would be like a cartoon house, with bright colours reigning supreme, a house all the kids watching would want to live in—a throwback to the type of hangouts The Monkees and The Banana Splits had on their TV shows.

At the helm of the proceedings would be a regular presentation double act, a younger couple with their own television family, this would include the crew, a computer whizz kid, various ‘experts’ and two alien puppets
from planet Zog by the names of Zig and Zag. There would also be regular appearances from Charlie’s business partner Bob Geldof as well as his gorgeous wife—the ice-cool Paula Yates, who would interview/seduce the latest stars every day whilst they reclined in her boudoir.

Already it sounded like fun and the more he told me about it the more he became animated and the more the show came alive. By the end of his spiel I was completely sold while Charlie was completely exhausted. I told him he could count me in. Charlie thanked me for my time and rushed off to deliver the news back to his team—but hang on a minute, there was something missing. He hadn’t offered me any money. Isn’t that what all TV people did?

Not Charlie, he knew he didn’t need to. For Charlie the idea was the thing, personnel could always be hired. If I didn’t want do it he would get someone else who did. Ideas were where the real value was. Ideas had to be dreamt up. People were everywhere, but ideas were priceless—ideas were everything.