It's Not What You Think (28 page)

I felt like I should protest, but seeing as there was now no one sat next to me to protest to, I decided I would let Michael get on with whatever he thought best and comforted myself instead by ordering a rather large glass of Krug champagne.

Several further large glasses of fizz later and who should return but none other than my trusty agent having smoothed the way for his client to have ‘talks’.

‘Right, it’s safe for you to go,’ declared Michael.

‘Oh thanks,’ I replied, knowing it was anything but, as I was half sloshed.

I don’t know about you but I have a sliding scale of who I can and can’t be myself in front of, especially when I’ve had a drink. When I’m operating in the ‘can’t’ mode I am hopeless at best. My words escape me, my brain turns to fudge, I begin to sweat and I end up saying things I don’t mean and would never normally say.

The thing was, though, all I had to do was reason with myself. I didn’t want anything from this guy—and after all, that’s all he is, just another guy. I hadn’t done anything wrong and I didn’t owe him anything—so what was I getting all worked up about? Before Richard had arrived on the scene that day I had been perfectly happy—I had come up with an excuse for us all to have a flight on Concorde to the Big Apple and yet now here I was—Percy Paranoia, pouring with perspiration and wondering what the heck I was going to say to the Virgin boss.

Once in the seat next to him, I really didn’t feel very well—‘a little queer’, as my mum would say. I decided the best thing for me to do would be to try to say as little as possible, be polite and just try not to pass out—I was suddenly becoming very light-headed. If I could remain conscious and not embarrass myself that would do, but the more I thought about doing this, the more my heart began pounding and the more panicky I became.

Richard grasped the nettle, thank God, and took no time at all in getting down to business. The more he talked, the more I relaxed, he ordered himself a drink and asked me if I would like another glass of bubbles.

‘Ooh, yes please.’ I replied, a little too excitedly.

Somewhere in the mix, Richard explained how he wanted me to host the drivetime show on his Virgin Radio station. I was happy talking radio stations and with the help of Monsieur Krug, didn’t hold back in telling him what I thought he needed to do with his. I also made no bones about the fact that the only show I would consider taking on would be another breakfast show, anything other than that would not be a prospect I would be willing to entertain.

Richard listened intently as I spoke, pausing for a moment after I had finished before motioning to gain the attention of a stewardess.

‘Yes, Mr Branson, what I can I do for you sir?’

‘You don’t have a pen I could borrow do you?’ came his reply.

‘Oh oh,’ said a voice in my head.

I don’t know how long it took but gradually there before my eyes a handwritten contract began to evolve in front of me. Richard would write something down, show it to me and then say, ‘So how does that look?’

If I agreed he would move on, if I didn’t—he would cross it out and start that bit again.

This was it—this was one of those moments I had heard so much about—the stuff of legend. I was witnessing one of his infamous ‘deals on the back of an envelope’, except this time it was on the back of a Concorde dinner menu.

I was transfixed with what was happening, his attention to detail was fascinating. The questions, crossings out and rewriting continued for twenty or thirty minutes until, satisfied, Richard declared the agreement complete.

I could now also see there was very clearly a place for my signature.

‘There you go,’ said Richard, ‘why don’t you put your name to that?’

10 See below

  9 See below

  8 See below

  7 See below

  6 See below

  5 See below

  4 See below

  3 See below

  2 See below

  1 Don’t sign it

Don’t sign it—
the only piece of advice I would ever give to anyone. No matter what ‘it’ is—unless you have thought it through and you are one gazillion per cent sure it is what you ‘want’ or what you ‘need’—there is no sense in signing anything.

Things can always be signed but they can never be unsigned.

Thankfully, despite the bubbles of loveliness bouncing around in my head, Richard’s persuasiveness and the general madness of the whole situation that day, I could still just about manage to hear my own mantra screaming back at me somewhere far off in the distance.

‘Er, excuse me one moment, Richard—just give me a second,’ I mumbled as I lifted myself up out of my seat to get past him.

I staggered back towards Michael and slumped back down next to him. He could see I was now even more bleary-eyed than before.

‘What happened?’

‘Oh, he wants me to sign a menu.’

‘What!’

‘Richard Branson, he wants me to sign a menu.’

‘What for?’

‘For a job—it had lots of other writing on it as well. Not just what there is to eat.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’d written lots of other things on it with a pen—sort of like a contract.’

‘Shit—sit there and don’t move,’ and with that Michael was off again.

As for me, I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. I was done, I wasn’t going anywhere except to sleep. I was ‘emotionally exhausted’.

Michael, for his part, resumed his position next to the tycoon and for the rest of the flight attempted to continue with a more ‘formal’ style of negotiations. In the end, however, there was no deal done, it was all too frantic and there would be no need for anyone to sign anything.

When the plane landed, R.B. vanished into the New York night as swiftly as he had arrived at Heathrow, like a business superhero in search of his next financial adventure. On this occasion he had left empty-handed but he needn’t worry. We were destined to meet again six months later at his home in Holland Park in West London and this time I would have a signature for him.

It would be on the bottom of a contract for £87 million.

So how did the gag with Mr Cleese go?

Well, here’s the thing, it didn’t.

When we arrived at his New York apartment mob-handed and by this time with something that just about passed for a script which Danny had managed to cobble together on the plane, we were told by the concierge that Mr Cleese had left a few hours earlier—for Paris!

Paris, what the heck was he doing in Paris?

‘Shit, what are we going to do now?’ said Will.
*

‘Presumably go to Paris, I would imagine,’ pronounced Danny looking in my direction.

‘Absolutely,’ I replied, trying to appear nonchalant.

This trip had now evolved into a full-on caper. Of course
we had
to go to Paris. We had to tell this story somehow and if it meant another unscheduled whistle-stop trip then so be it. More calls followed back to the production office. There was only one aircraft in the world more glamorous than the British Airways Concorde and that was Air France Concorde. The plane we would have to take in order to get to our next destination in time but not before…Danny broke his ankle.

We decided to go to a bar to kick back whilst things were being organised and take a moment to reflect upon what had happened in the last twelve hours or so. The bar we chose was a typical New York long-style bar that Danny had been to before—he knows New York like the back of his hand and wanted us to have a taste of the real thing.

The bar was daylight bright at the front, due to the huge window that looked out on to the street and then grew ever more mysterious as it stretched deeper and deeper into the shadows. It was a music venue at night and had an extremely cool vibe about it. American football was playing on the TV and there was a jukebox flashing away in the corner. We ordered a round of Bud Lights—how could we not?

We were all still reeling from the last few hours and were more dazed than anything. Conversation was slow to say the least, even with Danny around, which was a first in my book. After extraordinary things happen there is often little to say. This is probably why we sat there in relative silence for the first couple of rounds.

‘I’m just gonna shoot out to a record shop I know,’ said Danny after a while. When Danny’s not working or with his family or talking, he buys records. These are the only four things he does.

‘Alright, good luck,’ I said.

‘Yeah, see you in a bit, Danny,’ said the others.

It couldn’t have been three or four minutes later when Danny returned in what looked like total agony with his left leg dragging behind him. Upon seeing a big man close to tears I did what all good friends at such times do and started to kill myself laughing.

‘What in God’s name happened here?’ I just about managed to get out.

‘Fuck off—it’s not fucking funny.’ Danny was properly helpless and obviously in real pain but this just made me laugh even more. I was now dying.

It transpired that he had stepped off the kerb right outside the bar, turned his ankle and that was it. It was broken. For the last couple of minutes he had been attempting to shout back in to us for help but we hadn’t been able to hear him. This last bit of information pushed me over the edge. I had to go outside to calm down.

Poor Danny’s injury meant that he had to travel back to England on his own with his lower left leg now in a cast whilst the rest of us boarded the
Air France flight to Paris—we were one man down but we had to carry on. Our mission was incomplete.

Flying BA Concorde was amazing but Air France Concorde was even better. In their wisdom the French had taken out several rows of seats so there was more room and comfort for the supersonic commuter to enjoy. They had also replaced the cold leather material of the chairs with a softer, more luxurious fabric. The gimmicky gifts of B.A. had been forsaken by the French in preference to focusing instead on the service, the wine and the food. A far more sensible idea as far as I could see and one that we would happily indulge in during our flight.

As the arrival time to Paris drew ever nearer our attentions turned once again back to ‘the most expensive joke in the history of light entertainment television’ and the great John Cleese who was staying at a hotel in Paris—except not by the time we got there.

When we arrived we were curtly told that Monsieur Cleese had checked out and was currently on his way back to London to appear on a television show.

I promise you that is exactly what happened.

We had left for New York on the Tuesday afternoon, it was now Wednesday evening and we were in Paris. We had spent close to £70,000 and here’s what we ended up with—a twenty-second piece of film that showed me with a script outside John’s New York apartment being told by the concierge he had left for Paris and then a ‘wipe’ (TV term for a fancy cut) to me in Paris in front of the Arc de Triomphe still holding the same script and stating that once again we had missed our intended target.

When we played it out on the night of the show as an intro to bringing John on there were audible gasps from the audience as they realised the extent of our endeavour. In the end it was more dramatic than comedic and as every television producer will tell you drama is much more expensive than light entertainment, although maybe not normally several thousand pounds per second.

Yes it was decadent and yes that money could have been spent infinitely better, but those were the times, crazy, crazy times, and they were about to get crazier.

10 Self pitiful

  9 Jealous

  8 Envious

  7 Anxious

  6 Greedy

  5 Boastful

  4 Ungrateful

  3 Malicious

  2 Bitter

  1 In denial

It has been proven,
apparently, that 90 per cent of what we do with our brain is unconscious. That is to say information is fed in by our consciousness and then worked on and figured out whilst we are doing other things. Then when we come across future situations where we are made to draw on some of our ‘experience’, the unconscious is waiting in the wings to spring forth with whatever it is we might need.

Many philosophers believe that if you have a problem and ‘consciously’ feed it into your ‘unconscious’, you can then forget about it for a while and fully expect the answer to pop up one day. They also cite this as being one of the reasons we dream.

I think this may go a long way to explaining how many of the things that have happened to me seemed to have come about almost by chance when in fact there has probably been a grand plan all along. Maybe this is how what happened next came about.

TFI
only came off the air for twelve weeks of the year, two weeks at Christmas and for ten weeks in the summer. It was 1997, the summer after I walked out of Radio 1, when I went to Ireland where I would set about attempting to do two things:

1. Catch my first salmon.

2. Get back on the radio.

It was a beautiful August summer’s morning when I found myself sat in the peace and tranquillity of the occupation that man has come to know as angling.

I was set up with my rod on the bank of the River Laune in an area called Killarney on the west coast of the Emerald Isle. I was holidaying there in a country house with Suzi.

Suzi and I had got together after Rachel and I parted company—something that didn’t go down too well at first as Rachel and Suzi were good friends, having met on
The Big Breakfast.
Since then, however, Suzi and I had been an item for over two years and were now enjoying as good a relationship as either of us could ever imagine. I must also point out at this juncture that when it came to the trials and tribulations of living with a half-mad television and radio presenter by the name of Evans, Suzi definitely took the lion’s share of the fallout. To say she was a saint would not be overstating the point. Especially seeing as she stuck it out for the next five years.

After enjoying breakfast this particular morning, Suzi had gone back to the room while I went to enquire about the possibility of borrowing some tackle to try my luck down by the waterside.

The owner of the house pointed me in the direction of the rods, wished me luck and sent me on my way. I had little or no idea what I was doing but was drawn to the romance of the river.

The house rods were old and tatty and were kept more for effect than competition, but after optimistically bouncing down to the water’s edge I was now awaiting the arrival of a sympathetic fish that might afford me the generosity of attaching itself to my line. Not for one second did I think I might actually catch one, although incredibly this did turn out to be the case—not only that, but we ate the poor creature. The owner couldn’t believe it, he said people had been coming years and not caught a thing! But the poor salmon wasn’t the only thing I caught that day. I was about to catch the radio bug again but this time bigger than ever before.

Back in England I had placed myself under a self-imposed curfew of not listening to the radio. I knew I had majorly screwed up and this was the only way I could stop myself feeling sick at what an amazing opportunity I had blown. I knew that hearing other broadcasters having fun and
enjoying that buzz that you can only get by being live on the air would have been too much for me. By not listening to the radio at all I could almost forget it even existed. What a total fruitcake—I think this is what the shrinks refer to as being in denial.

This extreme theory worked for a while, but like all curfews, in the end it was no match for the person it was designed to suppress. I decided the no-listening rule only applied to UK radio stations. Ireland is, of course, not part of the UK, so together with my rod, reel and tackle box, down to the river came my beloved Roberts radio.

Big mistake—
huge
(another one!).

If you’re a drug addict it doesn’t matter which country you are in when you have your next fix, it’s still going to get you hooked again—and so it was with me and the wonderful world of the wireless.

The Irish are amongst the greatest talkers in the world. Not because they talk a lot—many Irish people hardly ever say a word—but when they do say something, they can throw a sentence on its back making the words sit up and beg like a well-trained dog. Add to this their voices are usually soft, with engaging tones and a teasing lilt. As you can no doubt imagine, if I was looking to escape the magic of radio, I had chosen entirely the wrong country to do it in.

A short film

CUT TO: EXTERIOR, DAY

Tight on a close-up of a classic Roberts radio. We can hear the voice of Gerry Ryan, Ireland’s premier radio broadcaster.

GERRY:
Good morning to you boys and girls—it’s your uncle Ger’ here. Did you have a good weekend, did ya’? Sure enough it was heaven sent alright…

As Gerry continues we slowly pull out to reveal a man fishing on the bank of a river in spate. We cut to his eyes, they are listening more than looking—to what Gerry is saying.

GERRY:
…I heard lots of ya’ went to der park wich yer kids, yer cats and yer dogs—no doubt yer donkeys some of yer and uncle Tom—and all dee udder lot. Well if yer interested, and I don’t presume for one second you are, but it’s me job to tell ya, so tell ya’ I will. I heard rumours of sunshine afoot so I kept me curtains firmly drawn on der good Lord’s day and went and poured meself a large whiskey, followed by anudder and anudder all t’roughout der day—if the truth be told. And there were cigars too, six or seven at least…and why—why? Because I’ll tell you this and I’ll tell you no more—I have to do dis’ broadcast five days a week and as easy as it may sound—whilst you’re out there frolicking in yer Sund’y best your man Ger’ is sat all alone contemplating what rubbish he’s goin’ to illuminate yer’ little lives with come the reluctant dawn of anudder five days of this bloomin’ show.

The fisherman smiles—Gerry is on form again. During the next three hours Gerry will help the police with a day-old murder investigation which is crucially going cold. He will invite callers to ring in and talk about which fan clubs they were members of as kids. The highlight of this segment is one man who phones up to announce he is a member of The Captain Scarlet fan club and after Gerry has pushed for a while, he admits that he is the only member and that he knows very little about Captain Scarlet in the first place. Gerry starts laughing at this so much that he struggles to speak for a good two to three minutes. Gerry then invites listeners to advertise items they may have for sale and at one point lambasts a woman for ‘trying to get rid of such crap via his show’. His last hour is a phone-the-expert section—a solicitor—and then he rounds off the show with a competition for older listeners to call in and sing old classics but without their false teeth in—the winner receiving a bag of chewy toffee…

As I listened to Gerry that morning I was in awe of what a radio show could achieve. His show was my mum and dad’s corner shop—it had everything. This is the power of radio over television—it can achieve more and can do it better for longer. A radio show is more sustainable because it has to be. It has to find a way to breathe every day otherwise it will die. Gerry’s show was on fire.

A radio show also has a unique relationship with its audience, it is a two-way street that’s all about a connection born out of a mutual understanding and from what I could hear Gerry and his audience were one big team creating a daily masterpiece.

After just one morning’s listening, the reason for my self-imposed exile became glaringly obvious. There was more work to be done and deep down inside I knew I had jumped ship too soon. The frustration I had felt before I left was because I didn’t know what to do next, when the next thing to do was simply knuckle down, and take the audience with me. As I listened further I was bristling at the prospect of what a radio show could achieve. The kind of intuition this man had with his listeners was something I hadn’t even come close to achieving during my time at Radio 1.

It was not yet midday and already Gerry and his listeners were weaving their magic, having just the most fun. Who wouldn’t want to do that for a living?

I ran up the hill back to the main house.

‘Could I borrow your phone, please, I need to call London,’ I asked the gentleman owner.

‘Sure, it’ll be through there in the kitchen,’ he kindly obliged.

I had to get back on the air.

‘Michael, it’s me…I’m in Ireland.’

‘You’re in Ireland?’

‘Yes, I came here so I could listen to the radio.’

‘What?…’

‘Never mind.’

‘Did you say you went to Ireland so you could listen to the radio?’

‘Yes. Now, can you please get me back on it?’

‘But you had the best job on radio there is and you said you didn’t want to do it any more.’

‘I know, but that is because I’m an idiot and I was lying to myself, please can you try?’

Michael said he’d have a ring round and get back to me, which he did later that day.

He called me back towards teatime the same day and said there was no chance, all the major slots were filled, and anyhow, the general vibe was that people were worried about my unpredictability and whether I was worth the risk any more.

‘Shit.’

‘The only way you could get a gig at the moment would be if you owned your own radio station.’ He was joking of course, but I was desperate.

‘Michael, you’re a genius,’ I screamed, ‘that’s what we’ll do. How do we do that Michael?’

‘Chris, you’re not serious?’

Of course I was serious. For the next few days the owner of the house we were staying at would make more money from my phone calls back and forth to England than he would from the rest of his business.

Michael tore at the project like a rabid dog and within twenty-four hours, with the help of John Revell, who was now a partner in my company Ginger and was always on the look out for opportunities, they together discovered that Talk Radio, a medium-wave national station, was vulnerable and might be up for grabs. In fact it was more than vulnerable—Talk could not decide whether it wanted to be a news station or a sports station and was currently falling somewhere in between the two whilst not being particularly adept at either.

It was also losing money hand over fist as lowly listening figures were failing to attract enough advertising. Listeners were confused by its mixed message and already had something similar available over on BBC’s Five Live. Five Live’s formidably professional operation was steeped in resources and had a depth of experience coursing through its veins which left Talk Radio like a lamb to the slaughter. Due to the overblown price the owners had paid for the franchise in the first place, it was hard to see how it was going to survive.

Again very much with John’s help, we suddenly found ourselves in the thick of takeover negotiations. It was all going promisingly until one of the shareholders dug his heels in and pushed the price up to a figure that
was unjustifiable as far as we were concerned. It was time to say goodbye to Talk.

The next significant thing that happened was that Zoe Ball was signed up to re-save Radio 1, which was already back in the doldrums again. The breakfast show that had replaced mine was not, as it transpired, what the nation wanted to wake up to—in fact it wasn’t even what the new hosts wanted to wake up to. They didn’t like ‘breakfast’ and ‘breakfast’ didn’t like them. So, ‘Bring on Ms Ball,’ came the cry, ‘your effervescence is required.’

Getting Zoe to sign up was a smart move by the BBC. She is hugely likeable and had a sizable following as a result of her massively successful partnership on the telly with Jamie Theakston and their Saturday morning show
Going Live.
She was sexy yet sophisticated, the darling of the tabloids, loved by kids, fancied by dads and admired by mums—the perfect combination. Her arrival would be a welcome tonic, nobody doubted that, but nor did anybody have any idea just how explosive her arrival would be.

For whilst Radio 1 were polishing Zoe’s new microphone in readiness for her first day, a whole set of extraordinary circumstances were playing out at No. 1 Golden Square, in the heart of London’s Soho, the home of Richard Branson’s Virgin Radio.