It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (28 page)

Over the years
Dark Waters
’ reputation has grown, drawing praise for its moody atmosphere, haunting visuals, and lack of on-screen gore (which of course annoyed the
Fangoria
readers no end). All in all, it was an arresting first feature for Mariano who is still making movies, and from whom I confidently expect great things in the future.

As for me, I filed an encouragingly upbeat report for
Fango
and did some follow-up interviews for the BBC. I even got Mariano on Radio One where he was interviewed by Emma Freud who said that she had found
Dark Waters
‘absolutely terrifying’. Mariano was speechless.

A year or so later, I collapsed and was hospitalised in Southampton where I was diagnosed as having two ruptured discs in the lower part of my spine. At first I was told that I would have to have titanium rods inserted into my back which would prevent any movement in the lower lumber area and make me walk upright like a man with a chair leg up his arse. Later, I was lucky to have extensive microsurgery which simply picked the insides out of the ruptured discs and left me with two ‘flat tyres’ as they are known in the trade. The official diagnosis was that the discs had probably been deformed from birth and I had no one to blame but my ancestors and their genetic imperfections.

That’s the official version.

But I know the truth. I know what
really
happened to my back. I know why I spent six weeks off work, two of them
in hospital, staring at the ceiling and cursing the day that I decided there could be nothing worse than travelling across Ukraine in the back of a van.

I know what was to blame. But I’m saying nothing. Nada.

Nul points.

Nyet
.

‘What is my role in all of this?’ Simon Mayo asked me recently, as well he might. After all, we’re into the sixth reel of this damned movie and so far my illustrious radio mentor has been notable by his absence. If things carry on this way much longer it’ll be like Marlon Brando only showing up (fat and unrehearsed) for the last twenty minutes of
Apocalypse Now
, or Dame Judi Dench bagging an Oscar for
Shakespeare in Love
after having been on screen for less than nine minutes. In fact I’m sure there’s plenty of you out there who are only reading this because you know that I’m Mayo’s irritating 5 Live sidekick and you were secretly hoping this book would really be about
him
rather than me me
me
in the same way that everyone really wanted that movie
Factory Girl
to be about exciting art innovator Andy Warhol rather than self-obsessed clothes horse Edie Sedgwick (a role for which Sienna Miller was, incidentally, perfectly cast). So ladies and
gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure, please welcome to the screen SIMON MAYO, who will be played neither by Mr Brando nor Dame Judi, but rather by Charles Hawtrey.

As I mentioned briefly in the Prologue, Mayo has no one to blame for this apparently unkind piece of casting but himself. In the early summer of 2009, Simon and I were interviewed by the
Independent
newspaper for a regular feature entitled ‘How We Met’ and the piece was accompanied by a photograph of us standing back to back in which (as Simon correctly pointed out) we did not look at our best.’You look like an Orc!’ he told me with his customary frankness when the paper showed up on the news-stands.’And I look like
Charles Hawtrey
.’ He was right on both counts, although luckily for me an Orc is a fictional character rather than a real-life actor and anyway Jason Isaacs was already in rehearsal (in my head) for the role which he was surely born to play. As for Hawtrey, he may be dead but nowadays that’s no impediment – Oliver Reed posthumously completed his scenes for
Gladiator
thanks to whizzo CGI trickery, and Brando even turned up in
Superman Returns
several years after shuffling off his ever-expanding mortal coil. Plus I’ve seen
loads
of movies starring people who
appear
to be dead – think of anything Val Kilmer made between dying on his feet in
The Saint
and experiencing an unlikely career resurrection in
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
. Or any of the Mickey Rourke ‘wilderness years’ movies (
Another 9 1/2 Weeks
,
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
) in which he even
looked
like a reanimated corpse.

So, can Jason Isaacs and the late Charles Hawtrey make their collective way to the set, please, and Charles let’s take it from your line: ‘What is my role in all of this?’

The scene we are shooting here (which features this timeless line) is an interview for yet another popular London newspaper of which I had never heard. (Mayo claims that this is because I have only heard of
two
publications – the
Guardian
and
Fangoria
– which is
clearly
untrue because I have also heard of
Sight & Sound
. And
Hair Products Monthly
. So there.)

In the wake of my absurd Russian escapade I had concluded definitively that travel in general and set reports in particular were not for me and had concentrated instead on carving a much more comfortable career niche for myself as a stay-at-home radio film critic. In this endeavour I had been aided incalculably by Mayo with whom I had been bickering about movies from the comfort and safety of various BBC studios for well over a decade. Now we were branching out into television, on which we would continue to bicker like cinema’s answer to Hinge and Bracket, only with pictures. Progress!

‘Your role is essential,’ I replied, ‘crucial, inexplicable, and indefinable. Or, to put it another way, easy. I do all the hard work and you take all the glory. Just like on the radio, except that now everyone will be able to see how much better dressed than you I am, and how much nicer my hair looks.’

Sadly, the paper opted not to run the interview on the grounds that my answers were too short (a first!) and also that we didn’t really say anything about the programme
which we were meant to be promoting. Instead (they claimed) we just descended into petty insults and personal sniping which didn’t really give the reader much of an insight into how we worked. On the contrary, I think that shelved interview said it
all
, neatly summing up our on-air relationship which has remained essentially unchanged since we first met at Radio One back in the mid-nineties. Simon is polite if somewhat irritable with me, and I am rude and opinionated with him – together, we sound increasingly as though we are going to strangle each other. Several people (some of them quite intelligent) have concluded that Mayo and I
really
don’t like each other, and that our on-air animosity is too ‘real’ to be faked. Indeed, there are endless internet discussions about the ‘barely suppressed’ tensions between us. Here’s a typical thread from the always engaging and entertaining forums of the Internet Movie Database.

‘I wonder if Simon and Mark
really
hate each other’ wrote ‘Fork Q’ on 15 February 2009 after hearing an altercation between us on 5 Live which ended in an ominous ‘dead silence’.

‘I don’t think they
hate
each other’ replied ‘Tweekums’ the next day ‘though that certainly was an “uncomfortable silence”.’

‘No no no!’ chipped in ‘HF Fan’ on 23 February.’They clearly
like
each other very much … In fact I think they
love
each other in that non-yucky, non-Brokebacky “we’re both married to women and happy with that thank you very much” kind of way.’

‘They absolutely
loathe
each other’ concluded ‘thunderroad90’, as was ‘confirmed on the radio show today’.

And so on …

For me, the phrase ‘old married couple’ gets closer to the truth of our radio relationship than the ‘do they/don’t they’ debate which seems set to rattle on forever. I do believe that in the same way everyone has a soulmate in ‘real life’ there is also a professional partner for everyone who, in the words of Jerry Maguire, ‘completes me’ (or ‘you’, as the case may be).

In broadcasting terms, Simon ‘had me at “Hello”’. Being clearly the best broadcaster in the country (and having the awards to prove it) he plays the knowledgeably open-minded Everyman with ease, a voice with whom audiences can identify and in whose company they feel interested, entertained and informed. If the trick of radio broadcasting is to make it sound as though you are talking to one single listener (so that each individual listener feels that you are talking directly to
them
) then Simon must have the biggest audience of ‘single listeners’ in the country. Everyone warms to him, listeners and interviewees alike, and for this reason he manages to get the best out of both. If you put a donkey in a radio studio with Simon Mayo he could make it sound good.

Which, in my case, is exactly what they’ve done. Within the protective cage of Simon’s unforced professionalism (and believe me, you have to work
really hard
on your research and preparation to sound that relaxed and carefree in the studio) I am able to behave like an un-house-trained animal. I don’t
need to worry about whether what I say sounds reasonable, or even
sensible
, to the audience; that’s
his
job.
My
job (as far as I can tell) is to talk about films in the only manner I know how – as if my life depended on them. Which isn’t very hard, because sitting through crap like
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
(a ‘family’ film which opens with an entertaining scene of child hanging – oh ha ha ha) I have seriously started to wonder whether suicide really is painless (and whether it really does ‘bring on many changes’ as the theme from
M*A*S*H
so awkwardly informed us). Indeed, in the case of
POTC3
(as I believe the fans call it) I was still
furious
about having to sit through the damn thing by the time I got on-air with Mayo to review it. The resulting transnational tirade (I was in Cannes, Simon was at some sporting event in the UK, a satellite feed linking the two of us) was videoed by the BBC so that everyone could
see
Simon nonchalantly looking at his watch, yawning, and theatrically reading a newspaper while I blathered on hysterically about Johnny Depp’s performance resembling a drunk karaoke singer showing off in a crowded room. I went further, demanding that director Gore Verbinski be given a custodial sentence for crimes against narrative cinema, and inviting the audience to see whether they really could distinguish between the supporting cast and a range of handsomely polished MDF furniture.’Is that a nest of tables?’ I screamed.’
No
, it’s Ikea Knightley and Orloondo Bland locked in a passionate embrace that is positively teaky!’ To date, 107,000 people have watched this meltdown on YouTube, and as usual many of the comments (‘I f**king LOVE how much Simon Mayo HATES Mark
Kermode’ – AnEyeOut) flag up the deep-seated negative energy that apparently arcs between Mayo and me even when separated by the English Channel.

It seems pointless to claim that quite the opposite is true (at least from my end) because whenever I do so it just comes out
wrong
. For example, during that
Independent
interview I made a point of repeating my mantra that Simon is a broadcasting genius and if our show worked on-air at all then it was down to his skill rather than my inane ramblings. Yet when the article appeared, Simon was quoted as talking warmly, affectionately, and generously about me, while I was quoted as talking warmly, affectionately, and generously … about
me
. Honestly, I don’t know why he puts up with it.

I started doing film reviews with Simon when he was presenting Radio One’s morning show. The station, which had earned an easily mockable ‘Fab FM’ Smashy and Nicey reputation over the preceding decade, was in the process of being revitalised by an influx of new talent including Mark Radcliffe, Steve Lamacq, Trevor Nelson, Tim Westwood and Mark Tonderai, the latter of whom has recently resurfaced as a successful film-maker with his impressive debut horror feature
Hush
. It was an exciting time, although there was a lot of spilled blood on the carpets as the old-school dinosaurs (Dave Lee Travis, Simon Bates, Gary Davies et al.) either resigned or were culled. The changes were not immediately popular, and for a few years the station haemorrhaged listeners. But somehow Mayo rose above all the storms, sailing gently from a very successful run on the breakfast show to an even more accomplished stint in mid-mornings,
and thence (some years later) to his multi-award-winning afternoon slot on 5 Live. By early 2010 he had moved to drivetime on Radio Two, and sharp-eyed readers will notice an inexorable progress though the hours of the day, with each new slot offering Mayo an ever more forgiving wake-up call. Presumably, this drift will culminate in an eventual late-night spot sometime around 2029, which the semi-retired Simon will doubtless be able to present from the comfort of his own bath chair. Personally, I likes the sound of them hours and my plan (such as it has been since we started working together) is to hitch my wagon to his star and hang on for as long as possible.