Greg Dyke: Inside Story. Greg Dyke

real David, himself or the character he played. I certainly preferred the latter.

      As David, he came to me one day to complain that Roland and his mate Kevin the Gerbil hadn’t got an office. I looked at him as if he was mad and tried to explain that they weren’t real and that, being puppets, they didn’t need an office. David was having none of it: to him, they were real. In the end I relented, had the broom cupboard cleared out, and handed it over to Roland and Kevin.

      On another occasion, when we were making Roland Rat in Switzerland, David fell on the ski slopes and as a result took to his hotel room. Later that day the floor manager looked in to see if he was OK only to find David, Roland, and Kevin snuggled up in bed together. David was fast asleep, with Roland on one side of him and Kevin on the other.

      But the funniest experience dealing with David Claridge came after the rat had saved TV-am – an event that led to the famous joke that it was the first time a rat had saved a sinking ship. By then Roland was our biggest star, so it clearly mattered when we got a call to the press office one Friday telling us that the Daily Star planned to run a story on their front page the following day in which they would claim that Claridge had hosted a Soho club called ‘Skin Two’ for rubber and latex fetishists. Almost anywhere else I’ve worked this would have led to a great crisis; but TV-am was in permanent crisis, and when Tim Aitken, Clive Jones, and I met to discuss this prospective story we couldn’t stop laughing. Imagine it: the saviour of the station, the man behind the most popular children’s characters of the day, involved in a sexual fetishists’ club.

      In the end we got lucky. I was deputed to phone the programme department of the Independent Broadcasting Authority to give them the news, but it was the day their Director was leaving and everyone had been out for a rather long leaving lunch at which the alcohol had clearly flowed generously. When I got through and explained the problem all I got from the other end was someone shouting rather loudly at me saying that he wasn’t bothered about that sort of thing, and then the phone went dead.

      Our luck held. The Daily Star didn’t run the story on their front page after all; it was replaced by a story about Billy Connolly’s divorce instead, and Claridge, Roland, and the rubber story were relegated to page seven or nine, where they duly disappeared.

      In planning the TV-am schedule for the summer of 1983 Clive Jones and I decided to send the Rat out on the road. Anne Wood bought a 1957 Ford Anglia, which we painted bright pink, and off they went to produce a half-hour show every morning for six weeks. The difficult question was what to do with the other three hours in a period notoriously short of news.

      Here we had the idea of doing the programme live from the seaside beaches of Britain. In fact it was the idea of a woman called Juliet Blake, who came looking for a job. We took her idea and gave her a job as compensation. Juliet now lives in Los Angeles but is still a good friend. We were lucky that it turned out to be a scorching summer, but that also had its downside as Eggcup Towers had no air conditioning and we were all dying from the heat. The story going the rounds at TV-am that boiling summer was that the Board had had to choose between air conditioning and an executive flat when planning the building and they’d chosen the latter.

      To produce By the Seaside, as I imaginatively called the idea, we needed an outside broadcast (OB) unit, a star, a producer, a director, and a union agreement in a matter of just a few weeks. In most organizations that would have been difficult to deliver, but at TV-am anything was always possible. In a matter of weeks we had them all.

      We found an old OB unit sitting unused outside Ewart’s studio complex in Wandsworth. The trouble was that Keith Ewart, who owned the studios, wanted £12,000 for it and TV-am was out of cash. I went to the finance director, who refused to sanction it; so instead I rang Tim Aitken, who was on holiday in the South of France. He was wonderfully pragmatic when I told him the finance director’s view. ‘Silly bastard. We’re going bust anyway.’ So I agreed to buy the OB unit and sent someone over to collect it. Luckily we managed to get it out of the yard, towing it because the engine didn’t work, without actually handing over any cash. I think it was some years before Mr Ewart’s cheque actually cleared.