I also have a daughter, whose birth invoked similar feelings.41
37 With the exception of a Hoseasons holiday to Bournemouth in 1979. Consistently excellent intercourse.
38 Press play on Track 7.
39 Press play on Track 8.
40 But not our boots – there was a fair bit of shingle underfoot.
41 Denise.
Chapter 5
Hospital Radio
IN 1967 I MISDIAGNOSED myself with cancer of the ball bag. In every other respect I was a perfectly normal youth – I was active, I had a good diet, I was pubing well – but one day I found a lump.
For three long days, I felt the cold hand of death on my shoulder. Lost in the depths of despair I tried to figure out what I had done to deserve this. I wasn’t an evil person. The worst thing I’d ever done was kick a pig.42 It’s not even as if I wanted to live a particularly long life. As a child I would have been satisfied to reach my mid 30s. To be honest, I just wanted to best Christ.
Yet it seemed I wouldn’t get the chance. As I sat in the doctor’s waiting room, I pulled out a notepad and began to draw up my final will and testament. It was almost as if, even at the age of 12, I was somehow aware of the tax implications of dying intestate.
But before the pencil lead had dried on the paper, I was spared. A quick medical fondle by Dr Armitage had identified that the suspected tumour was nothing more sinister than an infected paper cut – a result, I later realised, of a clandestine word-search puzzle done under my duvet after lights off. The heat from my head-mounted caver’s torch had made it impractical to continue without removing my jim-jams. And it was then that I must have nicked my scrotum.
I may have cheated death on that bitter February morn, but I had learnt a valuable lesson. I had learnt what it felt like to stare death in the face (and also what it felt like to have its cold hand on your shoulder). And I believe it was this knowledge that helped me make such an unmitigated success of my first job in broadcasting (read on).43
Snowflakes fell from the sky like tiny pieces of a snowman who had stood on a landmine.44 My wipers scurried across my windscreen, back and forth, back and forth, back and – my god, was that the time? I had just five minutes to get to work. And so help me god, nothing (other than perhaps the weather, the roadworks at the top of Chalk Hill Road, and the distance I still had to travel) was going to stop me.
For the last three years I had been a hospital radio DJ at St Luke’s in Norwich. It was a smashing little hospital and many of the people who went in there didn’t end up dead. I loved my job, though. And despite being unpaid, I’d been quick to negotiate free parking and the right to jump the queue in the canteen – this never went down well, but the patients were often too weak to oppose me.
But I hated being late, because the inmates needed me. And while no one would be silly enough to claim that my trademark mix of great chat, decent pop and amusing home-made jingles could take all their pain away, it did take the edge off and was definitely more helpful than homeopathy.
Six minutes later I pressed the red button and spoke into the mic(rophone).
‘Whoa! Yeah! Call off the search party. I’m here. It’s one minute past eight and this is Alan Partridge! Or should I say the late Alan Partridge! Perhaps not, because that would suggest I was dead. And I am not! But here’s a list of people who are …’
You’ll notice from this that I had a much brasher broadcasting style in my early days, my speech peppered with laughs and shouts and whoops. Soon after Good Morning Vietnam came out, I’d even begin shows with the holler: ‘Gooood morning St Luuuuuke’s!!!!!!’ However, I was upbraided for this and told it called to mind a war zone littered with the injured and diseased – which was precisely why I’d thought it was so appropriate.
As DJing gigs go, it was far harder than people realise. Yes, you have a captive audience, but you also have a listenership that is almost exclusively poorly. And that makes song selection a delicate business. One wrong step and you could instantly offend a fairly meaty percentage of patients. Just take the number one singles from my first year in the job, 1975. Almost all of them were capable of upsetting someone. Art Garfunkel’s ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ (the recently blinded); David Essex’s ‘Hold Me Close’ (burns victims); The Stylistics’ ‘Can’t Give You Anything’ (the terminally ill); Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ (paralysed women, paralysed homosexual men).
In my time at the hospital, I was broadcasting live during the deaths of some 800 patients. It’s a record that stands to this day. Industry awards and repeated praise from TV Quick magazine are all very well, but it gives me immense pride to think that the final voice those 800+ people heard may have been mine, as I read the traffic and travel or introduced a clip from my favourite Goon Show LP.
I spent 94 wonderful months behind the mic at St Luke’s. But by autumn 1983, much like most of the patients on the Marie Curie wing, my days were numbered. I guess I always knew that as word of my competence leaked out across Anglia, my head might be hunted. And so it was that in September I answered the phone to local media mogul Rich Shayers.
‘Alan, you’ve done your time on hospital radio. It’s time to spread your wings.’
‘What, like a bird?’ I asked, keen to know more.
‘I’m starting a new station and I want you on board.’
‘Will I get loads of salary?’ I blurted. I was young and unsure how to phrase questions relating to remuneration.
‘Just swing by my office tomorrow and we can hammer all that out.’
‘Great,’ I replied. ‘I’ll bring the hammers!’ And with that, my career changed forever.
But there was to be a moving post-script to this chapter in my life. And I’ll tell you about it now. At my leaving do, with the party in full swing, I stopped the music, climbed atop a chair and gave the hospital staff an emotional, heartfelt guarantee. I pledged, no matter how famous I became, that while there was still air in my lungs, I would come back and do my show for a minimum of one week every year.
I may not have been able to donate money, but in some ways I was able to donate something far more powerful. I was able to donate chat (to a maximum value of one week each year). And with that, I picked up my coat and left the building, the warm applause of my colleagues still ringing in my ears like a big church bell.
Sadly, circumstance has meant that I’ve not been able to get back to the hospital in the intervening 31 years. In the main that’s down to me – work commitments have made it simply unfeasible. But for the record I’d like to point out that the hospital is not entirely blameless itself. In 2001 it moved to a new site around the corner from the University of East Anglia. The studios from where I used to broadcast my show were reduced to rubble. And I think most reasonable