On a personal level things were slightly different. He and I were just chalk and Cheddar. At the height of the show’s popularity I was receiving five, sometimes six, pieces of fan mail a quarter. It was pretty relentless and if I’m honest, I think it stuck in Eastwood’s craw. Sure, I tried to build bridges from time to time. I’d take him to the BBC bar and order us each a pint of bitter and a meat-based sandwich. But he’d take a few sips (of his drink) before claiming he was ‘dead drunk’ and needed to go home.
Maybe it was possible to get drunk that quickly. I’ve certainly heard it said that Chinamen can’t hold their booze. But all these years later, when I think back to those aborted evenings out, there’s one tiny detail that just doesn’t add up: Eastwood wasn’t Chinese.
Okay, he had a soft spot for a portion of Chicken Chow Mein on a Friday night. But, be honest, who doesn’t? And besides, even the most berserk Sinophile would struggle to argue that ingesting industrial amounts of egg noodles actually makes you Chinese. No, Eastwood was from Hertfordshire, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
But as I made my way to that first editorial meeting, I knew I still had my fellow reporters to wow. Questions tumbled around my head like trainers in the washing machine I have mentioned on two previous occasions. Would I pass muster? Would I cut the mustard? Would I pass the mustard?
I was panicking. There was no point spending my time conflating two well-known phrases or sayings into a third that, while making grammatical sense, had no value as a metaphor. Or was there? I thought for a moment. No, there definitely wasn’t.
Somehow I needed to chill the eff out. If I was a drug-doer I would probably have spliffed myself into the middle of next week. But I wasn’t (although – full disclosure – I had taken two paracetemols from my first aid kit and administered a splodge of Savlon to an ankle graze sustained at London’s [CHECK NAME OF STATION].)
In the end I sorted myself out by using a simple but effective visualisation technique taught to me by either Paul McKenna or Russ Abbott, I forget which. Hang on, no, it was Ali Bongo. Taken from the teachings of Buddha (I’m guessing here), the idea is to imagine yourself as someone with the characteristic you desire. In the case of Bongo, he would think of a cuddly old cat lying in the sunshine. Before a big show he would spend 15 minutes purring, licking his imaginary paws and hanging his head over a bin trying to bring up fur balls. And by the end of it? He was as cool as beans.
For me, though, cats weren’t the answer. No, the answer was Roger Moore. I locked myself in a toilet cubicle and spent the best part of a quarter of an hour visualising myself in A View to a Kill, taking on the evil Max Zorin, sailing under the ocean in a submarine disguised as an iceberg and having it off with Grace Jones, the first black woman I have ever slept with.
And by the time someone started banging on the door wondering what all the noise was about, I had reached a zen-like state of calm. As it turns out, though, I was right to be anxious about the editorial meeting. There were some seriously large-brained people in that room. Those in attendance included Christopher Morris (anchor), Rosie May (environment), Kevin Smear (roving reporter), Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan (economics editor) and yours truly (sport, plus the Paralympics).
I picked a chair and sat down quietly and effectively. It was a good start but I needed to do more. I took a deep breath and prepared to introduce myself. But as soon as I heard the level of their chit-chat, I froze. They were using words, ideas and concepts that you simply never heard in Norfolk. Not even in Norwich.
I resolved to keep my mouth shut until I’d acclimatised. Phrases swirled around the room. ‘Where does Labour stand on that?’ ‘It’s over for Milosevic.’ ‘Alan, could you pass the biscuits?’ ‘This Rodney King thing is going to be massive.’ ‘GDP’s down by 0.5% this quarter.’ ‘Alan? The biscuits.’ ‘The Home Office aren’t going to comment apparently.’ ‘Fine, I’ll get them myself then.’
How in the name of holy living heck was I going to bust my way into this conversation? I don’t know, I answered, inside my head. On the table next to me was the tea urn. Now this was a plus point because I loved tea urns. Still do. There’s something very reassuring about the concept of hot beverages dispensed from a lovely big drum.62 Of course your problem with any kind of communal drinks station is the sugar bowl. People put the spoon back in the bowl after stirring in their sugar. No problem with that, you might think. Well think again. The residual moisture acts as a caking agent, forming the granules into unsightly asymmetric clumps. Worse still, those clumps are stained a grubby brown by the tannin-rich tea. Not nice, not nice at all.
And let’s not forget the germ issue. Putting a damp spoon back in the bowl is the tea-drinking equivalent of sharing a needle. And I did not want to end up with the tea-drinking equivalent of AIDS.
Instantly it struck me that if their ‘thing’ was intimidating intellect, my ‘thing’ could be beverage-related hygiene. Of course I later remembered that I already had a ‘thing’, namely sport (plus the Paralympics). But I wasn’t thinking straight, which should go some way to explaining what happened next.
Kevin Smear (roving reporter) approached. This seemed somehow appropriate because while the others had stayed where they were, he had quite literally roved over.
‘Hello, Alan.’
‘Hello.’
‘Guys, I’m just saying hello to Alan.’
The rest of them nodded in my direction, using their heads.
‘What are you doing sat over there?’ said Rosie May (environment).
‘Nothing much,’ I smiled. ‘Just thinking that you lot have probably got tea AIDS!!’
Wham! I knew it was a winner as soon as it’d left my lips. If you’d stuck me in a room with a typewriter for ten years I would never have come up with one that good. But in that room, fuelled by nothing other than raw nerves, out it plopped, fully-formed and ready to go.
Of course it wasn’t a winner at all. Not being privy to my train of thought, they had no idea what this ‘tea’ prefix was. As far as they were concerned their new colleague had just accused them all of having AIDS. Yet they didn’t have AIDS. And though the colourful lifestyle of one of them certainly put him in the ‘at risk’ category, he wouldn’t go full-blown until 2003.
No, I was wrong to suggest they all suffered from a terminal beverage-based illness, whether that was tea AIDS, coffee cancer or hot chocolate tumours. I was so ashamed by my behaviour that I retreated into my shell like a turtle would if it realised it was about to have a car reverse over its head. (And for the record, Fernando shouldn’t have let it out of its cage in the first place.) And it was in my shell that I would stay for most of my time on On the Hour.
To be honest, you’d find this unfriendly attitude across the whole BBC News and Current Affairs team. It saddened me because the department was populated by heroes of mine, faces I’d watched time and again on the news while eating my dinner: pork chops and gravy, beans on toast, hot pot, chicken pie and chips, maybe even a coq au vin, sometimes just a quick can of soup. Any meal, it doesn’t matter really. I’ve just realised I’m listing things I have for dinner when I should be listing faces I’d seen on the news. But I’m just saying I’d seen these people on the news and respected them. But their reassuring televisual demeanour was, I realised, a facade. In person, they didn’t like to mingle at all. Not even with each other.63
So yes, in London, I was very much in my shell. But back in Norwich, things couldn’t have been more different. Anyway, this chapter’s over now.