A large and lightly perspiring man sat on the opposite side of the counter in the standard security guard uniform of white shirt with epaulettes and dark blue tie. We nervously gave our names and our reason for being there, just in case the names alone weren’t enough. He jotted them down in a book and handed us each a yellow sticker stamped with the day’s date and the familiar BBC logo. He barely looked at us while picking up a telephone and mumbling into it before pointing in the direction of a nearby cheap sofa. ‘They’ll be down for you in a minute. Take a seat please…’
The reception area could best be described as ‘utilitarian’. I felt like a character marooned in some backwater of the Eastern Bloc in a Cold War spy novel. This thought had me muttering ‘Yes we have no bananas’ under my breath in Russian. You couldn’t fault my tradecraft. Presenters of the day grinned forlornly from framed photos on walls, which clearly looked embarrassed about having to display them, and by the doors a rack groaned with cheesy postcards of the same faces and a few others. I wandered over and took out a John Peel postcard for myself, simply because he looked so deliciously uncomfortable at having his picture taken. Dave Lee Travis, on the other hand, appeared to be over the moon. He had opted for ‘wacky’ from his extensive catalogue of looks.
Once we were introduced and on air the time whizzed by. As I glanced around our surroundings I was delighted to note that studios really did have a red light up on the wall that said ‘ON AIR’ when the microphones were faded up. I had always thought that was just a Hollywood conceit. Little Brother performed his excellent parody of Stanley Holloway’s monologue about Sam the soldier, which he had re-imagined for the recent Falklands War. We both chatted with the presenter for a bit and then I read out my poem ‘They’ve All Grown Up in the Beano’. I can remember that as I spoke I experienced the dizzying sensation of my heart hammering in my chest combined with a simultaneous delight in what I was doing. It was a feeling I’d only ever experienced before when kissing girls.
Our segment was soon finished and we were politely ushered out just as quickly as we had arrived. And before we knew it, we were stood out on the windy pavement of Portland Place like nothing had happened. This being the age prior to mobiles, there was no instant debriefing phone call like one might expect these days. David and I looked at each other and wandered off to a nearby pub to drink the remainder of the afternoon away. I was fizzing with excitement. I had just made my first broadcast on the radio. And it was so cool, they had microphones and soundproofing, and a control booth through the glass; and everybody who wasn’t on air still had a role to play.
While the experience was a bit of a let-down in one sense, the actual working environment was oddly inspiring. These people were being paid to do what I had done for pretty much every day of my life since I was thirteen, which was to play records and chat. This could very well be a future career! When I really thought about it, radio was the only thing that I was in any way qualified to do. So why not do it? It was one of the first times I experienced any kind of aspiration. I wanted to get myself a job in radio.
Even though this was the first time in my life I’d felt such a powerful surge of ambition, it took another ten years of poorly attended benefits and ropey gigs in the back rooms of pubs, plus the rise and fall of Red Wedge, my debut at the Edinburgh Fringe, a tour with Paul Weller, a few illadvised television shows and the birth of two daughters, before I was to walk into a radio studio again…
Corner office. Those were the two words that were going through my head as I walked into the bright, airy room. I had never before understood the significance of a ‘corner office’ or why one should be so desirable. Now I was actually stood in one, I understood. It’s all about having more square feet of windows than your subordinates. Simple really. While your many underlings crawl around in cubicles and subterranean studios, their pale waxy skin craving just the odd shaft of natural sunlight to bring them some much-needed vitamin D, you can bask in your greenhouse, knowing that when the sun goes just that bit too far west you can simply lower the blinds on the acres of windows adorning your west-facing wall. Presumably those fortunate souls who had risen to the higher echelons of management at the BBC required such rarefied conditions because, in addition to their corporate abilities, if push came to shove, they could also photosynthesise.
Addison Cresswell is my agent. He is very loud, very talented and on occasion almost unintelligible. And he was on the line.
‘Hello Ad…’ I said nervously.
It was autumn 2001, two years after I had walked out of GLR. As soon as I saw Ad’s name flash up on the screen of my mobile phone, I inhaled sharply and braced myself.
Whenever Ad called personally it was either really good or really bad news. It seemed that nothing between these two extremes was reason enough for him to pick up the phone, so I always experienced a frisson whenever there was a call from him.
‘PHILL!ADDISON!LISTENMATEI’VEHADACALL FROMMYMATELESLEYDOUGLASHERAND JIMMOIRWANTSTOSEEYOUSOWE’REGOING TOGOINANDSEETHEMBOTHNEXTWEEK ALRIGHTMATE.’
‘Ummm…’
‘BRILLIANTTHEYWANTUSTOGOINNEXT WEDNESDAYATELEVENO’CLOCKATJIM’SOFFI CEI’LLCOMEINWITHYOUANDWE’LLSEEWHAT THISISALLABOUT…LOTSALOVEMATE!’
Much like you have just had to very slowly re-read and pick apart the words in the above barrage of capital letters, any listener also has to slowly deconstruct a phone call from Addison. But mercifully, this one was both brief and to the point. We had been called in to see Jim Moir at Radio 2.
Jim Moir was a broadcasting legend, who had more than earned the corner office in which I was now standing. But Jim Moir didn’t need to photosynthesise because the sun shone out of him.
When you meet Jim Moir, he is one of those characters for whom the phrase ‘larger than life’ seems tailormade. A huge, red-faced, charismatic and incredibly funny man, I always thought that he is exactly what Santa would look like if he’d chucked in the whole toy thing, lost the beard and gone into middle management. As a bit of a fanboy I was slightly in awe of him as he had produced The Generation Game with Bruce Forsyth, as well as undergoing a stint as the BBC’s Head of Variety and Light Entertainment. His career at the Corporation spanned decades. Admittedly today you can’t throw a doughnut off a double-decker bus in London without hitting a TV producer, but Moir was producing ratings-busting television programmes back when there were only three channels…I know – three. We were all like the fucking Amish in the seventies.
Big Jim had been handed the stewardship of Radio 2 in 1996, and in no time at all had deftly changed its image from that slightly starchy station where they played show tunes that your mum listened to into a hip, fun, sparky and forward-thinking network which swiftly became the highest-rated radio station in the country. Addison already had clients Mark Lamarr and Jonathan Ross with weekly shows on 2 and in the light of his manic phone call to me it was reasonable to assume that I might well be joining them on the airwaves.
I started to mentally flick through the schedule to try and work out what slots might soon be coming available. None of the heavy hitters like Wogan, Ken Bruce or Steve Wright would be going anywhere as they were all doing very nicely thank you. The recently rehabilitated Johnny Walker was going great guns on drivetime, and as for Sir Jimmy Young, he just seemed to be permanently locked in his lunchtime studio like it was a high-tech sarcophagus. The only place that man would be moving to, if he was lucky, was the Egyptology wing of the British Museum.
So it might be a weekend slot. Jonathan Ross owned Saturday mornings with his slick blend of great music and hilarious interviews, apart from one memorable encounter with a surly Dannii Minogue who had apparently undergone a sense-of-humour bypass. Maybe they’d be asking me to do something on Sunday mornings. Might Steve Wright’s ‘Sunday Love Songs’ be getting the old ‘Spanish Archer’?
I spent odd moments pondering over what the gig might be