Like many seven-year-olds, I had an imaginary friend – Sammy Mouse. My sister Jane had Cumsiarbar, Alley Dorby and Heffer’s wife, so mine felt rather mundane in comparison, which is probably why the stories I wrote about him were never published. So by the time I was eight, I realised that if I wanted to get anything in print, I would have to do it myself. Many youngsters get a job as a paperboy or girl, delivering the morning news, but I decided to make my own publication to deliver. It was driven by an obsession with telling people things they didn’t know. On FA Cup Final day I would display the latest score on the front window, even though we lived at the end of a cul-de-sac and only a passing cat would ever see it. So it seemed perfectly natural to spend my spare time writing and printing the Daily Owl, with the help of my old mate Derek. He was a duplicator I got for Christmas when I was nine. I have no idea why I called him Derek. She could equally have been a Deirdre.
For those too young to remember, the duplicator was the great uncle of the printers we rely on today. I can tell you that one of my early thrills came from threading in the carbon paper on which I had typed my stories, and then turning the handle to make the copies fly off the press. This was Ashwell though, a village in Hertfordshire, rather than Wapping, and the Daily Owl had a circulation of just eight. Despite this I like to think it had a loyal readership and they were well rewarded, especially if you entered the weekly competition. With only eight readers you stood a great chance of winning. Not that Mum was very impressed when Gary McCormick turned up to collect his prize, which happened to be the Leeds United football shirt I had just got from Father Christmas. However, he had won the competition fair and square and so we had to hand it over.
Like a couple of the national papers, though, the Daily Owl was eventually consigned to history. I still remember how I wept when, aged 11, I was told we were moving away from the cosy Hertfordshire village to Yorkshire. 180 miles away from all I had known, from the girls I hoped to marry, and from friends I had made for life. But Dad had a new job, and so in 1977 we moved north, and fate took me closer to the world of extreme and bizarre sporting challenges.
That desire to report, to tell a story – the driving force behind the Daily Owl – had followed me to Yorkshire. But now it wasn’t just print I was interested in. At the age of 13, I broke into the world of broadcasting – not that anyone else knew it. I took a tape recorder onto the school bus and recorded the teenage banter. I kept it in my bag for a whole day in lessons and even assembly. When the Chemistry teacher thought I was reaching into the bag for a pen, I was really flicking the pause button from off to on. Soon I had a 30-minute montage of sound-bites from a day in the life at Harrogate Granby High School.
My cover was blown when another teacher caught me whispering away into my rucksack. I was doing a piece of voiceover commentary, but he thought I was disrupting class. I was sent to see the headmaster, who listened to the recording as I fidgeted nervously, gazing out of the window and picturing the cane landing on my hand. Thankfully though, there was nothing malicious or offensive on it and so instead of getting a detention, the fly-on-the-wall documentary was played to the whole school. These days there are many opportunities to make radio and television programmes at schools, and you will end up with a far better result if you discuss it with your teachers first!
On other occasions I would follow the sound of a fire engine on my bike, all the while talking into the tape recorder. I didn’t know or question why. It just seemed normal and if you have the same symptoms, a career in journalism is the only cure. It has to be a passion, an interest, and it was the same when I got to King Alfred’s College for my drama and television degree course. I ended up presenting the weekly TV programme Pulse and writing the college newsletter.
Sports-wise, though, through those formative years I was always overlooked. It can’t just have been my size. After all there are plenty of 5’5” sporting heroes and heroines. So I concluded that it was because I am flat-footed, which still means I don’t quite have the touch of a Messi. I am also bow-legged: and have often been accused of impersonating John Wayne. However I was determined to make up for this oddity with sheer determination and belief.
As I settled into life in Yorkshire, I couldn’t get into the football team. Even the five-a-side tournament was beyond me, as I was told that I was too Southern: too soft. This is where the Jack Russell gene in me, which I think I get from my Mum, kicked in. I had threatened to ‘run home’ to Hertfordshire numerous times, but it was still a shock when one day Dad’s patience snapped and he said ‘Go on then, do it, run home’.
So a year later I did. 175 miles in six days. I had great company in Simon Wild, a friend from school who for some bizarre reason had also thought it seemed a good idea to run over six marathons in as many days. Not many other 15-year-olds would have seen the point of it, but Simon was an inspiration: the driving force behind each cold winter training session.
By now the idea had snowballed way beyond a stroppy teenager’s foot stamping. We were running to raise money for the International Year of Disabled People. Simon’s father Malcolm had come on board, planning the route, sorting out a support car and arranging for the mayor of each town to roll out the red carpet. It was a first taste of being on air, as we were interviewed and had our departure covered live on BBC Radio Leeds.
So it was, that after six days of blisters bleeding, of dogs barking and sometimes chasing, of sleepless nights in dodgy B&Bs, of Simon’s father shouting the test match and Open golf results, we got our first taste of sporting champagne. It flowed down our red cheeks at the finish line in Ashwell, and the blurred image of familiar old faces cheering, hangs like an oil painting in my mind, a permanent reminder of what can be achieved. This was the moment I was bitten by the adrenalin rush you get from a sporting challenge. It had shown me that you don’t have to be talented, or blessed with the Pele gene, to get the most out of sport. Our own goals and challenges are not just about winning, or even competing.
I have learned that it’s the adventures you have, that enrich your understanding of this complex, rich tapestry of life that count for as much. Sometimes you have to follow your heart, go with your instincts and take a risk.
For example my early steps in journalism meandered more than the yellow brick road. Having left King Alfred’s College in Winchester with a 2:1 degree, I got a job as a newspaper reporter on the Hampshire Chronicle. My extra-curricular interests at college had proved to be worth their weight in gold, and demonstrated my enthusiasm for the profession. The editor did take me down a peg, though, saying that the only other applicant had been a woman who had sent in a picture of herself topless. I was fully clothed, so the job was mine.
Local newspapers are still seen as the best way into the media by many in the business, because of the training they give you, not just in writing, but in law, local and central government, shorthand writing and the ability to tell a story. If you can get to the bottom of a dog show and make it into interesting copy, you won’t have much trouble reporting on something much meatier higher up the food chain.
The Hampshire Chronicle sent me on a 10-week journalism course in Portsmouth, but I didn’t complete my two-year indentures, because I joined a band with other journalists Marion and Nigel and his friend Dave, and the following summer we set off on a tour of Europe. It was a tour ended prematurely by thieves in Amsterdam and mechanics in Spain, but the Spinal Tap gang would have been proud, and the experience gave me something to talk about as i got a job on a daily paper in Derby.
That New Year I was travelling again, as Nigel persuaded me to spend New Year’s Eve with him, ringing in 1990 on the Berlin Wall. It was just months after it had started coming down, and the atmosphere was uneasy at times as thousands of revellers from both the East and West, all tried to get onto the wall leaving decades of misconceptions and tension on the ground. I wrote about the experience for the Derby paper and it was this, more than anything else that persuaded Steve Panton and Henry Yelf to give me my first job at the BBC just a few months later, on Radio Solent in Southampton.
The early days at the BBC were