Life's What You Make It Read online

  As the junior, it was obviously my job to get the teas in. Joyce, the tea lady, stood proudly by her trolley and urn, ready to provide it. She was a middle-aged cockney who looked uncannily like my Auntie Jean. Joyce was a delightful dream of a woman. She knew everything and everyone and we quickly became friends. On day two of my new job I asked her what was behind the MI5-style security. When she told me, I was awestruck. Behind those doors was the main control room for all BBC Radio, linked to the Post Office Tower and the entire world. However, that was just half the story. If you walked through the control room you would find the studios, or ‘cons’, two studios each for Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. It was, for me, the holy grail. It was all in there – they were all in there, at the end of my corridor.

  In the weeks and months that followed, Joyce, who seemed to know more than she should, would say to me in hushed tones, ‘Princess Grace of Monaco, this afternoon at four.’ I’d make sure that was the time for the day’s tea run and stand waiting with Joyce, and there she was, spot on four, Grace Kelly being escorted to a studio. ‘Enter,’ read the green sign, and in she went, graceful and beautiful, to be swallowed up by the black double doors.

  ‘’Ello, lovey. Margaret Thatcher, in at ten.’

  ‘The Police … here at five.’

  Indira Gandhi, Muhammed Ali, David Bowie … and so it went. Joyce and I stood and watched as the VIPs of the world walked by and the office teas went cold.

  It was fun to watch the massive stars drift by, but much more appealing to me was the daily arrival of the DJs, off to do their shows, from Jimmy Young to Peter Powell. I was on nodding terms with them all. Me, the radio anorak from Sport and OBs.

  But it wasn’t enough! I needed to get through those doors. Access came in the form of a memo that I had to type and put in the internal post every Friday to the ‘TOM’. It was the weekly schedule of OB activities. For weeks, I typed it up and posted it without question until, one day, I asked John who TOM was. He didn’t look up from his work.

  ‘Technical Operations Manager.’

  ‘Ah, right, where is he?’

  ‘In the control room.’

  Holy shit!! Access! The address on the envelope was just an office number, with no indication that this piece of paper was a passport to ‘enter’.

  ‘I may as well deliver it, rather than post it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Seems silly to post it if I can drop it off when I get the tea.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  Friday took ages to come round. I typed the memo with trembling hands, I was so excited at what was to come. My legs were shaky as I walked to the top of the stairs, my heart pounded as I pressed the button … I waited … enter.

  Literally, excitement off the scale. I walked down the steps and in through the doors. I’m not sure if anyone has ever delivered a sheet of paper as slowly as I did. On that day, and every Friday afterwards, I walked like a tortoise. It was the bridge of the Enterprise on speed. There were screens, monitors, buttons and dials by the thousand, links to every corner of the globe. My eager eyes drank it all in. I could see the corridor to the studios, but that was for another day, as my brief access didn’t allow that. I put the schedule on the desk of the TOM, and he said thanks but didn’t look up. I walked very slowly back through the nerve centre, heard the doors click behind me, and that was it for another week. Except one week, it wasn’t. A bout of flu (for someone else) was the fledgling beginning of a life-altering friendship.

  Our office was next door to the motoring unit, a supervisor and two secretaries responsible for typing up the travel news for all four networks. ‘Beep beep, beep beep, yeah, traffic news on Radio Oooone’ was the jingle. One morning the motoring unit supervisor walked into my supervisor’s office, Alastair McLachlan or ‘Mac’. Small, Scottish and very kind, always keen on enhancing our love lives, usually by saying of one or other of the girls in the building: ‘Aye, she’s a cutie, better give her a wee tickle.’

  Only a couple of months into my booking-clerk job, both secretaries in the motoring unit had gone down with the flu, and the supervisor was, as Mac pointed out in his lilting Scottish accent, ‘in a pickle’. One of us had to go in and type up the travel newsflashes.

  John didn’t want to. I did. It was something different. I was sent next door to help out.

  The job was simple. The supervisor, with the information coming in before him, dictated it to me, and I typed it. I had no idea what happened to it after that. First flash of the morning came in, he spoke, I typed on to four sheets of carbon paper. ‘Crash on the motorway, M1 closed …’ I concentrated as I typed, but on completion I had to correct the four copies because the crash hadn’t been on the K1. Well, ‘K’ and ‘M’ are very close on the keyboard …

  ‘What next?’

  ‘Right, now you have to go to the control room at the end of the corridor. Know where that is?’

  ‘Err. Yes.’

  ‘Walk through the control room, there’s a corridor at the back, go down that corridor to the studios.’

  ‘Okay!!’

  ‘You deliver one sheet to each of the four studios that are on air. Walk into each of the control rooms and they’ll either take it from you or send you into the studio to give it to the person on air.’

  Imagine a very loud, choral burst of ‘Hallelujah!’ exploding in your head.

  ‘Enter’ had never looked so good. I almost ran through the control room this time. There was the corridor, there were the doors to each of the studios, four red on-air lights shone like beacons and called out to me in their siren voices. Radio 4 first: heavy news debate going on; the producer took the sheet from me. Radio 3 next: orchestral tones echoed out; I woke the engineer and gave him the sheet. Now it got interesting: Radio 2. The producer said hi, a record was playing, he pointed to the door of the studio and said, ‘Go straight in.’ I walked into the studio, and there was Terry Wogan. The mighty, affable and brilliant Tel. I told him this story of our first encounter years later, and he was as charming and gracious then as he was that morning. Paper was strewn everywhere in the studio and there was a bright, cheery atmosphere. Terry looked up, said hello and I gave him the traffic flash. He asked if I was new, I said I was filling in, he smiled and said thank you and I distinctly remember backing out as if I was leaving the presence of a king – which, in a way, I was. How could this day get any better? Well, Radio 1 was next. I’m sure I must have been bright red as I stood at the door of the control room. Here I was, eighteen, standing at the heart of British radio broadcasting. My memory flashed back to that conversation with my mate.

  ‘Why would you want to leave Cornwall? Everything you could ever want is here.’ In my head, I was screaming, ‘Because of this, mate, because of this!’

  In through the door, a nod from the engineer to go into the studio of the radio station I’d been listening to for years from a bedroom with a secret door in the wardrobe. Only a few months before, I had listened to the last Noel Edmonds breakfast show as he handed over to Dave Lee Travis. The final thing Noel played was ‘It’s Over’ by Roy Orbison and the sound effect of a door slamming. Now I was in that studio and big, hairy DLT was in the seat. He was known as ‘The Hairy Cornflake’ on the show. The music was loud. As a matter of fact, he was out of his seat and dancing around. ‘Morning!’ he shouted, over the noise. I gave the traffic report to the producer and left. As I walked back down that corridor I was grinning from ear to ear. What a geek, but a happy geek. When I eventually got my Sunday show on Radio 1, I used the studio after Dave. He laughed when I told him the story and said, ‘I remember you!!’

  Reunited with DLT, ‘The Hairy Cornflake’, when I finally got my Radio 1 show.

  ‘No way! Do you?’

  ‘Do I bollocks.’

  Being in his studio with him for an hour or so on a Sunday was a joy. DLT was utterly bonkers, very loud and very funny.

  As I delivered my traffic report I admit I was a bit disappointed I’d missed Noel
Edmonds on the breakfast show by a few months. Noel was who I wanted to be, great fun on the radio, a sort of more restrained Kenny Everett.

  I had watched the first show of Multi-coloured Swap Shop on BBC1 in 1976, open-mouthed at how live and exciting Saturday-morning TV had just become, and how clever the producer, Chris Bellinger, must be. Two hours totally live, famous guests, phone-ins, sketches, music, cooking – it was all there and would cast the mould of all the following Saturday-morning juggernauts to follow. Noel was in his broadcasting prime and would remain there for some considerable time. How could I know that in only seven years I would be presenting Going Live with Sarah Greene in that same Saturday slot and that the brilliant Chris Bellinger would be my producer and friend. I certainly couldn’t have guessed that one day I would watch him slide down the wall in my house in Chiswick, full of over-proof rum. Noel and I would eventually become friends, too. I always cited him as my TV inspiration. Sadly, many years later, he and I would strongly disagree over an interview on This Morning when he suggested that ‘negative energy’ could cause cancer. I still take a different point of view to Noel, but I think it’s a terrible shame we fell out over it.

  The gang surprise me on my birthday. From left to right: production secretary Cathy Mellor, DLT, me and production secretary Louise Musgrave.

  That day helping out with the traffic news was amazing. I ran back and forth and met pretty much every DJ as I delivered the bulletins, but it was at about four o’clock that afternoon that, unbeknown to either of us, a friendship would be forged that lasts until this very day. I took a traffic flash down to Radio 1, and Peter Powell was presenting the afternoon show. This was the guy I’d been illicitly listening to late at night on Radio Luxembourg. One of the best voices on the radio, the same taste in music as me, a flag-bearer for new bands. I walked into the studio and he said, ‘Hello, mate,’ in a way that only Pete can. I gave him the travel flash and said I’d loved his show on Luxembourg. I think I blurted out that I wanted to work in radio, too. The song finished, he said, ‘Hang on,’ opened the mic, did a link and then he was back. It was just a brief chat, but he was very charming, said something like ‘Good luck, it’s tough to get into.’ I said thank you and left. What a day.

  In the months that followed I bumped into him in the corridor a few times and he always said hi. Eventually, he was given the tea-time show and one day, as we passed each other, he asked if I was still interested in getting into radio. I said yes and told him that I’d recently used a lot of BBC resources and favours to make a Christmas show to send back to Hospital Radio Plymouth. He said, ‘Well done,’ or something equally generic, and said I was welcome to pop down to watch the show for a bit after I’d finished work. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, so I only took up the invitation two or three times, but to sit in a studio and watch a show go out was priceless in helping me get to where I wanted to be. The life-changing moment came a couple of years later when I told Peter in the corridor outside Room 130 one day that I had just handed in my notice and was emigrating to New Zealand. He said three words that would shape my career. He swears he can remember, but I’m pretty sure he can’t. Peter Powell said to me, ‘Keep in touch.’

  The Hospital Radio Christmas show happened simply because Hospital Radio Plymouth asked whether, now I was in the BBC, I could record anything for them. I dropped a cheeky note to a few presenters and all of them replied that yes, of course they’d be happy to help, as it was for Hospital Radio. Brian Matthew, John Dunn, Ray Moore, Libby Purves, Pete Murray and others all recorded a passage from A Christmas Carol for me. Arthur, my friend down in Technical Stores, blagged one of the basement war-time studios for me. It even came with an engineer! I recorded my show for a few hours in the middle of the night when everything was quiet. Those studios are the historic soul of the BBC, deep below the building. I spent a lot of time wondering what landmark broadcasts had been made from there as I felt the Tube trains on the Bakerloo Line rumble beneath my feet.

  One of my proudest moments on getting my job was being given my BBC pass. I still have that first one. When it arrived in the internal mail I tore up my temporary pass and studied my new official one. I was reasonably happy with the picture and I remember asking John a burning question.

  ‘Where can I go with this?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘Which buildings?’

  ‘All of them. Why?’

  ‘Well, I was wondering if it would get me into TV Centre?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Why would you want to go there?’

  ‘Dunno. Just wondered.’

  The ‘Hallelujah!’ chorus burst forth in my head once more. As most companies do, the BBC shortened many locations into acronyms. Broadcasting House was BH; the Royal Albert Hall was RAH; RFH was the Royal Festival Hall; and so on. Television Centre was just TC, and I had just been given a pass into TC, the building I knew so well from my Ladybird Book of Television. I made a decision: that weekend I would go, to test access, to snoop, to finally be there.

  Saturday morning arrived and my head was buzzing all the way on the Tube. St John’s Wood to White City seemed to take an age. I walked out of the Tube station and on to Wood Lane. A look to the left, and there it was, this imposing, minimalist seat of British television, which opened in June 1960 and was respected around the world. The architect, Graham Dawbarn, allegedly drew a question mark on a sheet of paper when he was given the job of designing the BBC’s new home of television and, viewed from the air at the time, that’s exactly what was built. Even now, though so much has been made residential, that original shape remains. I knew what to expect. The mighty brick wall that was the side of Studio 1 (TC1) with its iconic BBC Television Centre logo, and twenty-six white square lights below, in three rows. The centre of the main block was circular, and affectionately known as the ‘Doughnut’. In the middle of that was the golden statue of Helios, the Greek god of the sun, to represent television radiating around the world. I knew that there were eight studios of varying size built around that circle. I knew because I’d studied it. I knew because I was obsessed.

  As I walked down Wood Lane, it revealed itself to me brick by brick. If I’d walked past Mick Jagger at that moment, I wouldn’t have cared, because this building was the star I’d dreamt of meeting from the moment I put that cardboard box on top of a tea trolley. My God, it was majestic. I thought then, and have felt ever since, that this building was designed perfectly for its purpose. It was, as Sarah Greene and I would say to each other in a few years’ time, the Fun Factory.

  I stood at the barrier and walked up to the commissionaire’s window. This was never going to work. He looked at me, I shakily showed him my pass, he nodded and looked back at his paper: entry had been granted. I spent the entire day exploring. Any door that would let me through, I walked through. I looked into all the studios I could that weren’t flashing their red transmission light. In TC1 a huge drama set was nearing completion; in TC6 a set for what looked like a sitcom. There was a studio for sport, for current affairs, too, and in all of them the white-topped EMI 2001 cameras. My breath caught as I saw them for real for the first time. In one silent studio, I went up close to look. In my eyes, it was a work of art. It’s a source of regret to me that by the time I got in front of a UK camera, the 2001 had been mostly phased out. I would have loved to have looked ‘down the barrel’ of one of those as a presenter. I’ve often wondered which shows and which stars had been in front of the camera I now have pointing at the pool table.

  I’ve tried all my life to be as encouraging as I can to those who want to get into broadcasting. I’ve always remembered those kind replies I got and the help I’ve received along the way. Some of the presenters and performers who are working now wrote to me, and I gave them advice. Although she wasn’t asking for advice, Sarah Millican sent me a birthday card at my Radio 1 show. She had made a gag about the fact there was a hamster on the card and called herself ‘Hilary Hamster’ as an encouragement to get others hamsters
to write in. I apparently said, ‘And remember, if you’re going to send stuff in, you don’t have to try to be funny.’ Apparently, she was crushed. I’ve insisted on a number of occasions since that I wasn’t being dismissive and that she was funny. Having said that, she has told me that it was the first step on her path to becoming a comedian, so the misunderstanding didn’t do any lasting damage. I’m in her book, now she’s in mine, and we have a secret love for each other. (Hi, Sarah.)

  In all of the letters I’ve sent and all the interviews with students I’ve had, I have always stressed one thing: I’m not interested in helping you if you just want to be famous; you have to want it, in your bones. I didn’t want to be a presenter, I wanted to be a broadcaster, and that’s the profession I write down in official paperwork, though, obviously, some may disagree.

  There’s a reason I mention this right now, and it comes down to smell. As I walked into those television studios that very first time I realized that they had their own unique smell. It’s hard to describe. One of my favourite smells is petrichor: the smell that comes off baking tarmac when a brief shower hits a hot road on a summer’s day. A television studio is similar, but it has an unidentifiable smell. I’ve joked with other presenters that it’s the smell of adrenaline and fear, but that’s not it. It’s vaguely electrical, I suppose, maybe with hints of floor paint and the wood of the sets. Every studio has its own distinct smell. Studio one at the old ITV studios smelled differently to Studio 8, the home of This Morning. They must retain their own personal aroma, because the smell of TC3 on that day as they were striking a music show was imprinted on my mind. Many years later, when This Morning moved from the Southbank to Television Centre and we moved into our new home, I walked back into TC3 and my memory exploded with wonder: the smell was exactly the same. So, if you write to me about wanting to pursue a career in broadcasting, I’m not interested if you just want to be famous, but if the smell of a studio gets you, you have my attention.