Guy Martin

by Guy Martin

  Before the set-to with Shaun, the whole scene at Oliver’s Mount had become even more weird when Mr X explained to Andy Spellman that he’d been under surveillance since he’d appeared in Scarborough. Mr X even went as far as to introduce Andy to the two huge, ex-military blokes who were spying on him. He was basically saying,’I’m the man, don’t mess about with me.’

  Seeing the way he treated Shaun made my mind up, and I’ve never had anything to do with Mr X again since, though he still tries to get in touch with me. It didn’t take long for it all to feel like a lucky escape.

  I left a disappointing and disturbing Scarborough without talking to Andy. I hadn’t spoken to him all day. I got it into my head that filming Closer to the Edge and getting involved with a TV company had turned my life to shit. I’d lost my girlfriend, which was my fault. Lost my home, because I had been living with her at her parents’ farm. My racing had gone to shit. I wouldn’t go home and mope and cry, I just got on with it, but I was being an arsehole to Andy.

  The next day, right after the Sunday of the Gold Cup, was to be the first day of location shooting for The Boat That Guy Built. I’d done some bits in Kirmington, but this was the start, proper. Andy met me in the reception of the hotel, in the north of Manchester, where the film crew and Mark Davis had stayed, and I was telling him I could take or leave the whole TV programme. I was being selfish. I hadn’t thought how much work had gone into the pre-production of the show, the research, buying the bloody boat – I was just down on it all.

  I was about to start six weeks of filming, working on my first-ever TV show. The Boat That Guy Built was a six-part BBC TV show with my name in the title, but I was feeling so negative about the whole job, I wasn’t bothered if it happened or not. I still wasn’t in a good place mentally.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE TV JOB

  ‘I thought I was spitting teeth out, but it was actually pieces of my top jaw.’

  THE BOAT THAT Guy Built and all the rest of the TV job all came from being interviewed for ITV’s 2009 TT coverage. The first year North One got the rights to cover the Isle of Man TT they contacted some of the racers and arranged to interview them before the racing started. A researcher rung up and told me they wanted to film me training or whatever I did. I told her I didn’t really do any of that, I just fixed lorries, so they came and filmed that instead.

  North One is a production company. They make all sorts of programmes and sell them to various TV channels, like ITV, Channel 4 or the BBC. One of North One’s directors was asking me all sorts of questions about engines and then started asking my views on electric bikes. I began telling him that I reckoned until they sort out nuclear power stations the electric bike is burning the fossil fuel a different way, further away from the end user.

  They filmed me at work, then at the farm. I got talking about tea, explaining the theory Russell Benney had told me back at the end of 2007, about how putting the milk in first made an emulsion and the molecular reaction made for a tastier cup of tea.

  Anyway, I was rambling on and it must have triggered something in someone’s head at North One, when it eventually was shown during one of the highlight shows for the 2009 TT. The boss of North One, Neil Duncanson, came to see me in the pits, and told me I could be on TV. I didn’t think anything of it, but if they wanted to do some legwork and have TV channels tell them, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ then it was no skin off my nose.

  Weeks went by and nothing seemed to be happening, but Andy kept reminding me North One were pushing hard. I was hardly losing sleep worrying about when my TV career would take off, but in January 2010 North One got in touch to say they’d like me to do some film tests up in Kirmington. Andy and a lad called Dan came and filmed me at work, talking about the Suffolk Punch piston tattoo on the back of my leg, my tool-box and loads of other stuff. That day’s filming was edited down and mixed with me yarning about tea and shown to Jay Hunt, the lady who was in charge of commissioning at the BBC. I didn’t think of it as a waste of time, because I still wasn’t going out of my way to do anything. The film crew came to me and sat about until I‘d finished what I was doing, then they went away and pulled strings, leaving me pretty much ignorant of what was going on and liking it that way. I’ve been told that the BBC made the decision that they wanted me to do a series for them on the strength of my videoed ramblings. It was a pretty big risk on their part, as I was totally unknown in this line of work, and apparently it was very unusual for them to work this way.

  A while after that North One got in touch again, because they had a BBC1 project they wanted to involve me with, but I’d need to do the show with a co-presenter. Honestly, I wasn’t that bothered. I explained I had enough work and didn’t really want to take a day off. Andy twisted my arm, saying it was my big opportunity. The BBC were under the microscope at the time. Listening to Radio 4 at work, it sounded like every man and his dog were complaining about how they were spending the licence fee, and here I was, a truck fitter, being offered the chance of a TV show. You can see why I was thinking, ‘Not as long as I’ve got a hole in my arse …’

  Andy added that North One would pay me some expenses, so I ended up taking a couple of days off work to do screen tests with established TV presenters.

  The first was in Brighton. I met Andy Spellman and travelled halfway there in some noisy Porsche he had at the time. He changes cars more often than I change underwear. We got nicked on the way and, for some reason, when the copper asked, ‘Where are you going?’ Andy replied, ‘Off to see a man called Jem.’ He made us sound like a couple of drug dealers. Why didn’t he just say Brighton?

  We did go and see a trick ex-German Fire Service Mk2 Ford Transit that Andy had found. It was still on its original tyres. I asked the salesman if he’d take an Aston Martin V12 in part-exchange. He looked at me like I was off my head, but I meant it.

  When we made it to Brighton, the test was with Jem Stansfield from the BBC show Bang Goes the Theory. Clever bloke, lovely bloke, but we didn’t hit it off. He knew all these maths formulas and he was a sound bloke, but not my kind of fella. He wasn’t trying to show off that he was cleverer than me or anything, we were just very different.

  The next screen test was up in my dad’s shed with Jason Bradbury from The Gadget Show, who was another lovely bloke. Andy Spellman turned up to operate one of the cameras, along with other fellas I didn’t know from Adam, but, it turns out, people I’d work with later.

  I didn’t realise what a big opportunity this was for TV folk, those whose only career was in TV. Bradbury was a Channel 5 presenter and keen to get on the BBC. Maybe that had something to do with the way he behaved. It was the day the iPad launched and he was all revved up about that, but it was a bit lost on me and my Nokia 7210.

  He’d talk away normally, like me and my mates would, until a camera was put on him, then he became the most enthusiastic bloke in the world. He kept picking up my 18-volt Snap-On nut gun to pretend it was a machine gun. He did it four times to make sure at least one camera got it.

  For this screen test, we had to pretend to build a hoverboard out of old leafblowers. It was all make-believe, but I got these knackered leafblowers going, something the crew didn’t think was going to happen. You’d think I’d turned water into wine, the way the TV folk reacted. Just when I was about to try and start them up, Bradbury went into a big spiel about having to open the shed’s windows and doors to make sure we weren’t poisoned by the carbon monoxide or something. I was thinking, ‘Get a grip …’

  Still, after the screen test I must’ve thought it had gone quite well, because when they quizzed me I said I thought the test with Bradbury went the best and that he got the best out of me. The crew who were filming the tests and those who were judging them can’t have agreed.

  The problem was, they reckoned, that I looked like someone who was just interested in what was going on, while the two professional TV bods looked like they were presenting a TV show, and because of the way I behaved it made th
em look even more exaggerated. It was chalk and cheese.

  The whole idea of the screen tests was to see if I was any good and if I could work with anyone. Unfortunately, the experienced TV presenters didn’t get me and I definitely didn’t get them. People might say we had no chemistry. They weren’t my kind of people. They didn’t think like I thought. They didn’t come from a background where a perk of the job is reading a truck driver’s porn mag. They were all right people, but not my cup of tea.

  North One got the gist that the tests hadn’t really worked because I struggled to hit it off with the people they suggested, but for some reason they were still keen on me doing something with them. They asked if I knew anyone. No one came to mind until I was mountain biking in Wales with my mate Mark ‘Mavis’ Davis.

  I have known Mave since I was about 18. We’d go mountain biking together a fair bit and we’d always have a good craic. I asked him if he’d be up for trying to present a TV show with me, and he was. So I texted Andy, he got the wheels in motion and another screen test was set up at Mave’s house. He’s a carpenter and we made something for his kitchen, in front of the cameras. It all went well and we got the job.

  It had taken a year from being told that something might happen to actually getting it off the ground. I’m sure there was loads of paddling going on below the surface, most of which I knew nothing about.

  A few weeks later we started filming the BBC TV series. I booked a block of six weeks off work, which my dad was sort of all right with, starting right after the Scarborough Gold Cup on 20 September. I still went in and worked weekends at the truck yard.

  The show would become The Boat That Guy Built. The idea was to buy a knackered old canal boat and for me and Mave to do it up and kit it out using technology and methods from the Industrial Revolution. It would include stuff like making a steam-powered shower, the china and stainless cutlery, the cotton bed sheets …

  In the time between signing up to make the show and filming actually starting, the wheels came off a lot of aspects of my life. That meant, right from the off, Mave was more interested in it than me. I was all over the shop. He was behaving professionally and I wasn’t.

  I came round slowly, but I still needed to escape from it, so even though I had a hotel room booked I would sometimes sleep in my van. I wasn’t having big heart-to-hearts with myself. I’d go to a pub and have something to eat, then when I’d get back in my van I would just feel, Aaaaah. A feeling of relief and relaxation. I love my van and I like being by myself – but it was an absolute godsend to have Mave with us.

  Two weeks before the Gold Cup and all the Shaun the Sheep and Mr X weirdness coming to a head, and two weeks before I saw the boat for the first time, we were filming the title sequence for the show in Lincolnshire. It was beginning to feel like the same old interview stuff, in my dad’s shed in Kirmington, at Mave’s house or at the truck yard. North One had said they wanted to do a bit of personal stuff: people who knew me giving some soundbites. I don’t know what the thinking was behind it, but I just nodded along.

  The show was originally going to be The House That Guy Built, and they were going to have a lot more input from people I knew. They planned to talk to Kate, my girlfriend at the time, and her mum, Mrs Lancaster, who knew me well because I’d lived on her farm for so long. But just before filming began, me and Kate split up and I moved out.

  Before we started work on the boat I was in the shed in Kirmington, doing the first bits ever to a proper broadcast camera, other than interviews on the grid of the TT or whatever. Before then it had all been handheld cameras.

  The time came for them to interview Kate. I obviously hadn’t made the situation clear and reverted to my default setting of, ‘Oh, it’ll be right, worse things happen at sea, let’s just get on with it.’ I might have played down the seriousness of the breakup and the hurt I’d caused Kate. Looking back, I can understand how the film crew assumed we’d just had some change of plan and gone our separate ways, so they still planned to ask Kate if she’d come and do the bit to camera for us.

  When Andy walked over the road and knocked on Kate’s door, she explained I’d been sleeping with someone else behind her back. Something I might not have explained to the TV crew at this point. She added she didn’t think she had too much positive to say about me at the time, but still asked if I was over in my dad’s shed. Andy admitted I was and then spent the short walk from the farm to the shed desperately trying to think of anything to say to make the situation better.

  Kate, always a very calm, laidback woman, came into the shed and asked if she could have a quick word with me. I walked outside with her and once we were around the corner she lamped me, slapping me hard across the face, and started shouting at me at the top of her voice.

  Next she stormed back into the shed and asked the film crew why they were wasting TV licence payers’ money on a See You Next Tuesday like me. It was quite an introduction to their new presenter.

  Some of the directors of the shows were new to this kind of show too. They were experienced in TV, but The Boat was a different kettle of fish for them too and we’d bang heads.

  The crew were all used to working with professional presenters, and I was far from it. They dealt with the likes of Jason Bradbury, Jason Plato and Tiff Needell. These were people who could say things again and again, changing it slightly if the director thought it would be better a different way, but I just wanted to do it how I’d do it naturally and wouldn’t budge.

  There were three different directors on the series, each doing two programmes. That isn’t unusual in TV, I’m told. One of the directors, Jess Matthews, would ask me to say things a particular way and I’d tell her, ‘No, I’ll say it like I say it.’ I didn’t get on with her at all to start with. She was as stubborn as I was. We were like two rams butting each other. I bet she thought, ‘Why have my bosses chosen this dickhead to be a presenter when he doesn’t even want to do it?’ I’d have agreed with her.

  From my point of view, the problem was she was trying to direct me, she was a director after all, but I didn’t want directing. She’d say, ‘Can’t you say it like this?’ And I’d remind her I wasn’t an actor. I didn’t have any diva moments, but I look back and pity her for having to put up with a dickhead like me. We’ve worked again since and got on really well.

  If you’d asked me at the time I’d have told you, ‘I should never have done this.’ Getting up on a Monday morning to go filming wasn’t a good feeling. I was struggling to get going, a problem I’d never had with the trucks. I’d finish a day’s filming and not have the usual feeling of job satisfaction I’d always had. It didn’t feel like proper work to me.

  I thought Mave and I would have exactly the same outlook when it came to the TV, but he liked the camera a lot more than me. I can’t look into a camera and talk, I have to talk to the person next to the camera, not an imaginary audience. Mave was spot-on and, without doubt, the best man to do the first series with. He was more switched on to the whole job than me. As the series went on, I felt he became more and more like a TV presenter, and was going away from the character that he was at the start.

  Even though it sounds like I could take or leave the whole thing, we had some laughs. We built the steam-powered shower for the boat, and I had hand-made a bar of soap. When it came time to test the shower in front of the cameras, the crew said I could keep my pants on or get some swimming trunks, but I thought, ‘Sod it, I don’t wear pants in the shower.’ I looked at Mave and he said, ‘Get on with it.’ So in the boat, crowded with five or six crew, men and women, I stripped off and got in the shower. The water went from freezing to scalding while I was trying to get washed and I managed to get soap in my eyes. There wasn’t a lot of room on the narrowboat at the best of times, the clue’s in the name, and I remember Nat the cameraman shouting at me to keep my John Thomas out of the shot.

  I was laughing and swearing at the same time, while everyone except Mave kept quiet. I don’t think they were us
ed to their presenter’s meat and two veg swinging in the breeze on a Tuesday afternoon. Maybe if they’d asked me to lie in a warm bubble-bath listening to Mozart I’d have been the awkward one. What I found much harder was being told I had to walk up to a complete stranger and ask what he thought about the huge Boulton & Watt blowing engine in the middle of a roundabout on the A38(M) near Birmingham. The idea of talking to someone random, rather than someone random talking to me first, made me more on edge than waiting for the flag to drop on a grid.

  I didn’t mind that filming was pushing me out of my comfort zone, in fact I enjoyed that. I want to learn new stuff. I want to be challenged by stuff that is out of my league. And I wasn’t worried if I was no good at it. I’d put it down to experience and move on. I was embarrassed at times, but most when I had to go and speak to the public. It was awkward, but I did it.

  I don’t have a TV or internet at home, but I listen to the radio a lot. That’s come from living on my own for a while. I bike home from Grimsby, leaving at six or seven o’ clock, and pass house after house where people are just staring at the 70-inch plasma TV screens. It makes me think, ‘You don’t get that time back at the end.’ I can honestly say I’ve only seen one episode of the boat series. We were still finishing the last programme when the first was edited and ready to watch, so one of the crew showed me it on an iPad at lunchtime.