by Danny Baker
Going Off Alarming
A MEMOIR
WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON
LONDON
Dedication
The true propellers and turbos amid all these words are Bonnie and Sonny. This is from your dad, kids. Mancie, you’ll just have to sit up on your cloud and be born in the next one, OK?
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Teas, Light Refreshments And Minerals
Are You Having Any Fun?
Up In The World
Walk Between The Raindrops
They Might Be Giants
Jesus Was A Cross Maker
King Of The Mountain Cometh
Call Any Vegetable
Baby’s On Fire
Black Sheep
Nights On Broadway
Unfaithful Servant
Does This Kind Of Life Look Interesting To You?
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
My Friend The Sun
Ain’t It Grand To Be Blooming Well Dead
After The Goldrush
Notes
Plate Section
Also by Danny Baker
Copyright
List of Illustrations
The only known photo of the whole family together: Mum, Dad, me, Sharon and Michael. Norfolk Broads, 1963.
First photo of me. I’m on the right, playing with Stephen Micalef by the rubbish chute in the flats.
Debnams Road, where I lived until I was twenty. Ours was the first door along.
We were big on blue in my set. Spud can be glimpsed here employing a shop-bought saveloy as a comic phallus. My father, folks.
Mum and Dad: Bet and Fred.
Spud typically enjoying both life and the Courvoisier. My brother’s picture is beside him.
Outside the caravan shortly before shattering my legs in the ill-advised Dr Syn fiasco.
Dad and me at the ‘van. It was twice runner-up in Horse & Hound’s Britain’s Most Luxurious Dwelling poll.
Michael Aspel and me on The Six O’Clock Show. Or possibly Waiting for Godot.
This was how I fed and clothed my loved ones for six years. Note the Taser he’s holding to force me into such public ignominy.
Wendy holding Bonnie in Deptford Park. Our house is roughly centre in the row behind.
At work with Bon-Bon, 1985.
46 Scawen Road, Deptford.
I forced Sonny out to make his own way in the world when he was three. I presume he’s doing OK.
When you enjoy a short rest at Christmas, possibly after a Tio Pepe or two, somebody will always take your photograph.
Twizzle confined in his alley. You can just glimpse the gate on which he hanged himself – before resurrection – at top left.
Twizzle again. We never suspected he was mad.
The only picture I have of my time in panto. Here I am appealing for any loose change.
The cover of the programme from The Great Dick Whittington Scam.
Meeting my absolute hero Anthony Newley while dressed as my own five-year-old son.
This is weird. Made up to look like an old man and pictured begging money from my old man. I wildly overestimated how much hair I would have at that age.
Breakfast at the caravan. People often take pictures of food now but this was the first-ever one and started the craze.
My father-in-law Jim possibly recalling the night a molten lampshade scarred him for life.
In Spain with Rodney, who stumped up my VAT cheque. The surgical wadding in my ear is part of a terrific story that I just realized is not in this book.
Our wedding in 1988. I just realized that is not in this book either. Which will go over big I’m sure.
Wendy and Sonny with Jonathan Ross, Jane and Honey at Universal Studios in 1992. I take Jonathan on holiday with us in case I get awards that need presenting.
Thumb chums. Sonny in our front room with Paul Gascoigne. Paul is on the right.
At the beginning of Donald Duck films he looks like this, like he can’t believe his luck. It is my default expression whenever I’m asked to pose. ‘Don’t do your DD face,’ begs Wendy. I always do. (Craig Easton)
Atop a mountain in Spain on yet another holiday. I convinced my thinning hair to gather on the western slopes of my skull to fool the camera.
In New York at 5am with the Saw Doctors who I’d met in a bar. We were broadcasting live, loud and very drunk back to Radio 1.
Burying pianos on beaches for Radio 1. Stunned, I have just realized I will be needing this shirt for the cover of Going to Sea in a Sieve.
My Spitting Image. As I got balder the puppet strangely began to grow more hair. (See Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Gormless.) (Spitting Image Productions Ltd)
Saturation Point in 1993. Within thirty minutes of this portrait I was utterly bald and as fat as a house.
The Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination has been reproduced more than this photo. The story behind it is, arguably, more shocking. (Fiona Hanson/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
Preface
For what it’s worth I would like to dedicate this book to my brother Mickey. If there’s any detectable chronology at all in these volumes then Mickey died just after the last one finished and this one begins. Following a fellow docker’s enormously boozy leaving do, he went home to bed and simply didn’t wake up again. I’ve wrestled with how to place his sudden passing into the cavalcade of events that gather in these pages, but no matter how I approach it the problem always remains the same; I am just no good at morbid reportage. All the stories told here are true and all, I hope, contain something fresh, surprising and entertaining for the reader. To simply write out the tragic impact of Michael’s death on the people around him seems to me, in a literary sense, obvious and strangely banal. In my own reading tastes I have never had the slightest interest in poking about in other people’s bad news, whether in book, magazine or broadcast, and this is possibly why I have no idea how to serve such stuff up as a cracking good chapter. I grant that some may see the reticence to dwell on the dark months immediately following Mick dying as the psychological key to everything else contained here, but I’m afraid it really isn’t. There is no long-subsumed secret sorrow here from which to unburden myself. To put it simply: my brother died. How do you think it fucking felt? There are more than enough misery memoirs out there if people want to bizarrely nose about in the grief of others and, as I say, I am genuinely not armed with whatever heart-wrenching tools are required to guide an audience through the universal details or even how to make them interesting. I’m absolutely certain when it comes to publicizing this volume, interviewers will narrow their eyes and say, ‘You seem to skip over your brother’s death. Why is that?’ as though this would have been the really interesting part of my tale. The media is funny like that. So when that happens I will offer them a phrase that my mum would say whenever somebody started going on about how terrible life is and, for my money, it’s something you really don’t hear often enough these days. Once anyone began edging toward what we now label ‘confessional’, Mum would lean forward and touch their arm. ‘Ooh love,’ she’d coo, not a little alarmed at being trapped by all the drawn-out gloom, ‘We’ve all got our problems, mate, and besides . . . it’s none of our business, is it?’
So here’s to you, Mickey, his wife Jane and daughter Alex. Family.
Introduction
They say you never hear the shot that kills you, so at least I knew I wasn’t going to die.
I had definitely hea
rd the slug as it left the pistol, a ballistic snap identical to the spit of a log fire, and besides, the sharp pain and fast-blossoming bloodstain were located on the outside of my right knee so unless my assailant had tipped his bullets with cyanide, my life was probably not hanging in the balance. However, shot I most certainly had been and I now doubled over to grasp my punctured leg, turning about in small alarmed hops while emitting shocked choking sounds like a dog trying to sick up a feather. None of my friends appeared to have noticed the gunfire and continued to amble along Jamaica Road in their shared drunken buzz. We had been having a ‘late one’ in any of the various Bermondsey pubs that took a relaxed attitude to the legal drinking hours and were now meandering back through the borough, here and there losing a few from our original strength of fourteen as we passed the streets and estates where most of us still lived with our parents. There was little traffic this Sunday night and so I had got a pretty good look at the passing bottle-green Rover from which someone had just held a pistol out of the rear window and fired.
‘I been shot! Someone just fucking shot me!’ I bleated after my group while actually trying to put most of the alarm I felt into my facial expression rather than the pitch of the message – after all, it was nearly 1 a.m. and we were passing some flats where dozens of people we knew were fast asleep. Even in such a crisis I was aware that if any of them saw my dad the next day and said, ‘Here, your Danny was pissed and causing a row outside our block last night,’ it would really put the tin hat on affairs. So it was more in the style of a strangulated stage whisper that I drew attention to having just become a victim of what we now call a drive-by.
John Hannon reacted first. ‘Shot? What y’talking about, shot?’ he asked almost wearily, as if I’d asked him to help me find a shirt button.
‘Shot!’ I cried, stage whisper rising toward boiling kettle. ‘Some fucker in a car just got me in the leg!’
John turned to the rest of the chaps. With a chuckle in his voice he jerked a thumb toward my buckled pose and chortled, ‘Baker’s just got shot!’ And everyone began laughing.
Crowding around me under the street lighting they saw that the ‘bullet’, an inch-long chrome slug, had buried itself into the top of my knee right up to the yellow flights that adorned its base. Unconcerned with my pain, they seemed more intrigued as to who might have done it. The car I had identified to them was now well down the road and as it receded in the gloom it gave no clue as to its occupants. After a few moments dwelling on possible local suspects it was agreed – though not by me – that this was merely the work of a little mob from over East London, ‘just fucking about, having a laugh.’ The Rotherhithe Tunnel under the Thames lies at the end of Jamaica Road towards which the car sped and this would logically take them back to their own part of town. Case closed.
Forming my index, middle finger and thumb into a claw, I set about pulling the slim bullet out. In silence, my friends gathered about me to take in the gore. This was a mistake. For in turning all my attention to the injury I had stupidly dropped my guard and carelessly become the softest of targets. And it was literally the softest of targets that was about to receive a slapstick second blast. Believing the immediate threat to be over, none of us had double-checked that the mystery car had actually driven into the Rotherhithe Tunnel. It hadn’t. On arriving at the roundabout at the subway’s entrance it had in fact turned around and was coming back up towards us on the other side of the road. I certainly couldn’t see this because I was facing away from the road. Bent over. From my pistol packin’ tormentor’s vantage point, I was now presenting the fullest and most irresistible of targets. I fancy I was waving my rear end around a little, thus making the bullseye even more alluring.
Crack.
The dirty double-dip bastards shot me right up the arse. This time I not only heard the report, I was forced to process their wild whoops of glee as the car sped off once again – in the direction of Tower Bridge. I of course snapped violently upright as though I were spring-loaded, both hands grasping the under-fire cheeks, and turning the phrase, ‘Fucking hell, they’ve just shot me up the arse!’ into one long strangulated word. Now, if you thought my colleagues’ reaction after the first attack was possibly callous, I’m sure you must concede this occasion deserved nothing short of roars. Shocked as I was, I knew even at the moment of impact that being shot up the arse was, comically, a classic. By morning the sketch would be all over South-East London with pensioners, priests and close family members having to stuff handkerchiefs into their mouths in failed efforts to stifle outright guffaws. The only thing that might temper the hilarity would be a genuine sense of awe at what terrific marksmen these maniacs were. In those days my arse wasn’t anything like the size it would grow to be and, while never of a supermodel slimness, to land a dart almost centre-buttock from a moving car was little short of miraculous. If I had reported the incident I dare say the police would have narrowed the immediate search down to any army snipers on leave, but the fact is, I didn’t report it. In working-class areas in the late seventies people didn’t stride, or in my case hobble, to the local nick to alert the authorities there was a skylarking little mob with an air pistol on the loose, any more than the police expressed an interest in the tremendously common punch-ups in our local pubs. It just seemed to be part of the game. Compensation culture, trauma and counselling may be the options today, but back then if you got shot up the arse in front of your friends you simply had to take the gag on the chin, so to speak.
Those of you who bought the first book in this series may be wondering why, when that one ended with my earliest TV appearances in 1982, we’re now back in the late seventies again. Well, since that book was published I have had countless friends and family members get in touch to say how come I hadn’t included this story or that tale in the covered time frame – especially those that took place away from the show-business spotlight (a beam that was about to start shining into my life with ever greater force during the eighties). For example the incident of which you have just read. How, various chums have enquired, could I possibly have omitted that saga from any serious history of the times? Was I ashamed of being shot twice, once up the arse, in Jamaica Road? Did I feel I was somehow to blame for it, had brought it on myself, and by burying the memory hoped to shut out the truth? How long should a man live with such a secret? By sharing with the world that I had been shot up the arse in Jamaica Road I hope now to help all those who have been similarly assailed. In that era, a sharp injury to the backside while colleagues looked on was seen as somehow humorous. Thank God, we’ve moved on since then. I believe it’s a tragedy that in the twenty-first century we still have no idea how many other innocent late-night revellers in the seventies took gunfire to the rump and have ever since kept this outrageous fact hidden from even their nearest and dearest. From another angle there might possibly be an argument that that well-aimed pellet to my rear in some way spurred me on to my later successes by forcing me to show there was so much more to me than a simple patsy who presented his buttocks as a challenge for strangers’ firearms. Of course, nobody in the public eye would wish to be defined by the inevitable newspaper headline: baker: i was shot up the arse as a young man, accompanied as it doubtless would be by a photograph of myself looking grave but obviously relieved to have become unburdened. Yet how can I possibly hope to offer up a full picture of myself without including that awful night when I bent over in Bermondsey? I owe it to all of us who were shot up the arse back then and then suffered silently in the following years – particularly when sitting down too fast. I still have the small round scar which, if I position a mirror just so, I can gaze at and reflect upon those times in my life when not everything smelled as sweet as it does now. Maybe it is high time I ‘got it out there’, as they say.
So, diligent chronicler that I am, though I will earnestly attempt to move the biographical arc forward over the next couple of hundred pages, forgive me if the narrative becomes somewhat off-kilter at times. The differe
nce between life and fiction is that life doesn’t have to make sense. If by retrospectively dropping my trousers every few pages I can reveal a fuller picture of myself during these years, then so be it.
Besides. Being shot up the arse. In front of your mates.
Fucking hell. What else did I forget?
Teas, Light Refreshments And Minerals
To say that nobody in my family had ever been in show business would be an understatement. I may as well reveal that none of my mother’s collection of teapots had ever spoken to her or that our tortoise, Tom, was not the local MP. Although – and less than fifty words in, here comes our first diversion – I can see why I just put those two examples in harness. Our tortoise, Tom, completely destroyed my mother’s teapot collection, trashing it into smithereens as thoroughly as Keith Moon hepped up on a five-drug cocktail.
Tortoises, by nature, are not destructive animals and, until the Great Teapot Massacre, the only time Tom had been shouted at was when he had lunched too well on my father’s tomato plants. My dad’s voice actually woke me that morning. He was up early to go to work in the docks and had gone out in the back garden because, as he later told me, ‘I thought I heard someone chuck a wallet over the wall last night.’ Anyway, the old man wasn’t a bad gardener and as he was out there anyway he decided to quickly do a job that was normally one of my duties. His favourite flowers were chrysanthemums – or as he always called them, ‘crizzants’. He had once read in a magazine called Titbits that the greatest threat to the healthy chrysanthemum was the earwig and the best way to keep these pests off the plants was to fill a small flowerpot with straw, put this upside down on a stick and then place it beside the vulnerable flora. The idea was that Brer Earwig, journeying with a few friends to have a slap-up meal amidst my old man’s cherished crizzants, would see the straw up the stick and immediately alert his company that there had been a change of venue. Apparently earwigs are attracted to compacted straw in the same way some old actresses are drawn to cat-rescue centres. Therefore every few days it would be my job to evict these insects from their new digs and, to quote Apocalypse Now, ‘terminate with extreme prejudice’. Well, I know it’s wicked, and these days I am so respectful of any living thing that even Buddhists might find me a bit wet, but back then I approached this grisly task with out-and-out relish. I became tremendously inventive in coming up with new and shocking ways to dispatch these pincered squatters to the great flowerpot in the sky. Indeed I, as my mum once told me with shaking head, was ‘a fucker for it’. Seriously, if earwigs have any kind of oral history then I am surely recalled as their own Vlad the Impaler and invoked by mother earwigs as a final resort when the little ones are playing up. However, on this particular morning my dad had deprived me of my murderous fun by deciding to do it himself. It was as he was shaking the bundles of straw and stepping upon any of the half-asleep occupants that tumbled out that his eye fell on his tomato plants.
