Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  Fed up with him grumpily growling at me as I did him this favour, I told him what I thought of this ingratitude.

  ‘Don’t you fucking growl at me, you mad sod – I’ll leave you up there all night next time.’

  On about the third day of this series of suspensions, Ethel knocked. Ethel, unlike the Amazonian Maud, was a classic little old lady who spoke in the wavering tones her appearance suggested.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Danny,’ she began, looking embarrassed, ‘but Twizzle has started hanging over the fence looking into my front room.’

  I told her I knew and apologized, saying it was only a temporary situation until other enclosures were in place.

  ‘It gave me a terrific shock when I first saw him. I thought it was a man. The trouble is, neither of my cats will go out now. They see him looming up there and run back indoors.’

  She laughed as she said this, but I could see it was a worry for her. Also, when Ethel said ‘neither of my cats’ that was something of an understatement. Wendy and I were never sure exactly how many cats Ethel had, but if ever she left her back door open in summer the waves of ammonia emanating from unseen cat trays deforested hedgerows for several miles around. If just two cats were responsible for that, they must have had bladders like nuclear reactors.

  Promising Ethel it wouldn’t happen again, I closed the door and vowed to keep Twizzle indoors for the remainder of the work.

  After bringing Wendy up to speed with the latest arrangements, I went out to work on a voice-over for a TV ad – a further sign that my radio presence was getting noticed. This commercial was for Weetabix breakfast cereal and I was very flattered to be asked to perform the lines for one of the five wheat-cake-based cartoon characters that comprised the gang fronting the campaign. Previously my character had been played by Bob Hoskins, whose gruff, ‘If you know what’s good for you!’ contribution finished each commercial. Bob, understandably, felt he had taken the role as far as he could and had decided to step down before his performance began to deteriorate. As I travelled up to Soho to make my debut as the tough, streetwise, no-nonsense Weetabix, I was hopeful that I could bring something fresh to the role. Tragically, the waiting nation was never to know what might have been.

  As soon as I arrived at the studios, I was told by a concerned-looking receptionist that I must phone home immediately. Nobody likes to be told this and as I dialled the number I desperately hoped it would be something as trivial as me going out with both sets of keys in my bag. When I got through, it was clear I wasn’t to be so fortunate.

  Straight away I could tell there was anguish bordering on panic in Wendy’s voice.

  ‘Oh, Dan . . . it’s Twizzle . . .’ Wendy was now sobbing.

  Though looking discreetly away as I stood at her desk, the receptionist must have noted how silent I had fallen as I listened to Wendy’s terrible news with just the occasional ‘Oh no . . . oh no . . .’ by way of reply. But even she looked around when she heard me say, ‘But how could he hang himself?’ followed by a low, ‘Christ almighty . . .’

  Saying I was coming directly home, I placed the phone back on the cradle and with a rushed, ‘I’ve got to go . . .’ ran out into the street again.

  There were no cabs to be had and in a daze I ran to Piccadilly tube station and rode the Bakerloo line to Waterloo. There I jumped in a taxi from the rank. In those days a fare to SE8 was not greeted with a cheery ‘Right away, guvnor!’ and so in order to shortcut all the huffing and puffing I just yelled, ‘I’ll pay you double the meter if you get me to Deptford without stopping,’ as I leapt into the back.

  Even then the journey took over half an hour. Chucking the cash at the cabbie through the partition window, I strode up our front path ready to burst into tears at this awful turn of events. As I twisted the key in the lock I hesitated just for a moment, took a deep breath, then threw open the door.

  The first thing I saw was Twizzle at the foot of the stairs, doing his ‘Welcome Home’ dance.

  I looked at his wild circling and energetic shakes for several seconds before putting my hand on his snout to make sure this wasn’t some phantom vision. It wasn’t. Or if it was this was one of the new hyper-realistic phantom visions that came with genuine whiskers and a wet nose.

  Trying to take it all in, I now became aware of Wendy talking to someone in the scullery. Making my way there I found Wendy sitting at the table with John and Adrienne, our good friends from two doors down and our first call in a crisis.

  For a moment nobody spoke. Then they all laughed as Adrienne said, ‘You’re too late, you’ve missed it all.’

  I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t laugh along with them. And if I’d missed anything, my first thought was that it was the chance to bring the world my own take on a cartoon skinhead Weetabix that came with repeat fees. What kind of ghastly practical joke was this?

  ‘I just saw Twizzle in the passage,’ I managed to eventually mumble. ‘You said he was dead.’

  ‘He was dead,’ said Wend, uttering perhaps the most peculiar three words of our entire marriage. Then she topped that with: ‘But he came back to life.’

  I shall make my précis of how Twizzle was apparently rejected by St Peter – possibly even by Beelzebub himself – as coherent as I can.

  Though thankfully infrequent, there arrives into the life of any grown-up householder moments when minor events combine to form a perfect storm. Let’s say you have enough to do already and things are not going well. On top of this you have workmen in. Another lot arrive to estimate a future job. A friend pops by. The phone goes. And there’s someone at the door. You begin to feel like you have somehow become mixed up in a strained sixties stage farce, and will even say, ‘I am going to scream in a minute,’ to invisible cameras you believe must be placed around your home.

  It was during one of these extreme fits of domestic turbulence that Wendy found she could no longer keep shuttling our dog from room to room in case he took a snap at someone or made a bid for freedom. So in desperation she took him out into his alleyway enclosure and, putting him on his lead, tied the other end to a drainpipe and said she would be back in ten minutes. He was now prevented from charging into the garden, launching himself at strangers, or popping up like a pantomime villain over Ethel’s skyline. The job of enlarging our garden perimeter was nearing completion at this point, although one section, on Maud’s side, remained completely open. It may have been this tempting portal that caught Twizzle’s eye and set in motion the unbelievable events that followed.

  The drainpipe to which his lead was attached was about two feet from the wrought-iron gate. Walking back until the lead extended to its fullest, Twiz must have noted that he had a five-foot run-up before any proposed launch and after doing the maths reckoned that, while he would never clear the gate itself, if he made himself thin enough once in flight he might just get through a large gap in the curlicue pattern at the top of the fixture. It was, as always, worth a shot. Because he was a brilliant dog he got his calculations absolutely spot on and flew through the opening like a dart. Unfortunately, because he never thought things through, he had failed to factor in what might happen beyond this. Arriving airborne on the garden side of the gate the silver chain by which he was tethered suddenly came to the end of its reach and yanked hard at the collar around his neck. Twizzle, as yet some five feet from terra firma, was left helplessly suspended against the ironwork. When Wendy came out into the yard to allow him back into the house, it was this horrifying sight that greeted her. Her first action was to go to pull the gate open and support Twiz from the other side, but we’d had it fitted with a padlock just recently to stop burglars coming in via the junkyard at the rear. Wendy knew the key to the lock was on the big bunch in her bag upstairs (probably) but there was no time to confirm that now.

  She put her hands through the gate and tried to release the metal clip that affixed lead to collar, but working from behind was difficult and, once she did locate it, Twizzle’s dead weight made
it impossible for her to get her thumb under the required catch to spring it. Next she scraped and tore at the knot fastening the leash to the drainpipe, but again the tension created by his drop simply refused to let it yield. All the time she was screaming for help.

  Hearing the commotion, Adrienne, along with her partner John, tore up the road to our house with Wendy rushing through to let them in. While Adrienne called the vet, John set about trying to release the catch at Twizzle’s neck though, unbelievably, in what appeared to be the very last act of his life Twiz momentarily recovered just enough strength to groggily try and bite John’s fingers as he worked beneath his head. Then he slumped unconscious once more. John then decided to break the chain lead that held poor Twizzle aloft. After about thirty agonizing seconds he succeeded, causing Twiz to fall heavily on to the paving stones out in the garden. He was totally lifeless, so much so in fact, that when Wendy brought the key to unlock the padlock that secured the gate, Twizzle’s prone body prevented it from opening and he had to be shoved aside so that the door could be inched open.

  Our dog was not breathing at all and blood was issuing from his nose. About ten minutes later the vet arrived and did what he could, but it was hopeless. Looking at Wendy’s ashen face and red eyes he apologized for not being a miracle worker and asked, practically but rather tactlessly I feel, if he could use one of the empty rubble sacks nearby to transport Twizzle to his car. Wendy objected to this but the vet said he had another emergency to attend to and couldn’t roll up to that with a dead dog on the passenger seat – that might shake a client’s confidence. To this day my wife doesn’t know why she okayed this action, possibly through shock, but it was once our late-lamented lunatic had been decanted into this plastic shroud that something inexplicable happened. They heard growling. They had barely a second to comprehend the sound when Twizzle started to writhe and thrash around inside the bag like one of the Three Stooges with a wasp’s nest in his pants. The vet leapt back and Wendy fell clean over. From the top of the sack rose Twizzle’s head, his tongue licking away at the dried blood on his snout.

  Wendy asked the vet with some urgency what was happening. The vet, she said, looked utterly panic stricken.

  ‘I promise you he was dead, I promise you he was gone . . .’ he kept repeating.

  Registering the outraged look forming on Twizzle’s face as he eyed up the vet, Wendy advised that he might do well to be gone now.

  About twenty minutes later I arrived home, having, as Adrienne so correctly pointed out, missed it all.

  Twizzle suffered no ill effects whatsoever after having been officially pronounced dead. Nobody could explain it and we don’t blame anyone if they find the whole story to be totally far-fetched. I now believe he had merely popped over an ethereal fence to the other side, as he had done with so many earthly barriers. Taking a brief look around, he probably noticed all the ‘No Chasing, No Fighting, No Barking’ signs they undoubtedly have in Heaven, then, having weighed things up, decided to slide back to where all the action was.

  One last note about Twiz. I wrote earlier that he liked very few humans outside our house. Well, it’ll come as no great shock to learn that the one person he absolutely adored above all others and would roll over to be tickled by any time of the day or night was Spud. And Spud LOVED Twizzle.

  In old age, both of them, now calmer and at peace with the world, would sit for hours on park benches or walking slowly on the beach down at Dymchurch. My old man was never prone to outbursts of emotion, but the day Twizzle died – and I had to hold the old warrior while a vet gave the injection – when I told Dad he just sat down on the pavement swallowing hard, his eyes refusing to blink lest it release a welling pool of tears.

  ‘The poor old bastard,’ he said quietly a few times, followed by, ‘Do you reckon they had to do it?’

  I told him they did . . . and this time he really was gone.

  A tough old nut to the end, Twizzle had lived to be almost twenty years old.

  Nights On Broadway

  Chris Evans gave up overseeing my GLR show in order to make his own programmes at the station. These went fantastically well and by 1989 this local network had a weekend line-up that achieved a creative peak many radio devotees coo about even now. I would do the early shows and on Saturday I’d hand over to Chris for his boisterous, often bawdy, reliably brilliant zoo format, while on Sunday I gave way to one of the few broadcasting geniuses I have witnessed first-hand.

  This was Chris Morris, now a filmmaker, but then just about the most jaw-dropping ideas machine British radio has ever nurtured. While I was making up shows on the hoof, now comprising a growing element of bizarre audience participation, Chris M’s shows were meticulously planned in advance right down to the last daring cuts between live mic, prepared tape, original music, insane scripted links and varied regular characters all played by the host. He’d arrive a full hour before my show ended, and I’d watch dumbfounded as Chris would convert the studio to his needs, erecting extra mic stands, installing keyboards and loading up reel-to-reels. Quiet and intense away from the programme, once it started he would become a whirl of animation, spinning this way and that in his chair, arms waving, firing off several machines simultaneously, all the time reading from the pages of notes fanned out in front of him. That his entire output from that era has never been archived and made available to future generations to marvel at truly staggers me. Then again, nobody in radio today would give Chris Morris the absolute licence afforded him back then.

  Like most of the over-staffed, management-choked flat-pack media, radio does not want to hear from mavericks who can just ‘do it’. Self-contained talent is the enemy of those who require their jobs to be bolstered by an Everest of fatuous titles and who think creativity is a formula. Worse, they believe the more people in business suits who work on the formula in a series of deathless meeting rooms, the better the end product will be. Or perhaps they don’t, not really. In my experience, most of the dreary phalanx of managers and their ilk who clog up the simple show business world of ‘being any good’ are well aware their supposed ‘skills’ are completely worthless. It is an unspoken truth among their nervous ranks, and it forces them to create ever more blustering levels of unproductive desk-bound subservients whose only function is to mask the overpowering smell of horse shit. Anyone who seems to somehow be able to make programmes without their utterly unqualified interference is judged to be ‘trouble’ and gets suffocated under a welter of wordy PR and another round of empty self-serving meetings. It is not how fresh and original you are any more, it is how compliant, how malleable, how much you will tow the timid company line. To really seal your place on the vacuous inverted media pyramid these days, it is absolutely essential that you never draw attention to how many people in the room are 24-carat fucking imposters.3

  On my own programme at GLR I had backed off the bumptiousness, driven the play-list to new levels of disparity – typically playing Ry Cooder’s ‘Down in Hollywood’ followed by Charlie Chester’s ‘The Old Bazaar in Cairo’ – and had hit upon something that nobody else seemed to be doing, and that was to create a phone-in show that few people could actually phone in to. This inversion of the accepted format of throwing out topical or generic subjects that anyone might have a view on or example of, created an audience who listened to the show just to see if anybody had, for instance, eaten their dinner out of a hat. It remains my only piece of advice to any hopeful broadcaster – eschew whatever tired first-thought news agenda is suggested to you by the pusillanimous committees above and challenge your audience to raise its game to that of the show.

  Overwhelmingly, the sort of gargoyles who rise to power in media have a mortal fear of the frivolous and insist on stiflingly close supervision of programmes whose workaday dreary solemnity creates the illusion that they are serious thinkers when in fact they haven’t a single original thought in their banal, limited brains. Their greatest terror is that they will get into an elevator with whatever bubble-blower
is just above them in the corporate pile, who will then turn to them and say:

  ‘Hmmph! Caught a bit of your station the other day. Instead of discussing what’s in the newspapers, house prices and the danger mad dogs pose to us all, chap seemed to be asking can shoes be haunted, notable things you’ve had stuck to you and did anyone’s aunt ever dance with Emperor Hirohito. What sort of operation are you running over there? Hmmph!’

  However at GLR back then, possibly because the wages were so low they really didn’t dare flex any managerial muscle, everyone was allowed to create whatever radio world and persona they chose, free from editorial interference. I realize now how lucky we all were.

  In the middle of my first six months on the radio I received an offer that could not have been further from the frenzied yet cerebral rock’n’roll brew I was bubbling up each weekend. I was asked to star in a pantomime – actually star, with my name above the title and everything. I had not been involved in any stage work since the age of seven when I’d given my highly regarded Mad Hatter in Rotherhithe Junior School’s Christmas adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. This had been a terrific hit and while nobody actually said it, I think I had found some things in Hatter that many of my peers overlooked. So now I was being asked once more to parade beneath the proscenium, eh? Well, well, well. I wondered if I still ‘had it’.

  The production was to be staged at the Broadway Theatre, Barking, and the offer was to play Idle Jack in Dick Whittington and His Cat. Quite why they had chosen me for the part, I had no idea, though subsequent events would provide a few clues. The run was to be for just three weeks, twice daily, and I was engaged for the sum total of £4,500. In the event, they may as well have promised me a sack of rubies and a solid gold car because Dick Whittington and His Cat remains the one job in my life that I was ‘knocked’ for. That is, neither I, nor anyone else in the cast, saw a single penny for our efforts. It was, in short, a scam. Hooray!