Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  He allowed just enough time to enjoy the bloke’s look of absolute panic, then the chase was on. I like to think they went round and round the pool table to the accompaniment of a silent-film piano, but apparently the man just bolted for the door, knocking over several drinks in the process. I chanced upon him just as his already impressive sprint had found another gear, leading him direct to his cab office collision.

  Another occasion when Dad took the direct approach to a perceived critic of mine – this time erroneously – has almost passed into show business legend. It was during my 1992–94 stint as a talk-show host on BBC1 – another case of an employer making a job offer based on a miscalculation of my abilities. Because I had garnered a reputation as a good talk-show guest, they assumed I’d make a good talk-show host. It’s one thing to be able to talk up a storm – listening is a different skill altogether, and it’s one of the things I really look forward to having a go at once I have retired.

  On the night in question Spud was in the green room during the chat show, called Danny Baker After All. He rarely sat in the audience because, as he so rightly put it, ‘There’s so much ballsing about, it drives you mad.’ He had been to many of my programmes and, as was his wont, invariably formed a tight bond with both the catering and bar staff who serviced the guest celebrities. He knew most of them but even when a new bow tie was serving behind the little bar backstage he would make a beeline for him to conspire and discover what the ‘strengths’ of such a job might be. Ignoring whatever big names might be in the room, Dad would stand with what I suppose we must call his fellow workers. Nine times out of ten, he’d be exchanging phone numbers with them before the night was out.

  ‘He’s a good bloke, that Chris in there, ain’t he?’ he would say later in the BBC car taking us both home. I would reply that I knew who he was talking about but didn’t really know him. ‘Oh yes, he’s one of the chaps, all right. He’s going to get hold of some vodka for us.’

  I would beg him not to enter into these negotiations while he was my honoured guest on the property, but it never made any difference.

  On another occasion it might be, ‘That Pam, taking the food around. Her old man was in the docks. I’m trying to place him.’ Spud believed he must know every single docker there ever was. ‘She said at Christmas she can put her hands on all sorts. Big hams, the lot . . .’

  Making a weak joke about the actor connotations in what he said, I could see I was wasting my time. Dad had found a new contact and in his mind he was already selling the stuff on. A casual chat with one of the cleaners in the corridor might lead to everyone in his circle being good for mop-heads and Mr Sheen for the next nine months.

  Green rooms rarely offer hard spirits unless, for instance, Bruce Willis’ people request it in advance, but very soon into my tenure as show host the hospitality staff began providing a bottle of Hine or Rémy Martin brandy on the off chance Spud was going to be in. The night I featured Harry Enfield as a guest on After All . . . Spud was in his element holding court and, as usual, not taking a blind bit of notice of the outgoing show. Whenever I mentioned something that had happened on the programme on the way home he’d invariably say, ‘Must have missed that bit – still, I’m taping it tomorrow so I’ll watch it back.’ In defence of such an indifferent attitude very few shows aside from Match of the Day and The World at War interested him, and, as anyone who has ever attended a recording knows, they do drag on and on and on. The night Harry Enfield was in I asked him if he was working on any new characters for the forthcoming series of his successful sketch show. Harry, a quiet and genial man away from his work, answered that there was one explosive role he was currently enjoying performing very much. It was a character who would at first rationally mull over a subject before quickly getting into a rage about it, and then he’d talk as if he was confronting whoever was responsible. The catchphrase for this character was some variation on the bellowed phrase, ‘And if it was me, I’d say to Carole Vorderman. Oi! Vorderman – NO!’ Then he’d go on to outline a series of rabid reasons for his objections. As we sat opposite each other in the studio, Harry decided to use me as an illustration for how the thing worked. Starting in his usual voice, Harry led me into it:

  ‘So for instance if he was discussing what we’re doing right now, he would begin, “Watched that Danny Baker show last night. Yeah, quite liked it. Although, to be fair, he’s not a patch on Michael Parkinson. And some of his jokes were a bit personal. I mean, if I was a celebrity and I found myself the butt of one of his tortuous bits of logic and wordplay, I don’t think I could accept the jest in the manner intended. I mean, why should I [voice rising now] have to become a laughing stock just so he can help himself to the licence fee I pay with my hard-earned wages? It makes me sick to think I’m financing my own public lynching! I’m a private citizen, not Shirley bloody Bassey! And if he dared try any of his puerile babble while a guest in my house, I’d say, Oi! Baker. NO!! You may think yourself the heir to the late-night talk show crown, but . . .”’ and here Harry started to enjoy the audience’s reaction perhaps a little too much ‘“. . . to me you’ll always be a loud-mouthed, talentless, balding cockney cunt!”’

  Yes, he actually said that. Thus making the tremendously funny bit unusable. The studio audience, realizing they had been treated to something that would probably not be aired, exploded into shocked applause. The green room crowd had been appreciative too. All, sadly, bar one key individual. Spud had been in conversation with his chums behind the bar and had only turned to look at the TV relaying the show as Harry’s voice began to get shouty. Therefore he missed the reason for the ‘rant’ and got it into his head that Harry Enfield had gone nuts and was itching for a fight. Dad decided to give him one. Swiftly leaving the green room he made toward the studio doors and waited for Harry Enfield to emerge at the end of his segment. About three minutes later out he came and Spud, possibly – though not necessarily – inflamed by a few brandies, launched at him. Pushing Harry up against the wall, he put a hand hard on his chest and went into a real-life version of the character Harry had just been lampooning.

  ‘You fuckin’ little ponce!’ began Dad. ‘You speak to a boy of mine like that, I oughta throw you down these fucking stairs!’

  By now security were running over to the scene. Harry managed to say that the exchange had been a joke. Spud wasn’t having that. ‘A joke? What? What you said? How’s that a joke? His mother could have been sitting in that audience! I heard ya! See, he’s never been a fighter, but I fucking am! Go on, say that to me!’

  Hauled away by several members of the Corps of Commissioners – a platoon Dad had once been part of for about twenty minutes after leaving the docks – he freed himself and made straight for Wood Lane tube and a seething early journey home.

  Oblivious to these goings on, when I came off air I walked breezily into the green room rubbing my hands together and beaming that that had all gone rather well. Noting a somewhat muted atmosphere, my first thought was that my initial upbeat review must have been the raving illusions of a deluded ego. Double-checking, I saw that even my old man had abandoned this one. The show’s producer, Bea Ballard, took me to one side and filled me in about what had befallen poor Harry even as the applause was ringing in his ears. Good man that he is, Harry Enfield then handed me a bottle of beer with a wry smile. Twenty years later, on the rare occasions that we meet, his initial is greeting remains: ‘Hello, Danny. Your dad’s not with you, is he?’

  When I look back on the early nineties it is quite beyond me, and I suspect most of the country, how I came to be so in demand. This is no disingenuous attempt to court a counter-argument. It happens to certain performers every now and then, and usually not as a result of clamouring from the public. I certainly don’t recall any great swell in requests for autographs, public appearances or being asked to place my healing hands upon poorly babies, yet the cry continued to be raised within the industry, ‘Get Baker! It has to be him!’ So ubiquitous did I become during the
period that Spitting Image featured a sketch where multiple puppets of me popped up on various programmes simultaneously, including the news and the epilogue. It is some testament to how well I can spend a pound note that during this heyday hurricane I didn’t move house, buy a second home, or even a top-of-the-range car, or set up a production company, invest in any schemes or shares, fork out for a holiday home, or develop a spectacular drug habit to assist in hoovering up the bank balance. And yet I managed to knock the entire lot out on living well and having a good time, just as we had during the days of Mervyn’s marvellous letters – albeit now on a much larger canvas.

  I remember one holiday – and always being close with the in-laws, there would often be a gaggle of us – where I had the idea that it would be wonderful to gallop about New York for a bit, having plenty of everything, then eventually take a sleeper train way down south to Miami, from whence we would drive to Key West. It was the sleeper train that excited me most. I knew that these were fantastically romantic transports, the Iron Horses upon which America was made, smoke billowing from the stack, whistling as they thundered over wilderness bridges, cow-catchers up front and cabooses to the rear. They had fringed lamps in all carriages, Mae West holding court in the restaurant car, Marilyn Monroe drinking from a hip flask in a top bunk. As soon as we pulled out of Grand Central Station I realized I had perhaps been getting a tad carried away. In fact, our first-class three-day Amtrack Express to Florida bore a striking resemblance to the 11.05 Virgin Rail from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly. Far from a cosy communal hotel, we were all in poky plastic-walled rabbit hutches where you pulled an impossibly narrow bed from out of the wall and the toilet door flew open at every shake, filling your rattling cubicle with the acrid smell of whatever blue chemical sloshed about in the small stainless-steel fixture within. As for the restaurant car, suffice to say it made Nandos in Walsall look like Maxim’s, Paris. The corridors were full of stoned students and through the fuzzy windows, rather than the herds of stampeding buffaloes I’d promised, were spectacular views of Philadelphia’s finest tyre factories and breakers’ yards. We finally abandoned my fantasy on the rails in Savannah, Georgia, and chartered a private plane to get us down to the Keys as quickly as possible. So, yes, I can spend a few quid all right, but I am fantastically proud of that. It is a very working-class trait. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and may the record show these attitudes are affected by neither circumstance nor budget. Living ‘within your means’ is a filthy lie that only allows someone else to steal your pleasure during these few dozen summers below the sun. Eschew the middle-class habits of frugality, caution and making do, the cheap camping holidays and the parental lessons about the value of money. Knock the fucking stuff out. Buy the best prams, the best clothes, the best times for your children – and buy new ones for every child. When friends come round – and they should come round often – don’t budget and see if you have any half-open bottles of long-corked wines to finish first or any ‘value packs’ of anything. Offer more than they could possibly eat, drink or laugh about. Buy the best. Live the best. Sort things out tomorrow. And Knock. The. Fucking. Stuff. Out. As another of Spud’s maxims ran: ‘The only reason all these silver spoons have got a few quid is because they never fucking spend any of it – and where’s the pleasure in that?’

  Does This Kind Of Life Look Interesting To You?

  So now let me recall some of the vehicles – others may prefer the term ‘get-away cars’ – that provided the war chest for such trips as the Great American Railroad Disaster. The projects themselves may not be memorable, but I’ll attempt to furnish at least one incident from their existence to justify inclusion and offer clues as to how such a celebrity feeding frenzy gets underway.

  The football phone-in show 606 lay the foundations for pretty much everything else that was to come for me. Radio 5 in those days, long before its rebrand as Radio 5 Live, was a peculiar network with no clear idea of what it was supposed to be. The show Sports Call, which aired at lunchtime of a Saturday, had proved to be a big success, with the basic quiz element consisting of five individual rounds that anyone could phone in to, offering very good prizes for the winners. These were the days when most radio shows gave stuff away, ranging from VHS videos to holidays abroad. A few years down the line when a couple of stations were found to be handing out the odd CD to close personal friends a tremendous media outcry ensued, but it really didn’t amount to much and I don’t believe listeners were ever that bothered by whether there were six copies of Die Hard 2 up for grabs on the other side of George Benson’s ‘Love Times Love’ or only five because the host had tucked one away into his backpack. With a certain degree of mischievousness, even today I love to say on air:

  ‘Remember when we used to be able to give you tickets to shows, box sets and solid-gold cars as prizes? You know, before we got caught with our fingers in the till? Then a couple of you out there blew the whistle and now look – NOBODY gets anything! Well, I hope you’re happy, Mother Teresa.’

  Anyway, Sports Call – a totally legit racket, by the way – was doing very well and the ad-libbing I was engaging in with contestants between the questions appeared to surprise the station controllers. They had a plan to extend their afternoon sports coverage with a phone in programme – amazingly still a novel idea in the era just before the dawn of the Premier League. Currently their sport stopped at six on Saturdays to make way for the European Chart Show – such was the ragbag of an agenda Radio 5 had back then. After I had finished Sports Call one week, the station manager, Jim Black, asked me if I could spare a moment to hear him outline their plan. Two things I remember from that conversation. The first was his greatest worry seemed to be that I would find it inconvenient to finish Sports Call at one, go home and then come back at six to do another show. I said most Saturdays I would be watching Millwall play, but if they didn’t mind sending a fast car to fetch me, that would be fine. The second thing was they were having great trouble coming up with a name for the show.

  Various titles were mooted but, apparently, a decision had yet to be reached when the time came to send the schedules to Radio Times for printing. All that was provided was the time the programme was due to begin. Thus on Saturday evening, Radio 5’s line-up read:

  6.00: News

  6.05: Weather

  6.06: Sports Phone-In

  Devotees of the show today may note the word ‘sports’ there instead of ‘football’, and indeed the idea was that every game, contest and outdoors hobby would get a look-in. On the very first show I took calls about chess, cross-country and fencing. However, I made it plain that the last thing I was interested in was commonplace opinions or descriptions of someone’s pastime. I wanted the rare, the maverick, the strange. For example, only an ocean-going crackpot would want to foist some old fossil harping on about his success at the local chess club on a fevered audience fresh out of a football cauldron. So any calls had to be about giant chess – a variation you used to see often outside pubs and in the grounds of stately homes. To put heat under the subject I concocted a story about how, a few years previously, a queen piece from a giant chess set had taken flight during a gale and after crossing many counties had landed on a sow called Victoria, who had recently had a litter of piglets. Victoria had tragically been killed in the incident, a plaque erected to mark her passing, and authorities became alerted to the dangers of these unstable, outsized medieval bludgeons. Now, I contested, you simply never see these once-popular big boards and their huge black-and-white armies anywhere. What’s more, nobody aside from the pig had ever been injured by a chess piece, large or small.

  The upshot of all that balderdash was a surge in people wishing to prove me wrong – particularly on the last boast. One caller held us all mesmerized as he told a story of chancing across a giant chessboard while on a mountainside in the Himalayas where he was challenged to a game by a group of monks. While holding a colossal bishop and lost in his pondering of where best to place it, he
stepped backwards over a ravine and broke his leg. He was rescued and then tended to by the monks, who chanted by his bedside round the clock. The shattered leg, he insisted, healed in just three days. Now I don’t know whether that tale contains even a grain of truth, but it was brilliantly told and certainly beats some old bore droning on about whether Manchester United should play 4-3-3 or 4-5-1. Also I will never forget that our Himalayan correspondent was, as he told his metaphysical story, on his way back from watching Port Vale get beaten by Shrewsbury, which, for me, added further poetry to his claim.

  The point was the show was highlighting the hitherto ignored chasm between football itself and football supporting. Overwhelmingly, football supporters do not talk obsessively about the sport in the manner journalists and pundits do, and in the way advertisers insist. Fans are not submissive, nor are they of a type; a bore is a bore, no matter what your interest. Most supporters I know, sat next to a stranger on a long journey who attempts to open intercourse with, ‘So do you think the England manager got it right playing Coggins wide on the left?’ would willingly hurl themselves through the nearest window rather than endure such numbing small talk. However, if you start proceedings with, ‘I know someone who used a dead lion as a goalpost – bet you can’t beat that!’ then the motorway miles will melt away at high speed. To me, the giant chess game with the monks had far more in common with the kind of conversations carried out on football coaches than any of the dry analysis.

  That is not to say the show did not provide catharsis and even assistance to the outraged and the furious. If funny calls were in the majority, sedition was a very close second. It was never my intention to make 606 a debating forum; it was a broadside, a clarion call and I would often help organize supporters to fight back against the bullying corporate encroachment already paving the way for the suffocating brand of the Premier League. I barred anyone involved with or representing any club from coming on air. These people seemed to get enough opportunities to skew the argument everywhere else in the media, so I declared 606 would be the supporters’ voice and nothing but. One of these impromptu on-air salvos would result in a visit from some plain-clothes policemen who suggested strongly that I lay off one very famous team and its chairman, but that would be in 1998, when I’d returned to the show after a lengthy break, so let us return to that in due course.