by Danny Baker
‘I thought you were going to hold it,’ said Pete.
‘Well, you’d all say I nicked a look at it if I did, so now nobody can, can they?’ I replied. I wanted this thing watertight.
Tom remarked that the ghost would be forced to look at my bum now to find out what year was on the coin and after a good chuckle at this we asked the question formally.
The glass began to slide: 1 . . . 9 . . . 1 . . . 3. 1913.
Excitedly taking the penny from my pocket, I stared at the numbers beneath Britannia wielding her trident on the reverse: 1913. I showed this around and a strange sickly silence fell over us all. This was a bit weird. Placing our fingers back on the glass we started to ask each other what to request next. Our voices now were low and serious, all the effervescence knocked out by the inexplicable accuracy of the stunt. Before we could agree on a suitable enquiry, the glass began to move again: C . . . H . . . I . . . L . . . D . . . R . . . E . . . N.
‘Children!’ we all gasped as one, searching each other’s eyes for the deeper meaning of this. Then it continued on.
S . . . T . . . O . . . P . . . N . . . O . . . W.
We paused and stared at each other, quite terrified. I broke the spell.
‘I don’t like it!’ I said, my voice rising with fear. ‘I don’t like this bit!’
And we all jumped up and ran to the front door to leg it into the square outside.
I have absolutely no explanation for what happened there. All those who were present can confirm the events as recorded, and even if you rationalize the coin revelation as mere subconscious chance, none of us can think of a single reason why any of us would have concocted the mundane yet petrifying phrase that followed it. It really happened and there it is.
Possibly I should have brooded upon this bizarre incident more and allowed it to influence my world view from then on but it was soon made light of and only many years later did we all start to question what we experienced that afternoon. Thankfully, none of us have drawn a single spiritual conclusion from it and, quite sensibly, keep the story in a box labelled Derren Brown rather than a crystal ball named Uri Geller.
Anyway, the point of all these diversions into the fifth dimension is to tell you that on the day I was offered a job on BBC Radio 1 a pigeon pooped on my neck. This, coupled with the fire at my parents’, the collision with the cellar beam and the later caravan tow-bar trauma lead me to believe that many of my career turning points have been presaged by portentous omens, although it wasn’t until I set them all down in these pages that I recognized the inescapable pattern.
I may add that when we came to record the third series of the daytime game show Win, Lose or Draw, my schedule required that we record all twenty-eight programmes in four days. For the slower at maths among you, that is seven TV shows a day. And on the crucial evening I flew up to Edinburgh to start this lunatic undertaking the cab taking me to the airport broke down and I missed my plane. I grant you that I may be looking a little too hard here for mystical signs and that that the engine on a Peugeot 405 hardly qualifies as some kind of portal between worlds, but I insist this stuff all adds up when you look back over an eventful, if uneven, career.
The job at Radio 1 was never really a good fit and came at a two-pronged tipping point when the new boss at the station, a beleaguered Matthew Bannister once more, was attempting to haul the network out of its ageing complacency at the precise moment the British public began to feel that I was popping up a bit too much in their lives and might want to think about fucking off for a bit. In fact, the shows I did for Radio 1 on Saturday and Sunday lunch-times were among the most peppy I’ve ever done, with an audience ready and willing for the more ‘stunty’ end of aural broadcasting that would include such feats as:
A Piano Played While Buried on Scarborough Beach
A Wardrobe Full of Empty Cans Pushed Off a Student Dorm Roof
A Builders’ Skip Dropped on to a Microwave Oven
Two Men Racing Racing across a Supermarket Car Park in Shopping Trolleys Pulled by Teams of Dogs
Plus an inexplicably funny reccurring piece called the Universe of Turmoil, wherein my sometime co-host Danny Kelly would disappear from the studio with the day’s newspapers only to re-emerge ten minutes later with a clutch of photographs and advertisements he had cut from them. On the foreheads of the people and animals in these pictures Danny would have written either the word ‘turmoil’ or the phrase ‘we fear change’ and I don’t think anything in my life has ever reduced me to helpless hysteria quicker than when I would thumb through this pile of images trying to describe to the listeners what I was looking at. It became an extraordinarily popular spot, although neither we in the studio nor the listening millions could figure out just why it was so sublimely hilarious. Engineered or forced laughter in radio is easily detected and always irksome, so I think the genuine paroxysms I collapsed into as I hopelessly tried to convey the idiotic information that I could see a barn owl advertising British Gas with the word ‘Turmoil’ above its beak somehow infected the entire audience.
Less of a success was a visit from Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson. Though Sky TV had been showing the series for a couple of years, this was in the days when having a satellite dish was still far from compulsory. Dan arrived at Radio 1 with various promotional give-away items, including the first VHSs of the show and a bag full of character figures, but nobody seemed that keen to win any of them via the soft questions he posed about The Simpsons episodes, or indeed to have any questions for him concerning the programme. Booked for a half-hour spot, he actually stayed on for an hour performing in the guise of his many characters, each one today globally famous, and joining in with the other phone-in subjects that were getting far more attention than his presence. I had brought Sonny, then about seven, into the studio to meet with ‘Homer’ and afterwards we went for pizza with Dan personalizing all the left-over merchandize for my boy with various drawings and slogans. Those we still have, but lost to me are the dozen or so jingles he was good enough to record for the show as Krusty, Grandpa, Barney Gumbel, Mayor Quimby and Homer himself. Today I don’t believe any of the Simpsons’ cast are inclined, or indeed allowed, to be quite so free and easy with their gifts.
Though aware of the yowling mobs outside throwing rotten fruit at the windows, I was thoroughly enjoying my time at Britain’s leading youth network, despite being in my thirties and inviting on movers and shakers like the actor/director Lionel Jeffries (sixty-seven) to talk about his work on the film The Railway Children (1970), also his friendship with Bernard Cribbins (sixty-five) and Peter Sellers (deceased). Despite scoops like this, the show didn’t appear to be gaining any real traction among the kids. As far as most of the public and virtually all of the press were concerned, I was merely a radio interloper chosen to replace Dave Lee Travis just because I was the bloke on the Daz adverts. You can’t bellyache about this too much and neither can you pathetically point to photographs of yourself in Bermuda shorts being hurried across stage at a New York Radio Festival or flash your broken TRIC Award as proof of broadcasting bona fides. You just have to do the work as best you can and accept that there may be legitimate reasons everyone thinks you’re an absolute piece of cheese.
I had just the two spots in the weekly schedules, unlike dear old Emma Freud who was on every weekday lunchtime, yet my high profile elsewhere at the time saw to it that I became the poster boy for all that was new and revolting at the nation’s pop-most network. I found myself cast as a hapless struggler, totally marooned once away from his box of soap powder and TV hangers on, whereas in reality I was in my natural habitat and as far as I could tell the shows themselves were bouncing along brightly. It was simply the wrong place and the wrong time. Despite shedding an impressive three million listeners from the previous incumbent’s figures, I was holding on to something like nine million – my previous show at Radio 5 was lucky to get a third of that, so I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. However, one should never con
fuse popular with populist, and I think I might have done better at Radio 1 if I’d gone with the latter.
Though by my standards I was drumming up a sizeable audience for the peculiar, surprising and hopefully original programmes I continued to present, there will always be an even larger demographic that simply want the traditional, the generic, the norm, in the shape of big hit records and mild untaxing banter. This is completely understandable and so it was that many of DLT’s faithful couldn’t see what might be entertaining in hearing somebody doggedly walling up CDs they hated behind new tiles in their bathroom, or a small boy being ask to get inside a double bass upon which his father then played a solo. Yes, all that and Los Lobos too. I remember we received one furious email during a quite spectacular call where we were listening in to a woman’s budgerigar walking up the fret board of her electric guitar. It said:
I DO NOT PAY MY LICENCE FEE TO HEAR BUDGIES PLAY MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. YOU ARE INSULTING REAL MUSIC FANS. I AM WRITING TO THE PRIME MINISTER.
He probably did too, because some newspapers were organizing actual campaigns against what Matthew was doing at the station. Asked to meet with various journalists to mount some resistance to the swelling wave of negative, I encountered what remains for me the perfect example of the futility of such exercises. A woman from the Sunday Mirror asked how I felt about all the bad publicity my show was getting. Here is what I said:
Well, there’s not a lot you can do about it and it may be there are other reasons why it’s happening. If the programmes themselves were nervous and no good then I might take it to heart, but look; last year everyone was showering me with awards and calling me a genius, while this year, for doing basically the same show, I’m the leper of the airwaves. I think the only thing you can draw from that is, you know, there’s no business like show business.’
And here’s what she wrote:
Danny Baker looks down quietly at the drink he’s been holding throughout our talk. When I ask him about the battering he’s been taking from the critics recently he suddenly becomes angry and defiant. ‘You know what? Let them say what they want. I don’t care if I’m the leper of the airwaves. I still say there’s no business like show business.’
Ladies and gentlemen, can you detect the shift in emphasis between those two extracts? From wry and philosophical to needy and tearful. But there it was. Matthew’s revolution at Radio 1 was too much too soon and after about eighteen months of my not being DLT he took me to lunch and pulled the trigger. We both knew exactly what the meeting had been called for and so took the opportunity to get it out of the way immediately and spend the next few hours becoming nice and alight amid lashings of gallows humour. I may have reminded him more than once that he did ask me at one point to temporarily take over the Radio 1 breakfast show. A preposterous act of defiance that I think I’m right in recalling I answered by saying, ‘Oh dear Lord, Matthew, no! Are you nuts? Why not just drop your trousers, show your arse to the audience and have done with it?’
I probably also recounted how on the day he had offered me the gig, a bird unloaded its guano down the back of my neck – a pretty handy metaphor by anyone’s standards. Many years later the BBC made a TV documentary about those stormy years at Radio 1 as part of the hard-hitting series Blood on the Carpet, and one of the ousted old guard DJs, a droopy old string called Adrian Juste, whose gimmick was to edit himself into classic recordings of Hancock, The Goon Show and Dad’s Army, gloomily recalled the few weeks when it was his misfortune to have to follow my Saturday programme.
‘I remember hearing his show coming to a finish,’ he sombrely intoned into camera, ‘and I looked at my producer and just said, “What the hell was that? Now we have got to go on and try to pick this station up off the floor.”’ And he sighed.
Dad, who saw this go out, was slightly more direct.
‘See that twot talking about you on telly last night?’ he barked the next day before even saying hello.
I said I had.
‘You tell him if I see him, the only thing he’ll be picking up off the floor will be his fucking hooter.’
I am happy to report that their paths never crossed.
We were recording a short sketch for the After All . . . talk show one afternoon when, glancing toward one of the TV monitors peppered around the set relaying the action, I saw the most extraordinary thing. It was a circular piece of sandwich meat just a little bigger than fifty-pence piece that, unbeknownst to me, someone must have placed in the centre of my hair. Was I now so unpopular both inside and outside television that open season had been declared to make me look even more ridiculous? Keeping my eyes on the screen, I felt upwards with one hand and tried to locate this bleached piece of baloney resting upon my crown. My plan was to quietly remove it, hoping that an unruffled, dignified way of dealing with the prank would disappoint and ultimately shame whoever had instigated the insult. However, upon placing the tips of my fingers on the strategically placed slice of sausage skin, I found it wouldn’t budge. Not only that, but the harder I pressed, the more it hurt. After several seconds of this struggle it finally dawned on me that I was not in fact the victim of a cruel joke but witnessing the birth of a brand-new bald head. My bald head. I was not just going bald, I was technically bald already and it appeared follicles were abandoning the perimeter of my fledgling tonsure like the German army fleeing Mother Russia.
I have to say I was rather alarmed at the discovery and completed the sketch in an unblinking monotone. Your first thought on finding out you are now nurturing a flesh field at your North Pole is ‘Has anybody else noticed this?’ quickly followed by ‘What can I do about it?’ Understand that I was not by any means a vain type. May the record show I allowed myself to be dressed in some of the most terrifying and cumbersome ‘fashions’ of the period while in my TV pomp, none of which were sprung from my own wardrobe – a ropey enough affair in the first place. I remember as we approached the first programme of After All . . . I was asked what sort of style I had in mind for the series. My stock answer to this is ‘Picture hat, off-the-shoulder blouse and glass shoes with a goldfish in the heel’. However I did say that because I had been scrubbed up and made TV presentable in so many other recent vehicles, wouldn’t it be an idea if I did this talk show, usually so formal a forum, in a slightly less ragged version of my own street clothes, i.e., open-necked shirts and jeans. This suggestion was agreed and then later rescinded. I had no real problems with that, but sometimes as I looked at myself just before I went on, in a mauve jacket over a roll-neck jumper and a pair of casual trousers, I did wonder who the fuck that was looking back at me.
The worst stage-wear I ever got lumbered with was entirely my own fault. I was told to go and buy a couple of suits for the second run of the talk show and then give the receipts to BBC Wardrobe, who would reimburse me. I have never been one for claiming expenses and even way back at the NME would sit mystified as colleagues invented phantom business contacts to put down on their reimbursement forms as ‘Drinks: £2.50’. I genuinely thought it was demeaning. This may strike people as odd, given the other rackets me and my old man got up to, but ‘expenses’ and similar petty entitlements have always seemed so mean and grasping – from a different culture altogether. I can happily get in a cab if one is provided, and make sure the driver gets plenty of waiting time too, but never once have I made my way somewhere under my own steam and then said at the other end, while waving a train ticket or taxi receipt, ‘That’ll be eight pounds seventy, please.’ The very idea makes me cringe. Anyway, never having owned a wallet, I tend to lose receipts almost as soon as they are forked across to me and so it was on the occasion when I bought myself the heaviest suit since the Golden Age of Jousting. This was during a brief fashion window when gentlemen’s suit jackets were worn at three-quarter length and so cut to finish just above the knees. I saw one of these ensembles in a Savile Row shop window and decided that, though I wasn’t particularly faddish, at last a style had arrived to chime with my own tastes.
Long jackets, that was the thing, and I intended to hop on board the look while it was still hot – and hot is to be a key word in this disastrous sartorial misstep.
The problem may have lain in my impatience when in any kind of public changing room, coupled with only a passing interest in how I might look anyway. Hence my disastrous haste when grabbing the correct clothing for the New York awards ceremony. Even at the swimming baths as a kid I would get into my trunks as swiftly as possible and then roll all my belongings up into a ball to stuff into the locker so I could get on with the next bit of business – losing the locker key. In men’s outfitters I am even more of a fluster. I seem to believe that if I don’t get back out from behind the curtain in under twenty seconds the walls will start to move in like the garbage crusher in Star Wars. When trying on trousers – possibly my least favourite thing in the entire world – I go absolutely ape and inexplicably treat the exercise like it’s a desperate competition where I’m already lagging behind with a ten-second handicap or that at any moment a member of staff will rap upon the cubicle door saying, ‘Come on, Beau Brummel – what you doing, shooting up in there?’
Consequently I will only give the most cursory attention to whether a waistband is a little snug or if the trouser leg is over-running the heel of my shoe by several feet. In the dressing room at Savile Row I slapped the charcoal-grey three-piece on at my normal breakneck pace, looked at it in the mirror for barely a second and hauled it all off again, declaring the purchase made. So swift had been the process that my brain entirely failed to register that the thing had an overall weight like the pull of a black hole. Writing out a cheque for nine hundred pounds I walked out of the shop already composing my reply to Bryan Ferry’s letter asking me where I had bought such a classic and modish outfit. It was only as I got down toward Piccadilly that I noticed that I kept changing the arm bearing the carrier bag’s bulk as though it contained that month’s coal ration for the Ukraine.
