Lesley Douglas was incredibly tolerant of my behaviour at Radio 2. If you listen to old 6 Music podcasts, you will notice that all the competition winners that came into studio while we broadcast as a prize were female. This is because there was an additional aspect to the prize which could never be explicitly stated due to the BBC’s rigid policy prohibiting the misuse of the disabled lavvy. Radio 2 DJ and presumed future News of the World witch-hunt candidate Paul Gambaccini wrote that Lesley had a dangerous obsession with me; that I was like her pet and she was infatuated and he knew no good would come of it. Well, I think good did come of it; it was a fantastic radio show, and yes, the BBC was destroyed in the course of it but isn’t that a price worth paying for 20 or 30 relatively good podcasts and for a real hoot and a laugh?
At 6 Music, we were not “under the radar” because radar is probably a necessary part of the transmission process, but certainly we were beneath the coruscating magnifying eye of the British tabloids. The lens of their examination can combust you like a mid-August ant if you’re not heat resistant. My move to Radio 2 was heralded with this headline in the Daily Mail above an article written by Alison Boshoff:
My response to this was to give out Alison Boshoff ’s email address on-air, dubbing her “Nosh-off Bosh-off ” – a suggested colloquialism for hygiene-driven inter-orifice fellatio, and to ring the Daily Mail. T’were a prelude to the incident that was to bring the show national notoriety; the Mail failed to answer the phone and we were transferred to voicemail.
“What, the Daily Mail not answering their phone, what are they doing, driving immigrants out of the country with a sharpened stick?” I blurted. Answering machine messages became a feature of the show.
Steve Merchant articulated Nosh-off ’s point more charmingly when he came on as a guest early in the run – “This is disgusting! This is Radio 2! Most listeners can’t even turn off this filth when they want to – they have to hit the radio with their canes!”
We had great guests on those early Radio 2 shows. We had Courtney Love, David Walliams and Matt Lucas, and author and filmmaker Jon Ronson (who has made the shift to Hollywood with the adaptation of his book Men Who Stare at Goats) came on twice.
The element of which I was most proud was Noel Gallagher’s involvement. He’d turn up, week in week out, like a cousin – no cabs, no fee, no shit. Just a really famous rock star shambling in and being hilarious. In spite of all the Blur vs Oasis snarling and slick, sick epigrams, he’s an absolute treasure to be around, a docile sweetheart of a man who gives fine advice and has great integrity. What’s more, he’s a right bloody laugh and doesn’t take himself seriously – and many would argue that a sense of humour is the defining quality of an Englishman. Look at these funny bits between us on the show:
STUDIO. DAY.
RUSSELL
Aw, that’s a nasty, nasty perspective, especially from an atheist.
NOEL
I’m not an atheist!
RUSSELL
Hold on, you said you don’t believe in God, Noel.
NOEL
I don’t, that doesn’t make me an atheist.
RUSSELL
Well, I think it does.
NOEL
Don’t label me, I don’t belong to any group.
RUSSELL
Well, you do. There’s Oasis for a start.
And …
STUDIO. DAY.
RUSSELL
Alright, Noel, how’s your missus?
NOEL
D’ya know what she done today? She fixed our boiler that had broken, she fixed it.
RUSSELL
Bloody hell, that’s emasculating, what were you doing, needlepoint?
NOEL
She actually made the point that, you know when you were doing impressions of her last night, you were making her sound like Lorraine Kelly, which did not go down well.
RUSSELL
(in Scottish accent)
“Oh it’s me, Sara, I’ll just fix the boiler. Noel, why don’t you just sit there and wash your little vagina.” That’s what it’s like in the Gallagher household.
NOEL
Do not refer to my son as a vagina.
He’s got a natural comic mind, a quick turn of phrase. Later, when I asked if we could play “Rock and Roll Star” at the start of the MTV VMA Awards, he said, “Of course you can, then the people of America will see a bloke they’ve never seen before walking on to a track they’ve never heard of.”
When things went wrong on the show, as they frequently did, we’d tell people. We were childishly honest and avoided any form of artifice, something for which the BBC was always being criticised.
We deconstructed entertainment radio. All of the items were postmodern, they were there for the sake of having an item – hence “Gay” and “Nanecdotes” (all of which originally came from emails sent in by listeners).
One week we invited linguist and radical thinker Noam Chomsky on the show and he replied saying, “Thanks for the offer but sadly life is hard and I see no place for comedy.” So we went on air and launched a “Cheer up Chomsky” campaign. (Five minutes after the show Nic Philps gets a text saying that Chomsky’s wife is terminally ill, that’s why he’s miserable. The item was then wisely abandoned.)
We had Richard Dawkins, Ricky Gervais and Slash on the same show. We would go from an interview with Big Bird from Sesame Street (a bit up himself ) to one with newsreader Peter Sissons (a real dreamboat). I asked Sissons if he thought the news agenda was set by the government and the forces of consumerism that control all of our minds, and whether he thought about that whilst reading the news. “Oh no,” he blithely replied. “No, that isn’t what courses through my brain actually, it’s usually, ‘Is the autocue going to work?’”
My tricky gear-shift into ubiquity was coupled with a fair amount of commentary saying, “He’s come from nowhere, he’s a flash in the pan.” I can see why people would have been sceptical, because by the time I did become famous it was such an articulate stab; I arrived with a vocabulary, a manner of speech, a style of dress, a hairstyle, an ideology, all in alignment. Looking back a few years later, it was a perfect pantomime entry into the national consciousness.
This is where that preparation became relevant, because no longer was it just for the kids on 6 Music, there was a DVD out (and I was soon to be performing at The Secret Policeman’s Ball at the Albert Hall). When you have to be sought out on digital media you’re only going to be watched by people who actively want to see you. When you’re on Radio 2 you’re going to be encountered by a lot more people who don’t like you. I’ve come to terms with the impossibility of total acceptance. Not everyone will like you if you’re in a pub with twenty people in it, so when you’re exposed to sixty million people obviously there’ll be people who don’t like you. Jonathan Ross said, “With anyone famous, there’s as many people who don’t like us as do, that’s still enough for you to have a career.” To achieve absolute acceptance, one would have to become totally enlightened or utterly innocuous. Until then there’ll always be some sort of understandable irritation.
I was very nervous about that Secret Policeman’s Ball gig. Every gig I’m nervous about still. I can see the straight line from when I first stepped on a stage for Bugsy Malone to the last time I stepped on a stage, because I take performing very seriously, I’m meticulous about it, I care about it enormously, and I can’t bear to be anything other than well prepared and give a good account of myself.
It was good material I did there, the Ian Huntley stuff, I always had a fascination with the tabloid demonisation of criminals. It was an indication of how far I’d come: I could do successfully at the Albert Hall material that at the Gilded Balloon just a few years earlier got me bottled off the stage and hospitalised. I’d subsequently learned how to be respectful around such subjects and where the lines are drawn, and also that once people are laughing they are a lot more tolerant of risqué material. Here is the material I performed that night, it was
built around some hilarious, genuine letters from the Sun’s “Your View” section.
I like the Sun a bit, I’ve read it all my life. I think of the Sun as a friend, but have you ever had a friend you fucking hate? My favourite bit is the letters page, “Dear Sun, the page where you tell Britain what you think.” Not just any thought like “Move arm now, or eat breakfast this morning” – preferably a thought that might inspire hatred or antipathy towards people who are slightly different.
This is a story that concerns Ian Huntley practising witchcraft in his prison cell. When I read that I thought, what is the point of that story, because I, like most people, made my mind up about Ian Huntley when he killed those children. “What? Ian Huntley’s practising witchcraft? Oh, you’re joking … I liked him … you build them up then knock them down, don’t you?”
Let’s not query that source.
“Where did you get this information?”
“This desperate criminal told me it.”
“Did you give him any money?”
“Yeah, I gave him some money as an inducement to tell me the story.”
“Yeah, that’s alright, we’ll print that, then we’ll give them some fucking bingo – they’ll love it.”
If you’re going to have a father-figure in prison, probably best to have one that isn’t also a paedophile. He may abuse that position.
Here are just some of the letters elicited by that story. The first one is from Dave Franklin, who I happen to know wrote it with this expression on his face:
That’s what the situation in the Middle East needs – heavily armed paedophiles. Have we not done enough damage in that troubled region? What we need to do is get Peter Sutcliffe in a tank and unleash him. Tell you what, let’s get Rose West, take her to Basra, get her pissed, give her a jar of anthrax and let her wander round like Ophelia.
I do not think that Dave Franklin should be dabbling in international diplomacy, he lacks the aptitude. His brand of knee-jerk reaction isn’t what’s required.
“Dave, Dave, you’re not a bright man, are you? Never speak again, you are essentially an oxygen thief.”
Next letter, different tack but no less sublime. It begins thusly:
Often – not talking about freak occurrences, right? On the way in tonight I saw five people practising voodoo, three of them were destroyed by it. Look at the statistics.
That’s a heavy thing to hope for. And then to send it to the Sun, which is not a metaphysical newspaper. This is a proposition that if it came from Dante would confuse you.
“Do you know what I hope happens to Ian Huntley? I hope he destroys himself.”
“How?”
“This is the good bit. By opening a doorway to a world beyond the knowledge of mere man. A world so baffling and complex that whilst Ian Huntley can perceive it – he has after all just opened a doorway to it – he can never know it, he can never integrate it into his understanding of what is, because he is a mere man. If he were a meerkat, he’d have a better vantage point.”
Now I don’t know much about voodoo … but I think that is an improper solution.
The reason I’m interested in dark subjects is that I think it’s in the extremes and the margins that the interesting matters lurk. The quotidian has been dealt with on its own, it doesn’t need to be explained, it’s understood. Extremities of behaviour, sexuality and experience are what prickle my hackles. That’s why there was that difficult transition to national fame, because my sensibilities are a little bit cult, a bit off key, but my ambition is mainstream. I don’t just want to do an approximation of what already exists in the culture, I want to do things that are disturbing, unsettling and unusual, primarily funny – I want to be able to talk about anything that captures my imagination.
By the end of that year, when I did The Big Fat Quiz of the Year with Noel Fielding, Jonathan Ross and David Walliams, there probably weren’t many people in the country who didn’t know who I was. There’s never a point, though, of reclining in a bath and thinking, “I’ve done it,” and sinking down under the suds like in a Flake commercial – it always feels ongoing, it feels constant, because whenever those achievements are being made you’re thinking about whatever you’ve got to do next. And as I’ve already indicated, I fancied another bash at becoming a genuine movie star – such as you might find in a cinema or a rehab clinic.
We had agreed to do 1 Leicester Square on MTV out of what most people would think of as absurd optimism, believing that it might lead to more opportunities – perhaps in Hollywood. Remarkably, as per Nik’s prediction, it did, it led to the life-changing meeting with comedy movie star and cash factory Adam Sandler. Sandler, “The Sandman” as he’s known, is a compassionate fella and, far from thinking me an oik who didn’t listen to the answers to questions he’d moments before posed, Sandler liked me.
Nik’s foresight, my peculiar presenting style, and the astonishing approval of Adam Sandler, now meant I had an extraordinary opportunity and a difficult decision. I wanted to embrace this chance without offending my adored affiliates, as I’ve decided to work with them for the rest of my life, so obviously I had to consult Nik.
Nik was cool about it. “Yeah, we can pop over to America and see if we can get you in films,” he said in his typical gung-ho manner. At this stage Nik had not yet metamorphosed into the swarthy man mountain-mountain man, glimmering, ultra-competitive bayonet of charisma that he is now. This was still in his scruff-bag, beach bum, wet-eyed chancer phase. And I was a volatile, sex-mad egomaniac. A trip to Hollywood at this stage could do more harm than good. We were on the next flight.
†
Part Two
There’s gotta be a way! He who dares wins! There’s a million quid’s worth of gold out there – our gold. We can’t just say “bonjour” to it.
Derek Trotter
If you give me the chance, I’ll destroy America for you.
Johnny Rotten
Chapter 10
Seriously, Do You Know Who I Am?
The lesson that fame is subjective is a painful one to learn. I’d spent my entire life chasing its elusive blessing like a sunburned tramp pursuing a butterfly made of booze, only to discover that if you pop across the English Channel to Calais, British fame is as much use as British currency.
“Monsieur, I should very much like to take your daughter upstairs. And I’ll have that camembert an’ all.”
“Alors!! You stinking English scum, my daughter will go nowhere with you – I ’ave never seen you before and your haircut is, ’ow you say … ridiculous.”
“Do you not watch Big Brother’s Big Mouth? No? May I still have the cheese? I’m prepared to pay …”
Yes, anonymity was hard enough to endure the first time, but to have it revoked by foreign travel, why, it’s worse than a driving ban – it’s like losing your blowjob licence. Plus I’d organised my entire personality around fame, not to mention my physical appearance – my haircut for heaven’s sake! Without fame my whole persona doesn’t make sense. Without fame my haircut just looks like mental illness. So once me and Nik landed in LAX, I was no longer an edgy comic with a bright future, I was just another lunatic with access to strong hairspray.
Upon this trip, on these gold-paved streets, Nik and I began to forge a grown-up business partnership. He’d already shown himself to be the equal of his Darth Vadar, bare-knuckle father John Noel, our patriarch, when he’d expertly secured me the Brit Awards, which took some cunning and turned out to be a crafty move.
Me and John Noel had begun to argue; he’s a force and a natural dictator. I’ve been in meetings with him where TV shows were commissioned on the basis that the head of comedy didn’t want to have his nut-bag kicked in. He was the perfect tough-guy father to get me off drugs and on to telly. Me and Nik, his son, were already mates and Nik worked at the agency, so once my career had momentum it made sense to move the emphasis and control over to Nik, a diplomat and charmer who wouldn’t swagger round Hollywood pinning people to wa
lls. So John remains for me like Don Corleone, an overlord surveying our progress, but he’s not on the front line with a flick-knife.
Quarrelling between me and John was actually always very loving and manageable; I never forget what he’s done for me and what I owe him. Conflict is often favourable to complicité – combined we’re a terrible force when we agree, that’s when problems really start. For example, John and I used our combined might to turn a molehill into a mountain on my radio show, giving the BBC an irritating headache that in the fullness of scandal they would come to regard as minor. A tumult was invoked when me and John agreed that my friend Ade Adepitan, the wheelchair basketball player, tennis player, TV presenter and joie de vivre beacon, had been treated badly by the Movida nightclub in London’s West End.
Ade, my West Ham brethren and Stratford’s finest son, told us that he’d been denied entry to Movida on account of his chair and the door staff there had used racist language, I think including the N-word, and had unforgivably called him a cripple.
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