Life's What You Make It

by Phillip Schofield

  On that first day at Television Centre I walked through the scene docks, saw the Tardis and the set for The Generation Game. I smiled at sports presenter Des Lynam. Diana Dors, the actor, apologized as she trod on my toe in the lift as I made my way to the canteen. That was my final stop of the day, because the food at the BBC was subsidized then, so you could eat great food at ridiculously affordable prices (a cup of tea was three pence). I had steak and chips with big field mushrooms for my dinner, my only proper meal of the week, and then left to go back to St John’s Wood with a feeling of utter satisfaction. I had just enjoyed the best day out. I wish I’d known then how well I’d get to know TC in the future, how much telly I’d make there, the friendships that would be forged and the fun I’d have. It would have made what was about to happen a lot easier.

  I can’t say that my job as a clerk was fulfilling me, but I was with fun people and felt like I was on the beginning of some sort of ladder. I was at the BBC! Behind the scenes, I was sent to the Guildhall for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. (I got horribly drunk and threw up behind John’s desk when I got back to work. I cleaned that mark for hours and he never knew what had caused it.) I was sent to Centre Court at Wimbledon, and to Wembley in May 1981 for England v Brazil (Brazil won 1–0). At the bedsit, life was also good. I was seeing an older lady in Swiss Cottage called Madeline who was … fascinating. I felt like I was in The Graduate, an older lady and an eighteen-year-old, and she taught me things that were never in those copies of Health & Efficiency in the den under the roof of my bedroom in Newquay. Our stair parties continued apace, I went to Regent’s Park open-air theatre with my friend from school, Ruth, and to make her laugh I learned the ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ passage from Richard III and quoted it back to her in full-on thespian tones. I still have it in my head now, along with the Pepsi ad of the time: Lipsmackinthirstquenchinacetastinmotivatingoodbuzzincooltalkinhiwalkinfastlivinevergivincoolfizzin Pepsi. That was a bitch to type, but it’s amazing how these things lodge for ever, like the colours of Joseph’s coat!

  So, life was good, until one day the payphone in the hallway rang, someone picked it up and shouted, ‘Phillip, it’s your mum.’ My heart sank. When she had called in the past, that phone had delivered two horrid pieces of news, the death of my Uncle Alan and the passing of my grandad. My Grandad Harold was truly one of the world’s kindest men. He died at seventy-eight while sorting his record collection on the floor of the sitting room in Oldham. He told great stories, taught me brilliant rhymes and never, ever lost his temper. He left me his ring and, from that day, I’ve worn it on my right hand in his glorious memory. So, had someone died? I picked up the phone.

  ‘Hi, darling, it’s me.’

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  ‘We’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You know your dad has always wanted to go to New Zealand?’

  ‘Er, yeah.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to go, but we’re not coming back. We’ve decided to emigrate and wondered if you’d like to come.’

  My world disappeared from under my feet. I had to hold on to the payphone to steady myself. I had no idea what to say. I probably said, ‘Let me think about it,’ but I’m not sure. The loops began to spin in my head. I felt despair and confusion. I loved my family completely, unconditionally. How could I be separated from them by 12,000 miles? On the other hand, I had been writing to the BBC since I was ten, I’d got my job at seventeen, I was now nearly nineteen and I felt happy with where I was. What was I expected to do? After almost two years in London, did I have to resign? WTF hadn’t been invented then; if it had been, that would have been at the forefront of my mind. I lay in bed and listened to the chaos. ‘You can’t go, you don’t have a job to go to.’ ‘You have to go, you can’t be separated from your family.’ ‘You love London, you don’t know anything about Auckland, all your friends are here.’ ‘When will you be able to afford to visit? You have to go.’ All night long, and for night after night, I went round and round. Pointless, really. I knew I would go, I just had to torture myself a bit first, which was the start of that annoying habit. I wrote my letter of resignation to the BBC.

  At the time, I felt that I could be making inroads in my attempt to get on air. I was in the right building, I was meeting the right people – who knows? It might happen.

  I’ve thought long and hard about including this next bit. But what is known now wasn’t known then and at the time it was a great day for the Schofield family. It’s also a momentous occasion in my journey to making it from working behind the scenes to talking into a microphone or standing in front of a camera.

  Jimmy Savile was a broadcasting god at the BBC and in the country at large. With Jim’ll Fix It on the telly and his various radio shows, he was a big name – one of the biggest. He couldn’t use one of the usual Radio 1 studios at the end of the corridor to record his shows, because they weren’t big enough to hold all his guests, so he recorded in one of the big drama studios in the basement. Jimmy Savile’s Old Record Club was a weekly event in the building. It was recorded during the week and broadcast on Radio 1 on a Sunday afternoon, and I listened every week. It was clear he had a sort of informal audience in the studio with him, and sometimes he put them on air. I wondered, if I dropped an internal memo to his producer, Ted Beston, perhaps I could attend one of the recordings? Ted wrote back: of course! He said to come down and see us, they’d be expecting me. I asked John and Mac if I could be excused. They were always a little bemused by my radio obsession, but they agreed so I set off for the basement.

  When I walked into the studio, it was as if I’d walked into a religious gathering. There were about fifty people there – old, young, disabled, some with special needs, some wearing Scout leader uniforms. It was quite the most eclectic audience I’d ever seen. Ted Beston met me and showed me to a seat. Savile was standing behind a lectern with a script and a large microphone. We were all in awe; we felt truly blessed to be there. He’d play a record, then walk to the various attendees, chat to them, make them feel welcome, ask them why they were there, how he could help them. I’m pretty sure that if he had touched the head of the woman in the wheelchair, she would have considered trying to walk. He came over to me.

  ‘Now then, now then, young man. Ted told me you worked upstairs in OBs?’

  ‘Yes,’ I gasped.

  ‘He said you were interested in getting a job on the radio.’

  ‘Er, yes. Yes, it’s my dream.’

  ‘Well, we like to make dreams come true down here. Come with me.’

  I got up and he led me to the lectern.

  ‘This is the next record. Why don’t you introduce it?’

  ‘Okay, thank you.’

  The previous record finished, and Jimmy Savile spoke.

  ‘This is my friend Phillip from the Outside Broadcast department, but he has always wanted to be on the radio, so today we’re going to make that happen.’

  We briefly chatted, and I made the introduction. I was going to be on Radio 1. I thanked him and Ted, and calmly left, then I ran. I ran all the way from the basement to Room 130, where I phoned my mum and dad.

  ‘I’m going to be on the radio on Sunday.’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘I’ve just been downstairs to a recording of Jimmy Savile’s show and he let me introduce a record!’

  ‘Oh my goodness, darling, that’s so wonderful, we’re so happy for you. We’ll tell everyone to listen.’

  Sunday came, and every Schofield was glued to their radio. So were all the people in Newquay and Oldham that had been told. The moment arrived. Here it was, my first-ever broadcast. It was brief, yes, but it had happened – I’d been on Radio 1. My family were so proud.

  I went a couple more times to the adoration club, and Savile remembered me and was free with his advice. It was the first time someone had told me: ‘Be nice to everyone on the way up, you’ll need them all on the way down.’ He reiterated the ‘addressing the
world at large’ advice and gave me tips on broadcasting techniques. I was incredibly grateful. In fact, I was so grateful that I asked him if I could buy him a drink. He replied with ‘That’s kind, thank you, but no, I don’t think it would be appropriate.’ You couldn’t make it up.

  I met Jimmy Savile a number of times over my career. He always remembered me. The last time I saw him was at the launch of a new cruise liner. I was on board with my wife, Steph. He was standing alone, looking old, at the top of the grand staircase, and I introduced him to Steph. He bowed low and kissed her hand, said he was proud that I’d done so well, that he’d followed my career with great interest.

  A short time later he was dead. I tweeted my sadness at his passing. It is the only tweet I have ever retrospectively searched for. When it became clear how he had behaved all of those years, I scrolled back for hours to find it so that I could delete it.

  In any of the brief times I had contact with him, there wasn’t one hint of who he really was, from either him or anyone I met. I just wish that, back then, victims had been believed or had felt they had enough support to speak up against this monster, who was hiding in plain sight, and that ‘possibly Britain’s most predatory sex offender’ had not died before he was brought to justice.

  I’d come close to realizing my broadcasting dream, but it still felt so far away. Writing my resignation letter was deeply painful. I hesitated before I put it in the brown internal-mail envelope, but I knew I had to send it. It was ‘regretfully’ accepted. ‘The BBC and all my colleagues would miss me.’ They all wished me well in my new life in New Zealand.

  I worked out my notice. I would finish in OBs, pack up the bedsit, travel down to Cornwall to help with the packing there, then Mum, Dad, me and Tim would all travel back to London to fly.

  Reluctantly, I said goodbye to my BBC colleagues. At the bedsit, Eddie told me to send him my phone number as soon as I had one; he could be ‘helpful’ to us. I had no idea what that meant, but I promised I would. I kissed my friends at 93 St John’s Wood Terrace farewell and left the shining door knocker behind.

  Dad had been accepted into New Zealand because of their points system. Nobody got in unless the country needed you. As I mentioned, he was a gifted French polisher, and that was an occupation that happened to be on the ‘needed’ list. We had to have an interview at New Zealand House on Haymarket, which turned out to be quite controversial. All three male members of the family were asked numerous questions about why we wanted to go, what we would contribute to the country and whether we had ever been to prison. Throughout the entire process, they didn’t speak to my mother once, and it didn’t go unnoticed. She was furious.

  ‘If that’s the kind of chauvinistic environment I’m going to, I’m not interested,’ she said. Thankfully, it wasn’t.

  Those weeks packing up in Cornwall were painful. I didn’t want to leave. Everyone tried so hard to cheer me up, but I was moody and morose. We drove to the river at Bodmin so Dad could have a final fish. The weather was glorious, brilliant sunshine, the happy babbling of the river; a chorus of birds sang, dragonflies drifted over the long green grass and there was the sapphire flash of a kingfisher. It was literally the perfect day, except it wasn’t, because I didn’t want to go! I think if I had changed my mind at the last minute, they would have accepted it, but they would have been heartbroken. As the loops continued to spin in my head in Cornwall, I knew that, having resigned, there was no way back. I had made my choice. I tried to smother any anxiety by thinking, ‘This will be an adventure and we’ll all be together.’ I was talking myself into a decision that, really, I had already made.

  The last thing loaded on to the van for New Zealand … the vacuum cleaner.

  Our furniture was en route to NZ in a container, and we said a tearful goodbye to the rest of the family, locked up the cottage and set off for London.

  Perhaps if I’d known that emigrating would allow me to save my dad’s life, I wouldn’t have been so bloody miserable.

  3

  I always wanted to be a pilot. I think if the broadcasting gene hadn’t been so strong, that’s where my path might have led. Up until recently, I had a very sophisticated flight simulator game on my desktop and I’d sit for hours and fly all over the world. I got pretty good, too. I took it very seriously, so much so that I paid a fortune for AERAD charts. They are an impressive set of loose-bound books that have plates of every airport in the world, how to approach them and the frequencies needed to land. They’re used by real pilots, so my year’s subscription included any critical updates. If a runway was closed or a new part of the world had been deemed too dangerous to fly into, an update arrived in the post. Obviously, the updates were useless for my flight sim because it wasn’t updated, but it was worth it to see the postman’s face when he delivered another envelope marked: ‘Urgent: Contents Critical to Flight Safety’.

  If I had been the pilot on that plane flying us to Auckland, I would have pointed out the view from the window. For some reason, we couldn’t all sit together, so I was at the back of the 747, in a window seat. A few hours into the flight, when it was fully dark outside, I slid up the window blind and gasped. We were flying under the Northern Lights, a stunning spectacle of flashing purple and green that whipped and swirled in the night sky above us. Nothing was said from the flight deck. I took it upon myself to start to inform my fellow passengers, walking the length of the plane, saying, ‘Excuse me. If you look out of the window, you can see the Northern Lights.’

  The plane was filled with the sound of sliding window blinds. Most were thrilled; some were not. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a few people were unimpressed by being woken up in the dead of night by a total stranger advising them to look out of the window.

  Steph and I went on holiday to see them a couple of years ago in Norway. It was the second time I’d seen them in my life and, both times, it was truly majestic.

  As the Schofield family sped through the sky at the start of our 12,000-mile journey, I hoped that the beautiful sight outside in the night sky was a good sign of a happy arrival. It wasn’t.

  At Heathrow, my mum had had her manicure set confiscated because it contained sharp objects, and she was furious. My dad, on the other hand, had been doing some last-minute jobs on the cottage before we left and had accidentally wandered through security with a massive screwdriver in his hand luggage, totally unchallenged.

  As we left the plane at our halfway stop-off in Los Angeles, my thumb moved to my ring finger on my right hand. I always twiddle my grandad’s signet ring if I’m nervous or concentrating, but it wasn’t there. I’d taken it off in the loo on the plane when I washed my hands, and left it there.

  I was utterly bereft. Could this shit adventure get any worse? I tried to go back, but they wouldn’t let me. I asked the ground crew, but they weren’t interested. This was the second time I’d done this. The first was when I took it off, for the same reason, on one of my weekend train journeys home, courtesy of the BBC. I only realized it wasn’t on my finger and was still in the loo when my dad met me as I got off at Bodmin Parkway. I yelped, ‘I’ve left my ring on the train!’, but the doors were closing and the train was moving defiantly out of the station. We jumped in the car … and chased the train. We missed it at Par and St Austell, but finally caught up with it in Truro, where I burst on to the train, ran into the loo, and there it was, waiting for me by the sink.

  So, I’d done it again. This time there was no chasing. I walked, sullen and moody, my head down, to collect our bags. We stood and waited by the carousel. The first thing to come through the flaps at the end of the luggage conveyer belt was a little plastic tub. Curious as it passed me, I looked inside, and there, on its own and unannounced, was my grandad’s ring. I was stunned. It was only beaten by a second plastic container following behind containing … a confiscated manicure set.

  Our arrival in New Zealand didn’t go particularly well. We were knackered after the flight and we all felt deeply unsettled. Here we wer
e, in a different hemisphere, about as far as you can go without coming back, and 11,386 miles from everyone and everything we knew. The only people we knew in the country were Jim and Irene, who were friends of a friend, so it was a tenuous connection. Jim was kind enough to meet us at the airport to take us to our motel. Unfortunately, he didn’t know the way. International airports are seldom built in the prettiest parts of a city, and the suburbs surrounding Auckland airport are not the city at its shimmering best. We had no way of knowing that the drive should have taken us about forty-five minutes. An hour and a half in, and not realizing we were going in large circles, we were still driving through one of Auckland’s more run-down neighbourhoods. After mile after mile of rusty cars in unkempt gardens, my mood wasn’t good. It was only months later, when I made the drive myself, that I realized what he’d done. The poor man had got himself hopelessly lost and was bluffing furiously as he tried to find his way out. Jim dropped us at the Best Western Motel in Cockle Bay. His profession was driving instructor, and he would come in very useful a few months later when he ‘manipulated’ me through my driving test.

  New Zealand is an incredibly beautiful country, with a, rightly, very proud population. I say to any Kiwi reading this: any criticism you may read is fleeting. This was the eighties, we were on a journey of slow discovery and it was a while before we found our feet. I’m also very proud of my dual citizenship, which I was lucky to be given during my time there. I haven’t visited for many years and I know that Auckland has changed enormously and is a spectacular city. We went at a time when the now world-renowned wine industry was still in its infancy and long before Peter Jackson showed the world with his Lord of the Rings films what a stunning filming location New Zealand is and released the potential for a massive international film industry. It was also before the internet and, for all my dad’s passion to go, he hadn’t done much research.