Life's What You Make It

by Phillip Schofield

  Cathy Mellor and Roger Pusey.

  On stage at the Roadshow and swinging my pants with Trev and Simon.

  I was part of the best travelling circus of my life, with the best radio family. We’d roll into a town, perform a live radio show for two hours and then move on. It was so big, I even had my own bodyguard. Jerry Judge was a big guy, and the most well-known ‘personal protection’ in the business. He was someone that you wouldn’t mess with – a ‘unit’. He was also a very kind and lovely man and was the only person who could get Frank Sinatra out of a bar and up to bed. Jerry had protected them all, and would continue to do so until his death in 2019. The showbiz world was so sad to lose this giant of a man who had kept us all safe.

  I’d phone Steve Wright on his afternoon show from a secret location – ‘the farm shop by the phone box on the A171 between Scarborough and Whitby’ – and wait for the scores of Radio 1 fans to arrive. We did the Roadshow from the south-coast leg, to the North-east, to Northern Ireland. I was totally in my element. By now, Peter Powell had left Radio 1 and I asked him if I could have his legendary ‘Summer Radio’ jingle. He was chuffed. We had it remade with my name, and playing that jingle from the stage of the Radio 1 Roadshow was the absolute epitome of summer to me at the time. Everything about it was special – Smiley Miley giving away merchandise, me sitting backstage listening to the crowd as I waited for my introduction, the games I played in the warm-up before we went live, the GMT ‘pips’ signalling eleven o’clock and the start of the show, the roar as we went on air … All, literally, a dream come true.

  And then, in 1990, the final tick.

  ‘This year we thought you might like to do the final leg of the Roadshow season, the South-west, finishing in Newquay.’

  No ‘Hallelujah!’ chorus could ever play louder in my head.

  Cath, Roger and the team knew how special this was to me. They made that week one of the best of my broadcasting life. The unadulterated jubilation has never quite been surpassed.

  Roger Pusey went to town. The Red Arrows flew over the stage in Plymouth for us, I was air/sea-rescued from Falmouth Harbour and broadcast all the way from bobbing in the sea to inside the helicopter. An RAF Nimrod flew over us and I could talk to the pilot. In a genius, makeshift invention, our engineer had sent the crew a small radio receiver, no bigger than a packet of cigarettes, and told them to hold it up to the cockpit window … it worked! The crowd loved it and, somehow, we got away with it on the radio, even though the listeners couldn’t see a thing. All of those complicated and technical live links were achieved by the Outside Broadcast Department; the brilliant engineer on site with us was Dave Broomfield. It was a magnificent twist of fate. I had booked Dave out on to jobs when I worked in that department at the age of seventeen, and now, here he was, making sure I could be heard as I was bobbing in the sea. I would find out from him that to waterproof a mic, you popped a condom over it! Safe sound.

  On the roof at the Roadshow with Steph and Anthea Turner.

  Kylie Minogue was the guest in Plymouth. Steph stood with me on the roof of the Roadshow stage on the Hoe as we watched the Red Arrows fly above the crowd. My thoughts drifted back to my days in that city with the Hospital Radio gang. That night, Steph and I stayed on Burgh Island. She told me later that it was there that she realized that, if I didn’t feel the same way about her as she felt about me, she was in trouble. Thankfully, I did.

  The night before the final Roadshow season of 1990 I stayed with Mum, Dad and Tim in their cottage in Trerice. We had a barbecue and the whole team came, even Johnny Beerling, the boss.

  In the morning, I was picked up by a police car driven by one of Tim’s mates, a police constable called, coincidentally, Philip Schofield! He drove me through the town and out to the lawns of the Headland Hotel, where the Roadshow was set up. However, that wasn’t the first time I had made the trip that day. The first time was in the dead of night to play a trick on the team.

  A quiet break from the Roadshow.

  The roadshow weeks were famed for their practical jokes, and Tony ‘Smiley’ Miles was usually the ringleader. I had sunk him in a rowing boat on a lake, had a sack of lion shit delivered to his merchandise truck and had him marooned on Lundy Island. At a show in Cleethorpes, they had all been in on a big trick to get me. I had been told that a local magician would be part of the warm-up and that the local news would be there to cover the show and his act. It seemed like a good idea. He performed a few tricks for us and about ten minutes before we went live, I crouched down to put my head into a guillotine so he could ‘chop my head off’ in front of the crowd. He secured my hands in place with padlocks. The guillotine dropped, my neck was intact, the crowd went wild. As he undid the first padlock he snapped the key inside it. I was locked in. No matter how hard the team tried, they couldn’t get me out. I was, at best, rather peeved! Not only because I was on my knees and trapped, but also – and I didn’t tell anyone at the time – I had split my knee on the metal steps earlier in the warm-up and it was incredibly painful. The show started, with me on my bleeding knees. I asked the audience to be doubly loud because I couldn’t do my usual dancing around to whip them up. It was during those deafening cheers that Noel Edmonds walked unseen from backstage. To the delight of everyone, he was carrying a ‘Gotcha’ – another of his awards, this time for his House Party TV show. The camera was for him, and not the local news. It was a brilliant stunt, and I had been totally ‘got’. I added his ‘Gotcha’ to the ‘Golden Egg’ I’d been awarded in the Broom Cupboard. It was never possible to get him back – he was way too wily – but I had decided I would have my revenge on the team … in Newquay.

  Another Roadshow prank with ‘Smiley Miley’.

  As the production teams and DJs either drank or slept, the drivers and engineers arrived at the next location to set up the show. They usually rolled into town at about 2 a.m.

  With the help of a friend of my folks, Frank Wilkinson, I had organized the entire 5th Newquay Scout troop to be camped on the exact spot the roadshow was to be set up. Tents, canoes, cooking utensils and, of course, Scouts. Cathy Mellor, my dad, Tim and I were all hidden in a tent as the circus arrived. The huge articulated truck hissed to a stop and the other vans pulled up behind. Driver Richard Greaves got out of his cab and walked over to the encampment. Frank emerged from a tent in full Scout leader regalia and played his part beautifully. Driver Greaves was stunned but calm.

  ‘Mate, you can’t camp here! I’ve got the entire Radio 1 Roadshow to park on this spot.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. We have written permission.’

  ‘For tonight? It’s not possible. We’ve had this spot booked for years.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to wake everyone up. You’ll have to go somewhere else.’

  ‘Somewhere else?! Where do you propose I drive all this kit?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Try another beach.’

  The stand-off continued, until talk of the police crept in. It was time to come clean. We all emerged from hiding and the look on the faces of everyone on the team was spectacular. The impromptu camp was quickly dismantled and the Roadshow trucks rolled in. I had had my revenge.

  Whipping up the crowd on the Roadshow roof.

  Now, in the daylight, I was being driven back to the site in a police car to fulfil a childhood dream. As I was introduced to the 25,000-strong crowd, I could barely speak. What was happening to me was sinking in. How was this possible? How had this dream come true? All I could say was, ‘My God,’ before emotion made me turn away temporarily. My folks were there. I played my games in the warm-up. One

  of the games featured speed-drinking. Three blokes were brought onstage, all thinking they were going to get a free pint of beer, but by the end of the game they were drinking a pint of Coke through each other’s socks. I matchmade a couple and made sure they stayed together by tearing a tenner in half and giving them half each. The day had started off a bit drizzly, but as the clock ti
cked towards 11 a.m., the sun started to break through. Amazingly, it’s all on YouTube.

  A VERY proud moment: Mum and Dad on stage at the Newquay Roadshow.

  And then, it was eleven o’clock. The ‘pips’ pipped, the jingle played and Adrian Juste’s voice boomed over the crowd.

  ‘Today, the final summer roadshow, from the Headland Hotel lawn, North Fistral beach, Newquay with … Phillip Schofield!’

  The cheer seemed to last for hours. I tried to speak, but the emotion was caught in my throat. The first song was Craig McLachlan’s ‘Mona’. I danced with the crowd. Everywhere I went, they screamed. Jason Donovan arrived in a Sea King helicopter. I put my brother on the radio to play ‘Bits and Pieces’, the guess-the-song game. It was the best moment of my life.

  I looked into the front row, and there I was, looking back. Eleven years old and smiling. ‘You did it.’

  That was it, then: the final tick was ticked. Anything that happened from here was a bonus.

  Then Andrew Lloyd Webber called.

  6

  One weekend, soon after the roadshow, I travelled back to Cornwall to do something else that no member of the Schofield family had ever done: I bought a brand-new car. Every car that I or anyone in my family had ever owned had been second-hand. On the forecourt of the garage, my dad put his arm around me and said how proud he was. My black XR3i was knackered with all the miles it had been asked to travel, so I’d decided that I’d buy a brand-new Volvo 480. It wasn’t a sports car, so the insurance wasn’t prohibitive, but it did have pop-up headlights, which looked cool. It was the worst car I have ever owned. In fact, the first one died very quickly so they swapped it and I got another one. It was just as bad. I was constantly talking about it and how it had gone wrong again, so much so that my mates said that if I ever sold it I would lose half of my conversation. One of the headlights regularly refused to come up so I often drove through London with a winking car.

  I was filming The Movie Game in Milton Keynes. I never understood why we shot it there, in the Open University studios. The camera crew were very old and kept nodding off. We had to retake a link because one of the cameramen yawned so loudly. Anyway, in the car park, before setting off for home, was the first time the car caught fire, which it did on a number of occasions. The final straw was as I drove past the Royal Albert Hall. I pulled over the heater slider and the entire unit fell out of the dashboard and on to my feet, jamming my leg on the accelerator. I was out of control for about ten seconds on Kensington Gore. That was it. The car had to go before it killed me. Thankfully, I wasn’t going to need it because I was about to record a series of programmes around Europe, but my schedule was going to end up making me cry!

  On top of all the other shows I was doing at the time, in 1991, Schofield’s Europe sent me to an amazing set of destinations. When it was announced that I would be doing it, I got a very sweet note from Alan Whicker (the presenter of Whicker’s World, which had run for a groundbreaking thirty years). He said he was prepared to lend me Europe if I let him keep the world. I met witches in Barcelona, filmed in the cathedral-like sewers under Vienna and had a naked sauna in Finland with the rally driver Ari Vatanen. That day of filming required an enormous amount of trust in Chris, the director, and our cameraman and, as a result, I let them show my bum on telly. We filmed in Poland, Switzerland, Iceland, Greece – it was fascinating, but relentless. We did a week’s filming, came back for a day, then went off again. And when I returned home at the end of the six weeks’ filming, I had to immediately set off to record something for Going Live. It was too much.

  I called Anthea Turner, who was going out with Peter at the time. She was the organizer of our group and then, as now, a fixer of domestic dilemmas.

  ‘I don’t have a single item of clean clothing and I have to go filming. I’m so tired and so hungry,’ I sobbed.

  Anthea jumped in her car with hot food and did my washing, as only she would.

  Going Live continued to be a dream to work on. If Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders were filming next door in TC6, they would wander in wearing whatever costumes they had on and just mess around with us. In the course of working on the show, I had skydived from a plane with the Red Devils and been met on the ground by a wing commander who bellowed into my ecstatic face, ‘Now you know why the birds sing.’ We had broadcast live from a train that had been evacuated by a bomb scare, and I was the only one who didn’t know. I wondered why it was so quiet, and it was only the horrified face of the guard at the window that alerted me to the fact that I’d been left behind.

  Judi Dench had come on the show after nearly pulling out the night before because she didn’t think anyone would call in. It was the busiest our phone lines had ever been. I have always been Judi’s greatest fan, and she is something of a fan of mine. I have a framed signed picture she sent me when I was in the Broom Cupboard which reads, ‘From your most ardent admirer’. It’s one of the few possessions I would save if the house burned down, along with my signed Katharine Hepburn picture – but that’s for a bit later. Judi may be a fan, but I have yet to persuade her to sit on the This Morning sofa.

  My idol … Dame Judi Dench.

  Steph and I had been going out for a few months and were seeing more and more of each other. I suppose the one thing that is rare and commands a very high price in this industry is trust. I’d had friends who had been the subjects of ‘kiss and tell’ stories in the newspapers and it made me incredibly wary of trusting anyone. I knew I could trust my friends with my life. I’ve always said I could win 200 million quid on the lottery and trust them to go and pick the money up for me, but trusting my love to someone was new, especially now I was quite well known. It was obvious, though, that Steph was the one to trust with my heart. It helped that we were in the same industry and shared the same friends. It also helped that we were falling in love. I loved her voice and her blue eyes, her blonde hair and … if I’m honest, she had, and indeed still has, great boobs. I felt utterly comfortable with her and totally safe, and my friends adored her.

  I continued the tactic of staying out of central London, and we ate our way up and down Chiswick High Street under the protection of the local restaurateurs: Barry in Haweli if we fancied a curry, Jack in Sabai Sabai if we went for Thai … it’s safe to say I didn’t cook very much.

  By the time the next series of Schofield’s Europe came round I asked Steph if she would like to house-sit for me. She was living with her lovely sister, Georgina, in White City, so it would give both of them space. The house on Netheravon Road had four bedrooms and a lovely kitchen and garden. It would be perfect for her and she could keep an eye on it for me.

  I returned from filming slightly less stressed than after the last series. Steph thanked me for the use of the house; she had loved being there. We went out for dinner, and the next day she began to pack her little Fiat Panda with her belongings. As she closed the hatchback and prepared to leave, I was standing on the front doorstep, watching. As well as watching, I was also thinking – thinking about us, about how much fun it was being together, thinking that I loved her in every way. She was beautiful that day and has been every day since. I was captivated by her dancing blue eyes (I’m definitely an eye man) and melting smile. We clicked on every level – tastes, humour, interests. Yup, I’d fallen deeply in love, and she was so small and so damned cute.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I said from the step.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t go. Unpack the car and stay.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I’m eternally thankful that she did.

  At the time, she was having a nightmare with her bank manager, a very unsympathetic man indeed. She was waiting to be paid, but he was giving her a hard time and was sarcastic to boot. She explained that in a couple of days there would be more in her account; he ‘hoped there would be’.

  I think it was his tone that got my back up. It was time to teach him a lesson.

  I transferred every pound I had in the bank int
o her account. Steph phoned him to check it was there. He was ‘delighted’ and spluttered his ‘surprise’. ‘Good,’ said Steph. ‘If you had been more courteous, I might have kept my account with you. A bank should be there in good times and bad. I shall now be closing my account.’ Which she promptly did, even though he tried so hard to backtrack. She opened another account elsewhere and gave me my money back.

  Matt Goss was going out with Melanie Sykes at the time and the four of us would occasionally meet up for dinner. Matt would also pop over to the house for a chat once in a while. I always knew when he was arriving. I’d hear his car parking, followed by about another ten cars arriving in the street. Matt couldn’t go anywhere without his convoy of fans behind him. I always figured it must drive him mad until, one day, he arrived and was a bit flustered. He came into the house as his posse parked up. They were always very polite in the street.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Matt. ‘Just had a nightmare on the Hogarth Roundabout.’

  ‘Oh! What happened?’

  ‘I lost the bloody fans. Had to drive round three times until they caught up.’

  One of the magazines I loved being interviewed for was Smash Hits. It was always a bit random and bonkers, but great fun. They decided to launch a big awards show to be shown live on BBC1, and I’d been asked to host. The Smash Hits Poll Winners Party had arrived and it was just as random and bonkers as the magazine.

  Each year, there was a different theme. One year, it was ‘underwater’, and Janet Street Porter was producing. I arrived in the morning to rehearse. The show that year was sponsored by Skittles sweets. Onstage was a huge submarine painted in the Skittles rainbow. The PR company executive employed to promote Skittles was overjoyed – he couldn’t believe what he was about to get away with on national television. He phoned the head of the company and told him he should watch the show for a great surprise. His job done for the day, he left the arena. Janet Street Porter arrived.