I, Partridge (24 page)

Incredibly, the rights to
Swallow
are still available for purchase. I can be contacted through the publishers.

170
I’ve stopped doing it now.

171
I can’t speak for Pete of course, but my early interest in these floating vehicles was sparked by the chase sequence in
Live and Let Die
. Sometimes you forget films, don’t you, but this scene has always stayed with me. It’s up there with classic scenes such as the Union Jack parachute bit in
The Spy Who Loved Me
and the scene in
Sophie’s Choice
when she has to choose which of her children to send to their certain death. As you can see, I
love
movies.

172
I have similarly strong views on the death of Princess Diana (indeed, when she died I wanted to ring up the media and say, ‘Happy now??’ but I didn’t have their number).

To this day, there are so many questions that don’t add up. When I hear people refer to it as an ‘accident’, I shake my head and chuckle at them. Ditto when people say the twin towers were not detonated by the CIA.

By a similar token, I’m proud to say that one of my favourite books is Erich Von Daniken’s
Chariots of the Gods
which alleges that Jesus was genuinely an alien. And people may scoff, but I’m yet to meet anyone who can provide a compelling argument that the ascension into heaven was anything other than Christ taking off back to some kind of mothercraft.

Of course, I don’t believe
every
word he writes, but Von Daniken himself says 2% is conjecture and 98% is probable fact.

173
Press play on Track 33.

174
Don’t bother looking for it. It’s a Halifax!

Chapter 24
Other, Better TV Work

PEOPLE WHO WORK IN
broadcasting hate to admit this but it’s true: the vast majority of TV is unwanted. Audiences sit there, stuffing Doritos into their fat mouths, passively allowing television programmes to wash over them with the odd drib or drab landing in their eyes and ears. Do you honestly think anyone ever
wanted
to watch
Going for Gold
with Henry Kelly?
¹⁷⁵
Or set the video for
World in Action
?

It’s hardly fulfilling to pour your heart and soul into making TV content only for it to be used as an audio-visual backdrop to a man doing a crossword or a tired mum smacking one or both or all of her children.

The same cannot be said for corporate, marketing or public information videos. In watching them, your audience has made a conscious, active decision to view. They’ve gone out of their way to remove the free DVD from its polythene sheath, to turn off their BlackBerries for a health and safety induction, or to shuffle their way to the recreation room to learn about the dangers of diabetes.

They’ve made an appointment to view, and that knowledge makes the work utterly thrilling. It was this exciting realm that formed the next stage of my broadcasting career.

I hope this doesn’t sound vulgar but the money is effing brilliant. It’s borderline grotesque. I was
not
complaining. These people will pay through the nose for a presenter who has the gravitas, humility and time on their hands to front content that will be seen by less than a thousand viewers. I had that humility. And time. And gravitas.

Markedly different from publicly available TV work, this kind of presenting was a real learning curve. And I learnt plenty: you
must
smile when you say the name of the product – even if it’s for a genito-urinary complaint. There’s no need to speak louder for a geriatric audience.
¹⁷⁶
And there’s no budget for wardrobe so dress smartly before leaving the house.

Between 1996 and 1998, I became quite indispensable in this specialist strand of broadcasting, having seen off Rob Bonnet and John Stapleton in the land-grab that followed Nick Owen’s back injury. Until then, Nick had earned – and this is only my estimate – more than £12 million a year, and while I didn’t even approach those kind of numbers, I earned enough to pay for a hire-purchase vehicle and a static home.

Play your cards right (and I do) and this kind of work can provide a deliciously regular source of income. This sort of ready dosh can be handy when you need to pay for life’s essentials – groceries, utility bills, the slush fund you set up some years ago to defend yourself against the odd bout of unavoidable legal action.

But I say again – it’s not just anyone who can land these kind of jobs. You need to hit a certain level of ability before the really big boys start knocking on your door. You don’t seriously think that just anyone can be trusted to record a ten-minute sales video for, I dunno, Beccles-based Startrite Intrusion Detection Systems? I mean these alarms save lives.

Pick the wrong man (Rav from
Crimewatch
, for example) and potential customers will take one listen to his voice and zone out. The net result? People are going to wind up dead. Try sticking that on your CV.

So it makes me proud to say that during those years I have fronted over 60 corporate videos for everything from potato-based processed food products to Latvia.

Of course it wasn’t always plain sailing.
¹⁷⁷
I was once cow-bombed while stood on a traditional East Anglian narrowboat
¹⁷⁸
fronting a piece of sales collateral for the county’s leading off-land holiday operators.

It was a sunny afternoon and out on the Norfolk Broads the mercury was nudging 90. On the river-bank beyond, holiday-makers and the unemployed were sunning themselves in 32 degrees of pure British Celsius. It was then that my marketing patter was interrupted by a cow falling on me from a motorway bridge.

Incredibly, a group of militant APFs (anti-Partridge farmers) had decided that revenge was a dish best served deceased.
¹⁷⁹
They had waited for me to cruise beneath them and then tipped the big dead Friesian right on top of me. As I lay there, fighting to catch my breath, trapped under what was essentially a vast leather jacket, I knew I was lucky to still be alive.

It crossed my mind that the animal had simply fallen from the bridge while stopping to look at the view (and what a view – formed when rising sea-levels began to flood medieval peat excavations, the Norfolk Broads, with their reed beds, grazing marshes and wet woodland, offer even the most casual of boaters over 100 miles of stunning navigable waterways). But no. To borrow from the parlance used by the farmers, Partridge had been ‘beefed’.

I mention that story because my publishers felt it would make ‘a good anecdote for your book’, but actually most corporate engagements are far less dangerous. In the year 2000, I was hired to front
Crash, Bang, Wallop
. It neatly brought together three of my biggest passions: cars, car crashes and high-quality sell-through videos.

Had
Police, Camera, Action!
not already been a hit international TV show, it would have been the video that inspired
Police, Camera, Action!
The idea was simple. We would play to one of the most innate of all human traits – rubber-necking.

And I had an idea for a USP: why not show fatalities? Please don’t misunderstand, road deaths break my heart. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been reduced to tears when slowing down at the site of a pile-up to grab a few snaps on the camera phone. But isn’t that the point? By showing unedited footage of RTA fatalities, weren’t we shocking drivers into being more careful? The deader they are, the stronger the message. And believe me, the drivers I had in mind could not have been deader.

In the end I was over-ruled, though we did reach a compromise. We would show horrific accidents, but we’d use crash test dummies. I personally oversaw some of these shoots and I cannot tell you how much fun it was. We had families of four – just dummies remember – flying through windscreens left, right and centre. I hadn’t laughed so much in years. I wanted to do one with a crash test dog but apparently they don’t make them.

We got most of our footage from the Highways Agency and the police, plus the odd one from me following people home from company Christmas parties. I’d do the tailgating and my assistant would hang out of the window with the camcorder. It was simple, safe and almost always ineffective.

Ironically this was the time in my life when I was least at risk of being injured in a car crash myself. Due to an unfortunate Toblerone addiction, I had ballooned
¹⁸⁰
(see picture section). I even disabled the driver-side air bag on my Rover. It was simply not needed.

At this time I was also considering switching to an automatic. Like any real man, I much preferred a manual but my new-found bigness meant there were logistical issues to address. The recent expansion of my left thigh had effectively taken my gear stick out of the equation. When I got into the car, the contents of my leg would take four or five seconds just to settle. I’d sit there watching as it advanced like lava. I’d often have the engine running and a CD playing before it had finally come to rest, with the gear stick nowhere to be seen.

It was a great job to do, though, especially if you loved cars. And I, of course, am every inch the car-o-phile. I can’t recall the first word I ever spoke but I do remember that it didn’t take me long to go polysyllabic. And when I did, into my world came words like combustion, camshaft, Halfords. I didn’t need to use them all that much in those early days of playschool and Tufty Club, but they were just there, tucked away in the back pocket, ready. And to a young child still getting to grips with the world, I cannot tell you how reassuring that was.

Growing up, I adored words and loved reading. I could always be found with my head in a good paper. The rag of choice in the Partridge household was the
Daily Express
. And I actually enjoyed it as a nipper. Which does make sense, given my mental age at the time. But one day, things suddenly changed. I was becoming a man, with my own thoughts, my own opinions, my own pubes. I knew I needed something radically different. I rushed straight out and bought the
Daily Mail
.

I sometimes flirt with the
Telegraph
or peep at the
Times
, but it’s with the
Mail
that I’ve stuck ever since. It really is a rock-solid daily. I especially love Richard Littlejohn. He doesn’t just shoot from the hip, he fires bazookas from it. Immigrants, travelling tinkers, and especially homosexuals – many of his pieces are so good I rip them out and laminate them. I keep them in my downstairs loo, a simple, wipe-clean tribute to one of the most progressive thinkers in the United Kingdom.

Anyway, sorry, I’m jumping around the years here (I’m like a ruddy Tardis!).
¹⁸¹
My point was that as a youth I’d always read the paper. And I’d see stories about teenagers from broken homes joy-riding cars. Well it would turn me green with envy. Speeding round the council estate in somebody else’s car, spaffed off their faces on sniffed glue. It was the stuff of dreams. Apart from the glue. I always imagined that I’d trade my share of the Bostik for a bit longer behind the wheel. Besides, surely it sticks all your nose hairs together?

Of course joy-riding was just a crazy adolescent flight of fancy. In reality I didn’t drive a vehicle until I reached the legal age. I’ll always remember the morning of my 17th birthday. I was hoping to open the curtains and see a shiny new Triumph Dolomite gift-wrapped on the drive. But I didn’t get a car. That’s not to say I wasn’t pleased with my attaché case. The other kids in my class had to make do with satchels (boring!), whereas I looked quite the young professional, striding around with my nearly-new, jet-black Samsonite. It was a great feeling to arrive fashionably late, then make a show of flicking open the lock and pulling out my PE kit.

Mum was the one that took me out for driving lessons. Dad said he wanted to but couldn’t because of his temper. In reality, though, I got taken out very rarely, so I had to improvise. I’d sit on a chair in my bedroom, with a cushion for a steering wheel and upturned school shoes for the clutch, brake and accelerator. I guess these days you’d call it virtual reality. It might sound stupid, but I believe it’s as a direct consequence of my hours in the simulator that I was able to pass my test after just three or more attempts.

But it wasn’t just the driving I loved. I had a real reverence for the Highway Code too. Still do. If Gutenburg had known that one day his printing press would allow for the publication of the Highway Code, I’m sure he would have given us a pretty broad smile and an enthusiastic medieval thumbs-up. Because people forget that it doesn’t just save lives, it’s also a damn good read. More than that, it can help in social situations. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve broken into an impromptu braking distances quiz to plug an awkward silence at a cocktail party.

I remember once June Whitfield thought the braking distance for a car travelling at 50mph was 28 metres, not 38. Imagine that! Yet while her error quite understandably got one of the biggest laughs of the night, I was still duty-bound to tell her that those ten metres might be a harmless bit of fun at a drinks reception, but out on the open road they could mean the difference between a quiet Sunday drive and a dead baby.

I never heard back from the DVLA, but for the sake of all our children I can only pray they came down on her like a ton of bricks. That said, a ten-car pile-up triggered by the ignorance of June Whitfield would have been manna from heaven for
Crash, Bang, Wallop
.