It's Not What You Think (21 page)

10 The dead body in the river

  9 Don’t phone it’s just for fun—my first run-in link and catchphrase

  8 My pre-show bath—6.46-6.50 every day without fail

7 6

‘More Tea, Vicar’ ‘One Lump or Two’

}

Two tunes that still hijack my headspace from time to time

  5 Ben the Boffin—we had a big bro’—little bro’ bond going on

  4 Zig and Zag—simply the best

  3 Paula—telling the shark experts to eff off

  2 Gaby—the Hutch to my Starsky, the Bodie to my Doyle

  1 The first ever show—when I got stuck in the loo as the handle came off in my hand two minutes before we were due to go on air
*

The Big Breakfast
ended up winning the franchise by a mile.
It was bold and brash and most importantly a direct alternative to anything else on offer at that time of the morning. It was like Saturday morning kids telly but every day, which caused it to evolve more quickly. Again it was a deluge of ideas, which only served to make it more compelling—no one knew what was going to happen next because we didn’t know what was going to happen next. It was never going to last for ever—this we did know—but it would certainly cause a huge fuss whilst it was around.

On the first day of broadcast
The Big Breakfast
more than quadrupled the Channel 4 audience from 100,000 to almost half a million; by the end of the first few weeks this had risen to 750,000 and within a year we were over a million. After that the next target was to beat the once indomitable
GMTV.

Both the show and everyone on it were hailed as an overnight success, and that’s exactly how it felt even though, especially as far as I was
concerned, it wasn’t the case. But whenever things come good it suddenly feels like it’s all been so much easier than it actually has. Success has a knack of taking away the pain of hard work and I had never experienced or even imagined success on the scale of
The Big Breakfast.

Gaby Roslin was my co-host, but it was oh so nearly somebody else who just happened to drop out at the last minute. Thank heaven they did as

Gaby turned out to be the perfect partner. She was just a tad older than me and from the more traditional school of television presenting, she was also a drama student. I’m sure she won’t mind me saying that I added the humour while she steered the ship. We were a good team together, covering each other’s backs whenever things started to go wrong, unlike some presenters who use such situations to score points against each other. A fruitless exercise that serves no purpose whatsoever, especially to the viewers who just want you to get on with things.

Every single day on
The Big Breakfast
was an unforgettable pleasure. Sure, we shouted and screamed at each other behind the scenes—me in particular—but we all just wanted to get things right and sometimes this involves ‘difference of opinions’.

There are hundreds of stories about
The Big Breakfast
that I’d love to share with you, enough to fill a whole book on their own, but the pages are against us so let me just pick the one, here goes.

10 Suzi Quatro

  9 Annie Lennox (Eurythmics days)

  8 Kate Bush

  7 Chrissie Hynde

  6 Jay Aston—Bucks Fizz

  5 Debbie Harry

  4 Boy George (it was a good couple of weeks before I realised he was a bloke)

  3 Sharlene Spiteri

  2 Kylie

  1 Kim Wilde

One of the worst things about doing a regular show
is when your partner in crime decides to take a holiday. When Gaby was off it was nothing short of a nightmare. Here you have someone who knows both you and the show inside out and they disappear for a fortnight to be replaced by someone who has no idea about either. Add to these facts that sometimes the bosses would draft in a ‘name’ who had never presented television at all before and we are talking daily disaster. We had some terrible experiences as a result of this—maybe that’s why God decided to send me the guest hostess from heaven to even things out a little. God old God.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Kim Wilde into the proceedings—Kim Bloody Wilde, I tell you. What an awesome female.

Kim was to be a guest presenter for a week and this was one of the rare weeks none of the boys on the crew minded Gaby having off. We still loved ‘The Great Roz’, of course we did, but this was Kim Wilde we’re talking about here. Kim was in the ‘never presented on telly at all before bracket’ but did any of us care? Not for a second, we were all in love with her and had been for years. When she arrived it was as if Cleopatra had just entered the gates of Rome.

She was glamorous and giggly and so so so much sexier than even any of us had dared to imagine. Kim was a big fan of the show and threw
herself into the spirit of things right from the off; doing anything that was asked of her, which just happened to include one Wednesday morning having to crawl into a one-man tent with me during an ad break.

Every show, just before the eight o’clock news, we re-ran the main title sequence to start the next hour after which Gaby and I would burst on the screen to declare the day and date and why it might be significant. We called it ‘Today’s the day’. It was a neat idea that took no time at all whilst also giving the viewer added value and often involved a product new to the market—hence the presence of a brand new, revolutionary one-man tent.

The producer, bless his cotton socks, thought it would be a good idea for Kim and I to be in the tent when the shot came to us but with the flap zipped up. On his cue we would rip open the zip, reveal our happy, smiling faces and bid the world good morning. Having already been in the tent for about a minute waiting for the ad break to finish and for the titles to start, we were beginning to find the situation somewhat comical. Like two kids hiding in a wardrobe hoping not to be found we began to snigger and feel naughty all at the same time. We were also so close our noses were almost touching. From nowhere a voice told me it was just one of those moments that you have to grab in life, so as the title music having started in our earpieces, I whispered to Kim, ‘We could do anything now and no one would know.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked quizzically, becoming intrigued.

‘Well, anything, as long as we weren’t still doing it when the zip opens.’

The title music was about halfway through and the production assistant had started counting down to our cue.

‘What like?’ she enquired, raising an eyebrow as if to encourage me to do whatever it was I had in mind.

At which point I simply went to kiss her.

I didn’t care—I just had to do it, after all what’s life for if not for kissing Kim Wilde in a one-man tent seconds before welcoming the world to a new day live on television? After no more than what was initially a nibble really on that famous full top lip of hers, Kim kissed me back. I took this as a green light to go for it—what followed next was the most memorable, fantasy-filled, nigh on miraculous five-second snog any red-blooded male could ever experience.

As the countdown ended and the director gave us our cue, the zipped up door of the tent now filling the screen remained fastened for just that little bit longer than it should have done. And now you know why.

‘Cue!’ the director said again, ‘what’s going on in there?’

The next Monday Gaby was back on the show.

‘How was Kim last week?’ she asked.

‘She was incredible,’ I replied.

Gaby looked a little put out.

‘Oh no, not at presenting, Gabs, you know there’s no one comes close to you as far as that’s concerned—I’m talking about as a woman.’

‘What do you mean as a woman?’

‘She’s my new girlfriend—I kissed her in a tent on the show last week and now we’re going out.’

Gaby half smiled at what she thought was a joke but it was true—Kim and I had since got it together and were now an item as by now my marriage to Carol was unfortunately no more.

Out of all the questionable things I have ever done, and there have been many, marrying Carol is way up there. Impulse can be a good thing—in fact, impulse can be a great thing, but I have concluded that perhaps it is an emotion best employed in situations that may not be that important. Impulse is different to having a gut feeling. A gut feeling is more considered. It’s the feeling after the thought, whereas there is little thought to impulse and especially to the consequences of it. My marriage to Carol was based on impulse and the hope that it might work as opposed to any concrete reasons as to why it actually would.

When I think back now, it’s like it never happened. It’s hard to believe we were ever husband and wife.

Carol is the star in any room, in any situation. She was born with an extraordinary self-confidence and a take on life that’s unique compared with any other I have ever come across. I still don’t understand what makes her tick but whatever it is, it makes for a highly entertaining human being. She is also as hard as nails and not to be messed with.

After I had made a few quid in the first flushes of
The Big Breakfast
we bought a modest but pretty house on the edge of Hampstead Heath. It was
a magnificent location in which to live but, as always in life, when the heart’s not happy it doesn’t matter what the address says and if it takes someone having to leave before the situation can improve then that’s what has to happen.

I know for sure I was really not very happy at all and I suspect Carol was not feeling dissimilar. We were both being nicer to everyone else than we were to each other—a surefire sign of a couple in turmoil. We were starting to bicker at home and when we weren’t bickering we were becoming more and more distant, slowly and silently we were making each other miserable and as neither of us are the miserable type, this was not a sustainable situation.

Looking back, I can see how my success was more likely the determining factor in our break-up. Carol has a lot to bring to the table and now here she was married to a guy who was the talk of the town. Shrinking and violet are not two words one would naturally associate with my first wife, and quite rightly so.

Princess Diana once famously said of Prince Charlie’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, ‘There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a little bit crowded.’ Well, when it came to Carol and me, there was no longer even enough room for two!

And you know—sometimes that’s just the way it is. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s not a crime, it’s just a fact. Carol and I both wanted to be the lead singer of the band—therefore the band was destined to split.

I remember the afternoon it happened. It was a Tuesday and I was upstairs in bed. My days were divided into two because of my early morning start. I would be up and out with the lark and so I would always have a couple of hours’ sleep in the afternoon to stop me feeling like I was on drugs come the evening—anyone who has done regular earlies will know exactly what I’m talking about.

I was lying, eyes wide open, thinking the same thing I had been thinking for weeks.

‘I am so unhappy, we are so unhappy, why are we together, what are we going to do about this?’

I am not an individual that is at ease with confrontation—I am a man after all. And this was also Carol we were talking about here—not the easiest person to bring round to any point of view other than her own on
even the most trivial of subjects, let alone her marriage. But I had to do something, I was dying inside.

I got up out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen.

‘Alright?’ she said.

‘Not really, no,’ I replied.

‘Why, what’s the matter?’

‘I don’t think we should be together any more.’

There, I’d said it, with those few words it was out in the open.

One hour later, I was in my car driving away from a woman who had once been my best friend, a woman with whom I’d shared so much joy and laughter and yet we had now come to a point where we could barely recognise a single thing we had in common.

How does something like that happen to two people? All very sad.

10 Try not to leave on a row

  9 Try to resist going back

  8 Don’t bleat about it to friends

  7 Don’t jump into bed with someone at the next available opportunity

  6 Don’t worry about who gets what—it’s all just stuff

  5 Try to remember the good bits

  4 Don’t beat yourself up about it

  3 Don’t listen to lawyers—they will mess with your head

  2 Always remember you liked each other at the beginning

  1 Sort out somewhere to sleep that first night

Directly after my split with Carol
I was the first person to actually stay in
The Big Breakfast
house for real. I slept in Ben the Boffin’s room. Ben was our computer games expert, a slot he presented from his make-believe bedroom—make-believe for him maybe but reality then for me—for a few nights at least.

They really were a bizarre few days—the press having heard of my marriage break-up were looking for me all over the place when I was at the house/work the whole time. ‘How’s he getting in and out of the show without us being able to tail him?’ they wondered. Well, I wasn’t, I was in temporary residence at numbers 1 and 2 Lock Keepers Cottages, the home of the mighty
BB.

The bosses at Planet 24 didn’t mind me staying there, not for a second, but they were genuinely concerned about my circumstances and wanted me to be happy and so took it upon themselves to find me a new, more permanent address. This was to be a two-part process, the first part of which would involve me moving in with Zig and Zag, the show’s two massively popular space alien puppets.

Zig and Zag were, in real life, two former art students by the names of Mick and Keiron. They were based in Dublin and despite the huge popularity of their creations, they felt there was no need for them to move
across to London, preferring instead to fly over once a fortnight to prerecord their segments. Zig and Zag were a smash, by far the most popular things on the show and if this was what it took to keep Mick and Kieron happy then we would all have to make it work.

The Zig and Zag pre-records took place every other weekend and to be honest were a complete pain in the neck, but it was more than worth it as the guys were so good. That said, it was an organisational nightmare.

First of all you’re dealing with a crew who have been working all week on the main show and who are now being asked to come in one weekend out of every two. Next you have to write eight scripts, book eight guests, get them there, brief them, rehearse them and keep the energy going the whole time. As well as this the wardrobe department had to prepare eight different outfits, a Polaroid of each of these outfits would then be pinned to the wall so we could then attempt to match them up come the live show.

Ninety per cent of the time you saw me leave Gaby to go and join Zig and Zag in their bathroom, I was in fact just stepping off camera and going to have a cup of tea for the next ten minutes whilst the VT operator simply pressed the play button. By the way, the Zig and Zag outtakes tape is to this day the funniest thing I have ever seen. I still have a copy and watch it from time to time. It never fails to crack me up. I should put it on YouTube.

A person should always know their value in life and Mick and Keiron certainly knew theirs. Somehow they had managed to get the bosses to rent them an amazing warehouse apartment in the Docklands for when they were over, even though that would only be for two days out of every fourteen. I am not exaggerating when I say that their apartment was the greatest living space I had ever seen.

It was two floors and almost completely open plan. At a guess I would say it was 4000 square feet with bare brick walls, a huge open fire and balconies onto the river. This was more James Bond than Planet Zog (Zig and Zag’s native home), but good luck to the boys. Why not? When you’re hot, milk things for everything they’re worth—you can be a long time cold and then no one wants to know.

The bosses had the idea that I could move in with the guys whilst they found me a place of my own—if it was OK with Mick and Keiron that was.
They couldn’t have been nicer about the situation, they could see I was in a fix and were happy to help. So that was it, for a while we were a half-puppet/half-human family except for one occasion when the puppets outnumbered the humans.

The apartment came fully furnished with a huge oak dining table next to the kitchen where, early on a Sunday morning following a pretty heavy night out, I staggered down the wrought-iron stairs to be confronted by not one Zig and one Zag but three of each, all sat down as if waiting for their breakfast. I thought I was seeing things and became even more confused when I noticed that two of the Zigs and two of the Zags looked considerably different to the Zig and Zag closest to me.

It was new puppet time!

The original Zig and Zag had come to the end of the line and now here they were being forced to sit face to face with not one but two each of their clean, fluffy, sparkly-eyed, slightly weird-looking replacements. What a terrible thing to do to my co-hosts. They had served their television show well and this was their reward. Not even the chance of a quick dry clean to see if they scrub up a little and maybe last a few more weeks before being consigned to the scrapheap. It was already a sad scene and one made even sadder by the fact that because they were old, and less rigid compared to their new counterparts who seemed to be sat bolt upright ready for anything, my boys had slumped down in their chairs, looking almost as if they had suffered some kind of seizure, with their lifeless eyes staring blankly off into the distance and their mouths hanging open as if attempting to utter one final alien word.

That day at the pre-records I almost couldn’t bear to look at the imposters—two of them having been drafted in straight away to take over. If they thought they were just going to pick up where the original Zig and Zag had left off, they had another think coming. These weren’t my boys—I knew it, they knew it, the crew knew it and I wanted to make sure the viewers knew it. It wasn’t long into the recording of that day’s first segment that the opportunity to do so presented itself. Zig tried to pull one of his trademark comedy faces but it just didn’t work, he couldn’t do it, he was all new and stiff, like an ageing Hollywood actress who had had too much facial work. I was thrilled and didn’t waste a second pouncing on Zig to ask if there was anything the matter as he didn’t seem himself today,
Zig for once was lost for words and the new Zag, feeling obliged to defend him was about to speak when I turned around and scowled,

‘And don’t you look at me like that either!’

‘Like what?’ protested Zag.

‘Like you have never looked at me before,’ I declared triumphantly. ‘Like all of a sudden you are different!’

By this time we were all in hysterics, I could feel Mick and Keiron killing themselves where they were lying down on the floor next to my feet.

After the recording session was over, we all had to admit the new puppets had come through their initiation with flying colours, providing us with endless new material. That night, however, my old pals, the first Zig and Zag, my buddies in
The Big Breakfast
Bathroom for the last twelve months, were to pay me one last visit so they could say their goodbyes…

I was fast asleep in bed when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I almost jumped out of my skin before turning round to see who it was. When I did so it was none other than the original Zig and Zag back for one last performance.

‘Hey Chrissie,’ Zig whispered, ‘we just wanted to say thanks.’

‘Yes—and that we’ll miss you,’ added Zag.

‘And, and, and—and!’ said Zig triumphantly.

‘Oh yes, and!’ confirmed Zag.

‘Every speech deserves a nice big “and” somewhere in the middle of it, eh Zag?’

‘Indeed, brother Zig, indeed.’

They both giggled.

‘But hey, Chrissie, just one more thing,’ Zig went on in an almost serious voice, as serious as I’d ever heard him, ‘we just wanted to say—we love you.’

‘Yeah—you silly old ginger-haired megalomaniac,’ agreed Zag sincerely. I could feel myself welling up, I had genuine love for these puppets but of course they had to leave on a joke.

‘And even though sometimes you think this apartment is yours now, and bring girls back and do things with them, we want you to know that we’ve seen you in the shower and you have our greatest sympathy.’

‘Yeah, no man should have to make excuses for that,’ Zag could barely get his words out for laughing.

It was both hilarious and poignant at the same time and at no stage did Mick and Keiron admit to being in the room. It was a moment that will stay with me for ever. That night, for both the first and the last time, it was just the three of us.

Mick and Keiron are still the funniest things on TV anywhere in the world. They host an entertainment show back over in Ireland with their new puppets Podge and Roge, two naughty old Catholic monks—go find it, it’s all over YouTube and is as funny as anything I’ve ever seen.