It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (17 page)

I arrived at the radio studio early – 7.30 a.m. to be precise – in order to give myself time to gather my thoughts and take several deep breaths. After the usual routine of pushing the bell and getting no answer I was finally allowed in by someone who was clearly baffled to see me.’You’re not on till after eight,’ they said with some agitation as they ushered me into an anteroom outside the studio that looked as though it had been used as a mobile military hospital, so total was the chaos and carnage.’Did someone tell you that you were on earlier?’

‘Oh no,’ I replied.’I just wanted to be here in good time, you know, to “get in the zone” or whatever it’s called. Soak up the atmosphere.’

They looked at me as though I was mad, then apparently decided that I was taking the piss, turned on their heels and clumped back into the studio. From the clock on the wall I could see that there were at least twenty-five minutes to go before I was needed, and I suddenly had that sense of being in a doctor’s waiting room, about to receive some extremely unpleasant test results.’Ah yes, Mr … Commode is it? We’ve got your blood samples back and I’m afraid it’s bad news. Very bad news. Yes, it seems that you have a severe case of
criticus totalis fraudulenta
with an underlying bout of
radioramblus incompetentis
. Unfortunately it’s terminal – you’ll never broadcast in this town again. Now, take these two paracetamol and go crawl under a rock and die …’

Whilst it had seemed very sensible to arrive early, I was now starting to realise the benefits of just turning up and going straight on – at least you didn’t have time to sit there
sweating bullets while the second hand slowed to a crawl and time expanded infinitely before you. By the time 7.45 rolled around I was on the point of puking. What the hell had I been thinking? I’d already proved that I couldn’t do this in front of several thousand listeners including my mother. Why on earth was I putting myself through this humiliation again? In what would become a common experience I realised that if the radio station suddenly suffered a massive power cut and I was sent home without having had the chance to broadcast I would be relieved and delighted. I started unconsciously praying for just such an eventuality, imploring the heavens to rain down fire (only a
little
fire, obviously, not enough to
hurt
anyone – just enough to cause an electrical malfunction). Unfortunately, I have always believed vociferously in a non-interventionist God, and if the Almighty was listening he took this moment to prove to me that I was right by doing absolutely nothing; ‘Sorry, but apparently I don’t intervene. Your words, not mine. Have a nice day.’

Over the next half-hour I aged about fifty years, losing half my body weight in sweat that poured from my palms, armpits, and other embarrassing glandular areas like Albert Brooks experiencing his on-air flop-sweat meltdown in
Broadcast News
. By the time it was finally my turn to go on, I looked like I’d been for a refreshing pre-broadcast swim without first removing my clothes. I didn’t so much walk into the studio as ooze, before pouring myself like a puddle into the handily water-resistant chair behind the ‘blue microphone’, my fluid body held together by nothing more than surface tension.

But amazingly, despite my reversion to liquid form, the hours and days of practice, practice, practice paid off. I took a deep breath, unfolded my scripted sheet of notes, waited for Sarah to say, ‘So Mark, what have you got on video for us this week?’ and then started to read. Slowly and surely. Clearly and precisely. Factually and informatively.

Or, put more simply, boringly.

To be honest, I had no idea how it was going – the only sound I could hear was that of my heart beating out a percussive accompaniment to the chorus of ‘76 Trombones and a Euphonium’. But as each successive paragraph went by I knew that I was not cocking it up as before. I was not gabbling, I was not speaking incomprehensibly fast, I was remembering to breathe, and (most importantly) I had a script with a beginning, middle and end, and a well-rounded exit strategy. So when I finally got to the bit which read ‘and that would be
my
pick of the week, now back to you, Sarah.’ I was feeling pretty damned pleased with myself. As I finished, my physical body seemed to re-coagulate back into semi-solid form and I was able to evolve upward out of my chair, like an amphibian climbing out of the protean slime, and exit in the manner of some higher ape form doing an almost passable impression of early Stone Age man.

I had got away with it. I had not been totally rubbish. I had managed to read my entire script from start to finish without stumbling, and had kept pretty close to time in the process.

I had been … professional!

I was heading for the door which led back on to the street whence I had been thrust so rudely last time when a woman
whose face I didn’t recognise came out of the control room. She may have been the producer, or the assistant producer, and for the purposes of this story, she will be played by Kelly Macdonald, or someone of equally arresting reputation.

‘Hi,’ she said gaily, with just a hint of unsettling concern.

‘Oh, hi,’ I replied (clearly being on the radio had turned me into a fabulous wit and raconteur).

‘Just wanted to make sure everything was OK?’

Hmm. That sounded less than congratulatory. Perhaps I
had
been rubbish.

‘Oh yes, fine by me,’ I said, attempting to sound as if I did this all the time and it hadn’t been a big deal or anything – I had, after all, falsely told everyone that I had ‘loads of radio experience’.

‘Is anything …
wrong
?’ she asked, again more concerned than interrogative, which was in itself rather disconcerting.

‘Um, no I don’t think so,’ I flannelled.’ It all seemed to go alright … didn’t it?’

‘Oh yes,’ she replied.’It was “alright”. It was perfectly … “alright”.’

‘So it
was
… alright?’

‘Yes, like I said, “alright” is what it was. It’s just that …

’ Here we go. Here comes the tidal wave of recrimination and blame. Here’s the broadside about the number of complaints they got last time they put me on-air; about how I clearly lied to them when I said I knew my way around a radio station; about how the station’s bosses were now threatening to fire people for putting an eejit like me on their radio station and about how I was never ever going to be
allowed back into the building. Well, hell, I deserved it. I had gone and blagged myself into a job I was clearly not capable of performing, exactly as I had done with the
Time Out
listings fiasco and the lost cinema and the angry punters on the phone and all the rest of it. The LBC bosses may even have spoken to Geoff Andrew and had their suspicions about me being a lying useless fake confirmed.

‘It’s just that,’ she resumed valiantly, ‘we all kind of liked it last time when you sort of pretended that you didn’t know what you were doing.’

‘Pardon?’

‘You know, last time when you did that thing about pretending to be making it all up on the spot, as if you’d just walked into the room and said the first thing that came into your head.’

‘
What
?’

‘The
goofy
thing. The
funny
thing. The “I’ve got no idea what I’m doing here but I’ll give it a try anyway” thing. Your
act
. I mean, we all
know
it’s an act, but we thought it was funny.’

I was stunned (yet again). And shocked. Shocked
and

stunned. Positively Rutled.

‘You thought it was … funny?’

‘
Oh yes
, but in the way you intended obviously. We were laughing our heads off in the control room. At one point I think the engineer even started to think that you weren’t putting it on. But it was really entertaining, even if you weren’t interested in the videos which, let’s be honest, most people aren’t.’

‘Aren’t they?’

‘No, not really. After all, it
is
first thing on a Sunday morning. Most people are just tuning in to be entertained. Which was sort of the problem today.’

‘You didn’t like what I did today?’

‘Oh no, like I said it was fine, absolutely fine. If a bit … boring.’

‘Boring?’

‘Yes, well, you know, a bit downbeat.’

‘But I
did
review the videos.’

‘Yes, you did review the videos.’

‘And my reviews were considered, and balanced, and sensibly delivered.’

‘Sensibly delivered. Yes.’

‘But you didn’t like them?’

‘Not as much as the funny ones, no.’

‘So you
wanted
me to be funny?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘And to sound as if I didn’t know what I was doing?’

‘Yes, sort of.’

‘And to speak as if I was making it up as I go along?’

‘Well,’ she said, drawing herself closer, somewhat conspiratorially, ‘we’d just prefer it if you didn’t sound like you were reading a script.’

‘Which I did today?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because today I
was
reading a script.’

‘Apparently so.’

‘Whereas last time I wasn’t.’

‘No.’

‘I was just “making it up”.’

‘Exactly.’

She smiled brightly, shook me by the hand (firm but fair) guided me toward the exit, and the next thing I knew I was back out on the deserted street with the same feeling of having been unsuspectingly violated.

Several years later I would come to recognise the wisdom of this advice, and to accept that I have probably built my entire radio career around the principle of ‘pretending not to know what you’re doing and sounding like you’re making it up on the spot’. The only thing is I have
never
pretended – I have
never
known what I am doing. It’s so much easier when it isn’t an act – when you are genuinely incompetent. It also helps when you are right. And I am both of those things. Incompetent, but right.

But standing out on that deserted street in London without even my mother to call for reassurance (I hadn’t told her about the repeat appearance after the disaster of the first) I felt nothing other than despair and defeat. I had tried my best to be good at something and I had wound up being even worse than I was the first time round. Hell, as far as I could see I didn’t even know the difference between good and bad any more. I was lousy at listings and even worse at radio. I had run away from Manchester only to blot my copybook in London and the walls were closing in. Any minute now someone was going to blow the whistle on my budding career and I was going to be revealed for the talentless fraudster that I truly was.

That I truly
am
.

I needed to escape.

I needed to put clear blue water between myself and my very public failures.

I went home and listened to Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ third album
Don’t Stand Me Down
and heard Kevin Rowland speaking to me and me alone, impeaching me to ‘Go west, go west young man …’.

So I did.

Like Withnail & I, who went on holiday by mistake, I arrived in New York more by accident than design.

I was aiming for Los Angeles, following in the footsteps of my close friend Tim Polecat who was sending back daily reports about how much better it was than England because the restaurants actually understood the meaning of the word ‘service’ and the garage owners didn’t make that oddly British tooth-sucking noise every time they looked under your bonnet meaning you were about to be screwed for a grand and your car wouldn’t be ready till Wednesday. Tim used to live in Mill Hill, and it was there that he and I had cemented our friendship over a shared appreciation of the complex time structures and artistic merits of the entire
Planet of the Apes
movie cycle which (as we know) played such an important role in my political education. We had also bonded over a mutual belief that the seventies celluloid
car-crash
Caligula
was actually some weird form of masterpiece, rather than just an expensive porno flop with big-name stars like Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and Sir John Gielgud talking in between the interstitial Penthouse Pet sex scenes. Several years later I would oversee a clumsy but effective Channel 4 recut of
Caligula
which removed all the hard-core porno shots (which had been stuck in willy-nilly by
Penthouse
-owner-cum-movie-producer Bob Guccione) in a belated attempt to prove that Tim and I were on to something. When Guccione’s lawyers started making threatening noises, I took it as proof that we had been right all along.