by Dom Joly
There was always an eclectic mix of people hanging around: Rebekah Wade/Brooks, the ill-fated CEO of News International, lived next door with her husband Charlie, and David Cameron, not yet prime minister, would often pop by for drinks. It was at Alex James’s that I met Jeremy Clarkson. There then followed invitations to his house for New Year’s Eve. Stacey and I went along there and didn’t really know anybody. We tucked into the free booze and eventually got some food from the buffet and sat down at a table. It was only then that I noticed we’d plonked ourselves right next to Cameron. I was quite pissed by this stage and thought I’d be amusing by teasing him about keeping a diary of his journey towards becoming PM. I told him that should it all go pear-shaped he’d have a lovely nest egg from eager publishers. I then launched into my views on how he would eventually be unseated by Boris. It would be fair to say that we did not have an instant rapport and I could see Cameron longing for some way to escape this arsehole seated next to him.
Suddenly Clarkson appeared through a door. He was holding a very realistic-looking replica AK47, and unbeknownst to the future PM he proceeded to point it at Cameron’s head. I instantly reached for my iPhone in my pocket, hoping to grab a photo that would hopefully buy me a retirement home in the South of France, but the moment was gone before I could act.
I think that it was soon noted that I was probably not the most desirable guest in the ‘set’ and the invitations dried up as media attention heightened; with both the election and the subsequent Hackinggate looming, they started to close ranks and batten down the hatches. This was annoying as I was ploughing my random insider knowledge into a spoof column that I was now writing for the Independent.
I had come up with a fake persona called Cooper Brown, a horrible, right-wing American film executive who was now in the UK doing a sort of reverse Piers Morgan. In the column, Cooper was married to a posh Brit with impeccable Tory connections that allowed him access to political salons, and he dished the dirt in no uncertain terms. I knew that the column was working when the Indy letters pages started filling up with disgruntled lefties announcing that they would be scrapping their subscription to the paper if this ‘horrible Nazi’ wasn’t fired immediately. Cooper Brown lasted a couple of years and was then resuscitated in the i. I was very fond of him.
A couple of years later, a reporter from the Mail rang me up. He had found out that I had been present at a party at Alex James’s house when some monumental conversation had apparently taken place between Cameron and Rebekah Brooks. Had I noticed anything of this that night? asked the reporter. Sadly, all I could remember was that two other members of Blur had been there and we were just a Damon Albarn away from a full house . . . This was not the scoop that the reporter wanted.
Meanwhile, my wanderlust had not gone unnoticed by television channels. I started to get offers of travel shows, some terrible, others just awful. Then one day the phone rang with an offer to film an episode of Rough Guide Extreme.
‘Do you want to go film something in Nicaragua?’ The caller was a little fuzzy-sounding on the phone and I couldn’t really hear her that well. I was in the Cotswolds dead zone for mobiles and I was just managing to retain one bar by being perched halfway up an old willow tree hanging over the River Coln.
‘Sure . . . Sounds like fun . . .’ I was cut off and half-fell out of the tree simultaneously.
Looking back, this was probably a sign, but I ignored it. I continued my long, contemplative walk alongside my two dogs, Oscar and Huxley. Huxley looked troubled – he worried a lot about stuff and was a very wise old dog. ‘Nicaragua?’ he growled. ‘Sounds dodgy. Did you ask her what you were going to be doing out there?’ (Uh-oh: talking dog alert . . .)
I ignored him, but he was right: I hadn’t got a clue and I should have known by now never to accept random TV shows without reading the small print. I emailed the producers the moment I got back home but it was too late – I was committed. I asked them to get me a schedule of what we would be doing. It arrived half an hour later:
Day One – Look round Managua (so far so good)
Day Two – Visit old capital of Leon (this is great)
Day Three – Climb volcano (uh-oh!!!!)
I stopped reading and started to panic. I was not the fittest man in the world and at that time tended to avoid all forms of physical exercise apart from my daily dog walk. The phone rang – it was the show’s director – this lot didn’t hang about . . .
‘We’re so excited that you’re going to be doing this . . . We’ve found another really fun thing to do – can you snowboard? It’s just that there’s another volcano that you can board down on the ashes, and we thought that it would make really good telly . . .’
This was getting a lot worse. Luckily, I had my failsafe escape clause.
‘No, I’m afraid that I can’t snowboard, let alone ashboard – I’m a skier, always have been . . .’
I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief.
‘No problem,’ said the unstoppable director. ‘We’ll ship some skis and boots out – what size are you? This is going to be great . . .’
Two weeks later, I was in the quite stupidly hot customs shed in central Managua, trying to negotiate the pick-up of said skis and boots. Opposing me in this venture were about a hundred different officials who all needed forms signing and palms greased. My skis were, apparently, the very first pair ever to be imported into the country and customs were sure that this was some elaborate gringo reverse-cocaine-smuggling scam. (The term gringo, by the way, comes from old Mexico. When the US invaded in the early nineteenth century they wore green uniforms. Angry locals used to write ‘green go home’ on the walls everywhere – interesting fact, no?) But I digress.
It had been difficult enough to even find the customs shed. Managua, it turned out, was a city where the streets literally have no name. Everything was directed from a tree in the rough centre of the city. So you were given directions like, it’s two blocks towards the lake (South) from the tree and then three blocks up (East) and then five blocks towards the hills (North). To make matters even more complicated, someone in a big truck knocked the tree over about twenty years ago, so Managuans then had to do their directions from where the tree used to be – but this got too confusing, even for Managuans, so they planted a new one.
The ominous-looking Cerro Negro, whose smoking black hulk was visible from my hotel window, was the youngest and most active of all Nicaragua’s volcanoes. It had erupted so recently that, unlike all the others, it hadn’t even had time to allow any greenery to grow on it. It just looked mean, like a big school bully waiting to give me a good kicking and steal all my lunch money.
With my skis on my back, I set off on the hour-and-a-half climb to the summit of the bully. It wasn’t too arduous and I started to feel a little cocky as I cleared the top of the jagged lava flow and reached the bottom of the long ridge that would eventually take us to my ‘departure point’, as my guide insisted on calling it. Half an hour later and I was looking down a fifty-degree slope made up entirely of little sharp black rocks. To me, ash conjured up an image of sandy soft stuff, but something must have been lost in translation. As I contemplated the descent and the cameras started to set up, smelling blood, we were joined by two boarders from Leon. The boards in question were not snowboards, more metal toboggans, and the astonished looks that they gave my skis – and me – made me realise that I was in big trouble.
It was too late, however – the cameras were ready and I was a professional . . . Except I wasn’t. I looked down the black slope and had a moment of complete panic. I’d seen this scene before somewhere on something called When TV Goes Tits-Up. I knew that I really shouldn’t do any more thinking. I turned my skis to face the slope. I started to move . . . just . . . I slipped down about three metres and then the skis stuck fast on the rocky ground and I went arse over tit, cutting up my face as I planted it hard into the sharp little rocks. Then I felt the whole slope starting to slip downwards: an ashalanche. Did
these even exist? I stuck my skis hard into the moving shale and managed to stop my descent. So there I was, stuck to the slopes of a live Nicaraguan volcano in full ski gear while the cameras rolled – I really should have listened to my dog.
It was clear that there was no way you could ski down this thing, and I managed to get this salient fact over to the director along with quite a few choice expletives regarding his ‘research’. My guide managed to clamber down to me and together we got my skis off and he gave me one of the toboggans that we should have used in the first place. I gingerly tried to launch myself down the slope on this new vehicle, hoping to recover some adrenaline-credibility on camera. Sadly, I kicked it too hard and the foot board came flying off, which made the front of the thing bury itself into the stones and I came to another embarrassing halt. As this was happening, several boarders zoomed past me whooping loudly in a no fear kind of way and I realised that any plans to attend the BAFTAs with this particular programme were going to have to be shelved. Eventually, I managed to roll and stumble down to the bottom of the nightmarish lunarscape and headed off to find our vehicle, bleeding and bruised – this had not been my finest hour.
Our final Nicaraguan destination was a pretty little seaside town called San Juan del Sur, just north of the Costa Rican border. The crew and I were spending a couple of days relaxing there at the end of the shoot. On our first evening in town, we headed off down to the beach for a spot of supper. We found the perfect-looking seaside restaurant and I’d just ordered a ceviche and a chilled bottle of Chilean wine – all was well with the world.
It was then that I noticed the guy on the beach. He was shirtless, had one of those torches that you wear on your head and he was stumbling around, looking for his flip-flop. I knew this because he kept shouting, ‘Where’s my goddam flip-flop?’ in a soft Texan accent. It was clear that the guy was pretty wasted. He was having quite the problem standing up. He eventually gave up on his quest and staggered towards our restaurant. He tried to negotiate the low wall dividing the dining area from the beach but this proved to be way too much of a problem and he tripped and fell into our table, sending everything flying. We all jumped up as the drunken guy stood up unsteadily and mumbled apologies, before crashing into another table and going down again. It was at this moment that I recognised him. It was Matthew McConaughey. This was way before his recent McConnaissance and Oscar redemption. This was very much in the middle of his lean against a door frame with my shirt off and a wry smile, rom-com period.
San Juan del Sur was an up-and-coming surf destination and it seemed that McConaughey would make a rubbish film, cash the cheque and head down there for six months, bumming around. I was about to tell him how much I admired his life choices but he was off. He staggered out of the restaurant, narrowly avoiding being run over by a motorbike before disappearing into the fragile night. As I was about to explain my star-spot to the crew, a British couple sitting nearby, who had seen the commotion and recognised me, came over to say hello. I told them that they’d just missed a far bigger fish, but they didn’t believe me – it’s the problem with being a prankster: all my best stories are ignored. I later searched out the actor online and found out that his night had ended with a couple of locals giving him a lift home and stealing his mobile and a couple of thousand dollars. I’m unaware of what happened to his flip-flop, but I should have asked him to be in our ill-fated movie project.
We edited the show together and it was pretty good. It appeared, however, that Channel 5 thought otherwise as, despite them paying for six different celebs to travel the world being ‘extreme’, they never aired the series. I contacted them several times to at least try and get some reason for this curious decision but never received any form of satisfactory reply. I was seriously pissed off. I was keen to make my name as a ‘travel guy’ and had risked life and limb, all so that Channel 5 could just forget about it. It wasn’t as though Channel 5 had the luxury of too many good shows and were forced to shelve some. Maybe the whole thing was some complicated tax dodge set up by Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow? Who knows? Like much else in television, it just didn’t make any sense.
Ticking off yet another celeb cliché, I had rediscovered golf. I used to play the game as a kid but hadn’t done so for ages. I wasn’t much good but couldn’t resist invitations on trips abroad with friends. Simon Kelner was a golf fanatic and we would often head off to distant climes together, taking on all comers.
I could go into detail about our trip to Marrakesh with Piers Morgan but for everybody’s sake I’ll keep it short.
‘What is Piers Morgan like?’ I asked Simon just before I met him.
‘Shameless,’ he replied.
He was bang on. This was after he’d been sacked from the Mirror and before he’d headed off to America to get sacked over there. On the plane over to Marrakesh he was only interested in who would make the headlines should the plane crash. Once in Morocco, he spent most of the time wandering around the pool of the Mamounia with a copy of his just-released (and rather good) book The Insider clearly visible in a see-through bag, for all to see and admire . . .
I once found myself on a trip to Gran Canaria (my idea of utter hell) for a golf tournament that included the chef Mark Hix, a man who manages to combine a staggering consumption of alcohol with some magnificent cooking. Most of our group had been into town for a night out. They returned in taxis at around midnight, as we had an early tee-time the following morning. Sadly, some had not had enough and hit the hotel bar for a couple more hours. At about two-thirty in the morning they had a second wind and decided to revisit the town for more shenanigans. They ordered a taxi to take them back in. Imagine their surprise when the cab arrived and they tried to jump into the back seat, only to find an unconscious Mark Hix sprawled over it. The driver had not noticed the intoxicated chef and had been driving his comatose body around town for a couple of hours. Hix was awoken and evicted from the cab so that the die-hards could hit the town once again. Unbelievably, he played very well the following day.
The pinnacle was probably a mammoth California trip with Simon Kelner and the actor Jimmy Nesbitt. It started at Pebble Beach and ended up at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. I was getting rather too used to this lifestyle and was worried what my wife was going to say when I got home and rang down for room service and a monogrammed towelling robe. I sat in the lobby bar preparing the first draft of the new movie screenplay that would make my name in the City of Angels. I nodded in an overly familiar fashion to Vince Neil, the ex-lead singer of Mötley Crüe, who was looking reassuringly dazed and confused. Mickey Rourke wandered in. He had the look of a man who had done some serious playing with matches. Suddenly, there was a shout of recognition from another corner of the lobby – it was TV’s hardest man: Ross Kemp. He had been married to Rebekah Brooks and was now another recent evictee from the Chipping Norton set.
He came over and gave me a very showbizzy kiss on both cheeks. Ross, the hardest man on telly, was in town filming some extremely hard-core scenes with the Mexican Mafia in the badlands of LA. We invited him out for a restorative game of golf the next day – he looked like he could use it. It was shaping up to look like a star-studded match – Jimmy Nesbitt took a phone call from Max Beesley, who was thinking of playing golf with Robbie Williams . . . Should we meet up? Donald Trump’s course? This was pure LA . . .
The following morning, we all assembled in the car park out front to meet our LA golf host, Richard Schiff (Toby from The West Wing). Beesley and Robbie hadn’t made it, but the rest of us were raring to go. Richard announced that we were off to a place called the Lost Canyons and that we were to follow him. I made the error of getting a lift with him. Big mistake. It turned out that before Richard became an award-winning actor, he had been a New York cab driver.
Now, I’ve driven in some of the world’s hairiest places – Beirut, Naples, Swindon – but nothing, and I mean nothing, could prepare me for this man’s driving. As we screeched in and out of other terrified ca
rs on the six-lane freeway leaving the city, at over one hundred and fifty miles an hour, I began to wonder whether we might be featuring in some sort of weird movie ourselves – surely this man couldn’t drive this way in normal life? But he did. Unbelievably, and with what seemed like a hint of disappointment in Richard’s eyes, we made it to the Lost Canyons for our round of golf. There was a look of post-orgasmic pleasure on his face as he kicked his feet through the thick pile of litter that was half a metre high in the footwell. I hitched a lift back to LA with someone else.
That evening we were guests of the hotel and they had really pushed the boat out. We were outside on a long table on the terrace where some famous chef had been brought in to cook for us. I arrived late and sat opposite Ross Kemp (the toughest bloke on the box), who was looking very distracted. I tried to make polite conversation but Ross (a TV hard man) was not with us. He just sat with a thousand-yard stare. It was all very awkward. Eventually I had to deal with it head-on.
‘Ross, are you OK, you seem . . . troubled?’
Ross looked up at me with big, sad, worried eyes.
‘It’s just . . .’
He stopped for a second with the look of a man who had seen terrible, terrible things . . . and once been married to Rebekah Brooks.
‘It’s just that we’re sitting here having an amazing time, enjoying ourselves and all carefree, and yet just three miles away there’s some serious violent shit going down . . .’
Ross stopped again and looked very upset.
I was about to say something when Jimmy Nesbitt, who was sitting two seats up from Ross, closed the whole thing down.