Seize the Day

by Mike Read

  After another half-hour, and almost leaning horizontally backwards, I felt myself falling onto a sandy beach. The boat was still some yards out as I got unsteadily to my feet, thoroughly exhausted, and if I expected four grateful faces giving me a ‘you plucked us from the jaws of certain death’ look, I was mistaken. Their faces told a different story. They were struck dumb. With gratitude? No, they’d spotted the apparition bearing down on me like a galleon in full sail. The full-bodied female nudist swung her handbag at my head with such force that I thought for a moment that God had saved me from drowning to be concussed instead. She may have uttered something like ‘pervert’ or ‘weirdo’ but I can’t be sure, as I had that feeling you get after a bottle of Great-Aunt Doris’s home-made potato wine.

  Others of her clan arrived at the scene. I was being berated from all sides. ‘We’re fed up with people like you coming to ogle.’

  Fortunately for all concerned, explanation and recognition saved the day. They embraced me – not physically, of course. One of the men who had some naval experience and was a former policeman (make your own jokes here) went to help Peter with the boat while the other survivors waded ashore. The nudists were now my friends. I had become, within minutes, an honorary naturist. They gave me drinks and sandwiches. I had been accepted into their tribe. I felt like ripping my clothes off and being initiated. Well, maybe not, but I was certainly grateful to be alive-ish.

  Our problems weren’t over, though. The tide was coming in rapidly and we’d have to vacate the beach pretty sharpish. Peter and the ex-sailor were attempting to re-start the boat and coax it to a nearby port. Meanwhile our producer, Paul Williams, never one to panic in a crisis (yeah, right), took charge. Having discovered that the only way off the beach, unless by boat, was to scale the massive rock face via a steep and arduous set of steps, he set off in search of assistance. The stairs would be cut off at some point, so flapping his arms like a particularly inept Bognor Birdman entrant, with omnipresent cigarette clamped firmly between his lips, he capered across the beach as if trying to launch himself, and disappeared, mumbling something about emergency services. Where he was heading nobody knew. I doubt if he did.

  After what seemed a millennium, during which time the nudists had disappeared, the tide continued to menace us and Pop One Up drifted off towards the horizon, I came close to getting a haircut I hadn’t ordered from a helicopter. It hovered and landed on the beach, and two guys in full kit leapt out and came racing over. We’d already had enough action to fill a James Bond movie, and this latest episode provided the icing on the cake. Who were they after? The answer was me.

  ‘Which leg’s broken?’

  Silence. The other three members of our crew looked at me for an answer. Well, the real answer was ‘Neither of them, thank you’, but being a part-time student of the psychology of a Radio One producer, I soon realised this represented Paul Williams at his best. To make sure that he did his duty and behaved responsibly towards his party, he’d embellished a trifle. Why he’d selected one of my legs to be broken is beyond me. I wasn’t even sure which one he’d told them had been broken. I almost asked them to pick whichever one they thought fit, or unfit. ‘This one’, I whispered weakly, ‘hurts a little.’

  I now looked like a complete bloody idiot, trying to save Paul Williams’s face. The boys from RNAS Culdrose eventually dismissed me as a time-wasting buffoon. There was another twist to come, though, for their presence, albeit at the behest of a mad, fag-wielding, piano-playing Adam Faith lookalike, proved to be a boon. Just as they were about to give me a second unwanted haircut, the boat caught fire. In short order Peter Powell and the rather helpful naked policeman (an integral part of the nudist crew as I recall) were winched to safety, Pop One Up was towed to what might have been its final resting place and I was scooped off the beach in case Radio One was fined for littering. The following day’s papers carried dramatic photographs of the near-disaster, prompting the Radio One controller, Derek Chinnery, to haul me in and accuse me of setting it up as a stunt. Crazy I may be, but I would never knowingly attempt to slaughter a handful of people for a few column inches and a blurred snap or two in tomorrow’s chip paper. I assured him that no nudists had been hurt in the making of this tragedy.

  For some reason best known to himself, Peter Powell dropped his shorts and bared his bottom on the penultimate day of his roadshow week, so the idea was put to me that I should beetle down the following day and ‘arrest’ Peter on stage. His posterior had made the national papers, including the front page of The Sun. Smiley had organised a uniform and helmet in my size and was convinced we could get a fun picture out of it. Always available when the word ‘fun’ is mentioned, I drove to Torre Abbey Meadows, Torquay and the plan was put into action. I’d turn up on stage, show him the photograph of his rear end and ‘arrest’ him. All harmless fun. Well, harmless until the actual police joined the party. Two constables approached me. ‘We’re arresting you for impersonating a member of the force.’

  ‘Oh right, ha ha, very good.’ I played along as they dragged me away. ‘OK now, the media have taken the pictures and we’ve had a good laugh.’

  They didn’t appear to be doing too much laughing. I was bundled rather harshly into a police car and with sirens wailing, taken to the local nick. Lines like ‘it’s a fair cop’ and so on didn’t seem to cut much ice, so I shut up. A large sergeant, quite possibly the result of an illicit liaison between Giant Haystacks and a sturdy silverback gorilla, let me know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t messing around.

  ‘But it’s all part of the roadshow.’

  ‘I’m not interested in who you are or what you do, you’ve broken the law.’

  ‘Oh, come on, all my clothes are back at the hotel.’

  ‘You won’t be needing clothes.’

  Gulp.

  If he wasn’t a Radio One man (he clearly wasn’t) I thought that I could maybe get away with a false name. I was taking a damn big risk. The custody record already had the reason for arrest down, ‘Impersonation of a Police Officer’. I was in danger of adding to my sentence. I risked it.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Peter Powell.’

  ‘Place of birth?’

  ‘Birmingham.’

  I still have the charge sheet and Peter Powell’s name beams out of it. Here are the details, Pete, in case you ever need them. The arresting officer was WPC 2497 Wignall. Your height I gave as 5 ft 9 in., occupation DJ and address c/o Broadcasting House. You were arrested at 12.42 on Torre Abbey Meadows and detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. On the ‘prisoner’s rights’ section, I said that you didn’t want a solicitor and didn’t need anyone to be notified. I hope that was OK. You may be pursued for supplying false fingerprints as they remain my property. They’re a weird shape.

  I was led into the bowels of the station and chucked unceremoniously into a cell. After an hour in the slammer I was beginning to feel a trifle uncomfortable. I had a new neighbour, though.

  ‘Mike Read, isn’t it?’

  I nodded in a custodial way.

  ‘I was hoping to come and see you at the roadshow.’

  ‘Not exactly the best view from here, mate.’

  An hour later there was a rattle of keys. I didn’t hold out any hope that they were for me. The big fella was back. ‘All right, out you come.’ They obviously planned to rush me to court. Instead I was shown the custody record report they’d just signed. I quote verbatim:

  Enquiring into reasons for arrest and evidence. Determined a set-up by BBC Radio One staff. Detention authorised to continue set-up and enable evidence to be obtained by photograph and fingerprinting and for him to sign all autographs as required. Following photographs and fingerprints [notice the cunning lack of reference to my hour or two in the cooler] decided that the scam had gone on long enough. Prisoner was beginning to worry. [I can confirm that] Released from custody and even taken to his hotel, aren’t we good?!

  They forgot to mention that they gave me a slap-up
feed in the canteen first. Did I want a pudding too before my courtesy car driven complete with flashing blue light whisked me back to the hotel? I did. From a custody suite to a custardy sweet in under two hours.

  We made all the nationals the next day, including, once more, the front page of The Sun, which featured the arrest by WPC Marilyn Wignall and PC Keith Droudge. Both the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror deemed the prank worthy of page three, with the latter also giving us a cartoon showing me in jail moaning to a fellow inmate, ‘It started as a prank, then they decided to leave me in here.’ Peter’s ‘Super Soaraway bum’ even made another appearance in some papers.

  I’d have to admit it really was a fair cop, although not my first time behind bars. At college half a dozen of us caused a certain amount of mayhem having descended on the West End for our rag week. Students see rag week as an important issue. The public and the police have a different view. For some juvenile and inexplicable reason we parked our battered van outside the front entrance to the Hilton and proceeded to paint it. On being reprimanded by a couple of commissionaires we responded with the crass but reasonable student chant of ‘it’s a free country’. Not terribly original and straight out of the bolshie teenagers’ handbook. The work of art was proceeding very nicely and the van was heading towards a new psychedelic look when an irate American yelled, ‘Get that damn thing out of the way, I need to move my car.’ His car was a Roller so maybe he had a bit of clout. His outburst surprised our very own Van Gogh, John Calcut, who spun round and painted a rather neat line of red emulsion across the guy’s jacket.

  Downing Street was our next port of call, where we painted bare footprints from the doorstep of No. 10 along the street and down Whitehall. There were no security gates then, and you could stand within a few yards of the Prime Minister’s door without fear of reprisals. We were also unwittingly aided by a jostling crowd supporting the seamen’s strike, which masked us. Of course we didn’t get away with it. We were ‘apprehended’, marched across to Scotland Yard, and given buckets of water and stiff scrubbing brushes. As any painter and decorator will tell you, removing delightfully fresh gloss paint with water and a brush is impossible, but the boys in blue were well aware of that. They let us go with a warning after a back-breaking and futile hour of drudgery, after which we left Whitehall in a bigger mess than the government.

  Older, wiser folk would have learned their lesson, but not adrenaline-fuelled, fun-loving kids from Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge. What possessed our student union president, Marshall Dixon, and me to sticker the four lions in Trafalgar Square with our rag week publicity leaflets and change the colour of their feet, I have no idea, but I’m sure we thought we had a damned good reason at the time. The two policemen that arrested us weren’t of the same opinion and dragged us unceremoniously to the tiny lock-up a few yards east of Nelson’s Column. Names, addresses and parents’ telephone numbers were unwillingly mumbled, in the hope of being misheard. After half an hour contemplating our doom we were suddenly and inexplicably let go. Had the bomb dropped? Were all prisoners now free?

  I felt that the decent thing to do was to come clean with my Pa, before he smouldered and exploded in his own time. I was halfway through a rather faltering explanation when it dawned on me that this was new territory for him. Despite their threat, the police hadn’t informed our parents at all. Another lesson learned.

  One of the best-remembered pranks that year, probably sometime in the mid ’80s, took place at the Unicorn Hotel in Bristol. We’d been through the usual procedure of Derek Chinnery slowly ushering everyone towards the lifts, not unlike One Man and His Dog. The difference here was that the sheep didn’t stay in their pens. Within fifteen minutes everyone was downstairs again. I had to be up at some unearthly hour to do the breakfast show from a boat, but nevertheless stayed the course. Not everyone was a night owl and frankly I was surprised that so many of the guys were still up at three in the morning. At last I gave in and headed for my room. There was an unreasonable fishy odour invading my space, but nothing I couldn’t cope with. I hit the light switch. Not working. Could I be fagged to go downstairs to report it? Of course not. It’d be light anyway in a couple of hours. I couldn’t even be bothered to go to the bathroom as I’d be up again so soon. So, clothes off, into bed … and onto the floor. Fumbling in the dark I discovered that one of the legs of the bed had been sawn off. It was going to be an uncomfortable night. Now this I would report. I groped for the telephone. It was covered in something unpleasant. I couldn’t see exactly what it was in the dark, but it smelled like manure and now it was all over my hands. The bathroom after all, then.

  As I opened the door, it fell in of its own accord. I later discovered that the hinges had been removed. Whoever had set up this booby-trap had real attention to detail. I flew in on top of the door and the chickens flew on top of me. At least, they sounded like chickens. I couldn’t see a thing. It was impossible to take a head count, but I was obviously outnumbered. Through the beaks, feathers and flapping wings, the manured hands and kipper-impregnated nose I heard the gay, tinkling laughter of merry folk on the other side of my hotel door.

  I found the handle and although temporarily ‘blinded by the light’ in true Springsteen fashion, I caught a ‘fleeting glimpse of someone’s fading shadow,’ in true Bob Lind fashion. Simon Bates made it to his hotel room before he could be slaughtered by his naked assailant, but Noel Edmonds ‘kept on running’ in true Spencer Davis fashion. The hotel corridor went round in a square, if that’s not an oxymoron. I swear I was catching him as we approached my bedroom on the second lap, but guile took over. Noel looked at my naked form, clicked my door shut and disappeared. I was aghast. I was also as God made me – well, a little taller and a little heavier, but clearly no wiser. I had no alternative but to throw myself on the mercy of the night manager. The mirrored lifts weren’t flattering. I took the nude version of myself to the front desk. The manager’s face told me that he could smell manure. Was this the time and place for a full-frontal bedtime story involving chickens, bed legs, kippers and late-night revellers? Probably not. I skipped the explanations and simply said, ‘I appear to be locked out of my room.’

  In the early summer of 1987, Gary Davies and I fronted a special series of roadshows, the Twin Towers Rock & Rolls Tour. As you’d imagine, given that we were starting in Blackpool, the rock was the edible variety, not the musical genre, measuring 10 feet long by 16 inches in diameter, weighing a quarter of a ton and needing 335 pounds of sugar. It was a far cry from George Formby’s ‘Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’, and in fact was a world record, verified by the The Guinness Book of Records. To make the title of the show work, we had a brace of Rolls-Royce cars, and we would use them to drag this great, calorific lump of pink confectionery from the Blackpool Tower to the Eiffel Tower, stopping at various points along the way. Why? I really don’t know. I suppose because we were raising money for the charity Insight, fund-raisers for the blind. I guess the rock played some part. The great and the good from the music world (as seen from a 1987 perspective) joined us at each roadshow. Pepsi and Shirley performed at Heaton Park, as did Marillion, while Tom Jones helped us pull a record crowd of some 30,000 at Birmingham. Sam Fox appeared at Woburn Abbey, and Steve Van Zandt and Rupert Everett, then essaying a musical career in case the greasepaint lost its allure, joined us at Dover. In Paris Kim Wilde was our guest. I seem to remember we were having dinner when the news came through that she was number one in the States with her version of ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’.

  My 1987 roadshow week kicked off at Berwick-upon-Tweed, where I went for a world record. As soon as the roadshow was over at 12.30 my producer Paul Williams whisked me over the golf links to the gladiatorial arena of the tennis courts. The idea was that I’d play against 1,000 opponents. Not all at once, obviously. Anyone could appear on court as many times as they liked as long as they re-joined the queue and paid their token coin each time, which went to charity. I must have delivered my first serve s
ometime after midday and finished at seven in the evening, exhausted but exhilarated. I wondered what the heck I’d been thinking of when I agreed to this mad escapade, but I’d done it. So why didn’t we make The Guinness Book of Records? We had the correct adjudication and the qualifying forms from Guinness, and everything was recorded according to the rules. Who knows? Anyway, it was time to head off to Portobello on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where we had a police escort.

  This was the spawning ground for the young Sean Connery. From one-time lifeguard at the local swimming pool to international movie star: not a bad career path, unless you’re a great swimmer and lousy actor. Among the massive crowd were a couple of lads with guitars who appeared at the back of the roadshow with a CD containing a couple of their demos. They seemed very normal, down-to-earth and enthusiastic. My shows were always seat-of-your-pants affairs, so I suggested they came on stage and played live. They were awesome. They sang those kinds of harmonies that you only get from siblings, or people that are on exactly the same wavelength. I was seriously impressed by their talent, songs and attitude – they wore horn-rimmed glasses and wore them with pride. This duo was worth championing. I played the demos on my radio shows, so when they got a record deal I was up for pushing their first single. I even attended a playlist meeting, but the record got knocked back by several producers, one calling it ‘woolly-jumper music’. I went to two more meetings (unheard of for a DJ), whereupon they relented.