Guy Martin

by Guy Martin

  The lion’s share of the filming was done, certainly all the main bits, but the production company wanted me and Mave to go back and do a few fill-in pieces to link certain parts of the show together, to smooth it out a bit.

  By this stage I was even quite enjoying it. I’d done my six weeks solid. I was back working with my dad and this was me and Mave, a couple of mates, taking the odd day off to do something different.

  On this day, they had me jumping from the dock edge onto the side of the narrowboat, like I’d done a hundred times before. The filming stopped and I did one last jump onto the boat from the towpath. That would be the last time I jumped onto that particular boat. The oil-soaked sole of my rigger boot slipped on the edge of the boat and I fell into the water. That wouldn’t have been a problem if my front teeth hadn’t caught square on the boat’s steel tiller, the steering handle, on the way down.

  The impact knocked my two front teeth under up into my nose cavity and smashed my side teeth out. I lay in the water for a while, then managed to pull myself out. I walked up to Mavis and asked, ‘Am I all right?’ He pulled a face and just said, ‘Fucking hell!’ Coming from Mave, that was very bad news. He’d broken tons of stuff riding mountain bikes and BMX, and for his face to turn like it did after looking at the wreckage of my gob wasn’t good.

  I thought I was spitting teeth out, but it was actually pieces of my top jaw. It had shattered. There was a lot of blood, but, strangely, it wasn’t that painful.

  I went to the local hospital, and after looking at the X-ray they told me there wasn’t much they could do for me. They actually told me my teeth might push back down! What were they thinking? I had demolished my top jaw, leaving bits of it on the towpath of a canal.

  Next, I visited an emergency dentist. There they dried their teeth, sucking in breath – like when a woman takes a car to a garage and the blokes stand around drying their teeth, telling her it’s a big job, when all it needs is a spark plug. Anyway, I needed more than a filling, that was for sure.

  I got up the next morning, and went to the local dentist in Brigg. He told me I had to go and see this man to sort the jaw, then go see that man, to do this, then go see this man for that, and come back in two days.

  Luckily, Steph’s mate is a dentist in Newcastle. He met me on a Saturday morning, and he cut my jaw right open and cut the teeth out, under a local anaesthetic. I could see the rack of front teeth coming out and being placed on a tray next to the chair.

  He stated the bleeding obvious when he told me my face was a mess. I was sent away till the swelling went down. When I returned he made a pattern for some false teeth. After that I went back again to have a bone graft to rebuild my jaw. They used a certain kind of cow bone that took about six months to knit together.

  Through all those months I had a plate glued in with Fixodent. It changed the way I talked. The shape on the back of the false teeth must’ve been slightly different to my own teeth, and it made me talk with a short tongue. Now, I have permanent false teeth, not on a plate, and they’re as good as new.

  At one point in that first series, we were making some cotton bed linen, and I was asking how it got from the sheep. I now know cotton doesn’t come from sheep, but I’m not embarrassed to look daft and I’m not sorry they left that in the programme. If it makes me look thick, then I’m thick, I’m not bothered. The show would regularly get five million viewers on its two showings and has been exported around the world. It’s also shown in schools in Britain.

  Through connections with North One, and their contract to cover World Rally, I was invited to drive a Ford World Rally car up in a Cumbrian forest. It was November, snow and ice on the ground. Ford’s top driver, the Finn Mikko Hirvonen, was there, and so was Ken Block – who’d become famous for the drifting videos he’d made that had squillions of views on YouTube.

  I’d stayed in a hotel in Cumbria the night before and filled the works Transit up in the petrol station next door, on the way to the forest. As I was pulling out of the forecourt a woman was indicating to pull into the petrol station, so I rolled onto the road and she ploughed straight into me, damaging the front suspension.

  I managed to get the van fixed the same day, and drove a World Rally Ford Fiesta in a Cumbrian forest, but the accident would cause problems at work. It came after I’d done a daft thing, trying to be a bit rum by sneaking under a car park barrier behind Mave’s van, so I didn’t have to pay for parking. The TV company would have paid the expenses if I’d asked them. Someone took the phone number from the side of the van and rang up my dad. He was on the rev limiter when he rang me up. I apologised, but it didn’t make any difference.

  Over the weekend, back home at the house where I was living in Caistor, Dobby, my mate who owned the house, came in and told me he’d just seen my van driving off. I thought it had been nicked, but it turns out it was my dad repossessing it.

  He hadn’t knocked on the door, he just took it, using the spare keys. I took that as a sign I was sacked from the family business. I think I’d have preferred it if he’d knocked on the door and lamped me when I answered it. I’d have thought a million times more of him if he’d come up to me, face to face, and told me that he was taking it and that I was an arsehole. He was well within his rights. I was taking the piss. I held my hands up. I didn’t bother calling him to see for sure if I was sacked, and the rest of the family say I wasn’t, but in my mind, that was it, I was out of the village I grew up in. I was out of the family business. Me and Dad didn’t talk for months. I didn’t speak to my mum either. Me and Kate split up. I’d been flicked out of the Kirmington bubble.

  With no job, I thought, ‘That’s it, I’ll become a professional motorbike racer.’ I went out ‘training’ on my pushbike, but as much as I love riding my bicycle, by lunchtime I thought, ‘Bugger this.’ I rode to Grimsby and went to see a couple of mates who knew a couple of mates who worked on the banks of the Humber. I was offered a job working on the maintenance crew of a big factory, Blue Star Fibres, labouring for a contracting firm. I’d lasted one morning as a full-time motorcycle racer.

  That job, labouring with my mate Paddy, who’d driven me back from the North West race when I spannered myself and also paints my racing helmets, was the first time I had a job that finished at a reasonable time. I’d be done and dusted at twenty past four. When I was at home, work would not enter my head until I got up the next morning. I could do my own thing. There was no job satisfaction, and it was physically hard graft, but it was the first time I had no work worries niggling at me when I wasn’t there.

  I was living at Dobby’s flat, for £350 a month. He was supposed to be living there, but he was always at his girlfriend’s. It was all right, but I was missing fixing things, so I applied for a job at A Plant, the plant hire place. We used to rent our jackhammers and diggers from them. The manager said they were snowed under and needed another fitter. I went in for three interviews, biking there on my way home from work. They couldn’t get their head around me wanting to work for them. I told them I would need time off to race bikes. It was a big depot, because they supplied all the Humber refineries. They offered me the job at the same time North One offered me another TV series.

  When talk of the second series came up, I told North One their best bet was to just use Mave, not me. Or we could change roles. He’d be the main man, and I’d do the odd day. He loves all that stuff. ‘Get Mave to do it, he’s a bit slack at work,’ I said, but they didn’t.

  The Boat That Guy Built aired in February 2011. The month before, Andy Spellman got a call from someone at the BBC saying that the channel were looking for a new presenter of Jimmy’s Food Factory. It’s the show where the presenter, Jimmy Doherty, investigated what went into supermarket food and tried to make his own versions using Heath Robinson, home-built looking machinery in a barn in Suffolk or somewhere. Jimmy must have had enough of it, or had a better offer from another channel, and they wanted me to audition. It was all set up, but I blew it out on the morning o
f the audition, ringing up the BBC reception and leaving a message with the security man at 5am before I set off for work.

  When North One found out I’d been offered an audition on a series that was nothing to do with them, they drove up to Lincolnshire and offered me a retainer to stay exclusive to them. I signed a three-year contract on the spot, when I should have sat on it and asked Andy for advice, which we later had quite a lively debate about. Signing the contract meant I had to do a programme a year, but only programmes I was happy with, for the next three years. It seemed like money for old rope. The offer was rushed because Neil Duncanson didn’t want me to take the job I’d been offered at A Plant, where I’d have less flexibility to take time off. Or maybe he thought I was going to get poached by another TV production outfit, but I wasn’t looking to do that.

  North One went back to talking about doing The House That Guy Built. They said was there was no ‘legacy’ to the boat. It was all done for TV’s sake. The boat got sold, no one knew what happened to it. I wasn’t keen on doing all the same stuff again, so they came up with another idea.

  The next series would be How Britain Worked. The researchers found stuff that was due to be restored, or there were people who wanted to restore it, and the TV’s show and budget helped make it happen, in some cases saving special things for years to come. We were highlighting the work other people were doing and getting historic old things working for other people to see and enjoy.

  One big difference was that the series would be six one-hour shows, rather than six 30-minute shows. That involved 50 days’ filming rather than 30, but the filming was spread over six months, rather than in a solid six-week block, because I was desperate to keep my hand in at work, proper work, getting my hands dirty, plus race motorbikes too. Six weeks of filming was too much of the same stuff. At that stage of the TV business I still wasn’t feeling like I’d achieved anything. Perhaps it was related to something Mr X had said, that had stuck in my mind: that the truck mechanic looked down on the TV presenter side of my personality.

  Another difference was that North One decided to break away from the BBC and go to Channel 4, who were offering a bigger budget, to make a better programme. Jay Hunt, the lady who’d commissioned the boat series, had moved to Channel 4 and was still interested in me making more programmes.

  The new show would have something like a £1 million budget, I reckon. Expensive programming, I’m told. The BBC wanted another series, but they didn’t want to pay any more, and the idea was to make the next programme better than the one before. Anyway, that was all down to the production company, North One, of course, and nothing to do with me.

  I was a lot more involved in How Britain Worked, visiting the projects as they progressed and getting my hands dirty on a regular basis. The Boat was more of a fleeting glance over stuff, while How Britain made me realise that I could enjoy the TV projects if I was actually doing stuff, not just talking about what other people were doing or had done.

  The idea behind How Britain Worked was to ‘rediscover our industrial past’, to show inventions from the Industrial Revolution, and to explore both the mechanical and social side of things like the introduction of public parks and annual holidays to the seaside. The series was about the innovators and the grafters who changed the world. Not just the likes of Stephenson, Davey and Brunel, names nearly everyone knows. It would tell about the men who designed and built the high-speed Brixham trawlers, and those who went out to sea to catch fish to feed the exploding population of workers; about the miners and how difficult the work was for men, women and children. It was genuinely interesting. I loved seeing the passion of the 20-year-old lad who worked at Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Herbaceous borders aren’t my thing, but the passion he had rubbed off on me. We met another teenager who was restoring a steam train. It was just good to see younger blokes interested in this side of things.

  The best and most memorable part of filming that series was being involved with a crew that travels round the country repairing and maintaining the old Victorian cast-iron piers. The programme was about the introduction of the workers’ holiday and the way it transformed the British coastline, with holiday resorts popping up. We filmed most of the episode in the North Wales resort of Llandudno.

  The town’s 2,295 ft pier was opened to the public in 1877, and is an amazing piece of civil engineering. It goes without saying the metalwork is in a hell of a corrosive environment, battered by the sea and freezing winds. The fellas who I met have working lives that revolve around replacing damaged parts of Britain’s cast-iron seaside landmarks. And, I found out, there’s no easy way to do it.

  When a cross-member has corroded to the point where it’s potentially going to affect the structural integrity of the pier, it needs to be torn out and replaced. The thing is, it’s riveted together and the way to remove the rivets is to burn them out with the 3,500˚C oxy-acetylene cutting torch – while you’re dangling from the underneath of a pier above the Irish Sea. Everything’s cold, wet and slippery, and you’re hanging from climbing tackle, so you don’t have much to steady yourself against. You’re working to a deadline with a torch in your hand that could do some serious damage if you got too close to the hot end. I cut one of the cross-members out. At the time it was the only job I’d done that I could consider packing the trucks in for. It had the mix of hard graft, job satisfaction and an added element of danger to keep you on your toes. Plus I liked the fellas who did it for a living – we had a good craic. They could drink too, but were all up at the crack of dawn to get the job done. Proper.

  By the end of How Britain Worked I’d made two series about the Industrial Revolution, and North One wanted to choose another era and make a similar series. The Edwardian age was talked about, but I wasn’t interested in repeating the same idea. It seems like the TV way of doing things is to find something that works and flog it to death.

  The experience of presenting two series taught me a lot about what goes into the shows, what is needed to make an hour of television. If the TV lot get five minutes of telly out of a ten-hour day they’re happy. And after filming’s done a programme can take six weeks to edit. I pity the poor sods watching me for that long. I also learnt what I enjoy doing and what kind of jobs wouldn’t interest me. I realised that I could do some amazing stuff, like the experience of fixing the pier, a job I didn’t even know existed and one that I’d have never tried. I also got involved with the restoration of a Spitfire for another TV show. Proper dream stuff.

  The filming took me all over England, Scotland and Wales, and the long drives to and from filming gave me plenty of time to think over what I was involved with. It made me realise I don’t want to be the person who is talking about interesting stuff that other people have done – I want to be doing the interesting stuff. And because I’m willing to try things that a lot of other presenters maybe aren’t, and couldn’t do, then perhaps between me and the production company we can come up with some new ideas or at least new takes on old ideas. After having an attitude of take it or leave it, I’m getting quite into that whole side of things and thinking about schemes that could be great fun, give me a hell of a buzz and hopefully make something memorable to put out on telly.

  CHAPTER 16

  IN TROUBLE

  ‘The next minute a riot van turned up, two coppers jumped out and handcuffed me.’

  EVEN WITH A TV contract and racing for a decent-sized motorcycle team, I still want a proper job, and labouring, though it had its plus points, wasn’t hitting the spot. I was working with a good group of blokes and was home early to get on with building engines or training for a mountain bike race. I could forget about work the minute I left too, but that was part of the problem. It wasn’t testing me, so when I heard a Grimsby company was interested in me running the truck maintenance side of their business, I was interested too.

  Mick Moody used to run a refrigerated transport business, and my dad would do a lot of repairs for Moody International. When I was working f
or Ian Martin Motor Engineers I used to end up doing the oddball work that Moody would send to us. After packing in that side of his business Moody concentrated on selling used trucks. He had built his own garage to service the trucks ready for sale, and to maintain a fleet for customers. I’d been recommended to him and was asked if I would visit the yard to talk about working for him. This was in March 2011, not long after The Boat had been shown on the BBC. We arranged to meet on a Friday afternoon after I knocked off work. When I was labouring I would finish early on a Friday. I told Moody I would be with him by two.

  On the day of the interview I was out on a job in a Transit van with a tipper back, picking up hardcore, rocks and broken-up concrete, and taking it from one site to another. The tipper bed was loaded by the digger driver, then I set off. On the way back to site I got pulled over by VOSA, the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, who are the enforcement arm of the Department of Transport. They’re the inspectors who check that MoT stations aren’t cutting corners and also do roadside spot checks to make sure haulage firms and drivers are sticking to all the rules. If you just drive a car you never really come in contact with them, but haulage firms do.

  I was sent to a weighbridge in the lay-by and then told the Transit was overweight. Each van, lorry or trailer has a safe working load, and the hardcore I was transporting was over the legal recommended weight for the Ford tipper I was driving. It meant I would get a fine, but work would pay it, because I didn’t load the van and there was no real way for me to know if it was under or over the weight limit. I was just couriering it from one place to the other for them.

  The VOSA man took all my details and told me to wait a minute. Then wait a while longer, then a bit longer and a bit longer … Eventually, I said, ‘Look mate, I’m on a job. I’ve got to get going,’ but he wouldn’t let me go.