Bernie Fineman, Original Motor Mouth

by Bernie Fineman

  I looked round at the crowd and thought of my dad smiling.

  We’d done it!

  Well, we had done it this time. Tomorrow was another month and the Discovery Channel wanted another car.

  Well fuck my aunt.

  A month later and another car was done, Discovery had their series and I was off home, thank fuck. I couldn’t wait to get home to my comfy bed, my beautiful wife and family, but as we boarded the plane something incredible happened. I realised I didn’t want to leave. It had been such a powerful, all-consuming experience, the people and the place had just been incredible and I didn’t know if I would ever go back or see Leepu again.

  We missed our inter-connecting flight so had to spend the night in Abu Dhabi and I didn’t sleep a wink. All I could do was think about all the friends I had made in Bangladesh and wonder if they would be OK. It was so intense, I just couldn’t get it out of my system. I know that when I left Bangladesh a part of me stayed there.

  Words do not do justice to the conditions in Bangladesh. It was forty degrees in the shade and we were working from a tin shack with an open sewer running through it. To make the stench worse, next door they were decapitating live chickens! And all the time me and the crew were suffering from the dreaded Delhi Belly, but the only toilet was just a hole in the ground running to the sewer.

  They had no toilet paper so you’d do your business, then dip your hands in this bowl of water and wash your arse with your hands, then wash them in the same bowl of water. You can imagine the germs and infections swimming around in it! We all lost at least a stone out there and one of the guys in particular was really ill – when he got home he looked like he’d just come back from Belsen, not Bangladesh.

  All we ate for two-and-a-half months was curry. Now, I love a good curry as much as the next man, but three meals a day for ten weeks takes its toll, and the first thing I did when I got home (after kissing my wife) was eat bacon and eggs. The problem was that whenever we ate, we were ill.

  There was a doctor in the hotel, though, and he was making a bloody fortune selling us his diarrhoea tablets. Eventually he took pity on us and told us not to keep taking the tablets as eventually they would ruin our stomachs. By the way, if you ever get the runs, all you want to do is get a can of full-fat Coke, open it and let it sit there until it goes flat, then drink it. Coke stops the runs straightaway: seems it kills all the bugs in the stomach. So that’s what we’d do: buy loads of cans of Coke, open them up and put them on the side then drink them throughout the day. Leepu told us the best thing to do was to eat in the most popular restaurants in town. That’s because they had the highest turnover of food, so you knew it was always fresh. We hardly had a problem after that.

  Working in such conditions and being in a foreign country you get to know the crew really well and we all became good friends. Many nights we were working and filming until three or four in the morning, but when we did get time off we’d go out for dinner, take walks or go and see the sights. One night we finished and the rest of the crew went to bed except me and the sound recordist Martin, so we decided to try out a new restaurant that had just opened up, that was named after the Bollywood actor Sanjay Kapoor.

  It was about a twenty-minute drive away, but well worth the taxi ride as the food was fantastic and we had a great night. On leaving we hailed a taxi and asked to go back to the hotel. After a few minutes he says ‘petrol’ and pulls off into this garage, well off the beaten track. You couldn’t even call it a garage, it was just someone’s house with a petrol pump in the front garden. The guy gets out and starts to fill the car while a group of blokes are stood around in the front garden.

  Martin turned to me and told me he didn’t like it, he was sure something was up. These guys keep coming over and looking at us through the window and when the driver gets back in the taxi it won’t start. When the light outside the shed turns out I say, ‘Right, we need to take the bull by the horns.’ I get out of the car, pull my phone out of my pocket and show it to everyone.

  ‘Get me another taxi now or I call the police,’ I told them. Knowing they’d been rumbled at whatever scheme it was they had going, they found a car round the back and took us straight home, but all the while Martin and I were absolutely shitting it.

  Thankfully that was the only bit of funny business we encountered, which was lucky because you do hear a lot of horror stories about Westerners travelling to poor countries in Asia and they are sometimes seen as easy money. But everyone else was so friendly. We were there during Mela, their New Year, so we joined them as they danced and drank in the streets. We had our faces painted, and the atmosphere was absolutely electric.

  Being such a poor country, if something broke you had no option but to repair it, and so the result of this is that you have a highly skilled population. You would see young kids in the street, sat on the floor, legs apart, holding a car door that had been smashed up. They’d sit there for five or six hours with a hammer and dolly getting all the dents out of it to get paid probably a few pence.

  As for the guys in the garage, if there was a radiator leak they would put solder around it, but to pressure-test it they’d fill it up with water, put their mouth round the top of the outlet and blow into it non-stop for a minute, or a minute-and-a-half, without breathing, putting pressure through the water to make sure there were no leaks. It was an amazing thing to see.

  For me, it was the closest I will ever get to time travel: it was like going back to the 1950s when I first started in the garage trade. There were no cranes, so when we had to lift in this engine that weighed about 400 lbs, we did it the old-fashioned way. I got a bar and we tied it to the engine with all these old fan belts. There were three guys one side, me and Leepu on the other, and that’s how we got it in and out. No steel toe-capped boots there – if it dropped on one of those guys’ feet that was it, it would probably have to be amputated. With the barest of hand tools and no ramp, as I say, it was like going back in time. I never thought I’d work like that again, it was just an incredible experience.

  Going back in time also had its downsides, though. One day we went out for lunch and I was sat down eating a curry when all of a sudden something cracked in my mouth. At first I thought it must’ve been a bit of chicken bone or something but I soon realised it was one of my teeth. My dentist in England later told me it was my Upper Left 4. I spat this bit of tooth out and thought not much more of it, but as the afternoon wore on I developed the most raging toothache. I’ve never felt anything like it, just throbbing constantly in my mouth.

  When I was a kid if we got toothache we’d use oil of cloves, but there wasn’t much chance of me finding any of that in Bangladesh. I took whatever tablets I could get my hands on but it was no good, the tooth was cracked in half and the nerve was exposed. The pain was indescribable and I was completely debilitated, so the production crew went on a desperate search for a dentist, eventually finding one about a fifteen-minute drive away.

  When we arrive, it’s like a small shop. First there’s a waiting room, then when it’s your turn there’s a door you pass through to go out the back where the action takes place. I was quite calm sitting in the waiting room with the director and our driver, but nothing could prepare me for the horror that awaited me through that door. It was an open-plan room, nothing sectioned off, just six chairs with people sat in them having their teeth done.

  I stood there looking at these six poor bastards writhing in agony as the dentists worked on them. The equipment was like something out of Victorian times. There was no electricity, so instead they used a treadle to operate the drill, with all these pulleys hanging off the ceiling. On the table next to them was a tray of instruments and they just looked filthy.

  The third dentist along beckons me over and, to my horror, I feel my legs walking towards him. I sat on the chair and he took a look inside my mouth. Now, I’m not afraid of no one or nothing, but as he looked in my mouth I looked around at the guy sat not two feet away from me, moaning
with agony as he’s having his tooth drilled. I thought, ‘No way, I ain’t having this,’ and as he reached for one of his instruments I shot up out of the chair and legged it. Pain or no pain, that seemed like a fate worse than death. Genuinely, I thought the tools we had back at the garage, negligible as even they were, were a damn sight better than what those dentists had, and they were probably cleaner too.

  As I emerged from the room the director looked at me – my face must’ve been ashen. I just shook my head and said, ‘No way.’ The painkillers had finally numbed it a bit so I went back to the workshop and got on with things. An hour later, though, and the pain starts coming back with a vengeance so I decide to take matters into my own hands.

  On one of the shelves was an old bottle of whisky, so I got it down, emptied a triple into a mug and necked it. A few moments later, as I felt the whisky and Dutch courage kick in, I grabbed a pair of pliers and put them round the tooth. It was a little loose already, so after a few wiggles I just went for it. There was a momentary rush of pain and then it was gone. The guys just looked at me as if I was fucking nuts! Some of them said they didn’t know how I had the guts to do that, but I said if they had the same extraordinary pain as me and if they’d seen that butcher’s shop of a dentist, they’d have done the same, believe me!

  When I got home I was overjoyed to see my family, but there was no time for recuperating, I just went straight back to work. I didn’t really think any more of it until one day we got some DVDs in the post. Raw Television had sent me the DVDs of the series to watch before it went out on the box.

  That weekend we invited the whole family around to watch it. I’ve never been so nervous, but I just knew that it was going to be a good show. We all gathered around the TV and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. To see yourself on television, for a bloke like me, a poor boy from the East End, was just amazing, the stuff of dreams, and for your family to be there and for them to tell you how proud they were of you, I’m not ashamed to say that I cried too.

  A couple of months later the show went out on TV as the first series of Chop Shop under the name Bangla Bangers, and a few nights after that my wife Lisa and I were in a Japanese restaurant on the Finchley Road. This guy came over and said, ‘I saw your programme on TV, absolutely fantastic, can I have your autograph?’

  Well! Did my shoulders swell and did I have a smile?!

  I saw a glint in Lisa’s eye too, she was so proud of me, and we exchanged smiles. Fuck me, I’m famous! Since then barely a day has gone by that I haven’t been recognised by someone. For the most part it’s been a wonderful experience, everyone is so friendly and pleased to see you, you feel like you’ve made their day when they recognise you.

  It’s amazing the places I’ve been spotted – you just don’t realise how many people have seen these programmes. Lisa and I went on holiday once to Turkey, and just walking up to passport control I was getting calls from other holidaymakers, saying things like, ‘Hey Bernie how are you?’ Though, to be fair, I did happen to be wearing a Chop Shop sweatshirt!

  There were the usual huge queues at Heathrow when a couple of the security guys spotted me. ‘Hey,’ one of them said, ‘It’s Bernie from Chop Shop!’ Everyone turns to look at me and I’m mortified. They beckoned me over to one of the scanners that wasn’t in operation: a quick frisk and we were straight through, we bypassed the entire queue. Now I was even more embarrassed – hundreds of pairs of eyes looked at us as we jumped the queue.

  At that time I hadn’t realised that the show was being broadcast in ninety-two countries, so when I got to Turkey I was still getting recognised, there was no escape! I’ve been spotted in Finland, South Africa, all sorts of places. When I’ve been shopping in Asda people have come up to see what I’ve got in my basket, and they’re probably surprised to find bacon!

  A few weeks after the first episode went out I got a phone call from Raw Television saying how delighted they were with the series, that it was one of Discovery’s most popular car shows ever, and that they wanted to do another one. This would mean another year of my life filming an eight-episode series. I just burst into tears. I still didn’t think I had found my niche in life, so to hear that I was wanted was an incredible feeling.

  This time, though, things would be different. They wanted to take Leepu out of his comfort zone and take him somewhere where he could stretch himself and create even more amazing machines. So, where better than my manor? The East End of London, where there’s a large Bangladeshi community, but with modern technology as well.

  Before we knew it Leepu and his family were on a plane to England, they sorted him a house and we were making Chop Shop: London Garage. For goodness’ sake, we barely came out alive after two months together, how would we survive another twelve, I wondered?

  I remember Dan Korn, then head of programming at Discovery Europe, saying to me once, ‘We need more language.’ By that he meant swearing. Well, I didn’t need asking twice with Leepu around! I did have slightly mixed feelings, though. I was still doing my consultancy work and building up a new garage, and the new series would put a stop to that. A year out of a business can be a long time, especially so soon after coming back from a ten-week break in Bangladesh. But in the end I decided these sorts of opportunities don’t come around very often, and my reputation was good in London so there would always be work out there somewhere for me. So yes, I decided, let’s do it.

  When I went to Bangladesh I felt I needed to prove myself to the locals, who might be thinking, ‘Who is this white guy coming over here to tell us how to fix cars?’

  And it was the same for Leepu when he came to England. I think he felt he had to prove himself even more and that he would be judged by British standards rather than Bangladeshi standards, which put a lot of pressure on himself to raise his game.

  Sometimes it would get too much for him, and his mind would go blank. He’d get an idea in his head, start on it, then walk away and leave it. We didn’t know what he was thinking from one minute to the next. For the first three weeks he’d roll in at 9.30, 10 o’clock and go home at 3 pm. He’d say, ‘My mind’s just not with it, I can’t focus.’ But we had a show to make and the mechanics had to carry on. It took him a while to convince himself that what he was doing was right, but then he came up with some fantastic creations.

  Leepu soon grew to love London. There was a big Bangladeshi community so he didn’t feel like a total outsider, he loved the fact he could get a drink twenty-four hours a day if he wanted to, and he loved our burgers. Whereas we lost weight in Bangladesh, Leepu went home having put on twenty pounds in that first year in London!

  The car I am most proud of from that first run of London Garage is the one Leepu said would never work, the one we called ‘The Angry Frog’. It started off as a clapped out, beaten up piece of fucking shit Mitsubishi Pajero four-wheel drive. It was an old smoker that drank diesel like you or I would drink water, but I wanted to do something different. I wanted it to run on old cooking oil.

  There were companies out there that sold conversion kits for £2,000 but we only had a budget of £4,000 for the entire car, so there was no way the production company would sanction it and, anyway, it wouldn’t make great telly just buying the kit and bolting it on. So I decided to design and build my own. I went over the design with Leepu and, ever supportive, he said, ‘It’ll never work, we’ll be pushing this car.’

  All the way through he doubted it and doubted it and doubted it. In the end I just told him to fuck off and concentrate on his own design, which looked shit, and to leave me to it.

  For the grand total of £10 I built my own conversion kit for this car, and what did we get it to run on? Well, being only a short trip from Brick Lane, it had to be curry oil! So we went round all the shops and restaurants with 25-litre drums asking for their old curry oil. I built my own strainer to get all the crap out of the oil, my own heater to heat up the curry oil before it went into the engine, and bought two cheap filters which I attached to an
electronic switch to heat the oil up to 85 degrees.

  Five days later, much to Leepu’s amazement, the first time we tried it the engine started up on the button. The only downside was that when you stood behind it, you got really hungry ’cos all you could smell was fucking curry! And it flew like a rocket, without hurting the environment.

  What could be better? Make yourself a great dinner, enjoy it, then stick it in your car and drive!

  Just like Bangla Bangers, London Garage was hard work. There wasn’t the heat and of course we had better tools, but there was also the pressure of upping our game and, of course, being a much longer series it was nonstop for a whole year. We had just £4,000 and four weeks to build each car and there was no room for failure: Discovery needed their TV show – it didn’t matter how we did it, it had to be done.

  We had a great big whiteboard on the wall and on it was written what we were going to do each day: brakes, steering, electrics etc. and whatever it said we had to do, no matter how long it took. There was no script, it was a case of ‘What you see is what you get’.

  The most stressful car to make was the congestion-buster. We got an old square sandwich van and we were going to convert it so that you could take it into the West End without having to pay the congestion charge.

  Once we’d drained off all the fluids the first thing Leepu proceeded to do was start chopping it up, so a vehicle that started out eight foot long ended up just six foot long, then went down to five foot. This made everything fifty times harder for me and the mechanics, because by reducing its length he’d taken the whole backbone out of the car.

  Every time we made something to facilitate seating in the car it wouldn’t fit because the compartment was too small. It was so small that if you were anything over five-foot six inches, then your arse was sat on the brake lights and your feet were hanging over the front headlights, and in between we had to fit an engine, steering and suspension. The more he chopped it the more work it made for the rest of us to make the car safe, still run AND convert it to run on LPG.