Small Man in a Book

by Rob Brydon

  We left the do in Dave’s car with the placatory plate and, if I’m being honest, a bit of an atmosphere. It would have made sense, geographically speaking, to drop Jacque off last. I was against this as it would have meant leaving her alone in the car with Dave once Lisa and I had been jettisoned. I somehow managed to convince our hard-done-by driver that it would make much more sense to drop her off first. In so doing, I ensured that she remained beyond the clutches of my dear friend. And so it was that Jacque and I began to see each other. Tentatively, at first.

  It was a week or so later that we went back to her place, a room in a shared house on the prophetically named Colum Road. I stayed the night – rather nervously at first, although I got the hang of things after a while. Jacque’s room was at the back of the ground floor; at the front was a room taken by her friend Tracey and her boyfriend Gary. If either of them wished to use the loo during the night they had to come through Jacque’s room; this gave the proceedings a bit of an edge (and, I suppose, must at times have resulted in what can only be described as an early form of dogging).

  As I’ve said, I was tentative. With the light turned off we slipped out of our clothes – quite quickly, I recall – and jumped into bed, where Jacque soon discovered that I’d kept my trousers on, just to be sure. She expressed her surprise at this, and I reacted as though it was something of a shock to me too: ‘Where did they come from?’ I got out of bed in the dark and returned, trouser-less.

  As the situation developed, Jacque was surprised once more to discover that, while my trousers were now languishing in a crumpled heap on the floor, I nonetheless still had my pants on.

  I explained that I was just being careful, before submitting to full disclosure …

  The following morning I borrowed her bike and cycled back across town, along the pedestrianized Queen Street and down on to Newport Road, a huge smile on my face as I pedalled. I looked at the people as I rode by and laughed out loud at the thought of them having no idea where I’d just come from or what a momentous night I’d enjoyed. When I play the moment back now, it has a joyous, filmic quality to it; the sun is shining, birds are singing and music fills the air. I think I knew then, in a rare case of self-awareness, that a milestone had been reached – one which I would never forget.

  A trip to Bute Park with Jacque.

  In the fullness of time Jacque was enticed up to my top-floor sub-zero love nest and managed, with admirable foresight, to see past the cold-water kitchen and its collection of empty milk bottles, the damp-stained walls and the tinned-food diet to the handsome young man beyond. The house had a strict ‘no girlfriends’ policy, which Mrs Williams made no secret of. I’d already got on the wrong side of my perfectly reasonable landlady earlier that week when I openly flouted her hot-water rota by turning on the immersion heater one afternoon for an impromptu bath. I further angered her one morning when Jacque, having stayed over the night before, was sneaking down the stairs and out of the house. She quietly slipped through the front door, closing it carefully behind her before silently turning the handle on the door of the porch. It wouldn’t budge. Mrs Williams had cunningly locked the porch and hidden the key, leaving any unwelcome sex maniacs trapped in the tiny glass cell with only a local property paper for comfort until it pleased her to release them. Nothing was ever said regarding this breaking of the rules, although I did suffer an icy stare as I returned home that evening.

  This whole wonderful ‘having a girlfriend’ experience was all new to me. Most of my fellow students had had girlfriends prior to coming away to college, and some of them were already working their way towards personal bests when it came to bedposts and notches. I, on the other hand, slipped happily into a new world of doing things together and having someone else to share thoughts and experiences with.

  On the town with Jacque and James.

  We stayed together for two years and lived in a variety of flats and houses. When my time with Mrs Williams came to an end, I moved to an appalling Young Ones-style student house in Grangetown on a busy main road where heavily laden lorries and trucks charged past at all hours. We slept on a mattress on the floor while the architecture student in the room below worked to the sound of heavy-metal music turned up to eleven. I would wander downstairs bleary-eyed, knock on his door and ask him to turn it down, while he stood there looking as though playing music that loud at that time of night was the most reasonable thing anyone had ever done. The windows rattled through the night from the vibrations of the passing traffic, and I sellotaped cling film around their frames to keep out the cold. We’d stay up late and huddle under the duvet, listening in the darkness to Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle on the soundtrack album One from the Heart. The trucks rumbled by and the noise from the room below seeped up through the floorboards, but we were wrapped up and safe in our own little world. ‘It’s got to be love, I’ve never felt this way.’

  11

  Meanwhile, college life went on. With the exception of the more academic classes, like Theatre History, it was a doddle. Being able to make people laugh made everything that much easier, and already knowing what I wanted to do once I left college also helped. I knew that I wanted to be involved in comedy in one form or another, and I had a naively comforting belief that everything would be fine and that work would somehow come along for me. It’s virtually impossible, when studying acting as a student, to have any grasp of what life will be like in the outside world. There are always a few lucky ones who fall into work straight away, and some, luckier still, who find fame and fortune. But for the vast majority it is a dispiriting, endless slog of letters sent, CVs posted and auditions applied for – usually with very little coming back in the way of encouragement.

  While in college, students are given the opportunity to play a wide range of parts. This is excellent experience, allowing them to stretch and test themselves, but it’s very unrepresentative of the real world. Having left the comfort of the college walls, actors are generally cast in accordance with how they look. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are cast in relation to how they are perceived. I wouldn’t learn this for some years yet, as my hoped-for career as an actor would have to wait while I took a few unexpected detours.

  After our success on the Level Three radio show, I had become known to the Powers That Be (Powers That Were? Powers That Beed? Powerful Bees?) at BBC Radio Wales, and wasted no opportunity to make a nuisance of myself and remind them that I was eager and able when it came to radio. This persistence paid off one day when David Peet, the Director of General Programmes at the station, asked me to come in and audition for the role of holiday relief presenter on a twenty-minute mid-morning quiz show called Bank Raid. The programme involved a host talking to contestants on the phone and asking them questions about general knowledge. Successful answers helped the contestants progress towards the ‘vault’ where more successful answers would lead to an eventual winner, announced through the cunning deployment of a pre-recorded sound effect – in this case, the sound of coins showering down from a great height, signifying the sudden acquisition of not inconsiderable wealth. In reality the contestants won a book token.

  The audition went well, and the job was mine. I replaced a staggeringly confident and capable young man named Mark Wordley, who flew abroad to his honeymoon. Were it not for this honeymoon, I might never have begun my career at BBC Wales where I stayed, on and off, for the next six or seven years.

  Hosting Bank Raid was not a difficult job. The production team did all the hard work, finding the contestants, sourcing the questions and grouping them into categories. All I had to do was chat to the callers in a cheery manner, ask the right questions and play the correct effects cartridges. I managed this with ease and was eventually offered the job of hosting the show permanently. This would mean leaving college early, pretty much halfway through my three-year course, and without a qualification in the form of the diploma we were all studying for. I didn’t spend too long weighing up my options; it seemed clear to m
e that there was only one. It was a job, paid work, and in radio, which I had always loved. Surely it wouldn’t be difficult, once established as a broadcaster, to move across into the world of acting?

  Hmm.

  Readers familiar with the popular ITV game show Family Fortunes would do well at this moment to conjure up the distinctive sound of a wrong answer.

  ‘Rob says it would be easy to slide across into acting after being a radio presenter. Our survey says …’

  I didn’t know it at the time, but it would prove very difficult indeed to make the leap. For now, it didn’t matter. I was working; I had money coming in, and life looked good. I had to tell the college that I was leaving and worried enormously that, when doing so, I would see a look in their eyes that told me they thought I was making the biggest mistake of my young life. I sat across a table from a couple of the senior staff members and told them my decision. In replying, one of them made the point that they were worried that I was drifting towards light entertainment. Nonsense, I thought to myself. Within two years I was bounding down a stairway in front of a studio audience, my hair bouffant, my jacket blouson, as I turned grinning to camera and welcomed viewers at home to a Saturday teatime quiz show called Invasion. Touché.

  I don’t know if the cautionary words of my tutors were a real concern to me; I was too excited by the prospect of work, by the idea of getting out there into the real world and paying my way. I rented a large ground-floor flat on Cathedral Road. I’d coveted these huge, bay-windowed, high-ceilinged abodes for some time and moved in as soon as I could. It was only once tied into a contract that I realized that I would be sharing the place with a large family of confident, outgoing slugs. The road runs parallel with the River Taff and, I was told later, this was the reason so many slugs wanted to make friends with me. You wouldn’t see them during the day – they were busy, I suppose, or sleeping off the excess of the previous night – but come the evening they treated the place as their own. They would climb the walls of the bathroom and creep slowly across the bedroom floor under cover of darkness, only to be discovered when my bare foot came down unknowingly on their soft jelly-like form and ended their short life.

  Aside from the slugs it was a good place to live, midway between the city centre and the BBC – where I found it possible to spend a large amount of my time, quite disproportionate to the length of the show I was hosting. Bank Raid was a small portion of a longer, mid-morning magazine programme called Street Life, hosted on alternating days by folk musician and broadcaster Frank Hennessy and rugby legend and broadcaster Ray Gravell. The brilliant Ray had played for Wales and the British Lions, as well as being part of the Llanelli team that had famously beaten the All Blacks of New Zealand by 9–3, back in 1972. (The town’s Wikipedia entry proudly notes that the score would have been 10–3 in today’s scoring system.) Ray was one of the loveliest people you could ever hope to meet, a huge gentle bear of a man who made everyone he spoke to feel that they were the most important person in the world. He was a very honest man and enjoyed our handovers, when we would switch from his show to my little section.

  With the mighty Ray Gravel – ‘Tell me to fuck off ! Tell me to fuck off !’

  I once asked him, on air, ‘How’s it hanging?’ I honestly had no idea what the phrase meant; I thought it was a figure of speech.

  There was an awkward pause, a moment’s dead air, before Ray responded with admirable frankness, ‘Well, since you ask, to the left.’

  I stayed in touch with Ray right up until the end of his too-short life. Years later, when I had achieved some success and had begun to make a name for myself, he would phone me out of the blue, for no other reason than to tell me he was proud of me and to congratulate me on how things were going. People often call out of the blue once you’ve found success, to wish you well. While I don’t doubt their sincerity, the conversation often ends with something along the lines of, ‘Oh yes, I know what I meant to ask you; we wanted to go and see Peter Kay, but it’s sold out. You couldn’t get hold of any tickets, could you?’ It’s fine – I do it myself – but Ray never once had any such epilogue to his calls. He really was just calling to say well done.

  Ray particularly liked it when I insulted him. While we worked together at Radio Wales, I would make him laugh with my impressions of Al Pacino. These, in essence, amounted to no more than me pulling a vaguely Pacino-esque face and shouting, ‘Oh, Ray! You piece of shit! Fuck you!’

  He loved it. ‘Aw … crikey! Tell me to fuck off! Tell me to fuck off!’

  In 2000, at the age of forty-nine, Ray was diagnosed with diabetes, which eventually resulted in him losing his toe. This was followed by the loss of his foot. I saw him a little while after the amputation, when we both appeared on a television show hosted by our friend Max Boyce. Ray now had a prosthetic lower leg, on which was emblazoned the crest of his beloved Llanelli Rugby Club. He had lost weight, but was full of beans; he moved quickly on his new foot and, as usual, was only concerned with how I was doing, how I was feeling.

  Two weeks later, he died after suffering a heart attack while on holiday in Spain. He was a truly great man, and the world was a better place with him in it.

  I hadn’t been at Radio Wales for long when I was offered the opportunity to take over the early-morning slot: six thirty to seven thirty. To start with, as had been the case with Bank Raid, I sat in for a week while the regular host, Roy Noble, took a break.

  This would have been 1985 or 1986; compact discs were beginning to emerge but, like many radio stations, BBC Wales was still using mostly vinyl records. Each day I would pick up the programme box. This was a sturdy black case, big enough to hold about twenty or thirty long-playing records, with a large and – to me, at least – strangely intimidating BBC logo stamped on the front. It contained the records and the running order for the next morning’s show. The running order was a script of sorts, which listed the sequence of the records along with any other features within the programme, such as news, sport and weather. Next to the title of the record was printed its duration and the length of the introduction, also whether the record ‘ended’ or faded – essential information for any disc jockey serious about his craft.

  At Radio Wales. Poptastic.

  Once back at Slug Towers, I would sit at my record player and practise my links, i.e. what I planned to say in between the records. In the very early days I even used to script these seemingly off-the-cuff and certainly inconsequential bits of chat. Frankly, it terrified me. Most people getting to host a national radio show would have risen up the ranks of hospital or perhaps local radio. Their on-air personality would have formed gradually, at its own pace, away from the pressures of such a relatively large audience. Here I was, thrown in at the deep end.

  On my very first morning, as I approached the Greenwich Mean Time pips at seven o’clock, I trotted out my pre-written line.

  ‘You’re listening to BBC Radio Wales, I’m Rob Jones, it’s seven o’clock …’

  Nothing.

  Silence.

  I’d peaked too soon.

  I started again. ‘I’m Rob Jones and you’re lis–’

  BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEEEEEEEEP.

  Oh God.

  Those early shows were a very bumpy ride; I would get quite worked up and panicked at the prospect of making a link run to a specific time. For a long while, as ridiculous as it sounds, the sight of a needle three-quarters of the way across a forty-five rpm single would bring on a mild but effective bout of anxiety.

  If we’re going to talk about anxiety, I should tell you that all through my broadcasting years I would suffer the radio equivalent of the classic actor’s nightmare where he or she is struggling to reach the stage and can hear their cue being delivered in the distance. Or they arrive onstage in the wrong costume. Or they don’t know the play they are meant to be appearing in. I’ve subsequently enjoyed the delights of all these types of an actor’s nightmares since working onstage with my stand-up tours. Back in my radio days a good
night’s sleep would often be hijacked by vivid images of me sitting in front of the mixing desk, a turntable at each side of me, as I frantically searched the programme box in vain, unable to find the next record. Scarier still was the one where I had the record in my hands but couldn’t cue it up as the turntable was on fire. Meanwhile, on the other turntable, the needle was the dreaded three-quarters of the way across the disc.

  These anxieties aside, I suppose I settled into radio pretty well. I bought my first house, on a new estate just minutes away from the BBC, a little two-bedroom starter home for the colossal price of £28,000. I felt like I was Elvis, taking hold of the keys to Graceland. This house taught me my first lesson in not believing everything an advertiser tells you. When walking around the show home, unless someone has told you otherwise, it’s perfectly reasonable to look at the furnishings and take them at face value. Yes, this room really is big enough for a double bed and a chest of drawers. No, my friend, look closer. See how that double bed looks like a double bed, in many ways it is a double bed, but on closer inspection it’s a pretty damn small double bed. If you’re being generous, you might call it a huge single bed, the furniture equivalent of Al Pacino in Dick Tracy, where he played ‘Big Boy’ Caprice, the world’s tallest dwarf. And that chest of drawers, you’re right, is just that little bit smaller than a chest of drawers should really be.