by Rob Brydon
But hey, it was a house, it was mine. And, as far as I could see, there were no slugs.
Jacque and I were together through these early days at the BBC, and we would get on the train on a Sunday and head home to Neath for lunch with Mum, Dad and Pete. I delighted in showing her parts of Wales: the Brecon Beacons, the Gower Peninsula and, closer to home, the Aberdulais Falls. We once went for a walk along the canal and found what I thought was a clearing, where we began to enjoy each other’s company in a particularly enthusiastic manner. On reflection, I should have realized that it was a very long and narrow clearing; I suppose some people would call it a path. Certainly the man who came walking along it towards us would have done. The two of us ran, clothes in hand, away from the poor Welsh walker who probably still tells the story of the day he stumbled upon two lovebirds on the bank of the canal.
I went to Scotland for the first of several trips to meet and stay with Jacque’s large family. It seems curious to me now that in honour of the visit – in essence, the first time I would meet the parents of a girlfriend – I bought some slip-on leather shoes to replace the trainers I normally wore. It was a mark of respect, I suppose, a desire to create a good impression. The family lived in Jacque’s childhood home, a big double-fronted sandstone Edwardian house in the Pollokshields area of Glasgow. It seemed to me to be some kind of rambling manor house and was home to a variety of family members. There were her mother and father of course, as well as her brothers Andrew, John, Simon and Patrick. Aunty Eileen had a room on the ground floor and Uncle Michael, the priest, was an occasional resident with his own room on the first floor.
I got on especially well with Simon and Patrick, who were both on my wavelength when it came to humour. As I recall, Simon was a fellow enthusiast for the cinematic musings of my hero Sylvester Stallone. Indeed, it was in Glasgow and with Jacque that I went to see Rambo: First Blood Part II, having queued round the block to get in. I’d like to tell you that I considered it inferior to First Blood and indicative of a general decline in Mr Stallone’s output. But I can’t. I loved it.
Jacque’s brother Patrick was great, with a superb dry wit. He had been born with arthrogryposis, a congenital disorder that had left him with a curvature of the spine, and so he moved around the house in an electric wheelchair. There was no trace of the ‘Does he take sugar?’ syndrome here, though, thanks to his lovely self-effacing but also stinging wit. As he was transferred into or out of his chair, he would cry, ‘Dignity! Always dignity!’ (This was a quote from Gene Kelly’s character in Singin’ in the Rain who, having found fame and fortune, then glosses over his slightly dubious past with the cry of, ‘Dignity!’) This derived from the many occasions when Patrick was left rather undignified – perhaps shoved in a luggage rack when his wheelchair was attended to, or being manhandled by a taxi driver. He and his brothers greatly enjoyed the evening when we all sat down to dinner and somehow Jacque’s polite Welsh boyfriend managed to sit on his food, the plate having mysteriously found its way on to his chair.
I think it was on that same weekend that Jacque and I cunningly decided to spend the Friday night together at a hotel in Glasgow before I would arrive at the house on the Saturday morning, claiming to have travelled up the night before on the sleeper train. Jacque’s absence was explained by her having attended a friend’s party and slept over there. Her brothers were of course aware of the scam, and greatly enjoyed almost letting the cat out of the bag at dinner.
‘So, Rob, you look a bit tired. Were you up all night on that train?’
‘Well, I was a bit, yes …’
‘It must have been hard to get your head down?’
‘Well, no, I managed to in the end …’
‘I suppose the train, it just keeps going all night, does it?’
‘You could say that, yes.’
If Jacque’s parents were aware of our transgressions, they didn’t let on (though I suspect they were far more knowing than I realized). As was always the case, I got on splendidly with Mr and Mrs Gilbride and looked forward to welcoming Kathleen to Cardiff when she came down to Wales to see her daughter in a play. This would also be the setting for her first meeting with my parents.
The play was The Hard Man and took place at the Sherman Theatre, scene of my tiny roles with the National Youth Theatre of Wales. It concerned the story of the infamous Jimmy Boyle and much, if not all, of the action was confined to his prison cell. Jacque played his wife and – much to my alarm, dismay and embarrassment – on the occasion of my parents meeting Jacque’s mum for the first time (with me sitting between them in the darkness of the auditorium), we witnessed the lovely spectacle of the lead actor stripping naked and indulging in what can only be described as an enthusiastic dirty protest. He slapped his hopefully substitute doo-doo around the walls of his cell with gusto, like Rolf Harris in the grip of a breakdown. My poor parents. Jacque’s poor mum. We went out for a meal after the play; it was very nice, though as I recall, when it came to dessert, we skipped the chocolate.
Jacque was my first girlfriend, and first girlfriends are only around for so long. We split, saying that the parting was only for a while. She was struggling to find acting work in Cardiff and I was thinking that I was settling down too soon. She sensed that I was getting a bit twitchy, and her older head was wise enough to be the one to say that we should break up for a while and then see what happened. Although it was what I wanted, I was still broken-hearted as I drove away from Euston station after putting her on the train back to Glasgow and her old life.
We hooked up again six months later to go on holiday to Spain with her brother Simon and his in-laws. But on our return, we called it a day.
Meanwhile, my six or seven years at BBC Wales had begun. It’s a period in my life about which I’ve often been a little dismissive whenever asked how I began my circuitous route to here. I have to say that, at the time, I enjoyed it for the most part very much. I did a huge amount of work on a wide variety of shows, both radio and TV. As a presenter I hosted radio shows at various points of the day and week; I also worked on radio as an actor, usually in sketches that called for a range of voices and impressions. On TV I hosted the aforementioned quiz show Invasion: two teams competing to win county-sized chunks of a large flashing map, hindered only by my appalling pronunciation of many of the Welsh place names. There was one in particular that I struggled with.
Have a go yourself, see how you fare … Glyndyfrdwy.
Quite.
Even the most cunning linguist would surely have to concede that the word represents a challenge. Time and again I pronounced it Glyn Duvrudwee, much to the visible annoyance of the fluently Welsh-speaking floor manager, when I should of course have been saying Glyn Duverdoy. If you’d like to see this humiliation for yourself, and have had the foresight to purchase the electronic version of this book, then press here now and enjoy my rolled-up, blouson-jacket-sleeved embarrassment at your leisure.
My problem with the Welsh language was that I’d never managed to get to grips with it at school (where learning it was compulsory), and at home it had always had dreadfully dull associations. Whereas now I think it is something to be celebrated and hung on to – so obviously a vital part of our cultural identity – back then it was the language spoken on the news programme in Wales shown in place of Batman or some such glamorous TV show. To have grown up an English-speaking Welsh child in Wales in the 1970s was to know the befuddled agony of staring at the screen as the continuity announcer declared, ‘Now on BBC1 Batman/Star Trek/Land of the Giants, except for viewers in Wales …’ and a newsreader began, in his native tongue, bringing us up to speed with the latest developments in our homeland (a high proportion of which seemed to feature reporters in rainswept fields addressing the camera as a herd of cows lolled around behind them).
Missing Batman was a body blow. It seemed, on the rare occasions that I did get to see it, to be impossibly colourful and glamorous, a world away from a cold wet field just outside Carmarthen. I we
nt through a period of becoming fixated on the show, dreaming of one day owning a house with a study in which a bookcase would slide back to reveal two poles, down which I could slide to my hideout. Hiding was a recurring theme during my childhood, with a dream I kept having in which I sat concealed in a small submarine, possibly yellow, parked on the grass at Woodside. From inside my vessel I could see what was going on around me via the periscope, while I remained invisible. This was a most agreeable state. With the benefit of hindsight, my fixating on poles and submarines seems worryingly Freudian. Let’s move on.
Alongside Invasion I played a few odd comedy characters on a pop-culture youth show called Juice, became a roving reporter on a Sunday-morning magazine programme, See You Sunday, and made an ill-fated cinema commercial for a local jewellery firm. All this was going on while I noticed contemporaries of mine from college begin to make progress as actors. Several of my friends found work at varying levels, but it was only two who achieved what I’d call real success on a large and noticeable scale: Dougray and Hugo Blick. Dougray found theatre and television work with quite indecent haste, while Hugo bagged the role of the young Joker in Tim Burton’s wonderful though pole-free Batman.
At home with Pete.
‘That was easier than I expected.’ Flying a helicopter on See You Sunday
During my time at Radio Wales, I spent a couple of years on the early show, and several on a Saturday-morning youth programme, which I absolutely loved doing but hated listening back to (I sounded like such a buffoon). It was a laugh though. I was earning money and living an easy life with little responsibility, breezing in and out of the BBC at my leisure and, in the process, building friendships that would last for years. I became very friendly with Mark Wordley, for whom I’d originally stood in on Bank Raid. He continued to present and produce shows at the station and was responsible for my first TV presenting role on Invasion, which he produced. I also at this time met the man who was to become my best friend, Rhys John.
Rhys was working with Mark, and I clearly remember my first sighting of him as I was being shown around the offices on the second floor of Broadcasting House. I popped my head around the door of his office and there he was, in his leather jacket, unshaven, with mountains of long black hair; he looked like he was enjoying a day off from his main job as a roadie for Motörhead. Just as I had when first sighting James, my best friend at college, I thought to myself, Hmm, we’re not going to be spending much time together. Rhys, like Mark, was both a presenter and a producer and would go on to take charge of my Saturday morning show, a job which allowed us acres of time to do very little in the way of work. We would slope off in the middle of the day to play golf, go tenpin bowling or loll around in the health club at the recently built Holiday Inn where I was a member.
Rhys.
Rhys and I at BBC Wales. Despite the briefcase, we did very little work.
We were two young men in our early twenties, living the life of someone in his sixties who has retired through ill health and is slowly rehabilitating himself after a heart-related incident. Looking back on this period, I get a little cross with myself when I think of all the time I wasted, when I could have been more focused and working on an act. But I think I was such a late developer that it could only ever have happened the way it did.
Once I’d been a regular presence on the radio for a while, I began to gain enough of a name to receive the odd invitation to attend or host local events. These requests would come straight to the office at the BBC as I’d yet to find representation. Rather than deal with potential employers myself, I invented an agent and would play him on the phone.
Richard Knight was part of Knight and Day Management and spoke with a gruff London accent, a kind of Arthur Daley figure who could demand more money than I would have been able to ask for with a straight face. I’m ashamed to say that he would sometimes manage to get a modest fee from societies who’d asked me along despite obviously not having much spare cash knocking around. I remember one time calling a very nice, rather timid-sounding lady who wanted me to host an evening for underprivileged kids. I managed to get a fee for what I now realize was a charity evening.
‘Is that Mrs Jenkins?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hello, Mrs Jenkins, this is Richard Knight of Knight and Day Management. I’m calling about your letter to Rob.’
‘Oh yes –’
‘Now I’ve had a look at the date and I think we might be able to manage something, but I’ve got to bring up the sordid subject of money.’
‘Oh well, the thing is, Mr Knight –’
‘Please, call me Richard.’
‘All right, Richard, the thing is –’
‘Let’s go for Dick.’
‘Ooh –’
‘Can you go for Dick? Are you comfortable with Dick?’
‘Well, I suppose so … Dick.’
‘Now the thing is, Bobby is a saint, he’d do it for nothing, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t try and squeeze a little bit out of you.’
‘Right.’
‘So, how about this? And I’m not going to squeeze you tight.’
‘No.’
‘We won’t say a pony, we won’t say a monkey. ’Cause you’re both Welsh, let’s call it a sheep. Can you handle a sheep?’
‘How much is a sheep exactly?’
‘Oh, that’s very generous! A hundred it is …’
What appalling behaviour.
While at Radio Wales I became friendly with the teams on the various programmes I was involved with. My producer on Bank Raid, Tessa, had a younger sister who would come to stay with her at weekends. Martina and I first met in a pub on Queen Street that she and Tessa would frequent when she was in Cardiff. In those days, the Vaults was a smoky kind of place. On this night in question I had a cold, and was sitting there at the table amongst our crowd of friends feeling a little withdrawn and detached. In an echo of my first meeting with Jacque – although without, this time, the presence of even a solitary Chuckle Brother – Martina and I talked and talked and talked.
When she came back down to Cardiff a few weekends later, I contrived to muscle in on things and just happen to be around her. This second meeting prompted us to begin a correspondence, on paper of course (email was still the stuff of Star Trek), in which I would send her Opal Fruits and, eventually, in a more provocative gesture, a single Rolo. Younger readers will be blind to the significance of such a bold, sensual act – unaware, as they undoubtedly will be, of the advertising campaign of the late eighties in which viewers were asked to consider whether they loved anyone enough to give them their last Rolo.
The letters became more frequent and I began to search for a reason to find myself in London, where Martina was working at the time, so that I might be able to say, ‘I just happen to be in the area, shall I drop in?’ The opportunity arose thanks to the Brit Awards when the radio show I was hosting on a Saturday morning managed to get a ticket to the event, held that year at the Royal Albert Hall. I went up on the train, feeling very important indeed. The ticket had come via a record company and I wondered how close to the stage I’d find myself. As it was a record company ticket, I imagined my seat would be rather well placed, right in the thick of it. As it turned out, I was way up high – about as far away from the stage as it was possible to be while still remaining in the building. As the crow flies in a straight line, some of the surrounding houses were closer to the stage than I was.
Noel Edmonds hosted, and there were live performances from The Who and the Bee Gees. But all I could think about was the fact that, once the show was over, I was heading to Fulham to see Martina at the house where she was working as a nanny. In the end, my excitement at the prospect of romance won out over the excitement of being in the presence of Barry, Robin, Maurice et al. I slipped away early, got into a taxi and headed over to Fulham. Just as in my first digs in Cardiff, Martina had a room at the top of the house, although this was a slightly posher, very Fulham house. One of he
r employers was a Right Honourable; I took against them on hearing that, when the new baby was six weeks old, the parents went to the West Indies for two weeks, leaving Martina with the three-year-old and the newborn with a maternity nurse. They didn’t phone home once.
This wasn’t on my mind as I wove through the London streets in the back of a black cab before slipping into the house and up to the top floor in blatant disregard of the ‘no gentlemen callers’ rule. Two hours and one kiss later, I was back at the Regent Palace Hotel in Piccadilly. I went to sleep in complete ignorance of the fact that I had just kissed my future wife.
The next day I had returned to Radio Wales, and was regaling Rhys with my exciting news – although, to him, seeing Noel Edmonds in the flesh was not that big a deal. I was soon heading up the motorway at every opportunity, excited both at the prospect of seeing Martina and at the added bonus of getting to hear Radio One in FM. I remember in these pre-satellite-navigation days getting lost in the traffic around Fulham; the sun is shining, and Aztec Camera are singing ‘Somewhere in My Heart’.
Martina’s visits to Cardiff became more frequent, and after a time she moved into my little house by the roundabout in Llandaff.
I was coasting along nicely when my time with the station came to an abrupt and rather ungainly end. A new boss was announced and, in the manner of all new bosses, this one wanted to make some changes. I had known Megan Emery a little already; she was the wife of Chris Stuart, long-time host of the breakfast news show on the channel and sometime Radio Two presenter. When she took over at the top, everyone was a little nervous with regard to the security of their position. In his capacity as producer of my show, Rhys went off to meet her for a chat about the future. He breezed back into our office twenty minutes later and uttered the words that still make us laugh, ‘Rob, you’re safe.’