by Rob Brydon
Within a week Megan told me that my contract was not being renewed. She did, however – and this has foxed me every day since she said it – ask if I would like to make a documentary about lawns. Well, I wasn’t happy. I took it very personally. I had a month or so of shows left to run and I’m ashamed to say that my anger got the better of me one Saturday morning when talking on air to a caller whose words were being obscured by the sound of a dog yapping in the background.
‘Sorry, Rob, that’s our dog.’
‘Oh, really. What’s it called?’
‘She’s called Megan.’
‘Really? We’ve got a bitch called Megan here too.’
I know. Unbelievable. She didn’t deserve that.
And off I went, never to return – until Megan eventually moved on, and a new editor took her place.
12
Within a few months of leaving Radio Wales, I was running out of money. I put my car up for sale, a brand-new VW Polo bought a year or so earlier from the Volkswagen garage in Swansea where Dad was working. I went to meet a man at Red Dragon, the local independent radio station, handing him my demo reel and trying to appear simultaneously nonchalant and keen. It came to nothing. I was sending off dozens of letters in response to programmes mentioned in the Guardian’s ‘Media’ section. (I still have a ring binder full of rejections. Perhaps they form part of the e-book – press the screen and see what happens.)
Eventually I wandered across the corridor at the BBC to the Continuity Department and managed to wangle a try-out as a continuity announcer. This job basically involved getting up at five o’clock in the morning, sitting in a darkened room surrounded by television screens and waiting until the time came to say, ‘Now the news where you are …’ Or, more excitingly, ‘Let’s catch up with goings-on in Ramsay Street … It’s Neighbours.’
The announcer was also responsible for the technical side of things – opting in and out of what was being broadcast on the national BBC network, and making sure that the people of Wales got the Welsh news and not the latest happenings in Bristol and the West. This was the very mistake I made on one occasion, just towards the end of my shift. I slunk out of the building like a murderer trying to leave the scene of the crime undetected, although deep inside I felt I’d done us all a favour. The Bristol news was likely to be considerably sunnier than the Welsh – which, in those days, I would have considered to be rainswept and concerned primarily with redundancy and illness.
This may have said more about me than about the state of the nation.
I began to work continuity shifts quite regularly on a freelance basis and was ready to sign a longer-term contract when the phone rang one afternoon. I was in bed recovering from a strenuous morning’s announcements. It was my agent – my first-ever agent, Siân Trenberth, of Siân-Lucy Management – calling to tell me that I had an audition for a job in London. London! This was exciting. London was the Promised Land, the land of opportunities, the gateway to proper presenting work. Or even to some acting work.
What would this audition be for?
Theatre, television, maybe even a film?
It was none of the above.
Siân explained that there was a new venture starting up on the recently launched Sky TV, called the Satellite Shop. It was home shopping, as glimpsed occasionally on the kind of programmes Clive James used to host, where viewers were encouraged to laugh at some of the idiotic shows that had made their way onto the airwaves in America but which we Brits were far too smart to fall for. My initial disappointment soon gave way to excitement at the prospect of auditioning in London and the belief that the job, were I to get it, would at least be a job in London. It would be a job in TV, and it could be the first step towards bigger and better things.
I took the train to London and went to audition in a building just behind Oxford Street. The would-be sales people were set the task of talking to camera and selling a few items handed to them by the production team just minutes earlier. Then, just when they thought it was over, they were asked to sell anything that came to mind. Determined not to be thrown by this, I calmly took off my shoes and began to sell my socks. ‘Well, if you’re looking for something special between your foot and your shoe, you’ve come to the right place …’ I made an exemplary job of spontaneous sock-selling and, within a few days, was given the joyous news that the job was mine. This was an instant fix on the money front; I went from £30 a day as a continuity announcer to £150 a day as a proud ambassador of home shopping.
Oh. My. God.
The programme was broadcast from Sky’s new headquarters in Osterley, West London, and ran from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon. My parents back in Wales bought a satellite dish in celebration and watched as much of the output as they could bring themselves to. My grandmother even went so far as to buy something (no doubt in the hope of securing my position with my new employers). Initially, the producers built a set in the style of a house so that garden products were sold in the garden, kitchen gadgets in the kitchen and so on, all under the glare of harsh studio lighting. I suspect the lighting was brighter even than the usual television studio lights, so as to shine on the products and make them sparkle. Lighting this bright meant heavy make-up for the presenters; whenever I think back to my time on the shop floor, it’s always accompanied by the smell of the make-up as it sizzled and melted under the lights.
The presenters would all wear earpieces through which we could hear instructions from the gallery where the director sat, choosing his shots. Usually this would be a calm voice saying something along the lines of, ‘That’s it, just hold the watch up a bit …’ But when things went wrong, the challenge for the presenter would be to maintain a calm and collected exterior while all hell was breaking loose in their ear. On one occasion, I was selling a lawnmower – one of the old hover types – in the garden set. As I nattered away, scaling new heights of insincere inanity, I decided to turn the device over and show how easy it was to take the blade off and replace it. As I began to undo the big central locking nut with the handy plastic spanner, a chorus of doom built to a crescendo in my ear, ‘Nooooo!’ It was too late; I was committed now. As the voices reached their peak, the nut gave way and fell to the bright-green AstroTurf floor, closely followed by around ten separate component parts, which clanked and jangled into an unruly heap on the ground. I of course had no idea how to put it all back together again, although I tried for a while and succeeded in making things look even worse.
Another time, again in the garden, I was joined by an expert demonstrator from Black & Decker who was standing behind me, showing the viewers how easy it was to use one of their electric sanding devices on our in-studio fence. As we chatted away about how this appliance had enriched our lives, I enquired as to its unrivalled safety record.
‘Oh yes, Rob, this is one of the safest devices that … Argh! Bloody hell!’
He’d inadvertently used the thing on his hand. Blood began to gush forth on to our pristine set.
After several months of broadcasting what was essentially a magazine programme with a bit of selling stuck on the end, the producers decided it was time, in light of poor sales figures, to get tough and kick some retail ass. A home-shopping guru was brought over from Hawaii. Her name was Renée, and she was a diminutive powerhouse of selling. None of us presenters could be said to have lived for selling; we were doing the job because it was all we could get at the time, and it paid the bills. Renée taught us the basics: the importance of energy when selling; the importance of selling the benefit, not the product. Tell people what this product is going to make them feel, how it will improve their lives. We were told to tease the viewers with what was coming up in the show, not by telling them directly but by being vague.
So, rather than saying that we had a gold dress watch for men coming up, we would say, ‘If you’re looking for some really special jewellery for a big occasion, something that’s going to make you look and feel great, we’ve got just the thing …’
It sounds silly, but I’m here to tell you it works.
The other thing was to hammer home the price. The prices were always structured so as to give the appearance of being reduced.
‘This wonderful item [that you’ve managed to live without] was seventy-five pounds, it’s now just fifty pounds! A huge Home Shopping saving of twenty-five pounds!’
And to create a sense of urgency, ‘If you don’t order now, you’re going to miss out. Pick up the phone! Do it now!’
Some of the other presenters considered Renée to be a little vulgar and crass; I thought she was great. With Dad being a salesman, it’s probably in my blood. I was actually quite good at the selling – in fact, they told me I was the best. So there. Well done, me.
In spite of our newfound skills, the programme began to flounder and three of the presenters were let go. This left just four of us to soldier on until a month or so later, when we were told we could all take the week off while some restructuring took place. The restructuring was thorough and, within days, the whole enterprise folded. Although television shopping was never on my list of ambitions, and I now cringe whenever I see a clip or am reminded of it, the whole episode was an interesting time for me. It was my first introduction to London, to the media outside Wales, and while it was obviously on the extreme outskirts of the outskirts of where I wanted to be, perhaps comically so, it was nonetheless a move to London.
I was meeting new types of people; I remember the excitement of going shopping for clothes with the stylist. A stylist! I’d never heard of a stylist before, let alone met one. She was a tall, willowy, dark-haired girl and she whisked me off to Next on Kensington High Street. Although I’d already been lucky enough to have experienced Next on Queen Street in Cardiff, this felt different, the stylist gliding around the store as though she owned it, and I was naively impressed by the whole thing.
It was while on the Shopping Channel that I changed my name from Rob Jones to Rob Brydon. I had joined the actors’ union, Equity, and there was already a Rob Jones treading some boards somewhere, so I took my middle name, Mum’s maiden name, instead.
Now that I had a tiny, tentative foothold in the metropolis, I began to make cautious progress – one step up and two steps back – towards my destination: comedy, shining like a mythical Camelot on a distant hill. While at Sky I had left my Cardiff agent and joined the books of Jerry Hicks, who was based in London. Jerry represented one of my co-presenters, Sara Hollamby, as well as a few comedians, and he began to get me some presenting work and the first of a handful of warm-up gigs.
I had never warmed up before, and I certainly didn’t have a stand-up act, but I went along regardless, Jerry somehow having convinced my prospective employers that my lack of experience made me the perfect candidate for the job. The show was Jameson Tonight, Derek Jameson’s short-lived and long-forgotten chat show on Sky, and was recorded at the historic Windmill Theatre in Soho. The Windmill had been famous for its nude girls, who had to stand perfectly still to stay on the right side of the law, and later as the starting ground for comedians such as Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers. I hoped some of the Hancock and Sellers magic might rub off on me, but without even the most basic of stage acts to my name, this was unlikely.
I would arrive at the Windmill around teatime and do my best to entertain the tiny studio audience and put them in a receptive mood for Derek Jameson. Coming from his background in newspapers, he viewed the whole thing as a wheeze; it seemed he couldn’t believe his luck. A young Shane Richie was Derek’s sidekick, the Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson. While there, I saw many comedians coming through as they plugged their latest project. Michael Barrymore leapt around the sofa, destroying bits of the set in the process, and I chatted in the wings with the very nice Joe Pasquale. It didn’t matter whether the comedians were to my taste or not; I was happy to watch and see if I could figure out how they were doing what they were doing, and whether I would do it any differently.
Music acts visited the show too. A jet-lagged Dion DiMucci of Dion and the Belmonts fame promoted his new record, while Sheila Ferguson from The Three Degrees and Helen Shapiro both took the trouble to tell me they liked my act. Surely they were lying? I was awful. The house band was led by the drummer Pete Thomas (famous for being the drummer with Elvis Costello’s Attractions as well as Jonathan Ross’s house band on The Last Resort) and I always felt that he viewed my meagre warm-ups with a mixture of pity and contempt.
Money, or the lack of it, was now very much on the agenda once more. I was owed a fair amount by the Shopping Channel people and began sending endless letters and making telephone calls in pursuit of whatever I could manage to prise out of them. We were living rent free during the week in Hounslow, in a flat owned by my old school friend David Williams. Martina was working in London three days a week, and so we lived a rather odd existence where she would head off to work in the morning and my day would stretch out ahead of me. I would usually fill it with endless phone calls, chasing money and jobs, writing to prospective employers, killing time browsing in WHSmith, and making ratatouille for Martina’s return. All alone in the flat I would imagine I was presenting a cooking show and gaze at an imaginary camera, speaking out loud: ‘Now I’m just going to chop up the aubergine. I like to chop it to this kind of size, but it’s really up to you …’ On Thursday we would head back to Cardiff, where I had a half-hour radio show each Saturday lunchtime, The Welsh National Chart. Most weeks this would be my only source of income.
Things picked up slightly when a few more warm-ups came my way, most notably for a sitcom called Heil Honey I’m Home! It was an old-fashioned, sixties-style set-up which revolved around Hitler living next door to a Jewish family. As far as I’m aware, it has never been broadcast (although, I have to say, I thought it was pretty funny). In one of the episodes there was a recording break while the actor playing Mein Führer was taken away to have a bald wig fitted. In the intervening years I’ve had the misfortune to wear a few myself, and I now know that this is not a speedy process. My job as warm-up man was to keep the audience entertained and suitably ‘warm’ until the actor returned, a task I estimated would take ten minutes or so.
It took half an hour.
After five minutes I had run out of anything approaching what you might call prepared material and was reduced to just chatting to the audience, searching for laughs. Eventually, and in desperation, I asked one of the crowd if I could have a sweet from the packet resting on their lap. I took the whole bag and slowly, very slowly, shared them out around the audience. It was painful for all concerned.
Fashion icon
Why I carried on as a warm-up man is something of a mystery to me now; I seemed to limp on from disaster to disaster. Rhys was now working in London and remembers being at a recording of Wogan where my name came up while chatting to Terry’s warm-up man.
‘Ah, yeah … Rob Brydon … I’ve heard about him,’ said the comic. ‘He’s the one who doesn’t do any gags.’
I performed one such gag-free warm-up for a show BBC Wales were making at the time, The BBC Diet Programme. This involved a studio audience made up of people all trying to lose weight together, who would return to the BBC each week and share with the viewers the latest news of their progress. As the audience stood queuing outside the studio, I had the fiendishly clever idea that I would conspire with one of them; I would hide a chocolate eclair in a handbag and then, once the audience was seated, I would take on the role of a wildly over-the-top evangelical minister from the Deep South, suddenly claiming to have sensed a sinner amongst us. After a great, time-consuming show of scanning the audience, searching for the transgressor, I would apprehend the lady with the eclair planted in her bag. She would reluctantly open the bag, revealing the cream confection to the whole room, and the audience would erupt into applause.
That was the theory.
With the suitably plump accomplice selected and the eclair secreted, the audience made their way in and took their seats.
I began my usual stuff about enjoying the show, telling everyone where the fire exits were and other housekeeping matters, before launching, with some considerable gusto, into my southern evangelist.
‘Do you believe in the healing power of weight loss?’
‘Yes!’ came the reply.
They were playing along; this was excellent.
‘Do you belieeeeve in the power?’
‘Yes!’
I was on a roll. This was the point where I began to milk it, to over-egg it, to take it too far.
‘I can’t hear you! Do you belieeeeeve?’
The reply was now a little weaker, not quite so enthusiastic.
‘Yes …’
‘Has everybody been good this week, has everybody been eating less?’
Maybe five or six kindly souls offered up a positive response, but I could tell that I was losing them. Best to cut to the chase and reveal my cake smuggler, then revel in the applause that would no doubt follow.
‘Wait! Someone is not telling the truth!’ I eyed the audience with shock and distrust, as though I had been betrayed. ‘There is a sinner amongst us! I will find you!’
I made a great show of scanning the audience, ‘searching’ for the lapsed slimmer. I thought I’d take thirty seconds or so to ramp up the tension, before making my great revelation. But as the thirty seconds came to an end, I realized that I had no real idea where my accomplice was sitting. Not to worry … she can’t be that hard to find … now let’s just think … what did she look like? I had no idea. I could conjure up nothing whatsoever of her appearance, not one single detail.