by Rob Brydon
‘I know you’re out there …’
The audience began to sense that I didn’t know what I was doing.
‘Come out, come out, wherever you are …’
They started to shift uneasily in their seats.
‘I know there’s a sinner amongst us … [gulp] somewhere …’
Surely my little helper, my co-conspirator, would make herself known to me? I was dying out there!
She didn’t, she kept quiet – emboldened, no doubt, by the thought of the free chocolate eclair waiting in her handbag. By now I’d given up on the accent, I was just pacing the studio floor back and forth, searching for my betrayer. She was nowhere to be seen. At this point, after about fifteen seconds of silence, a slightly chubby man in the front row, squashed in next to his seat-and-a-half-wide wife, piped up.
‘We’ve come to lose weight, not to a bloody pantomime.’
I gave up, introduced the host of the show and got off as quickly as I could.
Believe it or not, I went on to complete more warm-ups after this experience, one for an ill-fated pilot for an afternoon show hosted by Simon Mayo, and another for Hale & Pace. In chatting to me after the recording, they proved themselves to be thoroughly nice chaps. I can only assume they hadn’t witnessed my warm-up.
Fast forward to 2004, and I’m standing in the wings at the BBC waiting to go out and welcome the audience to a recording of The Keith Barret Show while our warm-up man has the audience in stitches. It’s a still-unknown Alan Carr, mincing around the set, and he begins to talk about women who have piercings in delicate areas. On the one hand I’m wishing he’d tailor his material to my audience a little more – we’ve got Mr and Mrs Ronnie Corbett waiting to join me onstage, and I don’t want to put them off – and at the same time I’m thinking, Damn, he’s good … my warm-ups never went like this.
Alongside these sporadic bookings as a warm-up man, Jerry got me an occasional job presenting a late-night show, Pick of the Week, up at Yorkshire Television in Leeds. The show was a round-up of the ‘… and finally’ stories from various regional news programmes during the week. The presenter just had to sit there and link them, with perhaps the odd weak pun every now and then. When I say it was a late-night show, I mean it was a very-late-night show. It bumped around the schedules a little, but once it went out at five past three in the morning – so late it was early. I’d pray that an insomniac casting director might spot me and catapult me to success. The team that made the show – especially the producer, Maria Malone – were great, and the hotel I stayed at in Leeds had excellent butter. Other than that, it was neither here nor there.
I continued to write off for jobs: I auditioned to voice promos for Sky Sports, unsuccessfully (‘It’s a bumper Saturday of football on Sky! All the goals! All the action!’); I auditioned to become a continuity announcer at Channel Four (‘Now on Four, we join Richard and Carol for another Countdown …’) and got down to the last two; I was a roving reporter for a BBC Wales programme about the Tall Ships Race; I auditioned unsuccessfully for a Kellogg’s No-Nonsense Oat Bran advert (I should have known I wasn’t the type to advertise cereal); and I continued to send mountains of voice tapes off to agents, in the vain hope of finding representation and moving into the lucrative world of voice-overs, at which everyone told me I’d make a killing. In the process, I collected rejections from every voice agency of note in London. I made a TV pilot for BBC Wales, Throw Another Log on the Cottage – the splendid title was Jerry’s idea – and I managed to involve Ruth Jones and Steve Speirs, but it didn’t get picked up.
Earlier in the year, on the 3rd of January, I had noted in my diary:
I am currently £1,800 overdrawn. This is not good news as my current regular earnings are just £80 per week, of which 15% goes to Jerry and 25% to the income tax fund.
By 8th October the overdraft had increased to £4,000, although my earnings had also increased slightly thanks to a new editor at Radio Wales.
Gaynor Vaughan-Jones was more of a fan than her predecessor and chose me to host a Friday-night show that would link up with the new station Radio Five. Each evening, between ten and midnight, a two-hour show would be broadcast from a different region. We were the Friday-night slot; the Wednesday-night slot was taken up by Hit the North, hosted by the soon-to-be Radio One breakfast hosts Mark and Lard. Our show was called Rave, although if you were hoping for an Ecstasy-fuelled bout of loved-up arm waving in a field, you’d have been bitterly disappointed. I’ve no idea where the title came from, but it bore little relation to the content of the show, which began as a magazine programme with music and soon morphed into me doing lots of characters and playing a lot of music. I co-hosted with Alan Thompson, now one of the cornerstones of the station, and it was with Al that Keith Barret first raised his eternally optimistic head.
The Rave team, with Alan Thompson on the right.
He began as a voice. A silly, high-pitched Cardiff-accented voice called Keith, who would bounce off Al’s character Tony, who ran a mobile fast-food van. Tony was what’s known in Cardiff as a ‘chiefo’ (as in, ‘Arright, Chief, how’s it goin’?’). Al had the proud boast of having once followed Tom Jones into the toilet of an Indian restaurant just so he could stand next to him at the urinal. When Tom had finished and left, Al turned to his friend – who, it has to be said, had also followed Tom Jones into the toilet – and remarked, ‘He’s a bit of a chiefo, isn’t he?’ With that they heard a flush and Tom’s son and manager, Mark, emerged from a nearby cubicle, presumably having heard Al’s detailed character study. Tony and Keith were friends (‘Aw, Tony, I love you like a brother …’) but what Keith didn’t know was that, while he was out driving his taxi, Tony was enjoying the charms of Keith’s wife, Marion. And so it went; each week we would expand their world to include more and more ridiculous adventures until eventually they would break into song, ‘Grillin’ and Fryin’ ’ being especially popular with listeners.
When Keith made the move to television, his job as a taxi driver only arose as a way of making ends meet after Marion had left him for Geoff. In the original radio incarnation he drove a cab from the start, primarily because it made it easy for his friend to be cuckolding him, but also because it struck me as very funny for a man to be cheated on while driving round in circles. His name came about for two very simple reasons. Keith is a thin, sharp and, to me, very funny-sounding name, especially when spoken in an exaggerated Cardiff accent. It just is. Barret was chosen in deference to Shakin’ Stevens, who was born and raised in Cardiff and whose real name is Michael Barrett – the idea being that he and Keith were cousins. The curious spelling, with only one ‘t’, was not intentional. In Marion and Geoff, when Keith is on the phone to the Orange phone company representative he has to spell his name for security reasons. I got it wrong.
There is a small but loyal number of fans of Rave who remember all the characters we came up with. Dave Connors was the West Country businessman with his adverts for the Dave Connors Bathroom Wonderland, a bathroom furniture superstore that would get bigger each week, eventually including ‘a full-size Formula One racing track’. The ads always contained the mention of ‘a ball pond for the kiddies’ and ended with the promise that it was ‘all under one roof’. One week he tempted customers with the unexpected delights of a ‘fully working slaughterhouse, come and see how the burger gets to the table. And the kids can administer the electrodes themselves!’ There was Conrad Bolivar, the camp young German who loved to tap dance and talked incessantly of his one-man show, a tribute to the actor and raconteur Victor Spinetti. He would greet Al each week with the same cheery, ‘Yoo hoo!’ As the series progressed, we were introduced to Conrad’s Uncle Claus, a sinister man who spoke in an ominous low whisper. He wore nothing but a full-length black leather coat, and his pronouncements were always backed by the impending doom of Prokofiev’s ‘Dance of the Knights’ from Romeo and Juliet.
I played two presenters. One was the American Bob Goldentan, an aged Casey Kasem typ
e, who proudly boasted of having been the host of Lucky Lobsters! (the only water-based game show for the over-sixties and a show which, in thirty years of broadcasting, had only suffered twelve fatalities). His British counterpart was Barry Shoulder, a late-night DJ who offered his listeners ‘a shoulder to cry on’ in times of personal crisis. I based his voice on the real-life DJ John Sachs, augmenting it with an extreme lisp. He would read out a letter from a listener each week, which would always concern someone meeting the love of their life, only to cheat on them when someone more attractive came along. The letter would end with ‘… and then I did something, I did something very stupid. Anyway, when we’d finished I looked up, and there was Dave …’ Barry would then play ‘Hard for Me to Say I’m Sorry’ by Chicago.
Perhaps my favourite was Jeremiah Fanny, the gravelly-voiced lead singer of the Fine Fanny Four, Bodmin’s finest trad jazz/folk group. He had previously been a member of Thru’penny Bit and would each week tell Al of his adventures, before attempting a song.
It was while working on Rave that I first met Sir Tom Jones. I had been a fan for longer than I can remember and, I hasten to add, long before he had come back into fashion with his performance of ‘Kiss’ on Jonathan Ross’s Channel Four chat show. I was there during the dark days too, proudly coming into school with a double vinyl LP of his rarely celebrated Canadian TV series. In 1992 he made a very good series for ITV entitled The Right Time. During the following rounds of press interviews I was able to arrange a meeting, for which I travelled up to London.
He was staying at a small and rather exclusive hotel near Bond Street and I was ushered up to his suite, clutching my little tape recorder anxiously in one hand. I was keen to avoid a repeat of my interview at a nearby hotel with Michael McKean in character as David St Hubbins of Spinal Tap, when half my allotted time had been spent trying to get the tape machine to work. (As I nervously flicked switches and plugged and unplugged cables, Michael offered words of advice in character: ‘Yeah, well, I suppose you’ve got to plug it in properly, you put garbage in you get garbage out …’)
Interviewing Michael McKean as David St Hubbins. In his immortal words ‘you put garbage in, you get garbage out …’
I sat down on the sofa to wait and could hear Tom in the nearby bathroom, whistling to himself as he finished his ablutions. All the while, I was sitting there thinking, Wow, that’s the sound of Tom Jones whistling in a bathroom. He came and joined me on the sofa, positively radiating energy and good health, happily going along with my questions and the odd silly request that radio presenters are prone to ask of their interviewees. At that time, Al and I had a thing we did on the show where we would ask each other questions along the lines of, ‘Is a horseradish a horse or a radish?’ This would be followed by a pensive, ‘Mmm …’
I know. It was no coincidence that we never troubled the jury at the Sony Awards.
I asked Tom if he would record a few of these questions, and then sat there listening to Tom Jones saying, ‘Hello, everybody, this is Tom Jones. Is a horseradish a horse or a radish?’
Once he’d finished, I asked if he’d mind also doing the little pensive, ‘Mmm …’
He obliged, about five octaves lower than me, making the sofa reverberate as though a tube train was rumbling by below us.
Giving advice to a budding singer.
Many years later, I recorded ‘Islands in the Stream’ for Comic Relief with Ruth Jones. I found myself standing in the desert outside Las Vegas with Tom Jones, shooting the video while pestering him for stories about Elvis. We were filming in the limo and I asked Tom if there were any stories about Elvis that he didn’t tell in public.
Islands in the Desert.
He smiled. ‘Oh yeah …’
I asked if he’d tell me one.
‘Well, I was in the shower one time and –’
I jumped in and said that I’d already heard that one.
He calmly turned to me and said, ‘You haven’t heard the ending …’ and proceeded to tell me the story with an ending that I indeed hadn’t heard before.
And which I couldn’t possibly repeat here.
13
I loved presenting Rave with Al, although by now I was living in London and had to drive back to Cardiff each Friday afternoon for that night’s broadcast. When the last record was on, at around three minutes to midnight, I would have my coat on and be heading for the door ready for the 156-mile door-to-door trip. Staying awake so late was often a problem; I would sing along with the radio at the top of my voice with the windows wide open and cold air rushing through the car in an effort to avoid nodding off. The best trick for staying awake was an odd one – I’d pull into the services and buy some mini sausages. As I drove away, I’d place the open packet on my lap and begin to eat them. The sausages had tiny hairs or fibres sticking out, and I would tell myself that I was eating portions of severed human fingers. This would keep me awake.
Rave kept going until Radio Five became Five Live, and we were left without a home. I thought it would be a good idea for Radio Wales to keep it going, but this was not an opinion shared by anyone beyond Al and myself. Rave ran for just over two years, and it planted the seeds for much of the success that would come to me further down the line. In writing and creating the character spots with Al, I began to find my own comedic voice for the first time and to gain confidence as a writer – something that I’d always felt was done by other people, not me.
Much changed for me while the show was running. Most notably, Martina and I married in October of 1992 and moved to London. We sold the house in Cardiff after it had been on the market for an eternity and, one month, the bank had refused to pay the mortgage. With the money we made I cleared the overdraft, now at £5,000, as well as a loan I’d had to take out for £4,000. I suppose the bank had been patient with me over the years as my earnings jumped up and (mostly) down with worrying regularity.
I had been called in a year or so earlier to see the Branch Manager, David Walters, as he wasn’t happy with the state of affairs. Until that point I’d only dealt with bank staff further down the ladder of importance and had always managed to sweet-talk them into ever more lenient measures as my debt racked up and up. As I sat down opposite Mr Walters, I suspected I might have come up against a brick wall. He was older than I was expecting, and quite authoritarian in his tone. While we chatted, I tried to soften him up with the odd joke, to no avail. I mentioned that I was going to work at Sky and he remarked that he had a satellite dish himself, for the German channels. I saw this as my opportunity to get on friendlier terms.
‘Ooh, you dirty dog …’ I said with a conspiratorial grin.
His face turned to thunder. ‘My daughter is learning the language!’
The move to London was prompted by my getting a new presenting job at Sky, this time on a film show, Xposure. I had auditioned in July and felt it had gone well. A couple of weeks later the show’s producer, Colin Burrows, called Jerry to say that from an initial 250 applicants I was down to the last eleven.
‘Rob’s very good,’ said Colin, ‘but it’s a pity that his skin looks so bad in some light …’
I was furious – not with Colin, but with my face. My acne scarring had been an issue some months earlier when I’d managed to get a meeting with a casting agent who specialized in commercials. I’d sent him my demo tape along with a photograph, and he’d invited me to come along to his office in the West End. This was progress. I can’t tell you how difficult it was to get past the secretaries and receptionists of agents and casting directors – it seemed virtually impossible – so I was feeling rather good about myself as I entered the office and shook hands with Nicholas Young. We both looked at each other with a degree of surprise. On my part due to the realization that this Nicholas Young was the same Nicholas Young who had played John in The Tomorrow People, one of my favourite childhood television programmes.
David Williams and I used to play The Tomorrow People on the grass behind his house after schoo
l. We’d place our hands on our belt buckles and run twenty feet or so with our eyes closed, not opening them again until we’d come to rest in a new spot. This was our DIY version of ‘jaunting’, the name given to the teleporting that Nick and his chums were so adept at on their hit show. I had often dreamed in those days of meeting the Tomorrow People and maybe hanging out with them in their secret headquarters, deep within a disused London Underground station. I had imagined chatting with them as they welcomed me into their gang and handed me my very own jaunting belt. What would we talk about? I wondered. Evidently we would have talked about my skin, which was now the source of Nicholas’s surprise.
‘Ah, right, your skin … It’s not very good, is it? Hmm, it doesn’t really come across in the picture. I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help you. I mean, I could hardly put you up for a chocolate commercial, could I? Eat this and you’ll look like me …’
I agreed with him; he had a point, I suppose. I thanked him for his time and walked out of his office and into the cold fresh air of the West End as people bustled past me, going about their business. I couldn’t help wondering if they were looking at my face and deciding it was unlikely they’d ever see me advertising chocolate. Had they done so, they would have been wrong. Just a few weeks later, Steve Speirs and I were chosen to star in the new Toffee Crisp adverts. Stick that in your belt and jaunt it!
With Steve Speirs. We thought that we were about to be the stars of a Toffee Crisp commercial. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d been told that my skin wouldn’t allow me to play such a role.