Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  Now, although I had been quite looking forward to being recognized, maybe chatted to and so forth, I hadn’t expected this. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been much of an autograph hound myself. I did once shout out ‘Dustin!’ very loudly when I was working part-time as a decorator in Chelsea and we drove past the great Dustin Hoffman on the King’s Road. That was an exciting moment, even for him, I imagine. He jumped a bit, but then we were hurtling past at considerable speed and as I’d leant from the window to shout I was probably only about seven inches from his right ear. But even had we been walking, I don’t think I would have asked him to sign anything. The reason the autograph scenario sticks so firmly in my mind, I think, is that as soon as this guy asked me to sign my name he was treating me differently from the way he would treat anyone else he might have been having a conversation with.

  I can’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember that it was that request, that moment, that made me feel like I was famous, like I had jumped over the rope that normally keeps people off the red carpet. It wasn’t appearing in magazines or being invited to parties by people I’d never met to celebrate the launch of products I didn’t use. No, it was being asked to scribble something friendly but meaningless on a piece of paper that did it. And I knew at that moment that despite having rattled on previously about not caring whether I became famous or not, and how I wanted to do this show because I simply liked the idea of making a good TV show, I had been lying, as much to myself as to others. I wanted to be famous – and the moment I gave that first autograph I realized I was on my way.

  The depressing thing – or one of the depressing things – about fame is how quickly you get used to it and start to take it for granted. It’s like a beautiful view in a new house or a spell of unexpectedly nice weather. At first you can’t quite believe your luck, but after a while you only notice it when it’s not there, and even then your reaction isn’t that you were lucky to have had it at all, but rather how unfair it is that you can’t enjoy it every day, for ever. Which brings us to stage two: entitlement. I don’t have a lot to say about this stage as it’s self-explanatory really – but it takes a while to get there. I must have been on TV fairly solidly for about six or seven years before I mistakenly began to feel it was a right rather than a privilege.

  When I first started doing The Last Resort I spent most of the time in front of the audience in a state of panic. But despite that the show took off and it did pretty well. But although there were one or two shows in the first series that were really good, on the whole I knew that it wasn’t consistently of the standard it should have been. And consistency, I believe, is what distinguishes an amateur from a professional. A lucky amateur can occasionally deliver a professional performance, but a professional can always entertain. They might be in a bad mood, it might have been a slow news day, there might be a small audience, the guests might not be as interesting as they should be, the country might have just gone into a recession or war, but still you’ll find something to talk about with the guests and spin out into stories that will be entertaining for the audience, and with any luck you’ll make them forget about the horrible things and have a nice time.

  Back then, however, it was more luck than judgement with me. The show that probably worked the best was episode fourteen of the first series. The line-up was fantastic: we had Terry Gilliam, Dawn French and Tom Jones – and Tom Jones sang. Now at the time, booking Tom Jones seemed to the people in the office to be a bit of a strange gesture because Tom Jones was almost a figure of fun, in that he was a Vegas-style performer who had lost touch with the younger audience. But I had been a fan of his ever since I was a kid. I’ve always loved his voice. ‘It’s Not Unusual’ is one of my favourite pop records of all time. I love ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ too – it’s an odd song, in fact it doesn’t even really sound like a song, it’s more of an exclamation that punctuates a movie. And the movie’s fabulous, in a very sixties way.

  I remember once being off school sick, as a kid, and finding that my mum and dad had a Tom Jones album and playing it again and again and again, and just loving it, lying in my room in my stripy pyjamas belting out ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ without the faintest idea what it meant or where it came from, but just bloody loving it. I’d always loved his image, too – he was one of those macho showbiz stars from the sixties you don’t really see any more – hairy-chested monsters, like Sean Connery and maybe George Lazenby, who were like cartoon versions of macho men.

  Anyway, for all those reasons I really wanted to have him on the show. We didn’t expect him to want to do it as he was such a huge star and the show was seen as something of a curio, but I think Tom’s son, Mark, had just taken over as his manager and he had his eye on repositioning Tom for a younger audience. That’s how, even though he was booked to be here in the UK to appear on Sunday Night at the London Palladium with Jimmy Tarbuck, he also got roped into appearing on The Last Resort.

  Back then I tried to meet the guests before they came on the programme, partly so that I wouldn’t be overawed when they finally walked out in front of the cameras. We duly trotted along to meet up with Tom during the rehearsal – which in itself would have been more than enough for me, frankly. I can barely convey what a dynamically exciting moment for me it was to meet Tom Jones. I couldn’t believe it. Tom motherfucking Jones! I could barely have been any more excited if Batman or an alien had been there. But it was the real deal – Tom Jones was sitting there in front of me, chatting away. And he was nice as pie – ‘Hello, boy’ – you know, in a thick old Welsh accent. His son was sitting there as well and we talked about the show.

  One of our policies on the programme was that, whenever possible, we had guests doing a cover version if they wanted to sing, rather than performing their new single. Which was fine in its way, although it was a little hit and miss. Some weeks you’d have someone great doing something great and it was a treat, and other weeks you’d have someone great doing something awful and it was a wasted opportunity, and yet other weeks you’d have someone not so good doing something that just didn’t work, and that was a terrible way to end the show.

  So we mentioned this to Tom and he said that he’d recently started doing a few current numbers live as part of his show, one of which was ‘Dance Hall Days’ by Wang Chung, and another of which was ‘Kiss’ by Prince. I was there with a friend and associate at that period, Graham K. Smith, who was in charge of the music for the show – he is now a big television executive and has been involved with any number of fine shows over the years. He’s worked a lot with Vic and Bob and Jools Holland and many other people who came to prominence at about the same time as me. We immediately pressed for Tom to do ‘Kiss’, both being huge Prince fans as well. And he said (in exactly the same Welsh accent he’d used earlier), ‘OK, no problem, I’ll work it out.’

  What a night. He performed it with our house band, Nick Plytas and Ecstasy, and it blew everyone away. It also helped bring about the Tom Jones renaissance, as the show was watched that night at home by Anne Dudley, from Art of Noise. She loved it and they contacted Tom afterwards and got him to record their version of the song, which went straight into the charts when it was released, putting Tom in touch with the younger audience Mark had been hoping for when he allowed him to come on the programme.

  Dawn French was a brilliant and funny guest too – you couldn’t hope for a better guest on a talk show. When she wants to be funny, you just have to sit back and relax and enjoy it. And Terry Gilliam was perfect for us, because Monty Python was still recent enough for him to seem very fresh and exciting, and of course he’s not only a very funny man but a brilliant director, which gave us something more to talk about than just performing comedy. So more by good luck than judgement we delivered a remarkable show, unlike anything else on at that time, and the audience we got for that show reflected its success – we had 3.9 million watching, which for Channel 4 at the time was just astronomical. That’s why I remember it, and I knew we were headin
g in the right direction.

  A couple of months later, Tom Jones’s son got back in touch and asked if I would come along and introduce Tom on stage – he was performing at the Albert Hall. Strangely, I remember nothing of the actual performance, but I clearly remember walking offstage, and seeing Jimmy Tarbuck beckon me over. I was a bit nervous, because there seemed to be this feeling that I was part of the new wave of alternative comics on TV – and I wasn’t, of course. I’d never appeared as a comic, and even though I shared some of the sensibilities of the Comedy Store crowd, I disagreed with other things – like the fact that they were supposedly opposed to old-style humour, like Benny Hill. I grew up loving comics like Benny Hill and the Two Ronnies and still do today. So I didn’t feel in any way opposed to Jimmy Tarbuck, although I can’t say I was a huge fan of his because I’d never really seen him do his stand-up.

  Anyway, he called me over and said, ‘They like ya.’ At the time I thought these words of wisdom seemed a) a bit creepy and b) a bit condescending, but I now realize exactly what he meant. Which is that there is a sort of indefinable, unquantifiable something in some performers – I’m not saying I have it, though Jimmy was kind enough to suggest that was the case. You can certainly see it in some people – Ant and Dec, for example. You can see it in Simon Amstell and Russell Brand. Ricky Gervais has it. Catherine Tate has it. I’ve always thought Danny Baker has it, but he often forgets to bring it with him to the studio. These people have a certain something and people respond well to them. People like them. They like seeing them on screen. So what Jimmy meant was, ‘You might not know this yet, but you’ve got a career here if you want it.’ And then he delivered a body blow: ‘Getting there’s easy, but staying there’s hard.’ By which I presume he meant that getting that first burst of attention because you’re the new kid on the block is pretty easy, providing you’re in the right place at the right time and you put in a bit of work, but staying there – maintaining people’s interest and keeping them involved and watching you on TV – that, my friend, is hard. Of course, I now know how right he was, but at the time, with a newly growing sense of entitlement – after all, hadn’t Tom Jones just asked me to introduce him on stage? – I dismissed it as showbiz nonsense.

  Another quirk of fame is the spurious connection you have with other famous people and they with you. If you’re in a crowded room with lots of people and another famous person comes in, if you meet their eye and they meet yours, you’re kind of obliged to nod to each other. It’s strange. Even people you don’t really like or know. I remember early in my career I went over to America to make a show about obscure film-makers called The Incredibly Strange Film Show – and to this day I’m still very glad that I managed to get that particular show off the ground. My best friend at the time, Alan Marke, who was also the co-founder of my company Channel X, was with me. We went all around America together while we were filming, and we ended up going to Los Angeles to interview Russ Meyer, the king of the nudies, aka the Farmyard Fellini, the man who specialized in featuring fabulously pneumatic women in his movies. At the time I think I loved the women more than the films themselves, although it’s hard to resist their raw power and their unembarrassed, straightforward love of the subject.

  So we were in Los Angeles and I was with my lovely girlfriend, Jane, who wasn’t yet my wife. I had just turned twenty-seven and she would have just turned seventeen, which is obviously a marvellous thing and I wish I’d enjoyed it even more than I did at the time. While we were waiting for our car outside the Mondrean Hotel in Los Angeles, someone else pulled up and it turned out to be Chris Quinten – Brian Tilsley from Coronation Street , who’d left the show to go and make his fortune in America. At the time he was a big tabloid name in the UK, and there was a degree of interest as to whether or not he’d make it out in the USA. We didn’t know Chris, but we were a long way from home and he was what passed for a familiar and friendly face. He had seen some of my shows and got out of his car. I said, ‘Oh hello, you’re that Coronation Street bloke,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you’re the Channel 4 bloke. There’s a party going on tonight up in the hills, if you fancy coming along.’ He was dating a woman called Leeza Gibbons at the time, who was on an entertainment news show in America.

  So we were thrilled and quite excited – or at least I was. I don’t think Jane was particularly. She was a little bit wary. She tended to base her friendships on people she actually liked and had something in common with, whereas I hadn’t yet learnt that golden rule and was quite happy to try and be friends with anyone just because they were on TV. Shallow, I know, but I’m delighted to say I’ve learnt nothing over the years and will still gladly invite complete strangers round for dinner who I’ve only met for sixty seconds but I quite like their record, or book, or hat. Jane dreads it when I start a sentence with ‘I’ve invited some people for dinner’ because it will inevitably be people she either doesn’t much like or has never met.

  So we went up to this party, and I remember realizing we’d made a mistake as soon as I spoke to Chris for a while, as I had absolutely nothing in common with him. Not that he wasn’t a friendly bloke – just a bit odd. The moment I realized that was when he introduced me to a writer who he claimed was going to write a movie built around him. The plan was to launch him as a big star in the USA. He was, as I said, a nice enough bloke, but I thought it improbable that this writer could turn him into a Hollywood star. And later in the evening, presumably to fill a lull in the conversation, he leapt up and grabbed hold of a beam in the front room and did twenty pull-ups in front of everyone. This was in the middle of a crowded room, while fully clothed people were just milling around, dipping celery in cheese and drinking wine. Sadly for Chris, neither the pull-ups nor the writer managed to help him crack America.

  The Last Resort had been a big hit for me and for the company I had started with my friend. But after series four, despite it continuing to get pretty good ratings, we agreed with Channel 4 to stop. This wasn’t an agreement reached in a sane or sensible way; we all just sort of decided to try something new. It’s indicative of the charming nature of television back then, at Channel 4 in particular, that the real or perceived success of a show wasn’t really that much of a factor when it came to commissioning stuff. Looking back, we probably stopped making The Last Resort a little too soon, especially as we had no idea what to put in its place. Now, if I had genuinely only wanted to make shows I was proud of, I’d have done nothing until I had thought out a new show, with a sense of identity and purpose, to bounce back with. But I had grown accustomed to having my face on TV, and the money that comes with it, and so I fronted a number of different programmes, none of which were really that interesting and none of which really worked, before eventually agreeing to split from the company I had helped start and consequently had felt obliged to stick with.

  If we want to stick with my five-stages routine this would be the bargaining stage, especially as I wound up working for ITV, a company that’s never felt right for me. Too blatantly commercial and mainstream to really suit my tastes or skills, especially back then. I appeared in Fantastic Facts , a sort of trivia-based entertainment show that I’ve almost completely forgotten, and then The Big Big Talent Show , notable only because a pre-teen Charlotte Church came on to introduce her aunt. Imagine what a pisser that must have been for her aunty. Just before you try out for a spot in the final, the world’s most talented juvenile comes on and blows everyone away.

  Anyway, this unhappy and unproductive period inevitably led to stage four: depression. I was stuck in a groove, basically drinking too much and spending my earnings none too wisely. I wanted to keep making shows because I didn’t know what else to do, and because I thought I needed to keep earning the sort of money I had grown accustomed to. But earning that money by making shows I didn’t care about made me far unhappier than being broke ever could have done. I also missed being respected for what I did. Even when we’d been producing shows that were, according to the viewing figures,
failures on Four, we were still making stuff that we would have watched. But the shows for ITV were rubbish.

  One night I was out at a hip place in town called the Atlantic with Jane and a bunch of friends when a young guy came up to me, quite full of himself. ‘Excuse me,’ he said – and I immediately assumed he wanted an autograph or something – ‘Excuse me, but didn’t you use to be Jonathan Ross?’ Not a bad line – not an especially original one, but seeing as he was saying it to my face you can’t fault the timing. And he was right. Standing there, overweight from booze, looking forward to another night of getting off my face in an expensive restaurant, paid for by churning out rubbish that I had no respect for, why should others respect me? Yes, I did ‘use to be Jonathan Ross’. I did use to be someone who made a certain kind of show. Even though the bloke who said it was clearly an obnoxious twat, and he almost certainly didn’t mean to be anything other than unkind and make his mates laugh, he actually did me a favour.

  There was a moment of low-level epiphany and I realized more keenly at that point than ever before the wisdom of the great Jimmy Tarbuck’s words when he said, ‘Getting there’s easy, but staying there’s hard.’ I had found it surprisingly easy to get there, but staying there had meant gradually losing sight of what I had enjoyed doing and why I had started doing it, with the result that I was now making the kind of rubbish that I had started out deliberately mocking. Ah, the wisdom of Tarby, a veritable showbiz Buddha.

  So we finish with acceptance. I’d found it pretty easy to get to a position in show business where I felt my shows were watched but could have been fronted by anyone. So I backed off and stopped doing shows for no reason other than cash. I started doing radio, not least because Chris Evans, who had always liked what I did, had shrewdly spotted that I was floundering, in danger of dying on my back on a beach somewhere. Radio helped me get my foot back in the door. It was while I was at Virgin with Chris, who encouraged me to do more or less what I wanted, that I really learnt to trust my own judgement about what works and what doesn’t.