Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  Again, I was inspired by a greater talent than my own. Just as my talk show had been based on the American-style comedy shows, in particular the Late Show with David Letterman , my radio show was an attempt to create something as personal and quirky as the programmes that both Chris and more pertinently Danny Baker produced. The show worked on Virgin, and I eventually agreed after being courted for several years to take it over to Radio 2, which coincided with me turning up on a regular basis on the comedy sports quiz They Think It’s All Over on BBC1.

  That was a liberating and fun experience. I got to extemporize and ad lib and mess around to my heart’s content without being the host. I never felt that the success or failure of the whole thing rested on my shoulders, so I could be as good as I could without worrying. It was far less money than I would have got for hosting talent shows on ITV, but it was actually fun, and I wasn’t embarrassed by what I was doing. I need to thank the writers Jez Stevenson and Shaun Pye here, as they wrote a mountain of jokes for me, to help me seem both funny and vaguely interested in sport, essential requirements for a comedy sports quiz.

  From there I side-stepped into hosting a show called It’s Only TV But I Like It , and finally, after I’d dropped several hints, the BBC finally came around to the idea of me hosting a talk show again, and Friday Night with Me began around 2001. It wasn’t an immediate hit, and we had some teething problems, but by the second series we were heading in the right direction, and from series three we started beating most shows up against us in the ratings. Weird that it took me twenty years to go from being a flash in the pan to learning how to do the show I always wanted to do, the show I more or less started with, in a way that works and is reliably entertaining and is popular with a huge share of the audience.

  Acceptance, baby, as Tom Jones might have said in his Vegas period. Accept who you are and what you want to do and try your best to stay true and do it, and the rewards will come. And so will the awards. I never won anything much to speak of in the early years. I didn’t expect to, really, although I thought some of the shows I did back then were quite good, and fairly new for British TV. I’m thinking specifically of The Incredibly Strange Film Show and one or two of the one-off documentaries, like that Elvis impersonators special. I was a little surprised that none of these shows – well-made, original programmes like nothing else being made at the time – even received any nominations for any awards. But since my re-birth, if you will, I’ve received a number of Sony awards for my radio work, I’ve got four BAFTAs on my shelf now, and a couple of Comedy Awards. So thanks for the warning, Tarby. And thanks for the snide remark, stranger in the bar. And thanks for giving me another chance, TV execs and viewers, because I like being famous, but only because I like what I’m doing and want it to stay that way.

  My life as a Womble and other part-time disasters

  Who isn’t just a little nostalgic for their youth? Children, obviously. Perhaps also people who had a horrible childhood, but even then there are probably some aspects of their past they remember fondly. And bizarrely, we enjoy remembering bad times and things we’ve endured and suffered with almost as much pleasure as the good times. ‘Where would we be without our terrible childhoods?’ someone clever once said, and it struck a chord with me. That’s not to say I suffered much as a child. Compared to ‘A Boy Called It’ I had a non-stop party. But I felt deprived at times and persuaded myself I had it tough, and I can still enjoy pretending things were hard, which will have to do for this book.

  The truth is that I didn’t have many of the toys I wanted, and I wanted them badly, being a silly selfish boy of the old school. I was also gawky and geeky looking, back before being a geek was almost cool. Yes, I was a weird-looking boy, physically unattractive to most people, including, I am sure, members of my own family. So I felt hard done by. They were kind enough to try to hide it from me, but occasionally I’d catch a furtive glance or sense a shudder as I walked past, and I knew I was the cause.

  Frankly, it’s a bit of a pisser not having more to complain about. I feel quite resentful towards my parents now for giving me such a happy upbringing. Didn’t they realize they were depriving their children of the chance to make a fortune later in life with tales of being beaten, locked in cupboards or forced to dance for businessmen? I never even worried that I might get abducted, not once.

  That made for lovely long summer days out riding my bike with my friends – all right, friend; I never had more then one good pal at a time – but if you grow up safe in the knowledge that even paedophiles aren’t interested in you, how are you ever going to feel wanted? I strongly suspected that the rest of my family, my conventionally attractive brothers and sister, were told not to accept any sweets or invitations to view puppies by people in unfamiliar cars, but not me. They knew I was safe. ‘We’ve warned them all not to talk to strangers, except the weird, ugly one in the middle. Nature’s already taken care of that for us.’

  The things I miss about my childhood are, I’m sure, much the same things you miss. Confectionery you can’t get any more, certain smells, sights and even places that don’t exist now. Like those odd purposeless shops you used to find on every high street selling stuff you couldn’t imagine anyone making a living from, and which were almost always closed. They always seemed to have very specific but seemingly unrelated stuff on display. It was as if some clever entrepreneur had identified a previously uncatered-to niche market and leapt right in, choosing to test the water by only opening the shop for seven hours a week.

  There was an especially intriguing one that I used to pass on my way to school. It was ostensibly a wool shop, and in one window were loads and loads of balls of wool, knitting needles, knitting patterns and spools of thread. In another – and this was what caught my eye – they had a fairly comprehensive display of old cigarette cards, mostly depicting famous sporting heroes from the thirties, forties and fifties. It’s still a mystery to me why anyone would think that a knitting enthusiast, popping out for a ball of wool and some needles, might also feel compelled to buy a 1950s Capstan cigarettes picture of Fred Perry at the same time.

  Another thing I really miss about those days is the boredom. I’m a great fan of boredom. With only two TV channels you ever wanted to watch, hardly any radio worth listening to, no internet or mobile phones or DVDs or video games, there were huge chunks of the day when you just had to amuse yourself. That’s something that our kids will never experience, and although it might seem like we’re doing them a favour by offering round-the-clock cartoons and YouTube and Grand Theft Auto, we’re actually raising a generation of timid, pale-faced scaredy-cats, with excellent computer-game scores.

  Seeing as my lazy parents weren’t prepared to take on several extra jobs just to buy me toys, I had to do so myself. On Saturdays I had a number of different part-time jobs to earn some pocket money – another thing that my children probably won’t ever do in the same way. It’s a shame, but I suspect the days when you’d let a nine-year-old go off to drive around with a man in a van all day doing deliveries have long since passed.

  The first job that I ever had I inherited from my older brother, Simon, who had in turn inherited it from his older brother, Paul. It was a milk round, working with an old milkman called George. He looked as if he was in his late sixties when I started working for him. I was about nine and he kept going for at least another ten years after that, so either he looked bloody awful for his age or they had a more relaxed attitude towards retirement back then. I imagine he could have kept going for another fifty years, as he was as fit as a flea.

  A really tough, wiry old chap with leathery skin from being outside every day, he was lovely: cheerful, friendly and never horrible to me, though he was quite strict about making sure you did the job properly. It wasn’t that hard a job, it has to be said, putting four pints of red-top outside someone’s front door and once in a while, if they’d asked for it, a loaf of bread as well – this was back in the days before milkmen diversified much – but he t
ook pride in his work. That was it, really: milk, bread and those pints of strange, very watery orange juice we used to have, stored in the same shaped bottles as the milk.

  The round was pretty uneventful. All it involved was getting up very early, going to the milk depot, hopping on the back of one of those electric floats and driving around for three or four hours, dropping off bottles of milk, collecting the empties and stashing them in the back. You invariably went home stinking of the stuff. You’d have it all over your fingers from sticking them in the bottles to pick them up, and from there it got on your clothes and even in your hair.

  In the summer it was a very pleasant way to spend a morning, apart from smelling like an old yoghurt by the time you’d finished. But in the winter it was rather less so. In cold weather I got so freezing during the round that my mum would lend me a pair of her tights to put on under my jeans, which I acknowledge marks me out as something of a soft kid. But the warmth those tights provided was more or less negated by my anxiety that someone might discover I was wearing ladies’ underwear. I would imagine any number of scenarios that involved me getting knocked down, or stung by a really big bee, or knocked on the head by a falling milk crate, all of which wound up with me being admitted to hospital, where they inevitably pulled down my trousers and started to laugh at the sight of my tights. But they were a godsend on a frosty morning.

  The best part of the round came about halfway through, when we used to stop at a little café on Leytonstone High Road and George would buy me a cup of tea and a slice of toast. I used to really look forward to that treat. I’ve never been over-fond of working, or even standing up for any length of time, so any opportunity to stop for a sit-down was to be welcomed, especially if a snack was part of the deal. The toast they served at this place – I think it was called the Central Café – was made from lovely thin white bread, heavily buttered, and George would dip his in his tea, which fascinated me. Often the butter slid off and would be left floating on the surface in little greasy globules. I thought it must make the tea taste horrible but it didn’t seem to bother him, so I tried it myself, and got hooked. I still do it today, if I’m not sitting with someone too easily disgusted by a grown man sucking melted butter off soggy toast.

  Only one really exciting thing happened while I was delivering milk for George. We had a customer who lived on the other side of Wanstead Flats, just down the road from my best friend at the time, a boy called Stephen Turnell. Stephen and I were intrigued by this young guy, who was, we presumed, a hippy – we were a bit vague on the defining traits of a hippy as Leytonstone wasn’t exactly awash with them. Anyway, he seemed pretty wild and on his bedroom wall he had that poster of a soldier falling forward after being shot, under the caption ‘Why?’ To a boy just about to turn ten that was the coolest poster in the whole world. The only posters I’d ever seen on people’s walls before that were either of pretty awful pop stars or attached to calendars, often featuring flowers or animals, and none of those asked questions about the futility of war.

  We never went into his bedroom, by the way, but you could see it through the window from the street, where we’d sometimes hang around in the hope of getting a glimpse of what he was up to. After a short period of surveillance, mainly carried out by the surprisingly successful yet tiring jumping-up-and-down method, we decided he was friendly and had a keen interest in counter culture – and because we could glimpse a tiny part of another poster, showing what looked like a naked breast, we decided to knock on his door and ask him if we could buy a men’s magazine off him.

  Where did this idea come from, the notion that it was acceptable to knock on the door of a complete stranger, even if he did appear to be a hippy with a nudey poster on his wall, and ask him to sell us porn? It was born of hope and optimism, I suppose. But as it turned out, we were correct in our psychological profiling, however crude the methodology. After chuckling at the sight of two desperate, weird-looking schoolboys offering up a hard-earned shilling for the chance to see what ladies normally kept covered, he told us to wait a minute. He went back inside his house. To call the police? Or worse, our mums? No, he returned with an old magazine, which he gave us, free of charge, with the words ‘Here you go, you can have this. I’ve finished with it.’ Oh happy day.

  Stephen and I spent the whole summer poring over this treasure. In truth it wasn’t a proper porn mag: it was a kind of adult-film-industry what’s-on-at-the-movies guide. But there were colour photographs of ladies with their shirts off advertising their forthcoming appearances in those odd British sex comedies peculiar to the 1970s, films like The Tale of Eskimo Nell . I can’t remember ever seeing any of those productions myself, or hearing about anyone else ever seeing any of them, come to think of it.

  There was another famous one called Inside Mary Millington , a title which mystified me at the time. I thought it must be like Fantastic Voyage , in which Donald Pleasence and a group of fellow scientists get shrunk and injected into someone’s body in a tiny submarine. I’m quite sure it wasn’t, of course. But getting that magazine was just about the best thing that could happen to a couple of boys of that age and it was the highlight of my time working for George, so thank you, nameless hippy, whoever you were.

  I had a number of other jobs after my spell with George. For three or four years I worked as a kind of shop assistant/ delivery boy for a local store called Morgan’s Food Fair on Grove Green Road. Mr Morgan signed me up for the princely sum of 171⁄2p per hour, which seemed fair enough at the time. It was only when I realized that I was getting a mere fraction of what all my friends were earning in their after-school jobs that I complained to Mr Morgan, who was the epitome of a self-taught, skinflint small businessman. After about six months of my pleading he upped my money, first to 20p per hour and then eventually, after about a year of hard labour, to 221⁄2p. For that generous sum I was, on some evenings, running the shop virtually single-handedly.

  After a while I realized there was the potential to supplement my earnings to a modest extent by nicking the odd bar of chocolate, but my heart was never really in it, unlike some of my workmates, who seemed to really enjoy the thieving and used to go home with just about every pocket and available fold of their clothing bulging with something they could either eat or sell. Presumably that’s why he paid so badly – all his profits were being eaten by thieving part-timers.

  My few efforts to thieve were hardly the work of a criminal mastermind. I once walked home with two bars of cooking chocolate hidden in a way that rendered them more or less inedible. Not that they were all that edible to start with because, as I soon learnt, the cooking chocolate of the early seventies wasn’t great for anything but cooking, being made essentially of lard and cardboard. I took it because it was the easiest kind to get at. The regular chocolate was by the till, from which Mr Morgan never strayed too far, quite justifiably wishing to keep a beady eye on me and the other pilferers he found himself lumped with. The cooking chocolate, on the other hand, was out of sight at the back of the shop with the flour and icing sugar. I chose the milk chocolate, thinking, Well, it can’t taste that different from Cadbury’s, and put a nice-sized bar down each of my socks, planning to whip them straight out again as soon as I’d left the shop and got round the corner. But that particular night, one of the older ladies who worked on the till and also kept an eye on us boys said to me, ‘Hold on. I’m going in a minute, too – will you walk home with me? I’ve got to bring the night’s takings with me.’ Of course I had to gallantly agree. Apart from anything else, she was going my way. Not that I’d have been a great help if anyone had decided to bop her on the head.

  So there I am, in my thick glasses, and probably wearing my favourite trousers of the period, ridiculously flared bright-orange loons, with a bar of cooking chocolate stuffed down each of my scruffy, slightly smelly socks, strolling up Leytonstone High Road with this lady, who seemed absolutely ancient at the time, but was probably no more than about forty-five. It was a warm summer evening an
d I felt as if I had two small hot-water bottles strapped to my ankles. By the time we’d reached her house, said goodnight and I was finally able to liberate the chocolate, it was virtually dripping out of the wrapping. I gave up thieving from the shop after that. I just wasn’t cut out for it – even when I did manage to get some contraband home without most of it melting into my socks or pants, the guilt I felt meant I never really enjoyed eating it.

  Thieving featured a little more blatantly in my next job, when I worked for a brief spell at a Sunblest bread factory across Wanstead Flats. Often aromas from the factory would waft into our house, which was lovely when they happened to be baking bread but not so lovely on the days when they made the dough, which smelled a bit yeasty and less than pleasant. The man from Sunblest poached me from Morgan’s. He was looking for a ‘reliable boy’, as they called them, and he asked me how much I was getting paid there. I told him 221⁄2p an hour and after he had stopped laughing he offered me several times that to come and work for him. At Sunblest I would earn as much for a Saturday morning’s work (admittedly it was a long morning, from five a.m. to midday) as I made in three nights after school and all day Saturday at Morgan’s, so I didn’t have to think about it too hard.

  But I didn’t like the job at all. I hated getting up that early. I hated leaving the house in the winter when it was still dark outside. I hated climbing into the van full of bread. And I also hated it that some of the drivers used to try to cheat people. A lot of these bread guys were young, lairy types out to make a quick buck, and when they could get away with it they’d short-change customers by supplying fewer loaves than they were charging for. Once the bread had been tightly packed in its containers, with four or five loaves flat along the bottom, another four or five wedged in vertically next to them and the rest on top, you could remove a loaf, maybe two if you were feeling particularly courageous, from the middle of each layer and the rest would hold their shape. And so if the person receiving the delivery at the shop or, God help us, at the home for the blind – which they did actually deliver to – didn’t check thoroughly that the complete order was there, you could charge them for, say, forty loaves when you’d given them only thirty-six and then sell the other four elsewhere in the course of the day. Hardly grand theft, but not at all nice. I hated being party to it, which is why I stopped working for them after a couple of months.