Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  I can recall, with alarming clarity, half swimming, half standing in a swimming pool in the grounds of the Walt Disney World Resort with my friend, Danny Baker. We were on a family holiday together, and while the children – all tiny then, all big now – frolicked and splashed in the water we discussed just this topic – how fleeting memories are and how tricky it is to hold on to those precious moments. Danny had a theory – which works, but is flawed. If you really want to grab a moment and hold on to it, despite its best attempts to wriggle away, then you need to do something large and loud and deliberate while forcing yourself to lock the memory in. Together we counted to three and shouted ‘NOW’ very loudly indeed. A family near by all rushed from the pool in horror and a passing pregnant woman had to sit down as her waters broke. But certainly that memory has stayed with me. Here’s the flaw in Danny’s otherwise brilliant discovery. It’s all well and good if you want to preserve the sort of moment that won’t be utterly ruined by you screaming out loud and pinching yourself to lodge it in the brain bank. But I don’t think a first kiss, or the moment your children are born or when your wife-to-be says ‘I do’ will in any way be enhanced by you shouting out ‘NOW’ at the critical point. Furthermore, of all the memories I wish I had held on to with absolute unwavering clarity, the sight of Danny Baker in a pair of trunks finishing off a can of lager while a pregnant American looks on disapprovingly doesn’t even make the top thirty.

  Anyway, Christmas. I’ve always loved Christmas. I love having a nice tree in the house, seeing the lights twinkling inside and out, the evocative smells, the cold. Having the chance to go shopping with the family. I buy presents for relatives and friends and all the people I work with, which means that, as I’ve become more successful and the number of shows I do has grown, my Christmas list has become rather on the long side and I’m buying presents for close on two hundred people. Admittedly, for around a hundred of them it’s champagne and biscuits, which isn’t too great a strain on the ingenuity, but since you hope they’ll think of you when they’re eating the biscuits, you want to make sure you choose good ones. If you give people a packet of Rich Tea they’re likely to think, Happy Christmas, you miserable, unimaginative, lazy bastard. But a nice box from a nice place, that’s a lovely gift, so much better than a book token or a pen. I always order about ten or fifteen more than I think I’ll need, because inevitably I’ll have forgotten a few people. One of the added benefits of this is that when everyone’s finally sorted out, there are always two or three boxes of quality biscuits left over, which I give to myself as a Christmas bonus.

  This is no accident. I deliberately adopted this approach after spending a little time with the uniquely talented film director and artist David Lynch, who I interviewed way back when for a series of specials for Channel 4 on unusual film-makers. The other three in the series were Aki Kaurismäki from Finland, Pedro Almodóvar from Spain, and the brilliant but quite possibly insane Alejandro Jodorowsky from all over the place but now living and reading tarot cards in Paris. I found it tremendously exciting to be interviewing them all, but Lynch in particular, as I had been a huge fan of his ever since I saw his first feature film, Eraserhead , back in about 1978.

  Anyway, I spent a few days with Lynch in Seattle, where he was working on the TV series Twin Peaks , which had just begun. Many of the meetings we had took place in various coffee shops that he had frequented over the years, and he never failed to order himself a little piece of cherry pie or a doughnut when he had a coffee. How on earth he wasn’t magnificently obese I still haven’t figured out, but did he ever love pie. When I asked him about his pie-eating proclivity, he simply replied that you should give yourself a little gift every day. It was one of those oddly simple statements that immediately made sense. He didn’t mean you necessarily had to buy yourself some pie, or even buy yourself anything. He just meant, I think, that you should find a moment or two to reward yourself and administer a little shot of happiness, whether you’d done anything to deserve it or not. I have adopted his sanity-saving approach to life, although my self-giving might be getting out of hand. What started with one little thank-you a day has ballooned and I often now give myself ten or twelve presents a day. Indulgent, I know, but trust me, it takes the sting out of middle age.

  I may not celebrate Christmas in the same way my family did when I was a kid, but though they didn’t have much money, both my parents always made a big effort, and I suppose that’s where my love of the festive season originated, instilled by my mum, in particular. Back then Mum’s idea of decorating a tree was covering it with so many baubles and so much tinsel that the tree itself disappeared. Basically it would become a large, triangular pile of synthetic glitter in the middle of the living room with a faint piney smell seeping out from underneath. If so much as a glimpse of green could be seen, if there was a pine needle sticking out or a little bit of bark showing, she considered it a failure. A lovely day, Christmas was. We always had nuts, and tangerines or clementines, which we never saw for the rest of the year.

  Come to think of it, what is a clementine? How does it differ from a satsuma or a tangerine? How do any of them differ so greatly from a small orange that they deserve their own sub- category? An apple is an apple is an apple and the same pretty much goes for pears. But these seasonal mini-oranges are a little too full of themselves, if you ask me. They smell nice, though.

  It’s good to have treats you keep just for Christmas – it’s what makes it special. We always had Christmas dinner together, and there was always at least one big tin of chocolates. Though with about ten people swooping down on them – six kids and two grown-ups, plus a couple of rogue uncles who’d invariably turn up – they never lasted long. It was about that time that I mastered a simple act of sleight of hand that I still occasionally employ today at premieres and swanky functions. As the tin is offered you pick one, but grab at least two more and conceal them in your palm, making sure that they get transferred as quickly as possible to a pocket or, failing that, your cuff or your dressing-gown sleeve.

  It takes some perfecting, though, and you need to be prepared to get caught a few times and receive either a Chinese burn or a ‘dead-arm’ – that delightfully well-placed sharp punch in the shoulder that causes numbness for hours, so beloved of big brothers when they catch a younger, greedier one stealing. Luckily I have never been caught out at a premiere, although Jeff Goldblum nearly caught me palming an extra mini-burger at the post-premiere party for Jurassic Park , and I imagine he can give a good dead-arm when the need arises.

  For us kids, the presents were, of course, the biggest excitement. My parents scrimped and saved to get us lovely things, albeit often second-hand, and put a lot of thought into them. Not surprisingly, my fondest childhood memories of Christmas involve gifts. These are my top three, in ascending order.

  At number three is my Styrofoam glider. I was fascinated by flying toys and my heart’s desire was a remote-controlled plane. Obviously my mum and dad couldn’t afford one of those – they’re hugely expensive even today – so they got me this Styrofoam glider, which must have been about three and a half feet long with a wingspan of about three or four feet. You assembled it by inserting one giant wing through a pre-cut hole in the body, bunged a few stickers on it, took it outside and threw it into the wind. Simple as that, but man was it fun.

  Christmas Day that year was cold and fresh, with a piercingly blue sky, but there had been no snow since winter arrived and the pavements were dry and clean, so to me it didn’t feel like Christmas. It was how I imagined the weather might be in Finland or Norway when there wasn’t any snow: almost too clear, too clean, too bright. There wasn’t much wind, either. All the same, I went out on to Wanstead Flats with my glider, wrapped up reasonably warmly, if not as warmly as I should have been, and spent a delirious hour or so chucking it into the sky.

  Wanstead Flats was essentially just a big patch of flat grass with a bit of forest round the edge. It wasn’t especially nice, being largely fla
t, hence its name, and a bit scuffed and scrubby, with a fair amount of dog poo and cowpats. I was never sure where the cows came from but some days you’d go out and there’d be twenty or thirty of them there. They must have belonged to someone, but there were no farms or farmland near by, and we never saw anyone deliver them or take them away. Anyway, it was a good place to ride your bike in summer, and the flatness was broken up by one tiny little hill near the back, which came in handy as something to aim for if you went for a run. From there I was lucky enough to catch an occasional breath of breeze that lifted my glider and carried it a pretty impressive distance.

  I loved that glider, and it lasted, oh, a good couple of days before, inevitably, one of the flimsy Styrofoam protruding bits, a rudder or something, snapped off. I decided to stick it back on with Airfix glue – just the job, I thought, seeing as it was specifically meant for model planes. Unfortunately, having been designed for hard plastic planes, not Styrofoam gliders, it immediately melted what was left of the rear fin. I watched in dismay as what had once been a proud, jutting limb disintegrated into a sort of amputated stump before my eyes, and that was that. I have come to realize over the years that I am not an especially talented fixer of things, and DIY is to be avoided whenever possible, but the sadness I felt as I watched the glue eat into my lovely plane was immense. I had to steal several extra chocolates from the Quality Street tin to get over it, and by then the only ones left were the hard toffees and the orange creams, so they didn’t really help that much.

  At number two is the most expensive present I ever had as a kid: a Chopper bike. We all got one, all five boys, and my little sister got a girl’s version, which might have been a Chipper, or a Tomahawk, I can’t remember – I’m still waiting for the ‘bikes’ segment of my long-term memory to come back into focus. Anyway, Choppers were for boys and if you were a girl you could have either a Chipper or a Tomahawk, so it was one of the two. We were amazed and delighted, because Choppers, with their funky Hell’s Angels-style seats, their dramatically high, forked handlebars and the gearstick centred on the crossbar, with its ever-present risk of castration, were the latest thing. I think my parents bought them from a catalogue, to spread the cost, and spent the next twenty years or so paying for them. In fact, my father may well still be paying for my Chopper to this day. But if he is – Dad, it was well worth it, because we were just so thrilled. Being kids who didn’t often have brand-new toys, it was the most fabulous thing ever.

  We didn’t mind at all getting second-hand stuff, but one year there was a toy whose history I was a bit more familiar with than I’d have liked. I used to play with a boy from a nice family across the road. He was a bit younger than me, but I graciously overcame my age-based sense of superiority because he had Thunderbirds Four and Two. Four was the little yellow one that went under the sea. Two was my favourite: the green one that looked like a slightly squashed gherkin and carried the other vehicles in its belly. He had carved his initials on the undercarriage so that no one ever nicked it.

  Not long before Christmas it disappeared. He told me that his mum and dad had cleared out his old toys to make room before Santa brought the new ones, and they’d given it to the school fête. Fair enough, I thought, even though I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to play with it any more. Then, when I opened my presents on Christmas morning, I unwrapped a Thunderbird Two with some tell-tale initials carved on the bottom. I was surprisingly pleased. Granted, I was a tiny bit embarrassed to know that my Christmas present was a toy I’d been playing with all year and which had clearly belonged to someone else, but I was so made up to get the Thunderbird Two that it didn’t really matter. I used some of Dad’s sandpaper to remove my mate’s initials and it was as good as new.

  But back to the top three, and at number one … the best present I ever got. Bizarrely, it was neither big nor pricey nor especially fun to play with, and it certainly never attracted anything like envy or was coveted by my friends. It was a small figure of a deep-sea diver made of soap, attached to a rope. I’ve no idea why I was so fond of this thing, but it just goes to show that when it comes to capturing a kid’s imagination, the amount of money you spend is irrelevant.

  What I actually wanted that year – which would have been 1969, I think, when I was nine – was the new Major Matt Mason man in space doll, presumably rushed out by Mattel while the moon landing was still reasonably fresh in our memories. The Major Matt Mason man in space was a fantastic toy, a small spaceman in a white spacesuit with black bendy bits at the arms and knees so that you could position him as you liked, thanks to a kind of wire frame inside him that held him in shape. He also had a removable space helmet. He came in a blister pack with his own little space-track vehicle and, in some versions, with a jet-pack which had a thin bit of string running through it and a hook you could attach to a door or window frame. When you pulled the string he’d climb slowly up it, or shoot up fast if you were brave enough to yank it hard. There was also an endless range of accessories for him – the Major Matt Mason star seeker, the Major Matt Mason space shelter, space probe, space crawler, fireball space cannon, supernaut power-limbs – you name it. He was just a great toy and I really wanted the one with the jet-pack.

  I did eventually get it, but not for years, and of course now, thanks to the wonders of eBay, I have every single Major Matt Mason toy ever made, and I dust them and love them and play with them nearly as much as I would have done if they had been mine back when I wanted them most.

  Anyway, in 1969 I was given this little soapy man instead, which you might think would have been a crushing blow. But there was something about this soap-on-a-rope deep-sea diver in his old-fashioned helmet. I don’t know whether it was that he smelt nice, or was so neatly carved, or the notion that I could have him in the bath with me, but for some reason I grew very, very attached to that fella. So attached that, of course, I didn’t want him anywhere near the bath in case he wore out. I kept him safe in his little box. His helmet looked a bit like a space helmet, I suppose, and I somehow convinced myself that he was a very rare, multi-tasking and ultimately superior version of the original Major Matt Mason himself, even though he was made of soap, didn’t bend and was obviously ill suited to space travel. Improbably, he remains the favourite toy of my childhood, which I hope seems rather sweet and not just mental.

  The first Christmas Jane and I had together was before we were married, in the first flush of our youthful romance. I say youthful because Jane was only sixteen when we met; I was actually twenty-six, but of course acted much younger and much more stupidly than she did, so we made a pretty good match.

  Once we’d moved in together, planning our first Christmas in our own place was great: it was exciting doing everything for ourselves. We went out of our way to get a nice tree and decorated it painstakingly, we ordered loads of good food, quality champagne, mince pies and so on and invited some of the family over. With everything more or less ready for the big day, we went out on Christmas Eve and came back to find everything in a terrible state. A table lay on its side, the tree was in a heap on the floor and there were smashed baubles and decorations strewn all over the room.

  At first we thought we’d been burgled. It turned out, however, that one of the two beautiful white cats we had then – a Persian called Bella and a chinchilla called Bea – had wreaked this havoc. We’d noticed that Bea had taken a liking to our tinsel. Instead of the traditional furry-looking tinsel my mum always had, we’d gone with the more minimalist, modern, thin strips of silvery stuff that was hip in the late 1980s, the kind you hang and drape rather than wrap around the tree. It was too much of a temptation for Bea, and she had been pawing at the strands on the lower branches. Evidently she’d found she liked the taste and had started eating them. Having exhausted the accessible bits, she’d taken to climbing higher and higher into the tree to get more.

  Piecing together the events of that night – and this is pure conjecture, because of course we weren’t there – I think she m
ust have jumped into the tree and realized, too late, that it was not half as sturdy as the proper trees rooted in the ground outside. After clinging on for a while, and probably eating a bit more tinsel, she brought the tree crashing down, knocking over the table. Amid the ruins, she more than likely decided she might as well polish off the last of the tinsel.

  We managed to reinstate the tree, got hold of some more decorations and smartened the place up before Christmas Day, but unfortunately that wasn’t the end of it. The tinsel wasn’t as easy to digest as it had been to eat, and the poor cat obviously had it working its way through her for days, until it finally came out the other end, still glistening beautifully but now enhanced with blobs of poo attached to each long strand, which she couldn’t get rid of, presumably because the other end was still halfway up her intestines. So just as we were welcoming our guests into the house she’d be running around, trailing a length of what looked like silver string from her arse with three or four small brown nuts attached. Quite festive in a way, I suppose, but not really in keeping with the stylish ambience we’d envisaged for our first Christmas as a proper couple. I’m glad we went with the thin strips of tinsel though – imagine how uncomfortable she’d have been with the fluffy stuff hanging out.

  When Bea had kittens, I learnt early on, and excruciatingly painfully, that they had inherited her mischievous streak. Just thinking about it now has me wincing. Funnily enough, it was Christmas time again. The day before Christmas Eve, Jane and I had at long last moved into a new house with our first daughter, Betty, who was six months old, having been promised by the builders renovating it for us that it would be ready before she was born. Now it was finally finished, or at least, finished enough to be habitable, and we were so excited to be installed in a place that really felt like home in time for our first Christmas with our beautiful baby. With Bea having recently produced a brace of soft, snuggly white kittens, everything seemed as perfect as it could be. Until, on Christmas morning, the upstairs boiler stopped working.