Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  Now I had a job in the early eighties working for a company called RPM. They were one of the early independent production companies that grew up around the time of Channel 4’s birth. More often than not these were run by people who had worked in the hipper areas of television, at the BBC in particular, who had seen a gap in the market and realized they could now make the kind of show that they’d always wanted to, but had struggled to make for the BBC, which was a far more rigid and stuffy organization then than it is today. And so they set up their own little companies and went out, in a rather romantic, noble and foolish way, to try and spread the word. Normally they’d make shows about popular culture, the arts or social issues that they felt weren’t being covered properly elsewhere. And this company was one of those. It was run by a very lovely bunch of people, none of whom, it seemed to me, had an iota of business sense.

  They were producing various shows, including music-based programmes, and there was also a very early talk show on Channel 4, which was my first exposure to that kind of thing. It was called Loose Talk and I was a researcher on it, even though when I got the job I had no idea what I was doing. My brother Paul, the eldest kid in our family, was working in television and he had got in through the proper channels. After leaving university, where he had studied English, he’d worked for a local paper for a while, so he had rudimentary but proven journalistic skills, and he had then found his way on to TV shows that required that kind of talent.

  I, on the other hand, rather lazily saw being in TV as a very exciting situation that you could boast about and perhaps meet girls via. And it also seemed to pay far better than any other jobs that I’d heard of. So I was very keen to get in when I left university too and I kind of half borrowed, half stole Paul’s CV and applied for various jobs. And the only company that would even give me an interview was this company RPM, who I’m pretty certain knew full well I was lying. But they were the kind of lovely people who were happy to give kids a chance, especially kids with a spark of something approaching genuine enthusiasm and talent, even though they didn’t necessarily have the right qualifications.

  So they gave me a job on this talk show where I was meant to be booking guests. Essentially, I sat there for the first two or three weeks in a state of mild panic, on the phone to any friends who would give me the time of day or occasionally even my mum, pretending I was speaking to David Bowie’s agent or the person responsible for Queen’s world tour or the publicist for the exciting group Wham!, who were new on the scene at the time. I was not terribly good at it, although I did book a handful of guests I was quite proud of having got on to television. One of them was the graffiti artist Keith Haring, now sadly dead. Others were Tom Waits, Neil Kinnock, who was just about to be announced as the Labour leader, and Pete Townshend. Actually, now that I’m forced to think about it, they were all booked by a guy I worked with called Marek, who was far more talented than I was. I think the only person I genuinely booked off my own back was Diana Dors, the busty, blonde screen starlet from the fifties, who appeared on the show one week as a fairy godmother. Oh, and I gave Howard Jones his first TV appearance – remember him?

  After the talk show finished I was out of work, and was obviously keen to keep earning, and also to stay in touch with my new acquaintances in the company. They told me that one of their new ventures was to be a co-production with a group called Interface.

  Now Interface was a strange company, very indicative of the more overtly political nature of Channel 4 in its early days. The purpose of Interface was to integrate people with disabilities into the media. The idea was a very sound one in theory: to employ a group of people who might not normally be able to get work in a field where they were, and of course still are, woefully under-represented. People who were blind or visually impaired, deaf or hearing impaired, in a wheelchair or walking impaired, mute or speaking impaired – actually there weren’t any mute people, I’ll be honest with you, but I’m sure if we could have found one we would have employed them, just not put them on phone duty.

  That’s always a danger with positive discrimination – you wind up employing people for every reason other than their suitability for the actual task. But it was a genuine and laudable effort, and they asked me if I would be the non-disabled person in the team. Not that they needed one – I mean it wasn’t like The A-Team , where they already had the tough guy, Mr T, and the explosives expert and the really good-looking one and someone thought, Now let’s get a young English kid. The reason for me being there was that I was meant to know enough about the workings of television to help those people who didn’t and basically teach them the job, so I could then be edited out of the picture and it would be a company fully staffed by people with disabilities.

  So I found myself working for this small company, making two or three documentaries. One was about the state of the compensation system in the UK, another was about disability and religion, though it’s all a bit of a blur, to be honest with you. But I quite enjoyed the experience of working there. There was a lovely paraplegic guy. He used to be a tree surgeon and he had gone back up a tree to finish a job for an old lady and had forgotten to put his harness on again and had fallen. He hit a live power wire and bounced on to some solid concrete and snapped his spine fairly low down. He was obviously and understandably severely pissed off about that but he was a lovely bloke, a cheery, thoroughly decent Liverpudlian.

  He was a pleasure to spend time with and I had a good couple of nights out drinking with him. One of which finished up with me having to carry him up six storeys to the council flat I shared with my then girlfriend, because the lift was broken. We were collapsing in fits of laughter because he was a fat bloke and out of shape and I’d already lugged his chair up and I now had him in a fireman’s lift over my shoulder. It already seemed funny enough, but then halfway up the stairs, the bag which collects a paralysed gentleman’s liquids burst all over me. I think it was called a kipper, and it was strapped to his ankle, and he used to wheel himself outside the pub and empty it into the drain. Very convenient. So I’ve got a fat bloke over my shoulder and I’m now soaked in his piss, and as we’re struggling to make our way up the stairs, my neighbour, who always thought I was a little bit on the gay side, walks past. It probably looked like I was just desperate for some action and had dragged a drunk home and was forcing him up to my room. And the thought of how it must have looked as well as his not inconsiderable weight made me collapse, quite literally, in giggles. And unfortunately, quite literally in his piss as well.

  I have very fond memories of my friendship with him, but there were a couple of other guys in the group that I didn’t enjoy working with so much. One was a blind guy who was OK to start with, but he was quite strange. Years later he went a bit ga-ga – I remember him phoning me up once, claiming that they were talking about him on the news on Radio London. So I tuned in for him to see if I could reassure him, and they were discussing Princess Anne and horse-jumping. I thought maybe I had misheard him and he meant another station, but he was adamant. He told me that Princess Anne was the code word they used for him when they needed to discuss him on the radio.

  I often wondered whether I was wrong to dismiss him as being simply unwell. Maybe he was being followed, maybe somewhere there’s a thick file marked CODENAME: HRH ANNE. Probably not. So he kind of blossomed into full-blown nuttiness, but at the time he was just a little bit mad. And, although this really doesn’t show me in a good light, I should own up that when I used to get off the tube for work in the morning, if I saw him walking ahead of me I used to tiptoe around him and run off to the office, because it was very hard work having to sit opposite him all day and listen to his nonsense. Part of me felt bad that I couldn’t find it in myself to be more charitable, to find some extra reserve of compassion to draw upon and try to be a good friend. The larger part of me was just worried that maybe he was sighted enough to be able to make out my form as I dashed past him, holding my breath.

  But – and the point of
this story is appearing on the horizon – there was one guy I worked with – let’s call him Peter – who was a very sweet guy, really nice. One symptom of his disability was that he tended to shake and twitch a lot, and he seemed to find it difficult to breathe and talk easily, unless he was very calm when he was more able to keep control. Anyway, he wanted to get to know me a bit better and so one day we went out for lunch, along with his carer, a slightly nerdy young guy with a wispy, barely-there beard. Christ, it was a long lunch.

  The café we went to did an all-day breakfast, so I ordered the full English and so did he – I think it was partly a kind of matey all-boys-together kind of thing. They gave you a good portion for your money in this café, so there were a lot of beans on the plate, there were sausages, there was toast, there were fried eggs, there were tomatoes, there were mushrooms. It was a big old plateful. And I wolfed mine down in about fifteen minutes. But, of course, for him to eat, the bloke who was with him – the guy with the inexcusable beard who pushed him around and helped him get dressed and so forth – had to cut the food up into mouth-sized portions and feed it to Peter, who would then chew it as well as he could. But that wasn’t something he could do easily and it was all a bit slow. On average I think a sausage would probably take about six times longer for him to eat than it would for me.

  So I’d finished my meal and we were there for about another hour while he made his way through his. As the sun set at about four o’clock on that particular winter afternoon, I made a mental note to keep it down to just tea and toast next time.

  On the way back he suggested we pop into the newsagent’s. I bought a couple of magazines and he browsed along with me, and then he asked if I ever bought the top-shelf magazines. I did occasionally, but still felt a bit embarrassed doing so, which is the only sane way to feel. Even today, if I were to reach up and grab one I’d probably make sure no one was watching. Peter told me he wanted to buy them, but his bearded carer, or BC as we shall refer to him, disapproved and wouldn’t stretch for them. This was in the heady first wave of political correctness when all liberal men went out of their way to appear as non-sexist and right on as possible, while secretly slipping a copy of Penthouse in between the Guardian and Spare Rib when they picked up the papers. So, to help Peter out, I grabbed one and we paid up and went back to the office.

  Then Peter asked me if I would turn the pages of the mag for him because, as has already been established, BC did not approve. So I turned the pages and we were making slightly laddish talk together, praising the fabulous physique of the young ladies in the pictures and thanking their parents for doing a bad enough job of raising them that they would strip off for Fiesta or Men Only or Knave . Peter was clearly loving it, as was I to a lesser extent. We did have work to do, though, so I suggested we put the mag away and crack on, which Peter took as a cue to ask me to wheel him to the loo. Which was a bit strange because that was BC’s job, not mine. But then Peter explained that he didn’t need to go, rather he wanted me to finish what I’d helped start, and relieve him. Via a hand job. Now, I know I described the researcher’s role on a show as being flexible and covering a lot of different requirements, but as far as I knew wanking off the boss wasn’t one, so I decided to pass. Peter got rather cross. He felt that I had known where this was heading from the beginning. I had let him buy me lunch, I had harvested the porn, now I had to deal with the inevitable consequences. I try to see both sides of most situations, but I couldn’t agree with him. To him, it was as if I had been leading him on. To me, I had merely been doing him a favour. To BC it was a bloody nightmare, because once Peter grew tired of sending me dirty looks he had BC wheel him off to the loo for at least twenty minutes of quality time.

  Peter and I never really talked about that again, but a few weeks later, we were working late and he asked me if I ever went to strip clubs. Well, I never did. I once saw a stripper in a pub with my dad when I was a kid and it was quite an unpleasant experience.

  I should point out that my dad didn’t take me there on purpose. He was self-employed for much of his working life and at this point he had bought himself a Ford model A transit, a flat-bed truck which he used to do deliveries and small removal jobs, and he used to employ me and my other brothers as a form of cheap labour. He used to bung us about a tenner a day. It might have been a fiver a day when we first started, but later it was a tenner. So I was working with my dad one day and at lunchtime all the blokes said, ‘Let’s go to the pub.’ And I remember the pub clearly. It was a really rough joint called the Royal Standard in Walthamstow, up at the top of Walthamstow market, which was a big, noisy market, rather like the one you see in EastEnders but about twenty times longer and filled with genuine Eastenders rather than faux-enders. We went in there for a pub lunch, which back then meant maybe a sausage sandwich and three pints. If I was drinking, it would have been cider. I was only about fourteen but I was tall for my age, so I could get a drink quite easily without being questioned. Certainly, there were various people drinking in there who seemed younger than me, and I recall there was at least one pram. But to be fair the baby might not have been drinking, or if it was then it would have been a spritzer.

  We were sitting there and this lady came on stage who hadn’t seen fifty for several years. She was wearing glasses, a fake-leather skirt and some sort of top, which she took not too much time undraping. They say striptease is an art form – one of the great American art forms, alongside jazz, for example. Well, not the way this lady performed it. To be fair, she made a bit of effort, but the audience weren’t really there for the act, they wanted skin. There was a bit of music, a rudimentary stab at dancing, and then she turned around, unzipped her top and out came her bosom. She then turned around, unzipped her skirt, and was down to just pants. In an attempt to stretch out the performance she looked out into the room, obviously hoping for a bit of audience participation, and who should her eyes rest on in the front row but me? A lanky, incredibly red-in-the-face fourteen-year-old wearing thick glasses. A gift, in fact.

  She walked up to me and went as if to sit on my lap, much to the huge amusement of the men I was with and everyone else in the Standard. Then she took off my glasses, put them down her panties and danced off on to the stage. Now I am a minus nine in each eye, which isn’t good. Even when I’m wearing contact lenses I’m only just about legally able to drive. If my eyesight gets any worse, I’ll be entitled to a special parking permit. So she danced off with my glasses, and not only was I now incredibly embarrassed but I was also technically blind. And I had the beginning of an erection because, even though she was an elderly lady with no actual stripping skills, obviously she was alive and partially nude and for a boy of fourteen that’s all that’s required. I was by now in a state of panic. Panic that I had an erection in public. Panic that I didn’t have my glasses. Panic that I needed to go to the loo and if I stood up then chances were the jeering, cheering rabble surrounding me would notice my erection, and panic that even if I did summon up the courage to stand up I probably would not be able to locate the toilets without my glasses and might piss in someone’s pint.

  Finally she came back with the well-travelled spectacles, gave them to me and I put them on. Unfortunately, I was still blind. I’m hoping it was the baby oil she’d rubbed all over herself, but the lenses were quite slimy and greasy. I then fumbled my way to the toilets, slightly crouched, hoping no one would notice my condition. What a terrible way to see your first naked lady.

  So back to the anecdote. Peter had asked me if I would care to accompany him to a strip show. I told him that the only time I’d been before was that one time and that it was not a particularly fond memory of mine. But Peter was adamant that in a proper club I’d enjoy it, and said he was a regular at one of the places in Soho and that the people who ran it knew him and he was planning on going anyway but that, needless to say, old misery guts – meaning BC – didn’t believe in that kind of thing, so he wouldn’t take him. I agreed, providing it was clear up front th
at I was only going to help him get in the place and out of it again. An executive massage was not on the cards. He said that was fine – and told me he had now got a girlfriend who had moved in with him. So theoretically, Peter was sorted for the evening.

  After work we headed over to Soho. There’s a mnemonic for remembering the streets in Soho taught me by a taxi-driver: Big Women Don’t Fuck Greeks – Berwick Street, Wardour Street, Dean Street, Frith Street, Greek Street. If I’ve offended big women or Greeks then so be it, but it’s quite a useful way of remembering which street lies next to which.

  So anyway, we were in the ‘Don’t’ or the ‘Fuck’ part of that construction, either Dean or Frith Street, and we arrived at the charmingly seedy Sunset Strip, which might even still be there today. It was quite late at night and it was dark outside. Following Peter’s instructions, I went into the reception and told them that he had arrived. They told me they’d open the side door, next to the main entrance, which led to a narrow staircase that would take him down into the basement where the action was.

  As I bumped him in his chair down the stairs, we went past the changing rooms that the strippers were in. They all looked out as we passed, and on seeing Peter they greeted him by name. He really was a regular. There was something rather wonderful about that moment. The side door, the staircase, Peter in his chair, the semi-naked women in grotty rooms putting on their make-up and powdering their tits with glitter and greeting us warmly. I imagined I was Toulouse-Lautrec sneaking into the Moulin Rouge. Only taller, and pushing a wheelchair. And not wearing a top hat. And not able to paint at all well. Certainly, I was already enjoying the experience far more than that traumatic afternoon in Walthamstow.