Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  Anyway, this reflexologist – who lived on the south coast – was a friend of my wife’s mum. At the time Jane had a bad back, so her mum paid for a session with the reflexologist. Jane was grateful, but pointed out that travelling from London just to have her feet rubbed for an hour seemed a bit much. But the method to her mum’s madness was that the reflexology lady practised a form of transcendental healing, which is to say she claimed that by using the power of her mind alone she could visit the astral plane which hovers above or alongside us all without being seen. Once on or in this plane her astral self could visit other astral selves, and do whatever it needed to do, including stroking Jane’s feet, before going back to her body. For a fee, of course. You’d think it wouldn’t cost a lot; certainly there weren’t any travelling expenses.

  Jane suggested that while this lady was hovering around in spirit form she might perhaps be able to look in on Dave, our iguana, who was sick at the time. This was, of course, a joke on Jane’s part, but her mum didn’t realize that and phoned the lady and asked if she did iguanas. She said she would look in on Dave at no extra cost, which was nice of her. Whether she ever visited or not we don’t know. Certainly Jane’s back didn’t get better in the immediate future and neither did Dave, who only recovered after being taken to the vet in one of those boxes that you normally carry cats in. After reassuring several rather startled old ladies in the waiting room that this wasn’t a very scary new breed of pussy, I left the vet’s with a small jiffy bag filled with penicillin and hypodermic needles. Twice a week for the next month I had to inject the antibiotic just under the iguana’s armpit. It’s a tricky procedure, trying to creep up on a more or less fully grown female iguana and stick a needle under its armpit, especially after the first few visits when she knows what you’re up to, but it’s a lot more fruitful than relying on some loon by the seaside dozing off and charging thirty-five quid every time she has a nap.

  And that wasn’t a typo, by the way. The iguana’s name was Dave because we believed her to be a boy until one day she laid some eggs. We stuck with Dave because we’d had her for several years and had all grown used to it, and I doubt if iguanas are that bothered about gender-specific tags. They’re more advanced than we are in that way. I don’t think you can really tease an iguana by calling it gay. Not that I’ve tried.

  It might surprise you, but I am far less scathing about Scientology than I am about all the ‘you will live for ever and you can change the world with the power of positive thinking’ claptrap that seems to appeal to celebrities, primarily, but all people who have an illogical fear of death – illogical in that it’s inevitable. I suspect most people think Scientology is the absolute be-all and end-all of celebrity religious nonsense. And if you want to pick it apart, you’re fully entitled to do so.

  I should point out that I have absolutely no intention of ever becoming a Scientologist, so there’s no vested interest here. But I don’t think Scientologists get a fair deal. I don’t know enough about the religion itself to be able to say whether, as a belief system, it’s any more interesting or useful in helping you get through life than being a member of the Church of England or a born-again Christian or a Baptist or a Muslim. But I do know that the handful of people I’ve met who’ve happened to be Scientologists have been some of the nicest and most courteous of any it has been my pleasure to spend time with. I’ve met the three highest profile Scientologists that I can think of – Tom Cruise I’ve met several times, Will Smith I’ve spent quite a bit of time with over the years, always in a professional capacity, and John Travolta I’ve met once or twice.

  Let’s do them in reverse order. John Travolta seems to be not only very happy and stable and together, but for someone who’s been famous for as long as he has, he seems to have maintained a real sense of playfulness and fun. Now you might think that’s a given, bearing in mind the amount of money the man has earnt and where he is in the world, but I’ve met far more miserable millionaires than happy ones over the years. In fact, I’ve not done badly myself, but sometimes I start and end the day as just another grumpy old bloke. So it’s great to meet someone who not only has earnt his dough but really knows how to enjoy it, and seems to have got the right balance between his family life – whatever that might be, because obviously people love to speculate about that kind of thing – and his professional life.

  Will Smith is number two on my hit list of Scientologists, if indeed he is one, because I don’t know if he’s actually gone on record about it, but everyone seems to think he is and that’s good enough for me. Likewise, he seems to be not only remarkably focused on both his career and his family, but completely certain about what he wants to do with his life and where he wants to be at any given time. And you have to admire that. In this day and age, when most of us spend far too long scratching our arse and wondering whether or not we’re doing the right thing at work, at home, for ourselves, for our friends, for our partners, it’s refreshing to find someone who – presumably thanks to this particular creed or religion, call it what you will – has got that level of focus and achieved what he wants in life.

  Probably the most high-profile scientologist, and the one who gets the most flak for it, is Tom Cruise, ‘the Cruise-ster’. But here’s a guy who I’ve met many times over the years, including when he was at the very height of his fame – about the time when he’d just started filming Eyes Wide Shut with Kubrick, and before he started getting some of the knocks he has recently for his admittedly crazy behaviour, jumping up and down on the couch on Oprah Winfrey and saying how if he saw a road accident he’d know he had to stop to make a difference – that kind of crazy. But whenever I’ve met him he’s been incredibly down to earth for a star of his stature. When he walks into a room, he pays attention to everyone. He says hello to everyone, no matter what job they’re doing on a shoot – getting the coffee, doing the make-up, lugging the camera or sound equipment around – he doesn’t differentiate. He goes up to them and shakes their hand and looks them in the eye and says, ‘Hi, I’m Tom Cruise. Pleased to meet you.’ He’s one of the most famous people on the planet and he knows that when he walks into a room people are going to look at him, and that they’ll all have some kind of preconceptions about him, not always favourable. But he comes right in and goes on over and makes friends with the lot of them. It is rather exhausting to watch, I’ll give you that, but when he leaves the room everybody loves him. So, as long as you can get past the stuff about aliens and volcanoes and avoid reading any of L. Ron Hubbard’s bloody awful science- fiction books, Scientology doesn’t seem much sillier or more harmful than any of the bona fide longer-running religious games in town.

  Here’s what I like about the olde-timey religions. I love the way the people dress. I mean, who came up with their outfits? They are, more or less without exception, fierce, as I believe young people say nowadays. Who doesn’t smile when they see a nun coming down the road? And not just because they’re usually friendly old ladies. I’m sure that if you had the kind of Catholic upbringing that many people I know who were brought up in Ireland in the fifties and sixties did, when nuns seemed to rule almost like General Franco and his Barrista – no, hang on, they’re the people who make cappuccinos, aren’t they? Well, whatever Franco’s bullies were called – then you won’t have fond memories of nuns and you probably don’t smile spontaneously when you see one. You probably feel more tempted to tip them over, like bored teenagers in rural areas do to cows on farms at night. But I was raised godless, and I like the look of a nun. For a start, you never know what they’re wearing under that outfit. Sometimes I like to think that maybe something saucy is going on under there, or they’re nude, or maybe they’re like little stacking Russian dolls. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to lift up a nun and find another one underneath, exactly the same only slightly smaller? Then under her a smaller nun and then a yet smaller nun, until you get to the very middle and there’s a little toy like a Kinder Surprise. Or a nun the size of a Malteser, made of marzipan th
at you could eat.

  I also like the way that priests dress. Purple is a great colour and a sash is a great accessory. To top it off, anyone who wanders around with a little hanging basket filled with incense in front of them and smoke coming off it – that, my friends, is attention to detail.

  Other religions have caught my eye on the fashion front as well. I’ve always been very fond of a turban, ever since I saw James Coburn wear one in the second of the ‘our man Flint’ movies – those Bond spoofs he made in the sixties. He wears a white one and it looks spectacular on him. I hereby vow that I will one day wear a turban-and-Nehru-jacket combo on a big night out. I suppose I had better do it fairly soon, so people at least know it’s deliberate and don’t think I’ve just had a shower and forgotten to take the towel off my head before leaving home. But it won’t actually be the first time I’ve taken the plunge on the turban front.

  Way back when, I spent a brief period hosting the Virgin Breakfast Radio Show here in London. This was after Chris Evans had managed to get a group of businessmen together to buy Virgin and he was pretty much in charge of it, and he encouraged me to come back to the radio. I’d done a little bit of radio years earlier – for one stint he had actually been my producer, but it didn’t really work out. Two big egos both trying to come out on top didn’t make for an easy working environment or particularly memorable radio. Anyway, Chris thought that my career was not where it should be – and he was probably right – and he very kindly and generously encouraged me back in. The money wasn’t particularly good but it was OK, more than you’d get for working those kind of hours in the real world, and so I took over a Sunday-morning slot which was popular, and then when Chris was going away he wondered if I’d stand in for him on his morning show. Which I did.

  One thing I did on the show was to try to run a kind of multi-ethnic week – mainly because I wanted to get free food sent in from different local restaurants. I’ve always loved Japanese food, and at the time the papers were still banging on about the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war in the forties. Atrocious stuff, I’m sure, but eventually we have to move on, so I called one Monday’s show Forgive and Forget, It’s Jap Day – probably not quite sending out the message of tolerance and forgiveness I had hoped for. Nor did we get any free sushi. Tuesday we did Italy – nothing.

  On Wednesday we sent out the call for Indian food, and we were delighted when a couple of young Sikh listeners offered to come in and promised to cook something for us. Of course they arrived fully turbaned, as befits members of the Sikh community. And we got chatting about turbans and my desire to wear a turban, and they happened to have some spare turban equipment with them, if that is the correct phrase, and they duly turbaned me up at the end of the programme. I am assuming that the art of turban-tying is passed down from father to son, in much the same way that I must remember to teach my boy how to do up a tie and shave properly before he gets too old and starts to improvise. But if you join a religion late in life, I wonder how they teach you. Classes? Or do you get a starter kit with basic instructions?

  Anyway, I was very receptive to the idea of becoming be-turbaned, not least because although this was early in the morning, I was quite delightfully drunk, or at least tipsy. At that time at Virgin there used to be a large fridge near the studio which was filled not only with Richard Branson’s own brand of Coca-Cola – which I always found a little on the sweet and sickly side, frankly – but also with free beer, which was sent in on a regular basis. I can’t remember the name of the lager supplier, but someone obviously thought it was a good idea to ply Virgin DJs with free alcohol, and so we had a permanent supply of lager chilled and waiting.

  Initially, working in the mornings, I didn’t have a drink until at least twelve o’clock, and on Sundays we’d maybe have one at lunchtime – that seemed fair. But by the time we’d started the morning show we had become rather fond of it and would generally start the day with a bowl of cereal and a lager. I wish that was an exaggeration, but it isn’t. In case you’re curious, lager doesn’t go too well with the really sugary cereals like Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes or Coco Pops. But with the maltier ones, like Shreddies, it’s terrific. Just don’t tell the kids.

  Boozing first thing became the norm, and on that particular day I was definitely half cut and easily persuaded by our friendly Sikhs to try on a turban. It didn’t really suit me, to be honest – I’m a little on the jowly side, with rather podgy features, so I looked more like Beryl Reid than James Coburn. But then, in what I thought at the time was a flash of magnificent inspiration, I remembered that Sikhs didn’t need to wear crash helmets whilst on scooters or motorcycles, because their turban was an outward sign of their religious faith and consequently it would be wrong to insist that they remove it. So they were allowed to ride scooters etc. helmet-free, as long as they were wearing their turban.

  I’ve always been a fan of the scooter as a mode of transport and it just so happened that I’d ridden my scooter into work that day. And so, partly because I was excited at the wearing of my first turban, and partly because I was half drunk, I decided to hop on the scooter and ride home. I’m surprised that I wasn’t pulled over, but what a spectacular and lovely sight that must have been – a middle-aged, slightly overweight white bloke, wearing a turban, driving a scooter while under the influence. I’m not proud of it now, obviously, and am amazed that no one got hurt. And I apologize if anyone saw me veering up a hill towards them and thought that I might be about to run them over. But fortunately I got back uneventfully, and I like to think that I’ve learnt my lesson, and that this will serve as a cautionary tale to all other radio professionals that lager and turbans and scooters do not mix.

  But I wasn’t actually heading home that day, I was heading off to a local nursery where my little boy, Harvey, who must have been no more than four or five at the time, was due to be a tiger in a small production of a bunch of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. My wife was waiting outside for me. She saw me riding up on the scooter more or less on time, no crash helmet, wearing a turban, slightly flushed in the face, put two and two together and realized that I was a waste of time. She pretended that nothing was too amiss and just checked that I had remembered to bring the video camera, which I had. But in my excitable turbaned and drunken state I forgot to press ‘Record’ and just held the camera to my eye, looking through it, watching my charming son rolling around pretending to be a tiger in a scene which I’d hoped to be able to watch many times over the years, but which due to my terrible lack of self-control, louche behaviour and bad parenting is now lost for ever and exists only in our memories.

  I’m not one for regrets, and I’ve learnt over the years that living in the moment is a far more satisfying way of enjoying your family than trying to store experiences up for the future, but I do occasionally flush with shame and embarrassment when I remember what a stupid, pointless man I was for a few years. That then was my sole experience as a Sikh, and although I’ll concede that I didn’t give it my best shot, I have still concluded that, like the rest, Sikhism isn’t for me.

  I have, however, considered starting up my own religion – and why not? My religion would be very specific – I would base it on my many years studying that great pantheon of characters that exist in the world of the superhero. It’s not such a silly idea. OK, I know you’re probably thinking, Who wants to go to a church where the priest is wearing a red cape and a mask? But is it really that different from what you get when you go to a Catholic service at the weekend? Is it that far away from what you see on TV when a bunch of clerics out in Iraq wearing tall black hats are laying down the rules for how people should behave thousands of miles away at a certain time of day? Really, what’s the difference between Batman’s cowl and a sheikh’s turban?

  My religion will be based on the teachings of Marvel comic books specifically but a little bit of DC as well, and maybe some of the lesser-known publications over the years. Let’s face it, they’ve always had a very strong moral code. Lo
ok at Superman, for example – it doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to see the parallels between his story and that of Jesus, although I assume this was only a subconscious thought when he was created by two young Jewish men, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in the late 1930s. Someone comes from a faraway place that we can’t know of, lands here and is adopted by an earth-bound couple, who raise him as best they can. When he reaches maturity he has to wander off and sort out what he wants to do with himself, and then he comes back and realizes that he must sacrifice his own needs and desires and use his incredible powers to do good for the humble men and women of the planet. There you go – same story. Superman doesn’t die on the cross, but I suspect that’s because it’s a monthly comic book and it would have been a bit of a challenge finding an interesting and believable way to resurrect him every thirty days.

  Take Spiderman, too – here you’ve got someone who is a regular, selfish young man, gets some power and initially decides he wants to use it for his own ends. He soon learns that’s wrong, adopts the maxim ‘With great power there must come great responsibility’ and spends the rest of his life looking after those less fortunate than himself, while wearing one of the best costumes ever designed. How cool would the Church of Spiderman be? Webs everywhere, and the sermon delivered by a bloke hanging from the ceiling.

  So my religion – and I don’t know what I’ll call it yet, but you’ll be one of the first to know – would be based on those superheroes in particular. Some of the other characters might have to be pushed to the wayside a little bit. You wouldn’t want to go down the Hulk route, obviously – you know, when you get very angry you’re allowed to smash everything in sight and then afterwards everyone chases you. That would be wrong. And some of the others … I mean the whole Batman and Robin thing is a bit dodgy, Batman being essentially a lonely psychotic older man who has a penchant for young boys in costumes. Which brings me back to Catholicism and all those stories about priests and altar boys, which is not really the best advertisement for a faith. Although it doesn’t seem to affect the number of parents, particularly in the London area, who are desperately keen to get their children into Catholic schools. It seems that they don’t mind if their kids get buggered as long as they wind up with really good grades at the end of it.