It's Only a Movie

by Mark Kermode

  Which, in my case, is exactly what they’ve done. Within the protective cage of Simon’s unforced professionalism (and believe me, you have to work really hard on your research and preparation to sound that relaxed and carefree in the studio) I am able to behave like an un-house-trained animal. I don’t need to worry about whether what I say sounds reasonable, or even sensible, to the audience; that’s his job. My job (as far as I can tell) is to talk about films in the only manner I know how – as if my life depended on them. Which isn’t very hard, because sitting through crap like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (a ‘family’ film which opens with an entertaining scene of child hanging – oh ha ha ha) I have seriously started to wonder whether suicide really is painless (and whether it really does ‘bring on many changes’ as the theme from M*A*S*H so awkwardly informed us). Indeed, in the case of POTC3 (as I believe the fans call it) I was still furious about having to sit through the damn thing by the time I got on-air with Mayo to review it. The resulting transnational tirade (I was in Cannes, Simon was at some sporting event in the UK, a satellite feed linking the two of us) was videoed by the BBC so that everyone could see Simon nonchalantly looking at his watch, yawning, and theatrically reading a newspaper while I blathered on hysterically about Johnny Depp’s performance resembling a drunk karaoke singer showing off in a crowded room. I went further, demanding that director Gore Verbinski be given a custodial sentence for crimes against narrative cinema, and inviting the audience to see whether they really could distinguish between the supporting cast and a range of handsomely polished MDF furniture.’Is that a nest of tables?’ I screamed.’No, it’s Ikea Knightley and Orloondo Bland locked in a passionate embrace that is positively teaky!’ To date, 107,000 people have watched this meltdown on YouTube, and as usual many of the comments (‘I f**king LOVE how much Simon Mayo HATES Mark Kermode’ – AnEyeOut) flag up the deep-seated negative energy that apparently arcs between Mayo and me even when separated by the English Channel.

  It seems pointless to claim that quite the opposite is true (at least from my end) because whenever I do so it just comes out wrong. For example, during that Independent interview I made a point of repeating my mantra that Simon is a broadcasting genius and if our show worked on-air at all then it was down to his skill rather than my inane ramblings. Yet when the article appeared, Simon was quoted as talking warmly, affectionately, and generously about me, while I was quoted as talking warmly, affectionately, and generously … about me. Honestly, I don’t know why he puts up with it.

  I started doing film reviews with Simon when he was presenting Radio One’s morning show. The station, which had earned an easily mockable ‘Fab FM’ Smashy and Nicey reputation over the preceding decade, was in the process of being revitalised by an influx of new talent including Mark Radcliffe, Steve Lamacq, Trevor Nelson, Tim Westwood and Mark Tonderai, the latter of whom has recently resurfaced as a successful film-maker with his impressive debut horror feature Hush. It was an exciting time, although there was a lot of spilled blood on the carpets as the old-school dinosaurs (Dave Lee Travis, Simon Bates, Gary Davies et al.) either resigned or were culled. The changes were not immediately popular, and for a few years the station haemorrhaged listeners. But somehow Mayo rose above all the storms, sailing gently from a very successful run on the breakfast show to an even more accomplished stint in mid-mornings, and thence (some years later) to his multi-award-winning afternoon slot on 5 Live. By early 2010 he had moved to drivetime on Radio Two, and sharp-eyed readers will notice an inexorable progress though the hours of the day, with each new slot offering Mayo an ever more forgiving wake-up call. Presumably, this drift will culminate in an eventual late-night spot sometime around 2029, which the semi-retired Simon will doubtless be able to present from the comfort of his own bath chair. Personally, I likes the sound of them hours and my plan (such as it has been since we started working together) is to hitch my wagon to his star and hang on for as long as possible.

  To me, Simon is so much more than a friend and colleague. He is also a pension plan – in a very real and legally binding way.

  In our early days, Mayo and I used to condense a review of the weeks’ movies and video releases into two three-and-a-half-minute segments, with a record in between. The rules on speech-to-music ratios at Radio One were strict, and if the movie talk overran, the underlying ‘music bed’ would simply stop and a current popular chart hit would duly grind into gear – and there were few more sackable offences on Radio One than ‘crashing Sting’s vocals’. By the time we got to 5 Live, we had an entire hour of talk-time to fill, with news, sport and travel our only interruptions. Yet in keeping with the law that states that work expands to fill the time allotted to it Mayo and I still found ourselves struggling to cram everything into that massively expanded space, the amount of blather having multiplied like mould upon rotting cheese – which, as Barry Humphries once pointed out, is essentially the definition of ‘culture’. By the time you read this, our Friday afternoon show on 5 Live will have expanded to two hours and I bet you we are still running out of time before adequately addressing the Movie of the Week. You call it two old men wittering, we call it ‘wittertainment – at its most wittertaining’.

  Quite why things have worked out so well between Simon and me is anyone’s guess. After all, it’s not as if we’re each other’s first radio wives. In fact, when we picked up our prestigious (have I mentioned this already?) Sony Award for Speech Radio in May 2009, Mayo celebrated the moment by embracing his former Radio One cohort Jakki Brambles on stage and telling everyone how lovely she was and how much he missed working with her.

  Thanks for that.

  But hey, two can play at that game, so let me detain you a while with tales of my former radio partners and all the good times we had together before I settled down to become one half of medium wave’s very own George and Mildred. If you cast your mind back to Chapter Three, you’ll recall my incompetent spell at LBC during which I learned that the sound of me ‘pretending I didn’t know what I was doing’ was somehow preferable to the sound of me reviewing the new releases in a timely and orderly fashion. Well, as luck would have it (and I have been very lucky over the years) my path would cross again with that of one-time LBC presenter Sarah Ward, who called me out of the blue a few years later.

  ‘Hi Mark,’ said Sarah, in her distinctively sultry jazz-club voice, a cross between Julie London and Whispering Bob.’I’ve got a new job on a new radio station and I was wondering whether you’d like to be my film critic.’

  This sounded too good to be true, but it turned out she wasn’t kidding. For reasons which I never fully understood, the BBC had conjured up an entirely new station – something called ‘Radio Five’ – which would broadcast a bizarre mixture of sports, schools, and Open University programmes with anything else anyone could come up with jammed uncomfortably in between. Sarah had been asked to co-host the breakfast show along with Jon Briggs, the owner of a golden larynx who would later achieve fame as the voice of TV’s The Weakest Link. And now they needed a film critic.

  ‘Great!’ I said at once.’What day do you want to do the film reviews on?’

  ‘Um, Friday would make sense,’ replied Sarah, offhandedly.

  ‘You mean “Fridays”,’ I said.’The day that new movies open – always a good day for film reviews, Fridays.’

  ‘Well, yes, “Fridays” in general would be good,’ said Sarah, now sounding like a caller in Play Misty For Me.’But actually I did mean “Friday”.’

  There was a silence – as ever.

  ‘Friday? As in “this Friday”.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘As in “the day after tomorrow”, it being Wednesday now.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So let me get this straight – you want me to be the film critic for an entirely new radio station of which I hadn’t heard anything until two minutes ago when you told me about it, and you want me to start in less than forty-eight hours and then carry on
until…?’

  ‘Until indefinitely,’ replied Sarah. This had to be a hoax. Didn’t it?

  ‘This is a hoax, right?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ said Sarah, sounding genuinely perplexed.’Why would it be a hoax? If you don’t believe me, tune your radio into 909 or 693 and you’ll hear a strange kids’ serial called Wiggly Park being broadcast right now. And believe me, if I was making this up, that isn’t something that I’d make up.’

  And it wasn’t. And she wasn’t. But I was. Made up, that is.

  If memory serves correctly (and it almost certainly doesn’t) I did a little dance of joy around the living room, thrilled at being invited into the bosom of the BBC – albeit a bosom protruding from a strange tumour-like growth which would have to be cauterised and cut off in due course, to be replaced with something altogether more sleek and aesthetically attractive. That something would be Radio 5 Live, which would be born in March 1994 and would go on to be the natural home I never knew I had. But in that interim period, in which lowly ‘Radio Five’ seemed to be merely holding the fort until something better came along – oh what lovely times we had.

  Sarah and Jon’s Radio Five breakfast show was great fun, and was the first proper radio training I received. It was here that I learned to wear headphones like a professional (one ear on, one ear off, in the manner of the Bee Gees in all those faked studio pop videos, or the assembled cast of Band Aid’s ‘Feed the World’ which still makes me cry every time), to cut movie clips from quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape (razor blades and Sellotape – who knew?), and to say important-sounding things like ‘I need a little more cue in my cans’ (whatever the hell that meant). In fact, looking back I probably have that show in general (and Sarah in particular) to thank for the fact that I have continued to have a career in this most magical of mediums.

  After a year or so things started to change and the breakfast show (dubbed Morning Edition) found itself under the incoming care of the self-proclaimed ‘New Sheriff in Town’ – Danny Baker. I’d never actually met Danny before he got the job at Five, but as a teenager I’d stuck to my bedroom wall a review he wrote for the NME of the abysmal post-Sex Pistols cash-in LP Sid Sings which began with the timeless phrase: ‘If rock ‘n’ roll had any backbone it would close Virgin Records down.’ That review was music to my ears, as were two other famous stories about Danny: firstly, that he had forcefully remonstrated with a London shopkeeper for selling swastika T-shirts, a gesture which Julie Burchill had found to be ‘really sweet’; and secondly that on the night of Elvis’ death he had taken to the stage in a jeering punk club and told the assembled masses that there was more rebellion in Elvis’ little finger than in all their dyed mohicans and safety-pinned bondage trousers.

  On-air, Danny was every bit as electrifying as he was in print. Walking into his studio was like walking out on to the bridge of a ship in a force-ten gale, and if you weren’t sure of your footing you would get unceremoniously swept overboard. We met for the first time on-air, and had a blazing row about Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear which I insisted was no good at all despite Danny’s insistence that I was a know-nothing bozo who wouldn’t know a good movie from a hole in the ground. I thought our first encounter had gone terribly badly and I assumed that I was fired, but after the show Danny was boisterously upbeat and continued to insult me in a manner which seemed more affectionate than annoyed. It transpired that confrontation was exactly what he wanted and thus I held on to my job and learned an important lesson – namely that there is nothing to be gained from moderating your opinions because you think it will please those around you. It won’t. In a world in which every lazy hack falls back on the old ‘if you liked that, then you’ll love this’ cliché, the only thing a critic has to justify their essentially parasitic existence is the belief that they are right and everybody else is wrong. Sod cultural studies and all that non-judgemental aesthetic relativity claptrap – the Leavisites were right! There really is such a thing as good and bad art. And if you don’t believe me, try watching Taxi Driver and Cape Fear back to back and then telling me that they’re both ‘equally valid’. No they’re not, and you know it. One of them is really good, and the other is really rubbish. End of story.

  Anyway, back to Radio Five. After being OK’d by Danny I was promoted to ‘co-presenter’ of the afternoon show, a very strange mix of music, sport, quizzes, and phone-in hooey which I helmed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with former Blue Peter presenter Caron Keating – who was the very dictionary definition of ‘lovely’. Stylistically Caron and I were all over the shop, and on any given day, our show (which was charitably entitled A Game of Two Halves) could feature any or all of the following: an interview with Todd Haynes talking frankly about sadomasochistic sex practices in film; an instalment of a peculiar American radio soap entitled Milford Haven which seemed to have been picked up by the BBC simply because it had the same name as a place in Wales; a live performance by Paul Da Vinci, the uncredited lead vocalist of the Rubettes’ falsetto seventies hit ‘Sugar Baby Love’ with skiffle accompaniment; a pub-style phone quiz played between rival newspaper offices (Fangoria vs the Guardian, obviously) and featuring sound effects from Dougal and the Blue Cat; a romp through the news and music of a random ‘Vintage Year’ as chosen by Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? (‘I’m free!’); and sport. Heaven knows what it sounded like to the listeners, but as long as we kept broadcasting and didn’t swear or defame the Royal Family the bosses just let us get on with it. After all, they had bigger plans in the shape of the emergent 5 Live, with ramshackle old Radio Five being later described by a BBC boss as ‘a network with no audience focus, born out of expediency’. Our days were always numbered, but for a couple of years we experienced freedom on a level unparalleled since the heyday of the pirates back in the late sixties. You know that Richard Curtis film The Boat that Rocked which everyone agreed was too long and rambling for its own good? Well, that movie had a better script and generally made much more sense than anything we ever broadcast at Radio Five.

  But it wasn’t as much fun.

  Happy days.

  It was newly ensconced station boss Matthew Bannister who suggested to Mayo that he should get me in to do movie reviews when Simon started his mid-morning stint at Radio One in 1993. Simon and I seemed to hit it off immediately, but back then our relationship was far from monogamous. In fact, in those early days I was involved in a racy ménage à trois with Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley whose Manchester-based ‘graveyard shift’ show (10 p. m. till midnight) on Radio One blended an eclectic mix of non-playlist music with live performance, poetry readings, comedy and more, developing a cult following among listeners whose devotion bordered upon the religious. My job was to present ‘Cult Movie Corner’ – a long-running feature in which I rambled on incoherently about a favourite film (everything from Mary Poppins to The Wicker Man) whilst ‘Mark and Lard’ attempted to put me off with pointedly ill-judged asides (‘Fancy a brew, our kid?’) and off-colour comments about Elvis. The latter resulted in my storming out of the Manchester studios after Mark repeatedly insisted that Elvis had died on the toilet (he collapsed in his bathroom, which is rather different) although looking back I’m fairly certain that it was a prearranged stunt designed to cover a planned absence over the next couple of weeks. I say I’m fairly sure that that’s what happened, although knowing me (which, as we have learned, I don’t) it wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of possibility that my upset was real. In general, I consider the commandment ‘Thou Shalt Not Be Disrespectful About Elvis’ to be up there with ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ and ‘Nor Shalt Thou Review Movies Which Thou Hast Not Seen’.

  When I wasn’t storming out of the Radcliffe show I was passing out on it. Somewhere in the vaults of the BBC (and also doubtless out there on the internet) is a recording of me stopping mid-sentence one rainy Manchester evening and then making a strange croaking noise like the victims in The Boston Strangler (Tony Curtis in split screen!) before slipping semi-cons
cious off one of the studio’s plush orange plastic chairs. Ever the professional, Mark leaped to my aid with that time-honoured trick of playing a record and hoping that no one would notice. Meanwhile, Lard dragged me outside, resuscitated me with his Ventolin inhaler, and then steered me back into the studio to carry on where I had left off when the music stopped. At the time I lamely attributed this incident to an asthma attack although there was (and is) no evidence that I have ever suffered from asthma. The more awful truth is that it was probably a panic attack, the broadcasting equivalent of stage fright, provoked by who knows what. One minute I could breathe, the next I could do nothing but listen to the sound of blood rushing in my ears and wait for the floor to come up and hit me in the face, which it did with some alacrity. It was, frankly, not pleasant, and in the wake of this incident I seriously wondered whether my broadcasting career was over. Let’s face it, if people employ you to speak on the radio, it’s safe to assume that they’ll probably expect you to be able to do just that without apparently falling asleep (or falling over) on-air.

  Incidentally, in case you’re starting to think that there’s anything confessional about me admitting that it was stage fright rather than asthma that floored me all those years ago, let me be clear that I’m not telling you anything that hasn’t appeared in print before. In a 2009 profile piece for the Guardian’s G2, Mark Lawson outed my on-air collapse as a thinking (rather than a breathing) problem. And he was almost certainly right, although in that same piece Mark also insisted that I was a Sunday school teacher, a badge of honour which I would clearly be sorely ill-equipped to wear.