It's Not What You Think

by Chris Evans

  When I wasn’t on the radio, or at the radio station, on the road or asleep, I would be at work listening to the radio. It was still my link to the outside world during daylight hours when I was stuck in the back of the shop for most of the day.

  This shop didn’t have an actual office—so while the shop girls looked after things out front, I had to do all my paperwork in the stockroom, but it wasn’t really a proper stockroom even, it was more like a large cupboard, stacked to the rafters with cartons of fags and boxes of confectionery. It also had a barred-up window, which I thought was kind of appropriate.

  I arrived for the evening mark-up one afternoon, breezing through the shop as usual, except this time when I went to say hi to a couple of the girls, normally so cheery and pleasant with me, on this occasion they were barely able to bring themselves to murmur a reply.

  ‘Strange,’ I thought, they were never like that, they had the air of children about them who know there is something wrong but don’t want to let on in case Mum or Dad find out.

  I entered my cell as usual, took off my coat and immediately noticed something wasn’t right, there was something missing, I didn’t know what at first and then it dawned on me…there was silence. My radio wasn’t on. I looked around, not only was it not on, it wasn’t even there. I ran out to the front.

  ‘Does anyone know where my radio is?’

  ‘It’s been confiscated.’

  ‘What do you mean it’s been confiscated?’

  ‘He confiscated it, he said it’s a disruptive influence and it had to go.’

  Confiscated, where are we, at school?

  It transpired that the Oliver Cromwell of the retail world had come in that lunchtime and declared he’d had enough of me and my delusions of grandeur but most of all he’d had enough of my bloody radio, and what’s more he preferred the funereal silence of pessimism as opposed to the soundtrack of optimism. It was his shop and that was how it was going to stay.

  ‘What a coward,’ I thought to myself, ‘what a snivelling miserable snake in the grass.’ I had done nothing but work my nuts off for him and he didn’t even have the decency to have a conversation with me first before taking away the one little luxury that kept me going. ‘Even prisoners are allowed a radio,’ I thought to myself.

  This was obviously why he was so bloomin’ miserable all the time. He couldn’t convey his feelings about anything. He had a great business, a nice car, a nice house, by all accounts, and yet he begrudged me my little radio, in the back, never loud enough to be heard out the front, never gonna disturb anyone. What a loser.

  But surely there had to more to it than this—of course there did. His rage manifested itself in the confiscation of my radio but it was obviously a metaphor for wanting me out as well. To him the radio represented me, just as I represented it—why else would a grown intelligent man stoop to such petty depths where a junior employee was concerned?

  It also has to be said that, he was a moaner, one of the least attractive and useful traits a human being can adopt.

  When somebody moans about something, it’s never about what they say it’s about, it’s always about something else, that’s why they are moaners in the first place and if you can be bothered to dig deeper it’s usually about the fact that they are personally unfulfilled in some or other aspect of their lives.

  If anyone comes to me and says they want a word about something I always immediately ignore whatever it is they first talk about and then ask them, ‘What’s really the matter?’ It always works, they either tell you straight away what it is or never come to you again for fear of having to have a real conversation about something.

  So, in my opinion, if the old git wanted rid of me and didn’t have the bottle to tell me so himself, I would do the job for him. I informed the girls that I had enjoyed working with them but I was now leaving and I would probably never see any of them again.

  ‘What about the evening paper deliveries?’ said one of them, in a tizz as I walked out of the door.

  ‘No offence to you,’ I replied, ‘but I don’t give a stuff about him or his papers any more.’ I had suddenly become buoyed by a new-found sense of freedom, ‘and tell him,’ I added, ‘that I bought that radio with my own money—technically what he did by confiscating it was theft.’ And with that I was on my way.

  Sadly I never saw my beloved radio again. I would give a thousand pounds for it now. But the old git had indirectly done me a huge favour, he had pushed me away from him and his doom and gloom towards a better place. Bad people always do this if you give them long enough. They can’t stand positive people being around: it threatens their equilibrium of shite—they might try and infect you with their poison but once they see you’re having none of it, they’ll run a mile rather than run the risk of feeling happier about themselves. Ridiculous but true.

  More by chance than design, I was now finally free to put all my energy into my work at the radio station, albeit having just lost my only source of income.

  As a result of this drop in status I was skint within a couple of weeks, but there’s always a job if you want one; anybody who says otherwise is telling porkies. It may be a rubbish job with terrible wages but there will be a job somewhere.

  I had to find a job that left me free Monday to Thursday but paid enough for me to survive. I didn’t care what it was or what prospects there were. As far as I was concerned my future was in radio, so all I needed was the cash for petrol to get me there and food to keep me alive.

  I can’t recall how it came about but the perfect solution to my dilemma was waiting for me at a rusty old lock-up garage in a small village called Vulcan, which is a tiny place a few miles outside Warrington, famous for the production of railway locomotives.

  Somebody (for the life of me I can’t remember who) told me about a job selling seafood out of a basket around the local pubs—shrimps, prawns and crabsticks—all that kind of stuff.

  Apparently all you had to do was turn up on a Friday and Saturday night at this mysterious garage, pick up your basket, fill it with stock and then set off on your round. If you could put up with the initial banter from the lager lads then you were well on your way to earning a good few quid. It was just like being a paper boy again, but a bit smellier.

  I loved it, it was great fun, the banter was banal but bearable and the pubs generally friendly and welcoming. Sure, the hours meant I couldn’t go out and socialise like all my mates but I was sort of out anyway and whilst everyone else was spending their money I was saving mine and all for the greater good. I could easily make over fifty quid for a couple of nights’ work. I could have the radio on as loud as I liked in the car plus I had the rest of the week free to spend back at Piccadilly.

  Bingo, the miserable old git had set me free, my life had been transformed—for now at least.

  Having saved up enough cash from my seafood sales plus a few other odd jobs, eventually I had enough to see me through for a while and went to work at Piccadilly full time—more than full time in fact: I was there for as many hours as they’d have me in the building. I didn’t want them to be left in any doubt as to how much I was desperate to be part of what they did. All the time I was learning; it was invaluable in every sense but what I really needed was a paid position, and once again I was running out of options.

  I hung on for as long as I could but there came a point when I had to face up to a reality check, I had been working there for ages now including weekends and I still hadn’t earned a penny of actual wages. Of course I would have paid them to do what I was doing if I could have—I liked it so much—but that wasn’t a ‘real’ situation and a guy’s gotta live.

  Regretfully I concluded that maybe the ‘me working for free for ever’ bit of my original deal was now no longer a sustainable situation and that at some point if I was to carry on being able to work there, money would have to change hands—preferably from their bank account into mine.

  I conveyed my circumstances to the management but was told i
n no uncertain terms that this was not going to happen, it was not a possibility. They appreciated what I had done for them and were not ungrateful but they knew I needed the experience more than the experience needed me. I was still last in when it came to the pecking order for the next full-time paid job and things didn’t look like they were going to change anytime soon; they did, however, offer me a stopgap.

  The deal was, I would be paid bugger all for any work in the week, which I was still very much expected to do, but I would get paid at weekends for the Friday and Saturday night technical operating overnight shifts—the ones that nobody else wanted to do. ‘Fine by me,’ I thought, I did want to do those shifts—and for money, you’re not kidding! As long as I could afford to eat and get there I was happy, more than happy, in fact—I was ecstatic.

  I was working at a radio station and being paid for it, not much admittedly, but nevertheless I was official…sort of.

  Yeeeeeeesssssssss!

  Nooooooooooooo!

  As it turned out, I quickly discovered that the money on offer wasn’t actually going to be enough to fulfil these two lowly criteria. On what I was receiving I could afford to either eat or drive but not both, and seeing as I wouldn’t be able to drive if I was dead, I thought I’d better eat first and think about petrol second.

  However it wasn’t long before the writing was once again on the wall and this time I was at breaking point—I wasn’t being overly dramatic or precious, I was simply skint and was forced to face up to reality. I was left with no choice—I had to leave Piccadilly Radio and I had to do it now.

  Top 10 Things to Do When the Cards Are Stacked Against You

  10 Make sure you get enough sleep

  9 Eat well

  8 Exercise (these three are vital and often the opposite of what you want to do)

  7 Don’t panic or beat yourself up

  6 Take note of the new lessons you’ve learnt—there’s always value in every experience

  5 Get away—to anywhere, be it the other side of the world or the woods round the corner

  4 Remember yourself as a kid and how brilliant you knew life could be

  3 Think calmly, collectively and positively

  2 Hatch a plan

  1 Go again

  I left Piccadilly with my tail between my legs, my dream in tatters, but radio was now in my blood and I vowed that one day I would make it back.

  In the meantime I resolved to throw myself into the entertainment world closer to home, but I had no money and no resources with which to do so other than my precious Mini that my lovely mum had bought me. It was time to rejoin the real world.

  I took a job as a forklift truck driver while I thought about things further. It was a job I both loved and hated. I loved it because I could listen to the radio all day; I hated it because the bloke in charge of me—the warehouse manager—was a complete bastard. I really wished him ill and hoped he would get killed on the way to work, I pitied his wife and children he was so horrible—unlike the big boss of the company who was one of the nicest guys you could ever wish to meet.

  The business involved importing deep-fat fryers and ice-making machines from Canada. They weighed anything from a few pounds to two and a half tons and they were so tightly packed in the forty-foot freight containers they were shipped in, it was barely possible to get them out. The task of doing so involved sliding the forks of the forklift underneath the wooden packing case and then tilting the whole thing back and forth to somehow waggle it out, like you might do to loosen a brick in a wall, except this was two and a half tons of fat fryer and it was balancing precariously twenty feet above you—well, actually me in this case.

  Once I got the waggle on, I had to wait for the fryer to sway away from me and then reverse quickly while the angle of the forks enabled the case to come clean out, missing the top lip of the container; as the fryer then swayed back towards you, a full backwards tilt was required to bring the waggle to a halt and allow the fryer to slide gently back fully onto the forks.

  The momentum of the whole operation would often cause the back wheels of the forklift to come off the ground every time the fryer swayed away from me—over waggle and the forklift, along with the bespectacled ginger-haired driver, would be up in the air off the ground and it would be goodnight Vienna.

  This never happened to me but I did get a sideways waggle on once when one of the big fryers caught the top lip as I reversed out too late. The fryer began to rock slowly from left to right but instead of beginning to settle, the rocking became more and more exaggerated; with each rock it became ever more obvious what was going to happen. The fryer had taken on a momentum of its own. I was sat in the cab of the truck, helpless and openmouthed. I realised the fryer was going to tip at any moment and probably to the left which is precisely where the big boss’s brand new beige/brown Rover Vitesse happened to be parked. I looked on in disbelief—they say things like this occur in slow motion and that’s exactly how it felt.

  The fryer came crashing down right on top of the boss’s pride and joy which was flattened like a pancake. It looked like a joke car: all four of its wheels had splayed out like a baby deer losing its footing on the ice.

  As the deafening noise subsided and the dust settled I could not believe what I was looking at. There were splintered planks everywhere from the crate; the fryer was in bits and somewhere underneath were the remnants of a now unrecognisable prestige executive motor car.

  ‘Shit the bed,’ I thought to myself, ‘what do I do now?’ and then I remembered that line from The Godfather where Robert Duvall’s character informs the film producer that Senor Corleone always insists on hearing bad news as soon as possible.

  I walked straight through the office pool and into Bill, the big boss’s office.

  He could see I was distressed.

  ‘Well, hello young Chris, what can I do for you?’ he enquired warmly in his thick treacly Scottish accent.

  I had already decided the best way to break the news to him.

  ‘Bill, imagine the worst thing I could tell you.’

  He thought for a second. ‘…Alright,’ he said smiling as if it were a game.

  ‘OK, well, whatever that was, this is much much worse.’

  He laughed nervously. ‘What on earth is it? What’s going on?’

  There was no other way to say it so I just told him straight. ‘I have just dropped a two and a half ton fat fryer on your car.’

  He took a beat to take in what I had just said and then without saying a word he walked straight past me and outside to the loading bay. When he saw the car, or what was left of it, he stopped dead in his tracks, looking on at the carnage in total disbelief.

  ‘How the fuck did you do that?’ he finally said.

  ‘It just happened,’ I replied pathetically.

  ‘Well, for fuck’s sake don’t let it “just happen” ever again.’

  And with that he turned on his heels and went back to work. Later that day his secretary called the insurance and the next morning they delivered a replacement vehicle—the same model of car but this time in silver. Bill’s reaction amazed me and taught me several invaluable lessons:

  Never keep bad news from the person that needs to know it. Tell them as soon as possible.

  Never dwell on bad news—it serves no purpose save to make things worse.

  Never let something that is totally sortable get the better of you. As I said, Bill’s reaction amazed me, but looking back, it was entirely pragmatic: a car is just a combination of tin and rubber and it was insured—so no problem.

  What I also discovered later was that Bill had vehemently disliked the beige/brown colour of his car when it had been delivered and was secretly thrilled at being able to replace it in silver.

  It wasn’t long after this unfortunate episode that due to a combination of bastard warehouse bloke and more recently an over-amorous female member of the office pool (who happened to be married to a professional rugby player), I decided that it was tim
e to hang up my warehouse coat once and for all. It was back to the job section of the local paper.

  Top 10 Business Names I Have Been Involved in

  10 Big and Good Productions (my first production company)

  9 Gambon and Defreites (the private detective agency I set up with my friend Michael)

  8 The Great Car Company (my first foray into the classic car market)

  7 Umtv

  6 Ginger Television

  5 Ginger Radio

  4 Ginger Productions

  3 The Ginger Media Group*

  2 Ginger Air (an aviation company that never got off the ground)

  1 Kinkies Kissograms

  I began scouring the small ads for any opportunities that might be slightly more on the entertainment side of the employment fence. In my attempt to show business my way back above the breadline I applied for a job at Bunnies Kissograms in Chester. They charged £18 a time, of which the kissogram received half. I liked the sound of that but unfortunately they didn’t like the look of me; I was more Jane than Tarzan, they said.

  I returned to Warrington where kissograms might as well have been spaceships—they just didn’t happen. ‘A gap in the market if ever I saw one,’ I thought, and immediately placed my own ad in the local paper:

  KINKIES KISSOGRAMS—THE SKINNIEST TARZANS IN TOWN

  The kissograms that I’d witnessed were all very well but the biggest laugh was achieved when the kissogram first revealed themselves to their subject. After the initial shock it was all downhill. I decided herein lay a further opportunity and what I lacked in muscle I would make up for with humour.

  I devised a sequence that got funnier and funnier as it went on as opposed to fading out. My act was based around three balloons, a carving knife, a little teddy, a raw sausage, lots of cream and a blindfold on the girl; I also played the guitar and sang her a personalised song—all for six quid! It was cheap but I had to get the product out there. I had to make sure the cost was not an issue. If I was a hit then I could hike the prices all in good time.