by Simon Cowell
Through the day other volunteers started to arrive and we organized a clean-up operation. At one stage I tried to lift up the paving stone I had used the previous night to smash open Fleur’s door. I couldn’t even get it off the ground. It is amazing what adrenaline can do.
The whole custom-made area at the top of the centre had been gutted and the more I realized how much we’d lost, the more I thought about giving up. It was a rough few days and the worst time came when the vet walked into my office a few days later to explain that the badger we’d saved had succumbed to its injuries and died. It was my moment of wobble. I felt at that point lower than I ever had. I was bereft for a while and just needed to take myself away to try and process what had happened, make sense of it and come to terms with it. All the while patients were still coming in. Some had even arrived the morning after the inferno. They didn’t stop just because we had a disaster. The volunteers were heroic and made sure that, despite it all, there was no disruption to the service we provided.
My moment of doubt lasted several days while the smell of charred timber still hung over the remains. And then the local newspapers came out with the story on the front pages and my faith and optimism began to return. One by one we started getting envelopes in the post. Some had cheques, some had cash. People called to offer help. We had cards from well-wishers. We hadn’t even started to actively fundraise to replace the buildings and yet people sent money.
One lovely old dear, who lived up the road and must have been in her eighties, saw the story on the news. She walked all the way up the road in the cold and gave us a £50 note. That single gesture of kindness absolutely choked me up. It still does when I think of it. That lady could have spent her money on anything but she thought what we did at Wildlife Aid was important enough to merit it.
Several days after, the insurance assessors came and were extremely helpful. It became apparent that, with the insurance payout and the public’s generosity, we would be able to rebuild. The interest in our story lasted a week or so, and then it was old news. When all the fuss had died down, we collected ourselves together, dusted ourselves off and started working out how to move forward. As usual, I didn’t have a plan in mind. I trusted that things would come good.
Christmas passed and we welcomed 1997. It had been a decade since we had become a registered charity and I was optimistic about the future. We carried on shooting Wildlife SOS. I still have the camera from the first series, which I will never sell. It’s the box Brownie of video recorders, a plastic MS1 SVHS camera, like VHS but better quality. In the early part of the year the publicity drive for Channel Five’s March launch swung into action. It was the first new terrestrial channel for fifteen years and Wildlife SOS was one of its first ever programmes to be broadcast. Our little wildlife show was introduced by the Spice Girls. Immediately the series seemed to strike a chord with the public. I like to think that it was my charisma and good looks that carried the show but in reality they came second to the animals and the stories of dramatic rescues.
My moment of doubt was long gone and, as the months went on we started to rebuild what we had lost. The top area of the centre was rebuilt virtually identically because it had worked. We added more CCTV cameras, which meant we could monitor animals without approaching them or going in their pens. This distance was vital for their recovery and reintroduction back in the wild. We also rebuilt the badger sett but made one important difference. We created an above-ground sett which, while not ideal and not faithful to badger habitat in the wild, did mean that if in future we needed to get to the animals quickly we wouldn’t have to dig them out.
The work continued for several months and while I usually used volunteers to get a job done I wanted the rebuild done properly and I didn’t want it dragging on so I employed professional builders. Demand was increasing all the time and I wanted Wildlife Aid to be able to cope. To everyone’s credit we replaced everything that had been destroyed within a year.
CHAPTER TEN
Onwards and
Upwards
BEING ON TELEVISION meant I had what is laughingly referred to in the media world as ‘a profile’. Consequently, I became a go-to expert whenever other television shows were doing features about wildlife and Bill Odie was unavailable or Chris Packham wasn’t answering his phone. Being on other shows allowed me to raise awareness of Wildlife Aid and our work so I was happy to oblige. Even before Wildlife SOS I had been filmed for news items on several occasions – including once when a ferret I was holding memorably shat down my arm. That footage still does the rounds on It’ll Be Alright on the Night.
I appeared on daytime TV with Fern Britton on a couple of occasions and each time was asked to take an animal – a hedgehog once and then a badger. If I was asked today I wouldn’t comply because it is not fair on the animal. You live and learn, and back then I thought it would be good publicity. The hedgehog was taken in to illustrate a story about hedgehog numbers in decline in the wild and I was on the sofa with Fern holding it without gloves. In the middle of the live programme the hedgehog decided to bite me on the finger. I carried on talking to Fern and the camera didn’t pan down to show the carnage that ensued out of shot. I could feel blood trickling down my hand and I was being asked questions but all I could think was, This really hurts. Mercifully we went to an ad break and I managed to prize the creature off my hand and clean myself up.
On another occasion we were on air talking about badger cubs. Fern wanted to give a hug to the badger I had taken along. The cub was an orphan and was being bottle-fed at the centre. It had just been fed so it was settled but, like all babies after milk, badger cubs puke. As Fern cuddled up to the baby it let out a small badger burp and puked on her left breast. I was holding a towel that the badger had been wrapped in and without thinking I leaned forward to wipe the milk off, reaching out towards Fern’s rather ample boob. Out of shot, as I leaned over, two security guards leaped out from the side of the set. I stopped before I made contact. They obviously thought I was going to grope her live on TV.
On another occasion I was asked to do something on Sky News with Songs of Praise presenter Pam Rhodes. I took Fleur and had the owl on my shoulder. In the middle of the interview, she decided to hop onto my head. I am follicularly challenged with little cover up top so I could feel Fleur’s talons on my scalp, which was bearable. Suddenly, however, a light burst in the studio and Fleur tensed up, which meant her grip tightened and her sharp claws punctured my head. I could feel the blood dripping down my neck and grimaced through the rest of the interview.
Even on the occasions when film crews came to our centre things did not always run smoothly. We were filming in the garden once with a fox and, while I held it, it bit me on the thumb. I tried to release its jaw with my other hand and it bit that instead. As I walked away to clean myself up I still had the radio mic on and the crew overheard me cursing and threatening to go back and wreak revenge on the little monster (which obviously I never would have done). I dropped myself in trouble with a BBC news crew, too, when I forgot to take off my mic during a hedgehog news item. The producer with that particular crew was asking for some ridiculous shots.
‘Can you put it down there and get it to walk over this way towards the camera?’ he requested.
I stood there rolling my eyes because it was a wild animal and you cannot tell wild animals what to do. The producer kept trying the same shot again and again and eventually, after I pointed out that I was no longer going to risk stressing the animal, they agreed to go with what they had. I was exasperated by then and as I walked away to put the hedgehog back in its pen I muttered to myself what a complete bunch of unmentionables I thought they all were.
‘Sorry, we don’t mean to be,’ said a voice in my ear. I had left the mic on and the soundman had heard my tirade.
Being on television also meant I was recognized by my first fan, an eighty-year-old lady with no teeth in a supermarket. She was a fair representation of my fan base. My dreams that lots o
f pretty young groupies would fling themselves at me never turned into reality. I did get fan mail, however, and over the years have had correspondence from all over the world. I received an email from the United States just recently from a kid who said he loved SOS and wanted to be a vet. He set up a Just Giving page to raise funds for Wildlife Aid, which I thought was wonderful. I have always endeavoured to make time for people who are interested in what I do and can’t understand people who get famous because of the public and then choose to ignore them or, worse, deride them.
The show also boosted attendance at the annual Wildlife Aid Open Day, which we had begun to hold each summer. During the day we opened the centre and invited people in to allow them to see what we did and to meet some of the patients. The event got increasingly popular and also became an important part of the fundraising calendar. One day, I bent down at 11 a.m. to sign an autograph for a child and didn’t get back up for three hours because the queue was so long. We started the open days in 1995 and they became my guilty pleasure; my one day of fame.
Meanwhile SOS continued to gain popularity and was commissioned for a second series but I became increasingly dissatisfied with the post-production. Using an outside company also meant I was having to go backwards and forwards to a studio to do voiceovers. My relationship with the company became fractious and, around the same time, my friendship with Steve soured so while he continued to work on SOS things were awkward. I took production of the series to another company, Cloud Nine, in Dorking, and also tried to find more staff because Channel Five had doubled the amount of shows they wanted from twelve to twenty-four. And to complicate matters further I was no longer seeing the girlfriend with whom I’d had the extramarital affair but was living with another woman, Paula. She had supplied us with radios for an event we hosted and I struck up a relationship with her. She was the antithesis of Jill, all of which made me rather unpopular at Wildlife Aid once more.
Into this maelstrom of crap stepped a young man named Jim Incledon, a film student who wanted a job as a cameraman and whom I found by chance. I had asked the new production company whether they could recommend any junior camera operators and someone there knew a lecturer on the film course at Plymouth College, where Jim was studying. The lecturer put Jim in touch with the company and I agreed to give him a go. Jim explained later that before he came to Wildlife Aid for the first time he went to Cloud Nine for the lowdown. As he explains it, he was told there was a crazy man in charge of a TV series going on some sort of self-destruct personal rampage at a wildlife hospital in Surrey. He was told my life was in freefall because I’d left home after having an affair with a volunteer; my ex-wife was still living at the centre where I worked; I had another girlfriend; my daughters weren’t speaking to me; Jill wasn’t speaking to me; and Steve Rouse, the main cameraman, wasn’t speaking to me.
With hindsight I can see that there is truth in this assessment of the situation, yet I was in my own little world. I guess I knew to a degree that the situation was shaky but I had faith that things would come right in the end.
After his meeting Jim drove over to Wildlife Aid and I wasn’t there. He met Steve, who looked like Hulk Hogan and hated me by then. Everyone Jim met hated me and told him what a monster I was.
He was shown to a desk and, while he waited for me, he decided to call a friend and explained excitedly that he’d landed a job on a TV series and was going to get his name on the credits. After five minutes Jill went storming into the office and started telling him off because he had been using the house phone and not the office phone. That was his first encounter with her. I eventually turned up later in the afternoon and laid down the law like a sergeant major, telling him what I expected and that he needed to be able to keep up. He called me sir, which made me laugh. I imagine by that point his head was spinning and he was wondering what on earth he had let himself in for.
Before I went I left a camera on his desk and explained to him that I sometimes filmed my own rescues on it. One of his jobs was to log any footage I had acquired that could be used in an episode. Jim took it and, when I left, put the tape on to start watching. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that the tape in the camera was not rescue footage. On the previous weekend, I had been staying at the Waterside Hotel in Bray with Paula and the footage consisted of tastefully framed shots of her in the bath. Poor Jim thought it was some sort of weird test and spent half an hour rewinding and forwarding the tape to make sure it was in exactly the same position it had been when I had given it to him. He didn’t tell me he’d seen it for several months.
Jim turned out to be a brilliant operator, a real friend, one of the family and also a good laugh. Everyone loved him. Lou and Gemma got on well with him and he became like a brother to them. As the work was 24/7 and he had nowhere to live he lived in the house for several years before deciding he wanted his independence; he bought a camper van, which he parked in the driveway at the front of the house, and lived in that before he finally rented his own place in Leatherhead.
We went out on our first rescue along with Steve, who was still at the centre for a while after Jim started. Jim, eager as a newbie, had everything carefully organized. He had a big new cameraman’s jacket on with stuff in each pocket. He had spares for everything. The location was a country house called Juniper Hall and we had been called out because there was a fox in trouble in the grounds. Night was drawing in as we pulled up to the house. I told Jim to get out, run ahead and take a shot of us driving up the sweeping gravel driveway. He leaped out the door and sprinted ahead, and as he did everything in his pockets fell out. The next morning Jim had to go back and pick up bits of kit he’d not had time to look for the previous evening.
We had two slogans: ‘We can polish a turd’ and ‘We can drink anyone else under the table’. Jim was very exacting and professional; he would get frustrated with me when I muttered my personal slogan, ‘We will just wing it’, which I said all the time.
We worked well together but had moments when we got cross with each other. He would accuse me of shooting everything in soft focus. Theoretically, I was his boss as I was series producer but he called the shots and by the end of the series we had become good mates and knew how each other worked. With extra staff I was able to take on other private work. We did school plays and corporate gigs, and placed an ad in wedding magazines enticing customers to have their weddings filmed by a top television broadcast crew. The weddings and corporate work made more money than the TV series. A wedding could net anything up to £3,000 and a school play could bring in £2,000. I had black polo shirts printed up with the Wild Productions logo on them for us to wear and, depending on the job and number of crew required, I hired in outside help. As I had a mixing desk I could also do live events such as conferences, where we would have several cameras linked in to the desk and a director controlling things. We did a big event for Office Angels and a friend, Steve Knight, manned the mixing desk while Jim, Lou and I worked the cameras. The action took place on a stage around which a set had been built. At one point I started to climb up a staircase to get a good overhead shot and suddenly heard Steve shouting in my earpiece.
‘That’s not a real staircase, it’s part of the set. It’s not stable.’
I could hear Jim and Lou laughing in their mics as I carefully edged back down.
Later during the day someone wandered in front of the back projector that had been set up for the event and I heard Lou exclaim loudly: ‘For fuck’s sake, move your arse.’
The guilty party answered: ‘Sorry!’ It was Jonathan Ross.
We filmed one huge wedding in the first ever marquee designed without a centre pole. It was on a farm and the field in which it was erected had been mowed so closely it looked like a lawn. Inside the marquee the father of the bride, who was a very wealthy businessman, had recreated a Covent Garden Market scene. All the food they ate that night was on the stalls: the fish, the fruit, the meat. We filmed for seventeen hours and it was a spectacular wedding but hard work bec
ause the cameras were not light. As the slow dances started at the end of the night I was exhausted. I was filming on a handheld camera on my knees, shooting upwards from a low angle. As I went to get up after the song, I realized that I couldn’t move either of my legs. I panicked and thought I’d had a stroke. I called for Jim who came running over, looked at the pitiful sight in front of him and started laughing. I’d forgotten that I was wearing shoes with Velcro straps, which had stuck to the carpet. The night was topped with a huge firework display and one of the spent rockets fell on the marquee roof and started a fire. Luckily it was put out before it caused too much damage.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gunslinger
EVENTUALLY THE WILDLIFE SOS series made a seamless move from Channel Five to the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, and was shown across the world. There was no shortage of animal stories. There are plenty of people out there who, although good natured, are slightly nuts and will happily call me out on a wild goose chase. Often the old and confused make a beeline for us and some situations repeated themselves year after year. For example, every January calls come in about wild animals in distress, howling and screeching in gardens and parks. The volunteers or I have to explain to the caller that the noises were foxes and they were far from distressed because January and February is fox-mating season. They were, in fact, having a lovely time and the last thing they needed was a wildlife rescuer arriving on the scene and spoiling the fun.
One of my favourite ever calls came from a woman who phoned in with a fox emergency.
‘Some horrible person has glued two foxes together and they are in an awful lot of pain,’ she explained.
I asked her the details and she told me that they were joined backend to backend and had been running around together for around an hour. Whenever one went to run away, the other was dragged along with it howling in pain.