An Unexpected MP

by Jerry Hayes

  Clement Freud, though, was an odd bod. Plenty of wit but not a lot of humour. Like Archie Rice, he was dead behind the eyes. Gummer and he would be team captains and both would have to think of a witty twenty-second introduction for the trail. One rehearsal and then record. Every time Gummer thought of a better promo than Freud you knew it was going to be snaffled on the real take. He just hated to lose at anything.

  But fond as I was of Clem, he did have a dark side. While being escorted down the steps to the studio he turned to the pretty researcher whose mother and father were well known in theatrical circles and asked if she would like to go to bed with him. The poor girl stammered that she was terribly flattered but had a boyfriend. Without breaking step he just said, ‘Well, I fucked your mother and buggered your father; I was rather hoping for the full set.’ And off he went into the night.

  A few weeks later I got a call from Nationwide. Come on, you must remember it. The flagship BBC teatime programme in the days before John Stapleton’s hair went black.

  For some reason they were interested in making a frothy piece about the House of Commons gym. So I was drafted in to give it a bit of colour. All I can remember is walking into shot in a pinstriped suit, getting changed and doing a pretend work-out. Then a close shot of me back in the pinstripe, leaving the gym to perform some grave and weighty parliamentary business, then the camera pulling back to show that I was wearing no trousers, all to the chimes of Big Ben.

  This, I suspect, is when my elders and betters realised that I was a serious politician.

  The only other times I appeared publicly in sportswear were doing a fitness video with Heather Mills for GMTV and modelling Lycra with Christopher Biggins, although I suspect you will need deep counselling after picturing that.

  It was all rather surreal, but not quite as bonkers as being asked to go on a photo shoot to promote what I was told was going to be a ‘groundbreaking new product’. For someone as vain as me, this sounded rather exciting.

  So, I was told to meet the crew on the Victoria Embankment. To my confusion, I was challenged by two rather worrying events. A lavatory had been placed on the pavement. And an almost totally naked male model was talking to the director. Some crew members were warding off Japanese tourists who thought that it was some quaint British tradition to have an outside loo and were endeavouring to pee in it. Then I heard the wail of a police siren and saw a marked car screeching to a halt and two large bobbies approaching. Their eyes darted from naked man, to lavatory in the middle of the pavement, to Japanese tourists struggling with their trousers and then to me. Heaven knows what was going through their minds. They looked at each other, shrugged and said, ‘Oh, hello, Mr Hayes, it’s only you then,’ shook me by the hand and muttered that everything was in order, and off they went.

  A few moments later I discovered that the groundbreaking product I was promoting was a laxative. The shot was of the naked man on the loo in the pose of Rodin’s ‘Le Penseur’, with me grinning and holding a packet of the product (I really can’t remember the name). Somewhere deep in a vault, this awful image exists. I hope nobody ever finds it.

  So, rather than me being the face of L’Oreal or the buttocks of Calvin Klein, I had become the bottom of a laxative.

  But I did do lots of serious stuff too. A regular on Newsnight with Paxo and, of course, the Today programme. However, I do have a confession to make. John Humphrys may recall interviewing me down the line from home many years ago. The broadcast was rather echoey and at one stage a short whimper could just be heard.

  So here’s how it went. I had been moved down the schedule and was desperate for the loo as I had had a dodgy curry the night before. So I thought I’d take advantage of the time and plonked myself down on the seat. Then the phone rang. They were ready to interview live. I had no choice but to do it in situ. And just as it was getting interesting (ish), my four-year-old son decided that he wanted to play. The whimper was the result of the boy receiving a playful smack.

  Over the years I have been lucky enough to do a lot of work with the BBC. In fact, I started with them when news interviews were recorded on film. If you think that they are overmanned now it was nothing compared to then. For a thirty-second interview there would be a cameraman, a sound man, an electrician, a producer and the interviewer. And a motorbike would be on standby to take the film to be developed and edited at Broadcasting House. It was all slimmed down by the time I was asked appear on Children in Need. Would I be prepared to paraglide over Harlow? Of course, not a problem. So I rolled up at North Weald aerodrome, where the cloud base was rather low. ‘Your costume is over there, Jerry,’ smiled a helpful young member of the crew.

  Costume? Nobody mentioned anything about a costume, but what the hell, it’s for the kiddies. So, dressed as a chicken with big clawed feet and a big flappy beak, I soared up into the sky, eventually to come crashing down to earth. An assistant thought it would add a touch of humour to come bounding up with a packet of sage-and-onion stuffing.

  But the live appearance a few days later was the most unnerving. Walking down the corridors of Elstree Studios dressed as a chicken doesn’t do a lot for one’s dignity. Until I noticed that the cast of EastEnders were dressed as elves and fairies, which made me feel a lot better. Eventually, I was interviewed by Rob Curley, with one claw crossed over the other and a large gin and tonic in my hand.

  However, I do want to put the record straight over a little misunderstanding with the comedian Mark Thomas. The party thought that it would be a good idea if I was interviewed on his then famous Mark Thomas Comedy Product. So I trekked down to the studios, just off Carnaby Street. The lights were on but there wasn’t a camera in sight. But there was Mark, sitting on a sofa, dressed as a bear. He asked if I’d care to peep behind the sofa, see my costume and put it on. Well, I had a peep and didn’t like what I saw: a six-foot penis costume with a big blue vein down the side, two little eye holes, and slits for my arms to come through.

  Well, you can imagine the conversation. ‘You must be fucking joking … The Sun will have a field day … everyone sniggering that Hayes doesn’t need to dress as a prick … blah, blah, blah.’ Little did I know that I had been tricked by the producer, a ghastly, tubby, humourless man called Dom Joly (yes, that one from Trigger Happy TV and I’m a Celebrity) who had planted hidden cameras to record my expletives and eventually played them on air. He tried to convince Michael Grade, then CEO of Channel 4, that by signing the release form I had consented to be secretly filmed. He failed. But I never put that damn penis suit on.

  Some of my happiest broadcasting experiences were working with my old friend Ed Boyle. Ed is a creative genius but should be locked away in a darkened room and kept well away from management, whom he despised. He was the first political editor of Independent Radio News, a brilliant writer, a fantastic producer, but quite, quite bonkers. I was lucky enough, with Charlie Kennedy, Ken Livingstone and Tony Banks, to be part of his parliamentary repertory company. He wrote and produced two wonderful series for us: Party Pieces on Capital Radio and a nightly live TV show, Left, Right and Centre on BSB (the first UK extraterrestrial broadcasting company, later bought by News International and rolled up with Sky). It was thanks to Ed that I learned to write, and read an autocue. I owe him a very great debt.

  However, he did have a penchant for getting into scrapes. As political editor of Independent Radio News, he had to put together packages for the regions. These were the days before digital. Every studio had an enormous tape deck and as soon as you made your microphone live by pushing your fader forward, the tape recorder would swing into action. Obviously, you only lifted those clips you wanted for the package and that was done by marking the tape with a chinagraph pencil, cutting it, splicing it together and putting it in a beta cassette. This would be ‘fired’ by putting it in a slot and pushing the fader forward. That’s how the first jingles were made. And darn time-consuming it was too. But imagine putting together a budget package region by region with each clip b
eing different. And only one guy to do it, Ed Boyle. It used to drive him totally crazy, or rather even more crazy. And as he was doing the voice-overs he would be shouting, swearing and generally cursing … always being careful to make sure that those bits were cut out. Until a grateful nation heard Ed’s wonderful nationally networked Budget round-up. It ended rather oddly: ‘Fuck, fuck, oh God … wankers … shit, shit, bollocks.’

  But rather than being sacked, the great man was given an assistant, the equally bonkers Max Cotton, who went on to do rather well at the BBC.

  Ed and I put together a great quiz show called A Kick in the Ballots. It was from a germ of an idea by me, and Ed’s genius did the rest. Charlie Kennedy was in the chair, with Neil Kinnock and a few others on the two competing panels. One of the games Ed devised was called ‘U-turn’. A politician would start speaking in favour of an idea and then the chair would press a buzzer and they had to oppose it. So I would start off opposing the death penalty until Charlie pressed the buzzer, shouting, ‘U-turn.’ I would then, in mid-sentence, say, ‘on the other hand…’ and launch into an argument in favour. The trouble was that MPs could do this so seamlessly as to make the programme popular with the public but hated by MPs. They gave me a lot of stick over it. ‘Your damned programme is making us a laughing stock,’ huffed some ancient grandee. Oddly, I thought that many of them were doing that without any help from me.

  Sadly, we only did three programmes on nationally networked LWT. There were rows over money and they wanted to put in teams of writers and completely mess it up.

  Ed is a great practical joker. You had to be prepared for just about anything if he was about. Once, when the House was debating the Dangerous Dogs Act, I was asked to pop over to IRN to do a live interview on it down the line. It started quite well until I heard barking in the studio and then felt a scuffling around my ankles. And then something biting my ankles. Of course it was Ed on his hands and knees. I completely fell apart and pretended that there were technical problems. Heaven knows what the poor fellow who was trying to interview me in another studio thought was going on.

  Also when I am around Ed, particularly at parties, I have to watch out for my hair. He has a habit of creeping up behind me with a lighter and setting fire to it. A lovely, lovely man who has forgotten more about broadcasting than I shall ever know.

  I do have a great deal of affection for LBC. I cut my teeth there in the old Gough Square offices with Pete Murray. Pete was the very first DJ in Europe, if not the world. He started on Radio Luxembourg in the 1950s. He was playing music for the kids well before the pirate ships, let alone Radio 1. But he did have a disconcerting habit of popping off to the loo when the news came on, leaving his teeth on the table. He’d always come back with ten seconds to go, reinsert his gnashers and we’d restart the programme.

  Next (actually it was about ten years later), Ed Boyle’s parliamentary rep got a rather interesting offer. Every Tuesday at 11 a.m., Charlie and Ken and I would appear on an LBC round table. Our host was the phenomenally famous Michael Parkinson. The programme proved to be very popular, particularly with taxi drivers.

  The reason that we, along with Tony Banks, were hoovering up the media opportunities is because, for politicians, we were pretty truthful. We told it as it was and if that got in the way of the party line (which used to change like the weather anyway) it didn’t really matter too much. What we didn’t do, which seems to be the norm today, is make personal attacks on our leaders.

  Parky was great fun and obviously the consummate professional. It would be amazing to roll up at ten and get chatting to those megastars he would be interviewing. Most were a delight. I once bumped into a wheelchair-bound Ginger Rogers. For those of you under fifty, let me explain that she was once the dancing partner of Fred Astaire and the most famous actress in the world. I asked Parky what it was like interviewing her.

  ‘Bloody nightmare. I’d prefer to do ten rounds with Cassius Clay than interview her.’

  It is worth remembering that Parky was a distinguished journalist well before he became famous as a chat-show host. He covered the Korean War and slept in the bath for safety. He was also a brilliant sports journalist and really passionate about sport, particularly cricket. He found it utterly incomprehensible that Charlie, Ken and I had about as much interest in sport as in eating our own spleens.

  Parky is a very entertaining, warm guy. We had great fun, the deep well of his stories seemingly bottomless, and he was a generous host. Every so often he would take us out for lunch. Being old school, Parky’s idea of lunch was the same as ours: start at about 12.30 and finish sometime around six, if it was a short one. He used to take us to Langan’s when it was a proper restaurant and not some gastronomic wilderness infested with Essex scrap metal merchants and their bottle-blonde mistresses. He was always given a side table so everyone knew he was there. This was rather handy, as every time he was noticed a bottle of champagne would arrive. And there was a hell of a lot of champagne. Once, Parky thought he would lay on a treat for Charlie Kennedy. There was a very beautiful television actress (whose blushes I will spare), and Charlie was always banging on about how much he fancied her. So, just after pud, this vision of pulchritude sat down with us for one of the bottles of champagne that were beginning to queue up for our attention. What should have been love at first sight, or at least a shag, turned into a disaster. The poor girl had just come from one of many consultations with her gynaecologist and spared us none of the grisly detail. Charlie should have been creaming in his jeans rather than being on the verge of throwing up. For the rest of us it was great entertainment.

  It is difficult to choose my favourite Parky story, as there are so many. But I still dine out on the one when he was the first British journalist to interview Cassius Clay after winning the world heavyweight title. Parky is waiting nervously inside the trailer while the champ is having a shower. ‘Suddenly, Clay was standing in front of me stark bollock naked.’

  ‘And?’ we asked aghast.

  ‘And he had the smallest cock I have ever seen.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, he’s the bloody world heavyweight champion.’

  Parky, what a great man.

  Sadly, he went on to greener pastures and left us in the hands of the ghastly Richard Littlejohn. We took an instant dislike to each other. I think he saw me as a cocky little clever-dick. I saw him as an arrogant bully with the brain the size of a pea. I didn’t last more than a few weeks before he booted me out. Littlejohn was not very popular with the staff. His driver, a tough little Scot, became thoroughly fed up with his boorish behaviour after a drink. He once had to pick Littlejohn up after a session in the pub when he was at his most irritating, needling the poor guy mercilessly. This was unwise as the driver did a little bit of debt collecting on the side and was not afraid to give a stern warning that if he kept it up he would lamp him. Well, it never came to that. Littlejohn just passed out, and his limp form was laid in the back of the limo like a snoring Jabba the Hut. It was eventually dumped outside his front door, with the driver ringing the doorbell to alert Mrs L.

  Well, Littlejohn didn’t last all that long. The chair was taken by a former Radio 1 DJ, the thoroughly likeable Simon Bates, and I was reinstated. Simon is another one of the great gods of radio. My affectionate memory of him is him taking out his chrome stopwatch and talking live for ten minutes without a note. ‘Luv, it’s amazing, this gift I have for being able to witter on about absolute shit.’

  Simon is a fascinating guy with a gift for gossip which makes me look positively discreet. He started off work in a slaughterhouse, which he hated after he was offered fresh blood sandwiches for lunch. He then moved to New Zealand as a cattle inseminator. He gave up sitting in the back of a small truck masturbating horny bulls for broadcasting … tough choice.

  The wonderful thing about Simon is that he is great fun. One evening we had all been out on the town and the next morning we had the eleven o’clock show to roll o
ut, with the alcohol still coursing through our veins. In those days I rented a flat in St George’s Drive in Pimlico. I staggered out of bed to pick up the morning paper. As I was completely naked, I carefully opened the front door and slowly inched my arm out to collect The Times on the doorstep. Unfortunately, I slipped, fell onto the pavement and heard the depressing sound of the front door slamming shut. So there I was, starkers on the pavement with only a newspaper covering my modesty. Thank heavens it was a broadsheet. It goes without saying that I didn’t have a key on me. What on earth would I do? Then I remembered that there was a retired professor, an elderly spinster, on the top floor. I pressed the bell.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Er, Professor, this is Jerry Hayes from downstairs; unfortunately, I’ve locked myself out.’

  ‘I’ll be down straight away.’

  ‘Only one slight problem. I have no clothes on.’

  Bless her, she didn’t bat an eyelid.

  I rang up our producer to ask if the car could come a little later as I needed to shower and get dressed. I explained why. Five minutes later the phone rang and I received a tirade of abuse from a madman accusing me of being a pervert. It took a minute for me to realise that this was Bates winding me up.

  Trevor McDonald also sat in the host chair for a while. One of the most pleasant and unassuming people that I have ever worked with. One day, off air, he remarked that he couldn’t understand why so many presenters opened their homes to Hello! magazine. I explained that it was because they were paid about £100k. This rather shocked him. But two months later, guess whose house appeared in Hello!?

  Finally, that great Australian broadcaster Mike Carlton briefly took over the show. He wasn’t well known over here but in his own country he was a legend. And, at twenty-one, he was the youngest reporter to cover the Vietnam War. He once took me out for what I can only describe as a marathon lunch at the Ritz. When we both staggered out I suggested we go and have a drink in Annie’s Bar at the Commons. By this time Mike was in full Aussie mode. He was on great form. He fell off a bar stool, thumped a fellow journo and was escorted off the premises. It was a wonderful afternoon.