by Jerry Hayes
‘Bloody subs.’
‘Welcome to journalism, son.’
Anyhow, Rebekah and Les Hinton, News International’s chief executive, were very pleased with the columns. They led me into the main conference hotel bar, which was awash with journalists. ‘Have you guys been reading Jerry’s column?’ boomed Les. ‘It’s brilliant.’ That was the kiss of death. I never wrote for News International again.
All sorts of other offers came in. I was a regular contributor on Sky and the BBC, mostly reviewing the papers. And then all sorts of weird stuff. I used to appear on some Granada TV teen show with Sacha Baron Cohen and eventually did a pilot with him which included his Ali G character. Except he was called Wanker Boy instead and was white. He did a delightful send-up interview with Dr Madsen Pirie, who should be very thankful that it was never aired. I appeared in a game where I had to test my wits against a hamster in a wheel. It goes without saying that I lost. The only surviving part of the programme was Sacha’s new creation. The rest is history.
But if you think that politics is a swamp of backstabbing chancers, it is infinitely worse in the media. You are always the last to know if you are about to be sacked, and if you are in the running for a presenter job, it will be months before anyone bothers to tell you that you haven’t got it.
One day I was wandering back to the Punch office when my mate Simon Bates screeched his Beemer to a halt and wound down his window. ‘Luv, we must meet, may be a programme in it for you. Terrible station, the manager’s a complete tosser, but you’d be great presenting the breakfast show. I’ll arrange a meeting with the tosser.’ And, true to his word, he did.
The radio station was Liberty Radio, owned by Mo and two floors above the Punch office. To be fair, although hardly anyone listened to it, the product was rather good. Richard Arnold, now of Daybreak television stardom, and former children’s TV presenter Toby Anstis presented excellent shows, while Bates, that great old pro, did drive time. His idea was to crowbar me into presenting the breakfast show. But Bates was right about the manager, a grade-A tosser who wore polyester suits and was a complete caricature of the Smashie and Nicey Harry Enfield creations, a combined confection of Fluff Freeman and Tony Blackburn. He tried me out presenting a night-time show consisting of off-the-wall interviews and music of the 1980s and ’90s. He would let me know if I got the breakfast gig.
An old friend from the Whale Show, Victoria, was my brilliant producer. Once, with about thirty seconds’ notice, her voice in my ear told me that there was a guy live from Miami whom I was to interview about tantric sex. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what it was … only that I wasn’t getting any. So off we went.
‘So tell me, Chip, how do you achieve this great sexual marathon?’
‘Well, Jerry, first you have a well-greased hand and carefully thrust it into a well-greased…’
Well, that’s as far as I let it go as I turned up the fader for Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’ to drown out what I knew Mo would regard as a rant from a ‘filthy pervert’.
I did quite a few of these programmes and Victoria was very pleased. She would recommend me for the breakfast job. But did I hear a word from Smashie and Nicey? Not a word, and not for the want of me trying. The ghastly little man gave me the runaround. Eventually, one afternoon I bumped into him on the stairs.
‘Well, you know how to treat the boys in the big school, don’t you?’
‘What on earth are you talking about? We haven’t spoken in weeks.’
‘Don’t you remember lurching into me yesterday, calling me a tosser and saying that you were going to rip out my eyeballs and piss in the sockets?’
‘Actually, no. But I am happy to repeat it.’
In fact, I had no recollection of speaking to him at all. Then I had a vague flicker of memory. I had been lunching with Steen the day before and we had been rather thirsty. I must have been forcibly expressing my views about Mr Polyester and Steen must have gurgled, ‘Well, go and tell him then.’
I never got the job. A few weeks later Mo sold Liberty to an evangelical Christian broadcaster. I don’t think I would have fitted in very well. Bates went off to Classic FM.
But it stood me in good stead a few years later when I did a month’s stint on a mid-morning programme at BBC Essex, playing music and doing phone-ins. I loved it. And my great producer Stuart schooled me in the art of driving a desk, which means twiddling all the knobs and faders. I can only recall one little mishap. To set the scene, let me explain how a desk operates. In the middle is a red fader for your voice. On the left are faders for news, weather and callers, with a screen saying who they are and what they are going to bang on about. In the middle is a screen setting out beds (background music to talk over), jingles and tracks to be played. To activate these you move a fader on the right, click the screen and press ‘GO’ on a machine called ‘Radioman’.
One day we had a caller getting very uptight about paedophiles. The time came to wrap him up and play a track. Sadly, I was on autopilot.
‘Well, thanks for your views, John,’ I said as I cut him off. ‘And enough of paedophiles. Let’s play some Michael Jackson.’
Sadly, listeners just heard the beginnings of my hoots of laughter before ‘Thriller’ burst onto the Essex airwaves.
I learned to my advantage that it is not just MPs who go on fact-finding missions; journalists do too. So I was delighted to be invited on a trip to northern Cyprus to get the lay of the land and interview the President, Rauf Denktaş. It was all arranged by my mate Ian Hernon, who, apart from being a cracking journalist, is a very fine historical author. So, him, me, Eben Black, political editor of the News of the World, and Peter Willoughby, doyen of the Press Association, were feted by the Turkish Republic of Cyprus.
It really was an eye-opener. Of course, we were shown the usual sites of atrocities committed by the Greeks. Beautifully preserved spattered brains lovingly presented behind Perspex was a highlight. But I suspect that if we had been entertained by the Greeks we would have been shown exactly the same sort of thing.
I have always been a Turkophile and found Denktaş a personable and attractive fellow. Although it was a little disconcerting to see so many bits of blue circled pottery, to ward off the evil eye, in one room.
We only had one little mishap. While waiting in the VIP lounge in the early hours of the morning we thought that it would be a good idea to have a few swifties to ease the pain of the flight back home. This didn’t agree with Willoughby, who made a mad dash to the bathroom. Ten minutes passed. Twenty and then thirty, without any sign of the old boy. Somehow he had locked himself in a cubicle and had been wailing for help. Our flight was being called by now and there was a very real possibility that we would miss it. So drastic measures had to be taken. We broke down the door and scuttled guiltily off to the plane.
However, I did learn a serious lesson on that trip. Although most journos and editors (the ones who haven’t been dried out) drink like fishes, it cannot be admitted publicly, for reasons well beyond the comprehension of my little brain. So in all innocence I wrote a light-hearted piece mentioning that ‘Eben Black was permanently plugged into a life-support machine known as Stella Artois’. He went ballistic, fearing that his editor would give him his marching orders. In retaliation he printed a less-than-flattering photo of me astride a very phallic cannon. I learned my lesson.
Then I organised a trip to Gibraltar. The then First Minister, Peter Caruana, was a friend, as was the Governor, Sir Richard Luce, a former Minister for the Arts. Ian Hernon, the splendid Jon Craig, then of the Sunday Express and now chief political correspondent for Sky News, and I set off for a great jolly on the rock.
Craig is the master of teasing out a story where there is none. He casually mentioned to a senior official that Prince Andrew would make rather a fine Governor when Richard’s tour of duty was over. This translated into the headline ‘Andrew tipped to be next Governor of Gibraltar shock’.
Then he learned that the fi
erce little Barbary apes which were a menace to tourists were breeding too fast. He managed to get a two-page spread plus pictures out of that one on the lines that they were going to be issued with contraceptives. The man is a genius.
CHAPTER 21
IF WE CATCH YOU AT IT, YOU’RE IN IT
‘If we catch you at it you’re in it’ was the slogan we adopted at Punch. And one of the first was none other than Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, when we uncovered his controversial mortgage ‘loan’. He resigned. Through the sheer creative ingenuity of James Steen, Richard Brass and Dominic Midgley, Punch had become enormously popular with opinion-formers, though sales were not as good as any of us really wanted. The trouble is that under previous and short-lived editors like Peter McKay (now a columnist at the Daily Mail), the legendary Stewart Steven (former editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Standard) and Paul Spike (God knows where he is now, probably the seventh circle of hell) a gradual mountain of debt had built up. One reason: millions of pounds had been spent on a TV advertising campaign for the relaunch.
Under Steen’s editorship, the advertising was restricted to billboard posters in Underground stations. These would never be seen by Steen because his view was that travel on the Tube was some sort of perverted torture. Our advertisers gave a very excitable pitch once they’d created the posters.
‘James, let me take you round the Underground one morning next week. We’ll look at the new posters in the stations, and then we can do a lovely lunch.’
Steen drew on a fag while he considered the idea for about two seconds. ‘Let’s just do the lovely lunch,’ he said.
But the people who mattered, editors, political editors and senior politicians, loved the magazine, even if the public were lukewarm. They just didn’t get the fact that Punch had become fun, innovative, original and totally outrageous. We were stuffed by our old brand image, mild middle-class humour which would make the vicar and his wife contentedly smile over pre-bedtime cocoa, with a few safe cartoons thrown in. Worse, it was perceived as dentist waiting room fodder. This wasn’t helped by the launch editors, who thought they were carrying on some quaint British tradition like incest or Morris dancing.
Spike was certainly anti-Establishment and brought in exciting new columnists, but the new Punch under Steen was cutting edge and sometimes downright dangerous. Even better, we were totally unpredictable. This seriously angered old-school humorists like former Punch editor Alan Coren, to whom humour post-1965 was no laughing matter. In truth, the circulation of Punch had been on a gradual slide decades before the title was acquired by Al Fayed.
Within about an hour of becoming editor, Steen tracked down the very first issue of Punch magazine. He wanted a proper look at the roots of this grand old-timer of the magazine world. Sitting quietly in his office, he chained his way through a pack of Benson & Hedges while reading the issue that was published on 17 July 1841. On page three there was a leader item entitled ‘The Moral of Punch’, which included the founders’ objective: ‘Punch hangs the devil.’ Steen was captivated by this mission. And so we set a course, ‘Punch hangs the devil…’ Or, as a young trainee in the advertising department put it, ‘Punch gets the baddies.’
Steen instilled in us a totally different mindset. I mentioned a few chapters back the time when John Prescott thumped me, a story that I had dined out on for years, thinking that it was rather funny. I did a few hundred words on it in the magazine. Prezza, now Deputy Prime Minister, went ballistic and instructed solicitors on an action for defamation.
This was, incidentally, a couple of years before Prescott delivered a left jab to a man who’d thrown an egg at him.
As always in these matters, David Price, by far the best in the business, was instructed as our solicitor advocate. He arrived to discuss the matter, accompanied by his colleagues Paul Fox and Rose Alexander. This formidable legal team was in conference with Steen and, after an agonising wait outside the editor’s door, I was called in. They were ashen-faced. James said, ‘Jerry, can you take David and the team through it, please? Tell them what happened on that day in the House of Commons.’
It was as if I had been waiting stage left, and now I was ready to deliver my lines. I went into full theatrical mode, rolling on the floor, giving agonising groans and not a bad Prescott impersonation of ‘Ya little Tory cunt!’ David’s eyes sparkled. Steen told me many years later that while I was waiting outside, Price had given him a stern warning: ‘Do you realise,’ Price had said, ‘we’re up against the Deputy Prime Minister? This is serious.’ Price, like me, had the capacity for drama. However, when Price saw what I was saying was true, his little eyes sparkled. Perhaps he could also see how it would look before a larger audience upon the right platform; namely in the Royal Courts of Justice, in front of a jury. This could be an enormous, glittery, high-profile case for him.
Prezza’s grand solicitors assumed that we ghastly little Al Fayed oiks, spots on the bottom of Fleet Street, would be quivering in our shoes and would roll over. They did not bet on the total unpredictability of Steen. In the next issue, on the front page was a photo of Prezza in a judge’s wig. A few pages in, readers were treated to a photocopy-style image of the pompous letter before action from his solicitors (‘not for publication’, it screamed). Turn the page and there, a Sunday Times-style graphic of what actually happened: the two protagonists illustrated before, during and after the punch. Fleet Street loved it. Prezza sensibly caved in. And the Thumper had been thumped. But it was all good clean fun. Well, ish.
I am often asked what Al Fayed was really like. The answer is simple: fun. There are so many myths surrounding him that it is difficult to know where to start. Myth One was that he bought Punch to counter Private Eye’s attacks on him. Myth Two was that as proprietor he exercised editorial control. Myth Three was that it was just a vehicle to trash his enemies and laud his friends. Myth Four was that it was all part of a clever campaign to improve his image so that he could be given the coveted British passport.
All of these are hopelessly wrong. He never once told James, or any of us, what to write. Or rather, if he did then James ignored him. He didn’t interfere, other than to make suggestions and take an interest in the magazine as a business entity. Yes, he was keen for the magazine to succeed, of course. But he had a mile-wide mischievous streak, as did each member of the staff at Punch, and there was a mutual desire – almost a compelling need – to ridicule the Establishment. In other words, it was not that Steen needed to approve of Al Fayed’s instincts; more that Al Fayed did approve of Steen’s instincts.
The first he saw of what was going in the magazine was when he was handed the ‘mocked-up pages’ or the ‘book’ (printed-out pages of what had been despatched to the printers), and by that time the pages were rolling off the press. Al Fayed’s problem was that, from time to time, he had to placate his friends who had been parodied or ridiculed. It was usually with a shrug and a roll of his eyes and an apologetic sigh of ‘It is James. What can I do?’ And as for getting his passport, we probably made the situation even worse. Punch was his toy, but the toymaker, unpredictable and sometimes totally off-the-wall, was James Steen whom he forgave everything, just revelling in the fun of it all.
You may recall the great cash-for-questions scandal, when MPs were said to be given brown envelopes by Fayed. These envelopes were stuffed with £50 notes in return for putting down parliamentary questions. It dominated the news for months and resonated throughout the country for years. One day, Steen thought of a wheeze. He rang up a friend in the travel business (a specialist in dives in the Red Sea) and memorised one sentence phonetically. He then rushed from our offices, crossed to the other side of Brompton Road, into Harrods, and up the escalators to Al Fayed’s office. As usual, sitting in the chairman’s chair was not Mo but the enormous white polar bear that always occupied his place. But he was there, as always. So Steen rattled out his words of Arabic, which stunned Mo, who was sitting at a meeting with the good and the great. They were rather
perplexed. Who is this man and what has he just said to Al Fayed in his native tongue to make him roar with laughter? For their benefit he translated. ‘Where is my brown paper envelope?’ Nobody but Steen could get away with that.
One great scoop was ‘Life with Rupert Murdoch’, by Philip Townsend, who had been Murdoch’s butler at his apartment overlooking St James’s Park in London. It was a hilarious three-parter (run over three issues) and was so comical in content – heaps of behind-the-front-door stories about the ‘media mogul’ – that some readers even mistook it for a spoof. When the first instalment was heading to the printers, Steen took a copy of the butler’s story to Al Fayed. He was giving the proprietor a sneak preview of what would be on the newsagents’ shelves a day or two later. Al Fayed was a little anxious. He knew Murdoch and wondered how he would take it. ‘Oh, it’ll be fine,’ said Steen. ‘Rupert has a great sense of humour.’
On the evening of publication, at the local pub, Steen phoned the Harrods switchboard and, adopting a ridiculously strong Australian accent, he said, ‘Can you put me through to Mohamed Al Fayed, please?’
‘Who’s calling?’
‘Rupert Murdoch.’
Eventually, the call was transferred through the ranks of Al Fayed’s regiment before reaching his personal assistant. The conversation went like this:
‘Hello, Mr Murdoch?’ she said.