Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  When he was less than thirty yards from me I could make him out at last. Apparently oblivious to me, I saw a man whose face seemed to place him in his forties. His expression matched the agonized cries that punctuated his slow progress along the narrow pavement. Every now and then he would stop and bury his face in a handkerchief he held in one hand. Whether this was to soak up his sweat or his tears, I couldn’t tell. He wore a thick, dark woollen suit that appeared to be tailored on the army ‘demob’ style – with one bizarre modification. The trousers were colossal, the belt buckle securing them at the waist higher than the hair that was now standing up on my head. They encompassed towering and apparently useless lower limbs that swung out in a broad arc with every heavy, laboured stride he attempted. Whenever his thick shoes found the uneven ground once more he would let out one of his guttural wails. As we passed he never once looked in my direction. It was as if he didn’t know I was there or, more probably, didn’t care. I could only stop and stare as this poor tormented soul made his tortured way on toward distant Tooley Street – not for the ghoulish spectacle, but so I could say to myself repeatedly, ‘This is real. I am not dreaming this.’

  I picked up speed again and made it swiftly through the rest of the arch. Even as I turned into Druid Street at the far end I could hear those terrible groans billowing through the damp night air.

  The next morning I knew that if I rang my friends babbling about seeing a distressed giant so soon after their dire warnings about malevolent dwarves I would be exposing myself to a torrent of wounding comments. Anyone else I might mention it to would naturally view my account of events as coloured by the fact I had just left a notoriously accommodating alehouse. However, you can only sit on such trauma for so long and when I did start raving about what I’d witnessed in the eerie arches under London Bridge few seemed sceptical.

  ‘Yeah, that’s Davey the Dwarf,’ Paul Baldock confirmed, hardly looking up from the hand of cards he was playing. ‘Frightens the life out of ya, don’t he? They reckon he lives in that estate off Crucifix Lane. He’s well known – I’m surprised you didn’t know about him; walks around Bermondsey in the middle of the night. Porky Vincent’s seen him stacks of times. Never says nothing to no one, he’s harmless . . .’

  The story runs that Davey, anguished by his dwarfism, used to roam the lonely streets in the small hours experiencing a twilight life as a ‘normal’-sized person. Over the years, this tragic yearning lapsed into hopeless obsession and the stilts he used to achieve his longed for assimilation became grotesquely elongated and unwieldy. The cries and struggling I witnessed that night were but a terrible symptom of his nocturnal madness, the bizarre extended suit of clothes the shield of his suffering.

  Had I known as we passed that night that what I was seeing was based in the psychological rather than the spectral, I like to think it would have made a difference to the sheer terror I experienced. As it was, I just recall running home to Maydew House, jumping at every shadow and, not wanting to hang about for the lift, making it up those notorious nineteen flights of stairs in about thirty seconds flat.

  *

  South-East London had a lofty living legend in Davey the Dwarf and I had seen him with my own eyes, but over in West London I learned they had their very own illusive sensation with which to spook out the youngsters. This was the Brentford Gryphon, a top-notch mythical creature with the head and wings of an eagle but the body of a lion. After a vote during the Six O’Clock Show weekly meeting it was overwhelmingly decided that this fabulous beast knocked poor old Davey and his stilts into a cocked hat and so in May 1983 I was dispatched to file a report about it for that week’s programme.

  Obviously, the main problem with filming an item about a magical beast – particularly a mythical one – is that you cannot just dial up its agent and arrange for it to be under the clock on Waterloo Station at two the following Thursday, spruced up and bursting with usable anecdotes. This is what differentiates a gryphon from, say, Gyles Brandreth. Such details rarely threw the SOCS team once an enjoyable yarn had been decided upon, so a few malleable souls were lined up to tell us they had seen the gryphon perching on neighbours’ roofs and rifling through builders’ skips and suchlike. A couple of wary local historians were also interviewed and then edited to make it appear they believed in the glorious old brute, and I stopped a succession of passers-by and asked for their own stories about it.

  Now I have completed thousands of vox-pops, as this process is called, and earned a reputation for being just about the best in the business at them, but let me tell you, on the scale of life-affirming pursuits I put the practice on a par with sawing at the skin between my toes with a breadknife. Even in the days when the chance of appearing on TV still had some novelty value, the only people who would happily stop for roving reporters were maniacs, meths drinkers and puffed-up local councillors – who I’m convinced spent their entire working day searching for such opportunities. It’s laborious work and can take hours to get a handful of coherent replies from the indifferent masses, even when the question being put is as broad as ‘Do you think we’ve had a lot of rain recently?’

  The only person I know who hated vox-pops more than me was Janet Street-Porter, my boss on the very first TV show I had fronted, Twentieth Century Box. Strange then that it was her insistence that we include tons of these ad-hoc contributions on some of the shows that almost led me to throw her from a tenth-storey window and curtail my fledgling television career in that one rash action. In the event, it was me who ended up in hospital.

  I was in the Aldwych, central London, doing some deathly survey at her request about ‘Should Teenagers Be Paid More?’ or some similarly earnest bilge that was too often the show’s stock-in-trade. After an hour we all felt we had landed the three serviceable answers we required for the item and so our director took to the giant car-phone every TV crew proudly boasted back then to ask Janet if any other general shots would be needed. When he came back from speaking into the mammoth instrument he said that Janet felt we should do another half-hour of vox pops. Now I am my father’s son and, as future events would repeatedly testify, I have never been one for the traditional office politics of complaining quietly to friends in the corridors. Very few people argue with Janet Street-Porter, even to this day, but I am told by those who were present that as this news was relayed I made a noise like an old-fashioned factory whistle blasting the start of the working day.

  ‘No!’ I roared. ‘Let me speak to her! Let ME speak to her!’

  With the help of two bearers, I managed to lift the 1983 state-of-the-art handset to my ear while several others dialled.

  Once connected, I leapt straight in, shrieking at light speed about the appalling randomness of her decision. It’s all very well being back at the office balancing spoons on your nose to pass the time, I thundered, but out here at the sharp end we’re on our last legs, awash with withering glances, sneered at by school kids and with our confidence lower than this bollocking basic wage that nobody seems to give a flying fuck about. We had got the required desperate sound bites in the bag and, as far as I was concerned, that was that.

  Throughout this tirade, Janet remained ominously quiet. Then she spoke.

  ‘Listen, Dumbo,’ she said quite calmly, ‘I am the producer on this show and if I say—’

  I didn’t hear the rest. I bolted from the car interior, out into the traffic, and steamed full-tilt toward nearby Waterloo Bridge upon whose far side were the offices of London Weekend Television and JSP. I ran and I ran, my rage increasing with every beat of my shoes upon the concrete. I could not fucking believe this. It might be the norm for Janet to talk like that to these cowering college kids who cling to their media posts like limpets, but she would find that she’d come unstuck trying it on with me. I still had a real leather-jacket job over at NME, which I considered my true place of work, so fuck TV, fuck underpaid teenagers and fuck this master–serf bullshit. I was going to sort this out NOW.

  Turning left
off Waterloo Bridge into Stamford Street, I sincerely believed the pavement was riding up behind me – something I’ve only ever seen happen in Road Runner cartoons. By the time I scorched into the reception area of LWT I knew I was giving off so wild and manic a vibe that I just couldn’t be near people. Heading for the stairs – yes, stairs again – I bounded up them four at a time like Jason King with a good lead on his missing milk. Emerging through a fire door on the tenth floor I bellowed ‘Where’s Janet?!’ and, noting the alarmed faces of those in the office, was hastily pointed toward the meeting room where she was mid-conference. Striding across and taking the door handle in an iron grip, I flung it open dramatically and stood there huffing, puffing and with teeth bared like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

  I pointed one stiff arm directly at Janet like a tank commander signalling the way forward.

  ‘You! If you [huff] If you [puff] you EVER [huff] speak [puff] . . .’

  And then I fainted.

  I promise you, there and then I actually, and for the only time in my entire life, passed right out. As comedian Arthur English used to say, ‘A proper collapse too, lady! Ace, jack, king, queen on the deck!’

  When I came round, Janet was forcing my face into a paper bag, urging me to breathe normally, while Kate, the office secretary, was calling for an ambulance.

  ‘Don’t, don’t . . .’ I spluttered through loose lips. Looking at my feet in confusion I seemed to be somehow wearing four shoes. ‘No ambulance . . . I’m all right . . . I’m all right,’ I wheezed unconvincingly then, rising to my feet too quickly, promptly fell over backwards, hitting my head on the door frame.

  Everyone sort of screamed, but strangely the blow seemed to focus my thoughts. Rubbing the back of my nut, I said to Janet, ‘What just happened?’

  ‘No idea,’ she replied with some concern. ‘I was in a meeting, then you flung open the door, pointed at me and fainted. You looked like a completely mad person.’

  Giving orders to cancel the ambulance, she got me to my feet, gave me several plastic cups of water and then, putting on her jacket, took me down in the lift and walked me along the South Bank to St Thomas’ Hospital, where she insisted they check me over. My temporary collapse was unsurprisingly diagnosed as the effects of hyperventilation. Following some routine tests we both toddled off to a wine bar where we talked over the evening’s ridiculous events, probably blaming other people for the whole affair.

  It remains the only falling out Janet – who, after all had brought me into television in the first place – and I have ever had. Many years later, when I was the subject on This Is Your Life, she came out from behind the sliding doors and it was this story of two very similar temperaments winding up in A&E that she told in what might possibly have been a tribute.

  So, anyway, the Gryphon of Brentford.

  I mentioned earlier that when vox-popping you can have a dry old time even in getting responses about as universal a subject as the weather. So I think you can imagine how far and few between are the helpful voices when the question before the public is, ‘Have you ever seen something half-eagle, half-lion around here?’ Quite what we thought we were going to get in the way of replies I cannot fathom from this distance, but probably it was the kind of impossibly efficient dialogue that looks good on a pre-shoot script:

  The fantasy: ‘Oh yes, just the other day the Gryphon flew down into my garden and carried off ten rabbits. I thought at the time it was some sort of advert for the Midland Bank!’

  The Reality: Silent, sour glances interspersed with the occasional, ‘Don’t talk daft, son, I’m busy!’

  Of course, it was also extremely common to walk up to people with a playful grin on your face only to be told to ‘Fuck off out of it’ before you had the chance to utter a single word. This is the true voice of the people.

  On that day in Brentford High Street we were getting nowhere. Unless we managed to drum up a few independent voices confirming the local legend as advertised (by us), the whole piece was going to look thin and flimsy. Imagine that! Then I had a brainwave. Instead of one or two lunatics saying they’d seen it, how about if everyone had seen it? So here’s what we did. Keeping out of camera on one side of the busy thoroughfare, I hailed passers-by on the other side of the road and, though we didn’t record the sound, asked them where Brentford Football Ground was, where the nearest Tesco’s might be, and from what direction did planes from nearby Heathrow Airport fly over. What we captured then were scores of shots of people pointing wildly in all sorts of directions. Cutting these together back at LWT, all that remained was for me to record a voice-over that said, ‘It seems everyone in Brentford has spotted the Gryphon at some time or another, and locals were only too keen to let us know where it was . . .’

  Absolutely outrageous, admittedly, but this wasn’t exactly World In Action we were making here. Later on in the piece we went even further. Pretending that one resident, who did not wish to appear on camera, had actually recorded the sound of the Gryphon flying overhead, we held our boom mic next to an old umbrella that I then opened and closed swiftly and repeatedly. You would be surprised how that noise, when played back over a black screen emblazoned with the phrase ‘Actual Recording’ can sound exactly like a mythical creature in full flight. All in all, it was a terrific item that is still mentioned on many of the websites now devoted to Brentford’s fabled beast, and I’m happy to report that it wasn’t even the most preposterous thing we ever concocted on the SOCS.

  The reason I draw particular attention to that little film above all others is because it was directly after I had returned from filming it and barrelled in the front door of 113 Maydew House full of bubbling brio and insisting that we go out and spend a lot of money on a magnificent dinner, that Wendy suddenly cut through my frothing.

  ‘Dan, I’m having a baby,’ she said.

  I immediately stopped my babbling and felt an intense surging wave of impossible jubilation rise from my feet to crescendo in my head. I can still see the both us staring transfixed into each other’s wide eyes, just a few yards apart and yet entirely as one, exchanging between us the overpowering force that this moment would for ever hold. Then we held each other tightly, before starting to dance slowly, in small circles, to an invisible heavenly music.

  Now all we needed was a beautiful old house to live in. And, as happened so often in my life, almost instantly wonderful old drum fell right into place, bang on cue.

  Growing up, nobody in my family had either owned or expressed any interest in owning their own property. None of my friends lived in a house either, except Tommy Hodges and his was above his parent’s sweet shop on Rotherhithe New Road, so that didn’t really count. True, both my brother and sister had married and moved out of Bermondsey to live in small homes of their own, but I hadn’t a clue how this had come about and frankly the day I find myself so lost for conversation that I talk about such rot is the day you can screw the brass plate on the lid of my box. However, something had to be done. I was going to have to address the dreaded world of conformity for the first time in my life.

  My first stop was my dad – a bizarre choice, given that he had even less experience of sensible money management than anyone since Sergeant Bilko.

  ‘Dad,’ I said over a soothing half in the Jolly Gardeners, ‘I’m thinking about getting a house.’

  Arms folded, he threw his head to one side and straight away went into a sort of lament. ‘A nouse!? . . . fuuckin ’ell – what ya wanna lumber y’self with one of them for? You’re having a baby, aintcha? Where’s all this a-pence gonna come from?’

  All monies to Spud were either ‘a-pence’ or ‘wedge’ in the same way individual coins were ‘sprarzis’ and ‘tosheroons’.

  ‘Well, that’s the point,’ I soldiered on. ‘We can’t have a baby up on the nineteenth floor of Maydew.’

  ‘Well, get a transfer to a flat with a garden. Blimey, I can sort that out.’

  He could have too. The only reason we had the high rise on the
park in the first place – where I’d always wanted to live – was because, following the offer of a couple of dreadful dumps near Peckham, he’d ‘straightened’ a bloke at the rent office.

  ‘No, me and Wend really want to buy somewhere. I’m earning a nice few quid, it makes sense.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that nice few quid will suddenly become fuck all with an ’ouse – you watch. Besides, you can’t move out like Sharon and Michael. Your work’s here, smack on top of ya.’

  He had a point there. In the whole of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe there were so few private houses they bordered on non-existent. And, kids, I know this sounds like absolute science fiction, but I cannot think of a single estate agent with an office anywhere in our corner of the capital.

  ‘There’s some houses up the top of Southwark Park Road,’ I said weakly. ‘And a few near Tower Bridge.’

  ‘Yeah, and fucking people living in ’em, Danny! What you gonna do – go and turf ’em out because you’re earning a few quid? For now.’

  Those last two words were said with a timely raise of his Guinness and a glance from the corner of his eye as if to shed doubt on the longevity of my ‘stardom’.

  Ignoring the implication, I got to the real point of my raising the matter in the first place.

  ‘Anyway, if we do find a place . . . what do you do then, Dad? Say you see somewhere for sale when you’re out – how do you go about buying it off them?’

  My old man did not hesitate to impart the full sum of his knowledge of the subject.

  ‘Fucked if I know,’ he said.

  Wendy and I took to walking the streets looking for ‘For Sale’ signs. Surprisingly, there were quite a few more dwellings that had been spared by the Blitz and urban planners than I had previously thought. Not a glut, by any means, and none that could be classed as ‘well appointed’, but it was odd how I had totally filtered these places from my map of the area. As I say, I knew nobody who lived in them. Besides, not a single one was on what passed for the Bermondsey market. One day we walked to the far end of the Silwood Estate to where the flats suddenly stopped and gave way to a no-man’s land of abandoned railway sidings, long-vacated businesses that had once occupied the archways and general open ground. On the other side of the railway lines that bordered this wasteland was Cold Blow Lane, the notorious home of Millwall Football Club.