I have always been absolutely aware of how lucky I have been, and I try never to take any aspect of my life for granted. There’s no question that my career has given me some extraordinary experiences. One of those ‘pinch me’ moments was taking Steph to New York for a long weekend and travelling by Concorde. The upcoming tour was going to be long and there would be weeks away from home, so we decided to treat ourselves. The grandparents were overjoyed to have Molly for a few days. It was fantastic. I’d been in a plane behind Concorde as it took off at Heathrow and I’d felt my insides vibrate as it thundered down the runway with blue flames streaking out of the four engines. Being on board was like travelling on a luxurious rocket. In the loo, Steph marvelled at the fact that she was peeing at 1,300 mph. As she walked out, she smiled at Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, who was waiting outside, also about to have a supersonic wee.
On the way back from New York, the pilot, who was called Martin Robson, asked if I’d like to go up front for take-off. I’m not sure I’ve ever said ‘yes’ to anything faster.
Sitting in the cockpit for take-off was one of the great moments of my life. I learned that the Americans were immensely jealous of the plane, so that made flying it into and out of New York very difficult. Noise-registering devices had been put up all over the place to try to catch it breaking the rules. This required some pretty deft flying. The passengers had been warned prior to take-off that we would make a very sharp, immediate left-hand turn as we lifted off. I sat upfront for the manoeuvre. As the wheels left the ground, the plane banked sharply. As it came out of the turn, Martin was peering out of his window and said to the co-pilot that we were ‘bang on target for the car park’.
Excitement overload. On the flight deck of Concorde.
He explained that a particularly cantankerous old bloke lived on the flight path that Concorde took from that particular runway. If they flew over his house, he would complain. Every complaint was logged; too many complaints, and the jet could lose its licence to fly into the city.
The best way to keep the old guy sweet was to fly over the large car park of a mall further down his street. They also cut back on the power as they flew over in an effort to be quieter. This astonishing marvel of aviation technology was, briefly, under the control of an old bloke who lived near a car park.
There was no indication that we had gone through the sound barrier over the Atlantic, other than the passing of a black line on one of the instrument gauges. I was in raptures.
Martin had told me he lived in Bristol so, as I was returning to my seat, I said that to repay his incredible generosity, if he would like to bring his family to see Joseph, I could organize his tickets and give him a tour backstage. A week or so after we opened, Martin came with his family and they were given the full tour. He suggested that while I was in the city I might like to have a go on the Concorde flight simulator at Filton. He could book some time, if I was interested. Again, my answer was swift.
A week later I was sitting with him in one of the most sophisticated aircraft simulators ever built. I was lucky: it was a quiet day and we had it to ourselves. For the next few hours I was instructed in the immensely difficult job of piloting a supersonic passenger jet. We flew circuit after circuit of New York. I learned the importance of ten and a half degrees. As I was coming in to land, it was constantly repeated to me by Martin. There was a gauge indicating exactly 10.5 degrees, and it was a vital part of landing Concorde. At eleven degrees, the tail would scrape on the runway; at nine degrees there wouldn’t be enough drag on the delta wings to slow it down on landing and we’d shoot off the end of the runway. It was incredibly realistic: I felt responsible for the hundred imaginary passengers behind me. ‘Ten and a half degrees!!’
Towards the end of the day, Martin suggested that because of the amount of simulator training I’d done on my PC at home, coupled with the training I had just received, I was ready to join a very exclusive simulator club. Because of the size and shape of Concorde’s wings, it was one of very few large passenger planes that could fly between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. ‘Obviously, only ever to be tried in the Concorde simulator’, he said, laughing. Did I feel up to it? Absolutely.
I was in charge of nothing but steering. Martin controlled the power. We lifted off from JFK and I retracted the wheels. Off in the distance, I could see the towers. I turned to make the correct approach. The distance between the towers was about two hundred feet; the wingspan of Concorde was eighty-three feet and eight inches. If I got the approach right, there was plenty of room to spare. I levelled off at seven hundred feet, about halfway up the towers. My palms were sweating as I approached. The city flashed beneath me as the Twin Towers loomed ahead, closer and closer. I made tiny adjustments, but I was happy with my approach. ‘Looking good,’ said Martin.
It was perfect: we shot between the two buildings. I had joined a very elite club.
It feels uncomfortable to even write that story now. Little did I know that one day, I would stand horrified, watching a TV in another Bristol hotel room, because I would be back in the city appearing in Doctor Dolittle. Seven years after that day in the flight simulator, the Twin Towers would be gone.
8
At the same time as the Joseph tour kicked off, ITV had been working hard to find a show that would launch my new contract. It was going to be a very busy time. As well as doing Joseph, I would have to travel from wherever I was in the country to get back to the TV studios in London. A name and a company would become very important in my life. The name was Paul Smith (not of Gopher fame), and the company was Celador. Paul was in fact a TV executive who would soon become incredibly wealthy after he and his very talented team invented Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I wasn’t going to make him quite that much. Paul is dry-witted, thoughtful, precise and uncompromising. He and his team, comprising Steven Knight and Mike Whitehall, along with David Briggs, had come up with an innovative programme idea that both Celador and ITV would like me to host, alongside Emma Forbes. Emma and I had had a ball cooking on Going Live so it would be fun to be teamed up again.
Rehearsing Talking Telephone Numbers.
The show was Talking Telephone Numbers, and it would offer a prize of £10,000 and if you were prepared to gamble, a possible jackpot of £25,000. (I don’t think anyone actually took that gamble because they were more than happy to have won the 10k. Minor format flaw there!) Just pre-lottery, this was the biggest prize that had ever been given out on a TV show. The premise was reasonably simple. Through a series of variety-style games, we would generate five numbers between 0 and 9. If those numbers matched the last five numbers of a viewer’s telephone number, in any order, they could call in to one of ninety-six telephonists for a chance to win the prize. I should point out at this stage that the series was very successful. We made sixty-two shows and it ran until 1997, firstly with Emma and then with the equally lovely Claudia Winkleman. Having said all this, it was a totally new concept, partly live and got off to a rocky start. The huge prize money was its big selling point. On the first show, we failed to give it away; on the second show, we gave it to the wrong person! On the third show, one of the most spectacular cock-ups that I’ve ever been a part of took place on the nation’s TV screens.
In the afternoon, we recorded all the games and generated all the numbers. In the evening, we opened the show live, then ran in the recording of all the numbers being generated, then we went live again to find the winner, which usually took about two minutes. Some huge stars performed on the show. When Mariah Carey came on, I realized that Paul Smith could only be pushed so far.
Mariah stood onstage, asking for lighting positions, camera positions and light colours to be altered. No, still not right: that light up there, slightly to the left, a little lower. That one over there, a little higher, a little pinker. After about an hour of this, high in the gantry, I heard the gallery door open, then footsteps on the metal grid and down the spiral staircase. Paul Smith strode purposefully across the studio floor,
stood in front of Mariah Carey and shouted, ‘Miss Carey, please sing now!’ He then turned and walked back across the studio floor.
Emma Forbes and producer Jeff Thacker at Talking Telephone Numbers.
She looked stunned for a second, then nodded and told everyone she was ready to sing.
The opening titles rolled, Emma and I said ‘hello’ live and introduced the first act. The VT recorded in the afternoon played and we had nothing to do until the live ending. The first part was seamless. Into the commercial break: no problems. Out of the break and part two began. Still all okay. As we watched the show going out from the studio floor, little did we know that a VT operator was about to sink the ship. For whatever reason, he hit the rewind button on the VT machine and the show spooled off.
Since the days of the Broom Cupboard, I have worn an earpiece on TV. Children’s telly is a brilliant training ground in all aspects of apprenticeship, including talkback via an earpiece. There are two ways to listen to the gallery. The first is ‘switched’ talkback, which means you can’t hear anything unless someone presses a key to talk specifically to you. The second way is ‘open’ talkback, which means that you hear everything in the gallery, all the time. ‘Open’ talkback is the way I was trained in the Broom Cupboard days, and it’s the way I will present tomorrow on This Morning. People ask if it distracts me, but in fact it distracts me if I can’t hear. I like to hear everything. That way I can hear a problem being born long before it’s grown enough to affect the show. Over the years, I have heard some very funny things over talkback in my ear, some very sad things as news breaks, and some very panicked things. I was about to hear the last of the three.
Talking Telephone Numbers spooled off backwards and was gone. Most live shows with recorded content will have a back-up tape playing alongside the main one. As the show zipped backwards, the gallery erupted: ‘Cut to the back-up!’ The vision mixer did exactly that. In VT, the operator walked over to the now live back-up and hit rewind on that, too. We were off air. I ran from the backstage monitor I’d been watching to the set and stood in front of a camera. That was the moment I realized we hadn’t generated all five numbers so couldn’t play the game. I jumped from in front of the camera and hid – there was nothing I could do to help. It was absolute pandemonium. A sound recording of the gallery existed for a while, but I can’t find it now. Sadly!
Finally, the show crawled back on the air, the team found a place on the VT where all the numbers had been generated but a huge chunk of the show had been ‘spooled through’. We were massively under time. Emma and I filled for seven minutes. No game on TV has ever been played more slowly. A strange serenity washed over me. It’s happened since in complete technical meltdowns. It’s best just to relax and do the best you can. Panic breeds panic. By the side of me for those seven minutes I could hear Emma’s knee banging nervously on the lectern.
One Monday, as we were about to go live, I heard a yelp from the audience. A rather large lady had fallen, then rolled down the stairs and continued to roll out on to the studio floor. The cameras scattered out of her way. An announcement came: ‘Three minutes to on-air.’ The medics rushed over. The woman was okay but had hurt her leg and couldn’t stand. There was no way we could open the show properly because she was halfway across the black, shiny floor. Five cameras were out of position. ‘Two minutes to live.’
The floor manager knelt down and asked the woman’s permission to roll her back behind the cameras. ‘One minute to live.’ She agreed to the indignity. Two cameramen and the floor manager unceremoniously rolled the lady, as if rolling a barrel of beer, behind the cameras. She was in remarkably buoyant spirits. In the first commercial break, the large scenery doors were opened and an ambulance backed in to take her away. At the end of the show a guy called me over and asked if I knew where the lady had been taken. I said I didn’t know but I could probably find out.
‘Why do you need to know?’ I asked.
‘She’s my wife.’
‘What? Why didn’t you go with her in the ambulance?’
‘Sod that, I’ve been looking forward to coming here for months.’
It was on that floor in Fountain Studios that Emma Forbes and I nearly met our end. We were rehearsing for part of the show. Later, when we recorded, a remotely controlled ‘drop box’ above us would open and shower us with confetti. During the rehearsal, the drop box was triggered accidentally. It wasn’t full of confetti. Emma and I were standing maybe a foot further apart than we would normally, and it was a miracle that we were. Inside the drop box were its usual contents of stored chains, large metal hooks and various parts of a dismantled winch. They hit the deck between us, missing us by about two inches on each side. The noise was deafening. If you know where to look, you can still see the gouges on the floor.
In the make-up room, getting ready for the show, Emma and I were chatting about our idols. I confessed to her that I only had one: Katharine Hepburn. I adored her sass, her no-nonsense approach to life, and the fact that her and Spencer Tracy’s relationship was such a complicated but devoted
Hollywood love affair. Elton John once told me that Hepburn dived into his swimming pool to retrieve a dead toad. She grabbed it from the bottom of the pool, surfaced and threw it into the bushes. When Elton said, ‘Ewww, how could you do that?’ she replied, ‘Character, dear boy, character.’
When Michael Jackson came to stay with her, she berated him for not making his bed, and when he explained that he didn’t know how, she marched him upstairs and taught him.
I loved her style.
Emma looked at me.
‘You are joking?’
‘No, I’m deadly serious!’
‘She’s a close friend of the family! My middle name is Katy.’
‘No bloody way.’
She explained that her sister used to live with Katharine and, because of the actress’s love of early nights and because she had incredibly keen hearing, Sarah (middle name Kate) would climb on every bit of furniture and avoid anything that creaked so that she could sneak out without waking Katharine up. She would repeat the whole exercise when she got back to the apartment and Ms Hepburn never knew Sarah had ever been gone.
I made Emma a big promise. Could she get me invited to tea with Katharine? If she could, I would fly us both to New York on Concorde, she could shop anywhere she liked all day and I would pick up the bill. My only request was to meet Katharine. Emma laughed. She really didn’t think that would be a problem; she would ask her father if he could set it up. Emma’s parents, Nanette Newman the actress and Bryan Forbes the movie director, were utterly delightful. I’ve had some wonderful days chatting with them both. Bryan had directed Katharine in The Madwoman of Chaillot.
I waited for the response. When it came, it broke my heart. Her age had, sadly, begun to take its toll. She was now too poorly to receive visitors; I had missed her by about six months.
A month after the news that I would never get to meet the one star I idolized, a brown padded envelope dropped through my letterbox. Inside was a photograph from Kate Hepburn. It was signed in her very shaky hand, ‘For Phillip, All good wishes, Katharine Hepburn.’ And that, along with my Judi Dench picture, are the things I will grab if the house burns down.
I was sitting in the This Morning Green Room in June 2003 when it was announced on the news that she had died. I made sure no one saw me cry.
Towards the latter end of the Joseph tour, ITV asked me to present another series. Michael Hurll was a huge name in television. He had produced Top of the Pops and The Two Ronnies. He had worked extensively with Noel Edmonds and Cilla Black and had invented the British Comedy Awards through his new company Michael Hurll Television. He was known as something of a firebrand. People were scared of him. He came to us with an idea for a show. I loved the idea and I instantly liked Michael. Schofield’s Quest was a live investigative show, but with an entertainment spin on it. We found people, we found explanations, we found reasons. On one occasion, we found t
rouble!
I’ll be careful what I say here. A guy contacted us and said there was a set of steps at the bottom of his garden that he could see no reason for. At the bottom of the steps there was a door made out of metal. It was totally impenetrable. It didn’t show up on any of his house details or on any local maps. I interviewed him and we asked the viewers if anyone had any ideas. Could it be a Second World War pill box? Following the show, we received a polite but uncompromising phone call from a brigadier in the ‘security services’. We were never to mention those steps again. We didn’t.
I also nearly presented the first link of one Quest without any trousers on.
I have worked with TV’s most delightful dresser, Billy Kimberley, on many, many shows over the years and we’ve had a lot of fun. I think Quest was the first time we worked together. I had cut it a bit fine getting ready and putting on a new suit. Neither Billy nor I had realized the trousers needed turning up. I was already in a shirt, jacket and tie. I put the trousers on: way too long. We both ran into the studio, and Billy said he could turn them up in time for the live start. I sat behind the desk and took the trousers off and Billy raced away. I rehearsed the opening of the show in just my boxers as Billy worked madly at the sewing machine. ‘Five minutes to on-air,’ said the PA in my ear. I spoke to both Michael Hurll and the director: ‘Guys, if Billy isn’t back in five minutes, I’ll have to do the beginning of the show sitting behind the desk.’
Life's What You Make It Page 23