I, Partridge (17 page)

Hayers, who required emergency dental treatment which I was happy to pay for, was needlessly off with me in the days after the show. He was angry that I’d invited him on to the show as a guest to, as he called it, ambush him into recommissioning
KMKY
. Nothing could have been further from my mind.

He was also angry that I’d punched him in the face.

I left messages with his PA to say I’d booked us in at a Pizza Express so I could buy him lunch to say sorry. I didn’t hear back so I thought I’d better go anyway on the off-chance a message hadn’t been relayed to me. He wasn’t there, but fine. I wanted a pizza and tiramisu anyway, so it wasn’t as if I was going especially for that. That would be
sad
and I’m not/wasn’t.

It wasn’t a big deal, to be honest, because I’d already started thinking that I didn’t want to be on BBC TV any more so it was fine.

Three weeks later I received a letter from Raquel Welch’s lawyer instructing me not to contact her ever again. And that was fine too.

124
Press play on Track 25.

125
A
brilliant
marching song, up there with ‘Road to Nowhere’ by Talking Heads and ‘Portsmouth’ by Mike Oldfield.

126
But brace yourself for the fact that it does.

127
An idea subsequently stolen, wholesale, by
Jimmy Hill’s Sunday Supplement
.

128
Not beef mince.

129
Now the Michelin-starred chef-proprietor of Just Willis, but at the time suffering his own psychological meltdown which manifested itself in him appearing as transvestite Fanny Thomas. This is a period of his life about which he is deeply, deeply embarrassed, and if you meet the guy for god’s sake don’t bring it up. Much like Tom Robinson, he’s now sorted himself out and has a couple of kids. He’s left his homosexual days behind him and now does nothing more gay than shop for antique furniture. Good on you, Fanny! Oops! I mean
Peter
! ;-)

130
The company no longer exists, but its owners James Judd and Tony Dee have set up Greenacres, a chain of care homes for the elderly which I
urge
you not to use – even if it’s the only one in your area and your parents have become a real handful, toilet-wise.

131
Although
god knows
they need thumping now and then.

132
A class of schoolchildren aged 8–9 years old.

133
In real terms, less than a woodwork teacher would have got in the 70s.

Chapter 17
Return to Norwich

IF THE BBC THOUGHT
I was going to sit around waiting for them to mull over a second series or have yet more ‘meetings’ or conclude a criminal investigation into a man’s death, they had another thing coming.

If a shark stops moving, he perishes. If I stop broadcasting on the TV or radio, well I don’t know what happens because I’ve never let it come to pass. Probably not death but something pretty unpleasant – like glandular fever or the mumps!

I needed to work, so I approached Nick Peacock, then head of Radio Norwich, at a charity gypsy fight. Nick’s a larger-than-life
¹³⁴
character but I saw him as a heck of an admirable guy. He was beset by hygiene issues
¹³⁵
but his indomitable spirit and enormous wealth had enabled him to achieve a marriage.

It’s true what the Bible says, I mused to myself on their wedding day: beauty really is only skin deep. I mean, Carol Smillie is beautiful but blanks me every time she sees me and has a habit of tutting when I speak. Meanwhile, Anne Diamond is one of the nicest people I’ve met.

So I was pleased that even Nick could find someone. It reminded me of the relationship between Catherine Zeta-Jones (incredibly beautiful) and Michael Douglas (looks like a grey crow).

Anyway, Nick was helming Radio Norwich and had always been a pretty solid guy. So in between bouts, Nick and I found a quiet corner of the warehouse and I broached the subject of returning to Radio Norwich, in a role over and above and away from my erstwhile sports brief.

Sports reporting had been fun – I think I mentioned the evening I spent with Gunnell – but my horizons had broadened. People now looked to me to provide a much fuller ‘broadcast experience’.
¹³⁶
Merely providing award-winning snippets of sporting headlines would have left them short-changed and angry.

No, I’d lanced the all-rounder bubble, and the pus of mainstream acclaim had been all that it emitted – any sport that had been around had scabbed up and dropped off. I said to him, ‘Nick, what can I do?’

He said, ‘Do what you want.’
¹³⁷

Bloody hell, I thought. This is ideal. Nick wants me to do it, the listeners want me to do it, I want to do it.

‘Oh, I’m not sure the listeners want you to do it,’ he said. (I’d thought it out loud.) ‘But tits to all that, I’m sure we can sort something out.’

It was such a refreshing attitude, I agreed to re-
¹³⁸
sign there and then.
¹³⁹
Listeners are important, certainly, but automatically placing them on some kind of raised plinth (or ‘pedestal’) is tiresome. Sometimes people need to put the DJs first.

Nick was ballsy. He’d been in charge of the big revamp of Radio Norwich, which to the naked eye comprised of a new aluminium handrail by the steps, and a slightly bigger sans-serif font on the signage. He said there was much more to it than that and said he’d overseen a major organisational restructure which I wouldn’t understand. Try me, I said, and he reeled off some high-falutin corporate speak which I won’t bore you with now but which I did understand.

There were plenty of familiar faces still at Radio Norwich and I was confident I’d be welcomed back by the guys there. No one had had a problem with me when I left the station back in 1991.
¹⁴⁰
In fact, I’d seen some of them in bars and restaurants in Norwich during my chat show heyday and I’d frequently arrange for a glass of wine and an autographed napkin to be sent over, which I’d then acknowledge with a smile and a nod.
¹⁴¹
That was something I didn’t have to do. But I did because at the end of the day I’m a good guy. As my mother used to say: it’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice. FYI – she was neither.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew that there’d be the odd snide comment from people who think that a two-and-a-half-hour radio show five days a week is – I’m laughing as I write this – somehow a step
down
from presenting a half-hour TV talk show once a week (12.5 hours of weekly output, versus 0.5 hours). But there are idiots in all walks of life.

No, I wasn’t worried about being welcomed back into the fold. Employees at a London station like LBC or Radio London or London FM might have been a bit sniffy about it, but people in Norwich are warmer-of-heart than their bitter London counterparts with their negative-equity and their stab wounds.

No, I wasn’t worried about being welcomed back into the fold.
¹⁴²
I was fully prepared to be the big man and chat to each employee individually to ensure there were no hard feelings, so I made sure I sidled up to each member of the team – in the kitchenette, outside the lavs, jogging after them in the car park. I was making the effort and it paid off. At the end of each of these conversations, I said: ‘Right, point blank. Do you
like
me?’ And they all said yes.

It was good to be back. I was pleased that I wasn’t making television programmes. I was happy. This was good and I liked it. In short, I was glad to be back working for the radio station I’d been at five years earlier.

Had things changed at Radio Norwich in the time I’d been away? Not a great deal. While a few of the faces were different, the people who owned them were the same. By that I mean, the intervening years hadn’t been kind. For example, the girls on reception had sagged in the jowls a little and while I’d flirted with them in the past,
¹⁴³
it didn’t seem appropriate any more. But apart from the onset of ageing, I was pleased to see that the ethos, the spirit and the playlist of Radio Norwich were all exactly the same.

Nick and I fell out shortly afterwards. I’d asked for – and been given – the breakfast show. Done deal, shake of hands, my press release written. So when, just a couple of days before launch, I bumped into the incumbent brek-jock – a journeyman DJ called Dave Clifton – outside Oddbins, I commiserated in that hollow, plastic way that passes for friendship in the media.

‘Bad break, mate,’ I chirped. ‘Good luck in what remains of your career.’

Dave frowned as he loaded his cans into the boot of his car, and claimed he wasn’t going anywhere, mate. I told him I’d been given the breakfast show and he sniggered in a way that made me want to thump him in the guts.

‘Depends what time you eat breakfast,’ he laughed and drove away, wine bottles clinking in the boot like the laughter of a glass-throated child.

Nick (his skin now cloaked in a bumpy rash as a result of work-related stress and a wholly inadequate hygiene routine) had reneged on his deal – rendering him dead to me then and always – and had slotted me into the early morning show. Providing classic hits, news, weather and chat from 4.30 to 7am was by no means a bad gig but it wasn’t the flagship vehicle I’d been dangled. I confronted Nick in a corridor and told him he was making a massive mistake. ‘You’re making a massive mistake,’ I said.

He mumbled something about upsetting the listeners and scurried off, but I followed him down the corridor. ‘The listeners? Remember what you said? “Tits to all that, I’m
sure
we can sort something out! Tits to all that, I’m sure we can sort
something
out! Tits to all that, I’m sure we can
sort
something out!
Tits
to all that, I’m sure we can sort something out!”’

I’d followed him to studio 2, bamboozling him by placing the emphasis on a different word each time, and continued bellowing it for a while before I realised that Emily Boyce was in there doing the weather. She covered the microphone and said ‘Do you mind?’

Realising my error, I gasped a sexual swearword. Although still hoarse with anger, I must admit I was deeply embarrassed by that. But I’m pleased to say Emily and I became firm friends and I never dropped the Fuck-bomb over her bulletins again.

Nick and I are no longer close – in fact I was delighted when I learnt that he wasn’t invited to Fernando’s wedding.
¹⁴⁴
He left the station with a stress-related illness and I’m glad. I’m told that he’s lost a lot of weight, but at a rate that made you think twice about complimenting him on it because it was more likely to have been the consequence of a serious illness. Again, glad.

Up With the Partridge
– again, the name
Alan’s Show
was vetoed by people who think they know my own output better than I do – proved to be nowhere near as depressing as expected.

To be fair, the demographic was a real melting pot: farmers, taxi drivers, new mums at their wits’ end, fishermen, late-night returning ravers, and the disturbed people for whom darkness brought only despair. That gave the show a really spontaneous feel.

On my insistence, we conducted audience research, using a survey that I designed, which turned out to be chock-full of insights and learnings. In fact, the findings directly shaped my show. With the majority of Norfolk owning or having access to a telephone, it seemed utter folly not to build the show around a phone-in feature. Similarly, we learnt that a daily feature in which we asked aviation fans to call in with sightings of RAF training exercises was causing distress to the families of servicemen and consternation among RAF top brass who argued that it had serious security implications. I thought that was a bit precious. But after 18 months, Scramble! was quietly dropped. This was agile, responsive radio and I was its pioneer.

I began to fall in love with broadcasting all over again. And in a funny, kooky, zany kinda way I think it fell in love with me again too.

I may have been back at the exact same station, in the exact same building, at the exact same desk (the ergonomics needed work), but I was in no doubt that I was on a steep upward career trajectory.

Helming my own show, with neither the limitations of a sports-only remit nor the self-serving irritation of studio guests, was a challenge as new and fresh as an egg salad. This time, I set the agenda. It was me and my personality and, as I’ve been blessed with a superb personality, it translated into shit-hot radio.

For the first time, I was also at the controls when it came to selecting music. I knew that soundtracking my listeners’ early mornings was a major responsibility – music is a powerful emotional catalyst, and research suggests that people are at their most irritable between five and six in the morning. I was playing with fire. If my listeners were anything like me, hearing a sub-par song on the radio before breakfast could see them slamming cupboard doors in the kitchen, scrubbing themselves down with bodywash a bit too aggressively, or shouting at the assistant on the carphone. And I was buggered if my music was going to damage cupboard hinges, torso skin, or carphone cradles – all of which I value enormously.