It's Not What You Think (24 page)

10 You have a friend for the rest of your life

  9 There is no bitterness

  8 No one has to take sides during or after your break-up

  7 When you think about them it will only make you smile

  6 You look forward to hearing about them doing well

  5 You can compare notes on new partners

  4 Their mums don’t hate you

  3 Their dads don’t feel the need to come round and ‘have a word’ with you

  2 There’s always the potential of ‘one’ for old time’s sake

  1 They might help you find your dream house

For a while now I had been looking for a place ‘out of town’,
as they say. In fact Rachel and I had spent many of our weekends together doing just that—before we broke up.

We had this massive row in the car one Sunday afternoon just as we were coming back over Richmond Bridge from the south side of the river. It wasn’t about anything in particular—which I suppose was the point. What I remember most about it is that I did the majority of the shouting while Rachel did the majority of the crying. It was a typical angry boy/upset girl situation. I was angry about nothing, she was upset about everything. After that, things were never really the same again…we had burst our own bubble and there was no getting it back.

Rachel had left
The Big Breakfast
to come and work alongside me and on the first series of
Toothbrush
as my on-screen co-host, and although she had more than held her own on screen it was a role she was never comfortable with. After all, she had spent years being stared at as a model and would rather do anything in the world but that again and yet here she was being thrust in front of not just one, but sometimes as many as ten, television cameras and live on a Saturday night in front of the whole nation. Not the greatest decision by either of us.

Rachel longed for less of that and more of something else, something for her to claim as her own, something that would help her find out who
she was and what she might want to do with her life, whilst mine was proving a big old shadow to live in. I’d always known what I wanted to do and in that lies a certain freedom, a freedom that must be so frustrating to be around if you’re yet to find your own purpose.

As break-ups go, ours was pretty emotional.

It was my birthday and that evening we were due to meet some friends at a curry house in St Katherine’s Dock, just over the river from the penthouse Planet 24 had rented for me. We both sensed that we were about to go out and fake it again. Faking the fact that we were happy and jolly for the sake of the party. But Rachel had had enough.

‘You go without me,’ she said with tears in her eyes.

Stop.

When any relationship breaks down, you can’t help but ask yourself how does this kind of thing happen? How do two people who loved each other so much and fell in love for all the right reasons and had so much fun and cared for each other so genuinely end up at such a bleak crossroads?

Hopefully you have never been there but unfortunately most of us have. Other than death and illness, I think it’s life’s cruellest trick.

I feel sick just thinking about it.

I knew Rachel was doing the right thing by saying she shouldn’t come but I also knew that if I did go without her this would be the end.

Stop again.

This is another of those moments in life that no one tells you about. The moment that two people who no longer want to be together suddenly realise that they still love each other deeply and completely but it’s never going to work. How could they possibly not love each other? Too much love and laughter has passed under the bridge simply to disappear into thin air, yet there is an inevitable fatality about the situation.

Exactly as I had done the night Rachel and I had got together, the night of Kim and the Christmas party, I ended up going to the restaurant on my own. This time, however, I was not so circumspect when it came to explaining why I was without my partner—most of the guests were ‘our’ friends rather than my friends so I felt duty bound to tell them what had happened.

‘Rachel and I are no more, that’s the way it is, it’s all very sad, she won’t be coming.’ How else do you say it?

I then proceeded to get smashed as quickly as I could, I didn’t really know what else to do. If I hadn’t, I imagined I might run back home into the arms of Rachel at any second only for us to find ourselves in the same heart-wrenching situation again in a few weeks’ time. Bertrand Russell says drinking is temporary suicide—that evening I knew precisely what he meant.

Come the end of the night, I ended up staying at a friend’s house—apparently, by the time I’d finished I really had no idea where I was. When I did finally come to the next morning I was in total denial. I went straight out again on the tear, right through until the next day. I was too scared to go back to the apartment. Not that it would have mattered—Rachel had gone, back to her old flat. Underneath the tears, she was the strong one—girls often are.

So what happened to Rachel?

Everything she wanted, thank the Lord, including: a fine husband (a huge strapping army officer), a career in television production and just to round it all off, kiddies. And I bet she’s the most amazing mum.

All no less than she deserved. She is a truly beautiful human being. I am honoured to have known her and privileged to have been her partner. I wish we’d never had that row in the car on the bridge when she cried and cried and cried, when she cried so much there was no crying left but then we would have stayed together longer than perhaps we should have done. People who love each other do that kind of thing.

What excellent fun it is looking at big houses. Actually the houses Rachel and I looked at weren’t big-big, those days were still to come, but they were
quite
big—maybe five or six bedrooms with a few acres of land.

Following our break-up, I continued to go ‘out’ for several weeks during which time the house-hunting was put on hold; however, unbeknownst to me, Rachel was still receiving brochures from the various estate agents she had been dealing with and there was one brochure in particular that caught her eye.

Rachel was so struck with the details of the house in question she took it upon herself to forward them on to me with a brief note saying that she
hoped I was well and thought, if I was still looking, this property may well tick all the boxes we’d been after.

I told you she was amazing—how many people would be so thoughtful to do such a thing after they’d split up with someone?

I took one look at the brochure and immediately understood where she was coming from. The house was a perfectly symmetrical white, detached, four-bedroom Queen Anne-style rectory set in four acres of land with a stepped lawn at the back, a horseshoe drive at the front, a paddock and an orchard (both apple and nut!), plus a pond full of coy carp. It also had access to the graveyard and enjoyed a stretch of private fishing on the river that lay behind it.

I started to get butterflies. I had to organise a viewing as quickly as possible.

The property was much further away from London than I would have preferred, down the M20 just off the Brands Hatch junction, but when I arrived there on what was the sunniest of Kent summer days—the place was absolutely beautiful and it was love at first sight. I made my mind up there and then I would do all I could do to buy it.

The couple who owned the rectory were in their fifties and had really good energy. He was a real man’s man, bearded with short, cropped silvery hair, he looked extremely fit and strong for his age, the kind of guy whose forearms are bigger than most people’s thighs. He was a police dog handler by profession and had that permanent healthy glow of a good life, led mostly outdoors.

His wife was an equally refreshing individual and an international shooting champion of all things—she also happened to be absolutely stunning. She was tall and must have been close to five-foot-ten with an all-over tan and a mop of scraggy sexy blonde hair. When I arrived she was gardening in cut-off jeans, a pair of old trainers and a white vest—‘an outdoors Mrs Robinson,’ I thought to myself. She was the kind of woman it’s almost impossible to find unattractive. Something I thought it might be wise to try and do, judging by the size of her husband.

The lady and her shooting was a story in itself. The husband had always loved shooting, a sport he’d taken part in for years and whilst his wife hadn’t shown the faintest interest in his passion this hadn’t stopped him from encouraging her to have a go every now and again—just for a bit of
fun more than anything. An invitation she’d thus far declined; however, one day she did decide to have a go and what do you know? She was, as they say—a natural—a crack shot. In fact so much of a natural that within twelve months she was shooting for the British ladies team.

After spending no more than a few minutes in the company of this enchanting couple in what had been their home for the last fifteen years or so, I was filled with one of those overwhelming feelings of how right this all seemed and how if I lived in this house for a while a bit of their magic might rub off on me and my life would be better.

I made them a cash offer of the asking price—on one condition. The condition that the wooden chair I was currently sitting on in the kitchen was part of the deal. It was nothing particularly special, a relatively plain old farmhouse pine kitchen chair with two little curly arms and a worn-down back but it felt so comfortable and would always remind me of the day I first saw my new home.

The chair was thrown in and the deal was done—£350,000 for my own little slice of heaven—a bargain.

To this day its the best house I have ever owned, plus I still have the chair!

A few months later, Rachel came to see me after I’d completed on the house. I picked her up from the station and the second we turned into the drive she smiled and said,

‘I had a feeling about this one.’

10 The morning after I won a Bafta and bent it on the way home—it was the morning of my first show and the bent BAFTA became the star

  9 Taking the Radio 1 Road Show to the Yorkshire town of Driffield

  8 Vic Reeves falling through the floor of a local disco in Newquay

  7 Being asked to listen to a group of girls who turned up to sing in our office—they were called the Spice Girls

  6 Tina Ritchie our newsreader—she has the longest legs of any newsroom

  5 The documentary of our week on the road—
Five Go Mad in Dorset

  4 The fact that I’ve just discovered that documentary was in fact called
Six Go Mad in Somerset

  3 The day we had a brand new Beatles record to play—‘Free as a Bird’

  2 Oasis v Blur and the race to number one

  1 The morning after the Christmas party and a phone call from the boss

My time at Radio 1, like much of life,
especially the really good bits, passed by in a flash—almost like it never happened.

Our new breakfast show was an instant hit with the listeners. I put together a team of old pals—Holly ‘Hot Lips’, the glamorous Greek with the gorgeous voice who worked on
The Greenhouse
at GLR, Dan Dan the soundman, he of the Kim Wilde dumping me story, and good old John Revell, who I met on that first day at Radio Radio, the owner of the legendary ‘lucky tie’ that helped us both get our first jobs working for the BBC.

We were all friends—Holly and I a little more than friends at times—and all we did every day was go on the radio and have fun. It was a simple formula but one that worked a treat.

Sometimes all you have to do is ‘be’ and that’s enough, especially when you are younger. It is the job of the young to write the tunes of the day
whilst the rest of the world looks on. And so it was with us, we just lived out our lives and then went on the radio the next morning and talked about what we’d been up to.

We were doing extraordinary things with extraordinary people and it all made for good listening. All we had to do was stay out for as long as our bodies would allow us, collecting stories and then manage to get up in the morning in time for the start of the show. Something which, contrary to popular belief, we only failed to do once and that was on purpose!

It was Christmas and we were on our Christmas night out. Without telling the team, I had booked them all rooms in a hotel for the night—a fact I gleefully revealed over dinner and one that seemed to go down very well, to say the least—suddenly, the celebrations seemed to go up a notch.

As the revelry went on I got to thinking about the next day’s show and how we could best relate to our audience when it came to the infamous subject of the staff Christmas party. The listeners were aware we were going out that night and would want to know what shenanigans had taken place. After a few more beers and a bit more of a think, I declared a eureka moment. I called the troops together at the bar and informed them I had the perfect ruse for the next day’s broadcast.

‘Team,’ I declared, ‘I have decided it is our duty to the show, to our listeners and indeed to the country not to turn up for work tomorrow. That is what we must do, for that is real life. That is what happens when people have a Christmas do like we are having this evening and we are but a mirror to what goes on elsewhere. We must not turn up for work—to do so would be to not be doing our jobs properly!’ There was also a caveat—for the idea to work properly, none of us was allowed to tell anyone, otherwise cover could be arranged and the impact of our absence would be lessened.

I admit, it sounds totally insane now, but back then, at that very moment, I was genuinely convinced it was the right thing to do—obviously I was very delusional.

At first the team thought I had gone nuts, which I probably had, but I was having none of it and proceeded to order them not to go in. Once they could see I was serious and realised they had no choice—I was the guy who paid their wages after all, as we were an independent production company—acceptance began to sink in and with it a strange euphoria came over the group. This was creative thinking at its most obtuse.

People still to this day don’t believe we missed the show on purpose, but I promise you, that’s what happened. How else would all of us have failed to turn up?

The morning after the night before I was woken up by a phone call from Matthew B. I was in the hotel room asleep when he called. He was not happy. In fact he was spitting feathers, especially when I told him that it had all been a plan and that there was a creative logic behind it and that he should be congratulating me instead of berating me as he was now.

Matthew said that, if it was a plan, which he still couldn’t quite get his head around, then I should have at least warned him as a lot of very nice people had been put to a lot of trouble as a consequence of our no show. Of course he was quite right and being entirely reasonable.

He went on to add that in no way should I expect to be paid for that morning. A little unfair, I felt at the time, as I honestly thought I was doing what was right for the show and especially seeing as the next day we were front-page news—publicity money couldn’t buy!

There was no doubt about it, I was beginning to display the first signs of potty-ness.