Seize the Day (14 page)

With all our banging about, worms started to emerge from the turf. It was time to go. ‘What do I do about all this?’ asked Ted, not unreasonably.

We shrugged, made our excuses and left.

In 1989 I did the Welsh stretch, which involved fire engines, several tons of foam and a few hundredweight of greengrocery. As was often the case, I had no idea the night before what I was going to get up to the following day. David Essex was one of the guests at Porthcawl, so I raced through the local paper, tracked down a motorcycle dealership and hired a Harley-Davidson. I knew that David loved bikes, but there had to be more to it than that. I called the coastguard, who readily agreed to let me have half-a-dozen distress flares. A path was cleared through the middle of the 25,000-strong crowd, a makeshift ramp placed against the stage and right on cue, after Adrian Juste’s famous announcement, ‘Today, live from Porthcawl’ etc., David kicked the engine into life and with me riding pillion and letting off the flares,
we tore through the crowd at speed, hit the ramp and screeched to a halt on the stage. A dangerous but great start. It wouldn’t get off the drawing board in these days of caution and litigation. The end was more prolonged as Smiley, much to the delight of the crowd, removed the engine from my car, delaying my departure to the next venue by several hours.

That week in Wales was equally memorable for the look of despair my producer, John Leonard, gave me as, head in hands, he whispered in a rather defeated tone, ‘What … are the flock of sheep for?’ What were they for? Well, obviously, for a perfectly innocent sheep-shearing demonstration. He didn’t even bother asking about the enormous sheep dip that arrived and the blokes that did the shearing. The paramedics prescribed a week or two in a rest home where he could tend the marigolds, sit on a bench and mumble away to himself about what life could have been like before the invention of roadshows. Bring on the flock. Into the bath of sheep dip. Shearing demonstration. Any more sheep. No, but there’s Smiley. The 20,000-strong crowd were well aware of this inevitable conclusion and, like a crowd of toga-swathed Romans at the Colosseum, were baying for blood. Who was I to deny them? I turned my thumb down Caesar style and Smiley was duly dipped and shorn.

Smiley and I regularly spent far more money than we earned setting up elaborate stunts, and I intended the 1990 week, covering East Anglia and the south east, to get off to a flying start. For my birthday earlier that year, a friend had mocked up some silly photos of me on other people’s bodies. Being visual, you’ll have to take my word that it was well executed. One had my head superimposed on the semi-naked body of a female mud-wrestler. Perhaps I should choose my friends more carefully, but I was retrospectively grateful. For the roadshow, I simply intended to swap my head for Smiley’s. I paid someone I knew, with the wherewithal, to do just that and deliver the picture to the national newspaper that had agreed to run with it. I childishly rubbed my hands with glee. I’d turn up at Great Yarmouth and in Monday’s
paper would be the story I’d provided with the photograph. Easy. That story said that Smiley formerly wrestled as Gloria Smudd. Yes, that’s right, ‘Mud, mud, Gloria Smudd’. Of course it went wrong. The lazy oaf to whom I’d entrusted the job delivered the original, with Smiley’s head loosely stuck on top of the old photograph. The tabloid (all right, it was the
Daily Star
) leapt on it of course. That morning’s edition carried the story that
I
had formerly wrestled as Gloria Smudd. Damn. Never fear, a good commander always has a back-up plan and this one was the business.

I had obtained forms for joining the Army and when I arrived at the Dolphin Hotel in Great Yarmouth on the Sunday night, I revealed the plot to a willing employee. ‘Army forms. Carbon paper. Autograph paper on top. When Mr Miles arrives ask him for his autograph. I’ll pre-sign it and so will our producer so it looks kosher.’ It worked. Some 10,000 or so, gathered on Great Yarmouth beach to watch the antics, saw an unwilling and protesting Smiley being shown the forms to prove that he had enlisted of his own free will. ‘You can’t make me join the Army,’ he spluttered.

‘No, but these gentleman can.’

A sergeant major with a face like a sheer slab of granite and two squaddies were the enforcers. To the delight of the crowd, Smiley was stripped of his own clothes and dressed in Army uniform. ‘I’m not staying in this. I’ll just go back to the hotel and change.’

I had to disappoint him. ‘No point, Smiles, your clothes are long gone. You can have them back at the end of the week.’

The three military types turned up all week to keep him in check. There was a proud moment at Clacton when we asked him to perform with some twenty other people in uniform. His smile turned to humiliation when he learned that they were Girl Guides and he had to sing ‘Ging Gang Gooley’ with them. We wouldn’t let him play with Aswad. Later we told him he’d be involved in a military tattoo. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind a military tattoo – a few bugles, plenty of flags…’

‘Er, no, Smiles … not that kind of military tattoo.’

The squaddies stopped him from wriggling, squirming and squeaking while the tattooist went to work on Smiley’s bottom. It was terrific, crowd-pleasing stuff.

In Margate the sergeant major rather decently, at my behest, allowed Smiles to hold the regimental mascot, a small pig. We also had Bob Geldof and his band on the show to play their new single, ‘The Great Song of Indifference’, and I was roped in to play guitar with them. While we were playing and the crowd were swaying, Smiles was holding the pig, but the Army chaps had gone AWOL. Come the end of the roadshow and he’s still holding the pig. It’s OK, it was on a lead. He was now seriously looking to unload the pig on someone. No one wanted it. ‘Your responsibility, Smiles,’ I said, with a shrug of the shoulders. He said something that sounded like ‘bastard’. In fact it probably was ‘bastard’. It would make the most sense.

The next show was in Eastbourne and the run there from Margate was certainly the longest between two venues in any one week. A local constable was on hand to forbid any attempt at abandoning the small creature and ‘shoving off.’ This was possibly the first little piggy to ride in a Radio One Range Rover. Better than a trip to market with your mates. Smiles tried to unload the pig at various Kent and Sussex farms, but of course, as he was a thoroughly untrustworthy character that could well have smuggled it in from Calais, no one would touch it. But by the time we arrived at Eastbourne there was a definite lack of pig. I suspect Smiley just turned him loose in a field, but I prefer my apocryphal ending, making use of an ancient schoolboy joke:

By the time Shakin’ Stevens took to the roadshow stage at the Wish Tower Slope, the Army had discharged their latest recruit.

We finished the week at Southsea, so surely Smiley had suffered enough? No, there was more to come. I went to town the next day, performing ‘The Colours’ with The Men They Couldn’t Hang (what a song) and sending Smiley up to the old ramparts of Southsea Castle to try to find someone to interview. We went live to him and some 15,000 people looked up to the remnants of the castle.

‘You won’t believe this,’ said the small dot 100 feet up, ‘but there are some nuns coming towards me.’

I believed it. Of course I did. I’d sent them. They were paintball specialists, with their guns under their habits. I’d spent the morning organising them. Smiley’s interview was about to get underway when the ‘nuns’ let him have it. The crowd roared, Johnny Beerling, who had come down to ensure (or at least encourage) good behaviour, groaned and it was a bedraggled, sorry-looking, multi-coloured Smiles that trudged back to the roadshow.

Heaven knows why the roadshow turned us into shrieking third-formers for one week of the year.

Apart from the roadshows, there were many one-off outside broadcasts. Early in 1988 I did some live programmes from the Ideal Home Exhibition, interviewing all and sundry and throwing in the odd impression. All was well until I had to chat to Rodney Bewes, whose ‘Likely Lad’ voice I’d imitated many times. As soon as the person you’re attempting to take off is sitting in front of you wearing a querulous frown, mimicking becomes well-nigh impossible. My impression floundered. On a brighter note I also did the review programme
Singled Out
from there with Carol Decker and Rick Astley, and there was a celebration dinner. Prince Edward joined us, but the guest they’d seated me next to blew me away. It was Guglielmo Marconi’s widow.
Her husband had invented radio
. That was how young the medium was. OK, she was his second wife, but to lie in bed and listen to the radio with the man that made it possible must have been an incredible thing. The delightful Maria Marconi was eighty-eight at the time, her husband having died fifty years earlier. She told me that she’d
married him when she was twenty-four and that Benito Mussolini had been the best man at their wedding. Maria lived to the good age of ninety-four. Without her husband there wouldn’t have been radio … or roadshows. Thank you, Guglielmo.

Our head of music, Doreen Davis, was always up for programme ideas, and early in 1982 I came up with one. ‘What about
Three Men in a Boat
?’ It was the time of the Falklands War, so they felt the country needed something cheery on the radio.

‘I like it, I like it.’

There was no messing with Doreen. If she liked it, it was as good as done.

It wasn’t warm in April and early May. We even had a late frost or two. The crew had been press-ganged from the mean streets of W1, having taken the King’s Shilling, and were pressed into service. I was given the unenviable task of skippering the craft on its journey from Hampton Court to Oxford. The surly crew swarmed up the gangplank, without so much as a parrot or a ‘yo ho ho’ between them. Knaves. The onboard security was to be handled by a four-legged guard with a large tongue and a wet nose. The driver/steerer/pilot/navigator was the bearded American with the Mafioso handle, Paul Gambaccini. In the galley was another man who sported whiskers, the gourmet chef/washer-upper Noel Edmonds. As Radio One breakfast shows went it was certainly different.

Our starting point was the maze at Hampton Court. This proved to be trickier then we imagined. It’s only a third of an acre, but feels like 300, and has half a mile of paths. I swear I heard the disembodied voice of Gambaccini at some point, muttering something about a topographical algorithm from behind a gnarled hornbeam, but I can’t be sure. I may have cursed William of Orange, for whom it was planted, once or twice as I couldn’t remember the tip that seasoned labyrinthines, as I feel they should be called, wisely imparted to us first-formers. Was it ‘always turn left’, ‘always turn right’ or ‘keep the hedge on your left’? Whatever it was, it held us up. Once on board,
Noel’s dog thought better of it and decamped after a few hours and our producer, Dave Tate, fell in the river. Things were going swimmingly. The turn-out at every lock was amazing.

I’m still staggered that no one got a ducking. Knowing that Noel and I were likely to have something up our sleeves, one or two crews that we met on the journey got in first and chucked the odd tomato or egg. We may be decent fellows and all that, but a chap can’t turn the other cheek when tomatoes are hurled. We retaliated. We also discovered that feeble rejoinders such as ‘They started it’ cut little ice with the authorities. We knew we were in trouble when a Thames Water Authority launch pulled up alongside. Someone had snitched on us. Now it would be acceptable ‘whistle-blowing’, but then it was most definitely ‘snitching’. We were ordered off the river. The dressing-down, from a man with enough stripes to attract a zebra who was looking to settle down in a leafy suburb, brought us back to our senses. At the next lock we were to disembark, the authority having already informed Radio One of its intentions to remove the three offenders from the Thames. How could I blame the man in the galley or the chap with the wheel? I was the captain and as such would have to take the punishment for my men. ‘Tie me to the yard-arm,’ I insisted, ‘and give me the lash.’ There were no takers.

We reached the lock and sure enough there were the TWA blokes. Crikey, they looked grim. Would I be ‘kissing the gunner’s daughter’ before noon? No, I wouldn’t. Smiley Miley and the Radio One team had been rascally and devious once again. It was well planned, brilliantly executed and my crew, from commodore to powder monkey, were completely fooled.

Another intriguing Radio One creation was the annual Teddy Bears’ Picnic, a roadshow where up to 30,000 people turned up with their bears. Hairy bikers came in packs with well-loved bears strapped to the handlebars, some folk pushed prams full of bears and others even dressed as bears. Ursine creatures, old, new, borrowed, blue and every other colour turned up to mingle with their fellow bears and picnic,
not in the woods, but in the grounds of a stately home. It was usually Peter Powell and me on bear duty with Simon Mayo, Mark Goodier and Philip Schofield making the odd appearance. The
Radio Times
featured a wonderful cartoon of Peter, Mark and me as bears. Our first teddy bear excursion was to Harewood House, which proved so popular that the traffic jams it caused made the national news.

Assorted Sootys, Poohs, Paddingtons, Yogis and even the odd ear-buttoned Steiff, with a price tag on its head, dragged their owners kicking and screaming to Longleat for another ursine gathering fronted by the furries’ best friends, Peter Powell and me. Peter always brought Edward, his bear, and even Lord Bath flourished his teddy for the crowds. He told me that he normally kept a low profile and often enjoyed putting on his old clothes and just pottering around the garden and that tourists, especially those from abroad, would often shout at him to ask for directions. ‘Hey, buddy, which way to the house?’ ‘I say … yes, you. Could you tell us where the toilets are?’ ‘Hey, mate, where can we get a cup of tea?’ He never told them who he was. I think it quite amused him.