Seize the Day (37 page)

Elsewhere, I turned out a few times for Screaming Lord Sutch’s Savages. To be a Savage was a noble thing; there had been many of us over the years. The self-styled Third Ear of Harrow and founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party was without doubt a character. He still holds the record for losing the largest number of election campaigns – forty in all. Musicians such as Jeff Beck, John Bonham, Paul Nicholas, Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord, Jimmy Page and dozens of other have performed as Savages over the years. At a book launch at Nomis Studios not long before Sutch was found dead, we discussed him hosting a party for everyone who’d ever been a Savage, which would culminate with a group photograph. He was very excited about the prospect, but of course circumstances prevented it from happening.

There were also assorted games for the Bunburys, a team of showbiz and sporting reprobates organised, drilled and skippered by the inimitable David English. I’d first encountered this extraordinary character in 1976, when he became a part of Neil ffrench Blake’s on-air team. I was never quite sure of his role, but neither, I suspect, was he. My most vivid memory was of his newsreading. The news, as even small reptiles in the Vietnamese jungle know, is sacrosanct. If you’re the newsreader, commenting on news items is strictly
verboten
. Unless, that is, you’re David English. On one of those ‘and finally’ stories, a woman’s handbag had been stolen in Reading. That
says it all. The listener can draw their own conclusions. English had other ideas. ‘What a bloody awful thing to happen. People like that make me really mad. It’s absolutely despicable.’ And so say all of us, but you’d never catch Trevor MacDonald interjecting personal feelings into a bulletin. I rather liked his matey style, but he wasn’t there for long. Despite appearing wonderfully untogether, as former head of RSO Records, he looked after folk like Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees, who loved him to bits.

I was sitting in my old MG at traffic lights in the Fulham Road one afternoon when David pulled up behind me. Always affable, he leapt out for a chat as a queue formed. With one ear on the
conversation
and one eye on the red light, he chatted in his usual animated fashion. The lights changed.

‘David, the lights are green.’ I slid the car into gear. He remained unmoved both verbally and physically. ‘There are cars hooting at us.’

‘That’s showbiz,’ he laughed, his head firmly inside the car.

‘I’m certain it’s not because they recognise you from that old Head and Shoulders commercial you did.’

‘It might be.’ He turned, smiled and waved to a long and increasingly intolerant line of drivers. I wasn’t quite sure where to hide. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘nobody’s business is that important.’ He was probably right, but it didn’t ease the situation. The lights, which had gone back to red, turned green again. Chaps were getting out of their cars. ‘All right, all right,’ he beamed, ‘just having a chat.’ Again he waved regally to one and all. By the third change to green we were off the grid. I was thankful for my pole position and made sure I’d outrun him by the next set of lights.

David had a wonderful knack of pulling the Bunburys together. I’m sure he kept a secret book of likes, dislikes, whims and favourite fielding positions. He knew how to bait the stream for the fish he wanted to catch, in the most genial and charming manner. Who could refuse? I have to admit that he is also a class batsman. Anyone who can hold his own in the company of such eminent cricketers as
Ian Botham, Michael Holding, Dennis Lillee, Chris Cowdrey, Geoff Howarth and Chris Broad has to be good. Apart from the professionals, the Bunburys often looked more like a festival line-up than a cricket team, with Eric Clapton, David Essex, Bill Wyman and Spandau Ballet’s John Keeble taking to the field. Used to bigger balls, but equally handy with a smaller one, were Gary Lineker, Graham Taylor, Andy Sinton, Simon Barker and Dean Saunders. Graham Dene and I represented the broadcasters, with Andy Peebles supplying many a fine commentary.

An offshoot match in 1989 was probably the most festival-like, when Bill Wyman’s XI played Eric Clapton’s XI at Stocks Country Club in Hertfordshire. Eric fielded David English, David Essex, boxer Gary Mason, Frazer Hines, John Keeble, Chris Tarrant, Graham Dene and Johnnie Walker, while Bill’s side featured Peter Scudamore, Deep Purple’s Ian Paice, Errol Brown, Michael Holding, Mike Rutherford, Andy Fairweather Low and me. A good squad to assemble if there’s a lot of singing, twanging, punching, riding and talking, but cricket? We failed to reach their total of 234, the last wicket falling at 180, but money, glasses and spirits were raised at the Dorchester Hotel and, like the tagline that Jimmy Kennedy wrote for ‘The Hokey-Cokey’, that’s what it’s all about.

In May 2014 the Heartaches lads and the next generation gathered at the Oxo Tower to show off fading red, pink and green blazers and ties. The effect was that of squinting through a kaleidoscope at a herbaceous border having had a few snifters. I attempted to explain some of the team’s characters to Vanessa again, but in most cases they were unexplainable. I solemnly swore to many a fellow Heart that this year I would return for the annual tour of the Lizard, even if I’m not selected. If twenty first-class cricketers have played for the team during its colourful innings of forty years, surely I can return to lend them my camaraderie, wit and bonhomie, if not my dwindling skill at the bowling crease.

A
LTHOUGH I WAS
too young to hold a full-sized tennis racquet properly, I’d bash around on the grass court we had at home. No coaching, no lessons. It was still the era of ‘Right, kids off, the adults are coming on’. The tennis court was also the high jump section of my Olympics course. Not the net, as you may be thinking, but two fold-up chairs, standing all of 2 ft 6 in. in old money, with a bamboo cane stretched between them. We had a lot of bamboo, so no outsourcing needed. There was no raising of the bar, nor breaking of records. You either jumped 2 ft 6 in. or you didn’t. No judges or umpires needed. That isn’t to say there wasn’t the odd difference of opinion.

Running a mini-Olympics from the age of five onwards took more than a little organising. I could usually round up half a dozen willing, or unwilling, participants and persuade them to have numbers pinned to their shirts, T-shirts or whatever. Again, this was no haphazard operation. I meticulously drew numbers on sheets of A4 paper with AAA on it for Amateur Athletics Association and made the competitors wear them both front and back. The chief pinner-onner of numbers, my mother, would officiate at a distance. There was no professionalism or lack of dress code in
my
Games.

Apart from the high jump, there was the relay (if there weren’t enough competitors you had to run twice or even swap teams), the sprint, the long jump, putting and running. The running didn’t have a particular distance as I recall.

Despite our garden having a hidden stream that ran behind some giant cedar trees there were no water sports. Water is like a magnet to kids and although I often went there looking for adventures (as you do), the stream was too narrow for even a makeshift vessel and too shallow to swim in. So it never made it into the Games.

And then there was the tennis. This was the most difficult to organise as not only did the scoring confuse the other kids, and me to an extent, but the word ‘deuce’ always made everyone shriek because it sounded the same as ‘juice.’ Ah, the simplicity of youthful humour. In all these endeavours I was assisted by Old Charlie, our gardener who, unbeknown to him, doubled as my groundsman for the Olympics. I doubt that he was a great age, he just stooped a little, wore a cheesecutter cap and didn’t kick up too much when I jumped in his symmetrical piles of dead leaves, but he was ‘Old Charlie’ simply because our next gardener was also called Charlie and I suspect that he was marginally younger.

I’d trail round after Young Charlie; for kids, anyone that looks as if they’re doing something interesting and anyone in the dead leaf, wriggly worm, odd frog and bonfire trade was a natural magnet. Once some chums along the avenue were due to have a brace of Scottish cousins delivered to them for a period. There was much discussion between myself and Charlie as to whether they would look disarmingly different to us and indeed, if they spoke a similar language. This childlike train of conversation spilled over into an earnest conversation about the distance from Scotland to Walton-on-Thames. At such a tender, unworldly age, my estimate when asked to make one was 20 miles. I did believe for a while that everywhere was 20 miles from Walton, which would have been convenient for holidays, but would have made the world a much smaller and more densely populated
place. My guess made Charlie roar with derisive laughter. Now as all us kids know, we don’t like being laughed at, we like to be taken seriously, so I took the only course open to me and burst into tears. Normally I would have wandered off, licked my wounds and possibly come back for a second guess having consulted my globe atlas, but somewhere behind one of the windows the scenario had been observed.

My father later demanded to know the facts. ‘Why were you crying earlier?’

It was easiest to tell the truth. ‘Charlie asked me how many miles it was from Scotland and I guessed incorrectly.’

‘Now tell me the truth.’

‘That is the truth.’ I couldn’t have made up a story that was any truer.

‘Tell me the truth.’

I began to wonder if I was lying without realising it. No, it was what happened. I was sent to my bedroom to think about what I’d said and to revise my answer. Life is damned unfair when you’re a kid. Or at least it was then. I thought about making up some other story, but wasn’t sure that anything I could create could beat the truth.

The episode passed into history and only took on a new meaning many years later when Charlie appeared in the local paper for making what we’d now refer to as ‘inappropriate advances’ to children at a local park. All became clear. Had my father possibly heard a vague rumour that our gardener may be ‘slightly strange’ as he would have termed it and was keeping a weather eye out for anything untoward? These days, with young people being exposed to virtually everything via all aspects of the media, parents would sit down to explain gently and sensibly. But years ago, the social interaction between adults and children was nowhere near as close. Since then I have been incensed if I’ve been subjected to any kind of injustice.

I played tennis regularly at school, but although the Old Wokingians continued to trot out in their dotage to play soccer, there was no post-school tennis for those who were decanted year in, year out into the world beyond. Nevertheless I wielded diverse styles and
makes of racquets over the years against many an opponent on a variety of surfaces, entered the odd tournament and thought I was more proficient than I was.

When I lived in St George’s Hill, Cliff Richard was in the next road. We started hitting a few balls at the tennis club from around 1980. In 1983 Cliff’s first pro-celebrity tennis tournament kicked off what was to become twenty-five years of volleys, smashes and drop-shots in the name of improving the lives and sporting opportunities of hundreds and hundreds of young players. The amateurs for the initial outing were Cliff, Hank Marvin, Trevor Eve and me. Trevor distinguished himself on court as he did on the stage, winning the debut event with Ann Hobbs. Of course, he was never asked back.

My serving style needed a bit of fine honing at the time, but there was no call for the gales of laughter. I thought they were laughing at Hank’s humour, but it was my serve. Cheek. I could hear Cliff’s mother remonstrating with a section of the crowd on my behalf. It seems I lifted my right leg up as I served and it looked … well … let’s just say it didn’t look butch.

Terry Wogan, Mike Yarwood and Hank wielded the racquets at the second tournament, held like the first one at the Brighton Conference Centre, and in 1985 Shakin’ Stevens and Annabel Croft, Cliff and Sarah Gomer, Hank Marvin and Virginia Wade, and Ann Hobbs and I showed the audience a thing or two. Cliff and I sang a song or two, during which I didn’t lift my leg once. What were the audience laughing at, then?

The following year saw the return of Hank B. Marvin, clearly desperate for a trophy, battling it out against such tennis giants as Ronnie Corbett and Peter Cook and an athlete who could give Hank a run for his money over 1,500 metres, Sebastian Coe. In non-playing capacity I trundled off to the 1987 Tennis Ball in aid of Young Tennis Players of Great Britain. At least I qualified in one of those departments: I was British. Later in the same week Cliff’s office flew me up to Manchester to front his ‘Search for a Star’ day with Sue Barker. We had great
fun among 200 enthusiastic kids with fearless forehands and sizzling serves. The result of this day was to lead to the lad setting up his own tennis foundation. The annual tournament raised some £40,000 for the LTA, although fear of my increasing prowess on court led to me doing the commentary instead of posing in my shorts and giving verbal abuse to that year’s celebrity players, Elton John, Emlyn Hughes and Mike Yarwood.

On several occasions I presented the Radio One breakfast show from Wimbledon, catching the early morning atmosphere with players knocking up, tons of strawberries making their presence felt and the resident hawk circling Centre Court to put the wind up any disruptive pigeons. One year, following a barbecue at Cliff’s with Sue Barker, I persuaded her to come and present the show with me as she had the knowledge and was still Britain’s number one at that time. I sidestepped her self-effacing moment, knowing she’d be fine. She’s become not only a fixture at Wimbledon, but a great TV presenter, and to many the face and voice of tennis. Maybe I should have been an agent.

The 1988 line-up at Brighton for Cliff’s tournament comprised Cliff and Ann Hobbs, me and Virginia Wade, Aled Jones and Julie Mullins, and Jimmy Tarbuck and Annabel Croft. We were all wired up with microphones to catch any pithy or witty epigrams that might fall from our perspiration-flecked lips, but Cliff’s kept crackling, breaking up and producing some ghastly feedback. The crowd found it amusing. So did Jimmy Tarbuck, coming out with the lightning line, ‘I don’t what you lot are laughing about, that’s his new single.’ At the end of our match with Aled Jones, I jumped the net. Aled followed suit. Then Virginia. I wonder if we’d all leap it so convincingly now? As you may have guessed I carried my partner, with her lack of experience, to an astounding victory. Silverware was ours.

At the end of the evening there was Cliff’s usual festive serenading, one musically astute reviewer later commenting, ‘Cliff asked Mike to join him in singing “Silent Night”. This sounded really good. Much better than the same version sung by Bros.’ I hope they got seats where they could hear properly the following year.

Clearly spurred on by my victory with my short-term doubles partner in 1988, I took another trophy two years later. I say ‘short-term’ but must emphasise that that was purely Virginia’s decision. ‘Forget Jeremy Bates,’ I pleaded, ‘we could make a go of this tennis thing. We make a good team. I distract the opposition with some lamentable shots and you put the winners away.’ It made sense to me. Anyway, this second triumph occurred in the summer of 1990 at Marlborough College. It was the illustriously named Joan Hunter Dunn Tennis Tournament, organised by the Betjeman Society and its founder, Philippa Davies. The venue had been chosen as JB had been a schoolboy there, while Joan Hunter Dunn had been his muse for the poem ‘A Subaltern’s Love-Song’. It was a jolly day, with the chaps clad in blazers and boaters and the ladies in ’20s dresses and the like. I turned up in my MG TF and proceeded, quoting Betjeman, to start ‘whizzing them over the net with the strength of five’. In the afterglow of another fleeting moment on the podium of my mind, we lounged in the old cricket pavilion, drank tea and listened to some ’30s Wimbledon tennis commentaries. No silverware this time, the prize being a rather decent racquet and a certificate signed by Miss J. Hunter Dunn herself.

I had a good-quality court when I lived at The Aldermoor, which usually had somebody playing on it. Errol Brown came to play one day, taking to the court in fashionable long trousers, a beautifully tailored shirt and a rather exotic-looking fedora. I wasn’t sure how this would work in actual play, but Errol seemed to cope and effortlessly
straddled the gap between tramline and catwalk. Jona Lewie was also on court, stopping balls rather than cavalry and giving a reasonable impression of a solid player. Who knows who won? Who cared? We had a jolly time and a feed at the local pub, the Royal Oak, was the post-match carrot. Now many’s the time I’d been in that pub and heard the stentorian Gallic tones of Jacques the landlord, exclaiming, ‘Oh, you ’ave meessed ’im again, your namesake, ’e was in yesterday.’ The ‘’im’ in question was Oliver Reed, who lived in the next village. Not exactly my namesake of course, with our Christian names being entirely different and our surnames being spelled differently, but that didn’t deter Jacques. This evening, however, was different. Oliver and his wife and a couple of friends were also booked in for dinner. With only one table separating us (a golden wedding anniversary) we must surely fall into conversation and become the best of friends. Over a modest starter, Errol, Jona and I fell to talking about the media attention Oliver received and that most of it was probably exaggerated and unjust. Within two minutes of arriving he proved it wasn’t. Returning from a quick trip to the gents, an old boy in blazer and tie on the next table turned to him and said, ‘You’re Oliver Reed, aren’t you?’

The actor pushed his sleeve up and shoved his fist into the chap’s face. ‘What if I am? Want to make something of it?’

If I were a betting man I’d say that the chap didn’t want to make anything of it. Nevertheless he’d probably done his bit during the war and didn’t want to lose face. ‘Think you’re clever, do you?’

‘Yes,’ said Oliver, removing the flower from the guy’s buttonhole and eating it.

‘Oh, think you’re a big man, do you?’

In retrospect I’m sure it was more of a statement than a question, but it was a gift to Oliver Reed. He unzipped his trousers and slapped his manhood on the table, declaring, ‘Yes I do.’

As they say of bank robberies, it all happened so quickly. That being so, we felt that we should intervene at this point, so Errol and I rather cautiously got to our feet, without actually having discussed
a plan of action. Before I could wrestle Oliver to the floor and force him to apologise (yeah, right) he’d zipped himself up again, just as Jacques came round the corner and grabbed him playfully. I’m never sure whether anyone ever grabbed Oliver Reed ‘playfully’, but at least he sat down … and so did we. I wisely decided against going over and attempting to become bosom buddies with my ‘namesake’, for many reasons. Mostly because he might have punched my lights out.

The Federation Cup, the premier international women’s tennis event, hadn’t been to Britain since 1977, so it was quite a big deal when it was staged at Nottingham in 1991. I headed up there for a few days, as tennis and the Radio One Roadshow came together for the tournament, initially attending the official reception with British players Sam Smith, Monique Javer and Clare Wood. One of my duties was hosting the fantastic children’s day, with tennis kids of all nationalities integrating through tennis.
Tennis World
revealed that Cliff and I would be on court to ‘capture the excitement’ of the first day. Not ‘provide the excitement’ you’ll have noted, just capture it. They did us proud in the alliteration stakes with the headline ‘Royalty, Read and the Radio One Roadshow’.