Small Man in a Book (27 page)

Interviewing Michael McKean as David St Hubbins. In his immortal words ‘you put garbage in, you get garbage out …’

I sat down on the sofa to wait and could hear Tom in the nearby bathroom, whistling to himself as he finished his ablutions. All the while, I was sitting there thinking,
Wow, that’s the sound of Tom Jones whistling in a bathroom
. He came and joined me on the sofa, positively radiating energy and good health, happily going along with my questions and the odd silly request that radio presenters are prone to ask of their interviewees. At that time, Al and I had a thing we did on the show where we would ask each other questions along the lines of, ‘Is a horseradish a horse or a radish?’ This would be followed by a pensive, ‘Mmm …’

I know. It was no coincidence that we never troubled the jury at the Sony Awards.

I asked Tom if he would record a few of these questions, and then sat there listening to Tom Jones saying, ‘Hello, everybody, this is Tom Jones. Is a horseradish a horse or a radish?’

Once he’d finished, I asked if he’d mind also doing the little pensive, ‘Mmm …’

He obliged, about five octaves lower than me, making the sofa reverberate as though a tube train was rumbling by below us.

Giving advice to a budding singer.

Many years later, I recorded ‘Islands in the Stream’ for Comic Relief with Ruth Jones. I found myself standing in the desert outside Las Vegas with Tom Jones, shooting the video while pestering him for stories about Elvis. We were filming in the limo and I asked Tom if there were any stories about Elvis that he didn’t tell in public.

Islands in the Desert.

He smiled. ‘Oh yeah …’

I asked if he’d tell me one.

‘Well, I was in the shower one time and –’

I jumped in and said that I’d already heard that one.

He calmly turned to me and said, ‘You haven’t heard the ending …’ and proceeded to tell me the story with an ending that I indeed hadn’t heard before.

And which I couldn’t possibly repeat here.

13

I loved presenting
Rave
with Al, although by now I was living in London and had to drive back to Cardiff each Friday afternoon for that night’s broadcast. When the last record was on, at around three minutes to midnight, I would have my coat on and be heading for the door ready for the 156-mile door-to-door trip. Staying awake so late was often a problem; I would sing along with the radio at the top of my voice with the windows wide open and cold air rushing through the car in an effort to avoid nodding off. The best trick for staying awake was an odd one – I’d pull into the services and buy some mini sausages. As I drove away, I’d place the open packet on my lap and begin to eat them. The sausages had tiny hairs or fibres sticking out, and I would tell myself that I was eating portions of severed human fingers. This would keep me awake.

Rave
kept going until Radio Five became Five Live, and we were left without a home. I thought it would be a good idea for Radio Wales to keep it going, but this was not an opinion shared by anyone beyond Al and myself.
Rave
ran for just over two years, and it planted the seeds for much of the success that would come to me further down the line. In writing and creating the character spots with Al, I began to find my own comedic voice for the first time and to gain confidence as a writer – something that I’d always felt was done by other people, not me.

Much changed for me while the show was running. Most notably, Martina and I married in October of 1992 and moved to London. We sold the house in Cardiff after it had been on the market for an eternity and, one month, the bank had refused to pay the mortgage. With the money we made I cleared the overdraft, now at £5,000, as well as a loan I’d had to take out for £4,000. I suppose the bank had been patient with me over the years as my earnings jumped up and (mostly) down with worrying regularity.

I had been called in a year or so earlier to see the Branch Manager, David Walters, as he wasn’t happy with the state of affairs. Until that point I’d only dealt with bank staff further down the ladder of importance and had always managed to sweet-talk them into ever more lenient measures as my debt racked up and up. As I sat down opposite Mr Walters, I suspected I might have come up against a brick wall. He was older than I was expecting, and quite authoritarian in his tone. While we chatted, I tried to soften him up with the odd joke, to no avail. I mentioned that I was going to work at Sky and he remarked that he had a satellite dish himself, for the German channels. I saw this as my opportunity to get on friendlier terms.

‘Ooh, you dirty dog …’ I said with a conspiratorial grin.

His face turned to thunder. ‘My daughter is learning the language!’

The move to London was prompted by my getting a new presenting job at Sky, this time on a film show,
Xposure
. I had auditioned in July and felt it had gone well. A couple of weeks later the show’s producer, Colin Burrows, called Jerry to say that from an initial 250 applicants I was down to the last eleven.

‘Rob’s very good,’ said Colin, ‘but it’s a pity that his skin looks so bad in some light …’

I was furious – not with Colin, but with my face. My acne scarring had been an issue some months earlier when I’d managed to get a meeting with a casting agent who specialized in commercials. I’d sent him my demo tape along with a photograph, and he’d invited me to come along to his office in the West End. This was progress. I can’t tell you how difficult it was to get past the secretaries and receptionists of agents and casting directors – it seemed virtually impossible – so I was feeling rather good about myself as I entered the office and shook hands with Nicholas Young. We both looked at each other with a degree of surprise. On my part due to the realization that this Nicholas Young was the same Nicholas Young who had played John in
The Tomorrow People
, one of my favourite childhood television programmes.

David Williams and I used to play
The Tomorrow People
on the grass behind his house after school. We’d place our hands on our belt buckles and run twenty feet or so with our eyes closed, not opening them again until we’d come to rest in a new spot. This was our DIY version of ‘jaunting’, the name given to the teleporting that Nick and his chums were so adept at on their hit show. I had often dreamed in those days of meeting the Tomorrow People and maybe hanging out with them in their secret headquarters, deep within a disused London Underground station. I had imagined chatting with them as they welcomed me into their gang and handed me my very own jaunting belt.
What would we talk about?
I wondered. Evidently we would have talked about my skin, which was now the source of Nicholas’s surprise.

‘Ah, right, your skin … It’s not very good, is it? Hmm, it doesn’t really come across in the picture. I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help you. I mean, I could hardly put you up for a chocolate commercial, could I? Eat this and you’ll look like me …’

I agreed with him; he had a point, I suppose. I thanked him for his time and walked out of his office and into the cold fresh air of the West End as people bustled past me, going about their business. I couldn’t help wondering if they were looking at my face and deciding it was unlikely they’d ever see me advertising chocolate. Had they done so, they would have been wrong. Just a few weeks later, Steve Speirs and I were chosen to star in the new Toffee Crisp adverts. Stick that in your belt and jaunt it!

With Steve Speirs. We thought that we were about to be the stars of a Toffee Crisp commercial. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d been told that my skin wouldn’t allow me to play such a role.

We went to Pinewood Studios and shot five beautifully lit commercials in four days under the direction of the big ad director of the day, Nick Lewin (I think he’d done one for Flake that had performed very well). Steve and I couldn’t have been more excited. We took photos of ourselves standing outside the dressing-room doors that had our names written on them – this had never happened before – and talked of how the money would help us both out of a financial crisis. The ads were good too. Steve played a lumbering buffoon and I was his small, smart friend who at the end of every commercial took a bite from a pristine new bar of Toffee Crisp.
Mmm, tasty
. In reality there would be a chap just out of shot on his hands and knees, holding a bucket into which I’d spit my mouthful of chocolate as soon as I heard, ‘Cut!’

We left Pinewood on a high and waited for the ads to air and the repeat fees to roll in. It never happened. For reasons that remain unclear the ads never aired and the money, beyond the daily session fee, stayed put. Was it my skin? I don’t think so; I saw the ads, and they were so beautifully lit that I could have advertised soap. Hey ho. As Les would say in
Human Remains
many years later, ‘Onwards and upwards …’

Having heard Colin’s harsh but fair appraisal of my complexion, I assumed that I would soon be out of the running for the movie show, so I was very surprised when I was then asked to shoot a pilot for
Xposure
a week later. The pilot went well, and soon the job was mine.

It was – on paper, at least – an excellent job. The show was a magazine format devoted to the week’s new releases and was presented from a different location each week. There was no film reviewing, which I wouldn’t have been comfortable with. My role was just telling the viewers what was coming out, and often getting to interview the stars. My co-presenter, Nadia, and I travelled the world; we shot in New York for the opening of
Home Alone 2
, in Los Angeles to cover the build-up to the Oscars and witness the filming of the opening to Stallone’s
Demolition Man
, as well as flying to Berlin and Cannes for their respective film festivals. It was fun.