Big Beacon, page 24
112 The glasses in question were the protective specs you wear at the oral hygienist. Used in my case as a way of keeping off the meat spatter that flew my way when Seldom was eating his meats.
113 It really is a quality bit of writing – keep a particular eye out for the use of the word ‘rambunctious’ in paragraph four.
UNDER PRESSURE
March 2023
The news that I have high blood pressure immediately causes my blood pressure to rocket – something a medical professional must surely have foreseen.
An oxygen mask is placed over my face. Ordinarily I’d attempt a Darth Vader voice but panic has set it in. I am making a heeeeeee noise every time I inhale.
Soon, I’m being surrounded by concerned medics. It seems the reading the doctor saw once he’d blown up the inflatable armband was so concerning that I was immediately admitted. I am taken to a private room, given a set of 100 per cent cotton hospital pyjamas, and told to wait for the doctor.
What happens next is, I’ll be honest, a fog, as medics fight to bring my blood pressure under control. Cries of ‘98 over 30!’, ‘110 over 65!’, and ‘88 over 60!’ or whatever it is they shout, fill the room, competing with the urgent beeping of the various monitors-on-wheels to which I am hooked up like a (female) cow at milking time. I am given drugs. I am peered at by consultants. A young blonde nurse called Katie holds my hand and feeds me small sips of organic apple juice. Nothing is making a difference.
The stress of the build, spiralling costs, fear of death and now my worries about what being stuck in hospital will mean for the already-slipping schedule/schedule114 are pushing me to the very edge of a heart collapse. But just as the doctors are considering their options and I am asking Katie if I can have another little sip of juice, please, my assistant rushes in with news.
James Martin has appendicitis, and bad. He’s been taken in for an urgent operation and his lighthouse restoration put on hold. Like the warm jets of water surging into a hot tub, relief seeps deliciously into every vein, artery, nook and cranny of my beleaguered body. I am instantly soothed. Within minutes, my numbers start to level out and the danger passes.
To this day, I still don’t know if Martin was actually having his appendix out or if it was a lie from my assistant, and I’ve never bothered to find out. But that wave of relief, that sweet crumb of goodness has remained a touchstone for me. Whenever I feel my anxiety rising, I imagine James Martin clutching his side and wincing, and that brings me enormous comfort.
Thirty-six hours later. I am still in hospital. The worst has passed, but my blood pressure remains too high and the effects of medication on my hypertension are being monitored. One problem, though: this is an NHS hospital.
Bringing me here had been an honest mistake by a het-up assistant, but now it needed rectifying. She puts in a call to Tony-Tom Ridgely, an old friend of mine (with a double-barrelled Christian name in which the names are so similar it’s almost impossible to remember which way round they go) who works for the East Anglian Air Ambulance service. Hearing of my predicament, TT, as you’d imagine he’d let us call him but doesn’t, has immediately agreed to airlift me to my private hospital in Norwich.115
After a ninety-minute wait, during which my assistant ‘tries to distract’ me by telling me an interminable story about Michael Ball, Tom-Tony pulls up, loads me into the passenger seat of his Range Rover116 and we set off for the airfield.
Three hours into the drive, it transpires that he’s heading to Hardwick Airfield, which is only a 25-minute drive from my destination, rendering the helicopter flight quite pointless. He drives me to the hospital instead, which I guess was quite good of him, but I did want to go in the helicopter, that’s the only thing.
I later learn that Tony-Tom had lost his pilot licence a few months before. The incident that cost him his licence, flying his plane too close to a Scout hut, followed the discovery that his wife was having an affair with a local Akela.
Nothing against the NHS, but the Spire private hospital in Norwich is a terrific place to be poorly. Cable TV with on-demand movies, a call button nurses don’t pretend they didn’t hear, and a snack trolley at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., just some of the reasons it really is a cut above.117
My stay, in a private double room with views over the well-tended gardens, was organised through AXA Insurance. It lasted ten days.
By about the fourth day there is no medical need for me to be there, but after a quick word with the Clinical Director (whose husband is a friend of mine), my stay is extended and I settle down for fish pie and Schindler’s List.
* * *
114 To assist American readers I have included the US as well as the UK version of the word.
115 Like many middle-class people, I am a passionate supporter of the NHS. And while you’re obviously not going to muck about when it comes to your own health or that of your family, the principle of health services free at the point of delivery certainly feels right for the general population. But no, this was important, it was my health, so I went private.
116 Which, ironically, he does call his RR. Quite thick, really.
117 I know my assistant was similarly pleased with it. It had been a tough few days for her, seeing me so unwell, but I knew she was on the up because her frowl – the half scowl, half frown that was her near-constant expression – had returned. Being private, the hospital paid higher wages than the NHS and was thus able to attract a higher percentage of nurses and doctors who were British. And I sensed that, for whatever reason, that meant she just could breathe more easily.
HOPPING MAD
June 2021
In the two weeks after Seldom perished, I threw myself into my work. With no dog to care for, This Time became my pet and – this bit’s a metaphor – I treated it lovingly, tickling its tum, feeding it raw bacon and saying ‘I wuv woo’ in a gruff doggy voice, all through the medium of good broadcasting.
Things were going well. But they truly reached a zenith when I received a message from Gatcombe Park, the residence of Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal Princess Anne. An invitation for her to appear on the show had been accepted. This was a real coup, although I made sure not to use that word around the royal party in case they think you’re talking about an uprising and worry they’ll be beheaded.
News of the royal visit spread like wildfire or Covid-19118 around the town. In the shopping centres of Norwich, old ladies would squeeze my hand excitedly (with my permission), taxi drivers would grunt their support, even market-stall holders, traditionally the most belligerent people in Norfolk, nodded at me.
‘It’s nice that it’s you doing it,’ said Ethel, ninety, a retired butcher from Holt, as we chatted outside a branch of Dunelm. ‘Usually, if it’s not one of the Dimblebys, it’s Paddy McGuinness. Either too clever by half or too thick by double. People like me, we just want—’
‘Something in the middle?’ I offered, wryly.
‘That’s exactly the right phrase,’ she said.
I went inside and bought some pillowcases.
The day soon came when Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal Princess Anne would be joining us in the studio. I awoke, breakfasted on fresh fruits, a handful of nuts, some Greek yoghurt and bowl after bowl of Golden Grahams. I was alone in the house but I felt good. My assistant would be travelling to Broadcasting House separately, as she had an early morning hair appointment to get to.
I could tell this was a big deal for her, as she was going not to her usual salon, but to the gay hairdresser in town, something she, as a committed Baptist, was deeply uncomfortable with. But if you want ‘sophisticated glamour’, Barbara from Snippy Kutz just ain’t gonna give you that.
Me, I also wanted to look my best. I had my tailor knock up a suit based on one I’d seen in a painting of King George VI shooting a deer between the antlers. My shirt was lightly checked and the tie looked like an old school tie, even though it had come from M&S just a week earlier. On my lapel, my trusty tooth brooch.
I opened the front door, grabbed my jacket from the coat hooks quickly and well, then noticed Seldom’s lead hanging from a hook. I smiled. He would have liked this a lot. He’d been an ardent royalist who would sometimes stand when he heard the national anthem, although it’s possible he thought it was an ice-cream van coming.
I touched his collar, and noticed it still had tufts of another dog’s fur in it from Seldom’s last proper walk, when he’d partially eaten a Spaniel during an altercation. In his case it really was a dog-eat-dog world.
Little did I know, I was about to enter one of my own.
You see, on the day of what should have been one of the crowning moments of my career, I was about to be slain. You may remember a scene in the 1990 film Goodfellas in which a guy gets all dressed up thinking he’s about to be ‘made’, which is Mafia for promoted, but on arrival at the ceremony, he’s shot in the head. That was exactly what was about to happen to me.
Simon and I drove into London together. Simon is a committed anti-royalist and was doing his best to explain why. Well, I just roared with laughter. These republicans give it the big ‘I am’ in peacetime – ‘Oh, we don’t need a king or queen, we support the Liberal Democrats’ – but if an aggressor invades, we’re gonna need leadership and hierarchy like never before. If this green and (largely) pleasant land is one day besmirched by jackboots – or, let’s face it these days, sandals – we’d see another side to His Majesty the King. Gone would be his focus on making superb organic food products for Waitrose; instead, a commander-in-chief would emerge, marshalling the troops and barking orders: Scramble the jets! Prime the missiles! Man (or woman) the barricades! Get me a coffee – white, two sugars! And ready my steed, for today we lay down our lives that Britannia, the greatest nation on God’s earth, may rise again! Now, who’s going to do that in a world with no monarchy? Zac Goldsmith? Fuck off.
Simon tried to push back, but he gets quite carsick, especially if I razz it on the corners, and his tummy began to get the better of him. He went quiet, and I smiled, satisfied the argument was won (by me).
We arrived and parked up. I sang the full theme tune to the eighties sitcom Bread then out we got. It would be the last time I sang for many weeks.
I fairly bounced into Broadcasting House that day. I didn’t even mind getting my bag checked by security, although I gave them a few pointers on how they could look smarter. Incredibly, they didn’t even know how to do Windsor knots on their ties, but a crash course in the foyer using a willing receptionist as a dummy soon equipped them with the necessary know-how needed to know how to knot nicely.
I headed up to the This Time office. Jennie was in unusually early and I patted her on the arm. ‘Big day today!’ I said.
She smiled but her eyes didn’t meet mine.
FREEZEFRAME!
In that moment, in the split second when she looked at a kettle instead of me, I knew something was afoot. I’ve always been blessed with superb intuition, especially when it comes to women – on a date a tight smile, a dart of the eyes, a stiffened jaw can furnish me with substantial intel. She doesn’t like me stroking her ear, she wants me to compliment her blouse, she needs the toilet and wants me to busy myself doing something else so as not to be cognisant of how long she’s taking. It’s just one of the things I’m good at. When you’re alive to tiny details like this you notice when things smell a bit off. And today, this show stank. I realised then and there, this was a hit, they were going to try to finish me.
Why?
One theory is that Jennie and the producer Howard Newman were sleeping with one another. And while there’s no evidence to support that, it would explain their eagerness to eliminate anyone who might draw attention away from Jennie. Me, I choose not to get involved in tittle-tattle, so I’m not going to take a view either way. You can draw your own conclusions. It’s not even something I personally have heard, but if others are saying it, as you suggest, then who knows.
Another theory was that I was too old, too past it, too uncool for BBC One. But I quickly dismissed that as a big bowl of bullshit. No, this was something else – this was politics. Sometimes a presenter just outgrows the show he’s presenting. He begins to swell and rise, the parameters of the show no longer able to contain him, like a muffin cascading out of the cake tin as it bakes.
No programme wants to admit it’s too small for its presenter – that the star has outgrown the show. Instead, they find a reason to engineer an exit. It’s transparent and it’s petty, but I understand why they do it.
Did the BBC fire Jeremy Clarkson just because he hospitalised a producer for not supplying a hot meal and called him a lazy Irish cunt? I seriously doubt it. If that were a sackable offence Joan Bakewell would have been toast long ago. No, the BBC saw that Clarkson’s star was beginning to eclipse the car-focused ethos of Top Gear, realised he was destined for bigger things, and, yeah, it scared them.119 Same thing was going on here.
Fine, though. I accepted it, dusted myself off emotionally and instantly moved on. No fuss, no crying, no recriminations. An observer might have assumed I’d been trained by the SAS (I haven’t!). I remained happy, resilient and professional.
UNFREEZE!
The production meeting went ahead in a blur. I felt quite, quite serene, as if I’d done some light meditation or heavy medication. When Howard floated the idea that Jennie and I should interview Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal Princess Anne together, and glanced away like a big chicken, I just shrugged. Whatever.
That surprised a few people, I could tell. After all, it was me who had brokered the deal to get Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal Princess Anne to come along. It was me (I) who had briefed the crew on the correct way to address a royal. It was I (me) who had written a list of questions for the interview: What’s it like to be keen at equestrian? What’s it like to have a daughter who’s a keen equestrian? As someone who shakes hands with lots of people, what’s your hygiene routine? What’s all this about Prince Andrew, then?
Moreover, I’d long been a fan of Anne, an Anne fan. She’s the best royal by a country mile,120 managing to embody the very best of British, although I know she has Germano-Greek heritage. No, Anne has stiff upper lip and stiff upper hair and I like that a lot.
To now have to share the interview with a co-presenter who, at a push, should have been interviewing one of the younger royals – let’s face it, to all intents and purposes she is Kate Middleton – should have been a slap in the face. But I wasn’t going to let them goad me.
The show went relatively smoothly. Nothing it seemed could penetrate my cool exterior. Later, moments before Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal Princess Anne was to be interviewed, Howard would take me to one side and ask me to sit this one out, handing sole responsibility for the interview to Jennie Gresham, who, as I say, he may or may not have been boffing. It was all I could do not to laugh. Let’s call it what it was: constructive dismissal. But was I going to react and give them the excuse they wanted? Sorry, amigo, ain’t gonna happen. If anything I was in cheerier form than normal, even indulging in a bit of off-air horseplay with Simon where we pretended to have a fight resulting in one of us getting a bruised cheek. All good fun, though, all good fun.
Why was I being so zen? Well, this show was never the be all and end all to me. I had plenty of other projects I was talking to the BBC about. I’d recently paid a five-figure sum at auction for the now-lapsed format rights to ITV holiday show Wish You Were Here …?, which I believed could be updated and pizzazzed for a BBC One audience. I had recently pitched ‘Bencher’, an unapologetically inclusive drama about unconventional criminal barrister Ben Cher busting a gut to defend the seemingly guilty while a prescription drugs addiction threatens to jeopardise his marriage to a bisexual wife of colour, as well as his relationship with disabled non-binary teenage child Cassie who’s also autistic. A factual series, ‘Inside The Killing Machine’, was conceived to be a heart-warming docusoap following the lives, loves, hopes, dreams and execution methods of the employees of Britain’s biggest abattoir. So, as you can see, I had irons in the fire – coincidentally one of the execution methods I just mentioned – and the future was rosy.
Nah, it was all good, baby. It was gravy. But as the show reached the twenty-minute mark, something began to dawn on me. I might be fine with being cast aside – but what about the viewers? Didn’t I owe it to them to speak up? As the seconds ticked by, I became conscious that to ordinary people – from Norwich taxi drivers to market stall-holders with dirty fingernails and Ethel, ninety, a retired butcher who exists in Holt – I was the one person holding the BBC on an even keel. I was the keeper of the flame, the guardian of correct tone. I don’t want to get into hot water here, but I couldn’t help but think of the teen Christ telling the moneylenders that if they insisted on screwing people who were cash-poor, they should at least have the decency not to do it in an effing temple.121
I could feel their eyes burning through the screens. Please, Alan. Do something. Say something. I was, after all, more than a man on the telly. To ordinary people, I was a conduit, an outlet, a sluice pipe through which their own views could be expressed. Granted, I wasn’t bothered. But even though I wasn’t bothered, I had a duty to pretend I was bothered to reflect the fact that they were bothered.
And so, calmly and clearly, I took issue with a few points regarding the editorial direction of the BBC. It felt like a perfectly reasonable call to arms. Yes, I also issued some home truths about BBC executives not appreciating viewers’ feedback, but that didn’t feel like a bombshell revelation any more than if I’d said BBC managers are rude to the canteen staff or they wish Claudia Winkleman would cut her fringe or you’ll find cocaine on the top of the cistern in staff toilet cubicles. It’s not exactly news. Of course they talk down to the dinner ladies. Of course they get razzed off by Claudia’s fringe. Of course you’ll find cocaine on the top of the cisterns in staff toilet cubicles. And of course they’re not bothered if viewers write in.
