Big Beacon, page 8
Turning to face the van I see workmen spilling out (it is a Vauxhall Vivaro, but they have horns very similar to the Ford Transit’s). Next to arrive is my Dutch project manager Jan Verfoofen.
Bounding from his Audi, a huge Netherlands grin on his enormous, flat, pancakey face, Verfoofen thrusts out a giant hand.
‘Goodness me, that’s a big hand!’ I find myself shouting.
‘Yesh,’ he replies. ‘Who needsh a shpade, right? We could have jusht ushed my handsh for the fucking groundbreaking!’
Like all the Dutch, it’s never really clear if Verfoofen understands that ‘fuck’ is a swear word and therefore inappropriate to use in a professional setting. No matter, there is much to do and I can always keep his misstep in my back pocket to use against him later (if needed). And so, with the uttering of a vulgarity that could one day cost a Dutchman his job, the build begins.
What follows is a protracted debate/argument between Verfoofen and my assistant as to exactly which sod of earth should be turned first. It’s one of the few arguments I couldn’t care less about – to me, soil is soil and if you prefer one clump of dirt over another there’s something wrong with you — so I allow them to bicker without me, my eyes drifting seawards as they squabble.
In the corner of my eye, a flash of something red. I swivel my head and there, far away on the cliffs is … a woman. Ginger of hair and slight of build, she seems to shimmer in the light, looking for all the world like one of the eight angels I sometimes imagine had carried Seldom to heaven.53 Although unlike the angels, this woman’s smoking.
Lost in thought, I unfurl my hand into an open palm – international sign language for ‘hiya’. She takes stock of me, and begins to open her hand too.
‘Who are you waving at?’ says my assistant. I turn to see that she’s somehow wrestled the spade from the hands of the builders.
‘Oh, just that woman,’ I say.
‘What woman?’
I spin back. ‘The woman just over—’ The sentence aborts in my mouth. The woman! She’s gone, vanished like a speck of dirt in the corner of your eye after a really hard blink. Was she ever even there? What is going on? I’m unsettled.
But then another thought occurs to me, and a smile begins to form on my plump red lips. This is exactly what life is like here, a life far removed from the concrete certainties of the city. Here, reality and folklore live side by side, the village seeming to exist in the gloaming between this world and the next. A permanent half-light – where a mysterious creature like she would appear fleetingly to the lucky few. Right there in your eyeline and then gone for ever – like Natasha Kaplinsky. I don’t know if you remember her at all.
Far from shutting these thoughts out, I should be embracing them, rejoicing that in these faraway lands you still find mysterious, ephemeral women – mermaids, harpies, valkyries, banshees, wood nymphs. The sight of a banshee wailing in Luton town centre or a mermaid reclining on the Thames Barrier would quite rightly shit you up. Here, it feels right, somehow.
‘Yes,’ says my assistant when I tell her all this. ‘Or your woman might have been a siren, luring impressionable men to a grisly demise on the seafront.’
‘Thanks for that,’ I say.
‘What woman? I don’t shee no fucking woman,’ chirps Verfoofen.
‘Please, Jan,’ I said, eyes closed. ‘Try to stop swearing.’
Next morning, I stand on the headland and look at my property. It really is a fantastic piece of work, this home of mine. The air smells salty and fresh, the wind tousles my hair, but a liberal application of Elnett Diamond Hold hairspray this morn means I’m not overly worried about strands becoming displaced.
I stand with my hands on my hips, legs wide in the power stance popularised by Sir George Osborne. Looking out at the vessels on the horizon, a memory gurgles up from deep within my subconscious: many decades ago I myself had toyed with the idea of a career on the high seas. As a boy, stories of pirates and seadogs had captured my imagination. I had devoured tales of Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama and Chris Columbus. With my school days coming to an end, and keen to follow in the footsteps of my nautical heroes, I applied to become a captain of a P&O ferry.
When the rejection letter came, I was destroyed. I was eating a choc ice at the time, my lips slipping and grabbing at the frozen chocolate surface like when a horse eats a sugar cube. With the structural integrity of the chocolate compromised due to the thinning effect of my saliva, I was ready to tuck in, biting down hard on the chilled dairy treat. But I was never to finish it. Seeing that I had been turned down by the two-lettered cross-channel operator, I was seized by a blinding rage. I hurled the remaining knuckle of choc ice across the room. It thudded into the patio doors and began to slide down the glass like a big sugary skidmark. My dream had died. Until now. For soon I would be something better than a P&O captain; I would basically be his boss.
Feeling as good as any man can feel, I sip from a polystyrene cup of tea and breathe deeply. In through the nose, out through the mouth – the breath, not the tea, the tea would scald the nostrils. They say the best way to blend in to a new community is to immerse yourself in the local food culture. So I decide to spend the morning doing exactly that and bound off towards town.
First up is a local delicacy known as huffkins. Kent’s variation on the humble bread roll, here the difference is a small indentation in the middle, made by the baker’s thumb. Legend has it that a baker’s wife was so annoyed with him that she stuck her thumb into every one of his rolls before baking. Yet to her surprise, rather than shun the spoiled rolls, people loved them and these days fill the hole with jam, cream or even bacon. It was a charming piece of folklore but you’re having a laugh if you think I’m going to eat something a baker’s shoved his thumb in, so instead I settle for an unpenetrated bread roll from Sainsbury’s (£0.60).
Next up is Appledore chicken pie. Situated on the B2080 – variously pronounced as the bee twenty-eighty, the bee two-oh eight-oh, the bee two thousand and eighty, the bee two-oh eighty, and the bee two hundred and eight zero – the village of Appledore was once a thriving river port, its traditions shaped by numerous visiting invaders, from the Danes to the French. The pie that bears the village’s name combines chicken and hard-boiled egg in a creamy herbed sauce. But as I don’t like egg in pies, or even agree with egg in pies, I settle for chicken and mushroom, and jolly fine it is too (Sainsbury’s – £3.49).
By now really getting a feel for the food heritage of the area, I am keen to try more delicacies. Hailing from the south of Kent, lamb’s tail pie has been a firm favourite for countless generations. But as I would no sooner eat the tail of a lamb than I would the bum of a dog or the eye of a swan, I settle instead for a lamb samosa (pack of four, Sainsbury’s – £3.99).
It has been a fascinating morning in the supermarket, but by 11 a.m. it’s time to head back to the lighthouse to peep out at my builders from an upstairs window. I arrive to find an unstamped envelope fixed to the door. On it, one word: ‘Welcome’. Intriguing, I say out loud. Yes, very intriguing, I add in my head. I open it and find a letter from a group called Friends of Abbot’s Cliff.
If that sounds like a cult (and it does), well, fear not. The letter was signed by John and Julia Hirst, a retired couple who are keen National Trust members and amateur historians. John, far from being the charismatic leader of a quasi-religious sect, is a retired railwayman who had worked in procurement for Network SouthEast, later Chiltern Railways. I chortled at the thought of him luring impressionable and damaged people into a paganistic commune, with him as a messianic father figure chosen by the gods to lead them to eternal paradise! And it was damn near impossible to imagine an unassuming couple like the Hirsts trying to lure me to a meeting, just to meet the guys and have a chat, where I’d be made to feel genuinely welcome and would no doubt come again, only to find them, on the third or fourth meeting, leading me into a velvet-lined room where Julia would be lashed to a bed, naked and chanting. ‘Please,’ John would say. I’d look bemused. ‘Please,’ he would say again, and on this the group’s elders would explain that Julia has been without child for twelve summers and they hoped my seed would help her to yield an infant. They’d do it themselves, they’d say, but their past sins mean the gods deemed them unworthy, which is why their seed had failed to take. ‘Please,’ John would say again. I’d decline but the elders would surround and jostle me and insist that only I am unsullied enough to placate the gods and fertilise Julia’s womb with new life. Finally, I’d lose my temper and say, ‘It’s nothing to do with the gods, the woman must be fifty-five if she’s a day. Of course she can’t get pregnant, she’s had the bloody menopause! Google it.’
But again, that’s what wouldn’t happen, since the Friends of Abbot’s Cliff is not a cult but simply a group of local residents who have taken an interest in the Abbot’s Cliff lighthouse and seek to preserve it as a treasured piece of Kent heritage. They had applied to Historic England, in the hope of securing a grant for its restoration, but as it was built just after 1850, it had never been granted listed status and their bid had been unsuccessful. They had planned to raise funds for purchase and renovation through crowdsourcing, but then heard that the lighthouse had been sold to a private owner. Now they are reaching out to me.
They say they’d be delighted to provide any guidance I might need, and they can furnish me with a wealth of useful material – a ‘cornucopia’, they say! – including original drawings and a treasure trove of old photographs. Well, I’m as pumped as Ross Kemp when his Clenbuterol kicks in.
I go in(side) and eat my buns at the window, smiling and making contended hmmm noises as I chew. This is exactly what I’d hoped for – local engagement and a warm welcome. Perhaps even a few friends, who knows? I imagine they’ll be a motley crew of characters, each with their own amusing idiosyncrasies, and I’ll be like the Vicar of Dibley, there to raise an eyebrow and muck in.
I quickly write back and say I’d love to meet them. Then I call my assistant. Time, I say, to arrange a public meeting.
* * *
49 Keenly aware that the last thing those poor ladies wanted to see was a man, I put the salty rods of reconstituted meat in a holdall, slowed down as I approached, and threw the bag out of the window. It was a kind and tactful drive-by dogging.
50 Provided they have the money or are owed a favour by a surgeon.
51 Or the woman called Crystal I met online in 2008 who ended up being a man who was trying to diddle me.
52 He does.
53 Yeah, would have needed about eight.
SILAS, WHOM I DISLIKED IMMENSELY
August 2012
‘What do you say to critics of the tattoo industry who say it’s both an act of physical vandalism and a surefire way of catching AIDS?’
It was high summer 2012 and I should have been flushed by the success of Places of My Life. I should have been on a turbo-charged, breakneck, super-fast, can-we-slow-down-a-bit-please, one-way trip to TV prominence.
And while that hadn’t quite happened, we were making headway. Which was why I was standing in a tattoo parlour, interviewing a person called Syd. I used the word ‘person’ advisedly, as I didn’t want to get into a whole gender brouhaha. I could have taken a guess, but I know from some of the arguments Eamonn Holmes has got into online that is fraught with risk. What I do know is that when Syd said, ‘Do you want to know my pronouns?’ I pretended I hadn’t heard.
‘Well, for a start you don’t catch AIDS—’
‘HIV, then.’
‘And secondly, what people choose to do with their own skin is up to them and if Daily Mail readers don’t like it, they can fuck off.’
I sighed. ‘Come on, mate. You know I can’t use that. We talked about swearing.’
‘I mean it, fuck ’em.’
‘Please! We’re going to have to start again now. And can you turn down the music? It’s very loud.’
I became aware of someone else, a man who looked like a Bash Street Kid, standing behind me doing the rabbit-ears thing with their two fingers behind my head – I’ve never understood the meaning of this and I’m certain they didn’t either. I turned to admonish them with a quick ‘grow up’, and the chap, a heavily pierced man who must have had a nightmare getting through airport security or a magnet factory(!), nodded sheepishly. When I turned back, the branded foam muff on my microphone was no longer there.
‘Alright, where’s my muff?’
‘Your what, mate?’
‘My soft pink muff. It says East Anglia Live on it.’
‘Does it now?’
‘Yes, it does.’
The sniggering filled the room almost as much as their pungent BO. I felt like grabbing the tattoo needle and writing ‘I am an immature asshole and nowhere near as funny as I think I am’ on each of their foreheads, but they probably would have contracted HIV from sharing the needle – or actually liked the tattoo, which would have been even more annoying.
The interview continued in this vein for another twenty minutes before I conceded defeat and slunk back to the van.54
Why was I here? Well, it was part of a package of measures suggested by Silas McLean, a branding consultant who was, in his words, helping to ‘imagineer a repositioning of my brand proposition’.
In the months after Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life had hit the airwaves, i.e. gone on the Visit Norfolk website as a free download, I came to realise I needed to capitalise on the buzz, if any. Silas had been introduced to me by Hugh Asquith, a friend of mine from my health and racquets club, who had used Silas for his own corporate rebrand and was evangelical about the guy’s abilities. Hugh ran a wealth management firm called Accrual Partners and sought a brand consultancy to help him attract a younger, less stuffy client base. At the time, I scoffed at the idea of spending fifty grand on that. I said, ‘Hugh, you’re spending fifty K so a guy in a linen suit can put your company name in lower case, remove the space between the words and put a full stop at the end! Branding consultants are just snake oil salesmen – except they probably don’t even call it snake oil, they’ve probably renamed it serpentine petroleum or Python3000 or worm lube.’
But Hugh wouldn’t be deterred and insisted that accrualpartners. as it was now called, was a new and exciting proposition. I too wanted to be a new and exciting proposition so begrudgingly engaged the services of Silas.
I disliked the man immensely. He had a habit of saying ‘Right?’ at the end of every sentence, which was obviously a deliberate calculation to make him seem inclusive but actually screamed neediness. He also said, ‘I know, right?’ instead of ‘yes’.
But desperate times called for desperate measures, which was how I came to sit with him over a frothy coffee and talk about how I could reinvent myself for the modern TV commissioner. In Silas’s view, a man cusping sixty should lean into his advancing years and become a ‘bit of a card’ – he wanted me to embrace a kind of eccentric otherness cultivated by the likes of Gyles Brandreth, Bargain Hunt’s Tim Wonnacott, John McCririck or David Starkey.
‘You want to create a distinguished but careworn look, like a well-thumbed book. So stop trimming your eyebrows and nasal hair, stop dying your hair—’
‘I don’t dye my hair.’
‘… and embrace the elder statesman look, greys and all.’
‘I don’t dye my hair.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I said I don’t dye my hair.’
‘Yeah, I’m just giving an example.’
‘Yeah, and I’m just saying I don’t dye my hair.’
‘You can see my point, though.’
‘Yeah, and you can see I don’t dye my hair.’
I listened to Silas’s pitch with great interest and tremendous politeness but felt I had to demur – ‘Silas, that is terrible idea,’ I said – and pointed out the great many aging presenters who had stayed relevant – nay, cool – by clinging on to the last vestiges of youth.
Jeremy Clarkson, James May, Richard Hammond, James Martin, Tom Cruise, Gordon Ramsay – they all managed to retain their elan by perfecting a look known as ‘Sunday pub rocker’, where the hair has been permitted to dishevel into a gently rebellious length favoured by the Bay City Rollers and Tarzan.
This loose shoulder-length hair might seem more suited to a female divorcee called Trish who’s fifty and does step aerobics than to a man, but when accompanied by craggy male skin, bootcut jeans and a leather jacket with zip pockets on the sleeves, it turns into something dangerous and thrilling.
Jeremy Clarkson in particular owns that look, and no one accuses him of being over the hill even though he’s well into his seventies. James May (seventy-four or thereabouts?) is how I imagine James Dean would look now if he’d been better at driving.55 The result? Clarkson, May, Hammond, Martin, Cruise and Ramsay are cherished by boomers and millennials alike and could front an aftershave campaign if they wanted to.
Pleasingly, McLean came round to my way of thinking and we devised a campaign to reposition me in the minds of younger viewers. We agreed on three pillars: a fresh new look that would incorporate expensive denim and leather; a new lexicon, drawn from a compendium of buzz phrases and sentence constructions that would resonate with younger audiences; and optics. Under the last of these, I would ensure I was seen among a cool, young crowd and would try to create content that skewed towards what I call the Snapchat generation. Which was why I’d agreed to front Naked Norwich, a web series for the East Anglia Live on what they called ‘alternative Norwich’.
Naked Norwich – horrible title, by the way, especially if you picture the nakedness taking place on market day when the average age of visitor soars to sixty-five or so – explored anything leftfield, ‘out there’ and counterculture in and around Norwich. From tattoo parlours and skate parks to a drag club and a squat.
