It's Not What You Think (25 page)

10 The Boo Radleys

  9 Dodgy

  8 Cast

  7 Space

  6 Shed 7

  5 Black Grape

  4 Blur

  3 Oasis

  2 Ocean Colour Scene

  1 Texas

The figures for
The Breakfast Show
had been on the up almost since the day we’d arrived on the air but more importantly the whole perception of the station had also changed. As a result of our show, and its ripple effect throughout the rest of the station, almost overnight Radio 1 had gone from a museum piece to the heart of the here and now.

The old guard had clung to the wreckage for as long as they could but finally their fingers had been prized away from the driftwood and they were sent floating off to die. Or at least that’s how we saw it. This was the Nineties, Britpop was on fire and the new Radio 1 was smack bang in the middle of it.

Every decade needs to define itself but first it has to decide how and it can’t do that until it’s at least halfway through. This is what had now happened. We all knew exactly what was going on—guitars were back, Britain was the coolest it had been since the Sixties and there wasn’t a big hairdo or a shoulder pad in sight. Energy was everything. After the financial boom of the Eighties, bust had given rise to the need for a new generation to assume control. The grown-ups had messed things up: it was time for the kids to take over.

Remind you of anything?

I don’t think I’ll ever be as excited again in my time on Planet Earth as I was back then. Jesus, it was like a real-life rollercoaster ride that none of us wanted to get off—just thinking about it now makes my pulse
race. There was one thing missing, however. We didn’t have our own television show.

In television terms every generation gets what that generation deserves, which incidentally says a lot about the last decade with the dominance of
Big Brother.
Back then we wanted our version of the shows that had helped shape the more inspirational things in life:
Ready Steady Go
,
The Old Grey Whistle Test
,
The Tube
,
The Word
, and seeing as no one else seemed set to come up with anything soon, we decided we would have to come up with something ourselves.

I have no idea, not a single clue, how, when, or where we came up with
TFI Friday.
All I remember is that it was 1996 and we needed a place to play.

That place turned out to be a famous old television venue called Riverside Studios.

Located on the north bank of the River Thames no more than a couple of hundred yards from Hammersmith Bridge, Riverside Studios came with an impressive pedigree—there was magic in them there walls.
Top of The Pops
,
Dr Who
,
Dad’s Army
, to name but a few, had all been filmed there.

Round the back of the building there was a terrace that looked out onto the water whilst inside there was one cavernous main studio simply begging to be filled with the energy of entertainment again. There were rooms we could use for production offices and four rooms next to the main studio that served as dressing rooms.

It was perfect.

Again, however—just like
Toothbrush
had been—when it came to the pilot,
TFI
was a disaster.

In the pilot the interviews took place downstairs, alongside where the bands played; the upstairs bar was meant merely as a ‘star bar’ for the guests to hang out in while waiting to appear. As I watched the pilot back it became obvious that the place to have fun was the more intimate atmosphere of the star bar and not the abyss of the main studio.

The upstairs bar was much more conducive to what we needed for our non-music segments, plus it meant the audience would be within just a few feet of all the guests, which would hopefully heighten the excitement on a show where the atmosphere was going to be paramount to its success. With the guest walk-on also passing through the audience, there was a good chance if you were in the bar, you would almost certainly be on
camera—this should help charge the atmosphere even further. The bar’s low roof would also be much more efficient when it came to holding in the laughter, applause and other audience reaction.

Then when it was time for a song, the handheld camera could whip 180 degrees—leaving me at my desk to go and ‘find’ the band by diving downstairs into a frenzied mass of people as the band exploded into action.

This one simple change sorted out the whole problem of our lacklustre and confused pilot. From that point on we were good to go and looking at a run of close to two hundred shows over the next five years.

To have an entertainment show is one thing but to have an entertainment show with music is entirely another. If you can get it right and make it work there is no more fulfilling combination. Each week has its own soundtrack—a new moment in time in which to exist—like a mini movie.

There is one major problem, however: music on its own doesn’t rate on television. It never has done, with the one exception of
Top of The Pops
in its heyday. This is why TV producers have to wrap the music up in something else. For us on TFI we chose jokes, stunts and guests but we loved our music and we loved our bands so we stuck them in right at the top, then again in the middle—as well as at the end—and with the help of all the nonsense in between people did stay tuned. Praise the Lord, we had another big fat hit on our hands.

All the music on
TFI
was always 100 per cent live and we only ever had bands on that we liked—they were glad to be there, we were glad to be there—and as a result we hoped the viewers would be too. The central philosophy behind the show was that everyone watching would be in a great mood already as it was Friday night and time for some fun. All we really had to do was help them on their way.

TFI
would be screened twice a week within a few hours every Friday night. First of all at teatime for those just arriving home and getting ready to go out and again later at around 10.30 for those who had decided to stay in or were returning from their own night of partying. This nightly repeat gave the show and the acts double the exposure as well as giving Channel 4 double the value—two shows for the price of one. Everyone was happy—everyone was rocking.

Would I bring it back tomorrow? Absolutely.

Would it work? Probably not. Ha ha!

10 Puff Daddy turning up with his new girlfriend
a sweet young thing called Jennifer Lopez. I talked to P. Diddy at the desk while J Lo stood at the bar having a beer, none of us—including her—had any idea she was ever going to be the big star she became in her own right.

  9 David Bowie coming to perform
and having so much fun he stuck around and played for half an hour after we had gone off the air.

  8 St Patrick’s Day live from Dublin
while hundreds of people were packed inside the venue and thousands cheered outside in the street, U2 came and played acoustically at the desk.

  7 Tara Reid when she came on to promote the first
American Pie
movie
Tara ended up staying at my apartment for the rest of the weekend after casually asking me in the dressing room, ‘Do you know any good pubs?’ I couldn’t believe my ears.

  6 Comic Relief—our red nose special
the night when we didn’t go on the air until after midnight—the only time a rival channel has shared their airtime for the Red Nose event. We simulcast the show on both BBC 1 and Channel 4 and had close to seven million people watching, achieving an audience share of 66 per cent—still a record as far as I am aware.

  5 McCartney taking over the whole show
and then running off stage at the end out to the terrace and down a gangway we had built so he could jump straight into a waiting speed boat to shoot off down the Thames back to Rockstarland.

  4 The night we gave away a million pounds
we became the first TV show in the world to give away £1,000,000. It was to a bloke called Ian. I had to get one up on the brilliant
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
somehow!

  3 When Geri kissed Kylie
Geri (Halliwell) snogged Kylie (Minogue) ‘Have Kylie and I
got something special for you,’ Geri assured me before the show,’—of course it’s on YouTube.

  2 New Oasis album officially dead
we opened one episode of our show by trying to resuscitate the new Oasis album Be Here Now. It was not a good album. Danny wrote this skit where I would have a defibrillator held against the album in an attempt to bring it back to life as if it were a heart attack victim—Be Here Now—which is the last thing the album appeared to want to do—was a dog in my opinion and as nobody would say a word against Oasis at the time, what we did was all the funnier in my eyes. Noel Gallagher hasn’t spoken to me since. His brother Liam and I, on the other hand, get along fine—a far more convivial individual altogether.

  1 The
Lock, Stock and Two
Smoking Barrels special
my personal favourite.

The
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
special was one of those things that was just meant to be. It was entirely unplanned and all came about as a result of us booking a particularly ‘difficult’ songstress.

Frankly from the moment she arrived at Riverside Studios she was a complete pain in the arse—like not just a bit of a pain in the arse but a massive pain in the arse—so much so that in the end I felt duty bound to tell ‘my people’ to tell ‘her people’ she had to go.

One minute she did want to perform, the next minute she didn’t want to perform and then she was willing to be interviewed and the next minute she wasn’t. She spent the whole of the afternoon changing her mind whilst the rest of us waited around trying to finalise a running order—something she was making it increasingly more difficult for us to do. In the end I’d simply had enough.

‘Tell her thank you very much but we won’t be needing her any more—tell her she can have the rest of the day off,’ I said to Suzi, our music producer who also happened to be my girlfriend at the time. We’d met on
The Big Breakfast
, and had got it together after I’d split up with Rachel.

‘Really?’ said Suzi.

‘Absolutely—tell her to go and bother some other TV show. This one has had enough of her.’

‘If you’re sure,’ she smiled.

I couldn’t help feeling like Suzi had been waiting to do something like this for years. In her time as a music producer and before that as a guest booker she had been made to suffer this type of precious luvvy behaviour on far too many occasions. I could swear I almost saw her salivating upon hearing that she now had full permission to tell one of them where to get off.

When news of our desire for her to depart first reached the particular diva in question, apparently she didn’t believe it, thinking it was some kind of joke—who would dare throw her off any show? Ultimately I had to go and tell her myself, whereupon she apologised but it was too late—she had caused far too much trouble and we had all had more than enough of her.

Now although this briefly painted me as the hero to my team, it also left us with a fourteen-minute gap in our programme—not an ideal situation as we were due on the air in under three hours.

So what did we do?

We had no choice but to look at what we had left, and see if there was anything more we could do with it.

We were due to have Vinnie Jones on to talk about a new British film he was in. Everyone was getting very excited about this new movie along with its young director—a kid called Guy Ritchie. Guy was coming along with Vinnie as well as half of the cast. In the end, this was all the material we needed.

There were potential guests everywhere if we wanted them so we immediately declared a
Lock
,
Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
special. The film, the cast and Mr Ritchie dominated that night’s proceedings and it ended up being one of our best ever shows. When we went to air it looked like we’d been planning it for weeks—the karma police were on our side that night.

Ultimately though I think
TFI
will always be remembered for the music, as it should be. The music was the furnace that fired the rest of the machine.

It’s amazing how many musicians I still meet today who cite their inspiration as watching
TFI
every week as a kid. Kids want to be what they see on TV. When they watched our show they wanted to be in a band, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

10 There are several renowned wig wearers

  9 Famous people act like friends when they’ve only just met

  8 The lesser the talent, the bigger the ego

  7 The more famous they become, the less they want to pay for things

  6 Chauffeurs know almost everything

  5 Make-up artists know the rest

  4 The only thing celebs hate more than being chased by photographers is not being chased by photographers

  3 You have no idea who really likes you

  2 All comedians are mad

  1 Everyone loves Kylie

The combination of a national breakfast show on the Beeb
and the hippest music/entertainment show on the box had turned into a formidable and powerful combination which ensured us all the best guests, all the best bands and more press than we knew what to do with.

The press was both good, bad and in between. ‘All publicity is good publicity’, as the saying goes, but bad publicity was way better as far as we were concerned.

For a while the BBC liked their new spiky image and so did I—it was helping haul the previously dust-covered lurching giant back into the present day while making me feel like a rock star in the process.

Nobody really minded that we were being ‘naughty’—at least if they did they never said anything. I wasn’t a bad kid after all and most people knew that in my heart of hearts I had a genuine love for what I was doing. Although admittedly I was acting a little more strangely of late, I was still breaking new ground and for now that was enough…just.

Things were definitely changing though. I was changing. Those oh so important lines of what’s real and what’s not were becoming increasingly blurred. Writers may inhabit the lives of their characters for a while but only for as long as they need to, a lesson I was yet to learn as I continued to get lost in my world of make-believe.

Take my thirtieth birthday, for example.

We finished the breakfast show and immediately hot footed it over to the Langham Hilton Hotel which was opposite Radio 1. I had hired a suite for the day. This is where my party would take place.

The ‘celebration’ started at around five past nine in the morning, straight after the show.

Whatever anyone wanted they could have, which is probably why so many people turned up. By lunchtime it was like midnight—there’s something far more rebellious about starting drinking earlier on in the day. Suddenly the clocks didn’t matter—the world was on our time. New arrivals greeted this daylight mayhem with shock, but that soon gave way to excitement as they quickly decided to throw caution to the wind and pile in themselves to play catch up.

I set myself up in the drawing room to play cards with a couple of pals, helped along with a bottle of whisky, several packets of cigarettes and a case of beer. I don’t think I left the table, other than for toilet breaks, until well into the evening. All day I remember the flow of human traffic was non-stop; people came and went constantly, some of them popping in during their lunch break and then coming back again once they had finished work. Several presents arrived from various newspapers as they heard what was going on and were desperate to get in the door.

By the end of the night there were corpses everywhere. I have no idea what the final body count was but my last vision of the scene was of me stumbling out of my bedroom in the early hours of the next morning to go and do the show having to carefully step over some additional ‘guests’, the majority of whom looked like they might never wake up again.

There was no doubt about it, we were having ‘fun’ and lots of it. But whereas a couple of years before when in between the fun I would sit at home quietly figuring out the next big idea, now I was just out—all the time. Sure I was turning up for work every day but the fuel gauge started to register dangerously low.

Energy wasn’t the issue. I was young and relatively fit, plus, as the breakfast show was so early in the morning, I was still generally on a buzz from the night before whilst we were on the air: anyone who knows will tell you a hangover doesn’t properly kick in until lunchtime and by then I would be at the gym.

The problem was more about creativity. The ideas machine had stopped because I had stopped. As a person I had ceased to be. I had vanished into thin air and been replaced by a made-up character surrounded by other made-up characters.

The problem was, though, we no longer had a script and when the actors start making up the words it’s time to run for the hills.