What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (6 page)

‘Well, you’d better sit down, hadn’t you?’ he said. He divided up breakfast between me, Relda and himself and started telling us wonderful stories, doing brilliant imitations of the likes of Humphrey Bogart and John Huston.

After a while, people began arriving to set up for the press conference and he got slightly irritated with them.

‘Please could you make a little less noise,’ he said. ‘I’m in the middle of a story.’

Since then, basically, my career has been about bullshitting. I think a lot of journalists would say that, but I’ve done it to get meetings not just with actors, but with guerrillas and prime ministers. For the most part, however, my work with Relda involved not much more than picking music and running series.

During this time I thought a lot about my mother, who was still back in England, not enjoying good health and working too hard. I wasn’t happy being so far away from her and decided to head back to the UK. In between leaving National and heading back I somehow ended up working at Radio I.

The station had just moved into a beautiful building on Great North Road in Auckland, and I did midnight to dawn for a couple of months. It had the most bizarre format you could possibly imagine. They called it beautiful music but they made that up, there was no such genre.

The most important qualification for the job was the ability to count to two silently. You played four songs in a row and between them you had to say, ‘The beautiful music that is (one … two) Radio I.’ We had to pause and count every time we said anything. ‘You’ve been listening (one … two) to Pepe Arameo and his orchestra (one … two) and the duelling pianos of Henry Mancini (one … two). It’s now (one … two) 13 minutes past three (one … two) and now (one … two) the beautiful music continues.’ It was appalling.

I was in the building on my own at that hour. At the front was an alcove in which prostitutes used to congregate. It had an intercom through which the beautiful music that was Radio I was piped. I don’t know how they stood it, but there was also a light, so they would wait for clients there and talk to me while they were waiting. It was the only interaction I had with real people and on reflection they may have been the only people who heard the music I was playing.

Graham Someone came over from Australia to organise things, which meant getting rid of a lot of people. Radio I changed staff almost as often as it changed formats in those days. In my time, the format was fine but apparently I was wrong, even though I could count to two with my eyes closed.

AS I PLANNED MY
return to England, my thoughts followed a similar pattern — once they saw me, management would beg me to take over the running of the BBC.

I got a job in the mail room.

On one hand, being dyslexic, the job of sorting and delivering mail was a total nightmare for me. On the other hand, the job served Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, BBC 1 and 2 television, so I was at the centre of everything. I legitimately got to go into every office. Different cities specialised in different areas of production for the BBC. Birmingham, for instance, was drama. Bristol was natural history and responsible for some incredibly 
popular programmes. Geoffrey Boswell, who produced
The World Around Us
, was based there. Johnny Morris, who did a wonderful children’s TV show called
Animal Magic
, was based there and so was David Attenborough. I delivered mail to them and many other giants of television. These people had gilded offices with hospitality cabinets and people to fill the hospitality cabinets with liquor for them. They didn’t have a BBC cafe, they had BBC restaurants and bars.

As well as doing the mail, I gained experience by getting attachments — short-term appointments in different roles. I got one as a projectionist for the Natural History Unit. It was quite complicated because it wasn’t just a matter of getting the rushes and whacking them on. Curtains were opened, lights were dimmed — they didn’t get switched off, they had to be dimmed — and there would be fresh water and cocktails and nibbles on a little tray.

When important visitors came and wanted to view old film — which they often did — the pressure could be intense. First, you prayed to God the item had a combined track — meaning sound and image were on the one piece of film and in sync. This never happened, one of many proofs this book will suggest for the non-existence of God. I had to put the soundtrack on one side of the projector and try to line it up with the images on the other. The more important a project, the more likely it was to have separate tracks because the quality was admittedly better that way.

I had to screen some of
The Iron Age Project
once. This was a wonderful early reality series. I think we called them documentaries then because they often had quite a substantial factual component. For
The Iron Age Project
people were trained and then sent to live in Iron Age conditions for a couple of years. They had it rough but only slightly rougher than I did trying to screen the thing. 

In the very beginning of the film there was a man hitting a post with a mallet. When I screened it, you saw him hit it, then four seconds later you heard him. I waited for the inevitable command: ‘Let’s start a-fucking-gain, shall we? This is going well, isn’t it?’

Once a bigwig turned up to see a particularly significant piece of historic film. I opened the tape canister and the last person who screened it had put bits of paper in the film as markers. I knew if these went through the projector they would jam it, so while it was screening I stood there ready to whip them out just before they went through.

Suddenly, someone barked at me from his seat: ‘Could you just lift the light on that a little bit?’

‘Certainly,’ I said and in the moment it took me, a piece of paper went through the projector and, of course, flashed up on the screen.

‘Projectionist, what was that?’

‘I’m not entirely sure, sir, but it seems to have come good.’

But as the piece of paper went around it jammed the spool, so the film started to roll out onto the floor. I just stood there looking at this incredibly valuable film unravelling all over the room. It was a revelation how long it got in a short space of time. When it’s not wound tight, film is like water — it finds a natural level. Pretty soon I couldn’t budge because the film was around my ankles and if I moved I would have damaged it. So I decided — with, in hindsight, questionable wisdom — to let it go. As long as no one came into the projection booth — and why would they? — they would never know and I could get the film wound up nicely and back in its can when the screening was over.

My one bit of luck was that they didn’t want to sit through the whole thing.

‘I think I’ve seen enough,’ said the bigwig about halfway 
through. I breathed a sigh of relief and reached over so I could turn the lights back on without moving my feet.

‘Thank you very much, projectionist.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Can you just come in and clear up these glasses and what have you?’

‘Yes, I’ll do that.’
Just as soon as you’ve gone
.

But as he was leaving he opened the door to the projection booth, to reveal me paddling in valuable, historic film, some of which now took the opportunity to roll through the door and out of the booth.

‘What a fucking embarrassment,’ said the bigwig.

‘I didn’t want to disturb your viewing pleasure, but there was a slight problem because someone had left markers in it, sir. But I thought it was better that, you know, your time is valuable, it’s better that you can watch and get on and I’ll just sort this out.’

‘Do you want to know what’s valuable?’ he said. ‘This fucking mess here is valuable. Sort it.’ And he closed the door and walked off. I hope by now they’ve finished converting all those films to digital.

Eventually I got to be involved in other aspects of the organisation. The BBC was very traditional, but also ready to take chances. They made programmes no one would do now, like
A Year in the Life of a Tree
. They had a tree growing in the middle of the BBC grounds with cameras bolted to it that they kept running for 12 months to see what happened.

We did an outside broadcast for a year with a family of badgers. We parked a spare outside broadcast truck up in a badger sett and at around 10.15 every night it went live for 15 minutes. You could watch the badgers for a quarter of an hour. When they looked at the ratings, which they hardly ever did because they were the BBC, they realised people were checking on the badgers just before they went to bed. Some 
nights nothing would happen for minutes and those episodes were among the best rating because people stayed tuned in until they had laid eyes on the badgers. When the OB truck was needed for other duties, people wrote in.

I became one of several hosts for
Any Answers
, which was done at Bush House, the BBC headquarters in London. Questions would be read out on air in a show called
Any Questions
and then other people would write in with answers and we would read the best ones. The shows are still running. I was chosen possibly because I had an obvious affinity for mail, but mainly because I had been doing a bit of hosting on local radio and still hadn’t turned 20.

‘You’ve got a younger voice, so we’ll get you to do the younger letters for
Any Answers
,’ the producer told me. I got a first-class train ticket once a week to go to London.

Doing that made me think that the BBC would take any excuse for a radio programme, so I decided to come up with one and took it to one of my bosses.

‘I’ve had this idea and I’ve done a rough budget on it,’ I said. ‘We go to the most far-flung, most isolated parts of England and we just talk to the people that live and work there.’ There was a little bit more to it but essentially that was the guts of it. It was no surprise to me at all that this producer came back to me after a week and said he liked my idea.

‘Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll give you an office and a secretary, and you do the production. You turn it into something that we can then turn around and do.’

So for a while I had an office. I had visions of myself getting plants from the nursery and furnishing the thing and then mail people would come around and I’d be this mysterious character tippy-tapping away or dictating. The best thing about it, as far as I was concerned, was that someone would be delivering me mail. Stationery has always been an enthusiasm and I got a 
stamp made with my full name on it — Paul Henry Hopes — so that I could stamp any documents I thought needed it.

Of course, I never got around to making the programme. As with so many of my ambitions, I was much more interested in getting the gig than in doing it. Also, it didn’t pay any money, which was one of the reasons the producer had been so happy to let me do it, but it was a big disincentive as far as I was concerned. It was just going to be too hard. It was also going to take too long; my attention span was waning.

I was after something that was going to get me a job, not something that was going to become a job, possibly, at some stage. I still didn’t have a proper BBC job that I could live on and that would help improve things for my mother and myself. I liked the excitement and variety of what I was doing, but at the same time we were very poor and my mother was working very hard. The flip side of my taste for variety was a craving for security. In my life up till now there had been a lot of insecurity, so I wanted permanence in things, which at that time meant getting an actual job. Just not in the tobacco factory.

Also, England was even more depressing this time around. When I first went there it hadn’t been so noticeable, because I was only 11 years old and didn’t have a choice. But when I went back, my mother was still in the same council flat and everyone else I knew was still doing exactly what they had always done.

I decided to move back to New Zealand again — and if you’re finding this a little repetitive, I promise this is the last time I will change countries. At least I had made my mind up before I turned 21.

So I moved back to Auckland, determined not to waste any more time dithering about what I was going to do. I wanted to establish security and amass wealth, start businesses, get a decent job in radio. Probably not in that order. At the same time, 
predictably and in between finishing one thing and starting another, I added a few glittering lines to my CV.

I got a job selling coffee machines and quite quickly became the manager for my region — a deliberate move to divert attention from the fact I wasn’t any good at selling the machines.

‘I’m going to be found out,’ I thought. ‘I’ve got to become branch manager or they’ll realise I’m hopeless. They better promote me quick.’

One of the reps was Dutch and everyone else there hated him. I couldn’t work out why. I thought it might have been because he had a beard, or because he had an accent or just because he was Dutch.

Eventually I realised it was because he was so spectacularly successful. Also, he didn’t like any of them, either. He didn’t want to go to meetings or chat about the weekend or drink with them after work. His pockets were full of slips of paper with leads. All he cared about was leads and possibilities. Why would he come in for a meeting when he could be out there selling coffee machines? Somehow he ended up showing me how to sell the machines and he would have been a good teacher if I had been a better student. The only time he wasn’t talking about selling coffee machines was when he was running down the other people there. He used to sell these things like they were going out of fashion. He got as many knock-backs as everybody else but he knocked on a lot more doors.

My mother came back about a year after me. We were a good team and it was only sensible for us both to be in the same place. It did take a bit of organising because even though I had been born in New Zealand she had not.