I Should Have Been at Work

DEDICATION

For Rose and Patrick

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1. Daddy Who?

2. Not a Complete Banker

3. Taking the Mike

4. Not as Dumb as I Looked

5. A Face for Radio?

6. All Tanked Up

7. Gun Trouble in Texas

8. Gerry and Dean

9. Our Man in Moscow

10. A Call from Ali

11. Finding a Rose

12. That Was No Lady

13. Breakfast with Brisbane

14. Nothing Succeeds Like Excess

15. SPOTY

16. ‘A Signed Affidavit’

17. A Touch of the Dimblebys

18. Mr and Mrs Merton

19. See Naples and Dry

20. The King of Denmark

21. Sexy Football

22. Have I Got a Singer for You!

23. National Disasters

24. If I Could Keep My Head

25. Front Page Fool

26. Undiplomatic Service

27. A Briefcase Full of Money

28. ‘Use Your Sense of Humour’

29. Helen and Jill

30. Saturday Nights Again

31. ‘F*** It, We’ll Go at Seven’

32. Sir Alex is Unhappy

33. The D.G.s and Me

34. Good Cop, Bad Cop

35. ‘Herograms’

36. Orchestra or Chorus?

37. Anyone for Tennis?

38. Anyone for Table Tennis?

39. Retiring? Me?

40. Afternoons with Carol and Susie

Photo Section

List of Credits

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

It was the second of August 1999. It would be the most momentous day in my broadcasting life. That evening I would be all over the television news, the following day’s front pages and be the subject of columnists’ opinions for weeks. What was I doing to attract so much attention?

I was changing jobs. I was shocking myself in the process and obviously, to my amazement, a lot of other people too.

I had made my decision, although my partner, Rose, had been very circumspect about the move. She knew how much I had loved the BBC; how I had worked hard to get to the position I occupied, aided by a good share of luck; how I had fought battles to defend the organisation when it was under attack from outside, and often waged war when the sports department was being battered from inside the Corporation itself. But now I would fight those battles no longer. As I went up to the office of my agent, Jane Morgan, in Regent Street, I kept wondering if I was making the biggest mistake of my working life. I had one of the best jobs in broadcasting. The BBC had always looked after me. I was never going to get rich working for them, but they were family. I worked with a great number of wonderful and talented people, and I knew for the most part that I was popular with them. There were laughs every day. I had been given awards for doing my job, which I loved. Now I was about to throw it all in.

Had I lost my sanity? The day before, in the back garden of my house in West London, I had shaken hands with ITV’s Controller of Programmes, David Liddiment, their Head of Sport, Brian Barwick, and their lawyer, Simon Johnson. I had confirmed I would be joining them. The deal was that I would not accept any counter-offer from the BBC to stay. ITV now needed confirmation that I had resigned.

‘There’s the phone,’ said Jane. ‘Take a deep breath and the best of luck.’

1

DADDY WHO?

I was born on 17 September 1942, in the new hospital in the town of Ennis in County Clare, Ireland. For the privilege of being born in the country of my heritage, I am indebted to Adolf Hitler.

My mother and father had both left their homeland before the Second World War to forge careers in nursing in England, where they had met. Unemployment was rife in Ireland at the time, and would continue to be so for many years until the economic boom brought about by Ireland’s membership of the European Community in the Eighties. Like many before and after them, my parents had become economic migrants when still in their teenage years. Both, and entirely independent of each other, had been close to making their new lives in America but had been prevailed upon by their families to stay within reasonable reach of home.

They had begun their training in Bournemouth but had moved to Brighton in Sussex, where my father had become a senior mental health nurse at the Brighton General Hospital and my mother a nursing sister. But in 1941 my father was called up by the British Army to do his duty on behalf of his adopted country and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. Initially, he was posted to Northern Ireland, and so my mother decided to go back to the bosom of her family in Ennis so that they could continue to see each other from time to time.

Shortly after my mother found out that she was expecting yours truly, Dad was posted to the Far East. I would not meet him until I was nearly four years old.

Mother, Gertrude Veronica, was from a large family, eight children in all, of whom she was the youngest. Her father and my grandfather, Packo Malone, was a famous local sportsman when a young man, excelling in particular at the Gaelic sports of football and hurling, representing the county at both, and playing in an all-Ireland final before the First World War. He was well over six feet tall and as strong as an ox. Of all his grandchildren, I am the only one to match him in terms of height, and I also seem to have inherited his rather large conk as well. When he was young, he had enjoyed a few drinks, but on his fortieth birthday he had suffered an almighty hangover, subsequently ‘took the pledge’, and never did a drop of alcohol pass his lips for the next half-century.

My maternal grandmother Hannah, known as Annie, was a beauty when young and in later life devoted herself to the family and to the Roman Catholic Church. She rose early to go to Mass every day of the week. Packo went to church on Sundays, but each night of his life he could be seen kneeling on a chair in the living room of the tiny house in which he brought up his large family to say his prayers – his ‘duty’, he called it. They had absolute faith in the Catholic Church and their God and gave enormous respect to the local clergy, several of whom, including the bishop, became Packo’s close friends on his weekend hunting or fishing expeditions.

The house did not boast a bathroom: a tin bath was kept for the purpose of the occasional full-body ablution, with the water boiled in large kettles on the turf-fired ‘range’. The toilet was outside in the back yard. There was no refrigerator, food was bought fresh each day, and of course there was no telephone. My grandfather conducted his business by ‘message’. People would arrive at the door, to book their horse in for a ‘shoeing’, or simply turn up, in hope, at the forge that was a short walk from the house.

My grandfather was a farrier, a blacksmith, with his own business, like his father and grandfather before him. In the Forties and Fifties, the west of Ireland had not changed much since the turn of the century, and people continued to be largely dependent on the horse for transport. Deliveries were made by horse and cart; the pony and trap was still used by many for their personal journeys and donkey carts were prevalent too. Business was brisk for my grandfather, and only the hours in the day limited the amount of work available.

The story goes that Packo and his father had decided not to get involved in those newfangled motor cars, probably thinking them a passing fancy. Henry Ford’s Irish grandfather, a farrier from County Cork, had made a different decision, and the family had done rather well as a result.

My Uncle Frank, a dab hand with car mechanics, had been persuaded to assist his father as a farrier and eventually took the business over; but of course he saw its decline into a virtual tourists’ showpiece as the motor car began to dominate our lives.

My earliest years were spent in a home full of warmth, fun and security. The house was in the town centre, opposite the Friary Church, handy for my grandmother. There were always visitors – aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours – calling. Sometimes, on a Sunday, we would take the pony and trap out to visit a relative’s farm a few miles from town. I can still hear the clip-clop of the little animal’s hooves and smell the leather upholstery of the highly polished trap. One of my earliest memories is of being allowed to hold the reins of the pony.

I was too young to be aware of the horrors happening all over Europe – the bombing, the Holocaust, the terrible suffering. Ireland was a haven of tranquillity, having declared its neutrality under President de Valera.

My mother kept mentioning this fantasy figure called ‘Daddy’. I could not quite imagine who or what he was. This mysterious person had actually written to me from India, telling me to be a good boy and look after Mummy while he was away. This letter was read to me, as I was only three years old. I can imagine it not meaning too much to me.

Then, one day, a good-looking man in a grey pin-striped suit and a trilby hat arrived at the door, picked me up in his arms, and kissed me on the cheek. This was an invasion of privacy – and he was paying a rather undue amount of attention to my mother as well. I cried my eyes out.

Eventually, I must have warmed to this intruder; but, not so long after, there was another interloper, and I was no longer the focal point of everyone’s attention. My sister Ann was born. Of course, she had been delivered by an angel to my mother in hospital, a story I must have bought without further question. All I knew was that this new person was taking up a vast amount of my mother’s time and interest, and for the first time in my young life I felt the pangs of jealousy. My grandmother had to take me to one side and explain that Mummy certainly loved me the best but, because Ann was so small, she needed to be specially looked after.

But the ‘looking after’ wasn’t enough to save her young life. Within six or seven weeks of her birth, she died of meningitis.

While I remember my baby sister arriving, I have no clear memory of her death or that it affected me very much at the time. I suppose I was shielded from it, and my grandparents would have explained it all as ‘the will of God’. I have often wondered what sort of person Ann would have grown into and what effect she would have had on my life.

Obviously my mother and father were distraught at the loss. Soon afterwards they decided to take up their jobs in England again, and I found myself on the train to Limerick and Dublin and then the mail boat crossing from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead in North Wales, a journey I was to experience almost every year during my childhood as we went ‘home’ for the summer holidays.

My parents had rented a flat in Brighton before the war but now needed a new home. At first we became lodgers in the house of one of Dad’s work colleagues, who had two sons, both older than me. I didn’t take to them, and the feeling was entirely mutual. They continually mocked me when I spoke. I could not understand why, but of course I had a broad County Clare accent and they couldn’t make out a word I said, and neither could their parents.

Pretty soon we moved to a brand new council house, the building of which was virtually going on around us. Amongst the labourers were German prisoners of war, yet to be repatriated. I learned, much later, that they were treated badly by some of our new neighbours, but my Dad showed them respect. His view was that they were probably family men like him whose lives, like his, had been disrupted for five years through no fault of their own. Soon they disappeared back to their homeland, and I was disappearing off to school.

St John the Baptist Roman Catholic Primary School was a pretty dismal-looking place in a poor part of the town run by a combination of nuns and lay teachers. Most of the kids were from Irish or Italian Catholic families, but I was the only one nobody could understand, for a while at least. My earliest memory of school is of being asked to draw a line. I drew a funny little animal with four legs. For me a line, with my Irish accent, was a tiger without the stripes. The teacher thought I was mucking about. My parents told me that within a few months, the Irish accent had disappeared and I became like the other kids in my speech patterns, unlike my parents, who retained their Irish accents all their lives.

Once I could make myself understood I became accepted by my infant peers and I began to enjoy going to school. I worked out pretty soon too that I wasn’t the dullest in the class by a long way. Within a year, though, I was to be out of school for nearly three months. I had been complaining of stomach ache and a local doctor had diagnosed indigestion, told my mother not to let me eat apples, prescribed some milk of magnesia, and said I would be alright in a day or two. Over the next few days, I gave them great cause for worry. I developed spots, which my father immediately knew was measles, and the stomach pains were getting worse. Dad telephoned another doctor, Dr John O’Hara, who saved my life and whom I met again thirty years later when he was on the council of the Football Association. Dr John immediately diagnosed a septic appendix: I was in a fever with the measles, and now needed an urgent operation as well. My parents, having lost Ann a short time before, were now close to losing me. The appendix was taken out – probably in a hurry. The scar is still prominent all these years later. After the operation, I was removed to an isolation hospital, where I would remain for some weeks. When I eventually returned home, I must have looked a very poor specimen indeed. I could scarcely walk, having been bedridden for so long, and for weeks my mother had to take me to a clinic for physiotherapy to help me get the use of my legs again.

I didn’t like this place called England. First they mocked the way you speak, and then you got hit with not one, but two serious illnesses at once. I wanted to go back to Ireland, and said so in no uncertain terms. But, in time, I settled into the rhythm of my new life in Brighton. In those days, everyone who had been given a council house seemed to be inordinately proud of it. Gardens were tended with great enthusiasm – my father won several prizes for his garden; doors were regularly re-painted, and windows sparkled. We had a refrigerator, which was unusual for working-class people in the late Forties and early Fifties. Few of our neighbours had a car. If they did it was usually a pre-war model. My Dad cycled the four or five miles to the hospital where he worked, but after a time was able to afford a modest motorcycle combination. The bike was a 500 cc BSA with a Watsonian sidecar capable of seating my mother, with me behind her. It was a very fragile piece of equipment and seemed to be made largely of plywood, covered with a black lining. These ‘combinations’ were very popular in those days, being cheaper to run than cars. You rarely see one now. Sometimes, when the weather was good, I was allowed to sit on the pillion seat behind Dad. This was long before crash helmets were deemed compulsory, or indeed necessary. We often went up to London to see relatives by this mode of transport and once went all the way to Ireland, singing at the tops of our voices as we meandered through the country roads of Wales to the boat train at Fishguard. That sort of happiness should be bottled.

At school I was progressing from cowboys and indians to football and cricket. I also sang in the school choir – our rendition of ‘Panis Angelicus’ won us first prize in the Sussex schools’ competition. My best pal was Micky Weller and I was in love with a pretty girl called Janice Prossor. I usually showed my passion for her by chasing her round the playground. It was unrequited love, but I did manage to kiss her once. Sheer bliss. It gave me a wonderful tingling feeling of which I have never tired.

In class, I was doing well under the guidance of Miss Thornton and Mr Beech, but being a Catholic school we were consumed with religious instruction that took up around an hour of each day. I kept hearing about the Immaculate Conception many years before I knew what immaculate or conception meant, never mind the two of them together. It was a wonder we had time for the academic stuff.

I got into a few fights in the playground, won a couple, lost a couple. Steeled myself not to cry when I lost, but the emotions usually got the better of me when I won. In summer evenings I would gather in the local park with a few other boys and we would play cricket till dark.

Although we had little money, my parents loved to go to the local variety theatre, when the housekeeping budget allowed, to see some of the great comics of the day, and I went with them. They had heard Frankie Howerd, Jimmy Edwards, Max Bygraves and Max Miller on radio; and in those pre-television days, or at least before most people had TVs, this was the way to see your favourites. The Brighton Hippodrome was usually packed when a big name came to town, which happened regularly. The theatre was a ‘number one’; that is to say, the top-line acts would appear there. As well as those mentioned above, I remember seeing Tony Hancock, Vic Oliver, and even Laurel and Hardy live on stage. And of course we never missed a pantomime. To this day I can smell the red velour seats and remember the anticipation as the orchestra struck up their introduction to the evening or matinee.

But each year, Mum and Dad and I would set out for ‘home’. This was a trip back to Ireland for two or three weeks. While my pals were enjoying Brighton beach, I would be spending my time with the family, either in Ennis or at my Dad’s village, Boris in Ossery, in the county of Laois in the midlands of Ireland. I would usually return to Brighton, pale as death in contrast to my sun-tanned pals, having suffered from the wet Hibernian climate.

When in Ennis, I would go to my grandfather’s forge and spend hours pulling the bellows to heat up the fire for smelting the horseshoes. There, I would listen to stories and jokes as the men got about their work. I learned not to be afraid of horses, but never to stand behind them. The forge seemed to be the meeting place for many boys after school or on Saturdays, and I remember a great atmosphere of camaraderie. I was now occasionally ribbed for my English accent. What a turnaround.

On Sundays it was off to Mass, then lunch and either a trip to the country or, more likely, down to Cusack Park to watch a hurling or Gaelic football match. My grandfather was known to everyone and his former sporting prowess earned him a good deal of respect. He proudly introduced me to people, and being ‘Packo’s’ grandson seemed to give me some reflected glory. I learned how to use a hurly stick and, a lifetime later, I was walking in Richmond Park one day when I came across two Irish boys smacking a ball between them with hurlies. ‘Can I have a go?’ I asked. They were amazed that I could pick up the ball with the stick, control it at speed, and fire it to them accurately.

I loved being in Ennis, but would also spend a while at the home of my paternal grandparents, Joseph and Bridget Lynam. Joe was a signalman on the railway, a task he combined with running a small farm. Between them they produced no fewer than fifteen children, most of whom survived into old age, a couple of them into their late nineties.

Once, when I was about fourteen, I cheekily suggested to my Dad that grandfather must have been a sex maniac. Dad, rather amused, reckoned that his father might only have had sex fifteen times. Can you imagine bringing up that many children in a small farmhouse, with no modern conveniences, on low pay and no benefits? Well they all ate well, all went to school, all ended up with responsible jobs, and the only case of lawbreaking in the family was when Uncle Gerald was had up for a bit of poaching. My grandparents set standards for their children that were adhered to throughout their lives.

I was always frightened in the house at night. My parents, with my grandmother (who liked a Guinness) and other family members and friends, would go off to one of the many pubs in the village. I would be left in the house with my teetotal grandfather. I was always given a room that had a picture of Jesus Christ on the Cross wearing the crown of thorns; his eyes always seemed to be staring right at me. Whichever way I turned in the bed, the eyes never left me. I never slept a wink until daybreak. Then I could never get up.

Bridget and Joe Lynam were as different as chalk and cheese, underlining the old adage that opposites attract. Joe was straightforward, hardworking, and very literate. He could quote Shakespeare readily, and enjoyed most of the plays. He particularly liked George Bernard Shaw, a man of his own vintage. Bridget was somewhat capricious, with a ready wit. She liked a drink and whenever a visitor with similar tastes arrived at the house, she would ensconce herself in the ‘parlour’ to pour the guest a glass of Guinness. Then she would liberally imbibe herself. The theory was that Joe knew nothing of this habit, but of course he wasn’t that stupid and left her to her own devices.