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First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is:
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Text copyright © Christian O’Connell 2018
Illustrations © Rob Biddulph 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Christian O’Connell and Rob Biddulph assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work respectively.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008200596
Ebook Edition © 2018 ISBN: 9780008200602
Version: 2017-12-07
For Sarah, Ruby and Lois.
The three brightest stars in my world.
Love you, always.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1. The DJ Who Stole Christmas
Chapter 2. Barbecued Like a Sausage
Chapter 3. My Headmaster Hates Me
Chapter 4. The Surprise House Guest
Chapter 5. A New Team Member
Chapter 6. Radio Stars Wanted
Chapter 7. The Guest from Hell
Chapter 8. In for the Kill
Chapter 9. The Snake
Chapter 10. The Letter
Chapter 11. The Ray-chter Scale
Chapter 12. When Grandads Go Bad
Chapter 13. A Spurned Grandad
Chapter 14. Please, Dad, No
Chapter 15. Breaking Dad
Chapter 16. The Rumble at the Red Lion
Chapter 17. Please, Dad, No (part 2)
Chapter 18. Grandad Ray Rattles Cages
Chapter 19. Everyone’s a DJ
Chapter 20. Catastrophe
Chapter 21. Cliffhanger
Chapter 22. Cat-Napped
Chapter 23. Face to face With a Cat-Napper
Chapter 24. Spooking the Enemy
Chapter 25. Returning to the Scene of the Crime
Chapter 26. The FrankenHarrissteins
Chapter 27. Pretty Uneventful
Chapter 28. Blackmail
Chapter 29. Lasagne
Chapter 30. The Cha-Cha Chat Show
Chapter 31. Bring on the Red Carpets
Chapter 32. Embarrassing Parents
Chapter 33. Duelling Dancers
Chapter 34. Never Meet Your Heroes
Chapter 35. A Bad Thought
Chapter 36. Ninja Dad
Chapter 37. Dad’s on the TV
Chapter 38. A Reluctant Star is Born
Chapter 39. The Final Countdown
Chapter 40. The Final Four
Chapter 41. Training Camp
Chapter 42. Attack of the Dads
Chapter 43. Zombie Mum
Chapter 44. You Said What?
Chapter 45. Friends Remited
Chapter 46. The ‘Amazing’ Tent
Chapter 47. My Interview
Chapter 48. And Then There Was One
Chapter 49. The Aftermath
Chapter 50. And the Winner Is …
Chapter 51. Decisions, Decisions
Chapter 52. Choices
Chapter 53. And the Winner Is …
Chapter 54. The Final Chapter
Chapter 55. One Last Thing
Note from Me, the Writer of this, Spike Hughes
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Publisher
Can you imagine what it would be like to have your very own radio show?
Just think about it for a moment.
You could do whatever you wanted, say what you wanted, and get your listeners to do ANYTHING.
Well, that’s me. Spike Hughes. Living the dream. Surfing the radio airwaves from my garden shed at Number 27 Crow Crescent.
And the Secret Shed Show is live on air right now …
‘Spike, you cannot do this!’ begged my radio-show producer, Holly.
‘Oh yes, I can,’ I replied.
The song came to an end. Time to speak. I suddenly remembered watching this old documentary with my dad about a motorcycle daredevil called Evel Knievel. He would jump over things on his motorbike. Cars, buses and planes. He even once tried to jump across thirteen London buses at Wembley Stadium. I felt like him, about to try to make that jump.
The MIC LIVE sign turned bright red, meaning we were on air. I spoke into the mic.
‘So, who of you listening right now is brave enough to go and get one of your Christmas presents from under the tree, without anyone catching you, and open it up live on the show? Just grab one and call us right away!’
‘This is a really bad idea,’ said Artie, but I could see he was trying to swallow down his laughter as producer Holly scowled at us both.
A few months ago, after the whole school strike situation,1 I had promised them both I would take it easy, but what’s the point in having your own radio show if you can’t have a bit of fun every once in a while?
I could see we had callers eager to take part in my ‘bad idea’. I picked one.
‘Hello, you’re live on the Secret Shed Show. Who is this?’
‘Hi, Radio Boy and the team.’
Artie and Holly mumbled back a very strained ‘Hi’, making it very clear they still didn’t approve of what I was doing. Artie is my radio-show sidekick and he also picks all the music. He doesn’t really want to be a famous DJ like me. He’s just here because he likes being part of it. Holly is my producer because she’s the smartest out of the three of us. They are my best friends, and my only friends. I guess it’s like being in a band together. Does that make Artie the triangle player?
Anyway, they knew all too well how much trouble could come from my spontaneous ideas. I’ll tell you a little secret: this wasn’t that spontaneous as I had planned to do it, but knew if I told them before the show they’d try to stop me.
‘I’ve got a present to open from under the Christmas tree,’ said our caller.
‘OK. Firstly, what’s your name?’
‘Nick.’
‘OK, Nick, describe the present to us.’
‘It’s huge, I can hardly lift it, almost the size of a door.’
‘Is this your main present?’ I asked. I was starting to get a little worried, as Christmas is all about the MP. The Main Present. Had Nick grabbed the big one from under his family’s Christmas tree?
‘Oh yes,’ replied Nick. I could almost hear him frothing with excitement. You know what Christmas is like. It almost makes you sick with anticipation. It can’t come soon enough. But for Nick, it would come right now, live, on my radio show. I looked at the terrified faces of Artie and Holly and hesitated for only a split second, then, excited by the power I had right at that moment, I shouted –
‘Open it, Nick!’
Suddenly, the full horror of what I was doing got to Artie and he grabbed his mic, yelling:
‘DON’T DO THIS, NICK! YOU’LL GET INTO HUGE TROUBLE!’
Holly’s mouth was wide open, like she was watching a car crash in slow motion.
‘DO IT, Nick!’ I demanded.
He did it. We heard the unmistakable sound of wrapping paper being torn off – no, more ripped apart like a bear attacking a tent. There was no going back now. I had put tonight’s radio show on a roller coaster. The question was, were we on the going-up bit, or plummeting down out of control?
Nick squealed in the most amazingly high-pitched way.
‘OH WOW! OH WOW! OH WOW!’
‘What is it, Nick?’ yelled Artie. Now he wanted to play my game!
‘It’s … it’s … it’s … an Xbox, a brand-new Xbox,’ said Nick, sounding as if he was crying with joy. The wonder of Christmas!
The moment was then shattered by the very loud footsteps we could hear from Nick’s end of the line, and the sound of a door slamming open.
‘WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING, NICK?’ yelled a very angry-sounding man.
‘R-R-R-R-Radio Boy made me do it,’ stammered Nick.
Oh dear. Time for me to hang up quickly and play a song.
Then I remembered: Evel Knievel managed to clear all thirteen buses. But he crashed on landing. Breaking lots of bones.
I suppose I should bring you up to speed with things.
The Secret Shed Show is still doing really well. Everyone now knows that I, Spike Hughes, am Radio Boy (which is kind of brilliant). At least people know I’m good at something other than being a total loser.
It’s official, I’m now 17 per cent less loser (not 20 per cent less, unfortunately, as my mum still insists on making me a packed lunch, whereas everyone else in my year just has the school dinners. ‘Delicious fresh fruit to keep you regular, Spike, and gluten-free bread with nutritious mung beans, watercress and celery.’ If you want to know what this tastes like, try eating an old shoe with a dead toad inside it).
I always just quietly bin the leathery sandwich, and the dinner ladies give me a cooked lunch for free. I can see the pity in their eyes.
Being Radio Boy hasn’t exactly changed my world that much, then. Let’s look at the pros and cons of being a newly-fledged radio star in my world.
CONS:
Girls now officially find me funny BUT still just want to go out with the boys on the football A-team. I thought being ‘school famous’ would fix all this. Not so. Now I’m just their funny friend. A tap-dancing monkey is funny, but you don’t want it to be your boyfriend.
To be honest, it’s Artie that has been getting more of the attention from girls. They send him fan letters. He didn’t seem that interested at first (or so he said), but I noticed he’d started putting gel in his hair and wearing his dad’s aftershave. I say ‘wearing’; I think it’s fairer to say it wore him. Holly’s and my eyes watered within a metre of him and his scent.
Even worse, Katherine Hamilton, the girl I once wanted to marry, is now going out with Martin Harris, the school bully and the son of my evil headmaster. I try to tell myself they deserve each other, but it’s still like a stab to the heart whenever I see them together.
MORE CONS:
Our show would always be called the Secret Shed Show, but it wasn’t really secret any more – and even though I still went by Radio Boy, I had lost my anonymity. This created problems. The biggest was, of course, my mum.
It started innocently enough, with occasional peering in through the shed window mid-show. Then it escalated to bursting into the shed studio while we were doing the show. Yeah, don’t worry about the bright red glowing MIC LIVE sign, Mum. Just barge on in.
‘There is a cold draught in here, I’ll go and get your special jumper.’
‘Are those electrical leads even safe? We had a poor young boy on my hospital ward just the other week who had been literally fried like an egg by faulty wiring. Poor kid had a permanent grin on his face. Even in his sleep.’
‘Shall I make us all some nice soup?’
BTW:
My mum puts great faith in the restorative powers of soup. Like a simple bowl of soup is some highly potent ancient brew, not straight out of a can she just warmed up. My mum is a highly trained nurse, but her medicine cabinet appears to contain just three go-to things:
1 Soup.
2 Vicks VapoRub.
3 A cold flannel.
To my mum, this is the Holy Trinity of medicine. There is nothing that soup, Vicks or the application of a cold flannel cannot heal. If I was run over and lying in the road bleeding, my mum would go and get a stinking cold flannel and rub some Vicks on me before calling for an ambulance. By the time the ambulance had arrived she would have set up an IV drip, containing not blood, but chicken soup.
Anyway, my mum took to just bursting in on the show whenever she wanted.
So now there are two locks on the shed door. One on the outside to protect the broadcasting equipment from being stolen, and one on the inside to protect us from my mum.
‘Spike, is this door locked? What if the fire brigade needed to come and rescue you as your studio turned into a human bonfire? Oh, my poor angel, barbecued like a sausage.’
My mum wasn’t the only one trying to get in on the radio action, either. There was also Sensei Terry: our local postman, karate instructor and one-man neighbourhood watch. The man who rumbled the intruder in my garden, Fish Face, aka Mr Harris, my headmaster. Since then, Mum has given Sensei Terry permission to patrol our garden whenever he wants. It’s not exactly like being given the freedom of the city, but in his mind it’s exactly like being given the freedom of the city. The freedom to patrol at will in the garden of Number 27 Crow Crescent. The way he behaved, you’d have thought he’d caught the country’s most wanted criminal.
Without warning, Sensei Terry will leap out of a hedge or from behind a bush and shout, ‘Spike – all clear and safe!’ and then disappear again. I’m sure I saw him last week disguised as a conifer tree following a suspicious-looking door-to-door salesman down the road.
EVEN MORE CONS:
Apparently everyone’s a DJ. Who knew?
People at school keep giving me ‘helpful’ ideas of exactly what I should do on the show and they are nearly always bad. Don’t believe me? Here are some recent gems:
Radio gold, all of them. One day I might do an entire show full of these bad ideas. Get ready for Nan Fights Live!
On top of that, people also want to be on the show. I have a special way of dealing with this: Producer Holly. We have a system. I’m nice to people and say, ‘I think you’d be great on the show – speak to Holly. She’s the boss.’ Then Holly will say to them very firmly, ‘We aren’t hiring right now. Ask again in a few months.’ She does this in such a way that no one would ever dare ask again. It’s in her eyes, I think.
I still feel anxious, though, anytime anyone wants to be my friend, or invites me over for a playdate. It’s only a matter of time before I get hit with the ‘I’d love to be on the show’.
HOLLY!
BUT OF COURSE THERE ARE ALSO PROS:
I’m starting to get free things. Yes, people send me free stuff in the hope that I’ll talk about it on the radio show.
So far I’ve been sent:
Things are going so well, in fact, that just like an actual proper radio station, we now have adverts. Well, one advert. It’s for Mr Khan, the local newsagent.
He doesn’t pay me in cash, however, as an advertiser normally would. Instead I’m allowed unlimited sweets, as is Holly. Sadly, due to Artie’s very large sweet tooth (shall we say), he’s had to have his offer limited to just one bag a week.
Mr Khan wrote the advert himself and I have to read it out twice during every show, complete with sound effects. He even has a big sign in his shop window that boasts, ‘AS HEARD ON THE SECRET SHED SHOW’.
Here is my first-ever script for my first-ever advertiser:
SFX LARGE EXPLOSIONS
They have gone SWEET C-C-C-C-C-RAZY down at Mr Khan’s!
SFX MORE EXPLOSIONS
This week Haribo Tangfastics are HALF PRICE! Hurry after school tomorrow before Mr Khan runs out!
SFX OF PEOPLE SCREAMING AND RUNNING
Also, why not check out Mr Khan’s wide array of greeting cards for all occasions. Births, birthdays and pet deaths. Yes! You heard us right, a sensitive card for someone special in your life who has lost their beloved pet. The PURR-fect idea!
Find it all at Mr Khan’s Store. Penguin Parade, just opposite the dentist. No more than three schoolchildren allowed at any one time.
SFX MORE EXPLOSIONS
However, one thing hasn’t changed – if anything, it’s got even worse. And that’s my relationship with my headmaster, Mr Harris.
I mean, I get it.
If I was in his shoes I’d hate me. I’d spend every waking hour thinking of new and ingenious ways to make my life hell.
I would never not be out of my mind if I was him.
My headmaster, Mr Harris, carries not just deep emotional scars from the showdown in my back garden, but also a very noticeable physical one. I mean immediately noticeable. Like, you wouldn’t be able to stop looking at it if you were talking to him.
You see, Fish Face is now the only headmaster in the whole wide world with a golden front tooth. He had to have a new tooth to replace the one that to this day is still somewhere in my garden – knocked out with force by the legendary front karate kick of Sensei Terry.
Now, with his new golden tooth, Mr Harris’s face looks even more evil. Like a James Bond baddie. Or maybe a rejected Bond baddie who was turned down for being too scary.
And that’s unpleasant. But not as unpleasant as how Mr Harris must feel about it. I mean, I almost feel sorry for him. Every time he looks in the mirror he sees a reminder of what happened that fateful night in my garden. Marked for life.
Even worse, for months leading up to his manhunt for me, Radio Boy, I had made a laughing stock out of him on my secret radio show. To be fair, he started it. He launched the school’s radio station, Merit Radio, and he should’ve had me on it – I mean, I was the only pupil at the school with radio experience (hospital radio; I was fired, but that’s not the point). Instead, he put his idiot son, Martin Harris, on air and we became sworn enemies in that moment.
So, I mocked him mercilessly for weeks from my garden shed. I used a voice disguiser to mask my voice and real identity. I made up the name ‘Fish Face’ for him on air. He heard it. The school heard it. Everyone heard it. And when he finally tracked me down, Sensei Terry thought he was an intruder and knocked out his front tooth.
So it’s not really that surprising my headmaster hates me.
Which was why I found myself staring once again at my own terrible reflection in the window at school.
‘Do I really have to wear this?’ I asked.
Fish Face grinned, his gold tooth glistening. He was grinning because my evil headmaster was successfully making my school life hell. It was payback. I was on litter duty again at lunchtime and he was making me wear a high-visibility jacket with the words ‘RUBBISH COLLECTOR’ printed on the back in large letters. The ‘COLLECTOR’ bit is microscopically minute. It reads like this: