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  ‘Oh, hello.’

  Nothing else. Just ‘hello’. No ‘That was nice’ or ‘Well done’ or ‘Oh you sounded so relaxed’ – all off-the-peg maternal compliments that everyone knows are utterly untrue but which somehow make you feel better about things which have gone really badly. Like when you come last in the sports day sack race or fall off the stage while trying to play the French horn in the school concert or fail your French exam for the second time. Everyone knows you’ve done rubbish – most of all yourself – but your mum is allowed (nay required) to lavish you with well-meant but utterly undeserved praise before offering to buy you an ice cream and let you stay up late to watch Star Trek to make you feel better. But there was none of that. Clearly she’d forgotten about the broadcast. A blessing.

  ‘So, you missed it then?’ I said casually, planning to shrug the whole thing off safe in the knowledge that no one had been listening. It was, after all, only a local station.

  ‘Oh no,’ replied Mum, slightly indignantly.’I got up specially and listened to the whole programme from six o’clock onwards. I thought you might be on at any time and I didn’t want to miss it.’

  ‘So you did hear it then?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Still nothing else. Blimey O’Reilly, it must have been bad.

  ‘So you heard it, and…?’ I prompted desperately.

  ‘Oh, the signal was very clear,’ said Mum, clearly putting on a brave face and struggling to accentuate the positive.’Yes, very clear. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to find it, because I only really listen to Radio Two usually. But I looked up the frequency in the newspaper and I found it quite easily. So that was good. And, as I said, very clear.’

  Great. The signal was good and clear. This was even worse than I thought.

  ‘And what about me, Mum?’ I finally blabbed, unable to restrain myself, ‘How was I?’

  ‘Oh, very clear,’ she said again, brightly.’Yes, very clear indeed. I could hear every word. It was as if you were right here in the room. That’s how clear it was.’

  ‘But was I any good?’ I almost screamed. I knewthat I had been utterly awful but the fact that not even my mother could bring herself to lie about the extent of the on-air catastrophe was really giving me the willies. Central London is a lonely place to be at ten past eight on a Sunday morning, and I was starting to feel as if my incompetence had somehow unleashed a seismic blast of destruction and despair which had cleared the streets (there were neither cars nor pedestrians in sight), leaving a pall of hopelessness hanging over the city. The only time I’ve ever known London so quiet was years later when The Culture Show decided to restage the post-apocalyptic opening to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and I got to walk through a deserted Trafalgar Square at 4.30 a.m. thinking that the capital was actually quite palatable as long as there weren’t any people in it. Standing around outside the radio station on that lonely Sunday morning, however, I would have been grateful for any sign of human life. There was none.

  ‘But, other than the clarity of the sound, which of course I am thrilled to hear about, was I actually any good?’

  There was a brief but howlingly noticeable pause.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Silence.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. If a bit … gabbly’

  ‘“Gabbly”?’

  ‘Yes, you know … you gabbled a bit.’

  ‘A bit?’

  ‘Well, a lot, actually. Since you ask. But it’s probably just me, I’m not used to listening to people speaking so …’

  ‘Gabbly?’

  ‘Yes, as you say, gabbly. And fast. Fast and gabbly.’

  This was terrible.

  ‘But the signal was very clear,’ Mum ventured again bravely. It was no use. Clearly the entire fleeting episode had been career-threateningly poor. I had learned an important lesson – I was absolutely awful at radio, and I wouldn’t be doing it again in a hurry.

  Or so I thought. But a couple of weeks later I was back in the Time Out office, still answering the phones on Derek Adams’ behalf, when an uncomfortably familiar voice said, ‘Hello, is that Mark … Commode?’

  ‘Close enough,’ I replied, suspiciously. I recognised the speaker as someone from LBC; presumably there had been complaints and now they were ringing to offer an official reprimand. I deserved nothing else. But instead I got this: ‘Oh hi, look, it’s a short month this month and we need to do our video reviews a week early, which will be next Sunday. Same as before. Could you do it again?’

  Clearly there had been a clerical oversight and no one had informed this person of my former foul-up. They couldn’t have actually heard it because if they had they wouldn’t be offering to let me repeat the offence. But that was exactly what they were doing. And even as every atom of my being screamed, ‘No no noooo, never again, never never never not ever no,’ my mouth blithely said ‘Yes’ and that was that.

  But this time it would be different. This time I knew what to expect. This time I would be prepared. Indeed, this time I would make amends for the previous tragedy and perhaps rescue my dignity in the process. It was a second chance, a last-minute reprieve, a stay of execution, an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat …

  That’s it – I’m all out of clichés. Just choose the one you find least trite and hackneyed (or insert one of your own) and that’s what it was.

  So, over the next few days I ‘prepared’ myself for my forthcoming radio rematch. Having figured out exactly how long the slot would last (just under four minutes on the evidence of last time) and resolving to speak m-u-c-h s-l-o-o-o-o-o-w-e-r than before I calculated that it wouldn’t really be possible to talk about more than two videos – unlike the eight through which I appeared to have cantered on my debut. I duly chose two titles, both of which were reassuringly mainstream (no more Piranha Women this time, thank you very much) and I sat down to write a script which I timed, and rehearsed, then trimmed and edited and timed and rehearsed some more. It was amazing just how little you could actually say in four minutes if you were talking at the pace of the speaking clock, but I was determined to right the wrongs of yore and the most grievous wrongs were clearly the incomprehensible speed and unmanageable substance of my first outing. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was as practised, sonorous, and ponderously low-key as a churchgoer reading from the gospels at the lectern on Good Friday, desperate not to stumble over some hotly debated theological point, and determined that the deaf pensioners in the back rows would be able to hear every word.

  I arrived at the radio studio early – 7.30 a.m. to be precise – in order to give myself time to gather my thoughts and take several deep breaths. After the usual routine of pushing the bell and getting no answer I was finally allowed in by someone who was clearly baffled to see me.’You’re not on till after eight,’ they said with some agitation as they ushered me into an anteroom outside the studio that looked as though it had been used as a mobile military hospital, so total was the chaos and carnage.’Did someone tell you that you were on earlier?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I replied.’I just wanted to be here in good time, you know, to “get in the zone” or whatever it’s called. Soak up the atmosphere.’

  They looked at me as though I was mad, then apparently decided that I was taking the piss, turned on their heels and clumped back into the studio. From the clock on the wall I could see that there were at least twenty-five minutes to go before I was needed, and I suddenly had that sense of being in a doctor’s waiting room, about to receive some extremely unpleasant test results.’Ah yes, Mr … Commode is it? We’ve got your blood samples back and I’m afraid it’s bad news. Very bad news. Yes, it seems that you have a severe case of criticus totalis fraudulenta with an underlying bout of radioramblus incompetentis. Unfortunately it’s terminal – you’ll never broadcast in this town again. Now, take these two paracetamol and go crawl under a rock and die …’

  Whilst it had seemed very sensible to arrive early, I
was now starting to realise the benefits of just turning up and going straight on – at least you didn’t have time to sit there sweating bullets while the second hand slowed to a crawl and time expanded infinitely before you. By the time 7.45 rolled around I was on the point of puking. What the hell had I been thinking? I’d already proved that I couldn’t do this in front of several thousand listeners including my mother. Why on earth was I putting myself through this humiliation again? In what would become a common experience I realised that if the radio station suddenly suffered a massive power cut and I was sent home without having had the chance to broadcast I would be relieved and delighted. I started unconsciously praying for just such an eventuality, imploring the heavens to rain down fire (only a little fire, obviously, not enough to hurt anyone – just enough to cause an electrical malfunction). Unfortunately, I have always believed vociferously in a non-interventionist God, and if the Almighty was listening he took this moment to prove to me that I was right by doing absolutely nothing; ‘Sorry, but apparently I don’t intervene. Your words, not mine. Have a nice day.’

  Over the next half-hour I aged about fifty years, losing half my body weight in sweat that poured from my palms, armpits, and other embarrassing glandular areas like Albert Brooks experiencing his on-air flop-sweat meltdown in Broadcast News. By the time it was finally my turn to go on, I looked like I’d been for a refreshing pre-broadcast swim without first removing my clothes. I didn’t so much walk into the studio as ooze, before pouring myself like a puddle into the handily water-resistant chair behind the ‘blue microphone’, my fluid body held together by nothing more than surface tension.

  But amazingly, despite my reversion to liquid form, the hours and days of practice, practice, practice paid off. I took a deep breath, unfolded my scripted sheet of notes, waited for Sarah to say, ‘So Mark, what have you got on video for us this week?’ and then started to read. Slowly and surely. Clearly and precisely. Factually and informatively.

  Or, put more simply, boringly.

  To be honest, I had no idea how it was going – the only sound I could hear was that of my heart beating out a percussive accompaniment to the chorus of ‘76 Trombones and a Euphonium’. But as each successive paragraph went by I knew that I was not cocking it up as before. I was not gabbling, I was not speaking incomprehensibly fast, I was remembering to breathe, and (most importantly) I had a script with a beginning, middle and end, and a well-rounded exit strategy. So when I finally got to the bit which read ‘and that would be my pick of the week, now back to you, Sarah.’ I was feeling pretty damned pleased with myself. As I finished, my physical body seemed to re-coagulate back into semi-solid form and I was able to evolve upward out of my chair, like an amphibian climbing out of the protean slime, and exit in the manner of some higher ape form doing an almost passable impression of early Stone Age man.

  I had got away with it. I had not been totally rubbish. I had managed to read my entire script from start to finish without stumbling, and had kept pretty close to time in the process.

  I had been … professional!

  I was heading for the door which led back on to the street whence I had been thrust so rudely last time when a woman whose face I didn’t recognise came out of the control room. She may have been the producer, or the assistant producer, and for the purposes of this story, she will be played by Kelly Macdonald, or someone of equally arresting reputation.

  ‘Hi,’ she said gaily, with just a hint of unsettling concern.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ I replied (clearly being on the radio had turned me into a fabulous wit and raconteur).

  ‘Just wanted to make sure everything was OK?’

  Hmm. That sounded less than congratulatory. Perhaps I had been rubbish.

  ‘Oh yes, fine by me,’ I said, attempting to sound as if I did this all the time and it hadn’t been a big deal or anything – I had, after all, falsely told everyone that I had ‘loads of radio experience’.

  ‘Is anything … wrong?’ she asked, again more concerned than interrogative, which was in itself rather disconcerting.

  ‘Um, no I don’t think so,’ I flannelled.’ It all seemed to go alright … didn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replied.’It was “alright”. It was perfectly … “alright”.’

  ‘So it was… alright?’

  ‘Yes, like I said, “alright” is what it was. It’s just that …

  ’ Here we go. Here comes the tidal wave of recrimination and blame. Here’s the broadside about the number of complaints they got last time they put me on-air; about how I clearly lied to them when I said I knew my way around a radio station; about how the station’s bosses were now threatening to fire people for putting an eejit like me on their radio station and about how I was never ever going to be allowed back into the building. Well, hell, I deserved it. I had gone and blagged myself into a job I was clearly not capable of performing, exactly as I had done with the Time Out listings fiasco and the lost cinema and the angry punters on the phone and all the rest of it. The LBC bosses may even have spoken to Geoff Andrew and had their suspicions about me being a lying useless fake confirmed.

  ‘It’s just that,’ she resumed valiantly, ‘we all kind of liked it last time when you sort of pretended that you didn’t know what you were doing.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You know, last time when you did that thing about pretending to be making it all up on the spot, as if you’d just walked into the room and said the first thing that came into your head.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The goofy thing. The funny thing. The “I’ve got no idea what I’m doing here but I’ll give it a try anyway” thing. Your act. I mean, we all know it’s an act, but we thought it was funny.’

  I was stunned (yet again). And shocked. Shocked and

  stunned. Positively Rutled.

  ‘You thought it was … funny?’

  ‘Oh yes, but in the way you intended obviously. We were laughing our heads off in the control room. At one point I think the engineer even started to think that you weren’t putting it on. But it was really entertaining, even if you weren’t interested in the videos which, let’s be honest, most people aren’t.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’

  ‘No, not really. After all, it is first thing on a Sunday morning. Most people are just tuning in to be entertained. Which was sort of the problem today.’

  ‘You didn’t like what I did today?’

  ‘Oh no, like I said it was fine, absolutely fine. If a bit … boring.’

  ‘Boring?’

  ‘Yes, well, you know, a bit downbeat.’

  ‘But I did review the videos.’

  ‘Yes, you did review the videos.’

  ‘And my reviews were considered, and balanced, and sensibly delivered.’

  ‘Sensibly delivered. Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t like them?’

  ‘Not as much as the funny ones, no.’

  ‘So you wanted me to be funny?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And to sound as if I didn’t know what I was doing?’

  ‘Yes, sort of.’

  ‘And to speak as if I was making it up as I go along?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, drawing herself closer, somewhat conspiratorially, ‘we’d just prefer it if you didn’t sound like you were reading a script.’

  ‘Which I did today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because today I was reading a script.’

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘Whereas last time I wasn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was just “making it up”.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She smiled brightly, shook me by the hand (firm but fair) guided me toward the exit, and the next thing I knew I was back out on the deserted street with the same feeling of having been unsuspectingly violated.

  Several years later I would come to recognise the wisdom of this advice, and to accept that I have probably built my entire radio career aro
und the principle of ‘pretending not to know what you’re doing and sounding like you’re making it up on the spot’. The only thing is I have never pretended – I have never known what I am doing. It’s so much easier when it isn’t an act – when you are genuinely incompetent. It also helps when you are right. And I am both of those things. Incompetent, but right.

  But standing out on that deserted street in London without even my mother to call for reassurance (I hadn’t told her about the repeat appearance after the disaster of the first) I felt nothing other than despair and defeat. I had tried my best to be good at something and I had wound up being even worse than I was the first time round. Hell, as far as I could see I didn’t even know the difference between good and bad any more. I was lousy at listings and even worse at radio. I had run away from Manchester only to blot my copybook in London and the walls were closing in. Any minute now someone was going to blow the whistle on my budding career and I was going to be revealed for the talentless fraudster that I truly was.

  That I truly am.

  I needed to escape.

  I needed to put clear blue water between myself and my very public failures.

  I went home and listened to Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ third album Don’t Stand Me Down and heard Kevin Rowland speaking to me and me alone, impeaching me to ‘Go west, go west young man …’.

  So I did.

  Chapter 4

  CALIFORNIA ÜBER ALLES

  Like Withnail & I, who went on holiday by mistake, I arrived in New York more by accident than design.

  I was aiming for Los Angeles, following in the footsteps of my close friend Tim Polecat who was sending back daily reports about how much better it was than England because the restaurants actually understood the meaning of the word ‘service’ and the garage owners didn’t make that oddly British tooth-sucking noise every time they looked under your bonnet meaning you were about to be screwed for a grand and your car wouldn’t be ready till Wednesday. Tim used to live in Mill Hill, and it was there that he and I had cemented our friendship over a shared appreciation of the complex time structures and artistic merits of the entire Planet of the Apes movie cycle which (as we know) played such an important role in my political education. We had also bonded over a mutual belief that the seventies celluloid car-crash Caligula was actually some weird form of masterpiece, rather than just an expensive porno flop with big-name stars like Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and Sir John Gielgud talking in between the interstitial Penthouse Pet sex scenes. Several years later I would oversee a clumsy but effective Channel 4 recut of Caligula which removed all the hard-core porno shots (which had been stuck in willy-nilly by Penthouse -owner-cum-movie-producer Bob Guccione) in a belated attempt to prove that Tim and I were on to something. When Guccione’s lawyers started making threatening noises, I took it as proof that we had been right all along.