Are We Live? (16 page)

The grand dame of British acting talent, Helen Mirren, is as charming onscreen as she is off it. But early on in her career, a rather prickly Mirren took offence at Michael Parkinson’s line of questioning during an interview on BBC1 in 1975.

Proceedings got off to a shaky start when Parky introduced Mirren using press quotes that variously described her as ‘the sex queen of the Royal Shakespeare Company’ and ‘especially telling at projecting sluttish eroticism’ – neither of which appeared to endear Mirren to him.

She then misunderstood him when he called her ‘a serious actress’ using air quotes (Mirren: ‘In quotes? What do you mean, in quotes?’), and refused to play ball when he spent most of the interview trying to talk to her about her equipment (i.e. body), whereupon she (perhaps, understandably) came over a bit coy.

This time it was Parkinson himself who got a bit riled. While interviewing popular entertainer Rod Hull and his puppet Emu on BBC 1 in 1976, poor Parky was faced with an overexcited bird …

In an encounter of increasing aggression, the puppet tried to overrule the poor presenter. After flooring Parky and throwing away one of his shoes, the bird then nipped the presenter on the arse. Parky finished the piece with, ‘I knew I should never have booked you!’

Parky wasn’t the only celeb to face the relentlessly prodding beak of the puppet Emu.

In 1983, on ITV’s
Good Morning Britain
, Emu tossed aside host John Stapleton and co-host Nick Owen’s script, with pages flying all over the set. Emu could then be seen repeatedly nipping Owen’s bottom for the entirety of the show’s closing credits.

In 1981, on BBC 1’s
Lena Zavaroni and Music
, the show’s eponymous – and clearly terrified – star was forced to front a segment in which Rod Hull promised to demonstrate how to clean a pet bird with a brush. After asking Zavaroni to help scrub Emu’s feet, Hull spent the majority of his appearance attempting to pin down the bird shouting, ‘I’ve got him! Scrub his feet!’ Alas, it was all a ruse, allowing Emu to grab the brush and clean Zavaroni’s head with it.

In the 1990s, on Channel 4’s hip TV show
The Word
, Emu took a special shine to the US gangster rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg. The hip-hop star patted the bird’s head politely at first, but all hell broke loose when host Mark Lamarr produced his own (rather mean and considerably larger puppet) and began to attack another guest. Amidst the chaos, Snoop could be seen pushing Emu away, before trying to rip his head off. Lamarr then asked Snoop, ‘Do you have anything like this on TV shows in America?’ Snoop said absolutely nothing.

The annals of television are packed full of irate presenters and slightly mad guests …

In 1983, on Channel 4’s
Loose Talk
, in what’s reported to be his first appearance on television,
Private Eye
editor Ian Hislop managed to clash with no less a figure than rock’s most famous, gravelly voiced troubadour, Tom Waits. The problem was, Hislop didn’t think Tom was talking loud enough.

Hislop later said of his first foray into television interviewing: ‘I had to talk to a man called Tom Waits, who had flown in and had what was called “jet lag” – as celebrities call it. I think he’d put a huge amount of jet lag up his nose.’

Here’s how the awkward exchange went down:

Tom Waits
[haltingly, and very quietly]
:
   Part of the reason I’m here is that I have a new piece of work that’s out …

[An uncomfortable silence.]

Ian Hislop:
  Can I suggest you plug it a bit louder? I mean, if that’s what you’re over here for.

Waits:
  I’ll plug it my own damn way, you know?

Hislop:
  It’s just very soft.

Waits:
  Well, I think you can hear me, can’t you?

Hislop:
  Yeah, but I’m fairly near.

[At this point, Hislop simply turned in his seat and looked, baffled, at the three other guests – all three of whom failed to rescue him.]

In what would turn out to be one of his most explosive appearances ever (and that includes his performance on Oprah’s sofa), Tom Cruise was invited to talk to Matt Lauer on NBC’s
Today Show
in 2005 about psychiatry and anti-depressants.

Overusing the host’s name (his sentences were punctuated by a chorus of ‘Matt, Matt, Matt’), Cruise waxed lyrical about his thoughts on actress Brooke Shields’s choice to take antidepressants to treat post-natal depression. His comments included the following crackers:

  I’ve never agreed with psychiatry …It’s a pseudoscience.

  Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?

  You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.