Call the Midlife (38 page)

No more than ten seconds later Jay Hunt, the no-nonsense shoot-from-the-hip, straight-talking Channel 4 controller calls me back.

‘How much time do you need and how good is this material you’re going to have to leave out?’

Of course, we’re already scheduled for ninety minutes, sixty minutes more than ever before.

‘Ooh, I don’t know, fifteen mins, twenty-five max. The stuff is as good as everything we’ve ever done. All potential television gold.’

‘All right, if you’re sure, let me see if I can make it work. Stand by.’

Five minutes later she’s back on the phone and the kids are back in the show.

‘Yes!’

That feels like such the right decision.

At 11.30 I go to record two radio interviews for
TFI Friday
– the first with Matt Wells from 6 Music. Matt co-hosts their Breakfast Show and actually performed on
TFI Friday
five times as a bassist in a band called Headlight. He couldn’t have been more positive about the show and the 6 Music crowd is an audience we need to reach out to. After Matt it’s Steve Wright, one of my broadcasting heroes.

Steve pre-records all his interviews and, like Matt, is very enthusiastic about
TFI Friday
’s return. There is a lot of love and goodwill out there for the show, much more than I dared hoped for. That said, there’s going to need to be for a new show to work, even a new old show with a proven track record; all the stars will have to be aligned, come nine o’clock tonight.

After Steve it’s back to New Broadcasting House for a face-to-face sit down with Mark Linsey re:
Top Gear
.

This may well be the maddest day of my life so far.

I’ve met Mark many times before. His demeanour towards me having warmed gradually over the years. Let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly the safest pair of hands for a good while. Serious telly people weren’t going to just welcome me back, give me a whole bunch of shows and forget about the train crash that happended last time I had a hit show.

But today, when I walk into the room and hold out my hand to shake his, he doesn’t even bother, just coming in for the full-on man hug. Fine by me, I’m comfortable with that. It also bodes very well for our meeting. A full-on man hug is not a sign that the person giving it does not want you in their lives.

He may actually be more excited than me.

I tell Mark what I think could and should be done with the biggest brand the BBC has ever had. The more I talk, the more his smile broadens to threaten the perimeter of his face. I’m obviously saying the right things. He becomes more and more animated. Heat meeting heat, energy meeting energy, two positives coming together and sparking off each other like flailing electric cables. Our combined heart-rate easily over 300 bpm.

‘Days like this are what it’s all about,’ he enthuses.

I couldn’t agree more.

‘Let’s just do a deal and make the show.’

‘I need to contact your agent.’

‘I thought you might say that. He’s downstairs waiting to get in the lift and come up.’

‘Perfect. Have agent – will deal. Let’s get on with it then. Off you go, good luck with tonight, we’ll all be watching.’

‘You’re on, Michael,’ I whisper to my agent of the last thirty years back down in the foyer.

I really have no idea what happens next, I never have. I leave it to Michael and whoever is on the other end of whatever it is we’re doing, and wait for the next stage. Usually this comes in the form of draft contracts followed by the first round of to-and-fro, give-and-take negotiations.

When negotiating there are conditions and objections. It’s vital to know the difference, with an objection being something you would ‘like’ changing whereas a condition is something that you ‘need’ changing.

In other words, a deal breaker.

I have only two conditions where
Top Gear
is concerned: full creative control – a single vision for anything in entertainment is
key to its success. My second condition being a minimum of three years’ commitment. This will tell me the BBC is completely behind me, come what may.

It’s 1.30 p.m. Finally, I’m at the studio, I’m in
TFI Friday
land, this is it nothing else matters now.

We begin by rehearsing Parts 3, 4, 5 and 6. Basically where we left off last night. The plan is to do that, then for me to go and have a sleep for an hour before coming back for the dress rehearsal, wardrobe and make-up before show time.

The weather people were right, it is the hottest day of the year so far – fact. Our studio is temporary, fashioned inside a derelict theatre that is soon going to be redeveloped; consequently there is no air conditioning whatsoever and hardly any windows or doors.

It’s like we’re in a giant oven. By the time we get our audience in here tonight, after a day of natural incubation as well as the added heat our massive studio-lights produce, it will be more like a furnace. I mean sizzling.

Massive cooling fans have been ordered and are on their way over.

Otherwise, the atmosphere is extremely relaxed and carefree, no tension whatsoever. Like it should have been back in the day but never really was.

The new script is getting new laughs from the crew.

I am on the verge of feeling too confident. I have never felt like this in a television studio before. We’re either about to get it very right, or fall horrendously flat on our overly smug faces.

Be humble.

Be calm.

Be in the moment.

These are my mantras for the day.

At 5.00 p.m. the crew break for tea and we set about rewriting parts of the script and rejigging yet again the running order. Danny has written a really funny opening but it’s quite wordy and a big ask in my head for the top of the show, when all I want to do is get on
with it. Danny agrees if it’s playing on my mind we should cut it. I feel a huge sense of relief.

Another last-minute glitch (not to say there won’t be others). The sack of feathers we want to cover the audience in the bar with, right at the top, has been deemed unsafe. We’ve used the same feathers tens of times in the past, but now Health and Safety tell us Brussels has deemed them ‘potentially fatal’. There’s a heated discussion – hilarious – over the killer feathers. Later it transpires that if we get them sprayed with the right coating we can go ahead.

Dress rehearsal is scheduled for 7 p.m., we are way behind. I’ve not seen my dressing-room let alone a bed and a sleep. I can feel my eyes going red around the rims, beginning to sting. But the window’s passed, time for Dr Footlights to do his stuff. Dr Footlights – the mythical medical man who gets live performers through whatever it is they need to get out there and do. I believe the technical term for it is adrenaline.

The dress goes well except for one thing. It doesn’t finish until . . .

. . . 8.42 p.m.

Eighteen minutes before we go live on air.

This is so not ideal, but worrying about it will only use up more valuable time, energy and emotional capacity I simply don’t have. I sit in the make-up chair, my face now bright red – a combination of internal overheating and sky-high blood pressure. I ask for the time, there’s now only twelve minutes to go before
TFI Friday
hits the screens again for the first time since 2000. Allowing for the fact I need to be back down for 8.57 so I can say hello to the audience and walk through the first few camera positions one more time, I now have all of nine minutes to wash my hair, get it cut, coloured and dried, get all my war-paint on and change into my show clothes.

Obviously that’s not going to happen. What was planned as a nice, relaxed, organized pre-show half-an-hour routine turns into a full-on Formula One pit stop. I have three hair and make-up artists
working on me all at the same time. It is no longer a question of how good they can make me look, just how ‘not that bad’.

At 8.51 p.m. Suzi bursts into the make-up room with Will, Danny and Barty in tow. The A Team, something big must be going down.

What now?

‘There’s something you need to know.’

‘Go,’ I reply.

‘Damon Albarn has lost his voice and can’t sing!’

‘What?’

‘Are you serious?’

What the fuck!

Blur have been our big coup since weeks ago when we revealed to the nation
TFI Friday
was indeed coming back. Not only that, they’re due to play not one but two songs for us: a big opener and the finale at the end of the show, the big finish.

Shit, fuck, bollocks.

All of the above and more. None of which I say out loud.

At this point fifteen years ago I would have gone ABSOLUTELY BALLISTIC. Of course, that would have not been in the least bit helpful. But such logic never entered my head in those days. I was permanently in the ‘no one understands, poor me’ wilderness.

Tosser.

‘So what are we going to do?’ I ask calmly, while quietly shitting my pants.

‘It’s OK. We’ve changed Parts Three, Four and Five around. We can tell you what we’ve done now or in the break after Part One, and then in each subsequent break after that,’ Suzi replies in a flash, her lieutenants standing steadfastly behind her. I like what I’m seeing, and even more impressively I like the confidence and defiance with which Suzi has delivered their solution.

‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Hallelujah. God, tell me what you want of me and I’m yours!’

In that instant, in that moment of make-or-break decision time I finally realize THIS is why we do what we do. This is us in battle: kill or be killed, big decisions call for big kahunas, we were on the
precipice of being outflanked by the ‘shit happens’ machine but we had sent it off yelping with its tail between its legs.

What a team I have.

What a ring of steel.

‘OK, do whatever you have to and tell me each new part as the last one ends, during the commercial break.’

The show that Will and I have lived with over the last four weeks no longer exists.

So what? No point in worrying about that now. Only Part One will remain as it was, but at least I can focus on getting that right.

Four minutes later, I’m down in the bar. It’s heaving with people, expectation and perspiration. A massive cheer goes up when I enter. I couldn’t be any happier. Life doesn’t get better than this. Sure, I look like shit, having ended up with a 1970s snooker player’s vampire quiff, tired eyes and the same jeans and T-shirt I’ve had on all day, but again, so what? I’m not exactly Robert Redford to start with.

In many ways it makes me even more relaxed. This is it – time to say goodbye to the television show that has given me so much, but nearly killed me in the process.

Toby the floor manager: ‘. . . and five, four, three, two, one – we’re on titles.’

CUE
TFI Friday
.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Friday, 12 June: 9 p.m.

The show begins as it always did, with me walking in from the main auditorium where the bands play. When the theme tune strikes up, the noise from the audience is louder than I have ever heard in a television studio. It reminds me of Super Saturday at London 2012 in the Queen Elizabeth stadium. Sometimes, if only for a few brief seconds, the sound cheering humans can make is extraordinary. Not that they’re cheering just for me: they’re cheering for themselves,
their own past, life itself, and some of the younger ones are cheering because they’re at a show they’d only ever heard about almost as if it were the stuff of legend, and now they are witnessing it in person.

I see the red cue light sweeping towards me on the techno-crane camera after spinning above the audience’s heads – we’re back in the game. Time to march into the bar and be on the telly for a bit. I fairly gallop along the gantry and up the final steps, gesture to the camera and before I know it, I’m back behind that famous old desk.

The opening sequence is now much simpler to run through in my head, a natural procession of moments linked to each other, as opposed to a list of jokes, that I have to get word-perfect in order for them to work. I don’t get on with jokes, never have done, they frighten the life out of me. I prefer pictures I can see in my head, that can be brought to life with colourful delivery as opposed to precise articulation.

Will makes his entrance, again to huge applause. We fire the now ‘asthma-friendly’ feathers all over the crowd in the bar with a movie special-effects giant fan. Immediately it’s chaos, like we’ve never been away, fifteen years wiped out in the opening two minutes. We’re back in the groove, only this time it really does feel like fun. Knowing the show inside out helps, even though it’s all about to change.

This approach is more
Toothbrush
than
TFI Friday,
definitely the way forward, I’m so relaxed. You have no idea how important that is when you’re on live television. If you’re not relaxed, it’s all you can do just to remember your name. And
remembering
is a million light years away from
knowing
. When you know something, you have the spare capacity to deliver whatever it is you’re doing with warmth and a smile, or whatever the situation requires.

So many people on TV forget to smile when they are supposed to be having a good time, even if they really are. Whereas the old pros can look like they’re having a blast, even though their heads are already in the car on the way home. I recall what Stephen Merchant said to me when I commented on the fact that he was about to go
into rehearsals for his debut play in the West End yet he seemed so cool about the whole thing. He told me he’d already learnt the lines back home in Los Angeles where he lives. All that remained for him to do therefore was get started and see what magic dust he could sprinkle over them. So obvious when you hear it put like that. And one of the most useful things I’ve learnt from a pal in our business.

That’s exactly what’s going on with me and
TFI Friday
tonight. My goodness, I cannot tell you the difference it makes. The show flies by and everything we do works. This never happens. Some things end up stronger than others, but literally nothing fails to hit the mark. It’s a unique experience, a new one on me. I know things are going well when I notice that, as the rest of the audience continue to shrivel up under the now almost unbearable heat, I’m actually not sweating at all. If you watch the show back you can clearly see there’s not a drop of perspiration anywhere on me.