Small Man in a Book (26 page)

That was the theory.

With the suitably plump accomplice selected and the eclair secreted, the audience made their way in and took their seats. I began my usual stuff about enjoying the show, telling everyone where the fire exits were and other housekeeping matters, before launching, with some considerable gusto, into my southern evangelist.

‘Do you believe in the healing power of weight loss?’

‘
Yes!
’ came the reply.

They were playing along; this was excellent.

‘Do you
belieeeeve
in the power?’

‘
Yes!
’

I was on a roll. This was the point where I began to milk it, to over-egg it, to take it too far.

‘I can’t hear you! Do you
belieeeeeve
?’

The reply was now a little weaker, not quite so enthusiastic.

‘Yes …’

‘Has everybody been good this week, has everybody been eating less?’

Maybe five or six kindly souls offered up a positive response, but I could tell that I was losing them. Best to cut to the chase and reveal my cake smuggler, then revel in the applause that would no doubt follow.

‘
Wait!
Someone is not telling the truth!’ I eyed the audience with shock and distrust, as though I had been betrayed. ‘There is a
sinner
amongst us! I will find you!’

I made a great show of scanning the audience, ‘searching’ for the lapsed slimmer. I thought I’d take thirty seconds or so to ramp up the tension, before making my great revelation. But as the thirty seconds came to an end, I realized that I had no real idea where my accomplice was sitting. Not to worry … she can’t be that hard to find … now let’s just think … what did she look like? I had no idea. I could conjure up nothing whatsoever of her appearance, not one single detail.

‘I know you’re out there …’

The audience began to sense that I didn’t know what I was doing.

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are …’

They started to shift uneasily in their seats.

‘I know there’s a sinner amongst us … [
gulp
] somewhere …’

Surely my little helper, my co-conspirator, would make herself known to me? I was dying out there!

She didn’t, she kept quiet – emboldened, no doubt, by the thought of the free chocolate eclair waiting in her handbag. By now I’d given up on the accent, I was just pacing the studio floor back and forth, searching for my betrayer. She was nowhere to be seen. At this point, after about fifteen seconds of silence, a slightly chubby man in the front row, squashed in next to his seat-and-a-half-wide wife, piped up.

‘We’ve come to lose weight, not to a bloody pantomime.’

I gave up, introduced the host of the show and got off as quickly as I could.

Believe it or not, I went on to complete more warm-ups after this experience, one for an ill-fated pilot for an afternoon show hosted by Simon Mayo, and another for
Hale & Pace
. In chatting to me after the recording, they proved themselves to be thoroughly nice chaps. I can only assume they hadn’t witnessed my warm-up.

Fast forward to 2004, and I’m standing in the wings at the BBC waiting to go out and welcome the audience to a recording of
The Keith Barret Show
while our warm-up man has the audience in stitches. It’s a still-unknown Alan Carr, mincing around the set, and he begins to talk about women who have piercings in delicate areas. On the one hand I’m wishing he’d tailor his material to my audience a little more – we’ve got Mr and Mrs Ronnie Corbett waiting to join me onstage, and I don’t want to put them off – and at the same time I’m thinking,
Damn, he’s good … my warm-ups never went like this
.

Alongside these sporadic bookings as a warm-up man, Jerry got me an occasional job presenting a late-night show,
Pick of the Week
, up at Yorkshire Television in Leeds. The show was a round-up of the ‘… and finally’ stories from various regional news programmes during the week. The presenter just had to sit there and link them, with perhaps the odd weak pun every now and then. When I say it was a late-night show, I mean it was a very-late-night show. It bumped around the schedules a little, but once it went out at five past three in the morning – so late it was early. I’d pray that an insomniac casting director might spot me and catapult me to success. The team that made the show – especially the producer, Maria Malone – were great, and the hotel I stayed at in Leeds had excellent butter. Other than that, it was neither here nor there.

I continued to write off for jobs: I auditioned to voice promos for Sky Sports, unsuccessfully (‘It’s a bumper Saturday of football on Sky! All the goals! All the action!’); I auditioned to become a continuity announcer at Channel Four (‘Now on Four, we join Richard and Carol for another
Countdown
…’) and got down to the last two; I was a roving reporter for a BBC Wales programme about the Tall Ships Race; I auditioned unsuccessfully for a Kellogg’s No-Nonsense Oat Bran advert (I should have known I wasn’t the type to advertise cereal); and I continued to send mountains of voice tapes off to agents, in the vain hope of finding representation and moving into the lucrative world of voice-overs, at which everyone told me I’d make a killing. In the process, I collected rejections from every voice agency of note in London. I made a TV pilot for BBC Wales,
Throw Another Log on the Cottage
– the splendid title was Jerry’s idea – and I managed to involve Ruth Jones and Steve Speirs, but it didn’t get picked up.

Earlier in the year, on the 3rd of January, I had noted in my diary:

I am currently £1,800 overdrawn. This is not good news as my current regular earnings are just £80 per week, of which 15% goes to Jerry and 25% to the income tax fund.

By 8th October the overdraft had increased to £4,000, although my earnings had also increased slightly thanks to a new editor at Radio Wales.

Gaynor Vaughan-Jones was more of a fan than her predecessor and chose me to host a Friday-night show that would link up with the new station Radio Five. Each evening, between ten and midnight, a two-hour show would be broadcast from a different region. We were the Friday-night slot; the Wednesday-night slot was taken up by
Hit the North
, hosted by the soon-to-be Radio One breakfast hosts Mark and Lard. Our show was called
Rave
, although if you were hoping for an Ecstasy-fuelled bout of loved-up arm waving in a field, you’d have been bitterly disappointed. I’ve no idea where the title came from, but it bore little relation to the content of the show, which began as a magazine programme with music and soon morphed into me doing lots of characters and playing a lot of music. I co-hosted with Alan Thompson, now one of the cornerstones of the station, and it was with Al that Keith Barret first raised his eternally optimistic head.

The
Rave
team, with Alan Thompson on the right.

He began as a voice. A silly, high-pitched Cardiff-accented voice called Keith, who would bounce off Al’s character Tony, who ran a mobile fast-food van. Tony was what’s known in Cardiff as a ‘chiefo’ (as in, ‘Arright, Chief, how’s it goin’?’). Al had the proud boast of having once followed Tom Jones into the toilet of an Indian restaurant just so he could stand next to him at the urinal. When Tom had finished and left, Al turned to his friend – who, it has to be said, had also followed Tom Jones into the toilet – and remarked, ‘He’s a bit of a chiefo, isn’t he?’ With that they heard a flush and Tom’s son and manager, Mark, emerged from a nearby cubicle, presumably having heard Al’s detailed character study. Tony and Keith were friends (‘Aw, Tony, I love you like a brother …’) but what Keith didn’t know was that, while he was out driving his taxi, Tony was enjoying the charms of Keith’s wife, Marion. And so it went; each week we would expand their world to include more and more ridiculous adventures until eventually they would break into song, ‘Grillin’ and Fryin’ ’ being especially popular with listeners.

When Keith made the move to television, his job as a taxi driver only arose as a way of making ends meet after Marion had left him for Geoff. In the original radio incarnation he drove a cab from the start, primarily because it made it easy for his friend to be cuckolding him, but also because it struck me as very funny for a man to be cheated on while driving round in circles. His name came about for two very simple reasons. Keith is a thin, sharp and, to me, very funny-sounding name, especially when spoken in an exaggerated Cardiff accent. It just is. Barret was chosen in deference to Shakin’ Stevens, who was born and raised in Cardiff and whose real name is Michael Barrett – the idea being that he and Keith were cousins. The curious spelling, with only one ‘t’, was not intentional. In
Marion and Geoff
, when Keith is on the phone to the Orange phone company representative he has to spell his name for security reasons. I got it wrong.

There is a small but loyal number of fans of
Rave
who remember all the characters we came up with. Dave Connors was the West Country businessman with his adverts for the Dave Connors Bathroom Wonderland, a bathroom furniture superstore that would get bigger each week, eventually including ‘a full-size Formula One racing track’. The ads always contained the mention of ‘a ball pond for the kiddies’ and ended with the promise that it was ‘all under one roof’. One week he tempted customers with the unexpected delights of a ‘fully working slaughterhouse, come and see how the burger gets to the table. And the kids can administer the electrodes themselves!’ There was Conrad Bolivar, the camp young German who loved to tap dance and talked incessantly of his one-man show, a tribute to the actor and raconteur Victor Spinetti. He would greet Al each week with the same cheery, ‘Yoo hoo!’ As the series progressed, we were introduced to Conrad’s Uncle Claus, a sinister man who spoke in an ominous low whisper. He wore nothing but a full-length black leather coat, and his pronouncements were always backed by the impending doom of Prokofiev’s ‘Dance of the Knights’ from
Romeo and Juliet
.

I played two presenters. One was the American Bob Goldentan, an aged Casey Kasem type, who proudly boasted of having been the host of
Lucky Lobsters!
(the only water-based game show for the over-sixties and a show which, in thirty years of broadcasting, had only suffered twelve fatalities). His British counterpart was Barry Shoulder, a late-night DJ who offered his listeners ‘a shoulder to cry on’ in times of personal crisis. I based his voice on the real-life DJ John Sachs, augmenting it with an extreme lisp. He would read out a letter from a listener each week, which would always concern someone meeting the love of their life, only to cheat on them when someone more attractive came along. The letter would end with ‘… and then I did something, I did something very stupid. Anyway, when we’d finished I looked up, and there was Dave …’ Barry would then play ‘Hard for Me to Say I’m Sorry’ by Chicago.

Perhaps my favourite was Jeremiah Fanny, the gravelly-voiced lead singer of the Fine Fanny Four, Bodmin’s finest trad jazz/folk group. He had previously been a member of Thru’penny Bit and would each week tell Al of his adventures, before attempting a song.

It was while working on
Rave
that I first met Sir Tom Jones. I had been a fan for longer than I can remember and, I hasten to add, long before he had come back into fashion with his performance of ‘Kiss’ on Jonathan Ross’s Channel Four chat show. I was there during the dark days too, proudly coming into school with a double vinyl LP of his rarely celebrated Canadian TV series. In 1992 he made a very good series for ITV entitled
The Right Time
. During the following rounds of press interviews I was able to arrange a meeting, for which I travelled up to London.

He was staying at a small and rather exclusive hotel near Bond Street and I was ushered up to his suite, clutching my little tape recorder anxiously in one hand. I was keen to avoid a repeat of my interview at a nearby hotel with Michael McKean in character as David St Hubbins of Spinal Tap, when half my allotted time had been spent trying to get the tape machine to work. (As I nervously flicked switches and plugged and unplugged cables, Michael offered words of advice in character: ‘Yeah, well, I suppose you’ve got to plug it in properly, you put garbage in you get garbage out …’)