Hubris, neediness and TV

FULL VERSION RELEASED FROM PAYWALL

Hi pals. As regular readers will have noticed, I am a sloppy and chaotic operator at times. I wrote this piece about my ‘career’ in telly earlier this week and fired it off with my usual neglect of basic sub editing.

Anyway, here is a properly edited version, with some of the important factual errors amended. I have now removed the paywall so all subscribers can read the full piece, including the bits about Girls Aloud, Eamonn Holmes and Bianca Gascoigne.

Love you, bye.

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Most people who have ever been paid to stand in front of a television camera have got a ton of ‘nearly made it’ stories and I’m one of them. There are way more aspiring TV presenters than there are shows to go round, so not everyone makes it big. Some of us make it fleetingly mediocre. But at least we acquire some fun stories along the way.

During my years of dabbling in the TV industry, I was promised the world by agents, execs and producers on numerous occasions. I screen tested for some of the most famous shows on telly. For a while in my twenties, opportunities seemed to come so easily that I never bothered taking any of them seriously because I assumed another would be along any minute.

I realises now that this experience was no different to most of my contemporaries in the TV presenting caper. The reason so many of us have tales about how we were nearly the next Jonathan Ross or Holly Willoughby is because the entertainment industry is full of bullshit and dreams.

Still, I have no complaints: I feel lucky to have tasted the excitement and absurdity of working in and around TV for a few years. It’s a daft and relatively easy way to earn a living and, if I never quite made it to A list level (or B or C for that matter), then what does it matter? I’m too thin skinned to handle fame anyway. Mind you, it was my deep insecurity that attracted me to being on telly in the first place.

I first got into telly after finding myself unemployed aged 26 when the magazine I had been working for went out of business. I was reduced to flogging old review copies of books and CD’s at the local thrift shop in order to pay the rent when, one day, an ex-colleague called to ask if I would like to do a guest slot on new youth TV channel he was working for.

The channel was called Where It’s At - one of a number of short lived outlets that popped up in the early noughties when digital TV started. It was aimed at ‘the youth’ (hence the cringeworthy title) and broadcast live from a fishbowl like studio in Piccadilly Circus, which allowed tourists and lunch-break office workers to gawp through the windows at the presenters while they were live on air.

I rocked up for my ten minute slot chatting about funny things that had caught my eye in the papers. It was a chaotic atmosphere which - strangely - put me at ease. I forgot I was on telly and just starting dicking about with the two presenters, trying to make them laugh. It seemed to go well and, as I left the studios, a producer handed me a crisp fifty pound note. I was so ecstatic that I went straight down the pub with the intention of spending all of it on celebratory beer. But somehow I lost the note on the way. When I got to the pub and discovered my pockets empty, I nearly cried. I assumed that would be the first and last time I earned (then lost) cash so easily in return for talking bollocks on TV. I was wrong.

A week later I received a call from one of the owners of the channel asking if I’d like to try out for a role as an actual full time presenter. The channel was a bit of a chaotic set-up, to be honest, and I became a beneficiary of that. Driven more by the desire to get paid than seek fame, I agreed to front a twice weekly three hour live show. Madness.

I was a bit nervous for my first show so I nipped across the street from the studios and sunk a couple of pints in a dimly lit boozer in the middle of the afternoon. Then I went on air and just rambled on and on into the camera, stopping obediently whenever the director said ‘BREAK!’ into my ear piece. I don’t remember many of the specifics of the content, beyond a slot in which I challenged the south London villain Dave Courtney to an arm wrestle. It was all knockabout fun. I can only imagine it came across as car crash stuff to the handful of people who may have had the misfortune of actually watching it on the telly. But I had a laugh and they paid me which was all that really mattered.

After a few months in which I clocked up about 100 hours of live broadcasting experience, the channel went bust and I was back to square one. Then another piece of luck came my way. A showbiz agent had seen some of my stuff on the channel and offered to sign me up. A week later, she said she’d got me my own show on Channel 5. (this TV lark seemed absurdly easy).

I remember getting the news while I was in Newcastle visiting an old school mate. I celebrated that evening by getting absolutely wankered in the local boozer. It was the day George Harrison had passed away so I decided to climb up on stage while a local band was playing and insist that they joined me in a rendition of My Sweet Lord. Word to the wise: Geordies don’t like long haired, paralytic Cockney whippersnappers disrupting their Friday night drinks. I was swiftly ejected from the premises.

The show on Channel 5 lasted a year. They let me and my co-host, the brilliant Anita Rani, do whatever we wanted: from writing the scripts to choosing the guests to rinsing our expense accounts. Once, the producer of the show was hauled up in front of channel bosses to answer for the 300 quid I had spent on taxis in a single week. Yes, that’s right, I was becoming a bit of a cunt.

After six months I was approached by Channel 4 to become one of the hosts of their new daily breakfast show, Rise. My agent convinced me that I could use the offer as leverage with my bosses at Channel 5. So it was that she and I went to the head offices of the channel, where me met the controller and demanded that he give me a five year ‘golden handcuffs’ deal that would allow me to invent and host a number of shows, across all televisual genres, guided only by my own whims. Bear in mind, I had less than a year’s experience on terrestrial TV and was merely the co-host of a Saturday lunchtime show with really poor viewing figures. Unsurprisingly, the TV boss more or less told me and my agent to go fuck ourselves. He made it abundantly clear that he couldn’t care less if I went off to Channel 4 and that he already had Scott Mills, then a young up and comer at Radio 1, lined up as my replacement anyway. Not only did I not get anything out of Channel 5, I had a last minute change of heart about working at Rise (it was getting panned in the press and my agent suddenly decided it would be a bad career move) so I just remained in my existing job with egg on my face. Ho-hum.

Mind you, it wasn’t all barmy demands and embarrassing knock backs. Easily the best bit of that year was a women’s magazine featuring me in a section called ‘Totty Alert’ under the headline (I’m not making this up) ‘Phwoar!’ Which went some way to healing the varied wounds of romantic rejection I had sustained throughout my adolescence. I didn’t quite see it at the time but being on the box and getting praised for the way you look and behave is basically a balm for the little bits of pain and insecurity picked up in childhood. In that sense, it played a similar role in my younger life to booze and drugs - and was only slightly less toxic.

After that show came to a natural end, I found myself briefly out on my arse again before the production company, ITN, offered me a role as a roving news reporter on their evening news bulletin. I had never seen myself as that sort of journalist but I had grown accustomed to having my face on the telly and money in my bank account so I couldn’t say no. I bought myself a new suit and started life as a bedraggled bloke stood in Parliament square, surrounded by protestors, drenched in rain, a mic in my hand and a finger in my ear, signing off my garbled reports with the words: ‘Back to you Kirsty.’

The biggest role I had during that period was as ‘anti-war correspondent’ - with a special brief to cover the mass campaign against Britain’s involvement in the invasion or Iraq. It was fascinating work which took me on numerous protests and introduced me to various celebs, politicians and veteran campaigners who ringmastered the campaign.

It’s easy to forget but one million people marched on the streets in 2003 in an attempt to convince Tony Blair not to back George W Bush’s war on terror. On the day of the march, I was accompanied by a young work experience lad called Richard Wild who offered to ‘watch my back’ while I carried out filming. There were stories of journalists being violently attacked but ITN didn’t want to shell out for a security guard to protect me. Richard stepped in to help, saying that he hoped to learn something about news reporting along the way. He was a big lad, very refined and well spoken, extremely courteous and very smart. He had little to learn from me, really. I was very grateful that he gave up his Saturday to help protect me from getting my head kicked in.

A couple of months later, after the war had started, Richard bought himself a camcorder, blagged some press accreditation and went out to Iraq as a freelance journalist, making his own reports and selling them to various outlets back home. I remember hearing about this and being amazed, but not surprised, by his resourcefulness and hutzpah. Then I learned that, a couple of weeks into his time there, he had been shot dead outside a library in Baghdad after a terrorist mistook him for a British soldier. I was heartbroken. I was also humbled and ashamed that a young man who was clearly destined to be a brave and brilliant journalist ever thought that he could learn something from the likes of me. While I was busy making use of ITN’s private car account and fishing for compliments from women’s magazines, he was out there on the frontline doing proper reporting. And then he was gone.

Shortly afterwards I got a call from a BBC producer who had seen some of my anti-war reports and wanted to hire me as the host of a new docu-series on BBC Three called ‘The Hunt For Bin Laden.’ It would have involved me doing two weeks of hostile environment training in England before heading out for a month to Afghanistan, where I would poke my nose about in the tora bora caves in pursuit of the world’s most dangerous man.

My agent said it was the chance of a lifetime. But she could also tell that I was shitting myself. So she told me to go home and read John Simpson’s memoir for inspiration. I did, and it only served to shit me up more. I turned the job down in favour of interviewing Lowestoft rockers The Darkness for The Guardian’s pop listings magazine. I wasn’t sure exactly who I was at that point in my life but I knew who I wasn’t and could never be: Richard Wild.

I became a rentagob after that. Hungover on The Wright Stuff at 9am in the morning, trying to make sense of the latest Blair/Brown rift in the company of Anne Diamond and Terry Christian. Debating teenage porn use with Diane Abbot on Channel 4 news. Sky News at the crack of dawn every Wednesday for ten years, sat beside Eamonn Holmes while he interviewed world leaders and I waited to interject with flippant asides about an escaped lynx in Dartmoor.

They asked me to screen test for the presenting slot on Big Brother’s Big Mouth at one point. After a couple of meetings, I was assured that I was on a final shortlist that was sitting on the desk of the channel chief. “It’s between you and Girls Aloud,” my agent told me. “Ooh, I love Girls Aloud.,” I said. “There’ll be no shame in losing out to them!” In the end, Bianca Gascoigne got the gig. I wonder if Girls Aloud felt as disappointed as I did.

Then there were the pilots. So many pilots. A breakfast TV show called Brown Sauce which I co-fronted with Mary Ann Hobbs. A football banterthon with me, Les Ferdinand, Graham Le Saux, Kirtsen O’Brien and a bunch of Page 3 girls. A video game review show with the late, great Caroline Flack. All of them made with commitment and optimism. Each of them poised to be the next big thing. Each of them rejected at the last minute for a variety of often ambiguous reasons (sometimes because of internal channel politics, sometimes because they were just objectively shit).

By the mid-noughties I was writing for national press regularly and had published my first book, so I no longer had the temerity to think of myself as a pro TV presenter. Broadcasting gigs were more of a fun and lucrative sideline to my day job. But still the industry would wink at me from time to time, tricking me into believing that maybe, yes, I would still become the next Barry Norman or Lloyd Grossman or anyone who had a face so famous they could stick it on a jar of branded pasta sauce in Sainsburys (this remains my ultimate career ambition).

I’ve since fronted documentaries for the BBC and, in a final throw of the dice, wound up doing a satirical show on RTUK which produced comfortably the most watched piece of telly I’ve ever made: the prank in which I paid a little girl to dress up as the queen and call Nigel Farage a racist.

Often, I look back on my time presenting on TV and radio and ask myself why I did it. It could be fun, exciting and challenging, yes. But it was also exhausting: to succeed in that business, you need to be constantly hustling, selling a side of yourself that isn’t entirely authentic and therefore takes a great deal of energy to sustain. You are up against innumerable rivals for the same handful of jobs - each of them just as ambitious and determined and possibly more talented than you are. Rejections, both big and small, are frequent. Feedback is public, widespread and often brutal. There are plenty of slings and arrows in the old presenting game, I can tell you.

So what made me want to do it? What kept me going through those rough times, pushing myself into the limelight (while pretending I was quite indifferent to it)?

Ego. Narcissism. Vanity. A desire for approval, validation and connection. A need to be liked. A need to be looked at and listened to.

And also, the money - which was often better than what I could earn elsewhere as a writer. Those are all the honest reasons I was involved in broadcasting.

Plus, I guess, I enjoyed it when things were going well. I got a buzz out of meeting interesting people, connecting with audiences, thinking three steps ahead, communicating with a speed of thought. On the good days, when I was on form, that was a great feeling. The best presenters are the ones who hit that form consistently over long periods. They make it look easy but their off-hand demeanours are in fact the product of years of effort and diligence. I was never that consistent.

But still, why did I want to do it in the first place? Why does anyone first decide: ‘Right, I want to be the person in front of the camera, wearing the make up, shooting my mouth off so everyone at home will see and listen to me and only me.”

Could it be that something was missing? I think there was in me. I think it was driven by an insecurity. I knew I was pretty good at talking. And I knew that the approval I got from people when I spoke made me feel good. It felt better than the praise I had got for any other jobs, like print journalism, because it felt so deeply personal. When someone praises your presenting skills, it’s like they are saying: “I like the way you look and talk. I find your appearance and personality appealing.” Which is basically the sort of affirmation I had craved all the way through school.

To get that sort of praise in adulthood, on a large scale, is fucking intoxicating and you just want more and more of it.

But like drink, drunks or anything else you use to fill a void, it is all synthetic and using it will eventually damage you even more. I’m not saying everyone on telly is an addict searching for comfort and distraction in the empty adoration of strangers but, let’s just say, people with those kind of difficult urges are often drawn towards being TV presenters.

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Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

https://www.thecalmzone.net

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@CharitySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/gambling-addiction/