When I left ‘Good Food Live’, I took myself off to America. Sunny San Diego to a health retreat, The Optimum Health Institute.
It cost a fortune. The rooms were spotless and the grounds spectacular..
Big purple butterflies fluttered by, often landing on your shoulder to sip your salt.
The regimen was fierce.
You had to drink your weight, every morning, with a concoction called Rejuvilac.
All food was raw, served up in tiny quantities. Mondays to Thursday seed cheese and salad. Thursday was juice day. Just juice. Every day we would queue by the juicers. Squeezing the life out of bunches of freshly grown wheat grass. I can smell that pigging grass a mile off, it now makes me gag. On Sundays we were allowed out to visit a raw food restaurant. Guacamole was the dish gorged by all. Stuffing that creamy avocado into our mouths like starving animals, which of course we were.
The Optimum Health Institute is frequented by rich Americans, and an occasional Britisher like me. Everybody came with health issues. Me to lose five stone of gourmet dinners I had eaten every day for years. Diabetes, cancer, metal toxicity.
It was a truly international place Rita from Singapore, him from Liverpool and me from London. The food was only part of the process. I went for 21 days, they say it takes that long to break q habit. Apart from juicing we had to poke a pipe up our arse. Every day, after weighing in, drinking freshly squeezed grass, every day after yoga and meditation, we all went into our rooms and stuck a long pipe in our derrieres. For three weeks I plumbed the depths.
The inmates were lovely. Hollywood starlets, regulars who go every year fo a proper de-tox and a man who ground his teeth so loudly you could hear him before he joined the party.
The click clack of browning molars coming down the corridor.
He worked in thr White House. Couldn’t read until he was 15 then was introduced to Buckmast Fuller. So impressed was the grinding genius that he taught himself to read and ended up in the Presidential offices. He would shout
‘The trouble with this country is speech radio’.
I wasn’t familiar with talk radio, although I had come across Shock Jocks before.
‘The trouble with this country are arseholes on speech radio making aimless conversation. Right wing wankery.’
I lost two and a half stone, returned to England and started a job on speech radio.
A feller called from London’s Biggest Conversation.
‘Can you come and be one of our personality presenters?’
I thought about it for twenty seconds.
LBC beckoned. From sticking pipes up my bum I landed in a sea of effluence.
Speech radio is unique, predicated on news storylines and gossip. Obviously telly is different. telly is visual, radio ain’t. No shiny hair and pretty smiles necessary. The wireless couldn’t care less about your apperance. Although we did shower. Baby doll pjs with hob nail boots could be the order of the day. I liked the ostensible freedomw.
After 30 odd years of stage and screen I joined the ranks of LBC.
My agent, at the time, negotiated a reasonables fee – peanuts compared to the telly box. But I had a sense o security.
My assigned producer would sit on top of a metal filing cabinet, like a gnome, and teach me the secret of talk radio.
Aimless conversation had to be guided
The gnome taught me how to listen.
How to steer a conversation
How to contain my rage
How to not interrupt
And How to build an audience
‘Think it.’ he would say.
We started with 146,000 liseners.
‘Think the numbers up.’ said my mentor.
So I did and soon our figures improved.
Radio is highly pressurise. Only a few jobs, which people hold onto.
Each year the RAJAR – Radio Joint Audience Research – figures come out, measuring radio audiences in the UK.
If your numbers are down the bosses think nothing of humiliating you in front of your colleagues.
Most people think of radio as cosy, it is in fact as cut throat as the rest of the entertainment industry.
When I first started LBC was in Lisson Grove, near Portobello Road, I had no idea how to get there. Wandering round the streets of West London I stopped a car.
A young woman was driving, her husband sitting next to her.
‘Where’s Lisson Grove?’ I panicked. Live shows go out on time and I was perilously late.
‘Go Left. Go left’ said the man impatiently.
Possibly the first time he had ever uttered those words. That human sat nav was David Cameron.
.
It was a tiny studio. Rule number one do not eat too close to a show, burping is not allowed.
I never learnt how to drive the desk which meant I was expensive, always needing an engineer.
The gnome said in a three hour show subjects are divided into fifteen minute segments. Scouring the newspapers for topics, watching the news and staying alert – always.
When LBC moved to Leicester Square.I was beginning to get the hang of it.
Audience figures went up and I walked into work every week day.
Ideas would spring up on the Mall, in St. James Park and Trafalgar Square.
Working with experienced producers wax exciting. Guiding you in your ear, laughing at your jokes, and most importantly managing the callers.
I was always nervous; would I be fluent enough? Would I Know what I was talking about?. My mother, an avid listener, took notes and always praised me, necessary since you can’t see the whites of the audiences eyes.
My boss at the time was a control freak. He was reprimanded a year after I left and found guilty of bullying.
We worked in a big open open plan office. Sharing desks. I was talking to a young woman he’d made cry. The boss clapped his hands, like an infant school teacher.
‘I beg your pardon.’
He clapped his hands, aloft like a Spanish dancer.
‘You’re here to work.’
I stood up.
‘Are you questioing my authority’ he bellowed.
‘Fucking right I am.’
There were secret fist bumps and silent applause,
He dithered.
‘Do you want me on your programme?’ I asked
Silence.
I gathered my things and walked. 45 minute before a live show. It had now became his problem.
I sprinted to Charing Cross station and jumped on a homeward bound train.
I’m told I had huge support, but like any oppressive regime people kept schtum, afraid of losing their jobs.
I was finally sacked.
The curse of speech radio, aimless conversations and back stabbing had entered my life.
I then secured a gig on BBC London.
Vanessa Feltz, Robert Elms, and Tony Blackburn,you can imagine. But that’s another story.