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Sort of Famous

‘Are you famous?’ asks the wide-eyed friend of Alice, my eleven-year-old granddaughter. (I think Alice had been hyping me up.)

‘Sort of,’ I reply.

And in a way, that’s true. Especially in South Africa, which has been my home since 1970.

I have appeared variously on TV shows since the opening week of SABC television in 1976, when I did a book review on the arts programme Galaxy, and discussed for six minutes Harry’s Game, the first novel of a then unknown writer called Gerald Seymour. It was a groundbreaking thriller and Seymour became one of the genre’s best-known authors, with multiple international bestsellers to his name.

In the early 80s I co-hosted the TV show Prime Time, also on SABC. Directed by the late great Bill Faure, it was revolutionary in terms of its presentation, its glitz and glamour, and in its array of celebrity guests. I’d already had my fair share of celebs with BBC TV during the Swinging 60s, before my family and I came to settle in South Africa, when I’d hosted a show called Kate at Eight. I had interviewed everyone from the Beatles, fashion icon Mary Quant, assorted film stars – including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins – to, once, a talking dog (it barked, ‘I want one!’).

I’ve seen the Queen’s knickers (yes, really), chatted with Prince Charles, and interviewed prime ministers. I interviewed Pierre Cardin, Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone, and many more, now either dead, fallen from grace or just burnt out.

I was also sawn in half on live television. There were my feet on one side of the screen and my head on the other and a big wide space in between. To this I day don’t know how the magician did it.

But it was Believe It or Not, the radio talk show I hosted, that introduced me to ideas, stories and people that I had never dreamed of. Over the course of 20 years on Sunday evenings, I spoke to prophets, poets, prisoners, pagans, pantheists, witches and wizards. I listened to charlatans, Chinese healers, archbishops, the Dalai Lama, agnostics, atheists, leaders of cults, nuns and priests. I watched faith healers at work, met people who had had near-death experiences, people who had talked to angels or seen ghosts, and those who communicated with their loved ones on ‘the other side’. It was one of South Africa’s longest-running talk shows and I conducted approximately 4 000 interviews with the famous, not so famous and totally unknown. Most guests on my show had fascinating stories to tell.

Once I interviewed Jesus Christ – who was on the line from Southern California (where else?). He told me that there were secrets his mother had never told him. A listener immediately called in and said that obviously one of the secrets Mary had never told him was that he was stark-staring mad. However, we got along very well with one another and the next day I got an email (I still have it as a very cherished souvenir) in which he told me he had made me an honorary angel.

Shortly before this I had been chatting with the leader of a vicious homophobic cult in Kansas. So vicious in fact, that the US government passed a law against him. I didn’t get on as well with him as I had with Jesus the Puerto Rican messiah. In fact the Kansas cult leader urged his followers to put a curse on me and my family.

The Turkington Curse. For all I know it might still be there on the web. However, nothing happened to me or my family although, rather mysteriously, the radio station’s transmitter was struck by lightning the following day and went off air for 24 hours.

Later in life, I turned to full-time travel writing and, like Shakespeare’s Puck, I have now girdled the world several times and continue to do so. The thing about travel writing, as I tell young eager journalists and wannabe travel writers, is that you won’t make any money but you will travel the world at somebody else’s expense.

So … sort of famous.

There are a lot of good things about getting older. When you’re young you want everyone to like you and you want to make an impression. When you’re old you don’t give a damn. You know who you are. You know what you’re good at and not good at, and you’re not scared to say so.

I have experienced life to its fullest and I’ve learnt much along the way. Now I would like to share some of my experiences with you, and for you to meet a few of the people who have touched my life and impacted on my thinking in some way.

I am inviting you to come with me on a journey, not only to some of the world’s best-known destinations, but also to some places you perhaps might never have heard of. Maybe we’ll even travel beyond this physical world to other, still unknown, realms.

Leave your baggage at home so that you’ve space in your mind and heart to gather some new stuff.

All the people you’re going to meet in these pages are real and all their stories are true.

I hope they will resonate with you in one way or another, perhaps bring you some clarity, acceptance, knowledge – even power.

There is always a story.

So let’s begin.