Читать книгу Being Davina - Nigel Goodall - Страница 13

By the time Davina joined MTV’s Most Wanted as a guest presenter in 1992, the Europe division of the American cable channel had firmly established itself as a full service network, and the biggest threat yet to terrestrial television. Offering news, sports, sitcoms, documentaries, cartoons, game shows and other traditional television fare, the channel was building on its own reputation of being by far the most important outlet for music video programming.

According to Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture, and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York, MTV is ‘the only television entity of any kind that ever had a generation named after it. We don’t even have the CNN generation, but we have the MTV generation. This came out as the centre of the universe for the demographic of young people and it managed to bring together people who would have been very disparate in what radio stations they listened to. But they all came together in this one television hangout.’

Perhaps most impressive about MTV was just how quickly it caught hold of youthful psyches in the early 1980s. It seems that, as suddenly as the appearance of the Rubik’s Cube, a line was drawn in the schoolyard sand. Either you had seen the new Go-Go’s video on MTV, or you were one of those who didn’t have cable television. TV Guide journalist Jennifer Graham agrees: ‘I was really, really into it. It was such a huge event, everyone was talking about it. It defined pop culture for us at that time.’

Certainly, many in the entertainment industry refer to those younger than 20 as ‘MTV babies’, because the station had such a major impact and influence on the way television programmes were then produced, and still are today. If nothing else, MTV was the one network that pioneered and introduced the fast-paced ‘in your face’ style of programming and advertising with quick cuts, layered graphics, multiple messages, loud audios, high-impact visuals, frenetic bursts and random transitions. Not before or since has there been a style that has affected a generation so much and its programming of every media type.

So is it any wonder that it was Davina’s dream to work for the network while its success was still growing in Europe, or that she saw it as the perfect medium to launch herself into the world of television presenting? Not that she was in any rush to quit her job at Models One quite yet. She was only too aware that if everything was to go pear-shaped in her bid for fame, she would at least have a job to fall back on. The annals of television are littered with corpses of would-be star presenters who on any one day can wake up to the news that they have been dropped and replaced in favour of another new face. Even the lists of the ones who have in the past successfully moved from radio to television and then disappeared were endless.

Sixties DJ Simon Dee was perhaps the prime example of such success turned sour. Dee, one of the first voices of British offshore radio, joined Radio Caroline in 1964. One year later, he was the first pirate broadcaster to become a national star when the BBC offered him a show on the Light Programme. As well as his radio programme, he had a flourishing TV career and his Saturday-evening BBC chat show Dee Time was an enormous success. For a time he could do no wrong. But, by the end of 1970, after London Weekend Television prematurely terminated his contract just a few months into his late-night chat show, his position as the media golden boy faded into oblivion.

Not that Davina was about to be put off by such tales of woe. ‘I got on the show by purely persevering. It was my first big break and they put me on in the middle of the night so I could make loads of mistakes. They kept pulling me into the office and saying, “Calm down, you’ve got the job now!” But I was eager to please so they couldn’t shut me up. I was like a coiled spring. I found it was my niche and that’s what I really enjoyed, but being confident in front of an audience is something I’ve had to learn.’

Another DJ, John Barry, from the 1960s club scene, would agree with that summation. ‘I must have been about 16 at the time and had just started going out to discotheques (as they were called then). And, in every one I went to, there was a disc jockey from one of the offshore pirate radio stations, and it kind of hit me: “Wow, these guys are really popular!” And on top of that I was also listening to stations like Radio London and Caroline 24/7, so I was pretty much influenced by the jocks of the day, like Johnnie Walker, Roger “Twiggy” Day, Dave Cash and, a bit later, Emperor Rosco, and to the music they were playing on air. So I decided that was what I wanted to do.

‘What could be better, I thought, than having a job where you just play your favourite records and chat about them, and get paid for it? So I practised at home in my bedroom, with a small record deck, just playing the first couple of seconds of each record, taking it off, putting another on, or the same one back on again and was also doing the in-between record chat, over and over, using a hairbrush as a microphone in front of a mirror till I got it to sound and look right.

‘Next step was to march into a club and ask if they needed a DJ. No, they didn’t – but I kept going back to pester until they finally agreed to let me do a 20 or 30-minute spot two evenings a week as the punters came in. Although I wasn’t allowed to use the mike and wasn’t allowed to talk the record in, it was a start. So there I was just changing the records until the regular guy took over. And, for doing that, I got as much free Coca-Cola as I could drink in an evening!

‘So, after a few weeks of just putting the records on, I started to nag the club to let me talk the records in and, finally, after much debate, they relented and let me have a go one evening. And, as you do, I made a bunch of mistakes – silly things like having the mike switched to off for the first disc I played, getting tongue twisted on another, putting the wrong side of a record on, and so on. So don’t think I made much of an impression that first time. But the club was very gracious and gave me another try, and another, till I got it right!

‘And when I did get it right, it was great. Being allowed to introduce each record, well, wow, it was what I wanted and a great first experience of how to be and react with a live audience. But it was only because I persevered, probably to the point of annoying, that the club finally gave in, but it meant I got the experience that all first-timers need, whether club, radio or television.’

Of course, gaining experience for presenting on television was a lot more difficult than getting experience as a DJ in a club. You couldn’t just walk into a TV station and ask if you could have a go at it. Barry started out as a disc jockey in an era when the clubs and pirate radio stations were overcrowded with those keen enough to get seasick or drink as much Coke as they could in an evening. Although Davina would use the same perseverance as John Barry to get her first experience, it wasn’t as if fame knocked at her door, or was delivered to her on a plate. If she was going to succeed, then she was literally going to have to bombard MTV with letters, phone calls and tapes. She is said to have done that for three months until they relented, took her applications seriously and offered her the opportunity she had dreamed of.

Most Wanted, it seemed, was an ideal showcase for the innovative open style of presenting Davina had in mind. It was much the same as the other presenters on the show – Ray Cokes, Naughty Nina and Andy Cam – had adopted as well. The show aired every Tuesday to Friday evening and, according to many, its biggest appeal was that it offered viewer interaction, funny jokes, live music, famous guests and crazy competitions. Though some may have been dismissive of the show, by the time it ended (four years after it began), it had an unprecedented huge fan following. Strangely enough, MTV had decided to call it a day while it was still one of the most popular shows on the network, attracting some 60 million viewers across 38 European countries.

Aired live from the MTV headquarters in London, the show was, without question, an amazing achievement for a programme that had started out with a very economic budget and a very simple idea to simply entertain with zany, wacky and off-the-wall entertainment. On top of the weekday broadcasts, there were the occasional Most Wanted weekends, which started in the second year of the show’s run with guests all very much in the musical mainstream and to the taste of the time. These ranged from Sting, Right Said Fred, Shane McGowan and Nick Cave to Crowded House, Take That and Björk. As with most television weekenders, Most Wanted was no different in coming up with ideas to grab as many viewers as they could and have them literally glued to their set from Saturday morning through till Sunday evening.

On one weekend, for instance, they set up cameras in two Hard Rock Cafés and had Davina, who now favoured striped jumpers worn with black miniskirts, coming live from Camden Market on the Saturday, and on the Sunday live from a fan’s home in Germany. And, in the run-up to the last series, Wicked Will (who would go on to become a star in his own right with Chris Evans on TFI Friday) took the show to a new level of madness with items such as ‘Live Public Club Bed’, ‘Devil Ray’, ‘Internet Ray Chat’, ‘Clean Our Souls’ and ‘Underwear Everywhere’.

To many a reader this must sound totally bizarre, but if you grew up in the MTV era then it was, as one viewer raved, ‘a truly wonderful gem’. After years of tried and tested terrestrial television programming, one can understand why many considered it the greatest show on television. Nowhere was that more evident than when the kids arrived at school the next morning. Soon after they tumbled out of their parents’ cars or the school bus, Most Wanted was the talk of the playground, where almost everyone simply raved about it. Much the same as it was in Davina’s day when entire classes couldn’t stop talking about the latest episode of Star Trek or Starsky and Hutch, or others would quote their favourite Monty Python sketches that had them in stitches the night before. Whereas Davina had probably raved about William Shatner, Paul Michael Glaser or John Cleese, now it was Davina and co from Most Wanted who were being raved about.

What is perhaps also interesting to note is how none of the other presenters from Most Wanted found the same enviable, almost unique level of success that Davina has. According to one journalist, it is her bright, brisk and bouncy personality that is just perfectly suited for presenting the kind of shows she hosts. But to Davina it was simply where she learned her craft. ‘Generally speaking, I got on very well with everyone because I like people. Most American stars thought I was bonkers because female presenters in America are all the same – thin, beautiful, nip-tucked. I pull faces and say silly things, and they found it disarming to be interviewed by a dingbat,’ she jokes.

If anyone could find a niche in television so reputably, then that person has to be Davina. She is, most agree, the one celebrity you can imagine having a good old gossip with over a glass of wine. Friend and confidante Jackie Clune would certainly agree. Not only does she confess to being a big Davina fan on a personal as well as professional level, but ‘I’ve known her for several years. We worked on a programme called Good Stuff back in the 1990s and, although we haven’t always stayed in touch, the minute she found out I was expecting triplets, she rang me to say she was sending me a maternity nurse as a present.’

The most memorable times that Clune remembers about Davina, however, are quite different to the glamorous, mature woman she has now become. These were the moments when ‘we did a silly piece about male strippers and walked out of shot with our skirts hitched up and loo roll tucked into our knickers, or the time she let me tong her hair à la Farrah Fawcett for a piece about chicks with flicks. Or, more recently, the day I arrived at her house to find her in pigtails and dungarees, a child on each perfectly toned hip, laughingly trying to pass off a just-cooked fish pie as her own work.’

It is a far cry from when Davina was an almost total unknown at MTV and was then beginning to familiarise herself with the technical side of television, as well as learning a great deal about dealing with people and the public. Most of her time on Most Wanted, she says, was more or less spent ‘just out on the street with roaming cameras and no audiences in sight’. But perhaps that was her greatest strength as a presenter, and still is. Looking back over her career today, it seems that is how she has spent most of it, and perhaps that is what makes her so popular with the public. She is, after all, one of the few presenters who can adapt to any situation in or out of a studio, with more ease than most.

As if to prove that point, by the time Most Wanted reached its final broadcast on 15 December 1995, Davina had already been recruited to present the first series of God’s Gift for Granada Television, but not many critics were convinced about it. Despite it being classed as an X-rated version of Blind Date, the television reviewer writing for Gay Times was unimpressed: ‘There has been a rapid sprouting of these cheap, cheesy lonely heart shows.’ At the time BBC2 had Singled Out, an MTV buy-in, while ex-Capital Breakfast DJ Chris Tarrant was hosting Man O’Man featuring 10 pieces of male eye candy and 200 overexcited women.

In an attempt to vary things, the queer card was played with four alternative shows. Budgets may have been tight because the opening titles, in which a yellow-painted man sporting vine leaves on his lower half is ogled by numerous leather-clad women, remained the same. At least Davina got off lightly, being described as ‘the miraculous, mouth-watering Davina McCall’. In each show five contestants are set six tests of manliness. In between all this (and similarly to the voice of Big Brother), there’s a ‘Voice of God’ played by Stuart Hall (It’s a Knockout) in his own inimitable style.

One particular show featured black aerobics instructor Gary, who was ‘shitting himself’ despite his 45-inch chest; recruitment consultant Jonathan from Salford, who claimed an inside leg of 35 inches ‘with a built-in extension’; James from London, a blue-eyed stunner, Crusaid volunteer and an apparent descendant of Richard Lionheart; the voluptuous drag artiste Dusty ‘O’, who was 25 years of age, and Nick, ‘equerry to the royalty of Blackpool’. Each time the show’s audience proved to be an extremely lively bunch, eager to participate in the six rounds designed to separate the Gods from the Geeks. ‘Anything could happen on this most abnormal of nights,’ accurately predicted Mr Hall.

The first round was ‘Stud-U-Like’, which gauged the essential ingredient of sex appeal. Eager to prove himself, Gary couldn’t wait to strip off in a laundry, juddering his butt against the machine (‘It’s fucking gorgeous!’), meanwhile Jonathan had a play with a shower and Dusty was given the job of vacuuming a rug from IKEA. The hapless contestants’ chat-up lines were then put under the microscope with ‘Smarm or Charm’. Witticisms varied from the jaded ‘Do you come ’ere often?’ to ‘Do you fancy a bit of this succulent bird?’ and ‘Is that potted meat or jellied roll?’

Still more nauseous, and surely enough to get phones ringing constantly at the Duty Office, was ‘Suck It and See’, an exercise in which the lads’ sensuous streak was checked out when they had to caress tummy-buttons with their tongues. Mucky faces wiped, the ‘dirty rotten rats’ were happy to dish the dirt ‘Dish in the Dock’, mostly to get their revenge on ex-lovers who slept around. One man had scrubbed a lavatory using his lover’s toothbrush, while another faxed compromising pictures of his unfaithful beau to the office. Worst of all was the man who told his boyfriend that his father had just died so that he could have sex with someone he’d just met in a club.

So desperate were these guys for a date they even did a 30-second party piece (‘Larf or Barf’) featuring a fertility frolic, pelvic squats, saucy comedic talent and a puppet show. It was so bad that four men were booed off stage, while the audience was wowed by the talents of Dusty ‘O’ singing her hit song ‘Glamour State of Mind’ (available on Pushka Records). ‘It just goes to prove,’ she said, ‘queens do have fabulous taste.’

‘Bare Essentials’ was a real test of machismo, in which homo-mortals stripped to their smalls in a last-ditch, 15-second chance to beat off the competition. Gary unsuccessfully sucked in his beer belly, Dusty gave us a glimpse of her pink gingham bikini, and the rest revealed a dreary collection of Calvin Klein-style briefs, with gratuitous bum shots galore. Over tumultuous cat-calls, Davina quickly responded to events by yelling, ‘That was the quickest undressing ever!’ So how did the audience choose their Gay God’s Gift? They pushed hankies into the contestants’ briefs. Nice! Ultimately, Nick was the chosen one, winning a purple sash, a tacky crown and a dinner date with a member of the audience.

The Gay Times reviewer felt sufficiently inspired to write, ‘I’m swithering as to whether Carnal Knowledge and God’s Gift are just affable programming or simply vacuous schedule fillers’. He went on to say, ‘I can’t seriously believe that TV companies think they’re offering a reasonable alternative to a gay viewing audience as I’m positive lesbians and gays would demand something a little less cretinous, even in addition to programmes like these. I know I have a reputation as a crabby old critic and that maybe I should chill out – after all, it’s all fun, isn’t it? OK. I’m safe.’ He finished by warning his readers, ‘don’t come running to me in five years’ time when your brains have all rotted from watching this sort of show.’

But, according to fans of the show, yes, it was slightly embarrassing but fun at the same time. Why wouldn’t it be? Never before had a programme focused on five lads who really fancy themselves and try to persuade an audience of randy drunken women (or, sometimes, gay men) which ones they really want to have sex with. And where else could you see a succession of quiz rounds that see the men show off their limited talents in several different areas while Stuart Hall maniacally eggs them on with his voiceover? And where else on British television could you see a final round of a game show that has contestants stripping down to their underwear, while the women vote as to which lad is the winner, and who then picks a woman of his choice from the audience?

Sure, no one can dispute that the tasks of a game show wouldn’t usually involve stuff such as licking cream out of a woman’s belly-button, or sucking her toes, men dressing up as women to prove they could laugh at themselves, singing, dancing, serenading and being romantic. As one viewer from the time recalls, ‘It was the first time I had seen Davina, and she was so loud and outrageous I thought she was a drag queen for a few seconds! But she was also perfect for the show though, and, when it came back for a second series with Claudia Winkleman presenting instead, it just went downhill because, compared to Davina, she wasn’t anywhere near as cool. I seem to remember the first show had Davina in a bright-pink PVC skirt and jacket, and one memorable moment when one contestant stripped down to a G-string, and started wiggling his bum at the crowd, only for the crowd – and Davina – to notice that he had some of his own excrement sticking out the back of his G-string!’

Looking back, would Davina agree with either of those summations? Probably not, but she does recall some of the letters she received from both sexes while working on the show. ‘Women think I’m really funny. And the men always started off, “I’d never normally do this, but…” My favourite was from a 76-year-old lady who told me what she would do to my God’s Gift assistant Glenn, if she were younger. I thought, “Great! I must be broadening my appeal.”’

Although Davina claims God’s Gift (one of her favourite shows) was her first adventure into television with an audience, the audience were, she shudders, ‘all so drunk they were just going to clap and cheer whatever I said’. But, as most critics would agree, she had the flair to steer the show out of its potential doldrums. And it was that knack that was to land her another show, this time with a much higher profile, and one that would place her firmly on the television map. It was as if she has this fantastic timing, as if she instinctively knows the good decisions for her to forward her career. And perhaps ‘instinct’ remains the quality that best describes Davina McCall’s choice of what shows to present. There were, however, some other obstacles to overcome before she could get where she wanted.