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Chapter 4

Enter Sandman

I arrived on set at 1 Leicester Square, the MTV chat show vehicle created for me, fully formed. The junky they formerly employed had died, predictably, at twenty-seven. Now, thanks to Big Brother and John Noel, I was employable. John, our fierce patriarch and himself no stranger to madness, had bullied me into the Big Mouth job, and he used his unreasonable force to get me a very good deal at MTV. I don’t mean financially, though it might’ve been, as I tend not to ask about money, I simply trust that John, and latterly his son Nik, know what they’re doing. What was more important to me on my prodigal return to MTV was control. I wanted Nicola and Sharon with me, Sharon who bejewels me, and gobs at me, and keeps me giggling. And I wanted to write the show with Matt. Matt didn’t work on Big Mouth – he wasn’t needed, the show was fast and flighty and with Mark and Ian on board it was functioning. This new show, though, on MTV, where me and Matt had met, from where I’d been fired for dressing as Osama bin Laden on 12 September and running with crack and smack as my “dual fuels”, this was the kind of “on the edge”, digital stab of madness where me and Matt could flourish.

We were to be joined by a new oddball, the show’s handsome series producer Gareth Roy. I’ve mentioned Gareth already, mostly in his capacity as a twerp – well, that is largely defining but he does have a job as well. He is a creative producer, and 1 Leicester Square was where I met him. You’d never know at a glance that this Hull City-supporting hunk is a French hornist, and likely you wouldn’t care, I mention it only because the introverted nerdiness required to master a wind instrument is in evidence every time he opens his mouth. MTV, as you know, is cool. It is cool above all else, its graphics, its shows, its attitude, its brand are all about coolness, so the fact that their cool new flagship chat show ended up being hosted by a twit, written by a berk and produced by a prat is worthy of note.

Gareth has qualities, of course, he’s funny and silly and understands TV, he’s sweet and thoughtful and charming and a fine writer. What he ain’t is cool. None of us are. Yet, somehow, the show was. So MTV must know what they’re doing. 1 Leicester Square had a beautiful set, trash burlesque, pink chandeliers and leopard-skin chaises-longues. Again, cool.

Geographically it was a nightclub space above, as the name would suggest, 1 Leicester Square in the West End of London, causing friend, comedian, quiz show smartarse and pilot episode guest Simon Amstell to memorably say, “1 Leicester Square? It sounds so glamorous. Number 2 Leicester Square is an Angus Steak House.” We cut that from the show; the guests are not encouraged to have better lines than me. We didn’t, it stayed in. It was only a pilot.

Nik Linnen, my manager, John Noel’s eldest, made an early foray into the perspicacity that would soon make him my partner and move his magical, volatile father into an “upstairs role” (where our more frequent and ultimately loving clashes of character would be curtailed) when he observed that whilst, in the UK, MTV is an obscure satellite channel, in the US it is an institution; meaning the standard of guests the show would attract would be unusually high. He also reasoned that if I met Hollywood movie stars there would be an opportunity for me to impress them – and “Who knows what that might lead to?” This was a shrewd judgement. A few years earlier making a decision that hinged upon me impressing movie stars would be evidence that you ought be offered a residency in “everyone’s favourite nuthouse” – Broadmoor – but now, a few years clean, my ambition gleaming, surrounded by a good team and with a lovely new hairdo, the proposition was prudent.

1 Leicester Square was, indeed, “where the stars came out to play”. Well, maybe not to “play”, but to promote their movies and products and contend with some very unusual questions. With enough insanity in me to keep me amusing but not enough to get me banged up, the shows had a lovely vibe. With guests including Tom Cruise, Jamie Fox, Christina Aguilera, Will Ferrell and Jack Black, it was an embarrassingly rich canvas upon which to jizz up some lunacy.

When Will Ferrell came on, who I think may have been the funniest guest, I asked this question, written by Matt:

“Will. You said your wife has got a big head. If you could make a pact with the devil where your wife’s head would get bigger but it would make you the biggest star in the world, would you accept the pact?”

He reflected, mock-squirmed, then said, “Yes, I would accept the pact.”

The next question was, “What if every time it got bigger it caused your wife pain? Would you still accept this pact?”

Will looked at me like we were in a cat-and-mouse courtroom drama. “Yeah, I would. Damn you,” he grimaced.

Then I called Will Ferrell a cunt whilst playing the part of a cockney mugger in an improvised sketch, and you could see his face change. Will Ferrell, reflecting instantly on the differences between UK MTV and US MTV, made a judgement on me as a comedic adversary, then, with childlike relish, he called me a cunt. It was truly an honour.

Jack Black came on with his Tenacious D partner, Kyle Gass. Jack Black, as is all too apparent, is a joy. Ebullient, wild-eyed and sweet. The commodity we buy into when watching his films is tangible when you meet him. The pair of them were a right laugh. They ambled on in Paddington Bear duffle-coats and were twinkly and polite. It was Jack’s coat, however, that caught the attention of Gareth Roy. So enamoured was he of this unremarkable garment that it lodged in his peculiar mind, where it remained untroubled for two years straight, only to come gurgling out as a senseless faux pas when Jack Black once more entered our company.

Understandably I was nervous. I was backstage at the David Letterman Show, perhaps the most challenging talk show in the States because Letterman is so laconic a foe. If you displease him he’ll lazily bring you down like a lame antelope. I was mulling over such matters in my dressing-room, surrounded by now with a good team of trusted, highly professional colleagues – Nicola (Aunty Make-Up), Nik, Jack Bayles (Essex, sharp-dressing, quick-mind, West Ham fan), Ian Coburn (long-time promoter, harsh voice, as if sourced from a Beverly Hills Cop laugh) and Gareth. Ian’s measured drone draws me from my preparatory musing. “Russell, Jack Black is outside. He wants to pop in and say hello. What shall I tell him?”

Obviously Ian is being polite. If Jack Black is at the door, there is but one response: to welcome Jack and douse him in glucosey adulation. Duly Ian fetches him. Jack enters, unassuming and garrulous. I stand and greet him. One of the peculiarities of meeting famous people is the tendency to bend established protocols to accommodate them. For example under usual circumstances I’d introduce a newcomer to the group to all present with a cursory namecheck and nod. With a famous person you tend to eschew this ritual. Presuming they spend their lives encountering new people they’ll never see again, you spare them the rigmarole of all that ceremony and just say, “Jack Black – these are my mates.” If there were just one or two you might do names, but more than that it starts to feel tricky. Maybe Gareth felt short-changed by this slight, I don’t know. All I can tell you with certainty is while Jack Black offered up all manner of heart-stopping flattery – about my performance hosting the MTV VMA awards, and my turn as Aldous Snow in the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall – Gareth Roy was providing a metronomic beat beneath the conversation, contrived from the Rainman-ish observation that Jack Black was wearing the same coat.

“Man, I gotta congratulate ya – you did a swell job out there …”

Tick-tocking along under the compliment I can hear Gareth, chewing his way through a thought, like a mouse gnawing electric cable. “He’s wore that jacket on 1 Leicester Square.”

I try to meet Gareth’s eye, but it is trained on the jacket, a jacket upon which he is so fixated that had it been heroically returning from Vietnam, his interest might still’ve been thought excessive.

“Jack Black’s got the same jacket on. Same buttons, same hood. Same jacket.”

Jack, ever the professional, ignores the tinnitus of Gareth’s commentary. A DVD extra that no one had selected. “It’s great to see ya man.”

Gareth draws nearer. “It even smells the same. Crisps. It smells of crisps.”

Eventually the autistic soundtrack becomes so intrusive that I have to say, “Is that a new jacket, Jack?” A question I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking had it not been necessary to subdue Gareth’s Forrest Gump-ish detail fetish. If only, three months later, when editing a pre-recorded radio show I’d made with Jonathan Ross, Gareth had employed the same fastidious obsession with procedure, perhaps the BBC might not have been facing destruction. But these are thoughts for a later chapter, for now America is a long way away. We sit in the dressing-room at 1 Leicester Square devising risible enquiries to blurt at … well, movie stars.

The best question Matt wrote was this one: guesting on the show were a composite boy band constructed for a reality TV show from members of ’N Sync and Boyzone and a boy band called 911 (which is the number for US emergency services but also looks like the numerical date for September 11th, which is pertinent to the bad taste punchline). The question was: “So, Steve, you were in Boyzone?”

“Yeah.”

“Pete, you were in ’N Sync, that must have been fun, was it?”

“Yeah, yeah, it was.”

“And Chris, here it says you were involved in 9/11. What on earth were you thinking?”

He looked baffled. We weren’t allowed to use that.

Tom Cruise has an awareness of how he’s portrayed and constantly wants to be seen as ordinary. It’s one of the things that great big movie stars do, they don’t want to seem antithetical, insulated, overly-privileged and completely abstracted from their audience. They need to be accessible. We were talking about the birth of his first baby. Ours was the only interview he did in the UK, so quite a coup. The world’s most famous and glamorous man, smiled his ultra-violet smile and said, “Katie and I were sitting around on the kitchen floor thinking of names when–”

I interrupted: “You sat on the kitchen floor? Oooh, you should be able to afford furniture by now, Tom, watch yer ’arris, mate, you’ll get terrible piles.” This was a lovely, daft little moment that went some way to deflating the sycophantic tide of pink helium balloons and baby toys that inundated the studio that day.

Amazing women turned up as guests on that show. Kelly Brook, so beautiful and comely that I’d be prepared to fight any one of her consistently burly lovers for the privilege of brushing a hair from her forehead – if it was one of my own pubic hairs. Sorry. That was childish. She is beautiful and unnerving and from Rochester in Kent, dammit – which means she’s normal and could handle me. Dannii Minogue further demonstrated the hitherto absent tabloid interest in me when she dubbed me a “vile predator” – the papers enjoyed that. I think during the interview I’d politely flirted, such was my remit, and Dannii had passed her condemnatory verdict on to the press. I learned that the media are a mercurial force even when meddling only in tittle-tattle. If flirting can see you adjudged a “vile predator”, what language remains for murderous paedophiles? I must be aware of these newspapers, I thought. Pink came on, she’s feisty and a giggle; Christina Aguilera is a bit too perfect; I’d feel guilty if I got an erection near her.

There were an abundance of famous, glorious women and with my hair-trigger heartbreak mechanism scarcely a show ended without me scrawling a regrettable poem on to the dressing-room mirror. I still have an unsophisticated notion that women are ministers of redemption, that one day in the arms of a perfumed saviour I’ll be rendered complete. Perhaps it’ll be Juliette Lewis – she came on, we got on great, I thought she might be the one – or Rihanna, I foolishly pursued one of her backing dancers; had I not I could even now be sheltering beneath the umbrella (ella, ella, ella) of her perfection. Whilst 1 Leicester Square did not provide me with a wife, it did as Nik had hoped propel me into a new realm of artistic possibility when I was “talent spotted” by one of the biggest comedy stars in history, Adam Sandler.

He came on as a guest, bringing with him, as most performers of his magnitude do, an entourage including his legendary agent, Adam Venit, some writers, Jack Giarraputo his business partner and a bunch of Teamster-looking mates. We prepared in the usual ad hoc fashion, with me fighting tooth and nail to not go and see the movie he was promoting, Click. Gareth had to try and persuade me to fulfil my basic, contractual obligations. “Come on, Russ. He won’t come on the show if you don’t watch his film. Please?”

“Why should I? What’s it about? A remote control that can alter reality? It can’t be done! I will not watch a film with such an unfeasible premise.”

Having my own show had reawoken the prima donna in me. “Can’t you watch it and then tell me what happened?”

“No, mate. His people insist.”

“Can’t you fast forward to tomorrow after the screening, so I don’t have to watch it?” Secretly I knew I was being a ponce, so I yielded and agreed to do my job, for which I was, presumably, well paid.

When Sandler came on I was struck by how mild, pleasant, charming and unassuming he was. This caused me to briefly feel a pang for having been such a git about the screening.

“I saw your film Click, Mr Sandler, and if the Academy ignore it they are fools.” The interview, as usual, suffered from having no real questions in it and from being conducted by a man who rather enjoyed the sound of his own voice and considered Hollywood A-listers a senseless distraction from the improvised monologue.

There’s a distinction between the American character and the English character in show business. With us it’s a jaunty hobby, skylarking around: “What ho! Pip pip, tally-ho, let’s get some money and knock up a picture show.” The Americans make films methodically, industriously. They’re not overwhelmed by the “magic of the movies”, it’s a job. Adam Venit, Sandler’s Ming the Merciless-looking agent, who also looks after Sacha Baron Cohen and Dustin Hoffman, is exemplary of this mentality. “This ain’t my first rodeo, kid,” he once said to me when I complimented him on his fine work. Venit later told me that before Adam came off, Sandler’s entourage discussed the interview: “I wonder what Adam will make of that mouthy English oddball?” When they asked him he said, “He’s great, you should sign him, he’s got a future in movies.” They contacted the guest booker at MTV and asked him to tell me they were interested. I knew this was monumental. I’d always believed I could be a movie star, from the first time I spoke on stage it was my intention, but when those things materialise it punctures long-held fantasies with actual possibility and you have to make choices.

For this to happen I would have to negotiate with Nik and John and ensure cohesion without detonating Gelignite-John Noel, Nik’s dad and the man who Heimliched out my bellyful of demons. He is a man whom it is unwise to cross, especially as he’d just negotiated a fantastic deal with Lesley Douglas. I was to have my own show on BBC 6 Music, and if it went well it would transfer to Radio 2. John told me that Lesley had said they’d let me do whatever I want.

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