The Real Story Behind Yesterday's Richard&Judy Announcement

Stretched out on her La-z-Boy recliner about a month ago, my dear wife, Judy, switched off the vibrating headrest for a moment and turned to me with a quizzical look chevroned between her brows.

'You know,' she said, gesturing with her bar of the dark yet milky towards her favourite film playing on our 72 inch plasma widescreen, 'how on earth are we meant to compete with this?'

I looked up over my book and dragged my spectacles to the end of my slender and twin nostrilled Julius Caesar.

'Compete?' I asked, following the aim of her Whispa bar to the sight of Bruce Willis' first and best bloody vest staining the screen red. 'What makes you think we need to compete?'

Judy shrugged. 'Look at the time, Richard. It's on at the same hour as our show would be playing on Watch.'

'So?' I asked softly, never one to take Judy's worries too seriously.

'They work by different rules on satellite TV,' she replied. 'Unless you're going to start wearing vests and shooting terrorists in your bare feet, we're never going to attract a big enough audience on Watch.'

I could see her point. With bloody violence oozing out of Sky Movies pre-watershed, why would anybody choose to sit down and watch Judy and myself interviewing Simon Le Bon about his new apple orchard in Herefordshire?

'You worry too much,' I said, bringing the conversation to premature close. Judy shrugged and pressed the big red button the recliner's arm. The room was quickly filled with the sound of electric motors and chattering teeth, and I went back to my monograph on sub-atomic physics.

I thought no more about Judy's fears until last week when she was out leading her brass band in a spot of light regimental parading around the neighbourhood.

I'd come in after a hard day covering for Sarah Kennedy down at the BBC. I had the house to myself so I naturally slipped off my trousers and fed myself into my favourite dressing gown. Not only did the silk feel good against my skin but the ermine trim tickled my thighs in a manner both pleasant and relaxing.

It was around eight o'clock and I had punched in the code for Sky Movies. Alien3 was just coming on and, being a huge admirer of Sigourney Weaver, I decided to spend the rest of the night in her company. Soon I was sitting with a tub of Ben & Jerry's pistachio ice cream in my lap and was I tutting at the bit where the late dear Brian Glover disappears through the ceiling in the spray of an arterial fountain. That's when the phone rang.

I picked it up, slipped it beneath my chin and carried on scooping the cold stuff.

'Madeley,' I said.

'Dickie!' cried a voice.

A chill ran through me that had nothing to do with either Ben or Jerry wedged between my thighs. It was The Agent.

'I'm a bit busy,' I explained. 'Sigourney's down to just her underwear and a flame thrower.'

'I'm ringing with some bad news,' he said. 'Watch are having second thoughts about your Twittering.'

'My Twittering?'

'They think you're doing too much of it and you're being far too interesting.'

'Pah!' I spat. A pistachio arced across the room and stuck to the end of Charles Dance's proboscis.

'I know,' said The Agent. 'Rather foolish of them but they feel it might look a bit odd if your followers on Twitter got any bigger than the average audience watching you on Watch.'

'I see,' I said. 'So, you want me to quit?'

'Not quit,' said The Agent. 'They just want you to be a little less entertaining. You know… Take a leaf out of Philip Schofield's book. Make lots of meaningless statements like: "oh, that sounds interesting" and "I haven't thought of that but is it purple?"'

'Is it purple?'

'That's the sort of the thing they're after,' he said. 'Listen, I've emailed you a few suggestions. Give it some thought and tell me what you think. But you've got to change your ways Dickie. The people at Watch won't stand for any more of your nonsense.'

Well, after this conversation, my mind couldn't rest. With Sigourney still battling men in latex suits, I dragged my new laptop to my lap and powered it up.

It's Dell XPS Studio 13, which meant that my lap went from about -5% to something in the high scorching. Frankly, I was glad that my thighs didn't shatter like a red-hot alien under a sudden shower of cold water.

Date: Thu, 29 April 2009 21:29:11 +0000

From: ************** <*******@**********.co.uk>

To: dickmadeley@yahoo.co.uk

Message-Id: <4a065b155c354b3f9d41453f@*****.co.uk>

Subject: Your bloody Twittering

Mime-Version: 1.0

Dear Dick,

When are you going to learn? I've just come off the phone with the people from Watch. They are very displeased with you, Dickie, dear boy. They've been reading your Twitter account and think it's most inappropriate. They want to know why you can't be this entertaining on the show! Can't you at least get a few of your Twitter followers to 'follow' you onto Watch?

So, we've been banging a few ideas around and we think it's best if you stop being so damn interesting on Twitter. It looks bad for the show. Look at how Schofield does it. Can't you Twitter like him? He never once outdoes his show. Remember, Dickie, that banality is the key. That's why we want you to try a few of these @Schofe-like 'tweets'.

'Interesting. I like pudding.'
'I think that's currently unlikely.'
'Chicken? LOL. I'd rather have feathers.'
'I don't. Judy has the bigger thumb.'
'Yes but sometimes no. Other times: maybe.'
'I had one. I fell off and I couldn't glue it back on.'
'Ditto.'
'Perhaps.'
'Too soon.'

The list went on for page after page of this tedious stuff and, when Judy got home at ten, she found me blubbering in front of the TV, a bucket of melted ice cream at my side and the large shaved head of Ms. Sigourney Weaver looking down on my from the TV.

'When will you learn that she only ever goes as far as her knickers in these films?' Judy mocked as she dropped her trombone case by the door.

'It's not that,' I said and explained about The Agent's phone call and Watch's concern at my Twittering.

Judy's face hardened like she was trying to blow the high C at the end of 'The Thunderbird's March'.

'Well, that's it,' she said, coming to put a consoling arm around my shoulder. 'If it's a choice between your Twittering and our show on an obscure satellite channel, I choose your Twittering.'

I wiped away a tear or possibly even two.

'Really?' I gasped. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. Judy has often expressed how she frowns upon my involvement with social networking, comparing it with the time I took an interest in amateur operatics in order to wear lederhosen.

'Richard. You have to do what your heart tells you. If you really want to waste your time and talent making glib comments to thousands of strangers, then that's what you should do. I will not stand in your way.'

'Jude,' I said, pulling her towards me. 'You've made the happiest man in the mid-five thousand followers.'

And that's why, yesterday, we made the announcement that the show will be ending on Watch. To be honest, it's something of a relief. I won't have to endure constant questions about viewing figures and I will have time to explore new avenues. Watch will miss us more than we will miss Watch and our future is now an open book of our own writing. In Judy's case, it's an erotic novel based around her heroine, the buxom eighteen-century courtesan, Jemima Flirt.

I, on the other hand, will continue to Twitter, continue to update this occasional blog, and continue to explore the vastness of this island Earth, cloaked in the moonlight of opportunity, the heat of circumstance, and the twilight of accomplishment.

Or, as I put it so eloquently in my official statement, 'We will be doing stuff together and stuff apart'. And I hope you will continue to be with me as I do that stuff.

God bless you. God bless Richard & Judy. And God bless all who sail in us.

Jeremy Clarkson's Infinite Variety

I’m often asked if I find much time in my busy schedule to hate Phillip Schofield. I normally reply that I don’t give him much thought. While there are indeed a great many adjectives I would delightfully hurl at him like so many spanners wrapped in offal, these days, my hands are full holding a fairly broad-hipped opinion about people who watch ‘The Paul O’Grady Show’. They are the only people I currently consider the enemy and I would encourage you to do the same. Full-bodied eccentrics to the last, desperate like a constipative’s final gasp, they are full of that worldliness which leads them to consider cabbages the only fruit. To them a hosepipe ban is a cultural event and they donate their sphincters to medical science expecting to get tax relief. These are not bright people; as blind as a raincoat’s lining and as docile as gravy. Normally when I find myself in their company, I look for the nearest policeman and ask him to castrate me with his truncheon. Failing that, I try to disembowel myself with a coconut.

Unfortunately, last week, I found myself in far off Manchester with no policemen in sight and coconuts out of season. It was not the best time for one of these denizens of Transvestite TV to stop me in the street. I didn’t have high hopes for the encounter. He was a gnomish man who must have been pushing to peer up the skirt of ninety. I thought to make a dash for the nearby Athenaeum but he started to shuffle around me, examining the Madeley profile from side, back, and front, before he set a bead on my face and sighed. I could smell dumplings.

‘You’re looking old,’ he said. As simple as that. No small talk. No baiting it with compliments. Just a straight insult delivered with a slurp of his false teeth settling themselves back on receding gums. And then he was away. With the briefest of waves, he was back to the world of Scouse cross-dressers, cabbage and dry rubber hosepipes.

Yet had he waited just a moment, I would have explained that, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, age cannot whither me, nor custom stale my infinite variety. Let my face wrinkle and my brow sag, if they must, but you can never deny that my spirit is more youthful than that of many an angst-ridden teenager with a pension plan. It is why I care not a jot about looking my age. It also explains why I didn’t hold my tongue this morning when the doorbell rang and I found a strange man standing on my welcome mat.

Thankfully, he wasn’t alone, otherwise I might never have recognised him. Parked in the drive was a rocket car with AA Gill sitting on the luggage rack. AA gave me a wave as he always does; a flare of crushed velvet something special against the spare tyre.

‘We’ve come to take you for lunch,’ he shouted. ‘We’re off to the Hix Oyster and Chop House where we expect to make wry comments about the cuisine.’

‘Are you indeed?’ I replied and turned back to the tall man threatening me with a bleached smile the shape of scimitar. Without the clues of the rocket car and A.A. Gill to help me, I might have chased this stranger away with a few well times lashes of an umbrella. Instead, I stood staring at the poor man as I tried desperately to hide my disgust at the helpless product of unhindered vanity.

‘Well?’ he asked, standing there and making large hand gestures towards his face. ‘What do you think?’

‘You look a mess,’ I told him. ‘What on earth have you done to yourself? You have more than passing resemblance to Dick Van Dyke.’

‘It’s the new me!’ said Jeremy Clarkson with the euphoria that evidently comes of having your eyelids peeled by a laser. ‘Twenty thousand quid on the best plastic surgeon in London. He’s resculpted my chin and got rid of all my bags.’

‘Got rid of all your sense, I should say,’ I answered.

‘You can’t deny it. I look years young. And my testicles hang a good inch higher. I’d show you what he’s done for the hair on my back but it’s taking a time to heel. The skin graft hasn’t taken but that’s because we couldn’t get the right skin from a bald monkey. I’m having it re-laid this week.’

‘He’s left you looking like Richard E. Grant’s bulimic twin,’ I observed and dragged Jeremy into the hall as a dark cloud hinted at a sudden downpour. The last thing I wanted was a damp Clarkson threatening to split at the seams as he dried out.

‘Come on,’ he said, oblivious to his danger. ‘We’re going to try it out on London folk. See what they make of the new improved Clarkson 2.0 GTI.’

‘GTI?’

‘Grin, teeth, intelligence.’

‘Intelligence? They can help lift that as well?’

‘You’d be amazed what they can do with a laser,’ he replied.

This was an experience I thought it foolish to miss. I quickly changed into a suit and soon joined Gill on the luggage rack as Jeremy climbed into the driver’s seat. Once the cabin lid was shut and Jeremy was out of earshot, I turned to Gill.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ he said. ‘But he wouldn’t listen to sense...’

‘I blame you for putting all these ideas into his head,’ I replied. ‘You and your metrosexual dinner jackets lined with baby otters. He used to be an honest, down-to-earth bloke who liked to talk about oiling bolts and greasing washers. Now look at him. He’s a monstrosity! He looks like Fred Gwynne’s less manly brother.’

‘Ah,’ said Gill, switching to his TV critic voice, which is at least ten decibels higher, ‘Fred Gwynne from TV’s “The Munsters”. A show of dubious writing quality but salvaged by the charm of a likable cast.’

Luckily the rest of his review was hidden behind the blast of the jet engine. I held on tight as we began to head towards Mach One. On the other side of the sound barrier, things grew quiet once again. Back to being the food critic, Gill licked a finger tip, nodded appreciatively at the flavour, before running it over an eyebrow. I feared the worst. I could hear a full metal wit being loaded into a chamber.

‘I can’t deny that Jeremy is probably a little in awe of my élan,’ said Gill, ‘but as I always say, you can’t catch panache. It’s sad that the same can’t be said of bad taste.’ He looked at me and an eyebrow curled towards the implicit.

‘What do you mean by catching bad taste? You’re not saying that any of this is my fault?’

‘I’m merely pointing out that my tan came from the Côte d'Azur.’

‘Meaning?’

He shrugged. ‘Meaning it wasn’t a free sample in a woman’s magazine.’

I’d heard enough. I hammered on the roof of the cabin and the whine of the jet engine was replaced by the sound of brakes and the screech of Dunlops.

‘Don’t tell me he’s fallen off again,’ said Jeremy, popping his head out his plastic bubble. He looked to Gill who smiled, elegantly as always.

‘Not me,’ said AA. ‘We have a deserter in our midst.’

‘You not coming for lunch?’ asked Jeremy as I struggled to unbuckle myself. ‘We’re having escargot.’

‘A lucky day for the French snail,’ mumbled Gill.

‘I’m off,’ I said, slipping from the roof rack. ‘You can go to lunch without me. When you’re in the mood for the company of somebody who knows his age and is happy eating at home with a Pot Noodle, you know where I live.’

Gill shrugged but Jeremy’s face attempted a frown for which it was clearly not designed. He just looked pleased that ‘Mary Poppins’ had won so many Oscars.

‘Don’t go off like this,’ cried Jeremy. ‘I still haven’t shown you about my ears. They’re fully detachable and have Velco on the back.’

But I was too far gone to care listening, detachable ears or no detachable ears.

Give me lunch with men that are men and people who look their age. Give me men who are thinkers, wizened but wise, true to their principles, or habitually lost. Though my hair is brown and my skin is too, I am a real man at heart. When the crags on my face deepen, the hairs of my head whiten, you will see that I am still being myself and no other. You’ll never find me bleaching my teeth or wearing a baboon’s pelt on my back. I’ll leave that to O’Grady, Schofield and the rest of their unctuous kind. And though I never thought I’d say it, I’ll leave it to Jeremy Clarkson too. God knows. I’ll miss that craggy faced old bugger and his yellowing teeth.

And Now The End Is Near...

Reality struck me hard yesterday. Real hard. Hard like Judy’s elbow on a cold Monday morning. It left me so that I couldn’t cope. Couldn’t post. Couldn’t even function as the normal warm caring human being you’ve come to know and, I hope, love. Then it got worse. Dr. Raj wouldn’t answer my calls. He’s apparently still upset about my change of heart about paying for the psychotherapy sessions for all our mice. He’d planned to use the millions in fees to open his own private hospital. Judy wasn’t interested either. She thinks I’ve been a fool right from the beginning. Whisky was the only thing that could ease the pain on a Wednesday morning.

Having been in the public eye for so long, I’m somewhat use to having my own way. The best seats in restaurants, tickets for all the new West End shows, speeding tickets disappearing like an Amazonian’s leafy back garden. There’s not been a thing in my life at which I’ve failed. Until now.

What is this terrible failure, do I hear you ask? I did a foolish thing yesterday morning. I looked at the statistics for this blog.

I don’t know what made me do it. I imagine it was boredom. It’s always been my great nemesis. Nor do I know what I expected to see. I thought my readers might be in the thousands. Perhaps even tens of thousands once I took into account all the millions of housewives we get watching the Channel 4 show. I just wasn’t prepared for what I did see. It wasn’t tens of thousands. Wasn’t even thousands. It wasn’t even hundreds. It was fifty three. Fifty three people bothered to read this blog on Tuesday! We employ more people to produce the trailers for our show.

Things got worse when I looked at the statistics in detail. Seventeen of those people had arrived here from Google after searching for the phrase ‘Richard Madeley is a tw*t’. Hard to believe, I know, but true. Nineteen people came from other blogs where I’ve left some of my typically forthright comments. When I came down to counting the repeat visitors who clearly didn’t hate me, I counted seven. Think about it. That’s seven people who actually enjoy… Hang on, let’s not get carried away. That’s seven people who read this blog every day. And I know that one of them is Judy and another is me. In other words: I have five regular readers.

Once the tears began to flow, the bottle ran dry. I had no option but to ring up my old friend Phillip Schofield. Between you and me, Phil’s an unacknowledged expert on the web. If you can do it virtually, you can bet your bottom dollar that Schofield’s tried it. Hair extensions, penile products, Thai brides, commando holidays in North Korea…

‘Fifty three readers?’ he repeated. Then he laughed, a braying laughter like somebody had just inserted a red hot poker up the non-carrot eating end of a donkey. ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? Gordon the Gopher’s website has ten times that number of hits each day and he’s been dead for ten years. You must be doing something to put people off!’

‘I’m just being myself,’ I said.

The phone went silent.

‘Well I think we can see your problem, Dick,’ he said.

‘I don’t have a problem dick, thank you very much,’ I said, indignant. That kind of loose talk was how the rumours began about Forsyth.

‘No, no, your website. You shouldn’t be yourself. You’ll be telling me that you’re as abrasive on there as you are in real life.’

‘Sod off,’ I said, perhaps a bit abrasively. ‘If telling the truth is abrasive, then I’m abrasive. I admit that I seem to offend a few people here or there. I can’t stick a mouse down a garbage disposal unit without somebody thinking I’ve killed their childhood pet. As for my problem with polygamists, I think it’s only reasonable to upset them. And as for the homeless…’

He gasped. ‘The homeless?’

‘Well, not technically the homeless, per se,’ I explained. ‘There are apparently many different types of vagrant in the city, many different levels. Some with homes, some without. It caused a bit of a stink when I lumped them all together. Though, if you ask me, lumping homeless men together has to be a recipe for something a bit pungent.’

‘There you go again, Dick,’ said Phil. ‘You open your mouth before you realise what you’re saying. That’s why people don’t read your blog. You are incapable of speaking without being deeply offensive.’

‘Yes, well,’ I mumbled. ‘It won’t be a problem for much longer.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked in that sycophantic tone he has whenever somebody rings up This Morning and sounds a bit suicidal. I don’t know why he can’t just be more like me. I'd cut straight to a break so I could tell them to pull themselves together and do a jigsaw or go read the Guardian.

‘I’m thinking of closing down my Appreciation Society,’ I explained. ‘Do I really want to waste thirty minutes of my day writing a thousand words to an almost non-existent audience of five people? I might as well go work on the BBC if I wanted that kind of exposure.’

I shouldn’t have mentioned the BBC in Phil’s company, not after the way they treated Gordon the Gopher’s funeral. It took six flushes before they could get rid of his corpse. It was no surprise when Phil made an excuse to hang up, though he hadn’t had any useful suggestions other than I should let Judy write the blog and I should be happy nicking suitable photos from other websites like every other blogger does. Only, I’m not happy being like every other blogger. I want to be a shining star among blogs. I want every post to have ninety comments, watch small rivalries develop between groups of readers all vying for my attention. And if I can’t have that, I’m not going to play. I’m thinking of giving up unless somebody can come along and give me a good reason to stay. Any reason. Any reason whatsoever.

Please.