On Rowing, Sleep, and Needing This Job

My constantly sunny disposition suffered a rare moment of eclipse this weekend. Some long dormant weariness overcame me and I retired to bed for two days of sleep and constant Olympic rowing action. I really don’t have much to say about the rowing except that I’ve never seen so many well brought up young men wielding paddles since I was once accidentally hunted by a pack of Young Conservatives who mistook my bohemian style for causal vagrancy. About sleep, however, I have far more positive things to say. It really is the great healer. I don’t know what had laid me low. I think it might have been emotional exhaustion brought on by the continuing concerns for my friend’s father who has now been moved from Intensive Care and into a High Dependency Unit. I do know that, for me, sleep was the answer. I’m feeling better today and I intend to spend this time on my blog explaining Friday’s paranoia and why Manchester is such an important part of my weekly routine.

As many of you know, every week since February, I’ve been forced to make a two day trip up to Manchester to work on a new series of ‘Eye of the Storm’. I didn’t want to take the job but those in charge of my finances told me that my dream of writing for a living was not going to earn anything like a wage. Not even the wage of a one-legged paperboy with a part time round during a time of dwindling newspaper sales. Yet whatever my doubts about the job, I still believe it will be the TV series to end all TV series. Never before has the documentary form been used to investigate weather with the same rigorous attention. We’re not just focussing on the dramatic weather systems like hurricanes and lightening storms. We’re looking at all the less glamorous forms of weather, such as light precipitation, drizzle, summer nips, and winter flushes. We have three programmes on Indian Summers and intend to launch a spin off series that deals with every kind of snow, from crispy white to yellow mush.

Recently, however, I’ve begun to have reservations about my life. The end of our Channel 4 contract was always going to make a sensitive man re-evaluate his future. Should I continue to write? Should I continue to blog? Should I retire from the public eye and devote myself to my inventions? I came to the conclusion that Manchester is slowly ruining me as both a man and a writer. These trips are making me deeply unhappy. I have tried to blog my way through them but that has to now stop. Simon Merfalanger, our producer, has spotted the way I’ve been sneaking off to my laptop and returning in a much chirpier mood.

‘Richard,’ he said after he called me into his office on Thursday afternoon, ‘we’re paying for your wonderfully rich melliferous voice. We don’t pay you to write this tedious blog of yours...’

‘What do you mean tedious?’ I snapped.

He turned around his monitor and then pointed to the wall next to my desk outside his office. ‘You’ve been taking pictures of our walls again,’ he said. ‘Only this time you’ve been posting them to the web.’

‘I did it once,’ I replied. ‘But I was bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. So utterly bored! You make me sit on the same uncomfortable office chair for eight hours, giving me only thirty minutes for lunch. The only view I have is of a wall painted cream and the exciting diversion of some plastic electrical conduit. And the work is not stimulating for a man of my many qualifications and talents. I’m a creative man with imagination. You can’t expect me to enjoy fixing margins and proofreading copy. The weather just doesn’t interest me in the same way as it does you.’

‘You don’t really want to be here, do your Richard?’ tutted Simon, sadly.
I thought it only right to be honest. I’m a man who hates deception and nothing gives me greater worry than when a person has misjudged me.

‘To be honest, Simon, you’re right. I really don’t want to be here. This is not the life I would have chosen for myself yet now I can’t find a way out of it. I once had so many hopes for my future... Ronnie Corbett once told me that he’d only ever wanted to be a dentist but the height restrictions came into play. I now know what he meant when he said that I should never trust a man holding a diamond tipped drill who has to stand on a wobbly orange crate to see into your mouth. Well, Simon, not being published is my wobbly box of oranges. And I’ll never overcome that obstacle so long as I’m being dragged up here every week. Do you know how many books I have sitting unfinished at 30,000 words?’

‘But you have a book coming out in October,’ he said.

‘And believe me, I’ll review it on my blog as soon as I receive my complimentary copy from the Richard&Judy Foundation.’ I explained how they had authorised some other chap to write the thing for them and that it would probably share very few characteristics with my blog. ‘I bet there are very few laughs in the whole volume and not a single mention of Bill Oddie’s owl fetish or my beating Stephen Fry at Scrabble.’

‘So it’s not even written by you?’

‘Only the blog is written by the real Dick Madeley,’ I said. ‘Ask yourself, Simon: how can I find time to write a book? I’m in this office two days a week and recovering for another two days. I lose four good writing days whenever you pluck me from Judy’s arms for two eight hour shifts parked behind a desk and proofreading scripts.’

The man was clearly moved. ‘I didn’t realise that we were standing in the way of literary greatness,’ he said.

‘Well, now you know, Simon. Literary greatness has been left bound and tethered and dumped in an alley somewhere between Manchester’s Chinatown and Gay Village.’

‘I didn’t mean to be so hard on you, Richard...’

‘Think no more about it,’ I said. ‘We’ll carry on as though nothing has happened. Just so long as you realise that my presence here is depriving the world of the funniest series of books since PG. Wodehouse’s slippers went cold.’

‘Just no more blogging during office hours,’ he warned me.

I agreed though it went against every fibre of my being. ‘No more blogging,’ I promised.

‘And Richard,’ said Simon. I paused at the door. ‘Just so you know: there are other men with rich melliferous voices out there. If I catch you posting from work one more time, your rich melliferous voice will be left bound and tethered and dumped in an alley somewhere between Manchester’s Chinatown and Gay Village.’

My heart sank. Judy has such hopes for ‘Eye of the Storm’ that losing this job would destroy her.

‘I understand,’ I muttered as I slid away.

So, from now on, whenever I’m up in Manchester, expect only silence and think of me sitting staring as a slightly off-white wall and a length of plastic electrical conduit.

The Scrabble Champion

Among the many remarkable properties possessed by half quarts of cheap spirits left over from Christmas is the ease with which they manage to sneak their way into the garden shed at some point during the New Year. Some might describe it as uncanny, the way they always seem to find men more than willing to loosen sobriety’s belt buckle.

One such man had spent his Sunday morning replacing the garage’s automatic door mechanism with the engine he’d stripped out of an old hover mower. It was a job I’d been intending to do for weeks. As it turned out, the space of a lunchtime was all it took for things to go horribly wrong.

Judy arrived back from the hairdressers around noon and, as normal, drove her car right up the garage door. The moment her front wheel broke the infra red beam the door snapped open in rather brisk 0.1 seconds. Truth to tell: it was probably a bit too brisk. It proceeded to rise a further meter before it met resistance in the form of the garage roof. In less than the time it takes me to write ‘bent metal’, twenty four square feet of corrugated roofing had been peeled back before the electric motor had freed itself explosively from its bearing and gone sailing off in the direction of Dale Winton’s bungalow. It was about this time that I had retired to the workshop I maintain in the garden shed and this is where the liquor sought me out not long after.

It only takes the sound of fire engines rushing to the scene of a blaze in a camp celebrity’s bungalow for a man to appreciate what it means to share a bottle with Ronnie Corbett’s cat. Mr. Brucie often comes and sits in the shed for a little warmth. And so it was yesterday. We shared a few sad stories, Corbett’s cat and me, and then we each promised undying friendship to the other before one of us passed out.

I awoke at four o’clock to find that I’d emptied the bottle to within half-an-inch of its life and that Mr. Brucie had already broken our pledge of loyalty. Alone, I stumbled back to the house and plagued by the thoughts of my Monday interview at the local job agency, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I retrieved a box of matches and the manuscript to ‘Fry, Oddie & Me’ from my office, and then proceeded back outside where I dumped the pages in the barbecue pit. Swaying slightly in the cold air, I stood over it as I doused the whole lot with the last of the spirits.

‘This is it,’ I said, looking at my collected outpourings of the last few months. ‘It’s been fun while it lasted old friend but we knew it we could never go on like this. Goodbye cruel world! Tomorrow, I becomes a normal man.’

And with that, I struck a match and leapt back to protect my eyebrows as five hundred pages of my closely typed wit and wisdom began to blaze where summer bangers usually sizzle. I imagine this is how many of the great unpublished books met their end: with pages flipping and turning in a drunken heat. The force of inebriated flames pulled the manuscript apart, wantonly ripping off the odd page to send it hot and flighty into the sky.

As tears began to trail down my face, there was a movement in the shadows of my attention and I felt somebody come to stand next to me.

‘Is there a sight more likely to make a grown adult weep than watching a melancholic talk show host consummate his passion for wretchedness?’ asked the familiar voice.

‘Stephen?’ I said, wiping a few sooty tears from my eyes.

‘Ay,’ said the Great Man, brushing back a veil of that floppy hair some of us love so much. ‘’Tis I, Fry, with you at the end.’ He put his great paw on my shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze as we both gazed at the blackening pages, rolling in the flames like my tortured dreams. ‘You intend to go through with it then?’

‘Bill’s coming with me tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘It’s always good to have an Oddie on hand.’

‘He’s the perfect man for the occasion,’ said Fry. ‘Were I just a little less famous, I might have accompanied you to your interview.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ I smiled. ‘But I wouldn’t want you to see me like that. I’ll be wearing a bad suit.’

He seemed to understand the gravity of the moment for the first time.

‘You mean it won’t be bespoke?’

‘As unbespoke as they come,’ I said.

‘And am I to assume that it won’t be in some shade of gaudy showbiz orange?’

‘It will be very grey. It even came with a small plastic bag containing the spare buttons.’

‘Not buttons for you to stitch on yourself?’

‘The very same,’ I replied. ‘There’s not even room for a cape.’

To that he gave an audible shudder. ‘Shudder,’ said Fry.

‘Oh, don’t be down, Stephen. I’ve had a good career.’ I said this reassure myself as much as him. ‘These next few months will be bitter but at least I’m taking steps to get myself a proper job.’

But now I turned to see tears streaming down Stephen’s face. ‘Oh, forgive me, Dicky,’ he spluttered. ‘To think that you’ll be one of the hoi polloi in a matter of hours… It’s almost too much to bear. What will become of us?’

‘Not to worry,’ I said, taking his hand in mine. ‘Why don’t we go back into the house and have ourselves a jolly game of Scrabble? I’ll give you a ten tile lead.’

‘Include a blank and you’re on,’ he smiled through his tears.

That I certainly did. Half an hour later, I had just overcome Stephen’s ten tile and a blank lead with a cunning use of a ‘Q’ on a double word score. I was about to follow it up when the doorbell rang.

‘I’m not expecting anybody,’ I said as I stood and headed for the front door but Stephen just waved me away. Now recovered from his emotional outburst, he was clearly preparing to run me through with a ‘X’ he was eying for a triple letter.

It was a threat I would have to postpone for later because standing on the welcome mat was Sir Clive James. We’ve not been on speaking terms since he kicked me out of his house during an interview. It didn’t appear that he had recovered. He was red faced and he was waving a singed sheet of paper.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, pushing the page into my face. ‘Comes flying through my window. Is this your name on the top?’

I took a look at paper. ‘Ah, my story about Terry Nutkins and the squirrels!’ I said, recognising the style. ‘Made it all the way to your place, did it? That’s miles away. It couldn’t have got there quicker than if I had tied it to a squirrel and a blazing one at that.’

‘Bad prose travels quickly,’ was all that Sir Clive said, displaying the sort of wit that earned him few friends inside the BBC.

‘I thought it one of my better efforts,’ I answered.

‘Better efforts?’ laughed Clive. ‘Only such a stunningly crass effort could destroy the manuscript to the new book of poetry it has taken me ten months to get right! Every single verse had been rhymed to perfection before this came through the window.’

‘Pftttt,’ said a voice high above my shoulder. It was Stephen. I’d thought him anxious to get on with his triples but there was poetry to discuss and that rarely keeps him out of a fight.


‘What the bloody hell did that mean?’ asked Clive.

‘It meant, my dear squat friend, that there’s a new polymath in town and you are certainly not he.’

‘You think not?’

‘Look you two,’ I said, standing between two of the greatest minds of our age. ‘Can’t we calm down?’ I turned to Clive. ‘I’m afraid you’ve caught us at a bad moment. We’re in the middle of a game of Scrabble.’

His face changed. ‘Scrabble? You play Scrabble?’

‘We both play,’ said Stephen. ‘Care for a game? We could fight for the title of the “Nation’s Favourite Intellectual”.’

Clive stuffed the sheet of paper back into my hands and brushed me aside. ‘Out of the way, Madeley,’ he said. ‘Sir Clive James never says no to a challenge.’

And that was it. The last evening of my showbiz career was taken up with serving drink and food to a pair of insatiable Scrabble addicts fighting for the right to call Radio 4 their own. The night was abound with rare words, with scatterings of ‘x’s and ‘z’s. ‘Zouave’ matched ‘nuzzler’, ‘zonk’ with ‘zoom’. I could only gaze on the scene as one o’clock struck. Such a happy scene, yet mixed with he certain dread that it might be the last. Could I really give up my friends? Could I change the life I knew so well? Would I print out a new copy of my manuscript?

I closed the study door on a friendship newly found and I made my way to bed. Stephen would play until the early hours given a man foolish enough to encourage him. Sir Clive James was clearly that man. To the sound of their mutual laughter, sharing a joke in Spanish, I climbed the stairs. Perhaps I’d see them again before I left for town in the morning. Perhaps I wouldn’t. The only thing that matter was that peace reigned and I would soon be asleep, eased their by the gentle orange glow from the still smoldering ruin of Dale Winton’s bungalow.

The Postman

If you look above me today, you’ll see a thick black cloud bearing my name.

Yes, I’m glum and I’m in desperate need of cheering up. The weather has taken a turn for the chilly and Judy is away talking with the producers at ‘Woman TV’. Apparently, they didn’t want me because I’m too ‘phallocentric’, whatever that means. It’s why I’ve been stuck in the house, staring at the walls, and wondering what’s next for Richard and his glittering showbiz career. The situation hasn’t been helped by my guts which have failed to keep to the timetable I’d set them.

Nothing in the world gives greater worry than the fear of constipation. Scoff if you wish but there you have it: I’m a man whose regularity must be synchronised with a stopwatch. You might look to my childhood for the cause of this phobia. Perhaps there was some ‘Rosebud’ moment which explains the rest of my life. I myself have never been able to explain it. I do know that it occasionally leaves me feeling uneasy with the world.

Today that uneasiness transferred itself to the office when I spent an hour waiting for ‘the moment to come’ by doodling ideas for new TV shows. ‘Celebrity Odd Jobs’, ‘Dental Disasters’, and ‘A Brief History of Elephantiasis’ are three of my better ideas. I printed them out in large size 76 point fonts and stuck them to my noticeboard in the hope that they’d inspire me to work. They didn’t. It only took the dog to give a howl before I packed in for the day and went to investigate.

It was the postman who was delivering a letter of complaint from the people of Epping, who have taken offence over something I said. They’re more temperamental than the expat Brits living in Tunisia, who are almost as bad as the people of Warwick.

‘Good morning, Mr. Madeley, bad weather we’re having,’ said the postman.

‘A horrible morning,’ I said, taking the letter with the Epping postmark from him. ‘And to make it worse, I’m over an hour late.’

He looked at me, his face still an amiable grin. ‘An hour late for what?’

I thought it better if I didn’t explain but, still, I did.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, chin up. It can’t go on for long.’

‘That’s what Judy always says. Don’t worry, Richard. You’re not going to explode.’

‘And she’s right,’ advised the postman. ‘It’s like these post strikes. We had a bit of a backlog but we still managed to get everything delivered.’

‘But doesn’t it make you wonder what would happen if you didn’t get everything delivered? What if I’ve got blocked down there?’

The postman smiled, apparently at a loss for what to say, and then he turned to go.

‘Er…’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’

‘Simon,’ he replied.

‘Ah, Simon, I don’t suppose you fancy a coffee?’

‘A coffee?’

‘I’ve just made a pot,’ I explained. ‘You look cold. Come on inside and have a drink. We can discuss different kinds of blockage.’

He looked bemused. ‘I’ve got a round to finish.’

‘Look, I’m needing somebody to talk to. You seem an intelligent chap. Do you know anything about catching mice?’

‘Mice?’

I explained about the mouse problem and how Stephen Fry has tried to help us.

‘Stephen Fry!’ he said, eyes like hard boiled eggs. ‘I’m such a huge fan of Stephen Fry…’

‘Well come on inside and we’ll give him a call.’

‘You mean that?’

I meant it right up to the moment that Stephen picked up his phone.

‘You have called the iPhone of the man called Fry and I am he. Stephen Fry speaking.’

I’d clearly caught him on one of his wordier days.

‘Stephen, it’s I… I mean me. Richard.’

‘Ah, hello the young strapping son of Madeley senior. What can I do you for you? More trouble with the mice?’

‘I was wondering if you could have a word with my postman. He’s a big fan,’ I said, handing the phone to Simon.

I don’t know what Stephen said but a minute or so later, Simon the Postman was in tears and went running from the house. I picked up the phone to hear Stephen calmly talking about his favourite lines from Philip Larkin.

‘What did you say?’ I asked, caring not a bit if I was interrupting him. ‘The poor man has just gone running out of here in tears. We were about to have a coffee together.’

‘One of those days, is it, Richard? A bit down in the dumps? I suggested as much to your postman. I explained how you probably invited him into your house because you are bored and that you don’t really care for his company or tales of his pitiful little life. I then explained it to him again using some of my favourite lines in English verse.’

Now I understood the tears.
‘That might be so,’ I replied, totally cheesed off, ‘but I had my afternoon planned. After a cup of coffee and a spot of lunch, I was hoping to have a game of Scrabble with him.’

‘Scrabble?’ said Stephen. ‘Do you say Scrabble?’

I winced. I’d forgotten about the well known rule among us celebrities which is to never mention Scrabble to Stephen Fry.

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘I’ll even bring my diamond encrusted Scrabble set. You have the latest Chambers? I’ll bring that too. I love nothing more than beating a man senseless with an aas, an abo, or a zoa.’

He rang off. That was nine minutes ago.

If there’s a more silvered side to this dark cloud, I’m afraid I can’t see it yet. And I still haven’t gone.