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