The Man Nobody Recognises

I’ve worked with the BBC for more than a third of its existence, never mind mine - most of it on the radio - and in all that time I have never once been recognised in the street. You don’t need to feel sorry for me - I’m fine with it, honestly. No, really. It’s fine.

Not being recognised shouldn’t come as a surprise given that the amount of time or money spent publicising people who work on the wireless can be quantified as the same as absolute zero. When was the last time you saw a photo of any radio personality who isn’t under suspicion of having under-age sex?

Sometimes people think they do recognise me and there’s a moment of confirmation bias when they say “Oh, yes, I thought I knew you!” … but they didn’t. It’s just because my features are, frankly, common. I’m blessed with a boring face.

Thereve been times when I’ve spoken to people and they’ve looked at me a bit weirdly. Perhaps it was because they recognised my voice or perhaps it was because they wondered who this weird-speaking weirdo was. Who knows (but I favour the latter over the former).

Yr Wyddfa

On paper, in the Northern hemisphere, the 22nd of August of any given year should be a mixture of really good weather, warm soil, warm coastal waters, an equilibrium of sunshine and happiness but the drizzle and rain at the foot of Snowdon - the highest peak in England and Wales (but not Scotland) - told a different story. Actually, let’s be honest, it told the usual story which starts with the line,

“Welcome to North Wales, have you brought your coat?”

They should put it on the signs as you cross the border. At 20 miles per hour.

I had set off in the middle of the night to get to Llanberis by 5.30 in the morning. The windscreen wipers had been at work for most of the journey. I was interviewing Lord Sebastian Coe, the chairman of the organising committee for the Olympics.

He was going to walk up Yr Wyddfa (aka Snowdon) with a scout troop and light the Paralympic torch on the top of the mountain ahead of the 2012 games. The flame would then make a sweeping and swaying tour round Wales harnessed inside a miner’s lamp before reaching Cardiff. But first, they had to light a fire. In the rain. On the top of Snowdon, one of the most windy places known to humankind. Without matches or a Zippo. All the while being watched over by a bunch of photographers and camera crews, so no pressure then.

I was late and the group was just about to set off to Snowdon as I drove up. I jumped out of the car and shouted after them to stop. I’m always slightly amazed when people do stop when they’re asked to - but the organisers knew the success of this event depended on getting lots of media coverage for it. So Lord Coe was happy to chat. The plan was to do a quick piece for the first hour of the breakfast show and then meet him at the top of Snowdon and talk to him again as the torch was lit.

“What’s your name?” he asked before we started recording the interview

I told him.

“Nick Garnett! My word.. you don’t sound like you look.”

Let’s pause there and take that apart.

You don’t sound … like you look.

I challenge you to see anything positive in that. You won’t win. Do I sound taller than I really am? Thinner? Was my hair a bit of a let-down?

“There’s no good way to take that, is there,” I told him.

“Oh. No. I suppose not.”

Time was moving on, I had an interview to do. Despite my (slight) humiliation at not looking like the way I sound, we chatted into my audio recorder. It was a lovely chat - it flowed really smoothly - here’s a bit of it:

Lord Coe went off to start his climb up Snowdon as I wandered off to a nearby hotel and ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. It seemed like a fair deal to me. The rain hammered down outside and, I’ll be honest, sitting there with a hot cup of tea I might have quietly hoped and prayed his waterproofs leaked.

Badly.

I finished up and it was time to set off if I was going to catch up with the scouts. Before you start to think I’m some mad fell runner who was going to sprint up to the top I should explain that I was planning to let the train take the strain instead of my knees. The Snowdon Mountain Railway winds its way up the 7.5km track to the summit at the speed of a very slow thing going slow but it’s considerably easier than walking up and it was a hell of a lot drier. It was pouring now. Biblical.

The train set off, full of slightly giddy reporters and camera crews all there to film, photograph, record and witness some scouts lighting a fire on a mountain top in the rain. It was like a school trip. Someone opened a can of Coke and it sprayed all over the place. Everyone cheered. As the little train dragged itself up the mountainside I saw, in the mist, the odd straggling scout. Further up was the peloton, the main group, powering onwards and upwards and ahead of them all was Lord Coe thrusting his way summit-bound. He looked like he was in Chariots of Fire and I’m sure I could hear what sounded like Vangelis as we drew close. The footpath was right next to the railway and Britain’s most famous athlete stopped to wave at us. I spotted my opportunity. I waved at him. He was just a couple of meters away. He saw me and smiled and that’s precisely the moment my waving hand turned into another hand-based gesture. I mouthed a silent, slightly sweary, greeting. I can’t be sure Lord Coe could read my lips but he was laughing his head off at something.

At the top of the mountain, the mountaineers made their way in to the visitor centre to warm up and dry off, hoping the rain would stop. They had a fire to light by traditional scout methods and there wasn’t much dry kindling around. Firstly it would have been piss wet through and secondly it would have been blown half way to the moon. Luckily, scouts are always prepared and a plastic bag full of wire wool and wood shavings appeared as if from nowhere. The fire was lit, the Olympic torch was proudly lit and there as a huge, soggy cheer. We, the motley crew of journalists, donned our waterproof jackets, popped out for a couple of minutes each and filmed and photographed the scouts and Lord Coe as they lit the lamp.

“And… a big smile!”

“This time with your thumbs up!”

“Can we do it again, I think the flame’s gone out.”

GIrls Aloud

Sometimes fame is fickle in an opposite direction. For instance, I’m terrible at remembering people’s names and faces - which is a bit of a bugger in a job that depends on first contact recognition. I was working in London staying at a desperately trendy hotel. Work was paying - which made it even better although the BBC’s meal expenses when you were working away from home were notoriously rubbish. I had a friend who worked for a bank and was given £30 a night - and this was at the turn of the century - I was allowed £12.50 which paid for approximately three quarters of the cheapest thing on a London restaurant menu. One evening, I went to the bar and bought myself a bottle of lager. It was so expensive my meal allowance was gone in a couple of swigs. A young lad was standing next to me at the bar ordering some drinks.

“Do you know anything about whisky?” he asked me out of the corner of his mouth. “What should I get?”

I chatted to him for a bit, suggesting a few he and his mate could try. He jumped in at the deep end and bought a round of Lagavulins.

“That’ll be £48,” said the waitress. I’d have sprayed the room with lager if my bottle of Becks hadn’t cost me so much.

“Fine. I’ll have another double for my friend here. Stick it on the tab.”

“That’s really good of you,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Ah, it’s Virgin Records. They’re picking it all up for us.”

This seemed fair enough - I’d spent a fortune on Virgin’s products over the years so it was only fair that there was now an element of payback. I had no idea who the young man was, what band he and his friends were in or whether or not they became massively famous. In fact I’ve no idea where he went that evening. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. I started to panic. I hadn’t seen him pay his bar tab and I was in danger of getting lumbered with not only his tab but the cost of the drinks bill for two girls who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and been drafted into the group before he disappeared. Worryingly every time the girls ordered a round, they got one for me. If I ended up paying for this I was going to be in serious trouble.

“What do you do? Are you in the business?” one of them asked.

I explained where I worked and what I was doing in London and how I usually worked in the North West of England.

“Are you from Liverpool too? You’ve got a bit of the voice.”

“I am, yeh,” I told her in my usual ever-increasing-through-alcohol semi-scouse accent.

“I’m from Penny Lane.”

And it was at this moment that my attempt at ‘just chilling with some new friends in a bar’ all started to unravel.

“What do you do?” I asked. What the hell made me ask that?

“We’re in a band.”

It wasn’t the longest or most complete answer she could have given me, to be honest. If she had just given me a little bit more info maybe the next disaster wouldn’t have happened but she didn’t. Like the moment when your car starts skidding on sheet ice and you know you’re about to have a crash but there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, the conversation careered on to its natural, inevitable, conclusion.

“Oh, will I have heard of you?”

I still die a little inside when I think of what she said next.

“We’re Atomic Kitten.”

That would be Atomic Kitten, one of the biggest bands in the country at the time. Actually, make that one of the biggest bands in Europe, with two number one albums, the second of which had gone to number one that week, eight top ten singles and two number ones...

“Oh....” was all I could muster. I was dying with embarrassment. We chatted for a while, they carried on buying drinks long into the night for which Virgin ended up with the bill. I do still wonder where the boys from the other group ended up that night. Maybe they’re still there, lying unconscious on weird whisky given to them by some bloke who didn’t know what Atomic Kitten looked like.

Brookie

We’ve all been there but if there’s one thing worse than not recognising someone who’s really famous, it’s when you know someone but you can’t work out where from.

It was the anniversary of one of the most important meetings in modern history. Camp Hill in Woolton, Liverpool. The site where John Lennon was introduced to Paul McCartney in 1957.

I’d been sent down to do a piece for radio about the Woolton Show which, if I remember rightly, was doing precisely not very much to commemorate the meeting. I can’t remember why but I found myself sitting in a caravan, waiting to interview the show secretary. It wasn’t a big, Hollywood style Winnebago thing. It was more of a Swift 4 berth sort of caravan, the sort that, to misquote a line from The Inbetweeners, had a bucket in a cupboard for you to crap in.

A lot of guff is talked about Liverpool and how unique it is - but it is unlike other cities in at least one respect: Everyone seems to know everyone else. So when a young man climbed into the caravan and sat down opposite me, it wasn’t a surprise that I immediately knew him.

“Hi! How’s things?” I asked.

“Great, thanks. You?” he replied.

“Really good.” I paused before saying “I can’t remember when we last saw each other but it’s nice to see you again.”

Things were starting to click into place. I was starting to put images together. I could see him when was younger. It was all coming into focus and I could remember him being a bit of a lad.

“You were in the school plays too weren’t you? Didn’t you have a part in Humpty Dumpty?”

He looked a bit embarrassed. I could understand why - perhaps he didn’t want to talk about it. After all, he was probably just singing in the chorus and I’d been the star of the show - Humpty Dumpty himself. I was trying to remember his nickname all the time I was talking but it just wouldn’t click into place, like a jigsaw you couldn’t fit the final few pieces in.

“Er.. no.”

He really was starting to look uneasy now and I couldn’t work out why.

“So,” I started up again. “What are you up to now?”

“Well, I’m still in Brookside.”

And that was precisely the moment that I realised we hadn’t been in the same school. He hadn’t been in the school play. In fact, we’d never met before, unless you count me watching him on the telly three nights a week with an omnibus edition at the weekends. Philip Olivier, the actor, played Tinhead in Brookside. Oh God...

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I bet this type of thing happens quite often doesn’t it?”

“No. Not really.”

If I could have found a stone to crawl under, I would have.

The Big Bang

Probably the closest I ever got to actually being famous was back when I worked in Local Radio at BBC Radio Cleveland - it was a slightly smaller pond and I was a slightly bigger fish - because I had my own weekly show. Admittedly that show was the religious affairs programme on a Sunday morning - I wasn’t exactly Terry Wogan - but I did get a side-gig reading out the adverts on the public address system at Middlesbrough’s second largest shopping centre.

I was told it would be good for my profile. It wasn’t.

“Top Shop - all the fashion you need, all the prices you want. That’s Top Shop!”

One of my friends at the radio station told me he’d done it for years and not only did he do the voice-overs but mixed the music tape they played all day. Once, for a laugh, he recorded his voice quietly underneath the songs telling shoppers to go to the rival centre on the other side of town. They call this subliminal advertising and it’s been banned in the UK since the 1950s. It’s punishable by death - or a £50 fine. One of the two.

One day I took a phone call from an agent who ran a lot of the music events in the north east’s Working Men’s Clubs.

“Do you fancy being the compere of a firework display? They asked for you by name and I said I could make it happen.” Fame was knocking on my door.

The arrangements were made and on the 5th of November I went along to the hotel and walked in and upto the reception.

“Hi, I’m compering the fireworks.”

“Oh hi,” the manager said. He tilted his head to one side. “It’s funny, I didn’t expect you to look like you do.”

He took me to the back of the hotel where I could see banks of fireworks nestled in the ornamental gardens. It was, as the posters said outside, “One of the biggest fireworks displays in Middlesbrough.” I had a stage to stand on and a big button to press to set them all off.

“You do know that button doesn’t actually do anything?” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “It’s just a visual cue to the fireworks team and they’ll start it from where they are.”

I was a tad disappointed.

“And when it’s all over, the guitar’s waiting for you.”

“Eh?”

It was approaching half past seven and time for me to take to the stage.

“Wait a minute,” said the hotel manager. “I’ll just introduce you. It’s so good you could do this, you know. Thanks again.”

I assured him it was no trouble. I can’t quite remember how many people were there but it was comfortably more than a dozen.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls,” the manager said. “Thanks for coming tonight to the annual fireworks display. Middlesbrough’s finest - and the man who’s going to press that big red button is here - give him a big welcome: Middlesbrough’s own troubadour, the one and only VIN GARBUTT!”

Vin Garbutt was a folk singer from Middlesbrough. Big hair, big beard, twenty years older than me. I think my head swivelled 360 degrees to see if he was standing behind me but no, I was alone, standing in front of an acoustic guitar on a stand and a big banner saying

“Middlesbrough’s VIN GARBUTT”

I didn’t know what the hell to do. If I tried to explain I was really a complete unknown Local Radio presenter, I’d look like an idiot. If I tried to ride it out, I’d be exposed as a completely unknown Local Radio presenter and an even bigger idiot. So, I smiled as people politely clapped, I muttered something into a microphone about it being an honour to be here and that we shouldn’t forget the true meaning of November the 5th (people looked round a little perplexed at that) before hammering down the red button on the stage. As the first fireworks shot into the sky, I slipped down the corridor, grabbed my coat and made a run for it just as the big rockets from Middlesbrough’s finest firework display started to light up the sky.