Chapter 7: Lily on set

Part of the whole value of this experience has been my little brush with what it is like to be a TV star. Because regardless of whether it is ever shown on television, I was, as was my wife and our child, treated for a week to a large extent like TV stars. This is probably one of the most dangerous, unhealthy and most mentally retarding jobs that you can do. The main reason for this is that you become greedy, towards things and people around you. It is almost impossible to avoid. God knows, Kiran and I are better at avoiding it than people who want to be TV stars. The reason I say this is that the film crew, for the most part, within their budget and remit, began to do anything we wanted them to.

'What? I can't possibly do it unless I have another beer.'

'Get him a beer, get him a beer.'

I started making jokes, because I could not take this seriously that there was this instant access to anything I wanted.

'Is it all right if I nip out for a spliff?'

'Go and have a spliff, Craig, go and have a spliff. Quick... Will you feel better after a spliff, will it come out better?'

'Yes, it will be fantastic.'

'Oh, brilliant, brilliant. Go and have a spliff, Craig. What else do you need? Do you need anything else? Shall we get a seat? Would you like a seat? Get him a seat!'

Well, King for a day! Now, looking at that process from the inside, it was not doing me any good at all. I was turning into a petulant prima donna. I defy any human being not to start feeling like that when they are being so pampered. They want something from you and they are prepared to pay for it and this society is very good at paying you with things that are not good for you.

I even joked about it on the very eve of the show. With all the phone calls, the attention and people coming out to West Wales I had already started to get into that status bubble. Thus, there was a moment, at some ridiculous hour, about one in the morning, on the actual day that I was to be picked up, I rang the director.

'It's off, mate,' I said, 'I can't do it.'

'Why, Craig, why? Why are you doing this? Everything is set up. You can't do this to me! Why? What do you mean, it's off? What are you doing, everything is set up, you can't do it.'

'Look,' I said, 'I can't do it, unless...'

'Anything, Craig, anything at all...'

'Unless you find my Ghost Rider comic. Because I have got to have it. I have got to have it while I am up there. There is a very important spiritual reason for this, and I can't find it and if I don't find it I'm not bloody playing.'

'You can't be serious!'

He started wheezing. I thought, oh God! I've pushed him. He is going to have a heart attack. He is only thirty-one! This should not happen. I do not think he has been looking after himself properly. He certainly has not been taking enough drugs and moving his body around on dance floors. Oh God.

'Gasp, cough, gasp...'

'Only joking!' I said.

Then he started wheezing even more.

'You bastard! (Gasp) You bastard! (Wheeze) I nearly had a coronary! You utter bastard!'

'I had to get one in on you,' I said. 'You're going to be springing shit on me. I had to get one in first.'

And then he started laughing. Bless him, the more that he realised that I was TV gold, the more I was pampered to that extent. It made me laugh.

'I could really get used to the idea of having a Winnebago, Luke, and people having to come and knock on my front door before I perform.'

They were persistent buggers, though. They followed us everywhere. They would burst into the bedroom at half past seven in the morning with a full camera crew. We could hear them coming up the long staircase so it was like, 'Here they come. Are we ready?'

'What are you doing now? What are you doing now? What's going on now?'

Well, this brings me to my daughter. She will definitely get a shout. In case you are worried, we are not talking about me putting my child on a pedestal and saying, "Überkind! Look at my Überkind! Could someone make her Queen of the World because then I could rule it from behind her throne." This is what a lot of parents get like when they get their kids on telly, but I do not go along with that. All the same, though, Lily was very amusing and did some very funny things, because children do. Please don't stick your fingers down your throat, because this will not be the Esther Rantzen story you are all fearing. I shall be quick, sporadic and disjointed because that is what a two-year-old's world is like.

On one occasion she was sitting in Lionel the cameraman's lap. He was trying to placate her while her father was being interviewed on one of many occasions when this happened. Lionel was the youngest member of the crew. I think this might even have been one of his first jobs. He was really lovely, and conscientious but he was genuinely shocked by our views and some of the things we showed him in West Wales in a build up to this show. Lionel thought that one of the hippie communes I took him to was one of the most incredible things he had ever seen in his life and believe he thought that at the time. He was enamoured of the whole thing, it was quite weird. But when my child urinated on his lap, his reaction was brilliant.

'Craig, Luke, Luke, could we stop filming...? Craig, I think you child has just wee'd on me.'

'Oh yeah,' I said, 'that's nothing unusual, sorry Lionel, hold on.'

I pulled her off.

'Are you all right there? You want anything? Change of clothes?'

'No, I'll deal with it, but you must be interviewed but I think she needs changing.'

'Never mind,' I said, 'I'll sort it out.'

So, we sorted it out, now by this time, Lily had been watching the reaction to that having happened. I would not say she did it on purpose but there was one time I was working on the computer and she just walked up, spread her legs and pissed on the floor on purpose, while grinning. Now, before everybody calls for an exorcist, a two-year-old is not going to know that is an unhealthy thing to do, mentally or physically, in some circumstances if not in others, but you have to laugh. You cannot castigate her for that. It makes you laugh and if you therefore got angry she would become confused. Unfortunately, she makes me laugh sometimes when I shouldn't, so, I don't know what she's going to turn into, but she was watching Lionel's reaction.

'I'll hold her,' Luke said, and so we changed and Luke was holding her. The interview finished and he was really getting into it and cooing, 'Isn't she lovely, isn't she lovely?' and all that. Then she pissed all over him.

Now, this one I knew was on purpose. I thought, "You little monster! Why have you done that? He's been really nice to you. He's been really lovely."

The film crew were really good with Lily and, to be honest, it was how good they were with Lily that was one of the reasons that Kiran wanted to work with them. They proved that back in our flat in the preliminaries.

'That'll do,' Kiran said. 'As long as they are like that with her, that's good enough for me.'

If they had been what you might expect from media luvvies, if they had neglected our child, he would probably have left with a black eye from my missus and a "don't come back" for good measure, and my media career opportunities would have been out of the window, which is probably where they are anyway, but either way I would not have made anything of it. I would have said, "Fair enough, you bastards." You have got to mind a child if you are in a child's company, and let's face it, out of all the people involved the person being exploited the most over this whole project was our daughter. She didn't have a choice & it was whether or not she should be involved that provided the hottest debates when we were deciding whether or not to do the show. Still, they wanted a family with a kid & they got one.

So she pisses all over Luke and you could see he had a pretty expensive suit on and it was a proper golden shower, it was all up his front and everything.

'Luke,' I said, 'I am so sorry. What have you done? What? Have? You? Done? You could have said, you could have warned us. Are you going to apologise to Luke?'

Nope.

'Apologise to Luke,' I said.

'No, no, no, she doesn't have to apologise...'

Everybody has been here with someone else's kid, and the parents starting to lose it and you really do not want them to punish the child, either psychologically, physically or in any way whatsoever, but they feel the need to and you cannot stop it and you wished you were not watching. That was how it must have felt for Luke... whilst covered in urine.

'Can you apologise to Luke, now!' I said.

'No!'

'Well that's outrageous,' I said. 'Please put her down, Luke, I said, because he was still holding onto her, and I thought, please, because anything could happen, she could poke you in the eye, anything. So he put her down.

'I am really disgusted,' I said. 'Kiran! Kiran!'

She walked in.

'She's just pissed all over Luke, she's not apologising, she's not listening to her father. What are we going to do?'

'You did what?'

She was just grinning at her mother.

'Can you apologise to Luke?'

So, she sauntered over to near where he was, she picked up a lemon from a fruit bowl and threw it straight at him. It whacked him on the side of the head with some considerable force. I looked at him.

'Well, it doesn't get worse than that does it, mate? You've not only been pissed on, you've had a lemon hit you on the side of the head.'

He had gone red and I think he would be rather unfair in trying to convince me that it was not rage by this time.

'Right, Kiran,' I said. 'We're taking her out of the room. I need to have a chat with her. What can I do for you mate, you must be absolutely incensed.'

'No, no, Craig, it's perfectly all right.'

Now, if a director is urinated on and hit with a lemon and still wants to stay on the good side of their prima donna, namely me, then TV is proven to be a very corrupting influence. If I were to became a media star every day of the week, I don't know what I would turn into. I think they are all mini-Hitlers, celebrities. They cannot help it. That is how they are treated, therefore that is what they become. They may not have the politics to go with it, but they certainly have the attitude. You cannot inflate a human ego to that extent and expect it to stay reasonable. Even those who have influenced people like me in what I consider a positive way, the ones I love the most, like Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson; even they have become corrupted by it. You cannot own your own island, as Marlon Brando did, and not be more part of the problem than the solution. You cannot own a bit of the Moon, Bobby Geldoff, and not be more part of the problem than the solution. This is what I experienced for a week and it is important. It might not bear directly on the experience of the life swap but I think it is vital for me to report back to people who will never have a look at this. I was the head of a business empire, and, yes, I was being treated differently to the way I would have been had I turned up as an employee, but not only that, I was also getting a taste of what it is like to have a film production crew at my beck and call. It makes you behave more like a two-year-old, and, fortunately, I had a two-year-old close by for comparison, so I knew where I was headed.

Obviously living in a big house is very dangerous for a small child. They run around and you lose them very quickly. There was a swimming pool, weaponry and all kinds of heavy ornaments that could be pulled off and fall down. Some of our time was a bit like The Shining where we were running around shouting, 'Lily! Lily! Lily! Where have you gone?'

A child can hide and not know how dangerous it is for them in a way that they cannot in a flat or a terraced house. I was expecting to see my daughter on a tricycle going, 'Redrum! Redrum!' Not least of all, I wondered whether I would end up going psycho while I was there. 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' I did not think that a huge massive house like that was a healthy place for a human being to live. I say that, even though everyone aspires to it. I found it very cold. I can imagine that many family members rarely see each other in a house like that. On the other hand, small flats are considered to be prisons. Maybe both extremes are wrong. Perhaps we should be living in Yurts or Tee-Pees. Our daughter made a complete adventure of it, though. One morning, I was trying to have a cup of tea in Gerard's four-poster bed, with the most expensive sheets and duvet and everything you would expect on a rich person's four-poster bed, about five feet up in the air. Our daughter, by hook or by crook, manages to climb up the side of the bed, and crawl onto the bed while I was sitting there with the mug of tea. Then she drop-kicked it out of my hand. It went all over the bed, a whole hot mug of tea. The housemaid refused to let us deal with it, but I found it very difficult not to do. We ended up helping her and impelling her to let us help. She was charmed, and I knew that was going to be the case. I knew that she really did want help but I also knew that was not the rule. She sorted all of it out so that no-one would ever notice but by then our daughter had got downstairs. I went down, thinking I had to follow her about for a bit. She's in one of her moods, I thought. She's going to try and destroy something, I know it. I had already saved one of the stuffed partridges from having a wing pulled off it when she was trying to make it fly. How ironic is that, I thought? I called her, 'Lily! Oh, where is she now?'.

I went into one of the main living rooms where there was a snooker table. Well, where did I find her? Spread-eagled, face down on the snooker table, with balls all over the floor. They are heavy, snooker balls, and there was a load of china all about. Look to the left, look to the right, what's broken? What's the damage? Nothing. By some amazing, miraculous, bloody piece of luck nothing had been destroyed. I whisked her off the snooker table, which caused her great hilarity.

'You're not to go up there,' I said. I am not even sure how she had got up there because I did not see any means by which she had stepped up so I was lucky she had not pulled the thing over or something.

'This is a dangerous environment for a child,' Kiran kept pointing out to me. 'That massive heater/oven thing in the kitchen is left on, full-blast twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If she climbs up on that thing then it's third degree burns and all that!'

It was a worry. If you wanted to heat up food, you just put something on one of the surfaces and off it went. We were not allowed to turn it off. It was responsible for heating some of the house too, but I thought it was so wasteful. Imagine having your gas or electric oven on twenty-four hours a day, and do bear in mind that your gas or electric oven would be a quarter of the size of this contraption. It was just throwing heat out twenty-four hours a day, so much so that at some times in that kitchen there was a distinct lack of oxygen, a very unhealthy environment to be in.

On the positive side, to carry on with the impact on her world, I got her to play on the piano. It was desperately out of tune. Any South London publican can tell if a piano is out of tune, so I do not see why the upper classes cannot.

We made full use of the cinema sized television. She liked riding a horse. Obviously she was into the animals and the dogs and stuff, but a few things confused her. The dogs are kept in cages until they are used on hunting parties. They are not members of the family as they are in an 'average household'. They are there to work. Yet, even as a two-year-old, Lily knew damn well dogs should not be in cages.

She was absolutely terrified of the helicopter. When I landed in it she was waiting to see her dad come down in a helicopter. Prior to that, when we had heard the helicopter on a couple of instances she was really concerned and worried. Now something springs to mind that is very important here. Helicopters like jet planes were developed in the military. They were designed to scare, as part of their weaponry. Their arsenal is not merely physical; it is psychological, designed to terrify. I have already mentioned that the helicopter pilot who used to be an army helicopter pilot, has seen action. He admitted that they could make them soundless. In fact, it would do to make them soundless, strategically, but the ethic is still that they want to scare the hell out of the enemy and this is a very good way of doing it. He was so enamoured of me that he so wanted my daughter to go up in the helicopter.

'That's perfectly fine,' I said, 'I don't imagine she'll ever have a chance to do that again, I'm totally up for it, however risky, why not, eh?'

I am prepared to take her on mountain climbing trips when she is older, so why not? I was totally up for it. He was so charmed by the idea: a working class family, I can get them into the helicopter, wife and kid too. Sadly, though, as so many in the police service and the military all over the world try to, he was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

The helicopter was coming in. I could see my family like a dot beneath me, they were getting closer and closer and I was thinking maybe our kid was going to have the stomach for this. Just when I was within sight of their faces, I saw she had this look of horror as this thing was descending towards her. She panicked. She has rarely done that in the two and a half years she has been on the earth. She really panicked, with an utter, absolute shaking terror. My wife did the right thing, picking her up and running indoors with her while this thing landed. There were two reasons for her fear. It is a scary thing in its own right, but the first and the most important fear that my daughter has had yet had nothing to do with the number of times she has whacked her head or fallen off things, it was the when an RAF jet passed over our flat in Wales so low that it made everything rattle. She was only about nine or ten months old when this happened. She was scared out of her wits to a point that she had utter terror on her face for a period of minutes and an absolute sudden realisation that she was going to die. Now you do not visit the threat of mortality on a baby. That is one thing all babies must be bloody protected from. They do not need to consider immanent and violent death before the age of probably ten years, if we were really advanced, but as a baby she experienced that on an instinctive level because she did not know about mortality on a philosophical level or longevity or even the passage through time as a chronological series of events, but she knew this was bad and there was nothing I could do with my facial configuration to prove her wrong. I was feeding off her fear as well as feeling a little bit worried myself and I certainly had never seen her pull a set of expressions like that. What could I do? I just hugged her and thought, "You bastard up in that plane just put me and my daughter through that apart from waking my wife up, the elderly lady next door, the neighbours, the people in the village, you bastards, and you are not even Welsh!"

So she had already had an experience not dissimilar to the helicopter as it came down. The pilot was gutted. He was almost in tears.

'There you go,' I said, 'now you know the effect you've been having on festivals and traveller sites for years. It is not the same underneath as it is on top, is it?'

Then she saw me getting out of the helicopter through the kitchen window and from that moment on she absolutely resolved to make the helicopter her friend. She would walk round it, touch it, she would spend a long time staring at it and trying to analyse why it scared the tits off her. There were suggestions of taking her up in it, but obviously the pilot cost money and the TV crew were on quite a tight budget. That was half the reason we had been asked to do this whole thing in the first place, of course, because anarchists do come cheap. In fact, anarchists invariably come free! Gerard Braughn already had loads of money, so he was not going to be greedy for any of theirs, not on any grand level. In fact, we cost some one thousand five hundred pounds more than he did, but we were just redistributing funds to local toddlers groups, footpath clearance groups, bands, PA & marquee hire, all kinds of things that do not have enough money because people like Gerard are hoarding it. Anyway, we came close to Lily going up in the helicopter but she was unsure and I was pretty certain that once she started going up in it she might have a revisitation of that panic and if you are in a helicopter that is a good deal scarier than if you have somewhere to run. Which again, is something I pointed out to the helicopter pilot.

'I wouldn't like to be in this in a battle situation, mate,' I said.

'No,' he said. 'You wouldn't!'

So, it might look impressive, but they are all shitting bricks up there.

Lily, then, to this day has developed quite an obsession with helicopters and it is interesting that the human becomes obsessed with the thing that worries it most, the visceral thing, you know. Modern humans' interest in sexuality, for instance, seems to me to draw largely on childhood worries and attempts to analyse them and come to terms with them. So, I have drawn helicopters for her and she has had the odd helicopter toys, but I find it quite ironic because she is not going to have the money to own a helicopter and she should not own a helicopter, but by the time she is forty-two let us hope there are helicopters that are completely quiet and run on hemp seed oil or a water-based engine or... Oh, my God! They could actually run on wind power, couldn't they? Sorry, there is the obvious, shining in our faces.

Obviously we kept all of the frustration and the anger and stuff away from Lily. She was well looked after by the production team. Lionel the cameraman whom she urinated on first, bless him, he offered to read her bed-time stories one night, again so we could get on with more filming and interviewing and for a young bloke in his early twenties to do that is quite a big thing, because it is scary, especially for a young bloke and basically she realised that Lionel was very malleable and I suppose young blokes are in some respects and we had the monitors on and I am trying to do the interview but I insisted on having the monitors on because if she needs us or he gets in any pickle up there.

Suddenly he is reading her this story and we're all laughing and the director and his mates are going, 'Oh, wow, we can hear him, we can hear him.' And then came the classic, 'Lionel, Lionel, I want to go to toilet!' Of course, he freaked out, he thought, 'I can't deal with this.' He comes running downstairs.

'Craig, she wants to go to the toilet.'

'No she doesn't,' I said.

'She does, mate, she just asked, mate. What you going to do?'

'No she doesn't. I know exactly how often she's been to the toilet today. I don't think she does, man. I think she's playing you, but let's go with it... You don't need your potty, do you?'

'No.'

'Don't mess Lionel about. He's reading you a story, okay?

It's all right mate, she doesn't want to go...'

'Oh, thank heaven,' he says and obviously he had been wee'd on already, I mean, the whole business of toddlers' toiletries was a scary place for him. Laughs.

So, I went downstairs.

Anyway, we're trying to carry on downstairs and then I hear this little voice on the monitor:

'Lionel, Lionel, I want to go to toilet!' He's going, 'I knew you did!'

'I want to go to toilet!'

'I knew you did!'

He comes running down the stairs.

'Craig, Craig, she wants to go to the toilet.'

'No she doesn't, man,' I said. 'That's twice now. How many more times is she going to think, "Yea! Off he goes!"?

'Are you sure?'

'I'm positive,' I said. 'You go back there, read her a story, you're all right, she doesn't want to go to the toilet.'

So he goes back upstairs and he carried on and she went, 'No, I don't want to go to the toilet now.'

So, she's listening to him reading the story and then:

'Lionel, Lionel, I really want to go to toilet now!'

Hooray! And he came running down the stairs and by that time the director was nearly crying with laughter.

'Oh,' he said, 'it's great, isn't it?'

'It's weird,' I said, 'how you always give the youngest, most inexperienced person the toughest jobs that no-one else is prepared to do.'

It is the same in every workplace.

'All right, mate,' I said, 'you've done very well and all that but Kiran & I had better finish off reading her stories and stuff like that because she's just not going to want to go to sleep, she's too excited with having someone as easily led as you to play with!' Kiran & I then alternated between interviews & bed-time reading.

Lionel loved it all, he was really good, actually he was the one with the least agenda. The others all seemed to have some agenda, but he was too young. He said that just before our show his previous interview had been with a very major media celebrity, but one who will have to remain nameless or who cannot be named for legal reasons. Lionel said this character was possibly the most repulsive person he had every been left in a room with. It concerned him because it was quite a weird repulsion he had for him.

'I know, Craig, that you obviously revile him for a lot of political reasons,' Lionel said, 'but I can assure you there is something very corrupt and very sick with him. He smelt bad. He had terrible halitosis and close-up his skin was so unhealthy. He really stank badly. It was like being in a cattle shed where all the cows have defecated but no-one had cleared it out. He sweats perpetually, too. You would be amazed at what make-up can do and you would be amazed at what a lot of these people look like without all the attention from a whole crew making them look normal or even better than normal. He is repugnant. I didn't like being left in a room with him. I didn't feel safe. I couldn't quite put my finger on how he would be a threat. It is almost as if his presence was a threat, but physically I was pretty sure I could get out of the room before he could get to me, but the fact that I was even thinking like this was uncomfortable. I don't like a lot of the work I have to do for Armada.'

'I'm sure you don't,' I said, having received a chilling insight into where this cult of celebrity can lead and the toll it can have on the body and even on the soul.

Lily loved them all and they were really pleased with that, Luke especially said it is really important you spend time with your kid regardless of the penury it throws you into if you give up full-time work...

I think all parents should have paternity and maternity leave for the first four years because if you do not bond with your child during those years, then there is trouble down the road. This was another big difference between me and Gerard, and his attitude to children whom he farms off to carers, minders, boarding schools and so on. Inevitably, what are you telling your kid? That your child is not as important as your business or job and I do not think that is something a child wants to hear.

I think it was generally considered quite odd that Kiran and I took mutual responsibility for Lily. I do not think that is something that is experienced in that environment. I was a bit annoyed that my swanning about in Range Rovers and having all these high powered meetings and conversations with people was taking me away from my kid really. I was certainly really angered that it was taken for granted that Kiran was not even expected to look after Lily. The housemaid and various staff were constantly trying to arrange childminders, nannies, baby-sitters, and constantly saying that it was not Kiran's 'place' to look after her own child, that she should just be sending people out to shop for us. Kiran was not having that.

'I'm not letting someone I don't know take my child. Certainly not someone who's associated with this establishment. You are joking. Does this woman do anything? Does Gerard's partner do anything, aside from spend money? No! Well, that's terrible and I am not having it.'

In spite of this, she did actually developed quite a healthy relationship with the nanny, the woman who actually kept that house together. She found it all very amusing that I cooked, that I tried to help her cook. The fact that a man was trying to cook! I thought, how could she have missed out on the last thirty years of social change? She loved our daughter. She brought her loads of gifts. We did, in fact, leave Lily in her company on a couple of occasions. With her and her husband, an ex-Teddy Boy and Teddy Girl as they were, which was quite upsetting.

Jake and Gladys, it was a bit of a big one for them really. No wonder they both were driven to tears on a couple of occasions. They were the first point of contact for our daughter other than Kiran and I and the film crew. No-one else took too much of an interest in her, which I found a little bit galling but as far as they were concerned it was just this mad couple and their little kid, running around... being mad. I think it was a result of not understanding us more than an unwillingness to get involved. It is a typical reaction to something you do not understand - run away from it. We were not understood very much, as I have repeatedly said. Not as much as we understood what they were about, I am sure of it. Jake and Gladys, well, what the hell happened there? I will tell you what happened there. That was because the Teddy Boy and his wife were forced to separate under the extremely cruel regime of National Service and they had been dancers, drape-jacket wearing tearaways since 1952 so they were right there at El Beginño. Jake obviously did not stay in the army that long, he did not like it, but he was a changed man. He and his wife have generally been in service ever since he came out. So now he helps her clean a rich bloke's house. It was such a horrible thing for me to see such a turnaround. A cultureless imbecile lording it over two people who were so cool with such graceful body language. They were paragons of working class decency. They are the sort of people who inspired my whole generation's attitude towards the arts, culture, music, what it is to be a teenager, what is sexual, what is not sexual, how you dance, how you involve yourself in the courtship ritual. These were some of the grand-fathers and grand-mothers of everything I believe in and here they were scrubbing floors with aprons on and rubber gloves. It was like a bad scene in Rebel Without a Cause, or the end of Quadrophenia when the King Mod is found to be a bellboy! I wanted to shake Jake.

'What are you doing, mate? You should be giving Gerard a Glaswegian Kiss. This is the dominating class that bullied you in the army!'

'Yes, Craig, but you have to make money and we do have rather a lot of money. We've made enough money to send our daughter to public school, you know, and now she's an international dancer. And she's making an awful lot of money too, Craig.'

'Do you regret it, Jake?'

'Well, in some ways I do.' He was a very meek bloke, really,

'Was it worth losing your backbone for money? Because that's what I see. I've kept it and that's why I've remained poor because no-one wants someone who's going to say 'No!' and if you say 'No!' the payment that you have to make in this society is penury. You've probably got a lovely big house, too. It's not like the servants used to have, although I do believe the butlers used to be paid okay.'

'Well,' he said, 'I didn't plan any of it and to be frank I don't really understand all of what's going on, but I know one thing, Gerard is a better employer than some we could have.'

'That don't make him right, though, Jake.'

'I do appreciate your stance,' he said.

'I've got something for you to wear, Jake,' I said. 'You'll be amazed.

I went upstairs and I got my drape-jacket and my winkle-pickers and he could not believe it. Lionel got a photo but I still have to get hold of it. Lionel could be in Zimbabwe for all I know. These people, after a project, all fragment, there is no cohesion, there is no after-party.

They asked me about what it was like being a TV star, and I told them.

'Television is easier than parenting, just sitting there reading off a cue card and grinning every now and then. That is not work! Half these celebrities have never done a day's work in their lives and neither has Gerard Braughn,' I said to Jake. 'You work. He does not. He does not work. What he does I cannot say is work. If you have a meeting, it is to discuss work, it is not work in itself. All that man does is delegate at meetings.'

There was a lot of this through the week, me ranting away, but Jake and Gladys did not have a hostile reaction at all. I would have thought that a lot of what I was saying would be self evident, but I think that National Service instils the idea that you do not question the officer and it only takes three years to pile-drive that into a human being, no matter how rebellious they are.