If there’s one question that I get asked more than any other, it would have
to be, “Why are you wearing that?” – often followed by, “At your age.” But
apart from queries about my rather spectacular dress sense, the other
question I encounter a lot is: “What’s it like to be famous?”
It’s a strange one to deal with, as it supposes that you still have enough of
a grasp on what life was like before you were hit by this particular
life-changing truck called fame to make a valid comparison and report back
from the front line. Or should that be accident site?
The truth is that fame is almost definitely not what you’d expect it to be at
all.
You may well be familiar with the school of thought – or theory, rather –
called the Kübler-Ross model, which outlines the universal process-es that
people supposedly use to deal with grief. It suggests that there are five
stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Well, I would like to put forward my own model for the five stages that people
go through in finding fame, losing it, then finding it again. They are:
desire, entitlement, bargaining, depression and – yay, for symmetry –
acceptance.
First up, desire – to demonstrate which I shall recount the tale of my
first-ever autograph.
My first television talk show, The Last Resort, started on Channel 4 in
January 1987. Some weeks were terrific, but others were bloody awful. I
think we got away with a lot simply because there was no one else attempting
a show like it, certainly not a young bloke, clearly with working-class
roots, who also dressed a bit peculiar and spoke funny. We didn’t expect, or
get, a huge audience, but it was certainly getting noticed.
I was walking down South Mol-ton Street in Mayfair after the second episode
had gone out. The show hadn’t in any way changed my life, including my
financial situation – which was fine, but I was hardly rolling in it and not
yet in the market for a £500 suit.
So I was window shopping, when a guy came up to me and started chatting. My
initial thought was that I had yet again been mistaken for a young gay man
on the lookout for some action.
But no. After some small talk concerning the possibility that the monocle
might make a reappearance on the catwalks of Milan, he said: “Are you the
new guy on TV?”
Reader, it was only because I had the presence of mind to grip the store’s
railings that I was prevented from swooning. To be recognised! By a
stranger! In the street! In this particular street! It was all too heady a
combo.
Some further small talk ensued, during which he might have pointed out that
the show was almost quite good, but he certainly wasn’t what you would
consider lavish in his praise. So I was all the more surprised when he
concluded with: “Can I have your autograph?”
Now, although I had been quite looking forward to being recognised, maybe
chatted to and so forth, I hadn’t expected this. The reason it sticks so
firmly in my mind, I think, is that as soon as this guy asked me to sign my
name, he was treating me differently from the way he would treat anyone else
he might have been having a conversation with.
I can’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember that it was that request,
that moment, that made me feel like I was famous, like I had jumped over the
rope that normally keeps people off the red carpet.
It wasn’t appearing in magazines or being invited to parties by people I’d
never met to celebrate the launch of products I didn’t use. No, it was being
asked to scribble something friendly but meaningless on a piece of paper
that did it.
And I knew at that moment that, despite having rattled on previously about not
caring whether I became famous or not, and how I wanted to do this show
because I simply liked the idea of making a good TV show, I had been lying,
as much to myself as to others. I wanted to be famous – and the moment I
gave that first autograph I realised I was on my way.
The depressing thing – or one of the depressing things – about fame is how
quickly you get used to it and start to take it for granted. It’s like a
beautiful view in a new house or a spell of unexpectedly nice weather.
At first you can’t quite believe your luck, but after a while you only notice
it when it’s not there, and even then your reaction isn’t that you were
lucky to have had it at all, but rather how unfair it is that you can’t
enjoy it every day, for ever.
Which brings us to stage two: entitlement.
In the early days of The Last Resort, booking Tom Jones for the show seemed to
the people in the office to be a bit of a strange gesture because he was
almost a figure of fun, a Vegas-style performer who had lost touch with the
younger audience. But I had been a fan of his ever since I was a kid.
I think Tom’s son Mark had just taken over as his manager and he had his eye
on repositioning Tom for a younger audience. That’s how, booked to be here
in the UK to appear on Sunday Night at the London Palladium with Jimmy
Tarbuck, he also got roped into appearing on The Last Resort. It was a huge
hit: we had 3.9m watching, which for Channel 4 at the time was just
astronomical.
A couple of months later, Tom Jones’s son got back in touch and asked if I
would come along and introduce Tom on stage – he was performing at the
Albert Hall. Strangely, I remember nothing of the actual performance, but I
clearly remember walking offstage and seeing Jimmy Tarbuck beckon me over.
I was a bit nervous, because there seemed to be this feeling that I was part
of the new wave of alternative comics on TV – and I wasn’t, of course.
Anyway, Jimmy Tarbuck called me over and said: “They like ya.” At the time I
thought these words of wisdom seemed a) a bit creepy and b) a bit
condescending, but I now realise exactly what he meant; which is that there
is a sort of indefinable, unquantifiable something in some performers – I’m
not saying I have it, though Jimmy was kind enough to suggest that was the
case. You can certainly see it in some people – Ant and Dec, for example.
You can see it in Simon Amstell and Russell Brand. Ricky Gervais has it.
Catherine Tate has it.
These people have a certain something and people respond well to them. People
like them. They like seeing them on screen.
So what Jimmy meant was: “You might not know this yet, but you’ve got a career
here if you want it.” And then he delivered a body blow: “Getting there’s
easy, but staying there’s hard.”
By which I presume he meant that getting that first burst of attention because
you’re the new kid on the block is pretty easy, provided you’re in the right
place at the right time and you put in a bit of work, but staying there –
maintaining people’s interest and keeping them involved and watching you on
TV – that, my friend, is hard.
Of course, I now know how right he was, but at the time, with a newly growing
sense of entitlement – after all, hadn’t Tom Jones just asked me to
introduce him on stage? – I dismissed it as showbiz nonsense.
Another quirk of fame, by the way, is the spurious connection you have with
other famous people and they with you. If you’re in a crowded room with lots
of people and another famous person comes in, if you meet their eye and they
meet yours, you’re kind of obliged to nod to each other. It’s strange. Even
people you don’t really like or know.
The Last Resort had been a big hit but after series four, despite it
continuing to get pretty good ratings, we agreed with Channel 4 to stop.
This wasn’t an agreement reached in a sane or sensible way; we all just sort
of decided to try something new.
It’s indicative of the charming nature of television back then, at Channel 4
in particular, that the real or perceived success of a show wasn’t really
that much of a factor when it came to commissioning stuff. Looking back, we
probably stopped making The Last Resort a little too soon, especially as we
had no idea what to put in its place.
Now, if I had genuinely only wanted to make shows I was proud of, I’d have
done nothing until I had thought out a new show, with a sense of identity
and purpose, to bounce back with. But I had grown accustomed to having my
face on TV, and the money that comes with it, and so I fronted a number of
different programmes, none of which was really that interesting and none of
which really worked.
If we want to stick with my five-stages routine, this would be the bargaining
stage, especially as I wound up working for ITV, a company that’s never felt
right for me. Too blatantly commercial and main-stream really to suit my
tastes or skills, especially back then.
I appeared in Fantastic Facts, a sort of trivia-based entertainment show that
I’ve almost completely forgotten, and then The Big Big Talent Show, notable
only because a preteen Charlotte Church came on to introduce her aunt.
Imagine what a pisser that must have been for her aunty. Just before you try
out for a spot in the final, the world’s most talented juvenile comes on and
blows everyone away.
Anyway, this unhappy and unproductive period inevitably led to stage four:
depression. I was stuck in a groove, basically drinking too much and
spending my earnings none too wisely. I wanted to keep making shows because
I didn’t know what else to do, and because I thought I needed to keep
earning the sort of money I had grown accustomed to. But earning that money
by making shows I didn’t care about made me far unhappier than being broke
ever could have done. I also missed being respected for what I did.
One night I was out at a hip place in town called the Atlantic with my wife
Jane and a bunch of friends when a young guy came up to me, quite full of
himself.
“Excuse me,” he said – and I immediately assumed he wanted an autograph or
something. “Excuse me, but didn’t you used to be Jonathan Ross?”
Not a bad line – not an especially original one, but seeing as he was saying
it to my face, you can’t fault the timing. And he was right.
Standing there, overweight from booze, looking forward to another night of
getting off my face in an expensive restaurant, paid for by churning out
rubbish that I had no respect for, why should others respect me?
Yes, I did “used to be Jonathan Ross”. I did used to be someone who made a
certain kind of show.
Even though the bloke who said it was clearly an obnoxious t***, and he almost
certainly didn’t mean to be anything other than unkind and make his mates
laugh, he actually did me a favour. There was a moment of low-level epiphany
and I realised more keenly at that point than ever before the wisdom of the
great Jimmy Tarbuck’s words when he said: “Getting there’s easy, but staying
there’s hard.”
I had found it surprisingly easy to get there, but staying there had meant
gradually losing sight of what I had enjoyed doing and why I had started
doing it, with the result that I was now making the kind of rubbish that I
had started out deliberately mocking. Ah, the wisdom of Tarby, a veritable
showbiz Buddha.
So we finish with acceptance. I’d found it pretty easy to get to a position in
show business where I felt my shows were watched but could have been fronted
by anyone. So I backed off and stopped doing shows for no reason other than
cash.
I started doing radio, not least because Chris Evans, who had always liked
what I did, had shrewdly spotted that I was floundering, in danger of dying
on my back on a beach somewhere.
Radio helped me get my foot back in the door. It was while I was at Virgin
with Chris, who encouraged me to do more or less what I wanted, that I
really learnt to trust my own judgment about what works and what doesn’t. I
eventually agreed after being courted for several years to take the show
over to Radio 2, which coincided with me turning up on a regular basis on
the comedy sports quiz They Think It’s All Over on BBC1.
That was a liberating and fun experience. I got to extemporise and ad lib and
mess around to my heart’s content without being the host. I never felt that
the success or failure of the whole thing rested on my shoulders, so I could
be as good as I could without worrying.
It was far less money than I would have got for hosting talent shows on ITV,
but it was actually fun, and I wasn’t embarrassed by what I was doing.
From there I side-stepped into hosting a show called It’s Only TV but I Like
It, and finally, after I’d dropped several hints, the BBC came around to the
idea of me hosting a talk show again, and Friday Night with Jonathan Ross
began in 2001.
It wasn’t an immediate hit, and we had some teething problems, but by the
second series we were heading in the right direction, and from series three
we started beating most shows up against us in the ratings. Weird that it
took me 20 years to go from being a flash in the pan to learning how to do
the show I always wanted to do, the show I more or less started with, in a
way that works and is reliably entertaining and is popular with a huge share
of the audience.
Acceptance, baby, as Tom Jones might have said in his Vegas period.
Accept who you are and what you want to do and try your best to stay true and
do it, and the rewards will come.
So thanks for the warning, Tarby. And thanks for the snide remark, stranger in
the bar.
And thanks for giving me another chance, TV execs and viewers, because I like
being famous, but only because I like what I’m doing and want it to stay
that way.
© Jonathan Ross 2008
Extracted from Why Do I Say These Things? by Jonathan Ross, to be published
by Bantam Press on October 23 at £18.99.
Copies can be ordered for £17.09, including postage, from The Sunday Times
BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
