Listen,
the cover story...

those heckles in full

if you're american

Being the somewhat over-involved story of the album's cover photo...

For four years in the 1980's, I was a reporter on a BBC television programme called "That's Life!"

It was a very big show. Astonishingly, it often beat the soaps to top the national ratings. If you never saw it - which means that you're young or foreign or don't watch telly - then its popularity takes a bit of explaining...

"That's Life!" was the peculiar (in both senses) brainchild of Esther Rantzen. It was a flolloping mongrel of a show, but a mongrel with bite, a unique mix of consumer stories, social concern and slapstick comedy. Some people, loads in fact, loathed it. But up to 20 million (blimey) regular viewers knew and loved the blend. I was just one of the twenty-two people hired as sidesmen over the show's twenty-one-year lifetime.

Sidesmen - to Esther - we very much were. And the job certainly had a scary number of sides to it. Heavy investigative reporting, legal wrangling, sketch-writing, acting, scriptwriting, songwriting, music, choreography, standing in front of a live audience, a live camera or a live-and-spitting Broadcasting Complaints Commission... Hey, we were never bored. Tired, of course. Tired, resentful, insecure, manipulated and occasionally shat upon from steepling altitude. But never bored.

One of the regular strands on the show was Get Britain Singing. We'd disguise ourselves as road workers, shopkeepers, shrubbery or Shakespeare (as at Warwick Castle - see photo) and then leap out at passers-by, trying to get them to join in a well-known song, hope fully with Hilarious Consequences.

This cover photo (now we're getting there) is of me on a 1988 G.B. Singing expedition to the island of Jersey, on this occasion disguised as a film sound engineer. This seemed like a good idea at a time when Jersey was never off our TV screens because Bergerac (a weekly cop drama) was set there and the Jersey Tourist Board were giving away free flights to anyone who wanted to go and do a piece-to-camera about, well, anything at all.

So, Jersey had film crews like Hamelin had rats. You wanted to be unobtrusive on Jersey, what else would you go as?

But this same phenomenon gave us a problem. The people of Jersey are a considerate lot. On spying a film crew, instead of doing the old two-armed, corner-flag-moron's wave, or pretending to window-shop nearby in case somebody famous turned up (which is what happens in most places), they would instead give us a knowing smile and helpfully hurry over the road in order to avoid 'getting into shot'.

Which of course was the opposite of what we wanted. It meant we had to herd them back, re-set, turn over again and beg them to look spontaneously grateful when some four-eyed prat in a Charlie Brown hat started singing If You Were The Only Girl In The World at them. Hence the many fag breaks.

A G.B. Singing shoot was a major exercise, often with director, cameraman, P.A., runners, riggers, grip, sparks, sound, props, make-up artist, costume designer... you name it, we overspent your licence fee on it. Thank you.

On this shoot, a dresser got me into the duffel-coat and crap hat. Another guy - props - festooned me with the Nagra tape-recorder, the largest, most obsolete headphones and the lewdest, most phallic microphone in the Beeb's White City sound stores. All for show, of course. None of it worked. The real sound man wired me up properly afterwards. True Art never came cheap.

The photo is a genuine snatch: it wasn't posed. But the point - as you will see from the foregoing - is that it was hardly accidental either. (Can't remember who took the shot, by the way, but we owe them an album, a bottle of something and, conceivably, money.)

One last thing. The grey coat - and the red sunshade in the background - turned out to dictate the colour scheme of the album and hence this entire website.