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Paul
O' Grady |
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The first people outside of Paul’s
closely guarded group of friend to see what was going
on were his loyal drivers. They were used to the wisecracking,
relaxed and caustic wit of the man they said was their
favourite passenger. But in the summer of 2001 Paul
simply crumpled on the back seat and waved the car on.
One day on the journey from Kent to the television studio
he simply dissolved in a fit of tears – and this
became a regular feature of his near daily journeys.
Once Paul arrived at the south bank studio
complex it was equally hard to pretend that all was
well. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot and his mood
was black – something his inner circle tried desperately
to keep under wraps. Paul remembers one terrible day
when the staff had to practically push him into a cupboard
to hide so that none of the others would see how close
he was to falling apart.
But, amazingly, Paul never once failed
to deliver star quality when the moment came to perform
– though he still cannot explain how this happened.
‘It was extraordinary. I would get on stage and
Lily would be crackling, at her most vitriolic, mouth
and strong,’ he remembers. The audiences loved
it and the production team applauded as their star headed
back to the dressing room. But when the lights clicked
off and the cameras stopped rolling Paul’s personal
shutters came down fast. He would get changed in silence
and walk fast, head down, to his car so he could be
taken home as quickly as possible.
‘Paul, mate, what’s the problem? Is it drugs?
Is it booze? Is it sex-related?’
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A few months later when the studio discussion
was about a herbal so-called ‘love pill’
Lorraine was feeling equally mischievous. ‘Be
afraid. My husband’s away,’ she quipped
to the crew as she swallowed one and waited to see what
happened. Her support for Pop Idol contestant Darius
Dinesh brought some similar sexual tensions to the set.
When he had been in the final ten of the first series
she had jokingly opened her suit jacket on GMTV to reveal
a tight white t-shirt with the words ‘Vote Darius’
emblazoned across her chest.
When he didn’t win the contest and
launched his first single he stayed in the news, not
least because of one infamous photograph. He was singing
on stage in Scotland and inadvertently proving he was
a true Scotsman with nothing on underneath his kilt.
Within days the picture had become one of the most swapped
images on the internet. When he came on Lorraine’s
show, Darius should, perhaps, have expected her to comment
on it.
‘Have you seen the photo?’
he asked her, clearly embarrassed.
‘Seen it? It’s my screen-saver,’
she told him as he put his head in his hands.
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His mum might be angry about his swearing,
but the good news for Gordon was that his diners seemed
to like the fact that their food was being prepared
with passion. As its popularity grew, his new restaurant
became a fixture of the gossip columns and saw a near-endless
stream of famous names pass through its doors, sometimes
a little worse for wear from drink. And the rest of
the world had also started to wake up to the Gordon
Ramsay phenomenon – though the man himself continued
to take it all in his stride.
‘There was one American critic
who demanded a free meal for a review and said she could
only come at 8.30pm that Friday night,’ he says.
‘The restaurant was fully booked and she refused
to accept that paying punters who may have made their
plans months ahead could not be excluded just to make
room for her and her companion.’
In the end Gordon said he could offer
the critic the table she wanted at 8.30pm on the Saturday
night instead. What he ‘forgot’ to tell
her was that back then Gordon Ramsay didn’t open
on Saturday nights. ‘It was wicked, I know,’
he says. ‘I wanted to drive round in a car with
tinted windows to see what happened when she turned
up.’
This fearless attitude to critics, opinion-formers,
celebrities and all the other people that chefs normally
suck up to was yet another way Gordon drew himself apart
from his peers. It had always been part of his personality,
now it had became part of his appeal. And it was on
full display on the infamous night that Joan Collins
came to dinner.
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When it came, the turning of the tide
against Little Britain was both fast and furious. Academic
and author Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto was one of the first
to attack Matt and David for allegedly thinking it is
‘cool to be cruel’. He wrote that the show
‘ridicules the handicapped, homosexuals, you name
it’ and was in danger of destroying the country’s
entire comic heritage. ‘There is good bad taste
and bad bad taste and the British – though once
paramount in the art – no longer seem to know
the difference. Great Britain is becoming Gross Britain,’
he wrote in an article that was syndicated to papers
across the country.
Another writer, Barbara Ellen in the
Observer, was even tougher. Her criticism was measured
and well thought out. And it hit some pretty raw nerves.
‘Am I the only one heartily sick of Little Britain,
in particular their teen mum grotesque Vicky Pollard?’
she began, as the second series drew to a close. ‘It
seems to me that too much of their comedy is ill-conceived
and spiteful and mainly aimed at the working-class in
a self-satisfied chattering-class manner that makes
you want to thump them really hard. Watching Little
Britain you come away with this slimy feeling, as if
you have been watching a fox hunt. Only in this case
the animals being torn apart are the poorest, most helpless
members of our society.’
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It was good stuff, from a man approaching
his tenth wedding anniversary in 1999. And even this
event was celebrated in typically off-beat style. Jonathan
decided to take Jane and the whole family out for a
romantic lunch. They headed out of London and went for
a long country walk before arriving at their favourite
pub restaurant. Once inside they were led to their table,
sat down, and ordered their meal. Then Jonathan produced
his masterstroke. ‘We had brought a Walkman for
each child and we just plugged them in. Honey had a
Barney tape, Harvey had something from Nickelodeon and
Betty had The Spice Girls. It was the first time Jane
and I had had a proper conversation during the day in
ages,’ he says.
Heading back into London after such a wonderful day
out Jonathan was once again unable to stop counting
his blessings. He had a wonderful wife that he loved
and who still inspired and supported him. They had three
wonderful children. Two wonderful homes. Plenty of money
in the bank. And careers that they both hugely enjoyed.
He held his wife’s hand tightly as they walked
towards their front door and prepared for another quiet
night in. Jonathan, in particular, was feeling incredibly
confident about the future. Winter was about to turn
to spring and Jonathan was convinced they were going
to have the best year of their lives. Unfortunately
he could hardly have been more wrong.
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‘Billie Piper’s head needs
cutting off … she needs decapitating and killing.
She needs her body set on fire and her body burnt to
cinders.’ This was just one of the chilling death
threats that Billie had been forced to listen to, aged
just 17, when she was called into her record company
offices late in August 2000. Other threats, all delivered
during an extraordinary 11-day hate campaign, were equally
savage. The same caller repeatedly attacked Billie as
a ‘whore’ and a ‘cow’ and threatened
her with dismemberment burning, flogging and shooting.
Even her family weren’t safe from the threats.
‘Billie Piper is a bloody pig and I am going to
kill her parents,’ ran one of the messages. ‘I
see them out shopping all the time. They’re going
to get their heads cut off very soon. The silly cow
is a silly bitch. She can sing and dance but she’s
a bitch. She is going to be dead.’
Other messages told Mandy and Paul to
be ready for ‘a bullet through the head’
while Billie’s young brother Charlie was also
feared to be a target. One of the other 13 hate-filled
messages seemed to mention his name and ended with a
peal of maniacal laughter. And then, of course, were
ever more threats to Billie herself – including
the most chilling of all: ‘Next time she appears
on stage she is going to be shot dead.’
It was little more than a year since
the BBC’s Crimewatch presenter Jill Dando had
been killed on the doorstep of her West London home.
Fears over deranged stalkers were still running high
and a blond teenage pop star like Billie Piper was seen
as a desperately vulnerable target. Especially one who
had been attracting a mix of hate mail and obscene correspondence
since her earliest days in the public eye.
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If the scriptwriters of EastEnders had
wanted to conjure up the cliché of a dysfunctional,
disadvantaged, working-class family they could have
done worse than to look just south of the River Thames
to the Goody family in Bermondsey, south-east London.
There, in and around a council house
in one of the country’s poorest boroughs they
would have found a family with a grandmother who had
been shoplifting for more than a quarter of a century,
a father who had been in and out of prison throughout
his adult life, a brother who had been adopted at birth,
taken abroad and rarely spoken about since, and a partially
disabled, lesbian mother. And at the centre of it all
the would have found a loud, mouthy daughter who bunked
off school to look after her mum, got into trouble,
got bullied and looked set to repeat all the bad patterns
of all the generations before her.
They would have found Jade Goody.
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