IN BETWEEN BEING given our work visas and the day we were supposed to be flying to Moscow there had been plenty of talk between North One and Channel 4 about if we were going to get into Russia or not. North One are the production company. They make programmes for Channel 4, BT, Sky, the BBC or whoever. Nearly all my programmes have been made for Channel 4, but North One are independent; they work for whoever wants the programme idea they’re coming up with. It just so happens that Channel 4 wants the kind of stuff they make with me.
North One told Channel 4 that they didn’t want to risk sending us out, paying for all that travel, just for us to be sent home on the next plane. We all felt it was touch and go. North One’s top bods were talking to Channel 4, who had commissioned the programmes, explaining that they felt nervous about the whole job. From what I picked up, it sounded like North One were all ready for selecting reverse and they put the decision in Channel 4’s hands.
Channel 4 did their research and told North One to risk it, buy the tickets, book the hotels and if it all went wrong they’d cover it so that North One were not out of pocket. So that was it. Only a few days before we were due to fly, it was decided we really were going, but I still didn’t know how long we would be in Russia before we were deported.
I’d told them, ‘Well this isn’t happening, is it?’ James, the director who’d be working on all the Russia stuff, said the same. We’ll get to Heathrow and get turned away. Or we’ll get to Moscow and get turned away, or we’ll start filming on day one and be deported. That’s how we felt it would be as the ten of us met at Heathrow Terminal 4. Terminal 4, that said a lot. When was the last time you flew from Terminal 4? Usually you only fly to wanky places from Terminal 4.
Most of the crew were people I’ve worked with for years. James, the director, he runs the show really. Nat and Max, the cameramen, and Andy, the soundman. There was Amy and Jess, the producer and assistant producer, who do loads of jobs between them, logging the filming details, noting everything for future reference, sorting it all out on the day, dealing with the paperwork, keeping everyone happy and running as smoothly as possible. Then there was Aldo and Stu. Stu is the medic and Aldo is the minder, the security. They’re both ex-Royal Marines.
The only person I hadn’t worked with before was Matt, another soundman, but he turned out to be shit hot, too.
The ructions caused by the Salisbury nerve agent poisoning were still the main news on every radio station. They weren’t talking about much else. Twenty-three Russian diplomats had been kicked out of Britain, and 20 other countries expelled a load of other Russian diplomats in solidarity with the British government. The Kremlin wasn’t happy.
We were booked on a morning flight, four hours straight to Moscow. I was so sure I was going to be back in London that night, I was already making plans. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t go back to work, but I’d use the time I was supposed to be away working on my classic race bike, getting the Ford P1000 pickup project started. I’d get this done, get that done: I was looking forward to getting caught up.
The first thing that made me think I was right, and, yes, we would be sent back, was seeing four UK Border Force guards stood at the entrance to the bridge to the plane as we handed our passes in to board. I’d never seen that before.
We landed in Moscow, showed our passports and walked straight through. We were all nervously looking at each other, trying to play it cool, but we didn’t need to because the passport control officer didn’t bat an eyelid at us. We had to wait, as normal, about half an hour for the 30 extra bags that a camera crew travel with, and have all the carnets certified. The carnets are the temporary import licences for all their kit, so they don’t have to pay import tax on them. There were no problems there either.
In the arrivals hall we met Mikhail Smetnik, the fixer. He told us to call him Misha. I’d say he was in his late fifties, early sixties and dressed like you’d imagine a professional 60-year-old Muscovite would. He blended in, like a typical grey Russian who wants to go about his business. In all the years we’ve done these things, he was probably the most efficient fixer we’ve ever had. He was on the money. All the other places we’ve been we’ve used a couple of fixers, but not this time. Misha knew everyone.
A fixer lines up all the jobs. If we want to film on the Moscow Metro, the underground train system, you can’t just walk in and start filming; it’s the fixer’s job to organise all the permits in advance. Not an easy job, especially in Russia. Misha was a really knowledgeable bloke, spoke very good English, was really clever, witty, understood the British sense of humour. He stayed with us for the whole job in Russia.
Almost as soon as we met Misha we were asking how things were looking and he said it was all pretty good. There were a couple of things he had problems with – getting a flight in a MiG fighter jet was looking doubtful, because of the military associations and the whole diplomatic situation was affecting that – but everything else seemed business as normal.
Looking out of the window as we drove into the middle of the city, Moscow felt very Western, industrial, with snow piled up 20 feet high at the side of the roads and very square buildings. It was minus four or five degrees when we landed, nothing too stupid. I was warm enough in my truck driver’s trousers with the reflective strips around the bottom, John Deere coat and Five Ten shoes. I was still wondering when we were going to get turned away.
We stayed at a Marriott right in the middle of Moscow. The hotel could have been anywhere in the world. That was the first of four nights in the Russian capital, before we flew to another town. Looking out of the window I’d see a constant flow of people, going to and from work. It didn’t feel like England, but it didn’t feel as foreign as, say, Japan. It felt like Russia. I liked the fact that I couldn’t recognise any of the words on signs, because they’re all written in the Cyrillic alphabet. A lot of women would be dressed in big coats, but short skirts. Russians like their short skirts, even in the middle of winter.
The next morning we got straight into the filming, and all 11 of us first travelled in two people carriers to Red Square, arriving there at ten. I could see Lenin’s Tomb, with the Kremlin, a collection of buildings that includes President Putin’s official residence, and St Basil’s Cathedral in the background, with its famous brightly coloured domes. The camera turns on and James, the director, asks, ‘What are you thinking?’ I say summat like, ‘Well, we’re here.’ I was still dead surprised. This was it. We were filming in Russia, and the idea of that took a little bit of getting used to.
I talked to James, while I was being filmed, like I’d talk to any of you. I explained that we’re getting all this gobbledegook back home, propaganda, if you want to call it that, Theresa May is saying we aren’t taking it lightly. The nerve agent that was used on the Skripals was Russian. Boris Johnson is giving it all the spiel about Porton Down, where the Ministry of Defence has their Science and Technology Lab, who have confirmed there’s no doubt the poison was Russian and that the British government is sending diplomats back to Russia. It sounded serious, and I honestly thought we wouldn’t get to film, but there we were, right at the heart of the beast. You can’t get more Russian than Red Square. When soldiers appeared and asked for our permits to film, Misha sorted all that out.
I looked around and could see what I was sure were FSB men. The FSB, the Federal Security Service, are the secret service that took over from the KGB. They all wore earpieces, the grey men, in the background, watching. They also came up and said something to Misha, who gave them the right paperwork, and it was a case of, OK, go about your day.
After all that worry about being sent home, turns out Russia really do not give a fuck about Britain or what we do. We’re insignificant. It’s like the Isle of Anglesey declaring war on England. All right, mate, what are you going to do about it? That’s what we are like to Russia.
The Russians have got a history of this, so I didn’t have any doubt it was them that tried to kill the double agent, but, in a way, I think that’s good. You know not to fuck with them. Fuck about with England and what do you get? At the worst a strongly worded letter or six months in a well-furnished prison cell?
By now we realised that we were back to Plan A: make a telly programme and fly home in three and a half weeks. Now it was a relief to get started filming. It had been my idea to go to Russia in the first place, thanks to my fascination with the place, so we were only doing what I’d asked.
Across Red Square I could see people queuing in minus five to see Lenin’s Tomb. The leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, that overthrew the tsars and turned Russia Marxist, and the first leader of the Communist Soviet Union, Lenin was a doer and his body has been on show, except for during the Second World War when they hid him somewhere else, since he died in 1924. And still folk are queuing up to see him.
Stalin used to be on show there, too, until the Communist Party started to distance themselves from him. You could say Stalin ran a tight ship. Under his leadership the USSR sent nearly two million people to the gulags, the brutal labour camps folk who weren’t in line were sent to; many of them were political prisoners, some were teachers and lecturers, basically anyone Stalin didn’t like the look of. Of those two million he ordered the execution of over 600,000. After Stalin died in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev came to power and started letting some people out of the gulags, and slightly improving conditions. They didn’t exactly turn into holiday camps, but he’d let the prisoners get clothes and letters sent from their relatives. Khrushchev’s thinking was he didn’t want the Communist Party linked with Stalin and the abuses of the people, and what he called ‘the cult of personality’ that allowed Stalin to get away with what he did when he ruled the country by fear. Again, Russia hardly transformed itself into Butlins under Khrushchev, but it was nowhere near as bad. They call what Khrushchev started the process of de-Stalinisation. So Lenin stayed in the tomb, but Stalin was moved out of the Kremlin to a spot in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
We were in Red Square for a couple of hours, watched the changing of the guards, then went to the Federation Towers, two skyscrapers, one 97 storeys tall, the other 63, to meet a bloke called Kirill Vselensky. In his late twenties, he is what’s known as a rooftopper. His hobby is climbing the highest buildings he can find, anywhere in Russia; when he reaches the highest, most awkward bit, he takes a photo of himself. He’s not the only one who does it; it’s a thing in Russia. We met on the top of the roof, but I didn’t do anything daft.
He looked like just a normal bloke; you wouldn’t have any idea he did such extreme, hardcore stuff. He spoke a bit of English, much more than my Russian, which still doesn’t extend much further than hello, so we spoke through a translator.
He had an iPad and showed me some of the hardcore rooftopping he’d done in Vladivostok, on the tops of bridges, also without any safety equipment or harnesses. I quizzed him, asking if he was just doing it for Facebook followers, but he wasn’t; he likes doing it and does it for the buzz, taking pictures to show where he’s been. I could see the similarities between him rooftopping and me road racing. The fact that it could kill us both was part of what made us want to do it. In his game, you have to be concentrating or it’s curtains. You can get fairly well arrested for it, too.
Kirill told us he used to live in a flat with his mate, who was also a rooftopper. You can get away with a lot of it; you might get a small fine for trespassing, as long as you don’t do anything political. Try anything that the authorities think is provocative and they are after you. Kirill’s flatmate climbed up somewhere and painted a Ukrainian flag over the Russian hammer and sickle. There are big divisions in Ukraine between those who want the Russians to have more of a hand in running the country and those who want it to stay totally independent, and it led to a crisis when Russia annexed Crimea, placed in the Black Sea off the coast of Ukraine, in 2014. There’d been trouble in Ukraine in 2004 when an opposition leader and presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned, but survived. So, the Russian secret service is touchy about anything Ukrainian.
After Kirill’s flatmate posted footage of himself online rooftopping and painting the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine over the Russian hammer and sickle, the FSB came around to their flat, but only Kirill was in. He hadn’t been political and said he wasn’t involved in the incident, but the FSB were after anyone they could make an example of, so they searched the flat, found some drugs and locked him up for a year and a half. He didn’t want to talk about it; you can only imagine what it must be like in a Russian prison for a young bloke who’d been fitted up.
I also met another rooftopper, called Angela Nikolau. We met in SIXTY bar on the 62nd floor of the poshest skyscraper in Moscow. She won’t have been 25, and got a load of modelling contracts out of doing what she does and sharing it on social media. She’s been used for laptop and phone adverts and travel companies have sent her and her boyfriend – who is also a roofer, as they also call them – around the world to climb buildings and make films and photos for them. Again, like Kirill, I thought she was doing it all for Twitter followers and all that, but she loved it. She says she was going to stop rooftopping so often, but she still loved the buzz of it. When her grandparents see photos of her on the top of buildings, she tells them they’re fake, that the pictures have been Photoshopped, so they don’t worry about her.
When you’re on a job like this, away from home, the crew are together for the whole time, meeting early in the morning, working together all day and eating together at the end of the day. Except for a couple of people who are full-time for North One, the rest are freelancers who get booked when there’s work. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but there can be an exponential ball of arse-kissing when all the crew eat together at the end of the day and I don’t like that, so sometimes I go off and do my own thing. I tell them, I don’t just disappear, but I leave the hotel and find somewhere to eat on my own. They’re all good lads and lasses, but I need to get out on my own for a bit. I never got too far from the Moscow hotel, but I would go for a walk, a few roubles in my pocket; spot a restaurant somewhere, a bit oddball if possible; point to something on the menu and have a cup of tea or a beer. The tea was good, Russian caravan tea. I love people-watching, and that’s easier when you’re on your own. I love that no one knows who I am, no one gives a fuck who I am. I can just watch the world go by. There are nights I eat with the crew, but not every night. It’s healthy to have a bit of your own time. Everyone needs that.
The next day we went to Star City, the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre and the Russian space museum where we were shown around by a young bloke called Dimitry. He was only in his early twenties, but what a clever bloke.
I’m fascinated by the Russian space race. I love the story of how much the Americans spent on developing a pen that would work in space, and the Russians just took a pencil. That says a lot about the Russians, to me.
Dimitry explained that the Russians sent more than 47 dogs into space in different missions, only 20 of them coming back. I heard that the Russians used stray dogs, from the streets of Moscow, because they would already be toughened up from living on the streets and used to harsh temperatures. The Russians successfully sent up two dogs in 1951. I say successfully; they got out of the earth’s atmosphere, into space, but didn’t make it back alive. It proved that a mammal could survive the launch and leaving the atmosphere.
Laika is the most famous of the Russian space dogs, because she was the stray that became the first living creature to orbit the earth in space when she was sent up with Sputnik 2 in 1957. Even though it was seen as a success by the Russian space agency, she died in space, from overheating. Both the Russians and Americans had been experimenting with mammals in the early days of space exploration since the late 1940s, when the United States sent up Albert II, a rhesus monkey, in June 1949. He didn’t make it back. His name gives you a clue, but Albert I wasn’t cut out for successful space travel either.
Laika is the animal nearly everyone names if they know owt about four-legged cosmonauts, but Belka and Strelka were the first two dogs to return from space alive, in August 1960. The Americans had more luck. Gordo the squirrel monkey made it all the way to space and back in 1958, but died when the return capsule’s parachute device failed. What a bastard! Then, in 1959, a couple of monkeys, Able and Baker, made it back and survived, but Able died in an operation to remove a sensor. Baker lived on to the age of 27.
Dimitry took us through every area of Russian space travel, from Sputnik to the present day and their involvement with the ISS, the International Space Station. The USSR was the first country to put a man in space, on 12 April 1961. They kept talking about Yuri and, for a while, I thought they meant the spoon bender. Sorry, that’s Uri.
Yuri Gagarin was a hero of the nation, son of a bricklayer, who worked loads of jobs to get enough money to earn his pilot’s licence. He was only in space for an hour and a half. I say ‘only’, but no one had done it before, so after you, mate. He died in a fighter jet training crash, just short of seven years later, that many folk still think is mysterious.
Dimitry also told us about a Russian cosmonaut who spent the longest uninterrupted length of time in space: Valeri Polyakov was up there for 437 days, over 14 months. (Valeri was a bloke, by the way.) And he also told us that cosmonauts come back five centimetres taller than when they left because the lack of gravity in space means their joints and spines aren’t compressed. The height increase doesn’t last for long, though.
The last day of filming in Moscow was in the Metro, and what a beautiful place it is. Moscow’s Metro is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Lenin started the job and Stalin finished it. They planned it as an example of how advanced the Communist Soviet Union was. The stations are beautiful, like art galleries, cathedrals or ballrooms, with marble-lined walls, massive chandeliers hung from arched and vaulted ceilings, huge mosaics on the walls and hundreds of statues.
The Russian people supplied the labour, and were worked brutally hard to make sure it was finished on time, but it was the British who supplied the know-how. Stalin got a load of British engineers in to design his underground, because the London Underground was the first, and, at the time, biggest underground network, but then the Russians didn’t pay for any of the work. You can’t build an underground system beneath a major city without getting to know the ins and outs of the place you’re tunnelling under and this wasn’t good in a place as paranoid as Stalinist Russia. The NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, who were the secret police before the KGB, were used by Stalin to arrest anyone he had it in for, and they took in loads of the British engineers on suspicion of spying, just because they’d made it their business to know the layout of Moscow. I don’t know how they could plan to build an underground system without that research. Anyway, they got away relatively lightly. They were tried before being deported to England, not sent to Siberia. That was back in 1933.
The materials used to build this massive engineering project came from all over the USSR, including the steel, cement, marble and granite. When you’ve got a land mass the size of the Soviet Union you don’t have to import much from outside.
Stalin wanted the folk of Moscow to be convinced, or fooled into thinking, what a great regime they were a part of on every journey to and from work. He wanted to show that the Soviet underground was better than any in the West, so no expense was spared. Being Communist Russia, there weren’t any adverts for soap powder or tobacco, like there would have been at King’s Cross Underground in the same era. Instead, there are hundreds of works of art, all in the style known as social realism. It’s a style showing the Russian people looking healthy and happy and staring optimistically into the future. Ordinary people like farmers, industrial workers and schoolchildren are the main subjects, pictures of the people at work in the fields, showing the country working together for each other, men and women. It’s about the present and the future, not the past, to make people feel that it might be bloody horrible now, and you’re short of food, but keep working, comrades: this is the future.
I thought filming for a whole day on the underground would be a bit much, but it is massive and was dead interesting. We were hopping on and off trains, going here and there. No one was gawping at us, no one was paying any attention at all. The first time I had to film anything in public, seven or eight years ago now, I felt awkward, but I’m used to it now. I’ve got over feeling like an idiot. I can just get on with it, but it is easier if no one, except the crew, is looking on.
Misha was guiding us, taking us to various places, sometimes leaving the stations and going out onto the streets. We didn’t go to Russia to see the outside of the FSB headquarters, what was the KGB HQ, or any military stuff. We weren’t there for the politics. We’d done a bit of Red Square and the Kremlin and that was enough. We wanted to see what made the place tick. We wanted to show the positive side of Russia, not the same old stereotypes.
When we’re filming, I don’t have a script. I never do. If you’ve seen my programmes, that won’t surprise you. On a day like this Misha fills me in on the history, then James, the director, will ask me questions on camera and I’ll explain what I’ve been told, picked up, seen or thought about.
One bronze statue stuck in my mind. It was in the Ploshchad Revolyutsii, Revolution Square, station and of a soldier with his arm around a dog. Loads of Russian folk who walk past it rub the dog’s nose for good luck, so its snout is shiny. There are said to be 76 bronze sculptures in this one station alone.
What with hearing about Laika and the other space dogs, and seeing this statue, I was already beginning to miss my two Labradors, Nigel and Steve.
The final bit of filming for the day was for me to meet the owner of a ZiL, the presidential transport, a Cold War-era limousine. Misha arranged for us to meet the bloke, who called himself Vladimir. I don’t know if he was an oligarch, but he wasn’t short of a bob or two, and we know Vladimir wasn’t his real name but I wasn’t going to push it. I could tell by the way he dressed, his presence, that he was definitely a doer. So I ended up doing a lap of Red Square in a ZiL. It was mega.
That night was our last in Moscow for a while. We were never far from ten-foot icicles and you’re deafened by the noise of studded snow tyres, but we’d been right in the heart of Russia and had no bother at all. The traffic is bad, worse than London, but, then, Moscow has a bigger population, over 12 million compared to less than 9 million in London. Walking around Moscow on my own didn’t feel dangerous. There were no funny looks. I never felt threatened. I liked the place.