MY FIRST ROADSHOW week was in 1980. My debut was at South Shields, followed by Scarborough, Bridlington, Cleethorpes and Skegness. I know DLT must have been with us on one of the dates as the schoolboy in me came to the fore and the first of the infamous pranks was unleashed on him. Not for me that well-worn and overused cling-film-over-the-loo gag. That would have been childish and unworthy, disgusting and rightly frowned upon. I considered my wheeze a step up. Classier. It was the stink-bomb-under-the-loo-seat gag. Well, more than one stink bomb. Several actually. One has to make an impact or be found wanting. I subtly purloined the key to DLT’s room, sneaked in with the dexterity of Raffles, lifted the loo seat and gently laid three or four of the vile vials on the porcelain. With rock-steady hands worthy of a horologist I delicately rested the seat on top of them so they didn’t crack immediately. However, once subjected to the full weight of a large man with a beard they most certainly cracked. DLT’s bathroom must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta before Suraj-ud-Daulah’s gang of rotters let out the remaining few survivors.

Was the subject amused, you may wonder? He was not. Far from it. In fact he was livid. One might have imagined him being in the Black Hole himself and trying to break down the door to kill the sleeping Daulah, only it was me he was trying to kill. I really thought the door to my room was going to smash into a thousand pieces. I sensibly kept out of his way for the rest of the evening. What a lack of appreciation for a lost and underrated art form.

My 1981 roadshow week took in Morecambe, Blackpool, Southport, Rhyl and Colwyn Bay. In Southport I was reminded of another near-death experience there years earlier, when my father and godfather rather bravely pulled me out of deceptive quicksand as I sank up to my chest. My clothes were thrown away, new ones were purchased and I was chucked into a bath at a nearby hotel. Actually, that sounds uncannily like a roadshow stunt. If my father had known then that he would cross the street to avoid me in my later teenage years he might well have left me to struggle in the mud. I like to think that it was because of my attire more than my attitude. If I couldn’t locate the World War One knee-length cavalry boots and milkman’s cap that I preferred to sport in those days, I only had to look in the dustbin. I lost count of the times I retrieved them.

Morecambe too was memorable. It was there I had a phone call telling me that our current Guinness Book of British Hit Singles had hit the number one spot in the bestsellers. Of course, as soon as you’re able to look at the Times bestseller list, your eyes drop below that dizzy height to see which serious authors are running to keep up. The news gave me a decided boost for that afternoon’s game of rounders on the beach.

My 1983 holiday, sorry, roadshow week, took in Devon and Cornwall. What a treat: Torquay, Plymouth, St Austell, Falmouth and St Ives. Of course there were practical jokes galore, but let me single out St Austell for special mention. After a leisurely breakfast with my producer, Paul Williams, I sauntered back to my room to slip into something a little more Radio One, whatever that was, and to collect my guitar. But there was no guitar. The window was wide open and my pride and joy was no longer present. A footprint on the window ledge confirmed my suspicions. Half an hour later, accompanied by a concerned producer, I’m giving details of my loss to officers of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.

‘Could you draw the guitar for me?’

I could.

‘And from the side?’

Yes, even easier.

‘The back?’

I had to admire their dedication to detail.

‘Strings?’

‘Six when it left here. I couldn’t vouch for the number now.’

‘Do you know anyone who might have had a grudge against you and your guitar?’

‘Only the 15,000 roadshow audience, my producer, the controller of Radio One, the entire road crew, Smiley Miley and ten million people listening on the radio. Apart from that, no one.’

They were thorough to say the least, but how could I find a replacement at the eleventh hour? Paul Williams came to the rescue. ‘Kid Creole and the Coconuts are in town and they’ve offered to lend you an acoustic.’

‘How lovely. We’d better play “Stool Pigeon” a few times then.’

Now my guitar spot on the show, where I’d lead the children of St Austell, or wherever, into the musical wilderness, was normally an uphill battle, but Paul was actively encouraging me to play near the top of the show. Had he had a change of heart? Had there been a gradual realisation that my talents were worthy after all? Whatever the reason, I gave forth with my own personal battle-cry, carpe diem, and seized the day. With hindsight it should have been cave ne cadas, as I was about to be knocked off my musical pedestal. I was cantering along in full flow, making a decent fist of it, when the guitar exploded in my hands. Not only exploded and splintered, but showered me with that distinctive orange dye reserved for bank robbers. I was stunned. No, hang on, shocked and stunned. For a good two minutes the radio was filled with the cheering, howling, applauding and whooping of the multitudes assembled on the beach. What the hell had happened? I knew not. Only the appearance of Smiley Miley told me that all was not as it should be. There had been no robbery. It was an inside job. My guitar was safe. Even the members of the force making me draw the guitar from every conceivable angle were in on it. The guitar wasn’t from Kid Creole, it was one specially doctored by Smiles. It contained a small amount of explosive and a very large amount of orange dye and had been detonated by him from a safe distance. Right! His future wasn’t bright, but mine, for the moment, was definitely orange.

I had reverted to my normal colour and guitar when playing a duet with Justin Hayward at Falmouth and had gone with the full whites for St Ives. Wham! had just released the wonderful ‘Club Tropicana’ and were my guests on the last day of the week. We entertained the crowds by playing kazoos all in white shorts and shirts, which seemed like the cool outfit of the summer. I normally dreaded the final day as it signalled the end of the festivities, but Andrew Ridgeley and I decided to stay on for an extra day, not that I remember much about it. I do recall Andrew playing tennis against himself for half an hour. I didn’t ask why. Maybe I was meant to be on the other side of the court. George Michael flew back from St Ives, while I drove Andrew back in my Mercedes with the roof down and ‘Club Tropicana’ pumping out of the radio every hour. What posers … but what fun.

I was due to be at a twenty-first birthday party that day, so I called ahead to ask if I could bring a friend. ‘Sure.’ Birthday girl Penny was surprised to say the least when Andrew Ridgeley walked in with me, but her girlfriends were open mouthed. Wham! were about the hottest thing around at that time and Andrew had that heart-throb Mediterranean look that seemed to make the girls melt.

The summer of the following year, 1984, saw my group, the Rock-olas, undertaking our most extensive tour to date, performing in Hastings, Portsmouth, Southampton, Bournemouth, Plymouth, Exeter, St Austell, Newquay and Hendra Tourist camp. Then it was off to another roadshow at Gateshead with Midge Ure, before my own roadshow week took me back to the east coast, calling in at Scarborough, Bridlington, Cleethorpes, Skegness and Great Yarmouth. In 1985 I was once more in the West Country, taking in Torquay, Plymouth, Carlyon Bay, Falmouth and Marazion. We spent one night at the Carlyon Bay Hotel, former hideaway of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson. Mind you, they seemed to have bolt-holes everywhere. My abiding memory of that evening is sitting completely alone outside the hotel writing, as the sun hit the top of the Scots pines and the sea was flat calm. The twelve lines of ‘Carlyon Bay’ made it to my first book of poetry: ‘But the days are growing shorter | From Black to Gribben Head.’ It was one of those tranquil English evenings that I wanted to last for a week or so, but I was also acutely aware that the twilight was approaching and it would soon be over. So would the week. And the years would fly. They have. The era of Edward and Mrs Simpson seemed a world away, but they would have watched the gathering dusk there less than fifty years before that evening in 1985. Now it’s 2014 and the evening I sat there is itself almost thirty years away.

My first action on any roadshow day was to tentatively draw back the curtains praying for sun. A sunny day and a blue sky put a different spin on everything. Hurricane Charley put paid to that at Exmouth in 1986: the wind howled, flags flapped crazily, the rain swept in from the sea and yet some 20,000 souls braved the elements. Those at the back were virtually enveloped in a thick, wet, mist. If Smiley wasn’t in a mist he was certainly a laughing stock.

En route I’d spotted a character making gates and benches. I persuaded him to set aside these menial tasks and offered him far too much money to knock up some stocks.

‘Stocks?’

‘Yes, stocks.’

‘You mean like … stocks?’

‘You’ve seized upon my meaning instanter.’

‘You from the local council?’

Two hours later I was on my way, roof down and stocks on board. You’re ahead of me. Smiley, stocks. It would be a marriage made in Devon. Of course he wasn’t a willing participant, but there were enough burly blokes who rigged the roadshow to convince him otherwise. In he went and there he stayed. There was a heck of a lot of rain but I did treat him to an ice-cream. Tragically, his hand wasn’t able to reach his mouth, but being a good neighbour I fed him myself. Almost as tragically, my aim was terrible that day. The ice-cream went everywhere, the remains turning a rather ghastly amalgam of tartrazine E102 and sunset yellow E110. Maybe his face was already yellow. In truth I can’t remember. The rotten tomatoes may or may not have been thrown by me, but it would have been a shame to waste them.

Having taken Barry, Keith and Paul, my fellow Rock-olas, for the week, we couldn’t play on that first day. Horizontal rain, a stage that resembled Victoria Falls and a ton of electronic equipment just didn’t seem to be ideal soul-mates. Weymouth was also hit by the weather, but I managed to scrape up a few tarantulas and the like to keep the party going for Smiley. By Swanage it had perked up a little and by Bournemouth we were rocking. The group were in full swing and we were joined by the Real Thing, Bobby Ball and Stu Francis. I coerced some burly lifeguards to enlist Smiley to help with their drill. For demonstration purposes, they were forced to throw him in the drink. Then came the payback and ignominy of the final day at Southsea, when I was challenged to get all the answers correct to a special ‘Bits and Pieces’ competition or face a spell in my own stocks. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t. I got them all right. What? I missed one? Impossible. The last track turned out to be the dog whistle from the inner groove of Sgt. Pepper, which was inaudible to the human ear. Now if I’d been a Jack Russell … but then getting the other questions right may have been a little tricky.

Smiley was racing off on holiday at the end of the programme, so thank goodness I’d had the foresight to pay four bricklayers to build an 8-foot wall around his Range Rover while he was busy with the roadshow. Did I pay them? No. I told them that Smiley would pay them … to knock it down. He had no alternative. Know your enemy.

As well as the conventional, if that word applies, seaside roadshows, there were weeks away, where we all charged off to Leeds, Edinburgh, Bristol or somewhere and were sent into the market place, often literally, to impose ourselves on the inhabitants. We were also woven into the local fabric, as when my producer got me to fire the famous one o’clock gun at Edinburgh Castle. This six-day-a-week ritual had been in place since 1861, when it gave ships in the Firth of Forth an audible time signal. I was marched up through the Portcullis Gate and, at the far end of the Argyll Battery, given the relevant instructions. The idea had sounded terrific over a drink in the hotel bar the night before, for here was history. Mary, Queen of Scots had given birth to James VI here and Bonnie Prince Charlie attempted to take the castle during the Jacobite Rising, and here we were adding our minuscule contribution, by letting the rest of the country hear the one o’clock gun. The gun I fired was the 25-pound Howitzer which had been in place since 1952, although they’ve since replaced it. My instructor was Staff Sergeant Thomas McKay (later MBE), who went by the wonderfully scary nickname of ‘Tam the Gun’. The force and the noise at close range were extraordinary. I felt as though I’d been simultaneously punched by half a dozen chaps from the 105th Regiment Royal Artillery after a night on the town. You know that feeling. The castle was built atop a 350-million-year-old volcano, so I wouldn’t have considered it the ideal place to let off a jolly big gun on a daily basis.

If Radio One failed to kill you with conventional weaponry they tried to drown you. Come with me to the Plymouth of the mid ’80s and let me introduce you to a man attempting to emulate Sir Francis Drake. I will refer to him only as ‘Peter Powell’. An unlikely name, I know, but it will have to suffice. PP, proud possessor of a splendid-looking speedboat, brought it with him on the week away. Would we like a trip round the bay? Of course we would. With five of us on board, including Paul Williams, off we went, ‘sailing on a summer breeze’ and ‘skipping over the ocean like a stone’ without having to engage in any ‘banking off of the North East winds.’ Perfect, really. No, not really. Not wishing to sound like a landlubber who squeals like an especially savvy pig on its way to market when just 5 yards offshore, I waited until the water was around my ankles before I spoke.

‘That’s normal, matey,’ came the reply. OK, Peter was the captain. Five minutes passed before I passed further comment on the increasing depth of the water.

‘Oh shit!’ came the not-so-nonchalant response.

Somewhere we’d hit an underwater rock. We were about half a mile out to sea and Pop One Up, as the ailing craft was called, was close to popping five pairs of clogs. Baling with our shoes proved useless. With five of us on board and nothing to bale with, the weight was increasing by the minute as the sea washed around our knees. Step forward M. D. K. Read with a master plan. It occurred to me that the boat contained one lifebelt and one non-swimmer. Would it not make sense to put the two together? I donned the lifebelt, jumped overboard and tried to pull the boat towards terra firma. The Highwaymen had a number one back in the day about Michael rowing the boat ashore, but I don’t recall anyone on our craft using the US group’s tagline of ‘Hallelujah’. Over the side I went, rope in hand and lifebelt around my chest. I might not be able to actually swim, but I reasoned that if the lifebelt kept me afloat, I could do something through sheer strength. Gradually, gradually the boat nosed towards the shore. After what seemed like hours (they always use that line in books, but in this case it was no exaggeration) I felt sand and rocks beneath my feet, enabling me to get some purchase at least. The boat and four crew were getting heavier and heavier and I could feel the rope cutting into me. Peter also helpfully pointed out that there was hardly an ideal place to land anyway on this section of coast, even if we made it. It was true. Jagged rocks dotted the shoreline. Then he spotted what appeared to be a tiny sliver of beach. I’m not certain my sense of direction was up to much by then. I felt like Geoff Capes pulling one of those 20-ton trucks with his teeth. This was strength-sapping stuff.

After another half-hour, and almost leaning horizontally backwards, I felt myself falling onto a sandy beach. The boat was still some yards out as I got unsteadily to my feet, thoroughly exhausted, and if I expected four grateful faces giving me a ‘you plucked us from the jaws of certain death’ look, I was mistaken. Their faces told a different story. They were struck dumb. With gratitude? No, they’d spotted the apparition bearing down on me like a galleon in full sail. The full-bodied female nudist swung her handbag at my head with such force that I thought for a moment that God had saved me from drowning to be concussed instead. She may have uttered something like ‘pervert’ or ‘weirdo’ but I can’t be sure, as I had that feeling you get after a bottle of Great-Aunt Doris’s home-made potato wine.

Others of her clan arrived at the scene. I was being berated from all sides. ‘We’re fed up with people like you coming to ogle.’

Fortunately for all concerned, explanation and recognition saved the day. They embraced me – not physically, of course. One of the men who had some naval experience and was a former policeman (make your own jokes here) went to help Peter with the boat while the other survivors waded ashore. The nudists were now my friends. I had become, within minutes, an honorary naturist. They gave me drinks and sandwiches. I had been accepted into their tribe. I felt like ripping my clothes off and being initiated. Well, maybe not, but I was certainly grateful to be alive-ish.

Our problems weren’t over, though. The tide was coming in rapidly and we’d have to vacate the beach pretty sharpish. Peter and the ex-sailor were attempting to re-start the boat and coax it to a nearby port. Meanwhile our producer, Paul Williams, never one to panic in a crisis (yeah, right), took charge. Having discovered that the only way off the beach, unless by boat, was to scale the massive rock face via a steep and arduous set of steps, he set off in search of assistance. The stairs would be cut off at some point, so flapping his arms like a particularly inept Bognor Birdman entrant, with omnipresent cigarette clamped firmly between his lips, he capered across the beach as if trying to launch himself, and disappeared, mumbling something about emergency services. Where he was heading nobody knew. I doubt if he did.

After what seemed a millennium, during which time the nudists had disappeared, the tide continued to menace us and Pop One Up drifted off towards the horizon, I came close to getting a haircut I hadn’t ordered from a helicopter. It hovered and landed on the beach, and two guys in full kit leapt out and came racing over. We’d already had enough action to fill a James Bond movie, and this latest episode provided the icing on the cake. Who were they after? The answer was me.

‘Which leg’s broken?’

Silence. The other three members of our crew looked at me for an answer. Well, the real answer was ‘Neither of them, thank you’, but being a part-time student of the psychology of a Radio One producer, I soon realised this represented Paul Williams at his best. To make sure that he did his duty and behaved responsibly towards his party, he’d embellished a trifle. Why he’d selected one of my legs to be broken is beyond me. I wasn’t even sure which one he’d told them had been broken. I almost asked them to pick whichever one they thought fit, or unfit. ‘This one’, I whispered weakly, ‘hurts a little.’

I now looked like a complete bloody idiot, trying to save Paul Williams’s face. The boys from RNAS Culdrose eventually dismissed me as a time-wasting buffoon. There was another twist to come, though, for their presence, albeit at the behest of a mad, fag-wielding, piano-playing Adam Faith lookalike, proved to be a boon. Just as they were about to give me a second unwanted haircut, the boat caught fire. In short order Peter Powell and the rather helpful naked policeman (an integral part of the nudist crew as I recall) were winched to safety, Pop One Up was towed to what might have been its final resting place and I was scooped off the beach in case Radio One was fined for littering. The following day’s papers carried dramatic photographs of the near-disaster, prompting the Radio One controller, Derek Chinnery, to haul me in and accuse me of setting it up as a stunt. Crazy I may be, but I would never knowingly attempt to slaughter a handful of people for a few column inches and a blurred snap or two in tomorrow’s chip paper. I assured him that no nudists had been hurt in the making of this tragedy.

For some reason best known to himself, Peter Powell dropped his shorts and bared his bottom on the penultimate day of his roadshow week, so the idea was put to me that I should beetle down the following day and ‘arrest’ Peter on stage. His posterior had made the national papers, including the front page of The Sun. Smiley had organised a uniform and helmet in my size and was convinced we could get a fun picture out of it. Always available when the word ‘fun’ is mentioned, I drove to Torre Abbey Meadows, Torquay and the plan was put into action. I’d turn up on stage, show him the photograph of his rear end and ‘arrest’ him. All harmless fun. Well, harmless until the actual police joined the party. Two constables approached me. ‘We’re arresting you for impersonating a member of the force.’

‘Oh right, ha ha, very good.’ I played along as they dragged me away. ‘OK now, the media have taken the pictures and we’ve had a good laugh.’

They didn’t appear to be doing too much laughing. I was bundled rather harshly into a police car and with sirens wailing, taken to the local nick. Lines like ‘it’s a fair cop’ and so on didn’t seem to cut much ice, so I shut up. A large sergeant, quite possibly the result of an illicit liaison between Giant Haystacks and a sturdy silverback gorilla, let me know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t messing around.

‘But it’s all part of the roadshow.’

‘I’m not interested in who you are or what you do, you’ve broken the law.’

‘Oh, come on, all my clothes are back at the hotel.’

‘You won’t be needing clothes.’

Gulp.

If he wasn’t a Radio One man (he clearly wasn’t) I thought that I could maybe get away with a false name. I was taking a damn big risk. The custody record already had the reason for arrest down, ‘Impersonation of a Police Officer’. I was in danger of adding to my sentence. I risked it.

‘Name?’

‘Peter Powell.’

‘Place of birth?’

‘Birmingham.’

I still have the charge sheet and Peter Powell’s name beams out of it. Here are the details, Pete, in case you ever need them. The arresting officer was WPC 2497 Wignall. Your height I gave as 5 ft 9 in., occupation DJ and address c/o Broadcasting House. You were arrested at 12.42 on Torre Abbey Meadows and detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. On the ‘prisoner’s rights’ section, I said that you didn’t want a solicitor and didn’t need anyone to be notified. I hope that was OK. You may be pursued for supplying false fingerprints as they remain my property. They’re a weird shape.

I was led into the bowels of the station and chucked unceremoniously into a cell. After an hour in the slammer I was beginning to feel a trifle uncomfortable. I had a new neighbour, though.

‘Mike Read, isn’t it?’

I nodded in a custodial way.

‘I was hoping to come and see you at the roadshow.’

‘Not exactly the best view from here, mate.’

An hour later there was a rattle of keys. I didn’t hold out any hope that they were for me. The big fella was back. ‘All right, out you come.’ They obviously planned to rush me to court. Instead I was shown the custody record report they’d just signed. I quote verbatim:

They forgot to mention that they gave me a slap-up feed in the canteen first. Did I want a pudding too before my courtesy car driven complete with flashing blue light whisked me back to the hotel? I did. From a custody suite to a custardy sweet in under two hours.

We made all the nationals the next day, including, once more, the front page of The Sun, which featured the arrest by WPC Marilyn Wignall and PC Keith Droudge. Both the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror deemed the prank worthy of page three, with the latter also giving us a cartoon showing me in jail moaning to a fellow inmate, ‘It started as a prank, then they decided to leave me in here.’ Peter’s ‘Super Soaraway bum’ even made another appearance in some papers.

I’d have to admit it really was a fair cop, although not my first time behind bars. At college half a dozen of us caused a certain amount of mayhem having descended on the West End for our rag week. Students see rag week as an important issue. The public and the police have a different view. For some juvenile and inexplicable reason we parked our battered van outside the front entrance to the Hilton and proceeded to paint it. On being reprimanded by a couple of commissionaires we responded with the crass but reasonable student chant of ‘it’s a free country’. Not terribly original and straight out of the bolshie teenagers’ handbook. The work of art was proceeding very nicely and the van was heading towards a new psychedelic look when an irate American yelled, ‘Get that damn thing out of the way, I need to move my car.’ His car was a Roller so maybe he had a bit of clout. His outburst surprised our very own Van Gogh, John Calcut, who spun round and painted a rather neat line of red emulsion across the guy’s jacket.

Downing Street was our next port of call, where we painted bare footprints from the doorstep of No. 10 along the street and down Whitehall. There were no security gates then, and you could stand within a few yards of the Prime Minister’s door without fear of reprisals. We were also unwittingly aided by a jostling crowd supporting the seamen’s strike, which masked us. Of course we didn’t get away with it. We were ‘apprehended’, marched across to Scotland Yard, and given buckets of water and stiff scrubbing brushes. As any painter and decorator will tell you, removing delightfully fresh gloss paint with water and a brush is impossible, but the boys in blue were well aware of that. They let us go with a warning after a back-breaking and futile hour of drudgery, after which we left Whitehall in a bigger mess than the government.

Older, wiser folk would have learned their lesson, but not adrenaline-fuelled, fun-loving kids from Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge. What possessed our student union president, Marshall Dixon, and me to sticker the four lions in Trafalgar Square with our rag week publicity leaflets and change the colour of their feet, I have no idea, but I’m sure we thought we had a damned good reason at the time. The two policemen that arrested us weren’t of the same opinion and dragged us unceremoniously to the tiny lock-up a few yards east of Nelson’s Column. Names, addresses and parents’ telephone numbers were unwillingly mumbled, in the hope of being misheard. After half an hour contemplating our doom we were suddenly and inexplicably let go. Had the bomb dropped? Were all prisoners now free?

I felt that the decent thing to do was to come clean with my Pa, before he smouldered and exploded in his own time. I was halfway through a rather faltering explanation when it dawned on me that this was new territory for him. Despite their threat, the police hadn’t informed our parents at all. Another lesson learned.

One of the best-remembered pranks that year, probably sometime in the mid ’80s, took place at the Unicorn Hotel in Bristol. We’d been through the usual procedure of Derek Chinnery slowly ushering everyone towards the lifts, not unlike One Man and His Dog. The difference here was that the sheep didn’t stay in their pens. Within fifteen minutes everyone was downstairs again. I had to be up at some unearthly hour to do the breakfast show from a boat, but nevertheless stayed the course. Not everyone was a night owl and frankly I was surprised that so many of the guys were still up at three in the morning. At last I gave in and headed for my room. There was an unreasonable fishy odour invading my space, but nothing I couldn’t cope with. I hit the light switch. Not working. Could I be fagged to go downstairs to report it? Of course not. It’d be light anyway in a couple of hours. I couldn’t even be bothered to go to the bathroom as I’d be up again so soon. So, clothes off, into bed … and onto the floor. Fumbling in the dark I discovered that one of the legs of the bed had been sawn off. It was going to be an uncomfortable night. Now this I would report. I groped for the telephone. It was covered in something unpleasant. I couldn’t see exactly what it was in the dark, but it smelled like manure and now it was all over my hands. The bathroom after all, then.

As I opened the door, it fell in of its own accord. I later discovered that the hinges had been removed. Whoever had set up this booby-trap had real attention to detail. I flew in on top of the door and the chickens flew on top of me. At least, they sounded like chickens. I couldn’t see a thing. It was impossible to take a head count, but I was obviously outnumbered. Through the beaks, feathers and flapping wings, the manured hands and kipper-impregnated nose I heard the gay, tinkling laughter of merry folk on the other side of my hotel door.

I found the handle and although temporarily ‘blinded by the light’ in true Springsteen fashion, I caught a ‘fleeting glimpse of someone’s fading shadow,’ in true Bob Lind fashion. Simon Bates made it to his hotel room before he could be slaughtered by his naked assailant, but Noel Edmonds ‘kept on running’ in true Spencer Davis fashion. The hotel corridor went round in a square, if that’s not an oxymoron. I swear I was catching him as we approached my bedroom on the second lap, but guile took over. Noel looked at my naked form, clicked my door shut and disappeared. I was aghast. I was also as God made me – well, a little taller and a little heavier, but clearly no wiser. I had no alternative but to throw myself on the mercy of the night manager. The mirrored lifts weren’t flattering. I took the nude version of myself to the front desk. The manager’s face told me that he could smell manure. Was this the time and place for a full-frontal bedtime story involving chickens, bed legs, kippers and late-night revellers? Probably not. I skipped the explanations and simply said, ‘I appear to be locked out of my room.’

In the early summer of 1987, Gary Davies and I fronted a special series of roadshows, the Twin Towers Rock & Rolls Tour. As you’d imagine, given that we were starting in Blackpool, the rock was the edible variety, not the musical genre, measuring 10 feet long by 16 inches in diameter, weighing a quarter of a ton and needing 335 pounds of sugar. It was a far cry from George Formby’s ‘Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’, and in fact was a world record, verified by the The Guinness Book of Records. To make the title of the show work, we had a brace of Rolls-Royce cars, and we would use them to drag this great, calorific lump of pink confectionery from the Blackpool Tower to the Eiffel Tower, stopping at various points along the way. Why? I really don’t know. I suppose because we were raising money for the charity Insight, fund-raisers for the blind. I guess the rock played some part. The great and the good from the music world (as seen from a 1987 perspective) joined us at each roadshow. Pepsi and Shirley performed at Heaton Park, as did Marillion, while Tom Jones helped us pull a record crowd of some 30,000 at Birmingham. Sam Fox appeared at Woburn Abbey, and Steve Van Zandt and Rupert Everett, then essaying a musical career in case the greasepaint lost its allure, joined us at Dover. In Paris Kim Wilde was our guest. I seem to remember we were having dinner when the news came through that she was number one in the States with her version of ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’.

My 1987 roadshow week kicked off at Berwick-upon-Tweed, where I went for a world record. As soon as the roadshow was over at 12.30 my producer Paul Williams whisked me over the golf links to the gladiatorial arena of the tennis courts. The idea was that I’d play against 1,000 opponents. Not all at once, obviously. Anyone could appear on court as many times as they liked as long as they re-joined the queue and paid their token coin each time, which went to charity. I must have delivered my first serve sometime after midday and finished at seven in the evening, exhausted but exhilarated. I wondered what the heck I’d been thinking of when I agreed to this mad escapade, but I’d done it. So why didn’t we make The Guinness Book of Records? We had the correct adjudication and the qualifying forms from Guinness, and everything was recorded according to the rules. Who knows? Anyway, it was time to head off to Portobello on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where we had a police escort.

This was the spawning ground for the young Sean Connery. From one-time lifeguard at the local swimming pool to international movie star: not a bad career path, unless you’re a great swimmer and lousy actor. Among the massive crowd were a couple of lads with guitars who appeared at the back of the roadshow with a CD containing a couple of their demos. They seemed very normal, down-to-earth and enthusiastic. My shows were always seat-of-your-pants affairs, so I suggested they came on stage and played live. They were awesome. They sang those kinds of harmonies that you only get from siblings, or people that are on exactly the same wavelength. I was seriously impressed by their talent, songs and attitude – they wore horn-rimmed glasses and wore them with pride. This duo was worth championing. I played the demos on my radio shows, so when they got a record deal I was up for pushing their first single. I even attended a playlist meeting, but the record got knocked back by several producers, one calling it ‘woolly-jumper music’. I went to two more meetings (unheard of for a DJ), whereupon they relented.

‘All right, we’ll put your mates on the playlist.’

‘My mates? They played on my roadshow but I don’t really know them.’

‘Yeah, yeah. We’ll stick it on the C list for you.’ The C list was the bottom rung of the playlist.

‘You’re not doing it for me, you’re doing it for a couple of talented singer-songwriters.’

‘OK, we’ll see what happens, shall we?’

What happened? The song went top three and Charlie and Craig Reid, the Proclaimers, had a string of hit singles and albums spanning twenty years.

Job done at Portobello, we headed north to Arbroath and then across to the west coast. 130 miles of fabulous scenery which necessitated regular stops to scribble poetry. By the time we reached Helensburgh the poem was finished.

At various times during the week I’d made a point of telling a couple of Smiley’s sidekicks how the water in Loch Lomond was so pure that you could drink it. I let the fact permeate. I bided my time. When we arrived at the loch I let the conversation drift naturally towards the quality of the water.

‘I wouldn’t like to drink that,’ said my producer, right on cue.

‘It won’t hurt you. £20 says you won’t drink a glass of it.’

‘Not a chance.’

It was going according to plan. Someone had passed on my false knowledge to Smiley that the water was absolutely pure.

‘Twenty quid? I’ll do it.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Give me a glass.’

One glass. Into the water. Out of Loch Lomond and into Smiley. ‘No problem. Twenty quid please.’

I paid up, but the psychological fun I had, when he learned that it was no different from any normal lake water with its animal matter, dead fish, rotting plants and things unmentionable, was worth £20 of anybody’s money. He asked serious questions of his internal plumbing for the next two or three days.

At Helensburgh we stayed by Gare Loch, but I resisted pulling the same trick twice and instead got my old pal Stuart Henry on the phone from Luxembourg, much to the delight of the crowd, as he’d done the roadshow here many years earlier. He enjoyed being there in spirit.

I saved the week’s physical stunt for the final day at Ayr. After interviewing former Small Faces singer Steve Marriott, I set about Smiley. On stage we discussed his new many-wheeled roadshow vehicle. ‘Many-wheeled, yes, Smiley,’ I said, ‘but not many-tyred.’

The crowd parted to show his truck sans tyres. Storm clouds spread over his usually sunny countenance. Something that sounded uncannily like ‘You bastard’ issued from his lips.

The local Air Sea Rescue had played ball. Their helicopter rose on cue, flew out to sea and dropped six tyres into the ocean. Smiley was livid. He was steaming. I’d be receiving a bill that very evening. The crowd roared their approval. At the stunt that is, not the impending invoice. He was so angry that it was a struggle to get him back on stage for the finale.

‘Wait a minute, Smiles, how the heck did that happen?’ I pointed. The crowd parted again. The tyres were back on the vehicle. He’d been living on anger and adrenalin for the last hour, now he was a broken man. His tyres had been safe all along, those dropped into the sea being throwaways. The Air Sea Rescue later recovered them as part of an exercise. Unfortunately, in these straitjacketed days of health and safety no one would be allowed to even entertain such an idea.

Weston-Super-Mare was always fun. The lovely Hilda (some eighty-plus years young) would turn up with cakes and presents. I’d make a point of getting her up on stage as she was a real hit with the crowd and bought records to help the groups who appeared on the roadshow even though she didn’t own a record player. She always got a lot of press and would call me her favourite DJ. Radio One really was a family station then, broadcasting and not narrowcasting.

In Weston we always stayed at the Atlantic Hotel, where on one occasion I organised for Smiley’s room to be changed. A pretty feeble wheeze? Hold hard. I moved every single item to another room but put them all in exactly the same place they had been in his original room. Reception even swapped his key, which wouldn’t work for the old room but opened the new room. A bewildered Smiley asked anyone and everyone, including reception, which room he’d been in and, being well briefed, they all played along. He began to question his sanity, something the rest of us had been doing for some while. As any decent oceanographer knows the tide scoots in pretty rapidly at Weston, so during this diversion with the rooms, we’d appropriated his car keys and moved the Range Rover onto the beach. When this was pointed out to him at an appropriate moment he broke several British sprint records in one panic-stricken burst of speed, hitherto unknown in the Miles family. It was terrific viewing from our grandstand seat in the hotel. Through the waves he ploughed as the surf broke over the top of his wheels, but there was icing on the cake for us voyeurs. He fumbled with his keys and … they fell into 2 feet of incoming tide. We couldn’t see the expression on his face as he dropped to his knees and thrashed around in desperation, but we didn’t need to.

Weston is also tinged with a sad memory. At each town we were expected to be available for local press interviews and on this occasion I was asked to give an interview to a local reporter out on the seafront. It was one of her first interviews and although she professed to being a little nervous, she was actually pretty confident and very professional. We sat on the railings, did the interview and had a good laugh until some half an hour later Paul Williams appeared, shouting from the hotel doorway that it was time to eat. I asked my interviewer if she wanted to join the crew for supper where she could get a few more views on how the roadshow ran and even try to interview Paul. She said she’d love to join us, but then decided she’d better get back and write up the interview. It had been one of Jill Dando’s earliest assignments and years later she admitted that she desperately wanted to come and have a laugh with us but realised that she had absolutely no money and if she’d been asked to pay for her dinner would have been acutely embarrassed.

Summer 1988 got underway at Great Yarmouth, and it was while driving from there to Skegness that I stopped at an intriguing junk shop in a small hamlet. It was crammed with everything from stuffed parrots and milking stools to hundreds of paintings and piles of old furniture. Not knowing where to start on this alluring Aladdin’s cave of things that I couldn’t possibly fit in the car, I made straight for an old photo album. I have no idea what made me select that item out of the thousands arrayed before me, but I opened it to find that it contained the relatives of an early girlfriend of mine, Gillie Palmer. There was her grandmother as a young girl in an Edwardian landscape, early cars, family gatherings and many other atmospheric images. They were astounded when I presented them with the long-lost photo album.

Obviously buoyed up by my find I later screeched to a halt in the middle of nowhere. My subconscious had registered something a mile or two back. I turned the car round and re-traced my journey. What the hell could it have been? Then I spotted the sign: ‘Ferrets for sale’. A gift from roadshow Heaven. The following day they made their public debut. Come to think of it. I’m not sure whether there should be an ‘l’ in ‘public’ as the little chaps went down Smiley’s shorts. If you think he struggled, you should have seen the ferrets. The crowd pleaser of the furry duet brought the roadshow attendees to their feet as it pushed down Smiley’s zip and poked its head out. You couldn’t have written the script.

At Bridlington Captain Sensible and I battled it out for hours one evening on the crazy golf. No hedonistic orgy of personal destruction for us. We knew how to have fun. A pair of white shorts each, a pot of tea and an old-fashioned seaside town and we were flying. Brand us pleasure-seeking sybarites if you must. I recently wrote a rather decent song with the Captain, the lyric failing, rather significantly, to make any reference to Bridlington.

At Cleethorpes Boating Lake Paddock Smiley hired a huge crane which gently and elegantly lowered my green MGB into said boating lake. After being dunked like an oversized green digestive it re-emerged with water pouring from every orifice. Fair enough; after all I’d had a hairdresser attempt to dye Smiley’s hair blond the previous day and it had turned the colour of my car. I can understand a high level of peevishness dominating his vengeful thoughts. I then brought forth an Indian elephant called Bully, which Smiles was forced to ride, but I was subsequently attacked by six tarantulas. It’s a wonder we had time to play any music.

On the way there I’d phoned ahead to a garden centre. I began explaining my simple needs.

‘That could only be Mike Read.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I can’t think of anyone else who’d ask us to turn a hotel room into a beautiful garden.’

Fair point. The target this time was producer Ted Beston, who’d had the misfortune to be assigned to this roadshow week. Not being my usual producer, Ted had obviously drawn the short straw. While the garden centre got busy turning his room into an exhibit worthy of the Chelsea Flower Show, we staged a lengthy game of rounders on the beach. Nicky Campbell was with us, and if I’m not mistaken, it was his wicked swing of the bat that Smiley took on with his face. The bat won and an ambulance was called. As they wheeled him up the beach Ted called an end to the game. Knowing that we desperately needed more time for the completion of the garden, Smiley, ever the trooper, spat blood as he insisted, ‘No, no you must carry on, carry on … in my name.’ A little melodramatic, I felt. I mean, he wasn’t exactly slipping away having copped a packet in the trenches. We stretched the game out for as long as we could. It was enough. The front pages of the local and regional papers carried photographs of a beautifully turfed room with wall-to-wall grass, flowerpots a blaze of colour, hanging baskets, ferns, small trees and a wee herbaceous border. The only discordant colour came from the bruises on Smiley’s face.

With all our banging about, worms started to emerge from the turf. It was time to go. ‘What do I do about all this?’ asked Ted, not unreasonably.

We shrugged, made our excuses and left.

In 1989 I did the Welsh stretch, which involved fire engines, several tons of foam and a few hundredweight of greengrocery. As was often the case, I had no idea the night before what I was going to get up to the following day. David Essex was one of the guests at Porthcawl, so I raced through the local paper, tracked down a motorcycle dealership and hired a Harley-Davidson. I knew that David loved bikes, but there had to be more to it than that. I called the coastguard, who readily agreed to let me have half-a-dozen distress flares. A path was cleared through the middle of the 25,000-strong crowd, a makeshift ramp placed against the stage and right on cue, after Adrian Juste’s famous announcement, ‘Today, live from Porthcawl’ etc., David kicked the engine into life and with me riding pillion and letting off the flares, we tore through the crowd at speed, hit the ramp and screeched to a halt on the stage. A dangerous but great start. It wouldn’t get off the drawing board in these days of caution and litigation. The end was more prolonged as Smiley, much to the delight of the crowd, removed the engine from my car, delaying my departure to the next venue by several hours.

That week in Wales was equally memorable for the look of despair my producer, John Leonard, gave me as, head in hands, he whispered in a rather defeated tone, ‘What … are the flock of sheep for?’ What were they for? Well, obviously, for a perfectly innocent sheep-shearing demonstration. He didn’t even bother asking about the enormous sheep dip that arrived and the blokes that did the shearing. The paramedics prescribed a week or two in a rest home where he could tend the marigolds, sit on a bench and mumble away to himself about what life could have been like before the invention of roadshows. Bring on the flock. Into the bath of sheep dip. Shearing demonstration. Any more sheep. No, but there’s Smiley. The 20,000-strong crowd were well aware of this inevitable conclusion and, like a crowd of toga-swathed Romans at the Colosseum, were baying for blood. Who was I to deny them? I turned my thumb down Caesar style and Smiley was duly dipped and shorn.

Smiley and I regularly spent far more money than we earned setting up elaborate stunts, and I intended the 1990 week, covering East Anglia and the south east, to get off to a flying start. For my birthday earlier that year, a friend had mocked up some silly photos of me on other people’s bodies. Being visual, you’ll have to take my word that it was well executed. One had my head superimposed on the semi-naked body of a female mud-wrestler. Perhaps I should choose my friends more carefully, but I was retrospectively grateful. For the roadshow, I simply intended to swap my head for Smiley’s. I paid someone I knew, with the wherewithal, to do just that and deliver the picture to the national newspaper that had agreed to run with it. I childishly rubbed my hands with glee. I’d turn up at Great Yarmouth and in Monday’s paper would be the story I’d provided with the photograph. Easy. That story said that Smiley formerly wrestled as Gloria Smudd. Yes, that’s right, ‘Mud, mud, Gloria Smudd’. Of course it went wrong. The lazy oaf to whom I’d entrusted the job delivered the original, with Smiley’s head loosely stuck on top of the old photograph. The tabloid (all right, it was the Daily Star) leapt on it of course. That morning’s edition carried the story that I had formerly wrestled as Gloria Smudd. Damn. Never fear, a good commander always has a back-up plan and this one was the business.

I had obtained forms for joining the Army and when I arrived at the Dolphin Hotel in Great Yarmouth on the Sunday night, I revealed the plot to a willing employee. ‘Army forms. Carbon paper. Autograph paper on top. When Mr Miles arrives ask him for his autograph. I’ll pre-sign it and so will our producer so it looks kosher.’ It worked. Some 10,000 or so, gathered on Great Yarmouth beach to watch the antics, saw an unwilling and protesting Smiley being shown the forms to prove that he had enlisted of his own free will. ‘You can’t make me join the Army,’ he spluttered.

‘No, but these gentleman can.’

A sergeant major with a face like a sheer slab of granite and two squaddies were the enforcers. To the delight of the crowd, Smiley was stripped of his own clothes and dressed in Army uniform. ‘I’m not staying in this. I’ll just go back to the hotel and change.’

I had to disappoint him. ‘No point, Smiles, your clothes are long gone. You can have them back at the end of the week.’

The three military types turned up all week to keep him in check. There was a proud moment at Clacton when we asked him to perform with some twenty other people in uniform. His smile turned to humiliation when he learned that they were Girl Guides and he had to sing ‘Ging Gang Gooley’ with them. We wouldn’t let him play with Aswad. Later we told him he’d be involved in a military tattoo. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind a military tattoo – a few bugles, plenty of flags…’

‘Er, no, Smiles … not that kind of military tattoo.’

The squaddies stopped him from wriggling, squirming and squeaking while the tattooist went to work on Smiley’s bottom. It was terrific, crowd-pleasing stuff.

In Margate the sergeant major rather decently, at my behest, allowed Smiles to hold the regimental mascot, a small pig. We also had Bob Geldof and his band on the show to play their new single, ‘The Great Song of Indifference’, and I was roped in to play guitar with them. While we were playing and the crowd were swaying, Smiles was holding the pig, but the Army chaps had gone AWOL. Come the end of the roadshow and he’s still holding the pig. It’s OK, it was on a lead. He was now seriously looking to unload the pig on someone. No one wanted it. ‘Your responsibility, Smiles,’ I said, with a shrug of the shoulders. He said something that sounded like ‘bastard’. In fact it probably was ‘bastard’. It would make the most sense.

The next show was in Eastbourne and the run there from Margate was certainly the longest between two venues in any one week. A local constable was on hand to forbid any attempt at abandoning the small creature and ‘shoving off.’ This was possibly the first little piggy to ride in a Radio One Range Rover. Better than a trip to market with your mates. Smiles tried to unload the pig at various Kent and Sussex farms, but of course, as he was a thoroughly untrustworthy character that could well have smuggled it in from Calais, no one would touch it. But by the time we arrived at Eastbourne there was a definite lack of pig. I suspect Smiley just turned him loose in a field, but I prefer my apocryphal ending, making use of an ancient schoolboy joke:

By the time Shakin’ Stevens took to the roadshow stage at the Wish Tower Slope, the Army had discharged their latest recruit.

We finished the week at Southsea, so surely Smiley had suffered enough? No, there was more to come. I went to town the next day, performing ‘The Colours’ with The Men They Couldn’t Hang (what a song) and sending Smiley up to the old ramparts of Southsea Castle to try to find someone to interview. We went live to him and some 15,000 people looked up to the remnants of the castle.

‘You won’t believe this,’ said the small dot 100 feet up, ‘but there are some nuns coming towards me.’

I believed it. Of course I did. I’d sent them. They were paintball specialists, with their guns under their habits. I’d spent the morning organising them. Smiley’s interview was about to get underway when the ‘nuns’ let him have it. The crowd roared, Johnny Beerling, who had come down to ensure (or at least encourage) good behaviour, groaned and it was a bedraggled, sorry-looking, multi-coloured Smiles that trudged back to the roadshow.

Heaven knows why the roadshow turned us into shrieking third-formers for one week of the year.

Apart from the roadshows, there were many one-off outside broadcasts. Early in 1988 I did some live programmes from the Ideal Home Exhibition, interviewing all and sundry and throwing in the odd impression. All was well until I had to chat to Rodney Bewes, whose ‘Likely Lad’ voice I’d imitated many times. As soon as the person you’re attempting to take off is sitting in front of you wearing a querulous frown, mimicking becomes well-nigh impossible. My impression floundered. On a brighter note I also did the review programme Singled Out from there with Carol Decker and Rick Astley, and there was a celebration dinner. Prince Edward joined us, but the guest they’d seated me next to blew me away. It was Guglielmo Marconi’s widow. Her husband had invented radio. That was how young the medium was. OK, she was his second wife, but to lie in bed and listen to the radio with the man that made it possible must have been an incredible thing. The delightful Maria Marconi was eighty-eight at the time, her husband having died fifty years earlier. She told me that she’d married him when she was twenty-four and that Benito Mussolini had been the best man at their wedding. Maria lived to the good age of ninety-four. Without her husband there wouldn’t have been radio … or roadshows. Thank you, Guglielmo.

Our head of music, Doreen Davis, was always up for programme ideas, and early in 1982 I came up with one. ‘What about Three Men in a Boat?’ It was the time of the Falklands War, so they felt the country needed something cheery on the radio.

‘I like it, I like it.’

There was no messing with Doreen. If she liked it, it was as good as done.

It wasn’t warm in April and early May. We even had a late frost or two. The crew had been press-ganged from the mean streets of W1, having taken the King’s Shilling, and were pressed into service. I was given the unenviable task of skippering the craft on its journey from Hampton Court to Oxford. The surly crew swarmed up the gangplank, without so much as a parrot or a ‘yo ho ho’ between them. Knaves. The onboard security was to be handled by a four-legged guard with a large tongue and a wet nose. The driver/steerer/pilot/navigator was the bearded American with the Mafioso handle, Paul Gambaccini. In the galley was another man who sported whiskers, the gourmet chef/washer-upper Noel Edmonds. As Radio One breakfast shows went it was certainly different.

Our starting point was the maze at Hampton Court. This proved to be trickier then we imagined. It’s only a third of an acre, but feels like 300, and has half a mile of paths. I swear I heard the disembodied voice of Gambaccini at some point, muttering something about a topographical algorithm from behind a gnarled hornbeam, but I can’t be sure. I may have cursed William of Orange, for whom it was planted, once or twice as I couldn’t remember the tip that seasoned labyrinthines, as I feel they should be called, wisely imparted to us first-formers. Was it ‘always turn left’, ‘always turn right’ or ‘keep the hedge on your left’? Whatever it was, it held us up. Once on board, Noel’s dog thought better of it and decamped after a few hours and our producer, Dave Tate, fell in the river. Things were going swimmingly. The turn-out at every lock was amazing.

I’m still staggered that no one got a ducking. Knowing that Noel and I were likely to have something up our sleeves, one or two crews that we met on the journey got in first and chucked the odd tomato or egg. We may be decent fellows and all that, but a chap can’t turn the other cheek when tomatoes are hurled. We retaliated. We also discovered that feeble rejoinders such as ‘They started it’ cut little ice with the authorities. We knew we were in trouble when a Thames Water Authority launch pulled up alongside. Someone had snitched on us. Now it would be acceptable ‘whistle-blowing’, but then it was most definitely ‘snitching’. We were ordered off the river. The dressing-down, from a man with enough stripes to attract a zebra who was looking to settle down in a leafy suburb, brought us back to our senses. At the next lock we were to disembark, the authority having already informed Radio One of its intentions to remove the three offenders from the Thames. How could I blame the man in the galley or the chap with the wheel? I was the captain and as such would have to take the punishment for my men. ‘Tie me to the yard-arm,’ I insisted, ‘and give me the lash.’ There were no takers.

We reached the lock and sure enough there were the TWA blokes. Crikey, they looked grim. Would I be ‘kissing the gunner’s daughter’ before noon? No, I wouldn’t. Smiley Miley and the Radio One team had been rascally and devious once again. It was well planned, brilliantly executed and my crew, from commodore to powder monkey, were completely fooled.

Another intriguing Radio One creation was the annual Teddy Bears’ Picnic, a roadshow where up to 30,000 people turned up with their bears. Hairy bikers came in packs with well-loved bears strapped to the handlebars, some folk pushed prams full of bears and others even dressed as bears. Ursine creatures, old, new, borrowed, blue and every other colour turned up to mingle with their fellow bears and picnic, not in the woods, but in the grounds of a stately home. It was usually Peter Powell and me on bear duty with Simon Mayo, Mark Goodier and Philip Schofield making the odd appearance. The Radio Times featured a wonderful cartoon of Peter, Mark and me as bears. Our first teddy bear excursion was to Harewood House, which proved so popular that the traffic jams it caused made the national news.

Assorted Sootys, Poohs, Paddingtons, Yogis and even the odd ear-buttoned Steiff, with a price tag on its head, dragged their owners kicking and screaming to Longleat for another ursine gathering fronted by the furries’ best friends, Peter Powell and me. Peter always brought Edward, his bear, and even Lord Bath flourished his teddy for the crowds. He told me that he normally kept a low profile and often enjoyed putting on his old clothes and just pottering around the garden and that tourists, especially those from abroad, would often shout at him to ask for directions. ‘Hey, buddy, which way to the house?’ ‘I say … yes, you. Could you tell us where the toilets are?’ ‘Hey, mate, where can we get a cup of tea?’ He never told them who he was. I think it quite amused him.

At Chatsworth House the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire made us very welcome. We set up camp in the local hostelry. When I arrived, late at night and tired, the first thing I saw was peacock marmalade for sale. ‘Wow, I’ll have two jars of that, please.’

‘On your bill, sir?’

‘Absolutely. In fact, make it three.’

‘You’re fond of marmalade, sir?’

‘Yes, but this is really unusual. What does it taste like?’

‘Very much like marmalade, sir.’ It could have been Jeeves speaking.

‘Is it similar to normal marmalade, you know, the kind made of oranges?’

‘The very same.’

‘But this is made with peacock.’

He smiled wanly and let me down gently, ‘A common mistake, sir. The Peacock is the name of the establishment.’

Thankfully, I was more alert the following morning for the roadshow, which was another success for the bears, with even the Duchess brandishing hers. Afterwards, she kindly showed me around the huge greenhouses, gave me some cuttings to take home and instructed one of the gardeners which fruit to cut for the Duke’s breakfast the following day. The youngest of the Mitford sisters and in my opinion the most attractive, she was charming and engaging, but felt she’d been hospitable enough without discussing the family history, which has been a mixture of pleasure and pain. They inherited Chatsworth after Andrew’s older brother Billy had been killed during the war. Billy had married John F. Kennedy’s sister Kathleen, known as ‘Kick,’ but she herself, widow of the heir to Chatsworth was killed in a plane crash in 1948. With Billy the heir to the leading Protestant family in England and Kathleen a daughter of the leading Roman Catholic family in the US and sister of the future President, who knows how the future may have played out had it not been for three untimely deaths.

Kick is buried at Chatsworth, JFK flying in to pay his respects not long before that fateful day in Dallas.

It wasn’t all sweetness and light though. If my group the Rock-olas were on the tour, we’d often play some gigs in the evenings and agreed to do so at one major Northern resort. The evening started off pleasantly enough and our set went down well (it was the first night we featured Born to Run) so I was unprepared for the promotor’s wife’s contribution. I was chatting with one or two of the audience after coming off stage, when it seemed like my head had exploded. This woman had smashed a heavy ice bucket full of ice over my head from behind. I had no idea what had happened at that moment, but on instinct I turned around and scythed my adversary to the floor with a sweep of the leg. I was immediately surrounded by a ring of steel. Some six or seven bouncers were rubbing their knuckles and advancing. Only some very slick and fast talking by my producer John Leonard avoided serious bloodshed. Radio One did receive an apology a few days later. Another flashpoint was at a West Country resort. As soon as a few of the roadshow team repaired to a local club for a drink, a guy intermittently ambled up asking a few alcohol-fuelled questions such as ‘who do you think you are?’ and ‘you’re no one special.’ I knew the answer to the first one and agreed with him on the second. Presumably between the question and the statement he’d found out. The gist was that his girlfriend was apparently making flattering comments to which he objected. Clearly she’d had a few then. My producer on the occasion was Paul Williams, who made the sensible suggestion that we leave before things got out of hand. We left, but they still got out of hand. As we walked up the side road by the club, the aggressor re-appeared, blocking my way. I tried to reason with him and Paul tried to reason with him, but he just wouldn’t be reasoned with. Then he became physical. It’d been a long day, I’d tried my best to avoid violence, but I wasn’t going to stand there and let him start poking me. I hit him very hard, just once and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Paul could panic at times, probably in my case with justification, but back at the hotel he woke our the Radio One PR people and made a series of phone calls to the controller and anyone else that might take the sting out of what he was convinced would be a headline story for the tabloids. We never heard another word.

Which goes to show into how many historical, geographical, agricultural, topographical, hysterical and sometimes physical areas the roadshow could take you. You could find yourself discussing Hitler’s paintings with Lord Bath, broadcasting in submarines, hiring helicopters, purloining flocks of sheep, injecting a cow, delivering milk, blowing kazoos with Wham!, playing tennis with a thousand people, firing cannons from castle walls, getting lost in Hampton Court Maze, shooting the breeze with Prince Philip, going down a coal mine, being the fireman on a steam train or standing next to the grave of JFK’s sister. And each one began by stirring us into action with that rallying jingle ‘Today … live from…’