12

YOU HAVE TO WONDER WHY

‘UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE. WHO DOES he think he is?’

That was my reaction as the news filtered through to me that, three days after being released from Palace and despite his promises and protestations to the contrary, Iain Dowie was going to be unveiled as the new Charlton Athletic manager in a press conference scheduled for the Tuesday after the May bank holiday weekend in 2006.

I couldn’t believe it; well, I suppose I could because he had no shame. Dowie knew he was going to Charlton and, using his family as an excuse, played on my better nature to get himself released from a contract that had a £1 million compensation clause in it. There was no way I was going to take that up the backside.

Dowie should have known me better. But as I have said football people live in a cosseted environment, outside the normal rules that govern society and think they can do as they damn well please.

Over the years I spent many hours with lawyers and many millions of pounds fighting legal injustices so there was no surprise when my legal representation received my call. My lawyer, Mark Buckley, was aware of the Dowie departure and the manner in which it had manifested itself and now he had been informed that Dowie was to be the new Charlton manager. I wanted something done and I wanted to be told how I could address this outrageous abuse of trust.

Mark Buckley came back with two words: ‘fraudulent misrepresentation’.

Aware that Dowie would be presented as Charlton’s manager at a press conference with his new chairman Richard Murray I decided to get a writ served on him live on national TV.

It was drafted over the weekend and was ready to be served. There was a private detective who I used regularly, Stuart Page, and I instructed him to pose as a reporter going to the press conference. Once he was in, at the most opportune moment, I told him to serve it upon Dowie in front of millions of watching eyes.

I sat in front of my TV in Spain watching Dowie being unveiled as the new Charlton manager – the post he said he would never take – and only about six miles north of Palace. I waited patiently for my guy to deliver my leaving gift to Dowie, but as the press conference went on, I listened to certain parts where Dowie blatantly lied and Murray ridiculed me, but there was no sign of Stuart.

My phone rang. ‘I can’t get in, I couldn’t get a press pass.’

‘Hold tight, Stuart, I’ll get you in.’

I phoned one of the Sky guys and told him that if he wanted to see something unique and interesting to get my guy in.

Stuart Page burst into the press conference with a writ in his hand from CPFC for fraud against Iain Dowie. The place descended into mayhem. Dowie looked gobsmacked and Murray bemused, perhaps thinking it was some kind of prank from Candid Camera. Eventually my guy got manhandled out by security. Meanwhile, I sat in my front room, thinking, ‘OK, Mr Dowie, you wanted to lie and cheat, now you have something else to consider.’

My phone lit up like a pinball machine as newspapers and radio stations bombarded me with calls, but I wanted to speak to Sky live to ensure everybody knew what and why this was going on.

Jim White, the Sky anchor, who considered himself something of a roving investigative reporter, tried to portray my actions as taking football to a new low. I agreed wholeheartedly and said that when a man lies and cheats his way out of a contract and betrays people, football has reached a new low!

OK, it was theatrical and unnecessary to have served the writ in the manner I did but I wanted to ensure that Dowie got his just desserts. He had hoodwinked me; Charlton, our now fiercest rivals, had got him for absolutely nothing, and unlike most others in football, I was not going to sit back and let that happen. As with Steve Bruce before him there was a consequence. In the world outside of football, there were consequences for managers who behaved unethically, and I didn’t see why football should be any different.

Once the furore died down I discussed the next move with my lawyers and was horrified to be told that the charge I was alleging against Dowie was one of the hardest to prove and they had reservations about its success. My grandstanding had the potential of becoming a big custard pie in my own face. ‘Bit bloody late to tell me that now,’ I said, ‘and not what you said when we decided on this drastic course of action. You got me in this with your advice, you better get me out of it one way or another.’

And with that we put together a case that was to create legal history.

As I have mentioned many times before I didn’t want to constantly be in the way of confrontation but I wouldn’t avoid battles when they were necessary. Despite putting myself under enormous pressure I only stepped up when it was the right thing to do. Iain Dowie had betrayed me and all the Palace fans who had supported him when he was at the club. Why shouldn’t he be held accountable for his treachery?

During the summer of 2006 I distracted myself with getting involved in other projects. I’d always been interested in the restaurant business and with a partner launched the soon-to-be-award-winning Club Bar and Dining in the heart of Soho. I also decided to sell my 50 per cent shareholding in the very successful motor car magazine I had launched just over three years earlier to Felix Dennis, one of the country’s leading publishing moguls.

Returning to football I was always looking at ways to increase Palace’s reach. I had previously considered buying Northern Spirit, an Australian Club, also coming close with the Auckland Kingz, a New Zealand side playing in the Australian Major League, only to pull out when I discovered that they were being booted out of the league. This had been represented differently to me by Phil Alexander, who had a personal agenda because he wanted to run the club.

Following on from that theme of trying to increase Palace’s reach wherever I could, I started up a venture in America: Crystal Palace USA. We were to be the first English club to have a subsidiary in the US and would be based in Baltimore, just outside of Washington DC, and play in what was the Second Division of American Major League Soccer. The idea was to have a club where we could discover new talent for CPFC UK, as well as a venue for our young players to gain invaluable experience before joining our first team. It was a revolutionary move and one that could have had big potential.

While the long arduous task got underway with the lawyers on the Dowie case, I started the search for yet another manager. Incredibly, I had still kept on Bob Dowie, despite the situation with his brother. He assured me that he still wanted to work and I felt Bob would be advantageous to have around to help select a new manager.

I met Graeme Souness in Marbella for dinner to discuss the Palace job. I liked Graeme as he had been great with my dad when he had open heart surgery in 2005, talking to him about his own experiences of it. I admired his forthright nature and the passion he exuded. We had a good chat but I got the impression that he was done with club management. I have to say that would have been an interesting relationship between myself and Graeme.

In a night out with friends in Puerto Banus, I bumped into Mike Newell, the former Everton and Blackburn striker, who was then managing Luton Town. When I say ‘bumped’, Newell lumbered over, drunk as a skunk, plonked himself down next to me and told me he wanted an interview with Palace. I got the impression he actually expected one there and then! I told Newell that Bob Dowie was doing the selection process and if he wanted to be considered he should go through Bob.

You would have thought that I had just told him I had slept with his wife, given the offence he took. ‘Charlie big fucking bollocks, too important to talk to me,’ he raged. I thought he was going to hit me, especially when I told him that it was an impressive interviewing technique, standing in front of a potential employer pissed as a rat. Unsurprisingly, he never got his interview and was filed under miscellaneous with Stan Ternent and trolled off back under the bridge whence he came.

Someone, somewhere mentioned the former Palace player Peter Taylor, and for the life of me I can’t recall who it was or how it came to be otherwise I would have probably served a writ on them as well as Dowie with the benefit of hindsight. For some reason Taylor became a serious candidate. I held a long-standing opinion that Taylor was a coach, not a manager, and had conveyed as much to his chairman at Hull, Adam Pearson, a friend who I saw a lot of in Spain. Adam always told me how much that irked Taylor. Following Trevor Francis’s departure I had an opportunity to talk to Taylor when he was the Leicester manager in 2003. Peter had expressed a serious interest in the Palace job, but I had heard that he was nervous at Leicester and if they started badly he would get fired so was thinking of jumping before he got pushed. My reaction to that was, ‘What a bloody loser.’ Why would I want someone managing my club who forecasts failure?

With all that in mind I still interviewed Peter after Bob had met him and given me a good report on him. Given the absolute waste of time this appointment was to be I jokingly assumed that this was Iain Dowie’s parting gift to me: getting his brother to advocate Taylor’s appointment.

I liked Peter. He is a very affable man and does a very good Norman Wisdom impression. Unfortunately, I didn’t expect him to take that into our dugout when he was appointed. He spoke of his love of the club – as a player, he had been a hero there, becoming the only Third Division player ever to play for England; he felt as if it would be in some way coming home.

I confronted him with my usual barrage of difficult questions, but somehow he convinced me. He was easy-going in a determined way, had learnt a lot from his experiences at Leicester, where he had failed shockingly, and rebuilt his reputation at Hull. He was also the England under-21 coach, and I felt that would allow us to have access to perhaps a lot of loan signings of young talented players at the top Premier League clubs. Perhaps most persuasive of all was his claim that he wanted to work with his chairman, not against him. After two and a half years of Iain Dowie’s difficult attitude that was what probably sealed it. I wanted someone who I could bloody get on with.

Needless to say I had approached Adam Pearson seeking permission to open official talks with Taylor and was advised there was a £300,000 compensation fee to release him from his Hull City contract. Unlike others, I paid it. I tried to chip Adam but he wouldn’t shift. I managed to get only one caveat in the formal compensation agreement. As Adam Pearson’s dress sense was so shocking that I was embarrassed to stand next to him in Puerto Banus, I got a clause put into the agreement that 10 per cent of the compensation payable must be invested into Pearson’s wardrobe! And he actually signed it, although to date I have seen no improvement in Adam’s dress sense.

In between all the controversy of a manager leaving and writs flying about and a new manager coming in it was with immense regret that I had to make good on my promise to sell Andrew Johnson if we failed to win promotion. We had a number of interested parties with three firm bidders: Everton, Bolton and Wigan. Andrew wanted to go to Everton and after pushing Bill Kenwright the Everton chairman to breaking point – as he put it – I agreed to let my favourite player, my surrogate footballing son, go for £8.6 million. I could have got over £9 million from Wigan but I stayed true to my word, very rare in football, and let him choose his club.

Ironically Everton had bid £7 million for him when we got relegated from the Premier League and he had finished as the highest English goal scorer; now they paid £1.6 million more after a season in the Championship where he had picked up a serious injury and had his worst year as far as goals were concerned. The business of football decision-making defies logic but if a football manager wants a player, who cares? It’s not his money he’s spending.

With Taylor now secured in the managerial post the team headed off for a pre-season tour in America. Naturally we were to play our own team Crystal Palace USA, as well as LA Galaxy in the pre-Beckham days. I flew from Spain to London, picked up my suitcase packed by my right-hand man and driver John, and jumped straight on a flight to Washington with Bob Dowie and my brother Dominic. The two of them had been the architects of this American deal. When we landed in the capital of America it took us three hours to go twenty-five miles in rush-hour Washington traffic. I had spent eight hours on a plane, so more travel time was not exactly welcome.

When we arrived in Annapolis we stayed in the town’s best hotel, which was a marginal step up from a Travel Lodge. They had no English tea, no valet, no adaptors to charge mobile phones and, with humidity levels off the charts, the air conditioning in my room had broken. And when I opened my suitcase, virtually all I had packed for me were heavy woollen suits. I wasn’t being a precious little swine, I was absolutely exhausted and at this point my humour had completely deserted me.

Previously I never went on any pre-season tours, and the only reason I had gone on this one was because it was big news in the States that an English club had invested in US football, and a series of press conferences had been arranged. When I awoke in the morning to head off to speak to the media I was jet-lagged and in a filthy stinking mood. I had managed to dig out from my unwanted luggage one light tan Prada suit so to cap it all I now looked like the bloody man from Del Monte.

All the way to the press conference I did nothing but moan and groan. What was I doing here? What kind of godforsaken place had we landed up in? Was this really a good investment? But as soon as I was in the press conference and the lights and cameras of ESPN were up and rolling I went into a 180, extolling the virtues of this wonderful country, fantastic city, incredible opportunity and how excited I was about embarking on this project. Once the cameras had stopped I was back to full-on moaning and groaning. ‘Media hound’, was how my brother described my moth-to-the-light performance for the cameras.

Next stop was the biggest radio station in Washington for another round of interviews and one in which I sat next to Hasim Rahman, the former heavyweight champion of the world who had beaten Lennox Lewis. After talking about football I quipped to Rahman live on air that I’d seen Lewis beat him up like he had stolen something, which made for an uncomfortable ten minutes as this seventeen-stone former heavyweight champ glowered at me in the studio. I have to say at this point I gave serious thought to wondering if there was something wrong with my mental state to provoke a man-mountain like Rahman.

Paul Kemsley, the Spurs vice-chairman and a personal friend, asked a favour. During a holiday in the Bahamas, he had met and taken a young player under his wing and asked if I would take him with my team to America and give him a shot as in his view he wouldn’t be good enough for Spurs. Not rising to that comment I agreed to do him a favour. We took him on a trial but Peter didn’t rate him and in his honest expert opinion didn’t feel he was good enough. The player’s name was Jay Boothroyd, who went on to play for England a few years later.

My first impression of Peter’s managerial prowess and outlook was that he was a little bit of a whiner. Nothing seemed right. As I watched the players train the atmosphere wasn’t good. Apparently some of them didn’t want to come here and a couple of disenfranchised players who had asked me for transfers and been given short shrift were now sulking and causing a negative effect. Taylor picked up on the disharmony and it concerned me that he did nothing to address it. You would have thought players would want to create a good impression with their new manager but clearly, with Taylor, for some reason they didn’t think they had to!

As a result I thought, ‘Sod it. I don’t need this self-indulgent negativity.’ I had enough on my plate and left Dominic to deal with our American partners and Peter to do his job and get his team together, and flew back home to Spain.

The players and management returned from the States amongst reports from Bob Dowie that Peter Taylor was quite a difficult character to deal with and had been quite fastidious over there. I soon saw that side of Peter. Within weeks of being back he and Dominic were dealing with the travel arrangements for the impending season. We had a preferred travel agent and coach company but Peter wanted to use a firm he had a personal relationship with and when he didn’t get his way he spat his dummy out. Out of the blue I got a phone call from him. ‘Chairman, I am going to resign,’ insisted Taylor. After ascertaining what the problem was I was incredulous that something so inconsequential could cause such a reaction and told him so in no uncertain terms. Peter went full circle and apologised for ‘acting like a baby’. I began to wonder quite what I had employed.

After selling Andrew Johnson it was not my intention to weaken the squad further but I had various situations forced on me. Fitz Hall, the club captain, had a £3 million release clause in his contract and Wigan tabled a bid of £3 million and a pound. As the player wanted to go we had to let him. Emmerson Boyce had been one of the truculent players in America and from being a model professional he became petulant and difficult to deal with as I wouldn’t let him have a transfer. He became so negative that Taylor came to me and asked me to sell him, which we duly did for £1 million, again to Wigan. And finally Mikele Leigertwood wouldn’t sign a new contract and as he was under twenty-four we got compensation of £600,000 from his move to Sheffield United.

At Peter’s request we went into the market and bought quite heavily, bringing in eight players and spending nearly £6 million. Whilst it may have appeared we had generated some significant cash most of it was used in either buying players or paying wages. Despite having one parachute payment left and significant transfer funds generated by the Johnson, Hall, Boyce and Leigertwood sales, I had also invested £12 million back into the team in the previous twelve months.

Hull City prospered as not only had I coughed up £300,000 for Peter’s services, we went back and paid a million for their centre half Leon Court, as well as buying another player, Stuart Green, for £100,000. I have to confess the reason why we bought Green beggars belief. Peter’s daughter was dating Green and he wanted him down in London to make his daughter happy. So, to support Peter, I did it. Back in 1999 I had spent £100,000 on a marketing campaign with Palace as a result of a date with the advertising manager and this time I spent another £100,000 so someone else could have a date!

On the seemingly endless conveyor belt of players I had to buy year on year was the highly rated Scott Flinders, who was the England under-20 keeper from Barnsley, who we bought for £600,000. His inept performances were to earn him the unwanted nickname of ‘Flapper Flinders’. We bought Carl Fletcher from West Ham for £600,000, Tony Craig from Millwall for £200,000, the ex-Liverpool player Mark Kennedy arrived on a free transfer from Wolves and our marquee signing was Shefki Kuqi for £2.5 million from Blackburn!

We also signed Jamie Scowcroft from Coventry for another £800,000 as another striker to partner Kuqi. The fact that these two had scored 198 goals in 771 games between them appeared lost on Taylor and more fool me for allowing these signings. If they continued the way they were, I worked out that our strike force would only contribute eleven goals per season. In fact, they did even worse than that, scoring thirty-one goals in 161 games between them, an average of nine goals per season. So we hardly had a strike force to put the fear of God into the opposition. Although we did have Clinton the ‘Pest’ Morrison to back them up.

Despite all that the season started impressively under Peter Taylor as we won our first three games and went top of the Championship. But that was where it began and ended and like Forrest Gump: ‘That’s all I have to say about that.’

In September I had a change in my personal life and started dating the model Sophie Anderton, which inevitably drew the attention of the media. It was a short-lived liaison and as much as she was fun she did have a short circuit somewhere. One night we were dining out in the London restaurant Zuma and bumped into Paul Gascoigne. I liked Paul and he was charming although I have to say a little worse for wear that evening. Sophie had just done a TV show with his stepdaughter and certain unproven allegations had been made by her concerning Paul. When he joined us for a drink Sophie said she didn’t want to speak to him as she believed what Bianca Gascoigne was alleging. This greatly upset Paul and it also enraged me and I forcibly dragged Ms Anderton over to apologise, and that with a host of other eventful excursions was soon to bring the curtain down on my relationship with her.

No sooner had I ended my relationship with Sophie, I became involved with a beautiful lady called Suzanne Walker. Ironically Suzanne was the soon-to-be-ex-wife of former England goalkeeper Ian Walker, who Dowie had wanted me to sign at the beginning of the 2005–06 season but we had been unable to agree personal terms. Fate has a funny way of intervening in people’s lives. Suzanne was soon to give me the greatest gift in the world, something money couldn’t buy.

By October 2006 the team’s performances were pretty diabolical. After the heady heights of being top for two games we had now slumped to eighteenth and had been knocked out of the first round of the League Cup by Notts County.

But I had a bigger fish to fry. Ron Noades was selling the stadium to a property speculator, David Pearl. When I met Pearl I asked why he was buying it, why he hadn’t come to talk to me as the anchor tenant and what his plans were. What I heard didn’t make for good listening. Pearl controlled a property investment fund and they were not overly concerned if Palace stayed there. In fact, they preferred we didn’t, as they quite fancied the idea of building houses on the site and unlocking the real estate value!

We had four years left on our lease with the mistaken belief that Noades would never find anyone else to buy the stadium besides the owner of the football club. The ground had severe planning restrictions designed to ensure that the use of that land was only for football. Noades, being the individual he was, and seemingly without the slightest regard for the club he regularly professed to care about, had found a property speculator willing to pay £12 million for it. David Pearl couldn’t care less about restrictive covenants on the land and would simply wait for them to lapse after he had booted the club out when our lease expired. By taking a ten-year lease when I purchased the club, which had been designed to put us in the best position to take advantage of a raft of possibilities, including locating a new stadium in the borough, or getting Noades to become realistic and give us a fair price, especially as time pressed on, I had inadvertently got myself into a bit of a conundrum. Clearly I needed to do something pretty sharpish.

The solution I came up with looked great at the time but caused me some significant difficulties, embarrassment and damaged my credibility. It appeared to some people that I had misrepresented certain things and was ultimately to be for me like jumping ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ at huge personal cost!

My pal Paul Kemsley, the Tottenham vice-chairman and owner of a massive property company, Rock Investments, was my solution. The valuation of the stadium was only £6 million, which meant that I couldn’t get funding for a £12 million purchase without using a big fat slug of cash. Kemsley, however, could get the funding as he had a vast line of credit with HBOS.

My idea was this: Paul and I set up a company and used HBOS’s money to buy the stadium from David Pearl, who we would give a ‘drink’ to for stepping aside. I would service the borrowings, give Paul a small margin on that, and would work very hard to find a new stadium location in the borough where we could move Palace. Kemsley and I would then be free to split the property value of Selhurst Park on a 70/30 ratio in our favour and Palace would get a brand-new stadium, paid for out of the proceeds of the sale of Selhurst Park, the development value of which was estimated to be at the time upwards of £32 million.

So that is what we did and I announced to the world and a very surprised Ron Noades that I had in effect bought Selhurst Park. The reaction from the fans was one of delight and given that all I had got Paul to do was help with the funding via HBOS – no different from someone getting a mortgage for a house – I was happy with what I had done, for a few moments, anyway!

But like everything in football, nothing seemed to run to plan. Firstly the company that was set up never formalised the relationship that was agreed, and then within a matter of months Kemsley was expressing disappointment that we hadn’t found a new stadium.

He was being ridiculous. He knew it would take substantial time to get a new location. Besides, I was paying the mortgage on the loan but he was being clever with me. Our relationship began to deteriorate and he suggested we moved out and shared a ground with Millwall. I suggested Tottenham do the same with Arsenal! To cut a long and complicated story short I agreed with Kemsley to buy the stadium out of the structure we had created. All I had to do was to find a new funder as I was not prepared to put up £12–13 million of my own cash, as by now I had already invested over £30 million in Palace and I wanted to do what everyone else did in property – use a funder!

This transaction bit me on the arse. I had done it with the best intentions and motives and with Kemsley running around telling anyone who would listen he owned Selhurst Park, I got to look a bit of a fool and a liar. In a desperate attempt to secure Palace’s future, get the stadium away from Noades, I had dropped myself in it and now had a major problem.

As the months rolled by and I still hadn’t secured funding, the world began to collapse as the financial crisis began and borrowing money became more and more impossible. After a confrontation with Kemsley outside a London casino where I told him I had enough of him ridiculing me about the ownership and reneging on our original deal, I agreed to sign a twenty-five-year lease and a bloody high rent and I personally paid him £1 million premium to rectify the position. I got vilified for this in certain quarters. In the long run this was to prove an absolutely massive thing for Crystal Palace FC, but not for Simon Jordan.

To be blunt, football-wise, this was a very dull and uninspiring time. Try as he may, Peter just didn’t get the team going. We were eighteenth at the end of October, November and December. Industry wisdom purports that where you are at the end of December is often where you end up at the end of the season and as a rule of thumb it does have the ring of truth about it. So this was not quite the Peter Taylor effect I had hoped for. It was more like Peter Failure, as he was fast becoming known amongst my cohorts.

* * *

As a welcome distraction from Taylor’s failure to lift the team on the football pitch, in late 2006 I signed up to do a television series on ITV. Having been with Max Clifford for a couple of years and done various media work it was perhaps a natural progression. I had in fact a year or so earlier had the opportunity to do Dragons’ Den but I turned it down, not really grasping its concept. Why would I put up my money for the BBC to get viewing figures? More fool me!

Prior to the ITV show Max got me to do something with Sega games as they had introduced a function in their computer game Championship Manager called something like ‘benefactor button’. Given I was indeed a major benefactor of a football club with a high profile I agreed to do it. It was a press launch and suffice to say I got them a lot of headlines due to my strident views. I got paid £5,000, which I donated to a children’s hospice in Guildford.

The hospice was introduced to me by Max Clifford and touched my heart. I subsequently had a long relationship with it. Every piece of media work I got paid for I donated, as well as the damages payments I received from every inaccurate story written about me, which were many. I also made personal donations and got certain wealthy and influential people to do the same. I involved the football club, getting the players to go there every Christmas and we had a ‘siblings’ day every year, where the children could come and raid our club shop and take whatever they wanted – and they did, the little rascals! They also stayed, had lunch and watched a game. These are the things that make you proud to be part of a football club as it is an integral part of the community and makes a difference to people’s lives.

The TV show I signed on for was Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway. Seven hour-long prime-time shows at 9 p.m. on Monday evenings. It was similar to Dragons’ Den but giving away money not just for business ideas but also for appeals based around life-interest stories. I did the show with Duncan Bannatyne, Jeffrey Archer, Kanya King and Jacqueline Gold, daughter of David. We shot seven episodes in six days at Three Mills Studios in front of a live studio audience.

Straight away it was obvious that there was not harmony between the five millionaires. Jeffrey was a little smug, Duncan abrasive, Jacqueline and Kanya were gentle and cuddly, and then there was me.

On making myself comfortable in my dressing room on the first day I decided to put on some music and have a cigarette. Jeffrey Archer marched down the corridor and ordered me to turn my music down and to stop smoking. As you can imagine the volume went up and I advised Archer that insofar as my smoking was concerned I was surprised at his objection. Given that where he had just come from cigarettes were currency! That went down like a lead balloon with inmate Archer. Yet over the course of the week Jeffrey was quite charming to me and even brought a set of first-edition copies of his books signed for my mother.

There were other confrontations. Duncan, who I got on famously with, was a notorious camera hog. All the others complained, whereas my attitude was more fool you for having nothing to say. Jeffrey acted up immediately and during one session of filming told Bannatyne to shut up and let others speak. Duncan was raging in my dressing room afterwards and Jeffrey popped in and foolishly announced that he found the show a bit difficult as he was nothing like us and not an entrepreneur. Duncan agreed with him and said there was a vast difference between him, me and Jeffrey. And then went on to qualify that in language not even I can repeat! That was the end of their relationship and incredibly I found myself acting as a mediator.

As the basis of the show was to give a million pounds away to people that came forward with business ideas, community projects or life-interest matters, every time a contestant produced a hard-luck story, plausible or not, or if children were involved, Jackie and Kanya immediately voted yes. To get the money required you needed three of the five of us to vote yes. Given most of the time the contestants, whether merited or not, had two of the three votes required, this took the intrigue and possible misdirection out of the programme and was the subject of many a heated debate backstage with Duncan and myself upsetting the girls.

The show was hosted by Richard Madeley and to be honest was not particularly good. And whilst there were some very deserving individual cases that got money, on the whole the majority of the contestants were poor and difficult to get any grasp on. If some bloke comes on and asks for £500 as he has ‘ponced’ off his mates for years and wants to get the money to take them for a slap-up meal, or a guy who has lost all his money on the horses has decided he wants to buy one rather than bet on them, it does not take you too long to tell them to piss off, and that doesn’t make for great TV. One person who stood out was a twelve-year-old boy called Liam Fairhurst who suffered with cancer and raised £50,000 from us for Clic Sargent, a cancer charity. He was a fantastic young man and went on to raise much more money elsewhere and be recognised in far more auspicious surroundings than a TV show. Tragically, Liam died two and a half years later. If nothing else, doing that show gave me the opportunity to meet that splendid young man.

After filming the television series I was sitting in my office at Palace. I was busily looking through paperwork on my desk, perhaps stealthily trying to avoid signing any cheques for players in the transfer window, when I happened across a file containing information on the Telstar play. In it I found a screenplay for a potential film version. Since the critically acclaimed run had ended in 2005 I had stored the stage set under the main stand at Palace, with a view to bringing it back to the West End at a later date. Reading the script I had other ideas.

I decided that I wanted to bring Telstar to the silver screen and would fund it all myself. Why not? funding a football club was so easy! Why not go into another expensive and notoriously difficult industry? With my friend Ray Winstone I had executively produced and part-funded the BBC1 drama Sweeney Todd, so I did have some experience. I set about contacting Nick Moran in Los Angeles, who was filming an episode of CSI Miami, and asked him if he wanted to make this film. ‘Of what?’ he asked.

‘Well we don’t have enough subject matter to make your life story, you buffoon,’ I replied. ‘Telstar, of course.’

At the time of deciding this I was invited onto Soccer AM for the second time. The first time I had taken Terry Hall in 2005 to announce the likely re-formation of The Specials. This time I took Nick Moran with me as I was going to talk about amongst other things the intention to make Telstar the movie. What I did was get myself into some hot water.

On this edition of Soccer AM the resident fans of the club who sat in the studio were Brighton and Hove Albion, Palace’s fiercest rivals. Having me on the show was manna from heaven for them and gave them an opportunity to hurl abuse at me, which I took in a good-natured way. But when we got onto the subject of Telstar, I described the film and its storyline and, totally tongue in cheek, used one of the scenes to make fun of the Brighton fans. They were taking the mickey out of me, so I thought I would do the same to them.

It was a fantastically powerful drama, about an innovative record producer in the 1960s. What I said was: ‘In one scene Joe Meek is found “importuning” in a public toilet with another man and this should no doubt appeal to the Brighton fans.’ Brighton is known as the gay capital of England. Tim Lovejoy, the presenter, cracked up laughing. He immediately covered Sky’s backside, no pun intended, by saying this was not the view of Sky. Fortunately, the meaning of the word ‘importuning’ went over the Brighton fans’ heads – traditionally they’re not the sharpest tools in the box.

I sauntered off after the show and right into a media melee with newspapers, radio stations and journalists demanding I qualify my comments. Fortunately I had Max Clifford to deal with it as certain factions had taken great exception to my tongue-in-cheek remark, demanding I be rebuked and disciplined in the strongest fashion. Perhaps the punishment they had in mind was to send me down to the very same toilet I had mentioned to be inappropriately dealt with by Brighton’s gay community? I refused to apologise. It was a joke and I am in no way homophobic. I even got contacted by the FA Homophobia Advisory Unit, whose chairman was none other than Martin Perry, the CEO of which club? Brighton and Hove Albion! This kerfuffle soon blew over and I put it behind me.

I had hoped for good things from Peter but the team was just flat, with no real inspiration. Yes, the second half of the season was better. In fact, we picked up thirty-nine points from our last twenty-three games, which was play-off form, and if we had not been so poor in the first twenty-three games we could have reached them again. But the football we played was unimpressive, and the fans seemed jaded. It had been two years of having a go at getting back into the Premier League and our time at the top was receding into distant memory.

Despite Peter’s history with the club he did not seem to fit. The supporters, despite a level of enthusiasm at the beginning, hadn’t taken to him as I thought they would. Behind the scenes he had reshuffled the staff. Bob Dowie had departed, inevitable given what was going on with his brother, and Peter, despite my unhappiness, had dismantled elements of our scouting network especially our representation in Europe. Due to personal differences, he took out our chief scout Gary Seward, someone I rated quite highly, and replaced the scouting network with a group of his incompetent mates.

Taylor and I rarely had a cross word until the back end of this season. As the season was clearly going nowhere I hoped that Peter, given his under-21 and youth development background, would look to blood some of the younger players who were emerging stars in our academy. There was no substitute for first-team experience, but Taylor flatly refused, citing that it was important for his reputation that Palace finished as high up the league as possible. This didn’t sit well with me at all and told me all I needed to know about where Peter really was in the great scheme of things.

As the season wound down I found myself playing in two more games where my burgeoning reputation as a not-bad footballer was cemented. In the first of two matches organised again by Geoff Thomas for his leukaemia charity, I played in the first-ever game at the new Wembley in March 2007. I played alongside such luminaries as Graeme Le Saux and Neville Southall. We won 2–0 in front of 20,000 spectators. Mark Bright scored the first goal and I believe he was texting the world before the ball hit the back of the net. And I, to my eternal delight, scored the second. Say what you like about me, that fact is indelible. No one could accuse me of not being a real pro: I played in this game, and, before the next one against Liverpool – a restaging of the 1990 semi-final, I had cortisone injected into the base of my spine.

In the second game my expectations of myself were very high, playing against a Liverpool team consisting of the likes of John Barnes, Jamie Redknapp, Bruce Grobbelaar, Jan Molby and Steve McManaman. Again I played very well if I do say so, nutmegging Steve McManaman and laying on the pass for Mark Bright to score again, in the vain hope of halting his endless comments about scoring the first-ever goal at the new Wembley.

Ridiculously, these were the two high spots in a footballing Sahara of a season. The real team finished on a high, rounding off the season with back-to-back wins and giving me a straw to cling onto for next season that maybe, despite my nagging feelings, Peter Taylor may well come good …

But most things based upon hope rather than substance rarely come up trumps. Besides, I had the small matter of a High Court trial with Iain Dowie, the commencement of filming of a major movie, a landmark birthday and a monumental event in my adult life, all about to happen over the summer of 2007.