‘I thought I was spitting teeth out, but it was actually pieces of my top jaw.’
THE BOAT THAT Guy Built and all the rest of the TV job all came from being interviewed for ITV’s 2009 TT coverage. The first year North One got the rights to cover the Isle of Man TT they contacted some of the racers and arranged to interview them before the racing started. A researcher rung up and told me they wanted to film me training or whatever I did. I told her I didn’t really do any of that, I just fixed lorries, so they came and filmed that instead.
North One is a production company. They make all sorts of programmes and sell them to various TV channels, like ITV, Channel 4 or the BBC. One of North One’s directors was asking me all sorts of questions about engines and then started asking my views on electric bikes. I began telling him that I reckoned until they sort out nuclear power stations the electric bike is burning the fossil fuel a different way, further away from the end user.
They filmed me at work, then at the farm. I got talking about tea, explaining the theory Russell Benney had told me back at the end of 2007, about how putting the milk in first made an emulsion and the molecular reaction made for a tastier cup of tea.
Anyway, I was rambling on and it must have triggered something in someone’s head at North One, when it eventually was shown during one of the highlight shows for the 2009 TT. The boss of North One, Neil Duncanson, came to see me in the pits, and told me I could be on TV. I didn’t think anything of it, but if they wanted to do some legwork and have TV channels tell them, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ then it was no skin off my nose.
Weeks went by and nothing seemed to be happening, but Andy kept reminding me North One were pushing hard. I was hardly losing sleep worrying about when my TV career would take off, but in January 2010 North One got in touch to say they’d like me to do some film tests up in Kirmington. Andy and a lad called Dan came and filmed me at work, talking about the Suffolk Punch piston tattoo on the back of my leg, my tool-box and loads of other stuff. That day’s filming was edited down and mixed with me yarning about tea and shown to Jay Hunt, the lady who was in charge of commissioning at the BBC. I didn’t think of it as a waste of time, because I still wasn’t going out of my way to do anything. The film crew came to me and sat about until I‘d finished what I was doing, then they went away and pulled strings, leaving me pretty much ignorant of what was going on and liking it that way. I’ve been told that the BBC made the decision that they wanted me to do a series for them on the strength of my videoed ramblings. It was a pretty big risk on their part, as I was totally unknown in this line of work, and apparently it was very unusual for them to work this way.
A while after that North One got in touch again, because they had a BBC1 project they wanted to involve me with, but I’d need to do the show with a co-presenter. Honestly, I wasn’t that bothered. I explained I had enough work and didn’t really want to take a day off. Andy twisted my arm, saying it was my big opportunity. The BBC were under the microscope at the time. Listening to Radio 4 at work, it sounded like every man and his dog were complaining about how they were spending the licence fee, and here I was, a truck fitter, being offered the chance of a TV show. You can see why I was thinking, ‘Not as long as I’ve got a hole in my arse …’
Andy added that North One would pay me some expenses, so I ended up taking a couple of days off work to do screen tests with established TV presenters.
The first was in Brighton. I met Andy Spellman and travelled halfway there in some noisy Porsche he had at the time. He changes cars more often than I change underwear. We got nicked on the way and, for some reason, when the copper asked, ‘Where are you going?’ Andy replied, ‘Off to see a man called Jem.’ He made us sound like a couple of drug dealers. Why didn’t he just say Brighton?
We did go and see a trick ex-German Fire Service Mk2 Ford Transit that Andy had found. It was still on its original tyres. I asked the salesman if he’d take an Aston Martin V12 in part-exchange. He looked at me like I was off my head, but I meant it.
When we made it to Brighton, the test was with Jem Stansfield from the BBC show Bang Goes the Theory. Clever bloke, lovely bloke, but we didn’t hit it off. He knew all these maths formulas and he was a sound bloke, but not my kind of fella. He wasn’t trying to show off that he was cleverer than me or anything, we were just very different.
The next screen test was up in my dad’s shed with Jason Bradbury from The Gadget Show, who was another lovely bloke. Andy Spellman turned up to operate one of the cameras, along with other fellas I didn’t know from Adam, but, it turns out, people I’d work with later.
I didn’t realise what a big opportunity this was for TV folk, those whose only career was in TV. Bradbury was a Channel 5 presenter and keen to get on the BBC. Maybe that had something to do with the way he behaved. It was the day the iPad launched and he was all revved up about that, but it was a bit lost on me and my Nokia 7210.
He’d talk away normally, like me and my mates would, until a camera was put on him, then he became the most enthusiastic bloke in the world. He kept picking up my 18-volt Snap-On nut gun to pretend it was a machine gun. He did it four times to make sure at least one camera got it.
For this screen test, we had to pretend to build a hoverboard out of old leafblowers. It was all make-believe, but I got these knackered leafblowers going, something the crew didn’t think was going to happen. You’d think I’d turned water into wine, the way the TV folk reacted. Just when I was about to try and start them up, Bradbury went into a big spiel about having to open the shed’s windows and doors to make sure we weren’t poisoned by the carbon monoxide or something. I was thinking, ‘Get a grip …’
Still, after the screen test I must’ve thought it had gone quite well, because when they quizzed me I said I thought the test with Bradbury went the best and that he got the best out of me. The crew who were filming the tests and those who were judging them can’t have agreed.
The problem was, they reckoned, that I looked like someone who was just interested in what was going on, while the two professional TV bods looked like they were presenting a TV show, and because of the way I behaved it made them look even more exaggerated. It was chalk and cheese.
The whole idea of the screen tests was to see if I was any good and if I could work with anyone. Unfortunately, the experienced TV presenters didn’t get me and I definitely didn’t get them. People might say we had no chemistry. They weren’t my kind of people. They didn’t think like I thought. They didn’t come from a background where a perk of the job is reading a truck driver’s porn mag. They were all right people, but not my cup of tea.
North One got the gist that the tests hadn’t really worked because I struggled to hit it off with the people they suggested, but for some reason they were still keen on me doing something with them. They asked if I knew anyone. No one came to mind until I was mountain biking in Wales with my mate Mark ‘Mavis’ Davis.
I have known Mave since I was about 18. We’d go mountain biking together a fair bit and we’d always have a good craic. I asked him if he’d be up for trying to present a TV show with me, and he was. So I texted Andy, he got the wheels in motion and another screen test was set up at Mave’s house. He’s a carpenter and we made something for his kitchen, in front of the cameras. It all went well and we got the job.
It had taken a year from being told that something might happen to actually getting it off the ground. I’m sure there was loads of paddling going on below the surface, most of which I knew nothing about.
A few weeks later we started filming the BBC TV series. I booked a block of six weeks off work, which my dad was sort of all right with, starting right after the Scarborough Gold Cup on 20 September. I still went in and worked weekends at the truck yard.
The show would become The Boat That Guy Built. The idea was to buy a knackered old canal boat and for me and Mave to do it up and kit it out using technology and methods from the Industrial Revolution. It would include stuff like making a steam-powered shower, the china and stainless cutlery, the cotton bed sheets …
In the time between signing up to make the show and filming actually starting, the wheels came off a lot of aspects of my life. That meant, right from the off, Mave was more interested in it than me. I was all over the shop. He was behaving professionally and I wasn’t.
I came round slowly, but I still needed to escape from it, so even though I had a hotel room booked I would sometimes sleep in my van. I wasn’t having big heart-to-hearts with myself. I’d go to a pub and have something to eat, then when I’d get back in my van I would just feel, Aaaaah. A feeling of relief and relaxation. I love my van and I like being by myself – but it was an absolute godsend to have Mave with us.
Two weeks before the Gold Cup and all the Shaun the Sheep and Mr X weirdness coming to a head, and two weeks before I saw the boat for the first time, we were filming the title sequence for the show in Lincolnshire. It was beginning to feel like the same old interview stuff, in my dad’s shed in Kirmington, at Mave’s house or at the truck yard. North One had said they wanted to do a bit of personal stuff: people who knew me giving some soundbites. I don’t know what the thinking was behind it, but I just nodded along.
The show was originally going to be The House That Guy Built, and they were going to have a lot more input from people I knew. They planned to talk to Kate, my girlfriend at the time, and her mum, Mrs Lancaster, who knew me well because I’d lived on her farm for so long. But just before filming began, me and Kate split up and I moved out.
Before we started work on the boat I was in the shed in Kirmington, doing the first bits ever to a proper broadcast camera, other than interviews on the grid of the TT or whatever. Before then it had all been handheld cameras.
The time came for them to interview Kate. I obviously hadn’t made the situation clear and reverted to my default setting of, ‘Oh, it’ll be right, worse things happen at sea, let’s just get on with it.’ I might have played down the seriousness of the breakup and the hurt I’d caused Kate. Looking back, I can understand how the film crew assumed we’d just had some change of plan and gone our separate ways, so they still planned to ask Kate if she’d come and do the bit to camera for us.
When Andy walked over the road and knocked on Kate’s door, she explained I’d been sleeping with someone else behind her back. Something I might not have explained to the TV crew at this point. She added she didn’t think she had too much positive to say about me at the time, but still asked if I was over in my dad’s shed. Andy admitted I was and then spent the short walk from the farm to the shed desperately trying to think of anything to say to make the situation better.
Kate, always a very calm, laidback woman, came into the shed and asked if she could have a quick word with me. I walked outside with her and once we were around the corner she lamped me, slapping me hard across the face, and started shouting at me at the top of her voice.
Next she stormed back into the shed and asked the film crew why they were wasting TV licence payers’ money on a See You Next Tuesday like me. It was quite an introduction to their new presenter.
Some of the directors of the shows were new to this kind of show too. They were experienced in TV, but The Boat was a different kettle of fish for them too and we’d bang heads.
The crew were all used to working with professional presenters, and I was far from it. They dealt with the likes of Jason Bradbury, Jason Plato and Tiff Needell. These were people who could say things again and again, changing it slightly if the director thought it would be better a different way, but I just wanted to do it how I’d do it naturally and wouldn’t budge.
There were three different directors on the series, each doing two programmes. That isn’t unusual in TV, I’m told. One of the directors, Jess Matthews, would ask me to say things a particular way and I’d tell her, ‘No, I’ll say it like I say it.’ I didn’t get on with her at all to start with. She was as stubborn as I was. We were like two rams butting each other. I bet she thought, ‘Why have my bosses chosen this dickhead to be a presenter when he doesn’t even want to do it?’ I’d have agreed with her.
From my point of view, the problem was she was trying to direct me, she was a director after all, but I didn’t want directing. She’d say, ‘Can’t you say it like this?’ And I’d remind her I wasn’t an actor. I didn’t have any diva moments, but I look back and pity her for having to put up with a dickhead like me. We’ve worked again since and got on really well.
If you’d asked me at the time I’d have told you, ‘I should never have done this.’ Getting up on a Monday morning to go filming wasn’t a good feeling. I was struggling to get going, a problem I’d never had with the trucks. I’d finish a day’s filming and not have the usual feeling of job satisfaction I’d always had. It didn’t feel like proper work to me.
I thought Mave and I would have exactly the same outlook when it came to the TV, but he liked the camera a lot more than me. I can’t look into a camera and talk, I have to talk to the person next to the camera, not an imaginary audience. Mave was spot-on and, without doubt, the best man to do the first series with. He was more switched on to the whole job than me. As the series went on, I felt he became more and more like a TV presenter, and was going away from the character that he was at the start.
Even though it sounds like I could take or leave the whole thing, we had some laughs. We built the steam-powered shower for the boat, and I had hand-made a bar of soap. When it came time to test the shower in front of the cameras, the crew said I could keep my pants on or get some swimming trunks, but I thought, ‘Sod it, I don’t wear pants in the shower.’ I looked at Mave and he said, ‘Get on with it.’ So in the boat, crowded with five or six crew, men and women, I stripped off and got in the shower. The water went from freezing to scalding while I was trying to get washed and I managed to get soap in my eyes. There wasn’t a lot of room on the narrowboat at the best of times, the clue’s in the name, and I remember Nat the cameraman shouting at me to keep my John Thomas out of the shot.
I was laughing and swearing at the same time, while everyone except Mave kept quiet. I don’t think they were used to their presenter’s meat and two veg swinging in the breeze on a Tuesday afternoon. Maybe if they’d asked me to lie in a warm bubble-bath listening to Mozart I’d have been the awkward one. What I found much harder was being told I had to walk up to a complete stranger and ask what he thought about the huge Boulton & Watt blowing engine in the middle of a roundabout on the A38(M) near Birmingham. The idea of talking to someone random, rather than someone random talking to me first, made me more on edge than waiting for the flag to drop on a grid.
I didn’t mind that filming was pushing me out of my comfort zone, in fact I enjoyed that. I want to learn new stuff. I want to be challenged by stuff that is out of my league. And I wasn’t worried if I was no good at it. I’d put it down to experience and move on. I was embarrassed at times, but most when I had to go and speak to the public. It was awkward, but I did it.
I don’t have a TV or internet at home, but I listen to the radio a lot. That’s come from living on my own for a while. I bike home from Grimsby, leaving at six or seven o’ clock, and pass house after house where people are just staring at the 70-inch plasma TV screens. It makes me think, ‘You don’t get that time back at the end.’ I can honestly say I’ve only seen one episode of the boat series. We were still finishing the last programme when the first was edited and ready to watch, so one of the crew showed me it on an iPad at lunchtime.
The lion’s share of the filming was done, certainly all the main bits, but the production company wanted me and Mave to go back and do a few fill-in pieces to link certain parts of the show together, to smooth it out a bit.
By this stage I was even quite enjoying it. I’d done my six weeks solid. I was back working with my dad and this was me and Mave, a couple of mates, taking the odd day off to do something different.
On this day, they had me jumping from the dock edge onto the side of the narrowboat, like I’d done a hundred times before. The filming stopped and I did one last jump onto the boat from the towpath. That would be the last time I jumped onto that particular boat. The oil-soaked sole of my rigger boot slipped on the edge of the boat and I fell into the water. That wouldn’t have been a problem if my front teeth hadn’t caught square on the boat’s steel tiller, the steering handle, on the way down.
The impact knocked my two front teeth under up into my nose cavity and smashed my side teeth out. I lay in the water for a while, then managed to pull myself out. I walked up to Mavis and asked, ‘Am I all right?’ He pulled a face and just said, ‘Fucking hell!’ Coming from Mave, that was very bad news. He’d broken tons of stuff riding mountain bikes and BMX, and for his face to turn like it did after looking at the wreckage of my gob wasn’t good.
I thought I was spitting teeth out, but it was actually pieces of my top jaw. It had shattered. There was a lot of blood, but, strangely, it wasn’t that painful.
I went to the local hospital, and after looking at the X-ray they told me there wasn’t much they could do for me. They actually told me my teeth might push back down! What were they thinking? I had demolished my top jaw, leaving bits of it on the towpath of a canal.
Next, I visited an emergency dentist. There they dried their teeth, sucking in breath – like when a woman takes a car to a garage and the blokes stand around drying their teeth, telling her it’s a big job, when all it needs is a spark plug. Anyway, I needed more than a filling, that was for sure.
I got up the next morning, and went to the local dentist in Brigg. He told me I had to go and see this man to sort the jaw, then go see that man, to do this, then go see this man for that, and come back in two days.
Luckily, Steph’s mate is a dentist in Newcastle. He met me on a Saturday morning, and he cut my jaw right open and cut the teeth out, under a local anaesthetic. I could see the rack of front teeth coming out and being placed on a tray next to the chair.
He stated the bleeding obvious when he told me my face was a mess. I was sent away till the swelling went down. When I returned he made a pattern for some false teeth. After that I went back again to have a bone graft to rebuild my jaw. They used a certain kind of cow bone that took about six months to knit together.
Through all those months I had a plate glued in with Fixodent. It changed the way I talked. The shape on the back of the false teeth must’ve been slightly different to my own teeth, and it made me talk with a short tongue. Now, I have permanent false teeth, not on a plate, and they’re as good as new.
At one point in that first series, we were making some cotton bed linen, and I was asking how it got from the sheep. I now know cotton doesn’t come from sheep, but I’m not embarrassed to look daft and I’m not sorry they left that in the programme. If it makes me look thick, then I’m thick, I’m not bothered. The show would regularly get five million viewers on its two showings and has been exported around the world. It’s also shown in schools in Britain.
Through connections with North One, and their contract to cover World Rally, I was invited to drive a Ford World Rally car up in a Cumbrian forest. It was November, snow and ice on the ground. Ford’s top driver, the Finn Mikko Hirvonen, was there, and so was Ken Block – who’d become famous for the drifting videos he’d made that had squillions of views on YouTube.
I’d stayed in a hotel in Cumbria the night before and filled the works Transit up in the petrol station next door, on the way to the forest. As I was pulling out of the forecourt a woman was indicating to pull into the petrol station, so I rolled onto the road and she ploughed straight into me, damaging the front suspension.
I managed to get the van fixed the same day, and drove a World Rally Ford Fiesta in a Cumbrian forest, but the accident would cause problems at work. It came after I’d done a daft thing, trying to be a bit rum by sneaking under a car park barrier behind Mave’s van, so I didn’t have to pay for parking. The TV company would have paid the expenses if I’d asked them. Someone took the phone number from the side of the van and rang up my dad. He was on the rev limiter when he rang me up. I apologised, but it didn’t make any difference.
Over the weekend, back home at the house where I was living in Caistor, Dobby, my mate who owned the house, came in and told me he’d just seen my van driving off. I thought it had been nicked, but it turns out it was my dad repossessing it.
He hadn’t knocked on the door, he just took it, using the spare keys. I took that as a sign I was sacked from the family business. I think I’d have preferred it if he’d knocked on the door and lamped me when I answered it. I’d have thought a million times more of him if he’d come up to me, face to face, and told me that he was taking it and that I was an arsehole. He was well within his rights. I was taking the piss. I held my hands up. I didn’t bother calling him to see for sure if I was sacked, and the rest of the family say I wasn’t, but in my mind, that was it, I was out of the village I grew up in. I was out of the family business. Me and Dad didn’t talk for months. I didn’t speak to my mum either. Me and Kate split up. I’d been flicked out of the Kirmington bubble.
With no job, I thought, ‘That’s it, I’ll become a professional motorbike racer.’ I went out ‘training’ on my pushbike, but as much as I love riding my bicycle, by lunchtime I thought, ‘Bugger this.’ I rode to Grimsby and went to see a couple of mates who knew a couple of mates who worked on the banks of the Humber. I was offered a job working on the maintenance crew of a big factory, Blue Star Fibres, labouring for a contracting firm. I’d lasted one morning as a full-time motorcycle racer.
That job, labouring with my mate Paddy, who’d driven me back from the North West race when I spannered myself and also paints my racing helmets, was the first time I had a job that finished at a reasonable time. I’d be done and dusted at twenty past four. When I was at home, work would not enter my head until I got up the next morning. I could do my own thing. There was no job satisfaction, and it was physically hard graft, but it was the first time I had no work worries niggling at me when I wasn’t there.
I was living at Dobby’s flat, for £350 a month. He was supposed to be living there, but he was always at his girlfriend’s. It was all right, but I was missing fixing things, so I applied for a job at A Plant, the plant hire place. We used to rent our jackhammers and diggers from them. The manager said they were snowed under and needed another fitter. I went in for three interviews, biking there on my way home from work. They couldn’t get their head around me wanting to work for them. I told them I would need time off to race bikes. It was a big depot, because they supplied all the Humber refineries. They offered me the job at the same time North One offered me another TV series.
When talk of the second series came up, I told North One their best bet was to just use Mave, not me. Or we could change roles. He’d be the main man, and I’d do the odd day. He loves all that stuff. ‘Get Mave to do it, he’s a bit slack at work,’ I said, but they didn’t.
The Boat That Guy Built aired in February 2011. The month before, Andy Spellman got a call from someone at the BBC saying that the channel were looking for a new presenter of Jimmy’s Food Factory. It’s the show where the presenter, Jimmy Doherty, investigated what went into supermarket food and tried to make his own versions using Heath Robinson, home-built looking machinery in a barn in Suffolk or somewhere. Jimmy must have had enough of it, or had a better offer from another channel, and they wanted me to audition. It was all set up, but I blew it out on the morning of the audition, ringing up the BBC reception and leaving a message with the security man at 5am before I set off for work.
When North One found out I’d been offered an audition on a series that was nothing to do with them, they drove up to Lincolnshire and offered me a retainer to stay exclusive to them. I signed a three-year contract on the spot, when I should have sat on it and asked Andy for advice, which we later had quite a lively debate about. Signing the contract meant I had to do a programme a year, but only programmes I was happy with, for the next three years. It seemed like money for old rope. The offer was rushed because Neil Duncanson didn’t want me to take the job I’d been offered at A Plant, where I’d have less flexibility to take time off. Or maybe he thought I was going to get poached by another TV production outfit, but I wasn’t looking to do that.
North One went back to talking about doing The House That Guy Built. They said was there was no ‘legacy’ to the boat. It was all done for TV’s sake. The boat got sold, no one knew what happened to it. I wasn’t keen on doing all the same stuff again, so they came up with another idea.
The next series would be How Britain Worked. The researchers found stuff that was due to be restored, or there were people who wanted to restore it, and the TV’s show and budget helped make it happen, in some cases saving special things for years to come. We were highlighting the work other people were doing and getting historic old things working for other people to see and enjoy.
One big difference was that the series would be six one-hour shows, rather than six 30-minute shows. That involved 50 days’ filming rather than 30, but the filming was spread over six months, rather than in a solid six-week block, because I was desperate to keep my hand in at work, proper work, getting my hands dirty, plus race motorbikes too. Six weeks of filming was too much of the same stuff. At that stage of the TV business I still wasn’t feeling like I’d achieved anything. Perhaps it was related to something Mr X had said, that had stuck in my mind: that the truck mechanic looked down on the TV presenter side of my personality.
Another difference was that North One decided to break away from the BBC and go to Channel 4, who were offering a bigger budget, to make a better programme. Jay Hunt, the lady who’d commissioned the boat series, had moved to Channel 4 and was still interested in me making more programmes.
The new show would have something like a £1 million budget, I reckon. Expensive programming, I’m told. The BBC wanted another series, but they didn’t want to pay any more, and the idea was to make the next programme better than the one before. Anyway, that was all down to the production company, North One, of course, and nothing to do with me.
I was a lot more involved in How Britain Worked, visiting the projects as they progressed and getting my hands dirty on a regular basis. The Boat was more of a fleeting glance over stuff, while How Britain made me realise that I could enjoy the TV projects if I was actually doing stuff, not just talking about what other people were doing or had done.
The idea behind How Britain Worked was to ‘rediscover our industrial past’, to show inventions from the Industrial Revolution, and to explore both the mechanical and social side of things like the introduction of public parks and annual holidays to the seaside. The series was about the innovators and the grafters who changed the world. Not just the likes of Stephenson, Davey and Brunel, names nearly everyone knows. It would tell about the men who designed and built the high-speed Brixham trawlers, and those who went out to sea to catch fish to feed the exploding population of workers; about the miners and how difficult the work was for men, women and children. It was genuinely interesting. I loved seeing the passion of the 20-year-old lad who worked at Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Herbaceous borders aren’t my thing, but the passion he had rubbed off on me. We met another teenager who was restoring a steam train. It was just good to see younger blokes interested in this side of things.
The best and most memorable part of filming that series was being involved with a crew that travels round the country repairing and maintaining the old Victorian cast-iron piers. The programme was about the introduction of the workers’ holiday and the way it transformed the British coastline, with holiday resorts popping up. We filmed most of the episode in the North Wales resort of Llandudno.
The town’s 2,295 ft pier was opened to the public in 1877, and is an amazing piece of civil engineering. It goes without saying the metalwork is in a hell of a corrosive environment, battered by the sea and freezing winds. The fellas who I met have working lives that revolve around replacing damaged parts of Britain’s cast-iron seaside landmarks. And, I found out, there’s no easy way to do it.
When a cross-member has corroded to the point where it’s potentially going to affect the structural integrity of the pier, it needs to be torn out and replaced. The thing is, it’s riveted together and the way to remove the rivets is to burn them out with the 3,500˚C oxy-acetylene cutting torch – while you’re dangling from the underneath of a pier above the Irish Sea. Everything’s cold, wet and slippery, and you’re hanging from climbing tackle, so you don’t have much to steady yourself against. You’re working to a deadline with a torch in your hand that could do some serious damage if you got too close to the hot end. I cut one of the cross-members out. At the time it was the only job I’d done that I could consider packing the trucks in for. It had the mix of hard graft, job satisfaction and an added element of danger to keep you on your toes. Plus I liked the fellas who did it for a living – we had a good craic. They could drink too, but were all up at the crack of dawn to get the job done. Proper.
By the end of How Britain Worked I’d made two series about the Industrial Revolution, and North One wanted to choose another era and make a similar series. The Edwardian age was talked about, but I wasn’t interested in repeating the same idea. It seems like the TV way of doing things is to find something that works and flog it to death.
The experience of presenting two series taught me a lot about what goes into the shows, what is needed to make an hour of television. If the TV lot get five minutes of telly out of a ten-hour day they’re happy. And after filming’s done a programme can take six weeks to edit. I pity the poor sods watching me for that long. I also learnt what I enjoy doing and what kind of jobs wouldn’t interest me. I realised that I could do some amazing stuff, like the experience of fixing the pier, a job I didn’t even know existed and one that I’d have never tried. I also got involved with the restoration of a Spitfire for another TV show. Proper dream stuff.
The filming took me all over England, Scotland and Wales, and the long drives to and from filming gave me plenty of time to think over what I was involved with. It made me realise I don’t want to be the person who is talking about interesting stuff that other people have done – I want to be doing the interesting stuff. And because I’m willing to try things that a lot of other presenters maybe aren’t, and couldn’t do, then perhaps between me and the production company we can come up with some new ideas or at least new takes on old ideas. After having an attitude of take it or leave it, I’m getting quite into that whole side of things and thinking about schemes that could be great fun, give me a hell of a buzz and hopefully make something memorable to put out on telly.