In 1999, Sarah-Jane Hall from BBC Radio 4’s travel department invited me to take part in Sentimental Journey, a series about retracing your steps, revisiting a favourite holiday haunt in the genial company of Arthur Smith, so I chose to return to Cesanatico in the hope of finding some of those generous hotel owners and thanking them. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t take the train there via Milan, but flew direct from Gatwick. Although, as it turned out the train might have been quicker. Our cunning plan was that Sarah-Jane, Arthur and I would take the 11 a.m. flight to Bologna and meet up with some of the staff from Penguin Children’s Books who were over there for the Book Fair. A leisurely lunch followed by a stroll around that beautiful city and a car to Cesanatico in time for a light supper, a grappa or two and an early night. We arrived at the airport in good time to check in and were told that there would be an hour’s delay before take-off. Not a huge problem.
In the sad sequence of events that was to follow, I would like to make it clear that Sarah-Jane was in no way to blame, for she is one of those women who work for the BBC for whom you would cross croc-infested rivers, car-congested motorways and even, as I did, risk death by rucksack in the Grand Canyon.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that it was Arthur who said, ‘As we’ve got bags of time let’s jump on one of those little trains and have a coffee in the other terminal.’ Which we did and, returning to the departure gate forty minutes later, were told that the plane had left on time.
‘But you said …’ we chorused.
The next flight was at 8 p.m., to Florence, where we could take a train to Rimini and a car from there, which we did.
Have you ever spent eight hours at Gatwick Airport? Obviously, the people who work there do it every day, but as a transit passenger there are only so many aftershave lotions you can spray on in duty-free. We arrived at our hotel in Cesanatico in the middle of the night and I was sure the grumpy old night porter had been a handsome young waiter there forty years before. In my best Italian I asked him, and in reply he said how overwhelming my aftershave was. Even though Sarah-Jane turned down my suggestion to revisit the torture chamber in Forli, we did manage to get a decent thirty-minute programme, thanks mainly to Arthur, and I learned that Leonardo da Vinci designed the canal and that the original inhabitants were Celts, but I never did find anyone who remembered a visit by thirty-six desperate Scousers back in 1959.
I suppose I should pick up on that ‘death by rucksack’ allusion, mainly because it opens with another tedium-packed incident at the same aerodrome. An old friend of mine, the writer and broadcaster Pete McCarthy, had sold the idea to Sarah-Jane of a series of radio programmes called American Beauty, in which he and I would travel around the States, talking to people, describing what we saw and generally having a good time at the Corporation’s expense. For the first programme we would fly to Las Vegas and spend a few days there, before driving on to the Grand Canyon, where we would attempt a death-defying descent, camp in the valley (on our own, in the dark) and then at first light climb back up again.
At 8.30 a.m. on 15 June 1994, a silver Mercedes called to collect me, and an hour and fifteen minutes later we were at Gatwick, where Sarah-Jane was already waiting at check-in at the North West Airlines desk. She picked me out from the crowd very easily because I had chosen to wear an apricot suit, which I’d been too embarrassed to wear at home but which I thought might blend into the pastel-coloured heartland of US kitsch. Bloody typical, no sign of Pete, who always leaves things to the last minute. But he arrived, cool as ever, and we checked in. At least, Pete and Sarah-Jane checked in.
‘Is your wife travelling with you today?’ asked Bill Murray at the desk.
‘Er, no.’
‘Then why have you given me her passport, sir?’
‘Er, pardon?’
Within minutes, the BBC’s rescue and retrieval operation was called into force and I rang home to tell Hilary that a motorcyclist was on his way to pick up my passport. I think it was a couple of lamb chops that Hilary was buying at the time, although it might have been a rail for the new curtains in Isabel’s bedroom; wherever she was, she wasn’t at home when I rang, nor when Evel Knievel scorched the gravel in front of the house. I wished Pete and Sarah-Jane a good flight and they wished me a safe journey as I took the tube back to Hammersmith.
The next day it was Groundhog Day, because at 8.30 a.m. the same silver Mercedes arrived with the same driver, who dropped me off at the same entrance, and as I made my way to the same check-in desk and saw Bill Murray, looking straight through me as if he’d never seen me before, I thought if I see Sarah-Jane now I’ll be condemned to spend eternity checking-in at Gatwick. I did escape the loop, however, and, after the eight-and-a-half-hour flight to Minneapolis, plus a five-hour wait for the connection to Las Vegas, was met at the airport by Pete, who had really enjoyed his day off lying by the pool.