Tarrant Off The Record

We all know Chris Tarrant is a very funny man and has many funny stories to tell.

If you haven't got the book 'Tarrant Off The Record', you should have but if not I thought I'd treat you to a few of my favourite stories from the book written by the great man himself. Enjoy!

Murray Mints

Over the years I must have given away hundreds of thousands of pounds! Before you start jumping to the conclusion that I'm some sort of latter day St Francis of Assisi, I hasten to make it quite clear that none of ot was ever my own money. It's always belonged to some hugely rich company like Capital Radio or ITV. I've given away brand new cars, holidays in just about every exotic resort in the world and literally sacks full of money.

I've done all sorts of radio competitions and TV game shows, some of them very ingenious and some of them frankly incomprehensible. I've given people £50,000 just for knowing their birthday. I've given people two weeks in the Seychelles for gargling Christmas carols with their heads in buckets of water. I've given away booby prizes like drawing pins, hairy toffees and even a disgusting old newsreader's vest. I mean that the vest was old and disgusting, not the newsreader. I think.

People taking part in competitions are often very strange. Women are always much better at sounding excited and grateful than the blokes ever are. even when they win very large cash prizes, men seem to have a real problem sounding genuinely delighted, while women scream ecstatically at the top of their voices. I've never really understood it, but I think the bottom line is that men are too self-conscious, too worried about losing what they believe to be their dignity and composure in front of a live audience. I think men, to use a technical expression, have got their heads too far up their own arses!

Over the years, I must have talked to thousands of contestants, on all sorts of quizzes. The memory of most of them, I have to admit, is a bit of a blur. But of course thre are some that will always stick in my mind.

There was an incredibly brave but clearly potty bloke called Jim from Basildon in Essex who had won £12,000 one morning on a Double or Quits radio competition. Intax free cash, it was probably as much as he earned in a year. But he then decided, in spite of my pleas and those of all his factory mates in the background, to go ahead and double it on the toss of a coin. Needless to say, Jim lost the lot.

There was another woman who missed out on £20,000 because she believed that the capital of India was Moscow...

And my favourite was a girl who had to tell me the name of Britain's best-known motor racing commentator. In a production meeting before the show I remember saying, 'Oh, come on - that's much too easy. Everybody in the country knows it's Murray Walker!'

I was wrong. This girl simply couldn't remember his name. We went through Damon Hill, Emerson Fittipaldi, Jackie Stewart and even, rather puzzling, Ryan Giggs. I was desperately trying to help.

'Give me a few more seconds', she kept saying. 'It's on the tip of my tongue'.

I was running out of ideas for helpful clues. Eventually, I thought of Murray Mints.

'All right', I said. 'One last chance, on the tip of your tongue - it's something you suck'.

Without a second's hesitation, she said, 'Oh yes, of course - Dickie Davis.'

 

We're Mad As Hell and We Just Won't Take It Any More

In my duties as a news reporter for atv, I once covered a story about an angry farmer who was in court after taking the law into his own hands and spraying council offices with four tons of cow dung because planners had refused to let him build a bungalow.

He had arrived at his local planning office in Northumberland with his muck spreader and told the housing office exactly what he thought of them. The walls and windows were absolutely covered and he even managed to give a coating to the chairs, computers and carpets inside. Furious officials tried to stop him but were trapped by a ten-inch deep moat of manure.

Grandfather Dave said, 'I must say I felt a lot better afterwards'.

The sixty-three-year-old was convicted of criminal damage, but walked free from court with only an order to pay costs and compensation.

Obviously I can't really condone people taking the law into their own hands. It would undermine the very fabric of our society - but I have to say that sometimes ther's nothing like it for sheer satisfaction. There are times when, like Peter Finch in Network, 'We're mad as hell and we're just not going to take it anymore.' There are times when the tiny minded, the bullying bureaucrats or the good old fashioned jobsworths just have to be put in their place.

On a minor scale, I've done it in the supermarket where, having queued for half an hour with two huge baskets of shopping, some idiot at the checkout wouldn't let me have the one beer in amongst it all, and told me very forcefully to put it back on the shelf as they weren't licensed to sell alcohol until six o'clock. Seeing that it was 5-45, I found this totally ludicrous and left everything I'd bought right there in front of her till and walked off with nothing, telling her to put it all back on the shelves herself. It didn't go down a storm when I got home with absolutely nothing for the kids to eat, but there are times when these things have to be done.

We once had a particularly bloody-minded overnight attendant on our car park at Capital, many years ago. At 5-45 every morning for five years he had said a rather frosty, 'Good morning, Mr Tarrant', and then insisted on checking my identity pass. One morning, I arrived in a panic, late for my breakfast show and without my pass. There was a queue at the barrier which was making me even later, but when I finally got to the front the gentleman told me, with undisguised glee, that I couldn't come in because I didn't have my pass.

'But it's me!' I pleaded. 'You know it's me. It's always been me, every morning for the last five years and I'm supposed to be on the radio in exactly two and a hlaf minutes.'

This revelation made our man even happier, of course, and he ecstatically replied, 'Sorry - no pass, no entry into this car park.'

At 5-58 on a dark February morning I didn't really feel there was much point pleading any longer as I knew it would only make him even happier. So I got out of my car, locked it up right in front of the barrier, and walked away.

It caused chaos but it made me very, very happy and, five minutes later, an extremely apologetic manager rang on the studio phone to say he was deeply sorry for his man's ridiculous attitude and would I please, please, pretty please send the keys down and he would personally park it for me in my normal bay.

As you can imagine, I'm normally an easy-going enough sort of bloke, as my road rage therapist will tell you, but once in a while we all have to stand up and be counted.

One Saturday evening, just before Christmas a couple of years ago, a particularly bumptious young yuppie was holding up a whols side street in London by parking his brand new bright red porsche right in the middle of the road. The sickening little brat was strolling up and down the pavement looking for a particular flat and, while cars trying to go in both directions tooted their hornsat him furiously, he refused to be hurried and gave us all the 'V' sign. After about the third 'V' sign I have to admit shamefully I snapped.

I drove my rather larger, heavier car forward and took off the whole side of his pretty little sports car, to a loud cheer from everybody else in the road. It cost me a fortune to pay for his repairs, I lost my no claims bonus and, I admit, it was a totally irresponsible thing to have done. I also have to tell you that the precise second when my front bumper made contact with his wing, was one of the happiest moments of my life!

Kippers Like Slippers

Because I'm a fanatical fisherman, my friends and family always seem to think that any present they give me for my birthday or Christmas is going to be fine by me as long as somehow, somewhere, it's got a fish on it.

They won't buy any actual fishing tackle - partly because they're all too mean - but mainly it's because they reckon that the gear I use is a bit too specialized and they're bound to get the wrong thing. And in fairness, this is probably true. Buying fishing tackle as a prezzie is bound to be disastrous.

I remember at the age of twenty-eight some well meaning auntie buying me one of those little boy's first fishing kits from Woolworths with a float that even jaws couldn't pull under, an absurdly thick line that could have anchored the Isle of Wight ferry, and with the fishing rod itself made in a quite hideous bright fluorescent pink. Of course, I thanked my auntie profusely and then quietly bunged it on to my local rubbish tip. I couldn't possibly have sat amongst my mates, who had all the latest, all singing, all dancing gear with that funny little pink thing in my hand could I? Well I could have done but it would almost certainly have led to all sorts of misunderstandings.

So, family and friends have all slowly been educated not even to attempt to buy proper fishing gear for me. Instead, the attitude seems to be that anything else is fine, as long as there's some vague fish connection somewhere, however tenuous or hideous. I want to take this opportunity in print to tell them that this is not the case!

I'm sure many of my relatives will be absolutely horrified because they've been giving me these things for years and years not knowing how much I hated them all the time. But enough is enough - I really don't want them, I never wanted them - and if you trot out the old cliché about me being difficult to buy for, well uncles and aunties everywhere, please try harder!

I can just about stand the odd fishing t-shirt, or even the huge jumper with a great big diving whale on the front that one of my aunts knitted me (it was quite nice actually, although when wearing it I was always terrified of being boarded by Greenpeace), but some of the other 'novelty' ideas have been unbelievable.

For example, you know those hats with knives that go through them? Well, I've had one of those with a trout going through it. Oh, what a laugh. Where on earth was I supposed to wear that? I've had furry herring to hang off the rear view mirror of my car. I've had fish shaped soap on a rope. I've had a knitted herring shaped toilet roll holder. I've had a block of shaving soap in the shape of a halibut and probably worst of all, I've had a pair of fish-shaped slippers. I'm sorry, and I'm sure they were very well intentioned, but would you want to answer the front door wearing a pair of pilchards?

Copyright © Chris Tarrant