Look Mum, I’m Not Famous

The band’s name was Erebus (although confusingly Bristol also had a stalwart heavy metal band who went by the name Airbus, a local equivalent of Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts, who were a band you often saw advertised in the music press but you never listened to). But this was Erebus and they were an alternative indie band with a striking lead singer called Ari.

(Ari is not her real name, but I've forgotten that and I can’t tell this tale if I have to keep writing ‘the singer’ every third sentence. Forgive me, particularly if you were that singer…)

This was in the middle of the 1990s when anything Bristol-related threatened to be the next big thing (NBT). Massive Attack. Portishead. Roni Size. Tricky. (I’d seen the same thing in the 1980s with Iceland and its music scene).

The singer from Erebus – potentially the next big thing to come out of Bristol (although obviously 99% of NBTs don’t make it) – was about to be featured on Channel 4. This was a big deal. Satellite and cable TV were still in their infancy. The internet was little more than bulletin boards for nerds back then. Even a fifth terrestrial TV channel hadn’t quite launched by that point.

Channel 4 produced a feature titled The Slot that used to run in the ten minute gap between the end of their 7 o’clock evening news service and whatever show ran from 8pm (usually Brookside in those days). The brief of the show was to spotlight cultural figures, emerging bands and regional talent. Ari was singer in an emerging band, the band were regional talent.

Ari worked in the same slightly rundown offices above the Nationwide building society in Baldwin Street Bristol as I did. A crew from Channel 4 were coming down to film her at work. This seemed like a big deal for everyone. (Although not, as it turned out, for me).

Those offices were spread across three floors. Calls were made from two rooms on the first floor of the building – one room was slightly bigger than the other. On the first floor there was also a break room, a smoking room and a couple of individual offices. The second floor was where the admin department lived. Here all the paperwork was handled. Standing order forms would be dispatched to anyone who had pledged to make regular donations to their chosen charity. The third floor was a single cramped room used for ad hoc storage and occasionally as an overspill from where people could make calls if the rest of the call room space was in use.

But the first floor was where the main action took place. Where Ari and dozens of others worked most evenings and weekends. Before each shift someone would draw up a seating plan, allocating where people would be sitting. Usually everyone working on one campaign (say for the RNLI) would be sat in one group and those working on another campaign (Samaritans) would be grouped together elsewhere. Certain phones could be monitored remotely and these were the lines used when clients came to visit, ensuring that they could sample the quality of the people making calls on their behalf.

When Channel 4 came to film, places were allocated differently. Channel 4 would be filming in the bigger of the two call rooms. Into this room were allocated the young and the glamorous. This was the image that someone higher up had decreed should be portrayed to the world.

Look at these bright young things, dedicating themselves to supporting important and worthwhile causes. We are a forward-thinking, vibrant community of dedicated workers.

It was apartheid by style. Needless to say, despite my long service and success in helping us win an industry award, I was in the other room. No cameras on me or my ragged band of colleagues. I might’ve had the voice and manner that secured results for our clients, but none of that would be picked up by the cameras.

Please don’t get the sense that I minded any of this. I didn’t want to be on TV, in a background shot of a 10 minute documentary about someone else’s life. I was far happier elsewhere. Send me to the third floor and I’d have been even happier. It was just amusing to witness, that was all. I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall when they came to allocate those seating plans.

‘Him? Yes. Eleanor with her long, flowing dresses? Of course. The girl with the punk haircut and tattoos? I don’t think so. George? God no – he looks like a reject from the cast of Last of the Summer Wine.’

I’m sure that’s approximately how it panned out.

What happened to Ari and Erebus? Nothing happened. That’s why I couldn’t look them up and find out the singer's real name. But I’m sure they all went on to live good and fulfilling lives, just not in the manner of Massive Attack or Portishead or Roni Size.

I never saw the Channel 4 feature. I didn't own a working TV back then. Those five minutes short of the allotted fifteen minutes of fame we all hunger for. Blink and you missed it.  

* 

The offices of NTT (Actionaid) were teaming with representatives of the arts. Writers. Poets. Musicians. A bunch of friends had found themselves cast as extras in a Bollywood film about cricket. Jon provided bass for local band Shelbyville. Rachel designed dresses. Sarah (of the purple hair) was close friends with members of the Purple Penguin collective (purveyors of fine dub and hip hop). Jade was featured in the local paper for her sculptures and her art installations, one of which included the skeletal remains of a toilet.

It was the flexible hours, the evening and weekend shifts, that brought in the students and the artists. They made the place vibrant and colourful.

After the move to Lewins Mead everything became more corporate. (People gossiped openly about the rumoured eye-watering cost of a company logo redesign). The staff (particularly the managers) looked less like hippies on vacation from the summer festival circuit and more like what they now were – recruits from commercial sales companies, retail management and telecoms businesses. It might’ve depressed me more if I hadn’t carved out my own little niche by then where I was largely left to get on with my work undisturbed.

So niche in fact that when financial problems forced a dramatic reorganisation, I was omitted from the process. They did eventually remember I was still there and then shortly afterwards they axed my position. It didn’t matter. I was done with the place by then.

*

I was on TV once. In 1982. The pope came to Wembley stadium. There were around 80,000 people attending that day. My parents had seats in the stadium and got to receive holy communion from John Paul II. I had to stand out on the pitch, chaperoned by a woman of a similar age to my mother who I had never met before. We didn’t have any access to the pope.

I don’t remember much about that event, apart from the vastness of the crowds. Afterwards, the woman chaperoning me bought us both ice creams and then later on we were reunited with my parents and we made our way back home.

The event had been filmed or televised live and you could see me clearly in one of the crowd shots. We used to have a recording of this on an old VHS tape, the sort where fuzzy lines would occasionally swim across the screen and the audio would speed up as if possessed.

That recording survived for quite a while, but I suspect my brief TV appearance was eventually supplanted by something more prosaic like a random episode of Minder or The Good Life.

*

Look mum, I’m famous

Look mum, I’m not famous

How very Leonard Nimoy of me.