Terry Christian: The Man Who Revolutionised 90s TV and Survived It All

Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, screen rats.

Wow, this is a good one, this is a good one.

For you UK 90s kids, you're going to like this.

Friday night, Channel 4, what TV show was on the early 90s that everyone watched?

Me included, The Word.

You're correct, The Word.

And who was the presenter on there?

Terry Christian, a man who is very vocal on social media.

That is how we actually sort of met, in inverted commas, online.

I saw that Terry was going up to Edinburgh and I thought, you know, fuck it, let's try and talk to him.

Let's try and talk to the man.

And I did and it was great.

And, you know, we hit it off.

We hit it off pretty well.

This is a good interview.

And it was recorded up there during The Fringe.

It starts a little hot.

It starts a little hot.

That is because Tessa could not find me.

I was getting all these calls.

My phone was literally lighting up and it was like Terry Christian kept ringing.

He's going, where the fuck is it?

I'm like, yeah, it's not far.

It's just up here, Terry.

It's just, listen, mate, I'm gone up a hill.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, don't go down that hill.

Because you don't got a fucking show to do.

I go, yeah, yeah, I know, Terry.

He had this kind of like slightly tense beginning.

But once we met and started doing the podcast, it was great.

It was great.

It was absolutely brilliant.

And this one's pretty unedited, as unedited as I've ever done.

I try to keep everything in.

And in the beginning, you'll hear room noise and stuff.

And you can't quite make it out, but the first part of the conversation is me asking him if you were allowed to swear on TV, especially in The Word.

And at one point is a friend, Pete, gives him a bottle of water.

I don't edit that out.

And you know, it's a nice and clear, we're sitting opposite each other as well.

So if there's any reverb, you just have to deal with that, guys.

You know what I mean?

Terry is particularly close to the microphone throughout.

So it's nice and loud.

But you know, he doesn't hold back and he tells us everything.

There's everything in this one.

There's a lot of stuff about TV, an awful lot of stuff about radio and a lot about the Manchester music scene.

So you know, there's something for everyone in this one.

And I just want to get into it.

Let's get into it.

This is me talking to the brilliant and hilarious Terry Christian.

Terry, Terry, Terry, Terry, Terry, Terry Christian.

Roll up, roll up and welcome to another edition of Television Times with your host, me, Steve Otis Gunn, where I'll be talking to someone you do know or someone you don't.

It might be funny, but it might not be.

But it's always worth tuning in for.

So here we go with another episode of Television Times.

Well, it's one of those where you get, you know, people have an odd idea and there was a lot of this idea that because of my accent at the time, that seemed like a novelty.

So there was the assumption that you were like basically Sean Rider, you know what I mean?

Just because you were from fucking Manchester.

I do him in the show.

Do you?

Well, yeah, because Happy Mondays basically got me sacked from Key 103.

Really?

How?

Well, what happened was there was a guy who worked at Key 103, it was the second biggest station in Manchester, called Tim Grundy, and his dad was famously Bill Grundy.

Oh, really?

Yeah, Bill Grundy.

And obviously the sex pistol swearing on his show ruined his career.

But he had an alcohol problem.

So Tim Grundy was like the blue-eyed boy, and I'd come along as a new kid on the block, you know, with two Sony Awards, giving Carte Blanche to play What I Like, and I had the Happy Mondays live on my show, so I'd tell that story of what happened.

And then he ended up becoming the boss about four months later, and he marked my fucking card.

When he's quoting the Evening News, because it was quite an outcry when he got rid of me, he said, I don't think we should be playing obscure stuff like the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays every night.

And this is about two weeks before they went on Top Of The Pops together with 808 State as a play out track.

And my quote was one of the best ones ever come up with.

I said, Shakespeare's obscure if you're illiterate.

That's a good one.

You're right.

And I just thought reading up like today, like I kind of forget.

Most people will know you from The Word, obviously, in the Hivett All-90s show, but your radio career started when you were 21.

21, yeah.

21.

weird.

I was on the dole.

Yeah.

I'd been at Thames Poly in London.

You know what I mean?

Then did an HND in Applied Biology.

I was home on the dole.

There were no jobs, because but Thatcher's policies affected Manchester the most of any city because it had a lot of manufacturing there, steel, textiles and heavy engineering.

And of course, she went to wipe all that out.

So overnight, all the apprenticeships went.

So in terms of youth and employment, it was massive.

And then you had the 81 riots.

And one of the major causes of them was high youth unemployment.

So the World In Action Team made a TV series called Devil's Advocate.

I'm fucking on boiling.

It's really hot here.

Well, it was cold here, you know, before.

I know, it's hot, it's cold, it's raining.

But anyway.

But yeah, so it was completely by accident.

And I ended up on this show.

I was quite political when I was at Thames Poly, you know, just to annoy people.

So I joined the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers' Revolutionary Party.

I joined the Labour Militants, you know what I mean?

They were easy to sell papers for.

Socialist Worker was a struggle.

But the Workers' Revolutionary Party paper and Labour Militants paper had a TV page in.

So for, and I was staying at Halls of Residence, that was mainly for teacher trainers in Avery Hill, in Eltham.

So they'd all have, a lot of the girls had portable, black and white portable tallies in the room.

So they'd buy it for the TV page, you know, not for the counter revolutionary stuff, you know.

I remember the socialist worker got me, I used to live in Hackney Central and go to work in Acton.

So I'd get on the North London line every day.

At first I was like, who are these guys?

And I started reading it, I kind of agree with everything in there.

And I sort of signed up and I always got worried.

Do you remember there was that period where, if you bought that newspaper or you signed up for it, how did you do it?

How did you sign a thing and send it in the post or whatever it was?

But that list, you're on a list at that point, right?

I must have been on every list going, which would explain.

Well, I mean, I just did it to annoy people.

You know what I mean?

And then what happened with the Socialist Workers Party?

They were starting to irritate me a bit, you know, with the combat jackets and the rest of it.

They were a bit quenching the interest from me.

And they went and asked me for the money for the papers.

Right.

And I said, well, you know, I only owed them about 25 quid, 30 quid.

And I was like, stop migrating me.

You get it whenever, right?

Hard times.

Yeah, yeah.

So then I left enjoying the WRP and they'd be slagging me off.

And I'd be going like, well, why aren't you necking Trotsky or whatever?

But then when I left the WRP, I owed them about 30 quid for paper sales.

And then I went to Labour Militant and a very similar thing happened.

I ended up in debt to them for selling papers to the tune of 30 or 40 quid.

And that's probably why the revolution never happened because I owned all those left-wing parties collectively about 100 quid.

Have you ever paid them back?

No, no, in kind.

They exist?

In kind.

I only liked the Socialist Workers Party.

I remember going to the Rock Against Racism.

It was supposed to be a three-day festival.

It ended up just being the Thursday and the Saturday at Alec Park.

But the Socialist Workers Party sold these great screen print posters, three colours, one with Zimbabwe on and all this other stuff.

They were only like 20p each and they're fantastic.

So that appealed really.

Yeah, yeah.

You just reminded me of like gig prices when I was a kid.

I'm a little bit younger than you but I remember going to see gigs at Dingwalls for like two quid and stuff like that.

So did you see, I mean, obviously you introduced a lot of listeners to new music in the 90s, but did you get to see these bands early in the embryonic stages?

No, by that stage, with The Word, it was important that they could play live.

Yes.

That was the thing.

A few times, I remember being annoyed at one of our music bookers because he didn't do that.

He was too London orientating.

He was booking his bands.

They weren't necessarily from London, but they just weren't up to it.

I mean, obviously, I've been looking at the chronology of things, but The Word was obviously massively pivotal in the 90s, but it also led the way for many other things like TFI Friday.

Well, Chris Evans just basically came down to our show every week with his Jotter.

Is that what he did?

And his anorak.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the thing with Chris is I've known him, well, known of him since he was 18.

What I didn't realise until I went as a guest, because I thought he was good on the radio when he was 18.

I didn't hear this, because then he went to London as a producer.

And it was only once I showed that nobody gets fucking, pardon my French, nobody gets rabies from putting a northern accent on air.

Yeah.

Suddenly all the northern accents started coming out.

You know, Mark Radcliffe gets put on air.

And, you know, when Chris Evans, I mean, Radcliffe had been on air, you know, for Peking Ily, Key 103.

And he was really good.

And yet we went to radio once purely as a producer, and they never bothered putting him on air.

And so suddenly that was okay.

I kind of kicked the door in there.

But what was fascinating to me about Chris Evans was he wasn't actually really interested in anything.

He wasn't into music.

He wasn't really interested in interviewing people.

Everything had to be completely controlled.

But it was like, you know, I think the last time he did anything spontaneous was have a shit in his nappy.

Because I remember going on this Saturday morning show for Nets to Nothing as a favour to him.

And he was going, right, at the beginning, I'm going to say blah, blah, blah.

Then you open these doors on this Wendy House.

I thought, this is not good with a hangover at quarter past eight.

This is wearing me ass paper thin.

And then say, who's this?

No, this is some crap Saturday morning kids' TV show he did.

Then open the Wendy House doors and say, is this Chris Evans?

Blah, blah, blah.

And I did that.

And then he turns around and goes, who wants to know?

And I'm thinking, mate, you're from Warrington.

I'm from Old Trafford, right?

And I've got a lot of anger issues.

I can vouch for that.

But no, no, but it was like, it was kind of, it was sort of strange that he did that.

And then when he was coming down, what I thought was interesting that he did with TFI was he made sure that there wasn't an audience of 350 people like we had, and that he had his own like little, Yeah, little nook.

Little nook surrounded by all the, and then Danny Baker writing all his funny lines.

And then didn't really interview people and then on the music side when he was struggling a bit with that, he got Pete Mitchell and he worked on the radio just after me in Manchester.

And actually Pete was a good lad, so he had quite a good taste.

He was a big Northern soul lead back in the day, Pete Mitchell.

He died a few years ago.

He worked on Absolute Radio and virgin and all that.

But yeah, so he had Pete Mitchell sorting his music out.

But what was weird was when they did the revival of TFI, and they did TFI the album, and it was like Happy Mondays.

They weren't on TFI.

They split up by then.

Black Grape were on.

Stone Roses were never on TFI.

New Order were never on TFI.

Reef, okay, you know, they use it.

It's your letters.

But Raise Your Hands, that was on The Word.

So all this, Boo Radleys was on The Word, not on TFI.

So it was like they took our soundtrack to make it look like they were the ones who were sort of cutting edge.

But that goes on quite a lot, you know.

Was there ever a Word soundtrack?

No, I mean, we weren't liked by anyone.

We were seen as a misfit.

So I was unpopular for one reason, and then the guy was kind of our big boss.

This is what I read today.

The most hated man on TV in 1994.

Well, a lot of that was just bullshit.

Listen, it was all, here's Morgan, wasn't it?

Did it help though?

Did it help?

No.

You know, it's five years of that.

And then they all end up believing it because he would basically.

That's not true though.

You had great ratings.

How could you be hated?

Well, exactly, but it was that kind of view of, you know, no matter how big or popular you are, you've got to be, it's where you are popular.

So, like I'm doing my show here at Edinburgh, I've not even bothered really publicizing it because one thing's for sure, it doesn't matter how good that show is, I am never going to be validated by some twat from The Guardian, you know, especially after I had a go at them over printing the wrong picture of the wrong black woman when my mate Denise Johnson died.

Oh, God.

Yeah, well, I never apologize for it, by the way, pure laziness.

Yeah, but going back to The Word, obviously when people think of The Word, people who remember it, it was a fucking fantastic TV show, I was an absolute fan of it and never missed an episode.

Obviously, the Oliver Reed thing is insane, but what I didn't realize was that it's the same fucking episode as Bill Hicks.

Yeah, and Bill...

It must have been one of the worst days of your life.

Well, no, it was okay, but I was annoyed because...

He did not want to be there.

No, well, Bill Hicks had just come off a long distance flight from LA.

He'd literally stepped off and he'd been contractually obliged to do this because he was doing a Channel 4 comedy special.

Right, yeah.

So we had him on, so he was knackered anyway.

So all I was doing was feeding him lines from his comedy show, even his old one that he nicked off, Lenny Bruce, you know, the one about, you know, because he used to do the one, didn't he, about John F.

Kennedy, yeah, and The Rifle.

The Jackie.

And he nicked that, didn't he?

You know, Bill Hicks, he nicked that from Lenny Bruce.

I mean, he really shoehorned that in in The Word.

It was like, you don't need to do that, but he just did it anyway.

Well, I mean, that was it.

And then the Ollie Reed thing, I was really annoyed because what a great guest.

So I thought, well, why are we doing this?

It's one of these sort of, I'm sorry to say this, but it's one of these sort of public school things.

We have a lot of these types on the show who have very little experience and they'd be all like, hey, you don't have to be mad to work here but it helps, ha, ha, ha.

And you go, mate, I won't give you a fucking job washing bottles.

How drunk was he?

Was he actually?

Was he?

He was putting it on a bit.

I mean, he'd been in the pub beforehand, drinking with people.

Then he was out drinking after and he'd had a few shots of vodka, that was it.

But he knew that he'd been set up, but it was like, it was a waste of a good guest.

And it was for something that even if you were watching, was actually funny for about 30 seconds.

Yeah, it went on too long.

And there was a lot of that.

They used to do it all the time, didn't they, on the big breakfast and it was the same crew.

You know, like, today we're going to have, you know, lots of pussy and then they show a picture of three cats.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's like, okay, yeah, snigger, that's it.

And so there was a lot of that.

And he was so young, like this is the other thing as well.

He was, I just checked out, he was 55 when you did that.

55.

Well, yeah, they were so old, these people when they.

Well, yeah, when it seemed it.

But I mean, I had that thing because last Saturday just gone, August the 10th was the 17th anniversary of Tony Wilson's death.

And I'm going, blimey, he was 57 when he died.

Is that true?

I'm older than, I'm seven years older than him now.

And when he died, I just could never imagine being older than Tony.

No, he did have an older man vibe though.

He had that kind of, how can I put it?

Not so much gravitas.

What he had told him is he had this almost impenetrable, well, it is ego beyond ego.

If that makes it.

He had so much ego, he didn't have an ego.

He couldn't have done anything else.

Yeah, it was sort of weird.

So he was never really going to be over it.

The odd person that irritated him for whatever reason, I mean, he had some people he absolutely hated.

I mean, really hated.

Well, I can't really tell you that, but what's interesting is you get a lot of people who chat about him and stuff.

And you go, he couldn't stand you, mate.

He really genuinely couldn't stand you.

And one of them who's quite well known and I've seen it, he sent me a message saying, well, he sent me a letter from hospital and I said, no, he didn't, mate, because on his deathbed, he was actually saying to the guy who managed to simply read, whatever you do, don't let X ever talk about me and take my legacy.

Well, you know.

For those who don't know, Tony Wilson is obviously, just watched 24 Hour Party People.

Well, he was like Mr.

Manchester.

I mean, the weird thing is he's, yeah, 24 Hour Party People, Jossie.

Did you like that film?

I can't do it because I've got to think.

You don't like it?

I didn't like it when I first saw it, then the more I've watched it, the more I like it, because the true story is madder than that.

In a weird way, Steve Coogan lacks Tony's actual charisma, so although he does a good impersonation of Tony, he's not tall enough to be Tony, even though he's about 6'1, I think.

He didn't really look like him or anything.

No, but he didn't have that presence that Tony's got.

But he does a good impersonation of him.

The one who was brilliant in it is Paddy Considine.

That's Rob Gretton.

I know that is Gretton.

And in fact, the guy who plays Gretton in the control film, he's brilliant as well, because he is Gretton.

Gretton was quite funny, but quite gritty.

I mean, you wouldn't mess with Rob Gretton or you get a punch in the face.

So were you a Hacienda guy?

Did you just go down there and see what they say?

One of the myths about the Hacienda is that it was empty.

Now it was because they'd run it seven nights of the week because the guy whose idea it was, was Rob Gretton, who managed New Order, Enjoy Division and was big in the factory thing.

And he was the music guy, not Tony really, it was Rob Gretton.

But Rob just liked somewhere to go and have a pint every night.

That could be open till two.

So it was his own personal life.

And also his argument for the Hacienda was to get money out of Tony, to make sure that him and the band got the money out of Tony.

It's crazy.

There's so much to talk to you.

And so your show, obviously, you're doing a show here in Edinburgh.

This isn't an Edinburgh podcast, but are you touring it afterwards as well?

Well, yeah, so I did this one years ago because what I didn't want to do, I wanted to try, I was always being asked to do these evening widths and I thought, well, I'll do it stand up style.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm fucked up enough to do stand up.

So did you just start doing it or did you?

Yeah, so what I did was a guy asked me to do an evening width at a place called The Laughing in Chester.

It was owned by Jason Manford.

And so I said, okay, I'll do it, but I'll do it stand up style.

And it actually worked.

You know what I mean?

It actually worked.

I mean, obviously sometimes it's beginner's luck and because you've never done it before, you imagine it to be a lot better than it was.

And there is drinking involved.

And then as it developed it, and I called it Naked Confessions of a Recovering Catholic, so I wanted to make it about growing up Irish ascent in the area did and all the weirdness that goes with it.

And then it just sort of developed.

What went down really well last night, the first gig here was, I always said a bit about the saints, you know, the little icons and the rub of the relics and the sort of the heavy seasoning of weird superstitions that you have, especially as an Irish Catholic.

And that way, it was almost like you put the saints their special powers and what they do.

It was like the Avengers assemble.

Do you know what I mean?

It was.

Do you have them?

Do you have them as well?

Yes, yes, because well, normally I do it as like, you know, on a screen.

Yeah.

You know, and use that, but obviously you can't have anything fancy like that.

So I've actually bought all the little plaster ones.

There's a few that you can't get.

It's nice to have the props.

I do props in life.

Yeah, yeah, but it was quite good fun.

I mean, they've put some of them a little like that.

St.

Lucie and I spent a lot of money on her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tiny, oh, thanks for that, Pete.

There he is.

This place is really reverberant.

So if you go right up that end, then you won't make any noise on the mic set up.

In other words, I'm not telling them to fuck off.

No, no, that's cool.

No, no, I know.

But yeah, so, but then I've also been doing this year, The Word is Terry Christian, the 1990s and more, with big clips of The Word on giant screens.

So I've done like cinema-sized screens, like alternate, Garrett Playhouse, Stopport Plaza.

And that's really good.

And it's, that's what I wanted to do here, funnily enough.

So you don't run away from it.

You're not like, you like talking about The Word.

Well, I mean, the thing is, it was of its time.

It hit what it was designed to do by me.

My irritation was that I'd worked on radio for eight years before that, I've managed bands, run nightclubs.

Even Graham Parker went to the Hacienda, was poached off me.

I wasn't allowed to pay more than 70 quid, you know, for a Friday Saturday night.

Hacienda gave him 120.

And the guy who owned the nightclub said, I can't go giving him all that.

And I'm going, let me, mate, come on.

So The Word was originally part of your radio show.

So, well, no.

So The Word was the page I wrote in Even News that I inherited off Sarah Champion.

And before her, it was Mick Middles who wrote it.

And Mick Middles was like the big melody maker journalist from the punk days, you know, from Manchester.

So he'd be writing about Buzz Cox, Early Joy Division, you know, all that kind of stuff.

A good writer, Mick Middles.

But the name of the page, The Word came from Mike Unger.

He was the editor of the Manchester Evening News.

He was a Scouser.

So it is on, is it Rubber Soul, The Beatles album?

Rubber Soul, The Word.

So he put that in.

But the idea for even the page, I only later found out, trying to Mick Middles was Tony Wilson and Factory Records had fallen out with The NME.

So around that period, 85, 86, they weren't getting any coverage in The NME.

So then Tony went out for lunch with Mike Unger, the editor of The Evening News and said, because he had a general pop page in The Evening News and he went, he had the Jedi mind trick, Tony, he went, listen Mike, I think what would be really good, Manchester, there's so much amazing stuff from around here.

None of it on the factory, you got the Smiths, you got, you know, Simply Red, he said, we should be doing, we should be, you should be doing a page just about Manchester music.

And then he got Mick Middles in, and obviously then it was all about him.

What kind of pioneer it was when Sarah Champion as a 16 year old took over doing that, because then she was only from Charlton, whereas Mick was a stop baller, so she was on top of everything.

I mean, my, if I ever, if I ever want to know what's going to happen with music, I don't talk to some 21 year old, I go and ask a 15, 16, 17 year old.

They know, they care.

And they know what's good.

And she was fantastic.

So that word page, so the word page was it.

So when I was asked to do this show for Channel 4, it was just because Manchester was hip for six months, and I was a guy playing all the Manchester bands.

I'd won two National Sony Radio Awards for the Best Specialist Music Show.

Youngest person to ever win one, first person to win two, but I was never going to get on National Radio with a Northern accent.

I actually did a youth program on Radio 4 called WPFM.

So I did it every two weeks, Muriel Gray one week, me the next, and it was aimed at fifth and sixth formers.

But it mainly involved me sitting opposite Anna Rabin and asking her about thrush, you know, and stuff like that, or depression, you know, all the kind of things.

It was depressed.

Just have some drugs.

But it was all very kind of trendy and a bit overly aspirational, I always felt.

And me, you know, being full of bitterness and resentment coming from a particularly poor background, I hated all of that.

But then when I got the chance to do the show, I thought I'd have more say in it.

But I didn't have the confidence or that kind of natural self-esteem, you know, because I was a fourth of six kids and blah, blah.

So it's a lot of fighting to do.

When I worked at Radio Derby and even at Key 103, I've been supported to do my thing, do you know what I mean?

Make it happen.

And I've been surrounded by good people.

I mean, my sidekick when I was on a station called KFM after Key 103, after I got the bullet for playing too much obscure music.

So I went to the first official independent radio station before XFM, KFM in Manchester.

And there I worked with Craig Cash, Carolina Hearn.

And then I thought I was doing a late night show, Channel 1, Monday to Thursday.

And then I was also doing another show on the first official black music station in the UK, which wasn't Kiss, it was Sunset Radio in Manchester.

That Galaxy later took over.

And so I was doing a show there, four shows a week, and I thought, right, for this late night show, I need something a bit woo-woo to go with the music, give it a vibe.

And there was a guy who was managing a band called The Man From Del Monte, who everyone jokingly called Smith's Fan's third Favourite Band in Manchester.

Did they change their name?

The Man From Del Monte, no, they didn't do it good.

So the guy who was managing them had just been sacked.

And so I thought, actually, he's quite funny, and he's a bit quirky, so I'll get him on.

And he was like my permanent sort of sidekick.

And that was John Ronson, whatever happened to him.

John Ronson?

Yes.

So, but this is what I'm saying.

So suddenly when I get in, so 12 different people recommended me when this TV show were looking for a presenter, and the TV show, its working title was Club X2.

So it was the people who made Club X, which was an absolute abortion.

It was a terrible show.

It was a dog's dinner.

It was down the toilet.

It was unwatchable.

And so what happened was they rang me up at home.

I got a phone call and they said, Oh, hi Terry, it's Matthew Bowles, you know, really nice posh guy.

And he said, you know, we're just wondering if you'd like to come down to do an audition for this show.

I said, what's the point of that?

I've been auditioning for The Tube a few years earlier.

And I said, no one's ever going to give someone with an accent like mine a gig.

You know, they couldn't get a gig on the radio at that time in me 20s with two National Sony Radio Awards.

And I even went for a producer's job at Radio One, got down to the last six.

And it was like, you just weren't in that thing yet.

So I said, will you pay me train fare?

That's how much self-belief I had.

And he said, no.

And I said, well, forget it.

I wasn't being cool.

That's just the level of self-belief I had.

I'm just interested in getting me bus fare home.

Anyway, 20 minutes later, he rang me up and said, okay, we'll pay you train fare.

So I went down and thought, well, I'm committed now.

Went down to do it, but unlike The Tube, when I really wanted the gig and felt really nervous about it, because it was right up my alleyway, with this one, I just thought, not got a chance, I know what's the fucking point.

So in a weird way, because I had no nerves and I didn't care and I was so Mancunian and I didn't realize I had 12 different people in Manchester.

Not all necessarily for the right reason had all recommended me for this show.

I went and they decided there and then they were giving me the show without telling me.

And the next thing I knew was at a meeting at Cliveden with all the guys who had worked on Network 7 and Club X2 and all these other things.

And they were talking about UTV.

And I said, well, I said, because we were all banging on about what a great show Network 7 was.

I said, well, to me, I said, it was too glib of middle class.

He said nothing to me.

I said, I'm into music and I'm quite well read and kind of, well, I'm not quite university educated, polytechnic, where you go when you were too arrogant to work in a call center.

I said, so this isn't for me.

I said, really, I said, youth.

It isn't some hip 20, 21 year old.

It's when you're too young to go out and that's what you're dying to do.

So what we should do is a program that creates a night out, but brings it in your living room to make you, because in a weird way, you get to that weird age when you're 15, 16, you cannot wait to be older then.

Yeah.

You're not that bothered when you're 13, 14, but once you get to 15, 16, you want to get out there and amongst it, don't you?

Yeah.

And so that was the vibe.

And then also I thought what things excited me as a kid growing up.

Quite like the juxtaposition at the top of the pops, you know, where you'd have like James Brown or the Sex Pistols on the same episode as like Joel Dolch you're doing, Shut Up Your Face or the birdies song.

Quite like that juxtaposition of the crap and the good, the inclusiveness of the Hitman and Her, which would have some good tracks on, top dance tracks on, but you know, pass the mic and all that.

And that was the going out vibe that we wanted to create.

And then the great band selection of Tony Wilson, So It Goes.

You know, we had like Elvis Costello, Ian Jure, The Clash, Sex Pistols, Buzz Cox, Iggy Pop live from the Apollo doing Passenger, Steel Pulse, you know, from the Electric circus doing Macca Splat, feeling high, high, high, all that stuff.

So it was that, that vibe, bring that vibe into your living room.

And we actually did tick all those boxes, but the problem was, whereas I had always worked with people who were very good at what they did, I'm suddenly there on a YTS scheme for Public School Boys.

It done six months on Movie Watch.

Do you know what I mean?

So it was okay, but they weren't from a wide enough demographic.

So we even sat in a meeting and it'd be about what subjects should we cover.

The stuff that interested them didn't interest.

And I'd go, mate, you don't represent the majority of people of our age.

You've got money, they haven't got money.

They're not even asked about, LA, great, if we're going to LA to kind of interview Arnold Schwarzenegger or something like that or Patrick Swayze, as we did.

I said, but they're not that interesting for surfing in LA or a surfing competition or this, that and the other.

And that's what we're always doing.

We spend endless hours.

I said, they'd be more interested in doing a big rave weekend in Ibiza.

Well, Ibiza's had its day now.

I said, well, I've never seen anything on TV about Ibiza.

And when did you go to Ibiza?

I mean, I hadn't been myself, but I knew that was the vibe.

And it was weird that years later, they did Ibiza Uncovered, but they were down this weird Janet Street Porter path of you must make a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, even if you've got a shoehorn it all in.

I said, well, sometimes it's just interesting to see what's going on.

And which is what a lot of these reality style shows do.

How did you manage to get them to change the title to The Word?

Well, they just couldn't find a title.

It was so cheesy, I remember they were saying, well, we're going to, what about Warp Factory?

Oh, God, it's awful.

Or The Ediths, it's all like stuff like that.

It was all sounded so naff.

And I thought, well, my column in the Evening News, well, my page, the Word page, appeared on a Friday.

And The Word was going to be on at 6 o'clock on a Friday.

So I thought, cynically, if I could get it named after my page in the Evening News, I might get an extra 30 or 40 quid a week off Mike Unger, the editor, for my page.

That's not when it went out.

What time did it go out?

Yeah, 6 o'clock on a Friday for the first 12 weeks.

6 o'clock?

first 11 weeks, yeah, it went out at 6.

But I just thought, Friday night, it's in the Evening News.

I'm on the telly, doing the Word, makes it look like my show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also, but I only did it because I thought, well, it might help me get on Radio 1 at last.

And yet, for all those years of doing the Word, five years, and doing a really popular show with a 49% audience show on a Friday night, very targeted to 16 to 25s, especially, I never even got asked to do a wet bank holiday week in filling in slot for two hours.

And that's kind of crazy, isn't it?

Because my CV said that all the way.

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But for now, let's get back to the current episode of Television Times Podcast.

I actually got Joe Whiney the gig, or recommended her for the gig on The Word, because I'd worked with her on Radio 4 and that WPFM, you know, the thrush one.

She was a researcher on that.

So I got her in as a music booker, because I didn't like the guy who was a music booker on the first series, he wasn't right.

He was there for Kids TV.

You know, he ended up managing Steps and A1, which tells you everything.

And also he lied to me and said that the Manic Street Preachers weren't available when they were and we could have had them on doing Motown Junk, their first biggie, you know, and that annoyed me.

So it was interesting like that, but I think just all around, I was misrepresented from the off, purposely, because the guys that I was working for had never done anything successful, I had.

So it was almost like they wiped out all my past.

My first official press release from The Word went out to all the national press before the show started was former DJ and sheet metal worker Terry Christian.

Sheet metal worker?

Exactly.

Had you done that?

No.

They said to me, they said, well, besides the media, and I'd only worked in the media really since I was 21, since like, you know, December 81, I worked in the media.

It was like, have you done anything else?

And so, well, I did, in between radio jobs, before I got the job on Key 103, I said I had a big gas bill.

And so, R Tony was the kind of director or big boss of the Dormer warehouse in Salford, the older brother.

So he gave me three weeks' work there with overtime.

What were you doing there?

Picking sheets off a line, you know, bedding, curtains, bedding, sheets, sheets, and curtains, I said.

You know, and I did it for three weeks.

They just wanted to make it sound more industrial or something.

No, no, they just didn't want, because if this show, which was done by Charlie Parsons and all the rest of them, who'd already been involved in quite a few flops, and the show was a flop, it would be blamed on another flop by Charlie.

But if they made out that I was like a nobody, and I'd never, he could then shove the blame on me.

Sheet metal, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where's the goal?

He's won two Sony Raid Awards, he's really successful.

Why is this show a bit naff?

I mean, I didn't know that at the time, but it's all quite plain now.

So yeah, it was kind of, it was that battle, and it was crazy really, because the show could have been so much better, but rather than help me, they tried to hinder.

I had to argue eight weeks to get Oasis on the show.

There was a band that I was desperately trying to get on, and they just kept going, no, no, no, no, I'm booking all these crap, you know, the new wave of new wave so-called scene, and acid jazz, which is basically a few, well, a few white guys dressed in Frank Spencer berets and a goaty beard, you know, playing old 1970s funk.

And you go, well, what's that?

How's that acid jazz?

So we never had the cranberries on doing linger.

You know, so, but it's little things like that, because I wasn't looking necessarily at what I thought was hip.

I thought, what's going to be big?

What will be good?

What will have an appeal?

And then it would be one pop band every week, one black band, whether they're pop or whatever, and then one kind of, you know, indie type band.

And let's keep it like that.

So there's a bit of something for everyone.

You kind of feel like you've got your finger on the pulse, even if you live in, you know, in some outside place.

You know what I mean?

You feel like you might know a bit.

It becomes a bit of an appointment to view for whatever reasons.

But then they started putting in, thinking that it was all about the shock value.

And so they started contriving and gimmicking stuff, so you do like the hopefuls and all of that.

And what was weird, I hated it.

Did you?

Well, yeah, because it's just doing us down.

There's no need for it.

It never added any figures.

Our figures went up every series anyway.

But it gave them an excuse to get rid of us.

Because you get a new commissioning editor, and no matter how successful a show he's inherited is, he can't bathe in the reflected glow of glory.

But he can't just get rid of it.

He needs the Board of Governors to complain.

Because if he gets rid of it, Michael Gray is going to go, we were getting two and a half million viewers a week for that.

Why have you replaced it with something like The girly Show that only gets us 1.2 million?

Yeah.

You know, and then he's next on the block.

So what he did was he...

Is that what replaced it?

Was The girly Show?

Yeah.

Thanks a lot.

Basically, yeah.

And it was that.

And funny enough, that was Katie Pukrik's idea.

And she was like sidled out of it by the bloke who did it.

weird, eh?

Funny days, a lot of politics back then.

You said you didn't have confidence at the beginning, but it sounds like you definitely did, because you've got all these ideas and you're trying to get...

You had them, but then you got worn down, you know?

So, you know, I'm used to working with good people, even when they couldn't find a female presenter for The Word to start with, and they decided to go, you know, cynically with Amanda de Cabernet, because she was like the uber posh, rich, kind of sloney type girl.

Her dad was Alan de Cabernet, had won Le Monde's twice, you know, worth tens of millions and all the rest of it, and one was a Sloan.

And she was a great girl, actually, Amanda.

You know, she had massive balls, but it was like...

Well, what's the line?

Where is it?

Great smashing bollocks, Amanda.

You said that.

I've never ever said anything like that, no.

I've never said anything like that.

See, it's one of those things that just, you never did.

It's just, it's not even in my parlance.

I mean, what that was was, it was people like Rob Newman taking me off.

Right.

You know, off Mary Whitehouse experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But what they hated, Rob Newman was e-audition for The Word and didn't get it.

Loads of them auditioned for The Word and didn't get it.

You know, but yeah, so it was a peculiar thing.

So they did that quite cynically, but there was a girl in Manchester that I wanted to audition and they said, well, we can't have two people from Manchester on the same show.

And then in series two, when they auditioned, Katie Pukrik and then Danny Bear said, what about this girl from Manchester?

What about this girl from Manchester?

And they still wouldn't audition her.

Carolina Hearn, I think she'd have done quite well.

Is that who it was?

Come on.

Well, I mean, look, you see, you are, one of the things I was always good at was spotting talent.

So even when I was at Radio Derby, all the people that were involved in my show did well.

My resident poet was Henry Normal.

I ended up setting up Baby Cow and wrote The Mrs.

Merton Show.

It's from Nottingham.

When he left there and I went to Manchester, he'd moved to Manchester as well.

I brought him back in.

Then when he got busy, I brought Lem Cissé in as my resident poet.

You know, I had John Ronson working for me, all sorts of people.

And it's kind of, you know, but you get to know who's good, what will work.

Do you still do it now?

How do you still look out for what's on the horizon?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, obviously I'm of a certain age.

So, you know, my kids used to help me out.

So, you know, to find out who was big, you know, like they told me about Bugsy Malone in Manchester when he was, but mind you, as a mate of mine, I told Bugsy to write about your life.

A big music producer from Manchester is in Cheetah Mill too.

So, yeah, you still keep an eye on this.

You know, I mean, I like Sebastian Lowe, Seb Lowe, who's from like Olden Way and he's very political.

But he's like a Billy Bragg with humour.

You're not political at all.

You're very active online.

I mean, I watch your Twitter feed.

That's like a form of Tourette's.

It's so fun.

I know, but it's just like a form.

I shouldn't be wasting my time doing that.

No, you shouldn't be, but it is fun.

No, I can't resist it.

It's like something wrong, like a weird Tourette's.

Have you responded to anything today?

Can't get a signal, thankfully.

I need to plug my gig better.

Tories are safe for a few hours.

Yeah, so back to your show.

So I saw some footage of it from quite a long time ago, I think, when you were putting it together the first time, obviously.

And now it's a bigger show.

I didn't know there was any footage.

It's something on YouTube, dude, from 2012.

Do you know what that was?

What, a comedy club?

No, it was some student.

I think it was some student who, I let him film it for his project and I said, don't put it on YouTube.

It's like I put it on YouTube.

It was the very first show I'd ever done.

It's funny, people are laughing, it's all good.

I don't think so.

Oh, they're laughing, they're laughing.

That's a long game.

You played the long game with this one, because you, I mean, I like the way you say ethically Irish, they don't have that box, do they, when you tick white British white?

Oh, no, no, no.

Yeah, they do now, because I was involved in the campaign to do it.

Tick the Irish box.

When was that?

Last sentence, 2012, was it?

Something like that.

So is it white Irish or something like that?

Yeah, you can tick it.

Yeah, you can tick the box.

I mean, I wasn't really that bothered about it, but you know.

Plastic paddy.

Yeah, I never know what that is.

Well, I mean, I never was.

I wasn't, my mum and dad were Dubliners.

They didn't even count as Irish, did they?

But I do do some of that in the show.

Yeah, I guess I'll keep it.

I had the Irish treble songs thing up last night.

I love doing the saints, you know, because it's just weird.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the holy water.

So do you have, has it left any kind of mark with you?

Are you religious in any way now?

No, no, I'm still superstitious.

You're superstitious, but you're not religious.

Yeah, yeah.

So I will believe sometimes if I do take, because like I said, with that infant of Prague, the child of Prague, as they call it in Ireland, there's that belief that if you stick it in your back garden or your backyard and it's raining on the morning of your wedding day, it makes it sunny in the afternoon.

Okay.

Not bad.

Quite a good miracle.

But also, if you sellotape a coin under the base, your house will never be short of money.

Did they have sellotape back in the day?

Well, you know what I mean?

If you stick a coin to the base, then your house will never be short of money.

But I'm going to change it from a one pound coin to a two pound coin because I think it's a bit of urgency.

Up to a tenner.

So, those little things.

Maybe that is.

You get all this sort of trendy stuff about manifesting now and the secret and all that.

But maybe there is some truth to it.

There is some stuff in there.

I do believe that.

I do it all the time.

I literally just have these thoughts.

I think I'm going to make that happen.

I make it happen, like sitting here with you or like my show here.

I'm not a performer.

I used to do music.

I'm not a stand up, but I'm a storyteller.

But a year ago, I was on the night bus and I thought, yeah, I can do that.

I'll do it next year.

Here I am doing it.

Four star show.

Fantastic.

Oh, you got reviewed then.

I got a review.

I'll never get reviewed.

Why won't you get reviewed?

You have to ask them to come.

No, I mean, I wrote a book called Reds in the Hood.

So, it's about United and the years from 69 to 77 were really bad years.

We got relegated and then finally in 1977 won the FA Cup against Liverpool and stopped them being the first English team to do the treble.

So to get the advance of 30 grand, I made it about United.

But because I grew up in Old Trafford, what I really wanted to write about was being Irish descent and working class, so it's got all of that stuff in there.

Have you written a few books?

Well yeah, I mean I need to do more, but it's one of the things I was going to say.

So when I wrote that book, it came out in 1999, just around the time as United were going into the European Cup final and all that.

And it got a full page review in the Daily mirror.

Nice.

And the Daily mirror said, another ball's up then Terry.

And it had a Man United war with my head, kind of, my face superimposed on one of the players and they're all like covering the bollocks, you know, to stop the ball hitting them there.

And then it was 1,500 words, 1,400 words saying what a wanker I was and the next 100 words saying and the book's shit as well.

You're joking.

It's free advertising.

No, well, exactly.

But I mean, it was actually quite a good book, but it was like, you know, so it's only later on you're reading, oh, this is quite good actually.

So you've taken out that part of that story.

But it's because Bill, because it was Piers Morgan and he was the editor of, and he was obsessed with me.

When I was writing for the Evening News, doing the Word page, he used to go in and write it on the word processors, you know, put it, directly input it on a Tuesday afternoon.

And the guy sitting opposite me was a guy called Andy Spinoza, spin media in Manchester, and he's originally from down south, moved up to Manchester to go to Munich, because he liked the Buscocks, you know, from North London when he was 18.

And so we used to do the diary page from the Evening News, you know, like the gossip page.

So I'm sitting opposite of him, you know, right, and he goes, oh, right, well, he says, bloody hell, Terry, he said, I've just had Piers Morgan on the phone to me, and I'd only done three shows of The Word, it was only at six o'clock in the evening.

And he went and said, all right.

He said, yeah, he just asked me if I've got any dirt on you, because he wants to get you.

I go, why would he want to get you?

It was like 500 quid a week.

He's already in your bins.

Exactly.

So after that, he carried on and on, he was that obsessed that when I finally did meet him face to face, which was only about four years ago, he thought he'd met me.

Really?

He thought he'd met me.

So every week he'd write about how seribrily challenged, famously inarticulate, most hated man on TV, a whole lot of projection from him.

I remember him ringing me up saying, I believe you're in hiding, Terry.

They'd make up these stories, you know when he was on The Word, that I'd had a death threat and I was in hiding.

It was all just made up by Neil Redding.

And I go, yeah, Piers, fuck off.

You've rung me on my landline and I'm at home.

Well, he was on my landline and actually, I would be like Pete and those of my other mates around watching United, because I was the first person to have a satellite.

You know what I mean?

Before Rishi Srinath.

But you know, so it was like, yes, yeah, fuck him.

Well, I've worked on MTV and that's part of your, part of your wage to give you a free dish and a free card for the sport and two movie channels you have then.

Hosh.

But yeah, so that was quite funny and he just, he was just weirdly obsessed with me, but quite a nasty little piece of work.

I always described him as someone who sort of exists halfway between a sneerer and an arse lick.

I did a Good Morning Britain with Richard Maidley about the, should MPs have two jobs?

And I go, no.

And what he was trying to do was ask this really elongated question where he implicated some labour MP, who was a doctor.

So what I said, I cut him off, I said, no, no, hang on Richard.

The question is, should MPs have two jobs?

He said, no, no, let me finish my question.

I thought we'd be here all day.

I said, look, I said, all it is, no, they shouldn't have two jobs unless it's for the social good, i.e.

doctor, nurse, or you need to keep up your professional qualifications like you're a solicitor.

That's it.

Anyway, will you let me finish my question as someone who's pointless?

I've just told you the answer.

Move on.

But you did a lot of those shows because you've been on like Jeremy Vine and…

Jeremy Vine was a weird one because suddenly you're getting sat every week.

But ITN took over and they're sort of partly owned by the, I think 20% of them are owned by the Daily Mail.

So it was going very much in that direction.

And then you sat next to someone like Anne Whiddicam.

Yeah, she's on there way too much.

She's just weird.

She's not right in the head.

She's actually not right in the head.

Reform.

In my opinion.

I agree with you on this.

I mean, you go, if she sat next to you on the bus, she'd move.

I'm alone.

God bless her.

I mean, I don't dislike her.

There's something very vulnerable about her, really, Carol.

But it's one of those where you think, I totally admire her 100% commitment to doing no reading or research whatsoever.

It's Daily Express, isn't it?

It's not even real news.

It's just like The Star or something.

Well, it's just like you have an opinion and they like Dave down the pub.

Well, what I reckon is, and that's it.

Were you on there during the Brexit thing then or after Brexit?

Yeah, yeah.

Because obviously you've said something.

Yeah, but they were always trying to shut you up about it.

I mean, the funny thing is there is a bit of controversy about what you said about, you know, old people in Brexit, but-

Oh, no, that was quite funny.

So I know what you're talking about.

So is that thing on Twitter.

And what happened was I brought a tweet out saying, because it was the BMA said, in the case of a hard Brexit, there would be a massive shortage of flu vaccines for that winter, you know, as it was, they put it off, didn't they?

They put it off for a while.

Because remember, there was going to be Brexit day, then that got put off for a year, then it's Brexit day again, and it was put off for a week.

Just waited until the pandemic hit.

So I put, that's fair enough, I said, anyone who voted Brexit, back of the queue for the vaccines.

Besides, they don't need vaccines, you know, because they're created by experts, they just need to believe harder.

And then this guy called Dangerous Moz, that kind of semi-new from Manchester said, oh, blah, blah, blah, well, you know, it said something else.

I said, well, I said, do you know what?

I said, let's hope it's a good virulence strain this year.

Now, how'd they got that wrong?

So that then gets interpreted that you're wishing death on them.

virulence means how quickly it spreads, not how deadly or pathogenic it is.

And I know that having done an HND in applied biology, thank you.

But it was like, you know, they want to exaggerate, so they put words and thoughts in your mouth.

And again, that was Piers Morgan doing that.

Well, you literally wished old age pensioners dead.

And of course you hadn't, you know, so it's like one of them, build a straw man and then attack you.

Well, and I don't want to keep you for too much longer because you've been fantastic, but I will ask you two format questions, is that right?

Yeah, cool, yeah, yeah.

So we'll just go for it.

Right, these are just silly.

What's your favorite jingle?

I haven't got one.

You haven't got a favorite jingle?

Well, favorite TV theme then.

What was the tune to The Word?

Oh, that was 808 State Olympic.

How does that go again?

Well, we were in LA on the beach, on Irving Beach actually outside LA, when they were recording Pills, Shools and Bellyaches.

That was when they were fucking about.

And then we were writing Drugs in the Sand.

And then there was bits that we had to chop out, which would have been great, had we gone out at 11 o'clock.

When Sean Rider went, Oh yeah, it's great, it's a top place for a mess about.

And then told you how much opium was.

You know, it's only a third the price of in the UK.

Well, that's nice.

Thanks for that.

And then, but they were talking about how everyone had all, it was full of like, manks, scousers, cottonies, and even a load of lads from Bournemouth with all the E.

And that went out at six o'clock, but obviously the complaints were starting to come in, but by the time we'd done, we'd only been on air about five or six weeks, and we were getting one and a half million viewers.

And the irony was, I remember Newman and Medeo, people were kind of taking a mickey out of the word, and they did a thing, making out no one was watching it, and we had more viewers than they did.

But it was almost that determination.

I remember they hated us so much, the media.

I remember one guy, I think it was the Observer or Guardian, he wrote, the problem with this show is only the public like it.

That's the whole point.

But the thing is, it was hard to explain to people like, he was a hush puppy bloke, he was like the big arts critic in The Guardian, with the glasses, quite owlish and tall.

And I remember having to explain to him, I said, it's aimed at 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds, it's not aimed at people like you.

It's not for you, man, it's like peak 90s, totally peak 90s.

Yeah, well it was kind of, it was like, it was just one of those shows.

And actually, the weird thing is, a lot of the people who do remember it so affectionately, it was important to them, but when you ask them how old they were, they were all like 12, 13, 14, but it really meant something to them, do you know what I mean?

How did that shift happen?

What was the decision to change the time slot?

Well, because they just thought this will work better at 11 o'clock, and our very first show at 11 o'clock at night, what a line up.

So our live guests in the studio, Whitney Houston, Boy George, and they've kind of fallen out, you know, in the press, no, it's funny.

Every time we had him on, he was on with someone who had fallen out with Boy George, so we had him on with Shade O'Connor as well.

I mean, obviously, they both admire each other, it's all right once you've met.

They've all had a little snipe in the press, because he just loved doing that.

He was like you online, he's still quite active.

Well, and then we had Flavour Flav on as well, so that was quite good.

Whitney Houston was fantastic on the show, really good.

I don't remember that one, I left it rewatched.

Yeah, yes, that was episode 12, first one at 11 o'clock at night.

So I'll ask you one question.

Who was your favourite guest to interview on The Word?

On the actual show itself, live, there was quite a few.

I really liked Dave Chappelle when we had him on, because he was just so laid back, even though he was only about 19 or 20.

He wasn't phased.

It was almost like he was on Mogadon.

And he was so kind of cool.

And then on the show itself, I mean, it was great.

The very first person I ever interviewed was a few months before we went on air, May 1990.

And I think we first went on air on August 17th, I think, 1990.

It was it was Robin Williams in San Francisco.

That's a great first interview.

So he was fantastic, performed for me and everything.

And then I did James Brown August of 1990, about two weeks before the show went out.

And that was shown on episode two, which is a great show in terms of line up.

I mean, not me, I mean, obviously, because I was so nervous.

I've never done TV in that way before.

How I would interview in real life on the radio, you know, I do proper interviews because you've got time.

But on the Word, because you've only got five minutes, it was all too hurried.

It didn't suit my style in some ways.

You had to just try and get a sound bite.

You were always trying to get sound bites.

I could go in the papers.

So it wasn't ideal really.

It was a bit clumsy, but I did James Brown in Aitken, South Carolina, when he was in prison and he got out for it.

So that was amazing.

I had James Brown to myself on a piano singing to me and playing for me for the best part of half an hour while he was setting up all the lighting because it was all shot on film for his production company.

And because he hadn't been near a piano for like a month because he was in prison.

So he used to be allowed out on day release to work with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, but we bribed his warders.

We had to bribe his warders $1500 to let him disappear off for a few hours to do this interview in a doctor's house with a piano.

So he was there doing like a bit like, you know, in Sammy Davis Jr.

School and now this is Dean Martin and he was going.

So I was chatting to him about all my favorite soul vocalists like Little Willie, John, Clyde McFatter out of the original Drifters.

What's his name?

Jackie Wilson.

And he was doing them all.

He was like doing them, taking them off and singing their songs.

Must have been wild for you.

Yeah, just weird, just a proper pinch me moment.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, because obviously you're nervous about it and then you're briefed before you meet him.

You've got to wear a shirt with buttons.

It's a bit like getting into a nightclub in the 80s, you know, shirt with buttons, no jeans.

Just one shoes.

Yeah, no trainers, no shoes, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Then you've got to call him Mr.

Brown.

Well, yeah, fine.

Amazing, just amazing.

You know, that I've got it and I've got the proof there.

The only time I was ever sent off on my own was to Canada to do an on-set junket for Car 54 Where Are You with David Johansen out of New York Dolls.

And then a comedy film that never really came out over here called Married to It with Sybil Shepherd, Bo Bridges, Mary Stuart Masterson and Chris O'Donnell.

So it was about a younger couple, an older couple getting divorced and then moving out and all the rest of it.

And what was great was obviously I was given a big float, like $2,000 Canadian dollars.

And I thought I'm going to have this.

And I had to do, and I didn't like the way they'd been edited.

And I didn't like the way they'd been edited my interviews.

So you used to do reversals.

So I only did reversals for the questions I liked the answers to.

So I edited it myself.

And then because I wanted to spend this money and junk it, she could be hanging around all day.

I told the woman in charge of the junk it that my mum was ill and I had to get an earlier flight back to Manchester.

So they gave me one after another.

So we knocked them all off inside of 45 minutes instead of hanging around all day.

So we could go and tuck in that Canadian dollar float that I had in my pocket in case of emergency.

But the worst one was, I remember going to like Civil Shepard and she went, I'm so sorry to hear about your mum.

I hope she's okay.

And I did that kind of thing.

You know, where I was like, as if I was holding back a tear and going, listen, thanks for that.

But you know, a bit of an athlete guilt there.

Me and mum lived another 20 years, well 20 odd years.

I can't take the blame too much.

And we won't ask what you did with the money.

Spent a lot of it there, but then the rest of it was I took my ex-missus, I think we went to Tenerife or somewhere at Christmas and changed it into Pesetas.

That's nice.

When they asked me for it at the end of the, because I didn't think they'd ask me for it.

Well, because Amanda had been getting away with, Amanda the cabinet had been getting away with this for murders.

At the end of the series, she said, Terry, we gave you 1800 Canadian dollars and you never accounted for them.

I said, oh, buy a car, I had to put a deposit on it, never got it back.

The hotel rooms hadn't been paid for, the ad for me and the New York-based researcher said that.

So that was this.

I said, yeah, but there's still $500 outstanding.

And I went, street beggars, street beggars.

Street beggars.

Well, thank you so much for coming on Television Times.

It's been a blast.

I'm sorry.

It was difficult for you to find the place.

Started with a little bit of tension, a little bit of tension running up the hills.

Thank you, Terry.

So what's your show?

I'll tell you that in a minute.

Just say goodbye.

Oh yeah.

Hey listen, thanks a lot.

You're welcome.

That was me, talking to the brilliant Terry Christian.

What a guy.

What a peak 90s person for me to be chatting to.

So much fun, and he was very generous with his time.

And you know, he took a copy of my book, and we've been chatting a little bit via text about that, because we share this kind of British, Irish thing.

So that's kind of wild, right?

And you know, if you want to see someone really going at it on Twitter, follow him on there, because it's hilarious.

Now, to today's outro track.

Right, let's continue with the Irish theme, I guess.

The reason I'm putting this track out is because me and Terry share that particular gene.

This is a song called 60 Minutes, which I recorded in 2009.

So it should probably be called 75 Minutes now.

How should I say?

It's a song about my male alleged parental unit.

That's as far as I'll go with that name.

And yeah, it's a kind of sad one, I guess.

So yeah, I mean, people like it.

So let's whack it on here.

This is 60 Minutes.

This is from the album We Argue in Silence.

I hope you like it.

Wow, sons and their fathers, eh?

It's a whole subject we don't have to get into right now.

Well, I hope you liked my chat with Terry.

Please come back soon for another episode of Television Times, but for now, thanks for listening, and see you next time.