Roasting in Hell’s Kitchen
Temper Tantrums, F Words, and the Pursuit of Perfection

To Mum, from cottage pie to Humble Pie – you deserve a medal.

CONTENTS

foreword 1 Dad 2 Football 3 Getting Started 4 French Leave 5 Oceans Apart 6 A Room of My Own 7 War 8 The Great Walk-Out 9 The Sweet Smell of Success 10 Ronnie 11 Down Among the Women 12 Welcome to the Small Screen afterword index

7 11 39 59 87 113 127 143 157 171 203 237 251 273 279

PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT PICTURE CREDITS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CREDITS COVER COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

FOREWORD

I n my hand, I’ve got a piece of paper. It’s Mum’s handwriting, and it’s a list – a very long list – of all the places we lived until I left home. I look at this list now, and there are just so many of them. My eye moves down the page, trying to take in her spidery scribble, and I soon lose track. These places mean very little to me: it’s funny how few of them I can remember. In some cases, I guess that’s because we were hardly there for more than five minutes. But in others, it’s probably more a case of trying to forget about them as soon as possible. When you’re unhappy in a place, you want to forget about it as soon as possible. You don’t dwell on the details of a house if you associate it with being afraid, or ashamed, or poor – and as a boy, I was often afraid and ashamed, and always poor. Life was a series of escapades, of moves that always ended badly. The next place was always going to be a better place – a bit of garden, a shiny new front door – the

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FOREWORD

place where everything would finally come right. But it never did, of course. Our family life was built on a series of pipe dreams – the dreams of my father. And he was a man whose dreams always turned to dust. I don’t think people grasp the whole me when they see me on television or in the pages of some glossy magazine. I’ve got