Lifestyles of the Rich and Richer

It was certainly very blue, but the thing that struck me first was how small it was.

Andrew Lloyd Webber had invited us down to his Berkshire pile to view his new acquisition. It was 1995 and he’d just spent £18million on it. I couldn’t imagine any one item costing that sort of money, let alone being invited to see it close-up.

It was a painting called The Absinthe Drinker, or, to give it its proper title, Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto. Picasso painted it in 1903, during his Blue Period. Hence the colour. But I did think that for £18million he might have got something a little bigger.

We arrived in my second-hand Merc – I’d put it through the car wash on the way, as I didn’t want it to be shown up outside the house. Sydmonton Court is not the prettiest of country houses, but the setting is idyllic: it lies at the bottom of Watership Down where the famous rabbits have a grandstand view of the property, with its own church in the garden. Some years later, after he ceased to be just Mister, Andrew bought the entire Down and controversially relocated the public footpath that ran along the edge. Presumably he didn’t want ordinary people watching him eat breakfast.

He welcomed us with champagne and ushered us towards the stairs. I’d enjoyed watching Andrew’s art collection grow over the years. He’d always been intoxicated by Pre-Raphaelites and had been collecting them since he was 15 years old; I remember him proudly showing off his first £1million acquisition – a massive Burne-Jones which took up an entire wall of his huge dining hall. Now the house was full of these large, brightly coloured, poetic indulgences – he’d built up the most important collection in the world and had pretty much cornered the market. But a Picasso? This was something else.

We walked behind the staircase and there it was, tucked away on a little wall in a corner. It was a man holding a pipe with a glass in front of him, staring at us with dark blue eyes and curled up lips, almost sneering. Or maybe he’d taken in too much absinthe. Either way, the drinker, and we, were mesmerized. It was most certainly a masterpiece.

I first knew Andrew when he had a fraction of his present fortune. Even then he was in a different league. He and Sarah Brightman invited the family, including our two very young children, to stay with them in the south of France. We were put up in a beautiful guest annex overlooking the pool; by contrast our spare room at home had packing cases in the corner.

One hot afternoon Andrew and I were lying in the pool with another guest, the Tory minister John Selwyn Gummer, who was stretched out on an inflatable alligator. After several glasses of rose wine, the subject turned to our libel laws, and how much money you’d need to sue a newspaper for to have cash in the bank for the rest of your life. Andrew carefully worked out the cost of running Sydmonton and his flat in Chelsea and the house whose pool we were lying in and announced that £10million would just about do it. We then worked out what we’d have to do to get ourselves libeled.

This week, Christies announced it was selling the Picasso to raise funds for Andrew’s charitable foundation. With a pre-sale estimate of £30-40 million, it could well fetch the highest price for any painting ever sold at auction in Europe. The profit alone will outstrip the £10 million he said he needed to enjoy the rest of his life. And it’s all going to charity. Now that’s true wealth for you.

Selina Scott to the Rescue

Seeing the ruins of Lord Steven’s garden fence beneath my dented car on Monday night, I was reminded me of another fence I mangled some 25 years ago.

In 1984 I had a little red sports car, a Mazda RX7, which I used to drive at absurd speeds whenever I had the opportunity. At that time I was still working for the BBC, producing a BBC1 dance series called The Hot Shoe Show, with Wayne Sleep and Bonnie Langford. That series had brought me into contact with Andrew Lloyd Webber for the first time, and I’d just directed a video of his musical Song and Dance. The Hot Shoe Show was in its second season, and had an incredibly complex and exhausting schedule, but I still said yes when Andrew asked me if I’d moonlight to direct a video of Unexpected Song with his new wife Sarah Brightman. So it was that after a long day in the office in Shepherds Bush, I’d hit the M4 and drive over to Sydmonton, his Victorian pile on the edge of Watership Down in Berkshire to plan the shoot.

As I’ve never been one to knowingly arrive early for anything, I used to force my Mazda to ridiculous speeds in order to make up time once the road had emptied itself of rush hour traffic. Just after Reading there’s a stretch of motorway which runs without an exit for about 13 miles. It must be one of the most boring stretches of motorway in the country.

One evening I was cruising in the fast lane at well over a hundred miles an hour, and I was about ten minutes from the Newbury turning to Andrew’s house. I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open and had to turn the air vent onto my face to stop myself nodding off.

Then I felt a bump, and blinked hard. A pair of Wellington boots was flying in slow motion past my windscreen, followed by a kettle, some large lady’s underwear, and then, held weightless in suspension as if in a space capsule, a cloud of small household items. It turned out to be the contents of a small white caravan which I’d apparently shunted up the rear, and which had managed to absorb some of the impact of my car. Over what seemed like about thirty seconds (but in truth must have been a fraction of this time, for the adrenalin in a road accident causes everything apparently slow to a snails pace) I pushed caravan and its unfortunate owner off the road. The driver of the other car and his wife, quietly motoring to a week’s holiday in Devon, must have had no warning. One moment they were gently pootling in the middle lane, as caravan owners tend to, oblivious to everything else but the Archers on the radio, the next they were being pushed out of control towards the hard shoulder.

I’ve driven this stretch of road many times since, and I’m amazed at the narrow escape we all had. At the point where the accident happened there’s a steep ravine to the left of the road. Immediately afterwards there’s an equally steep embankment about a hundred feet high. In between the two runs a small ramp of grass and trees, like a sliproad no more than ten feet wide. One second earlier and we’d have been over the ravine, with a fall of into the river below; a second later and we’d have hit the hill and overturned. As luck would have it, with just a couple of feet on either side, my car pushed us all up this narrow ramp. Slowed down by some newly planted trees, we came to rest at the edge of a field. I can still picture the broken fence post in front of me, and the steam pouring from my bonnet.

I got out of the car, and went to check the others. Luckily noone was hurt, but the caravan had disintegrated and both cars were written off.

“What happened?”, said the confused driver, a man in his 50s who worked for the gas board. Avoiding the temptation to apologise and say I must have fallen asleep and driven into his mobile sitting room, I merely repeated, “What happened?”

Together we made our way down to the motorway. Traffic had come to a halt as people stopped to gape at the carnage. Except there was no carnage, just two cars and a few bits of tangled metal in a field.

“What happened?” The words spread round the onlookers. Someone found a bit of white caravan by the roadside with a blue scratch on the side. Then someone else said he had seen a blue van drive off after the accident. And then the police arrived.

They were terribly polite. They took our details, examined the debris and called for a tow truck to extricate our cars from the field. By now the “witnesses” had embellished the story. Apparently a blue van, going much too fast, had struck the caravan and knocked it into the side of my car, pushing both vehicles off the road. The policemen nodded, and wrote things into their notebooks. They radioed the details of the blue van. I kept quiet.

“And what do you do, sir?” one of them asked.

“I work in television”.

His notebook closed. He lowered his voice and said into my ear, “Do you by any chance know Selina Scott?” Selina was in those days the host of BBC Breakfast News and by far the most desirable female celebrity in Britain: to police officers, anyway.

“Actually, I do – we worked in the same department for a while”.

“Do you think you could get her autograph?”

“I’m sure there’s no problem, officer.”

We were standing beside a smashed motorway marker sign. Coincidentally, it appeared to be exactly the same colour as the blue scratch down the side of the bits of caravan. The same blue as the missing van. The policeman studied it carefully, and wrote something down in his book.

Just then the tow truck dragged my car out of the field. It came to rest beside us. There, embossed on my rubber front bumper, was the imprint of the number plate of the caravan. Clearly my car had struck it precisely in the rear.

The policeman frowned and turned to me again. “Of course, sir, if you hadn’t been hit by that blue van; if, dare I say it, you had fallen asleep at the wheel, and you’d driven into the back of that poor couple’s caravan, now that would be quite serious. It would in fact be called dangerous driving.”

I nodded sadly, as more bits of broken blue sign were extracted from the remains of the caravan.

“Could I have a private word, Sir?”

The policeman led me up the side of the motorway.

“The thing about dangerous driving is, that it’s incredibly difficult to prove. Usually, it’s just not worth our time. Now, are you absolutely sure that you can get Selina Scott’s autograph?”

Two months later I got a letter from Thames Valley police. It apologised for the fact that they had been unable to trace the third party in my unfortunate accident on the M4: despite exhaustive enquiries they were unable to find the blue van.

That was my first and last road accident. Until last Monday, that is. Tomorrow I take the Volvo into the “Mill Car Clinic” for an estimate. It’s been an expensive week.

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Boom Bang a Bang

Poor Diane Warren must be wondering what she’s let herself in for. One of the world’s most successful songwriters (she wrote Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time, and Toni Braxton’s Unbreak My Heart), she now has the tough task of lowering her game to pen the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Eurovision song. Ms Warren is an odd choice: apart from being American (couldn’t they find a British songwriter good enough for a show called Your Country Needs You?) she’s been dubbed Queen of the Ballad. Although she claims never to have been in love she has prompted more lovers to weep into their cappuccinos than any other songwriter. I doubt a ballad will set the right tone in Moscow; most successful Eurovision entries tend to be bland, poppy numbers that get the Balkans swaying over their slivovitz. The day after our disastrous Eurofiasco last year, when Britain came last, I wrote that even if the great Lloyd Webber were persuaded to donate a song, we still wouldn’t triumph. In a few months we’ll find out if I was right.

I’m intrigued to know if Andrew had a song in reserve when he agreed to do this, rather than, as the television programme is suggesting, genuinely composing the thing during the series. I suspect the former, as Andrew has sporadic moments of sheer genius and never throws away a good tune. I do hope this is the case, for I doubt he’ll be able to draw much inspiration from the unexciting group of wannabes who are still left in the BBC contest. He even said of the sub-cruise-ship act he “saved” this week, Emperors of Soul, that “they would absolutely entertain us in any cabaret club”, a plaudit more damning than anything Simon Cowell could dream up.

I’m privileged to have watched the master at work at his creative best. Having been asked to direct a television version of his musical Song and Dance I fully expected to be working with the original star Marti Webb. Instead, Andrew’s manager took me aside and said “Andrew wants you to audition another girl: it’s entirely up to you, but…”. That girl was Sarah Brightman, with whom Andrew had just fallen passionately in love.

I remember sitting in Andrew’s office with the choreographer Anthony van Laast and Don Black, the show’s lyricist, having to decide whether to cast Marti or the composer’s lover in a project that Andrew was personally funding. Tough call. Actually, for Don it really was a difficult moment, as he was Marti Webb’s manager, but at the end of the day, Lloyd Webber was the one paying the piper – and it was his tune we were already playing. Besides, Sarah was rather good.

It was almost an honour to spend some very enlightening months with the loved-up Lloyd Webbers making our film. It was during Andrew’s most creative period: Cats was wowing the world, Starlight Express was in rehearsals, and gestation was already well under way for Phantom of the Opera, written for his new love’s incredible vocal range. British musical theatre had never been so rich, and neither had Andrew Lloyd Webber. Occasionally I would be invited to stay over at Sydmonton, his Victorian pile overlooking Watership Down. I remember sitting in the kitchen having breakfast, when Andrew came down in his manorial dressing gown, beaming. “Come quickly”, he said, calling me into the music room, and tried out a new tune over the cornflakes. One morning he produced “Unexpected Song” which he’d dug out of the bottom drawer and re-worked as a vehicle for Sarah’s high notes. We stuck it in Song and Dance and it brought the house down.

On a good day Andrew’s catchy melodies play the emotions like no other. I just hope those Eurovoters appreciate all the efforts he’s putting in for them.

Puppets on a String

[Britain came last in last night's Eurovision Song Contest]

We used to be good at the Eurovision Song Contest. We rank second in the winners’ league. Only Ireland (7 victories) has won it more often. So last night’s result, with the UK at the bottom of the pack, ought to be a national calamity, akin to our failure to reach the finals of Euro 2008. Except this time we don’t really care.

Mind you, our entry was exceptionally dire. I don’t know which was worse, the singer or the song. We deserved nul points, so scraping fourteen was a bit of an achievement. But even if we’d resurrected Cliff Richard and persuaded Andrew Lloyd Webber to get a spare ditty out of his bottom drawer, I doubt we would have fared much better. We haven’t won Eurovision since the first day of Tony Blair’s government. That was on May 3rd 1997, when Katrina and the Waves gave us Love Shine A Light. It’s been downhill ever since. Not that we can entirely blame New Labour. It’s the fragmentation of the former communist bloc that did it. Isn’t it symbolic that Germany, Britain and Poland came joint last? How the power base of Europe has changed since 1939.

I don’t this think was just political. It was cultural voting. Those former communist states that voted together genuinely like those terrible jaunty songs. There are now two voting blocs controlling Eurovision: the Balkans and the Vikings. We only have a tiny blocette with Ireland. If their puppet turkey had got through to the final, he would certainly have had douze points from us. It was a protest song, and we would have got the joke. The Balkans take Eurovision seriously, whilst we have Terry Wogan. There’s the difference.

The song contest began as a symbol of European unity. Now that Europe is finally together, it’s showing us the cracks. Music, that great reflector of national spirit, is laying bare Europe’s cultural differences. We and Ireland, for all our Euro talk, are still islands off the far Western shore. Our popular music may sell around the world, our record industries matched in scale and diversity only by America, but at the end of the day, we don’t like the oompah band one little bit. And those Balkans adore it.

Watching the ghastly interval wedding-funeral songs from the Belgrade house band, we could have been sitting in some strange taverna, wondering why we’d booked the holiday, and counting the hours till we get back to nice British Easyjet. It takes something like the Eurovision Song Contest to remind us of why we like home so much.

Of course, if I’m wrong, and all this is just political, then we should be really worried. Despite the fact that Eurovision is just a lot of tosh, it should wake us up to an uncomfortable truth: Europe really doesn’t like us at all.

Terry Wogan says he may not do it again next year, because “it’s no longer a music contest”. Now that would be a national tragedy. Terry’s ironic comments have always been the only reason to watch this terrible, dull three-hour Eurocharade. It’s a waste of a good Saturday night, of a lot of licence fees, and of thousands of pounds worth of telephone votes. But we can’t pull out now that we’ve finished bottom: that would just be sour grapes.

It would also be the end of the contest. Britain, with Germany, France and Spain, pays 40% of the costs of this nonsense. Without us, the Serbians couldn’t have afforded the lighting bill. Ironically, we’ve let all these other countries into the contest in order to keep it alive. Now we feel like gatecrashers at our own party.

Anyway, I’ve got the solution. Let’s divide Britain up into counties, and give each one an entry. Then at least we’ll have 86 sets of douze points to throw around. That’ll show those Balkans.

Lunch with The Tap Dancing Millionaire

It’s just a month since my New Year’s resolution, and things aren’t going at all well. Keith Hann, my adversary in the battle of the diets, has gloatingly emailed me that he’s down to 14 stone 9 pounds. This puts me five pounds behind, and that’s not counting a wonderful dinner at Seaham Hall on Saturday night. As it was my suggestion that we undertake this ludicrous challenge, it’s particularly galling, particularly as Hann’s email arrived in the middle of a rather hearty lunch with my old friend Richard Stilgoe.

Stilgoe, he of the witty songs, has done incredibly well since I was his producer on Nationwide. He and I collaborated on all those musical sketches, like the barber shop quartet, where he played all four characters simultaneously and one Stilgoe shaved another’s beard off. We also made a little DIY series called Oddjob, with helpful hints for the hopelessly inept. I still have a couple of copies of the book of the series with my name on the cover, which Joanna thinks is a huge joke because she knows just how unhandy I really am, whereas Richard built his own house. Later we made a couple of comedy series together, including A Kick Up The Eighties, the programme that discovered Tracey Ullman and Rik Mayall.

Despite having a name that is an anagram of Giscard O’Hitler, Richard is one of the world’s really nice chaps, and he finally struck gold when Andrew Lloyd Webber hired him to write lyrics for Cats. He went on to pen the whole of Starlight Express, and nearly half of Phantom of the Opera. Yet, despite the massive royalty cheques which flow in to this day, and which could have seen him with more Ferraris and bling than the whole of Darras Hall, he has chosen to keep his feet on the ground and gives most of his wealth to various worthy charities. Well, I say his feet are on the ground: they haven’t been since January 1st, and this is where I got really depressed.

Apparently Richard’s new year’s resolution was to take up tap dancing. In contrast to my own utter lack of resolve, Richard has really gone for it, and now he’s paddling and rolling and shim-sham-shimmying like a true pro.

The thought of Richard, who’s 65 this year, queuing up for tap classes with all the lissom young dancers at the Pineapple Dance Studios really makes me smile. I can’t imagine him in a leotard (I’ve only ever seen him in a sports jacket and tie). He told me that even though he’s three times the age of most people there he’s very comfortable in his tap shoes, and only slightly disconcerted by the overtures of some of the men.

I’ve been to Pineapple Dance Studios many times, holding auditions for the various dance shows I produced in the 80’s, like The Hot Shoe Show with Wayne Sleep and Bonnie Langford. Surrounded by the slender and bendy, at first I used to hold my tummy in: then I decided looking like Orson Welles made me more glamorous, so I let it all hang out. Dance auditions are the cruelest sport. The bright young things arrive full of hope, having spent an hour or more travelling in from the suburbs. As a producer, it takes you on average 12 seconds to make a decision. “Thank you so much, next please”. Twenty at a time.

Meanwhile, I’ve managed to uncover Hann’s secret diet. Forget the fitness regime and slimming aids, he’s using the new “No-D” diet. He’s given up dinner. No wonder he’s winning the contest, the poor chap must be starving. No chance I’m going to follow his lead, living with Joanna, who is an excellent cook. Besides, I’m dutifully doing what The Journal commands, and Eating Local. In fact, I’m eating for the whole of Tynedale. So if I lose the diet challenge on Easter Day, I can now blame the Journal's Editor. Anyway, I’m fighting back. Inspired by Stilgoe’s hoofing, I’ve hit the Matfen Hall gym big time. No photos please, and I’m certainly not releasing a slimming video.

How to Start a Business

According to a recent report, the North East of England needs another 30,000 businesses.

That's an awful lot of business cards, I should start up a graphic design company. Apparently we need to "develop a more entrepreneurial culture".

The name "entrepreneur" sounds like a member of some exclusive sect. I became one because I had a phone call from Andrew Lloyd Webber. He asked me to direct a television version of his musical Song & Dance, and he wanted me to cast his then girlfriend, and subsequent wife, Sarah Brightman.

At that time I was at the BBC earning £2,000 a month. I was thinking about going freelance, but never had the courage. Obviously I jumped at the chance of working with the great man, but I had no idea what to charge him for the month's work it was going to take. So I rang an agent, the late Richard Armitage, whose father Noel Gay wrote The Lambeth Walk and Run Rabbit Run. He was the wisest man and most loyal friend.

"What would make you happy?" he said.

As anything more than two grand would have been a bonus, I said "Do you think he would stretch to three?"

An hour later Richard rang back. "I said you'd accept £45,000".

After I regained consciousness he said, "Let that be a lesson to you. Andrew only employs the best, and I told him you are the best director in the world. So that seemed about right to both of us."

Of course, it was nonsense. I was way down the directors' pecking order, but it's undoubtedly the most important lesson I ever learned, and which I recently passed onto my son who has become a director himself.

So I had £45,000 burning a hole in my bank account, and at that time Richard was reviving his father's hit West End show, Me and My Girl. He was looking for backers, so I offered to invest my entire earnings in the show. Richard refused the money with two other pieces of great advice: "Never invest in a friend's business, and never put all your money into something you can't control". Shame, really, because the show ran and ran. Instead I quit the BBC and put the cash into setting up a TV production company. Within two years it was the largest in the UK.

During the next fifteen years, there were incredible highs and utterly miserable lows. The most important quality an entrepreneur can have is the ability to cope with failure. Television production is like Norfolk: turkeys come with the territory.

Mark Thompson, now director general of the BBC, once said that his most disastrous commission was Happy Families, a terrible Saturday night spectacle that involved Grannies being hoisted into the air in giant cages. One of my many turkeys, which viewers voted off with their remotes. Occasionally out of the gloom would emerge a couple of shows which would become part of popular culture and make it all worthwhile, like Challenge Anneka and Robot Wars.

Now I've launched another production company in Newcastle, which has cost me ten times as much as the last one. Reducing the North East business start-up requirement to 29,999.

Talk about risk money: I know I can lose the lot, but that's what entrepreneurs do. The venture capitalists (who actually take almost no risks at all) call it "skin in the game". It's the adrenalin of potential failure which keeps you awake at night and drives you to success. It requires courage and a good sense of humour. And I know those are qualities that people in the North East of England have in abundance.

Which makes it all the more galling that just as One North East is calling for more entrepreneurial risk, our government is trying to stifle it by increasing Capital Gains Tax by 80%.

Baked Potatoes and Peterborough

I'm somewhere near Doncaster, on my weekly train to London, finishing my scrambled eggs. Breakfasts on the train haven't been the same since they took Robson's Craster kippers off the menu.

Soon I'll be looking sympathetically on the poor people boarding at Peterborough and wondering what on earth made them live in such a dull flatland of a region. Because the geography of a region is directly reflected in the creativity and sense of humour of its inhabitants, I'll be basking in the superior glow of someone who knows just how lucky he is to be returning to Northumberland tonight.

Last week's London trip brought a meeting with Peaches Geldof to talk about a new TV programme idea, then an afternoon at ITV, trying to persuade them to buy a new gameshow. It took us six weeks to plan the pitch, and precisely half an hour for them to turn it down. So Jo and I took solace in the ultimate home of comfort food, The Ivy.

I have a friend who flies up from his home in Provence twice a year just to join me at The Ivy for their French roast chicken. I was there during the famous Ivy lock-in, when the police refused to let us leave because the IRA had planted a bomb in the next street. The owners opened champagne and all the celebrities danced on the tables singing hits from the shows. I've only once had an unhappy evening there, which was with my ex-wife on our first and last wedding anniversary. Julie Andrews, sitting at the next table, complained to the manager because we were rowing so loudly.

Last week's experience was much more pleasant, though the only star sighting was Andrew Lloyd Webber holding court with his Connie/Maria girl.

Later, I thought I caught sight of the back of Monty Don's head. A year ago I wouldn't have blinked, because to me gardening was as dull as a London football derby. When I was young, my parents had an allotment. There, in sub-zero temperatures, they would prise frozen sprouts from their stalks on Christmas Eve. Why they couldn't go to Walter Willson's like everyone else was beyond me. But now, having relocated from Southern California (which grows only dry, fire-ready scrubland) and Hampstead (where an allotment is called a patio), I have my very own vegetable garden and I've discovered the meaning of fresh. We now have enough potatoes to last us through till Christmas Day.

But only just. Jo, who as a Californian is enduring her first Northumbrian autumn, offered to help me with the harvest.

"Just brush off some of this soil before we bag them", I said, doing my Monty Don impression. Twenty minutes later, I walked into the kitchen to find the sink completely full of drowning King Edwards.

To say that there was a strain in Anglo-American relations would be an understatement. I know little enough about gardening, but on Gardeners World I had distinctly heard Monty say "lift and dry potatoes and store in paper sacks in a cool, dry, dark place".

"They're supposed to be dry", I hollered, and stormed out to the spinach to cool off.

Half an hour passed, and I went back inside. There on the kitchen table was a huge mound of potatoes and Jo meticulously drying each one -- with her hair dryer.