I called home and spoke to my wife Shelley and told her all about the job I’d just been offered. She quite rightly pointed out that we had always talked about me doing regular radio a bit later in life, the dream gig being a weekly show of some kind on Radio 2. But in the light of the new offer we didn’t take long to decide. The regularity of work and a steady income would be a refreshing change after the seasonal vagaries of life as a stand-up and TV performer. The fact that I would no longer be able to tour or do gigs was actually a bit of a bonus family-wise. I also told her about my idea to just do the show for two years, which also met with a resounding thumbs up. After agreeing with her that it would be nice to have some stability for a couple of years, I then somewhat foolishly added that I’d now have a perfect excuse to buy limitless CDs! On hearing this Mrs Jupitus started swearing profusely, and I pretended we were going into a tunnel and hung up.
Workers’ Playlist
‘Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend’ – John Cale
‘Theme from The Godfather/Al Capone’ – Jazz Jamaica
‘Get a Job’ – The Chordettes
‘Start’ – The Jam
‘Good Morning’ – The Beatles
‘Hitsville UK’ – The Clash
‘Rez’ – Underworld
‘Train Song’ – Holly Cole
‘What Do I Do Now?’ – Elvis Costello
‘A13, Trunk Road to the Sea’ – Billy Bragg
Chapter 2 The Boy in the Corner
As long as I can remember I have loved radio. A love which has become all the more bittersweet since I got the opportunity in the second half of my life to actually work in the medium. The actual time when the idea of radio was hard-wired into my consciousness was the 1960s. Commentators are wont to wax lyrical about this brisk little decade, perhaps best summed up in an episode of The Simpsons where Homer’s view on it was a concise and brilliant ‘Mmm…turbulent…’ Memories of it are sketchy as I was born in June 1962. I was a sixties ‘love child’ born to my mother Dorothy at Newport on the Isle of Wight. Having fallen pregnant with me, Mum was keen to avoid any trouble with her father, so with her savings and my grandmother’s knowledge, she relocated to a caravan park on the Isle of Wight to await my birth.
My original birth certificate from Newport Hospital has an anonymous handwritten dash in the box marked ‘father’ which has bothered me over my life a good deal more than any piece of punctuation ever bothered Lynne Truss. Before long, Dot and I were moving on to Aldgate, Barking, Ryde on the island again, back to Barking, Horndon on the Hill, back to Barking yet again before eventually settling in the quiet dormitory town of Stanford Le Hope in 1970, pausing only for her to reconnect with her college boyfriend Bob Jupitus who, much to my joy, manfully took on the job of being my stepfather in 1968, after which, as far as we were all concerned, he became Dad. Apart from our brief sojourn back on the Isle of Wight, it did seem that for some reason Mum always liked to stay close to the A13. I’m not sure why she felt the need to do this, unless her freewheeling gypsy spirit dictated that she should never live more than a mile from a main arterial road. On reflection that’s one of the many ways that Mum differed from George W. Bush, in that she has always maintained a well-thought-out exit strategy.
The first home that I clearly remember was the Brewery Tap, a huge pub located on Ripple Road in Barking, Essex. For the development of interpersonal family relationships, living in a busy working pub is something of a double-edged sword. The environment is absurdly hectic. Every day, dozens of staff would come and go, huge brewery lorries would arrive, groaning with crates and barrels of fizzy Ind Coope keg beer, then between noon and midnight hundreds of strangers would come into what I considered my home to drink, bicker, laugh, chat, cry, flirt, dance, vomit and fight with each other, mercifully not in their own homes. Despite the fact that I considered such behaviour not a little rude, it took place without interruption and regular as clockwork seven nights a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
The king and queen of this boozy monarchy were my maternal grandparents Sid and Edie Swann. Sid was a tall, broad, prepossessing man with bad feet and a spectacular line in malapropisms (he once memorably described Mum’s Mini Metro as a ‘hunchback’). The family feared him, the punters adored him, and the brewery revered him. He was a publican with the golden touch, able to turn dodgy pubs round over the space of a few months. Wherever he found himself, he always managed to remain onside with the local constabulary and villains alike. He was never so crass as to try and play them off against each other, he was simply savvy enough to make sure the two groups were never in on the same night. The peace was maintained, and by keeping a foot in both camps he had two places to turn if there was ever any trouble.
Regardless of who he was talking to at the bar, he had the knack of making them feel like they were his sole confidant. He would mutter things whilst pulling pints and they would gently smile and nod, thinking that only they had been vouchsafed the most precious of landlordly secrets. Then he would take their money, share a conspiratorial wink with them, and the hapless drinker would wander off, laden with light ales but now feeling part of Sid’s select inner circle. As soon as they were out of earshot, he’d tell the next bloke exactly the same stuff in the same way and another acolyte would be born. He was hardly Machiavelli, but he knew the kind of simple things that made people feel good.
My grandmother Edie was a very different kettle of fish, a chain-smoking, chain-knitting, passive-aggressive Essex matriarch, controlling the comings and goings of the family with almost military precision. One of her shrewdest moves was to only tell Sid what he absolutely needed to know about what was going on with the family outside of the pub. A great example of this spectacular ability to control the flow of family information was the first time he heard about my mother’s pregnancy. Mum had returned to Barking carrying a new addition to the Swann clan. She marched into the lounge without a word, then I was matter of factly thrust into my grandfather’s arms by Mum with the words, ‘This is your new grandson.’ Then she went downstairs for a drink. Nothing dissipates a sense of anger quite as quickly as a two-week-old baby.
Generally Nan had a quick temper, but when she was out from under Granddad’s shadow she became more breezy and outgoing. To the general public during opening hours they were a sparkling double act like George Burns and Gracie Allen, each working their own areas of the bar with a slick grace and minimum of effort. Jokes and lively banter would fill the air. But once the doors were bolted shut, the bar had been wiped clean and they trudged upstairs, the knowing smiles and conspiratorial winks were turned off and the day-to-day business of making other people’s lives pleasurable was somewhat perversely put on hold for the members of their own family.
One of the afternoon golden rules for us at the Brewery Tap was never to wake Sid up when he was having his nap. It made for an unusual upbringing. I saw two extreme sides of my family members, a lively public façade and a sullen private one. Even as a small child I realised that the public faces were a lot more fun to be around, which is why I hung around downstairs as often as I could get away with it…
To have the run of a large pub outside of opening hours is not unlike having a wardrobe with Narnia in the back of it. Your home is located over the top of a big, scary place where you weren’t really supposed to go. Behind the bars themselves was a dense tangle of pipes, wires, pumps and bottles, which I was only allowed near when I was helping the head barman, Jock, with the daily rigmarole of bottling up.
