- 35 -
I cross Uxbridge Road opposite the Defectors Weld pub. Now there’s a name! No apostrophe so we can’t be sure that the weld – the joining of two metal parts together – belongs to the defector or defectors. But, as apostrophes are often omitted in names of businesses (Waterstones, where you may well have bought this book, have dispensed with theirs) we can’t be sure that it doesn’t either. Maybe it’s a statement: that’s what defectors do – perhaps metaphorically. Is it a refutation of the argument that suggests defectors, those who desert or leave a country, company, cause or civilisation, are divisive figures? On the contrary, the pub is saying, defectors weld: they join together nations and ideas, their very act of treachery a sign that people are not so different. Somehow. Or is it just a reference to a Soviet émigré’s bodged bit of metalwork?
I like quirky pub names and I think it’s always a shame when one is lost and turned into an All Bar One or Slug and Lettuce, horrible chains that roll out their dismal puns nationwide. But my pleasure here is marred because I’m pretty sure Defectors Weld was an Edwards Wine Bar ten years ago. Maybe this is a reversion to an older name? I hope so but I suspect that ‘Defectors Weld’ is a recent attempt at quirkiness which I slightly despise. Although, full marks for weirdness – and I suppose for confirming my theory that it doesn’t much matter what things are called.
I continue past the pub up Wood Lane. I’m nearly there. I’m tired now and, as I drag myself along the side of the giant retail cuboid that is the Westfield shopping centre, I feel like an ant doggedly crawling across a tile. Or antedly perhaps. This place where things are sold was built in a massive ‘brown field site’ where, a hundred years ago, things were made. Not many things are made in London now. I’m going to one of the few places where they still are. Although not for long.
I pass a multi-storey car park, continuing under a railway bridge and past the new Wood Lane Tube station, on the site of the derelict remains of the old Wood Lane Tube station. I carry on a little further without looking to my left yet. I want to get to the point where I can see it all properly, before turning. To catch that famous, familiar, ugly, lovely sight all in one go.
I turn and read the words written across the bland brick of Studio One: ‘BBC Television Centre’. There’s no visible ‘For Sale’ sign.
I’ve worked here a lot. I still do, although at the moment I’m making a Channel 4 show, 10 O’Clock Live, here. We did the studio recordings of our sketch show in TV Centre. We shot our first Comedy Nation sketch in an office here. So many excited Bruiser, All Day Breakfast and That Mitchell and Webb Look meetings happened here, so many panel show recordings, so many drunken after-show drinks dos in the dingy basement green rooms.
I’d been heading here for years, really. Since I first saw it on TV – this was the place the programmes came from, we were given to understand. This was where the Blue Peter garden was, where Not Only … But Also and Monty Python’s Flying Circus were dreamt up, as well as Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Yes, this was a place where the British still made things.
They’re closing it, selling it. Everything’s moving either to Portland Place or up to the new ‘Media Village’ in Salford. ‘It would cost more to update it than it would to knock it down,’ some people say. Although it’s listed so they’re not allowed to knock it down. Anyway they’re leaving and I only just got here. It seems, when I left Oxford, I took the M40 in the wrong direction.
I’m not from London, but I came here because it’s the capital. It seemed logical to me that this would be where most of the TV comes from – just as it’s where most of the theatre and film happens. I thought that was the system, so that’s why I made the journey. I didn’t think it was unfairly advantageous to Londoners because London, I thought, was everyone’s, was the world’s. That’s what Sherlock Holmes thought too. So it’s galling to see that system suddenly change, apparently for the benefit of people in other regions whose desire to get into broadcasting isn’t sufficiently strong to make them willing to move house.
I’m confused. Confused that the thing I’ve been travelling towards is closing just as I arrive. I don’t just mean the BBC, I mean the whole old media. Television, radio, publishing and newspapers, these grand old thriving British traditions that I grew up with and dreamt of being part of, are all now foundering and changing. They’re retreating in the face of technological developments that threaten to render them obsolete, or at least undermine their ability to pay people for their work.
Opportunities, excitements, technological revolutions abound – we’re living in a heyday for entrepreneurs. But I don’t want to be an entrepreneur or a businessman. I don’t want to try and guess the future and make money from it. I want to make normal programmes within established parameters. I feel like a painter who’s been handed a video camera.
For years, I was driven on by ambition. And also by the absence of a private life – a nagging unhappiness like the burn of sciatica which can suddenly rear up into crippling pain. I had to keep moving to walk it off.
There was this brilliant exciting job called ‘TV comedian’ that I knew a very few lucky souls could get. I was determined to be one of them. And now I am and I love it. I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t want to move on – I just want to carry on. And that’s an increasingly unacceptable aspiration in our age. People say, ‘If you’re not moving forwards, you’re moving backwards.’
Well, I’m not moving forwards any more. For the first time in a long while I’m standing still.