Paul Burke

Radio is my favourite medium. Always has been. It doesn’t shout ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ in the way newspapers and screens do. Radio informs and entertains as you drive a car, paint a ceiling or perform open-heart surgery. And there was no finer, more creative and more enduring radio entertainer than Steve Wright, who died on Monday. His afternoon show made Radio 1 in the 1980s. When Wright moved to Radio 2 in the late 1990s, it was a stroke of genius by the station’s then controller Jim Moir, reviving Steve’s – and Radio 2’s – anarchic glory. There, The Big Show remained a hugely popular and always evolving stalwart of the schedule.

I’m writing this in a coffee shop. I write most things in coffee shops but I’ve never been to this one before. As I paid for my latte, I noticed the sign (below). Never mind Brexit or Palestine, I can’t think of an issue that will divide the nation like this will. People will immediately take sides and, like Brexit or Palestine, I think we all know which side will be the more voluble. And it won’t be the side who sigh with relief and think, ‘at last!’ The British are famously a nation of dog lovers but has that love has gone a little too far? The Pope certainly thinks so. Last year, he incurred the unholy wrath of dog owners by declaring that ‘dogs now sometimes take the place of children’.

In 1973, everyone loved David Bowie. Album buyers had put Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Hunky Dory high in the charts, while singles buyers had bought similar success for ‘Drive In Saturday’, ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Sorrow’. Then right in the middle of this, he released ‘The Laughing Gnome’. In truth, he probably didn’t. It was a twee little novelty song recorded six years earlier, featuring Bowie duetting with the eponymous gnome. Nobody could believe that Bowie had recorded it – less still that he’d written it – but the more you know about him, the less surprising it seems. In fact, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ says more about David Bowie than anything else he did. It was early evidence that he would do anything to be famous.

Hard to imagine now but I was once a hot club DJ. I now need to go to bed on the same day I got up but once upon a time – in fact, hundreds of times upon a time – I dropped big tunes at famous clubs including Le Beat Route, the Camden Palace and Stringfellows. I was knee-deep in cocaine and hookers but had no interest in either. My only interest was the glory I gleaned from filling a dancefloor with shiny, happy people. Being irredeemably shallow and easily flattered, I faux-reluctantly agreed Playing clubs was relatively easy. Revellers were keen to dance, especially those who arrived, shall we just say, ready-stimulated.

A few years ago, I abandoned a five-year counselling course after just 40 minutes. Apparently, I couldn’t have a refund from the community college but could transfer to another course. I may have a writer’s fascination with finding things out but I have a strange aversion to being taught. Looking at the long list of courses available to me, all I could see were things I didn’t want to be taught. Computerised Accounts and Book Keeping, Burlesque Dancing and The Art of the Burgundian Netherlands. I wasn’t looking for a hobby and there was barely anything on that list that came close to piquing my interest.  A more unprepossessing bunch of human specimens would be hard to imagine There was, however, one course that caught my attention: Stand-Up Comedy.

In practically every respect, I’m a useless human being. This is not the vanity of false modesty – I really am worse than most people at most things. I've never picked up a musical instrument, a golf club or a foreign language; I can barely boil an egg and would find it almost impossible to paint a wall without stepping back and kicking two and a half litres of emulsion all over the carpet. The course was not for me or anyone remotely like me. In fact, it was all a bit public sector Yet I thought, in terms of life experience, that I’d make quite a good counsellor. I was one of five children with a father too sick to work. We lived on benefits, had free school meals and our clothes arrived in bin bags from the local church.

We all know that the saddest words in the English language are ‘too late’. We also know that ‘procrastination is the thief of time’ and that ‘punctuality is the politeness of kings. However, since this piece was published a couple of weeks ago, many have got in touch to point out that, very often, ‘the tidy’ are also ‘the early’. Their irrational obsession with being tidy is matched by an equally irrational terror of being late. They’re missing out on the joy of spontaneity, the thrill of uncertainty and of going with the flow I’m not advocating a slack attitude to timekeeping. If you’re late for your train, your plane or your appointment at the Palace to receive your OBE, you really will miss it.

A few years ago, James Delingpole and I were two-fifths of ‘The Manalysts’ a clique of agony uncles employed by a women’s magazine. The idea was to provide five answers to each problem from five disparate standpoints. James was the trenchant intellectual, I was (supposedly) the metrosexual adman and the other three were a practising psychotherapist, a blokey builder from Essex and a gloriously camp hairdresser. The great fallacy about untidy people is that we’re always losing things A fair few of our correspondents were, unsurprisingly, complaining about a boyfriend or husband’s untidiness but I remember being struck by how many wrote in to bemoan the very opposite – the strain of living with someone tyrannically tidy.

If you were born after 1970 and don’t remember punk, you’ve almost certainly been misled by people who do. You’ve probably been told – through countless paean-to-punk retrospectives, documentaries and newspaper culture pages ­– that it was a glorious, anarchic revolution that swept all before it. I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t. Punk was as middle-class as a Labrador in a Volvo. It was invariably the posher kids who abandoned Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes Far from being hugely influential, punk was a passing fad that made little impression on the charts and left the lasting legacy of a spent firework.

Let’s play a game of word association. I’ll start: ‘skinhead’. Hmm. I think I can guess which words instantly occurred to you: ‘thug’ perhaps, ‘hooligan’ probably and possibly even ‘racist’? Yet for anyone who remembers the original incarnation of skinheads, another word will always spring to mind: ‘reggae’. If you believe that Britain’s love affair with reggae began in the late 1970s with Bob Marley, I’m afraid you’re out by several years and several million record sales. It began in the late 1960s with a happy confluence of Caribbean immigrants, Trojan Records and skinheads.

We all have secrets which, when we remember them, shroud us in shame. I’m afraid I have a particularly dark one that I’m forced to remember almost every day of my life. Twenty years ago, I was a working in a big London ad agency with a smart and ambitious young man named Richard Reed. I liked him a lot and it was clear that he wouldn’t be constrained by the advertising industry forever. Sure enough, he came to me one day and announced that he and some friends were starting a business, making fruit smoothies called ‘Fast Tractor’. Richard explained that they’d chosen Fast Tractor because the tractor that transported the fruit from field to fruit crusher was fast. Or something.