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Being Davina. Nigel Goodall
Читать онлайн.Название Being Davina
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781843586845
Автор произведения Nigel Goodall
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Not that Davina was about to be put off by such tales of woe. ‘I got on the show by purely persevering. It was my first big break and they put me on in the middle of the night so I could make loads of mistakes. They kept pulling me into the office and saying, “Calm down, you’ve got the job now!” But I was eager to please so they couldn’t shut me up. I was like a coiled spring. I found it was my niche and that’s what I really enjoyed, but being confident in front of an audience is something I’ve had to learn.’
Another DJ, John Barry, from the 1960s club scene, would agree with that summation. ‘I must have been about 16 at the time and had just started going out to discotheques (as they were called then). And, in every one I went to, there was a disc jockey from one of the offshore pirate radio stations, and it kind of hit me: “Wow, these guys are really popular!” And on top of that I was also listening to stations like Radio London and Caroline 24/7, so I was pretty much influenced by the jocks of the day, like Johnnie Walker, Roger “Twiggy” Day, Dave Cash and, a bit later, Emperor Rosco, and to the music they were playing on air. So I decided that was what I wanted to do.
‘What could be better, I thought, than having a job where you just play your favourite records and chat about them, and get paid for it? So I practised at home in my bedroom, with a small record deck, just playing the first couple of seconds of each record, taking it off, putting another on, or the same one back on again and was also doing the in-between record chat, over and over, using a hairbrush as a microphone in front of a mirror till I got it to sound and look right.
‘Next step was to march into a club and ask if they needed a DJ. No, they didn’t – but I kept going back to pester until they finally agreed to let me do a 20 or 30-minute spot two evenings a week as the punters came in. Although I wasn’t allowed to use the mike and wasn’t allowed to talk the record in, it was a start. So there I was just changing the records until the regular guy took over. And, for doing that, I got as much free Coca-Cola as I could drink in an evening!
‘So, after a few weeks of just putting the records on, I started to nag the club to let me talk the records in and, finally, after much debate, they relented and let me have a go one evening. And, as you do, I made a bunch of mistakes – silly things like having the mike switched to off for the first disc I played, getting tongue twisted on another, putting the wrong side of a record on, and so on. So don’t think I made much of an impression that first time. But the club was very gracious and gave me another try, and another, till I got it right!
‘And when I did get it right, it was great. Being allowed to introduce each record, well, wow, it was what I wanted and a great first experience of how to be and react with a live audience. But it was only because I persevered, probably to the point of annoying, that the club finally gave in, but it meant I got the experience that all first-timers need, whether club, radio or television.’
Of course, gaining experience for presenting on television was a lot more difficult than getting experience as a DJ in a club. You couldn’t just walk into a TV station and ask if you could have a go at it. Barry started out as a disc jockey in an era when the clubs and pirate radio stations were overcrowded with those keen enough to get seasick or drink as much Coke as they could in an evening. Although Davina would use the same perseverance as John Barry to get her first experience, it wasn’t as if fame knocked at her door, or was delivered to her on a plate. If she was going to succeed, then she was literally going to have to bombard MTV with letters, phone calls and tapes. She is said to have done that for three months until they relented, took her applications seriously and offered her the opportunity she had dreamed of.
Most Wanted, it seemed, was an ideal showcase for the innovative open style of presenting Davina had in mind. It was much the same as the other presenters on the show – Ray Cokes, Naughty Nina and Andy Cam – had adopted as well. The show aired every Tuesday to Friday evening and, according to many, its biggest appeal was that it offered viewer interaction, funny jokes, live music, famous guests and crazy competitions. Though some may have been dismissive of the show, by the time it ended (four years after it began), it had an unprecedented huge fan following. Strangely enough, MTV had decided to call it a day while it was still one of the most popular shows on the network, attracting some 60 million viewers across 38 European countries.
Aired live from the MTV headquarters in London, the show was, without question, an amazing achievement for a programme that had started out with a very economic budget and a very simple idea to simply entertain with zany, wacky and off-the-wall entertainment. On top of the weekday broadcasts, there were the occasional Most Wanted weekends, which started in the second year of the show’s run with guests all very much in the musical mainstream and to the taste of the time. These ranged from Sting, Right Said Fred, Shane McGowan and Nick Cave to Crowded House, Take That and Björk. As with most television weekenders, Most Wanted was no different in coming up with ideas to grab as many viewers as they could and have them literally glued to their set from Saturday morning through till Sunday evening.
On one weekend, for instance, they set up cameras in two Hard Rock Cafés and had Davina, who now favoured striped jumpers worn with black miniskirts, coming live from Camden Market on the Saturday, and on the Sunday live from a fan’s home in Germany. And, in the run-up to the last series, Wicked Will (who would go on to become a star in his own right with Chris Evans on TFI Friday) took the show to a new level of madness with items such as ‘Live Public Club Bed’, ‘Devil Ray’, ‘Internet Ray Chat’, ‘Clean Our Souls’ and ‘Underwear Everywhere’.
To many a reader this must sound totally bizarre, but if you grew up in the MTV era then it was, as one viewer raved, ‘a truly wonderful gem’. After years of tried and tested terrestrial television programming, one can understand why many considered it the greatest show on television. Nowhere was that more evident than when the kids arrived at school the next morning. Soon after they tumbled out of their parents’ cars or the school bus, Most Wanted was the talk of the playground, where almost everyone simply raved about it. Much the same as it was in Davina’s day when entire classes couldn’t stop talking about the latest episode of Star Trek or Starsky and Hutch, or others would quote their favourite Monty Python sketches that had them in stitches the night before. Whereas Davina had probably raved about William Shatner, Paul Michael Glaser or John Cleese, now it was Davina and co from Most Wanted who were being raved about.
What is perhaps also interesting to note is how none of the other presenters from Most Wanted found the same enviable, almost unique level of success that Davina has. According to one journalist, it is her bright, brisk and bouncy personality that is just perfectly suited for presenting the kind of shows she hosts. But to Davina it was simply where she learned her craft. ‘Generally speaking, I got on very well with everyone because I like people. Most American stars thought I was bonkers because female presenters in America are all the same – thin, beautiful, nip-tucked. I pull faces and say silly things, and they found it disarming to be interviewed by a dingbat,’ she jokes.
If anyone could find a niche in television so reputably, then that person has to be Davina. She is, most agree, the one celebrity you can imagine having a good old gossip with over a glass of wine. Friend and confidante Jackie Clune would certainly agree. Not only does she confess to being a big Davina fan on a personal as well as professional level, but ‘I’ve known her for several years. We worked on a programme called Good Stuff back in the 1990s and, although we haven’t always stayed in touch, the minute she found out I was expecting triplets, she rang me to say she was sending me a maternity nurse as a present.’
The most memorable times that Clune remembers about Davina, however, are quite different to the glamorous, mature woman she has now become. These were the moments when ‘we did a silly piece about male strippers and walked out of shot with our skirts hitched up and loo roll tucked into our knickers, or the time she let me tong her hair à la Farrah Fawcett for a piece about chicks with flicks. Or, more recently, the day I arrived at her house to find her in pigtails and dungarees, a child on each perfectly toned hip, laughingly trying to pass off a just-cooked fish pie as her own