ON THE ROPES (5)

But it may well have been and I bet it was a listen…

It was a terrific listen…

But…there's got to have a but here. You can't have anarchy on….

There was no anarchy on that show. There was no….If I had of said "This f'n ref we've gotta…." that's anarchy and it's also dull and it's brutish and boorish, it wasn't. It was a five minute section between what I thought was beyond football, I thought this was a law and order thing….

But why …….You see if they were satisfied with the way it was going…. I mean you were an enormously……

They weren't satisfied! They weren't. I had been called in before that, three or four, very pleasantly, I mean there's no "Sit down Baker…" There's none of that because I wouldn't tolerate that and neither would they I'm sure. I'd been called in three times saying, you know, it was the time when Sky was buying up football. The Beeb were losing things all over the place. They didn't want me ah…..asking people to ring in. If you've heard a shocking terrible rumour about a footballer, ring us up and we will pick the legal bones out of it, call him Mr X and we will say what they done. Now I'm not going to turn that radio off, that's fantastic! You know, it was just very pixyish, but the Beeb all of a sudden thought. Listen, we're going to lunch with them and they're not going to let Five Live have, they're not going to let us into Elland Road again; and I'm not paranoid, but as it came about a few weeks later, " Ah well, better get rid of him". It could have been anything, by that time we were on borrowed time, I was living on borrowed time….

So in other words what you are saying is that the BBC regarded you as a trouble maker..

Yes

.......potentially damaging their own interests…. · Yes I think I was……

…with the football establishment?

When I was fired, they wanted me to come back and do the Saturday show, they didn't get rid of me, they said…….because the Saturday Show was silly and I did it with Danny Kelly and it was……..the better show in fact. It was very funny and they wanted to put…..They asked me to come back. They said - can you imagine - they've just fired you, they said, "But we'd like you to do the Saturday Show"; and that was that. I said, "No, I think we know were we're both ….." it was very civilised. I think we know were we're both going with this don't we? I cannot be the cockney on the string saying, "Well what about referees, no names please? These are decent people paying hard-earned money, taking days off work and because there's so much hand in glove in this national game, you can't be fair about it and shouldn't ask to be. But we can do is get a great radio show out of it. It wasn't irresponsible, nothing I don't believe on that was irresponsible at all…..

But it wasn't only the BBC who thought you were irresponsible. The media generally thought you were irresponsible…..

Yeah!

The Newspapers thought you were irresponsible…

Yeah, but even so, I don't. Yeah, but when you meet the Hacks one-by-one they miss it a lot. I do think, it was…and it hasn't been replaced. I would think in football, we can talk about Pets Win Prizes and argue about that if you like, but in football phone-in/broadcasting, I am the best. I am the best at it and that's it. It's like saying, what's the fastest plane? Concorde. Who's the best football phone-in? I am and I don't care how much that jars, I am. I've never been replaced over there and you know ..that's the truth.

Tell me this. If you're the best, why aren't you doing it now?

Because nobody will employ me, no one will have it. I was at Talk…

But I mean, nobody includes Talk Radio.

Yeah, but you know, Kelvin McKenzie took over Talk Radio and the first thing Kelvin does is, his phrase says, to the bone, to the bone. I was getting £1,200 a show. Kelvin McKenzie takes over, looks at the balance sheet; I don't think that takes a genius to work……and again, it's not saying, why did he do that? That makes sense to me. In other areas I can be insecure, not in the football broadcasting. I know exactly what I'm doing there and the audience follows us you know, it just is.

All right. Let's look at some of the other areas, some of the television programmes that you did..

Oh no, here we go.

Which you're clearly not going to defend? ·

There's nothing to defend, they're television shows. You know, one out of what, three hundred TV shows work? I can give you two or three that work you can give me four or five that didn't. All that you can do when you go into any series is say, it's got half a chance. If I was more, If I was in anyway, if I had some kind of work ethic that made me turn up and want shows to succeed and put time into them. But the thing is, I'm a great, hopefully I'm a pretty good guest, I can always give stuff. But in telly speak, that'll always, give him his own chat show. That's happened stacks of times. I mean the talk show is the cushion over the face you know; do that kind of radio again, that's great! To me that's great radio.

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