Chris Tarrant . . . gone fishing

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The move from children’s television took Chris a bit further than he had anticipated. In fact, for a while it took him away from television altogether.
“What happens is that there are some phone calls that completely change your life. The one about Tiswas was obviously one. It was like ‘we’re doing this little show on Saturday mornings; would you be interested?’ That completely changed the direction of my life. Then in 1984 I had a phone call from a radio station I was only vaguely aware of. It was Capital Radio in London and I was still working in the Midlands, so I didn’t really know it. I’d never done radio. I’d never been on radio. I’d never been in a radio station. I knew Kenny Everett quite well and I knew Aspel, but I thought, ‘I just do telly, that’s what I do’.

“I went down to do a pilot and I thought it was great: get a pile of records, witter on a bit between the songs, in the pub at 2 o’clock - fantastic. So I did the Sunday show for Capital Radio for about three months, called Lunday Sunchtime, and I thought it was a doddle.

“After a year, Nigel Walmsley, the boss there at Capital, said to me ‘We’re thinking of renewing your contract’. Now this would have been 1988. Nigel said that the first year had been very good. He said that they’d like me to do the breakfast show and that they were prepared to increase my salary. I asked how long a contract they had in mind and Nigel said that they’d like to do it the way they do in America – which meant that he wanted me to sign up for ten years. I said, ‘Nigel Walmsley, if you think I will still be doing the Capital Breakfast Show in 1998 you must be mad’. Well in actual fact I left in 2004. They could have saved themselves a fortune!”

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