To Hell in a Handcart. Richard Littlejohn

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ sentence for driving while disqualified, without insurance, road tax or a valid MOT certificate.

      It was also the end of what passed for Bulletin FM’s credibility. The station’s owners decided that rolling news was not the way ahead and convinced themselves that sport was the next big thing. Having seen the success of Sky, they decided to launch a dedicated football station, Shoot FM. Not actually having the commentary rights to any live football, they were reduced to inviting listeners to call in match reports on their mobiles from the back of the stands. This lasted about six weeks, until the lawsuit landed from the Premier League. Shoot FM struggled on, covering non-league football and commentating on the Spanish Primera Liga, until Sky realized it was being ripped off and the commentator was in fact sitting in Shoot FM’s studio watching the game on Sky Sports Three.

      With three years left on the licence, the Aussies played their last card. Scouring the franchise document they discovered it allowed them to play forty per cent music by content. They decided they could always fill the other sixty per cent with phone-ins and thus Rocktalk 99FM, a mixture of classic rock and pig-ignorance, was born.

      It coincided with Ricky Sparke, controversial columnist, being shown the door by the ailing Exposer, a downmarket tabloid aimed primarily at the illiterate and famous for being the first Fleet Street publication to feature full-frontal nudity.

      The Exposer was Ricky Sparke’s last-chance saloon as far as newspapers were concerned. He’d blown more jobs than Linda Lovelace, largely through drink and an inability to tolerate fools. He was a gifted polemicist but had a history of throwing typewriters through windows if some lowly sub-editor changed so much as a single syllable of his prose.

      For once, drink and madness played no part in Ricky’s downfall. His contract had run its course and the editor decided there was no longer any point in paying £100,000 a year to a wordsmith for a once-a-week column, given the fact that few of his readers could actually read.

      Ricky was replaced by a former lap-dancer who dispensed sex advice in the form of a comic strip with voice bubbles, True Romance-style. When her first column appeared, readers were invited to take part in a competition to describe in no more than twenty words why they’d like to give her a bikini wax. The winner got to give her a bikini wax. Ricky entered under a false name and came second.

      Ricky had frequently appeared on Voice FM, Bulletin FM and Shoot FM as a guest pundit, filling the voids between callers with sarcastic banter and mock outrage. It didn’t pay much but there was always a steady supply of drink in the studio, which Ricky reckoned at least saved him a few bob. He was quite good at it, too.

      When Rocktalk 99FM was launched, Ricky received a call from Charlie Lawrence, the programme director, who offered him a job as the mid-morning presenter.

      Lawrence was a former salesman who started off selling solar-powered boomerangs to tourists at Circular Quay in Sydney, wound up in newspaper telesales and graduated to promotions manager at an ailing talk-radio station.

      He transformed the station, turning it into Down Under AM, Australia’s first all-gay on-air chatline.

      Lawrence shipped up in London, headhunted by Rocktalk FM’s Australian management in an act of desperation.

      ‘We need controversy, we need to provoke people. We need someone who’s not afraid to speak his mind. You’re the man, mate,’ Lawrence had insisted over a bottle of Polluted Bay Chardonnay.

      Ricky didn’t take much persuading. He was also available. What Lawrence didn’t know was that Ricky had already been told his contract at the Exposer wasn’t being renewed and that he had nowhere else to go.

      Ricky was almost potless. Although he had always been handsomely paid, his prodigious thirst and the mortgage on his flat in a mansion block at the back of Westminster Cathedral swallowed his earnings. He could just about manage to service his credit cards and his extended bar bill at Spider’s.

      He could have lived somewhere cheaper, but he needed to be at the centre of town. He also liked being driven, especially since the London Taxi Drivers’ Association had blacklisted him following a column in praise of minicabs. Ricky only discovered this when he clambered into the back of a black cab in Soho one night and asked to be taken home.

      The driver looked at Ricky in the mirror and checked. He took a newspaper cutting off his dashboard, held it up to the vanity light, inspected it and turned to get a better look at his dishevelled passenger.

      ‘You’re him, aren’t you?’

      ‘Eh?’

      ‘Sparke. You look older in real life. And fatter. But I can tell it’s you.’ The driver was clutching Ricky’s picture by-line, torn from the pages of the Exposer. It had been taken some years earlier in a professional studio and enhanced by Fleet Street’s finest photographic technology. Although Ricky had worn badly over the years, it was still recognizably him.

      ‘OK, so it’s me. Give the man a coconut. Now take me to Westminster.’

      ‘You must be kidding, mate, after what you said about us. You’re barred.’

      ‘Then take me to the public carriage office. You can’t do this.’

      ‘I can do what I like. Now get out. Go on. Out!’

      Ricky stumbled out of the cab and retraced his steps downstairs into Spider’s. Dillon laughed when Ricky told him the story, gave him another one for the strasse on the house and called a local chauffeur firm to take him home.

      When the car turned up, it was being driven by former police sergeant Mickey French, an old mate Ricky had known since the Seventies, when he was a local newspaper reporter and Mickey was PC at Tyburn Row, although he hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. Mickey took him back to his flat, declined an offer of a drink and said he’d call Ricky in the morning. Since that night, Mickey had been Ricky’s regular ride around town.

      Not today, though. Mickey had taken the family off for a long weekend at Goblin’s Holiday World and Ricky was left to his own devices. Lunch loomed. Ricky had no wife to go back to. He was married once, to a copytaker on his first newspaper, a printer’s daughter from Lewisham, south-east London.

      But it wasn’t going anywhere. Ricky refused to go south of the river and she could never settle north. Since he never came home, it didn’t really matter where they lived. She moved out, filed for divorce after less than a year of marriage and ended up with a used-car dealer in Eltham, three kids, a facelift, a tummy tuck and a villa in Marbella, where three times a year she topped up her fake tan with the real thing.

      Ricky never remarried, was never bothered about children, rather liked his bachelor existence. The booze had taken its toll over the years, but had never taken over. Ricky prided himself that he always got up for work, no matter how rough he felt.

      ‘I’m a milkman. I deliver,’ was his proud boast. And he did deliver. Abuse and insults by the bucketloads, tipped over the heads of the great and the gormless, the rich and fatuous in a succession of newspapers. He’d always been good for circulation but his off-the-ball antics cost him a string of jobs, right back to the time when still in his teens he clattered the long-serving chief reporter of the long since defunct Tyburn Times, sending him tumbling downstairs, in a heated dispute over punctuation, and caused his first employer to tear up his indentures.

      A quarter of a century later, he had mellowed, rather like a top-class single malt. Probably because of single malt. His fighting days were over, СКАЧАТЬ