Apex Publishing Ltd PO Box 7086, Clacton on Sea, Essex, CO15 5WN, United Kingdom Tel: 01255 428500 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.apexpublishing.co.uk ______BOOK EXTRACT

Title: Bushell On The Rampage: The Autobiography of Garry Bushell Author: Garry Bushell Foreword by: Billy Murray Publication Date: 11 September 2010 Page Extent: 260 ISBN: 1-906358-80-X ISBN 13: 978-1-906358-80-8 Book Type: Hardback Classification: Autobiography Price: £15.99 ______

Chapter Seven Celebrity Squared

I’m probably not the first person that Barbara Windsor has snogged in front of a green room full of horrified BBC executives, but I bet no one enjoyed it as much as I did. And okay, she was 56 at the time, but it was Barbara Windsor, for God’s sake, and I’d been a fan since I was thirteen. I’d just come off camera from a live TV show, and, high on adrenalin, I found myself chatting to Bar. Booze was flowing, the conversation was flirty and funny, and suddenly, to the shock of her fellow EastEnders and other celebs, we kissed long and hard. What a carry on! After a while a BBC runner sidled up and told Bar that her car was waiting and our tonsil tennis came to an end before we’d got to the stage when the star famous for telling punters to “get aht of my pub” was telling me to get aht of my pants. If we’d drunk any more I would have probably proposed, which would have come in handy. Bar is so short I’d have to go down on one knee just to look her in the eye. I’ve always believed that celebrity should be a by-product of talent, so how it came to me escapes me. In the name of celebrity I have been flung out of a plane at 12,000 feet on prime-time TV, had knives thrown at me by Freddie Starr, and been flown first-class to Los Angeles just so Noel Edmonds could mentally scar me by dragging himself up as Teri Hatcher (more about that later). My parties are covered by OK ! magazine, I’ve had to sign breasts, thighs and buttocks and I’ve notched up more TV and radio appearances than I can count, ranging from the worthy ( Newsnight, The South Bank Show ) to the shameful ( Pets Win Prizes, The Mint ). I’ve been gunged fifteen times and ‘Gotcha-ed’, stranded in a ‘haunted’ castle and hypnotised by Paul McKenna, who made me chat up a broomstick live on TV on Children in Need . He told me it was Claudia Schiffer, but it definitely looked more like Victoria Beckham. The next day potty Paul Devine left a brush outside my front door with a note saying it was my love child. Once you start doing a lot of telly people begin to recognise you. Most people are friendly, but I did get insulted once. A bus driver pulled over by Sidcup Station, got out and shook my hand. “I’ve always wanted to meet Matthew Kelly,” he said. Bastard. I did sign an autograph for him though: f.u.c. … I was in a working men’s club in Pitsea the other year with Garry Johnson and this woman kept staring at me. After about fifteen minutes she came over and said, “You think you look like him but you ain’t.” Sorry? “You think you look like Garry Bushell but you ain’t. I seen you signing on last week in Romford wearing motorcycle leathers.” So not only was it not me, I was signing on and riding a motorbike! In the end I just agreed with her. The worst one ever was in Tesco, when a woman came up and said, “You don’t half look like Garry Bushell, no offence.” I had someone start filming me shopping in Costco. “Why are you here?” she said. “Why are you buying sausages?” As Spike Milligan said, everybody’s got to be somewhere. Most people are amiable, however. I’ve had pints bought for me in pubs by strangers, and free cab rides from taxi drivers who agree with my views. But some are too friendly. I had a stalker once while I was working in Wapping. She’d seen me on the game show You Bet ! and, bizarre as it sounds, she became obsessed with me, sending steamy letters, waiting at the gates for me and leaving suggestive notes under my windscreen outside Booty’s bar in Narrow Street. Filming in Blackpool in 1996, we brought a whole main road to a standstill, with wobbly Northern folk shouting, “Look, it’s Garry fookin’ Bushell!” (that appears to be my name up there). I went for a Chinese in Manchester with Bob Monkhouse, and a homeless guy pushed past the master comic to shake my hand. And in LA, while queuing up to board a plane, I had to sign autographs for people who had walked straight past Bill Wyman to get to me. It was mental. More recently, a People reader emailed me, saying that his wife wanted me to shag her and asked if I was up for it. I was horrified. What did he take me for? I mean, he didn’t even send me her picture. Incredibly, appearing on TV makes you a magnet for nutters, numpties and nubile women – even if you look like Matthew Wright. I have been propositioned by three famous soap actresses, two pop singers, two Page 3 girls, a glamour model, a couple of PRs and several talent show contenders, including a contortionist who wanted me to look up her antecedents. If I’d been halfway handsome I’d have been beating them off with a stick. Often I just had to stop and pinch myself. I’d gone from seeing Ozzy Osbourne’s sphincter winking at me during some drunken Halfin 2 a.m. photo session in the corridor of a posh hotel, to having a household name Page 3 girl showing me her breasts (good) and Joe Pasquale showing me his Jacobs backstage at the Circus Tavern (not so good). Doing pantomime puts you right there in easy access of the public. Back in 1994 I was approached to appear in the Southend production of Dick Whittington , because the wife of the manager of Cliffs Pavilion was a fan of my column. My agent at the time was Stan Dallas, formerly of the Dallas Boys. Stan also managed Shane Richie, who called him The Colonel. It made sense. In my opinion Stan would have been far better working with fried chicken than he ever was handling turns. The Colonel did the deal, the money was good, and the next thing I knew I was in the cast as ‘The Ship’s Captain’ with funnyman Davro, EastEnders heart-throb Ross Kemp, Falcon from Gladiators , Rod Hull and that poxy Emu. Nobody gave me any direction. On the opening night, The Colonel came in the dressing room five minutes before I went on and said, “Remember, Garry, project!” I had no idea what he meant. Project? What was I doing, showing a film? That was the extent of my coaching. For the first week or so I had the charisma of a cold chip, but I got better. I had to. I hate doing anything badly, but there wasn’t much I could do about my dancing, which is diabolical. I danced like John Travolta in that movie … the bit where he was machine-gunned in Pulp Fiction . The backstage crew used to watch me every night for a laugh. When I finally managed to perform the dance properly I came off to a standing ovation. On the opening night I was having a drink with Garry Johnson when a rather large woman came up to us in the bar and said to me, “You know Grant, don’t cha?” I told her I knew Ross who played Grant, but she just went into one. She was crying because Sharon Mitchell in EastEnders was betraying Ross’s screen character. “That bitch,” she said. “That cow …” I was looking around for Jeremy Beadle, but she was for real. Ross was a bit stand-offish at first, and a little bit ‘actory’. One night he was method-acting King Rat and got so into character that he spat at the kids in the front row. He later denied it when the press followed up on parents’ complaints. We got on well by the end, though. Ross was at the height of his soap fame and was fighting women off all day long. The following year he invited me down to Joey Banana’s, a nightclub in Croydon, where he was doing a PA. It was full to the brim with birds trying to tear his clothes off. Inevitably, he pulled – he left me talking to the girl’s flatmate while they made out for about fifty minutes. Although I don’t know how much of that time was taken up with her just begging him to give her the old Grant Mitchell stare (which was very much like Nookie Bear’s). A pair of girls came up to him once and one said, “I’m black, she’s white, let’s spend the night.” How could he resist? Rod Hull was the real nightmare during our run. I ended up having a fight with him on stage, too - a proper one. Rod used that bird to touch up the girls in the cast. One night the leading lady, Tracy Wilson, came to me in tears and I snapped. I got my own Emu-style puppet and hid it in the wings. Every night Rod had to knock me down twice, and he always did it as hard as he could. This particular show, just before he was due to poleaxe me for the second time, I went into the wings and came back with my puppet. Well, he hit me and I hit him. We were really going for it. We went offstage and he said, “Do you want some more?” I said, “Yeah,” and we came back on like Itchy and Scratchy. The kids loved it. They thought it was part of the show. I’ll tell you what: he never annoyed me again. The headline act, Davro, was his usual funny, depressed, mixed-up self, storming it onstage and fretting about his career offstage. The impressionist was at a low ebb when I came out with one of my best ever adlibs. “Bobby,” I said, “don’t just sit there, do somebody.” Bob had a dog called Oscar, which he’d trained to lick itself on command. One night, during Tracy’s big romantic ballad, Oscar trotted onstage, sat down and proceeded to lick his balls. The audience roared. We roared from the wings. Everyone thought it was hysterical - except the leading lady. A lot of comics came down to see me at Southend to offer moral support, including Mickey Pugh, Dave Lee and Jimmy Jones. Good old Des O’Connor came along, too, although the only one who dicked a dumb-dumb was my mate Mark. The People were trying to poach me from The Sun at the time, too. Kelvin MacKenzie was the mastermind behind the scenes, very kindly working a scam that got me a whopping rise. I was staying at Garry Johnson’s house in Wickford when Kelvin called. Garry and I sound so alike on the phone that Kelvin refused to believe that he wasn’t talking to me. He got agitated, and if Gal hadn’t turned on the charm it could have blown the whole deal. As it was, on 2 February 1995 (the day Uncle Sam died), as a result of Kelvin’s plot, my salary was more than doubled to £130K a year. The problem with staying with Garry was that he had a young baby, and I was getting woken up in the early hours for the night feeds. So I moved in with Willie Thompson, the notorious cockney stag comedian in Benfleet instead. Looking for my bag, I looked in the wrong wardrobe one day and came across an array of uniforms – Nazi gear, nurses’ outfits, a pilot’s uniform. I’d stumbled on the Thompsons’ love of dressing up for adult recreation. I made damn sure I wasn’t there for Nazi night, so I can’t tell you whether or not he actually invaded the hinterland. The next panto I did was at Wimbledon in 1998 with Bradley Walsh, Britt Ekland and Kriss Akabusi. That was Cinderella and this time I had a more stellar support group in the audience. Ross Kemp, Billy Murray and Barbara Windsor all came along, either to cheer or to enjoy watching me screw up. I was never sure which. One day J.J. French, my old friend from Twisted Sister, turned up – I hadn’t seen him for about fifteen years. I don’t think panto rocked his world, but the dames must have made him feel at home. Reba McIntyre, the country singer, came down for a few drinks, too. She was fascinated by the whole panto tradition, because they have nothing like it in the States. Who else? Oh yeah, Elton John’s gobby mate Gary Farrow came one night and started heckling. The silly git thought he was at a comedy club. And Dale Winton came twice. Tania, then my girlfriend and now my wife, was pregnant with Jenna, our first baby, and Dale begged us to let him be her godfather. What’s that? You say. ‘Homophobe’ Garry Bushell, friends with one of the gayest men in light entertainment? Absolutely. I first met Dale on an edition of ITV’s Celebrity Squares , the day after I’d branded his show Supermarket Sweep Number One in my list of the worst daytime TV shows. We had a bit of banter about it and got on really well. He’s not the same as his TV persona. Dale’s bright, funny and very up on all kinds of music. We were firm friends for many years, meeting up frequently on holiday in St Petersburg, Florida, and we stayed in touch until I left The People in 2007, when the phone calls dried up. I couldn’t tell you whether it was because I’d now fallen off his networking radar, because I’d slaughtered his appalling cheapo Sweep remake or because I wrote that his face is lifted “like his shirt”. Actually, it may have been because I’d never ever been tempted by his sexual texts. Sorry, mate, sharing roll- mops with the still beautiful Britt Ekland in her dressing room was always going to be more of a turn-on than you offering to undo my jeans with your teeth. It was Dale who’d conned me into going along to An Audience With Freddie Starr . “The producer’s a friend,” he said. “Nothing will happen to you.” Yeah, right. I’ll never forget that night. I can’t. I was traumatised by it. Freddie is nuts – and I mean that in a good way, and in a bad way. He’s as predictable as a Third World dictator and just as dangerous. First he chucked maggots at us all, and then he dragged me up from the audience, strapped me to a wall, blindfolded me and seemed to be hurling knives at me. Janet Street-Porter was yelling, “Kill ’im!” One knife appeared to miss my head, and a balloon between my legs popped. It was terrifying. (Freddie also attempted to take my trousers off, but I kicked him away). And at the end of the show he left me up there while the celeb audience filed past. Thanks, Fred. It was ITV’s highest rated Audience With … and is still shown today. The highlight for me was meeting Elvis Presley’s backing singers, The Jordanaires, or, as I prefer to call them, Three Syrups & A Comb-over. ITV booked me for a revenge appearance on Another Audience With Freddie – I was meant to wheel him on in a straitjacket at the start of part two, but Fred was in a weird mood that night. To producer Nigel Lythgoe’s helpless fury, he went off script and just did his club act. Freddie then booked me to do the straitjacket routine in a comedy video rushed release for the following Christmas.