Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie Read Online Free Page B

notes, but my influence was limited, drowned out in an onslaught of ’80s rock. After a few nights the
NME
savaged us in a live review. By the end of the tour we were playing to almost empty houses. Chris returned to Manchester to a court summons. He owed £30,000 back tax. On the day of
his court appearance he stood up in the dock. The judge told him it was a very serious matter and had he considered a payment plan?
    ‘Would a pound a week suffice, m’lud?’ he asked.
    ‘No it would not!’ the judge shouted.
    Chris never actually said to me, ‘You’re fired.’ But I began to notice in the listings magazines that he was doing a lot of solo shows – just him and a
keyboard. They were in the same venues we used to play, and then in smaller venues, and then eventually there were no shows at all.
    I moved back to London.
    ***
    And there I was, two years later, twenty-five and presenting a terrible BBC2 television show nobody remembers called
The Ronson Mission
. After leaving Frank’s band
I’d become a radio presenter at KFM in Stockport and a columnist for
Time Out
magazine in London. My old college lecturer Frank Hatherley had approached the BBC’s Janet Street
Porter on my behalf, suggesting me as a presenter, and they’d given me a chance. Now I was sitting in the corner of the editing suite watching the producer, director and editor work on an
interview I had done in Bournemouth with a Conservative town councillor. For most of the interview she’d been perfectly nice. But at times – when irritated by my line of questioning
– she’d become screechy and short-tempered. In the editing suite they were carefully stitching together her screechiest moments, whilst meticulously deleting the normalness.
    I watched this black magic. ‘Is this bad?’ I asked from the corner.
    The producer gave me a patient look. ‘Think of it this way,’ he explained. ‘One interviewee suffers, but millions are entertained.’
    I grinned nervously. He was right. This was OK. She was a Tory councillor. We were in the tradition of the great caricaturists like Hogarth. And history proved us to be pioneers. During the
1990s the approach we adopted with the town councillor became fashionable. Journalists in magazines and newspapers and on radio and TV would take the furthest reaches of their interviewees’
personalities – the hysteria, the pomposity, the passive-aggression, the delusions of grandeur – and stitch them together, deleting the ordinariness. We were defining people by their
flaws. I did it to Tory grandees, white supremacists, anti-Semites, Islamic militants, and then conspiracy theorists, psychics and, eventually, hippies. We didn’t think hard about what we
were doing. We did it because people liked it. The more we did it the more successful we were. But if we had thought hard we might have realized that we were contributing to what was becoming a
conservative, conformist age. ‘If you behave like
that
’, our stories said, ‘people will laugh at you. They aren’t normal.
We’re
normal!
This
is
the average!’ We were defining the boundaries of normality by staring at the people outside of it.
    One night in the midst of this I stood wearing a tuxedo outside Grosvenor House, a five-star hotel on Park Lane, Central London. Downstairs in the banqueting hall I had just not won a radio
award so I’d gone out for air and spotted another non-winner – the radio presenter Adam Buxton. He was leaning against some railings. I stood next to him for a while. We watched the
limousines speed down Park Lane, the winners spilling out of the hotel in their tuxedos.
    ‘You know why we always lose?’ Adam suddenly said to me.
    I shook my head.
    ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘You and me? We’re marginal.’
    I looked at him.
    ‘The things we like,’ Adam continued, ‘they’re
marginal
.’
    ‘You’re
right
!’ I said, my eyes widening. ‘We are
marginal
!’ I felt a great weight lifting. I’d