Animal House by James Brown

Author:James Brown [Brown, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 2022-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

I didn’t get where I am today . . .

Spring 1994

Once we’d been given the go ahead I had to set about building or finding some staple regulars for loaded. The men we had talked to in focus groups all wanted to read about people who had made a lot of money so I created a very simple Q & A for entrepreneurs and business people called My Brilliant Career – the high-roller questionnaire. Would business people want to tell us what the first money they ever earned was and how much they had on them now?

The first one was an easy win, Chris Donald from Viz, who had made a fortune out of strips about violent vicars and boys with explosive backsides. My favourites from those we ran were the less obvious ones like Russian-looking American Victor Kiam who had been famous when I was younger for advertising his own shavers on TV with the phrase ‘I was so impressed I bought the company’. In the pre-Internet days it was sometimes a bit of a hunt to track these people down – you couldn’t use Google or LinkedIn. When someone uttered the line, ‘I didn’t get where I am today by . . .’ in the office one day I realised we should feature the businessman whose catchphrase it was. CJ, the boss of Sunshine Desserts in David Nobbs’s brilliant sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. I wrote to their creator to see if he could get CJ to do it. David Nobbs didn’t get where he was today without recognising a good opportunity and agreed to write it for £200. Many years later I’d call David back to come and script-edit a BBC sitcom project written by Mitchell and Webb about my time ‘adrift in a sea of women’ at Condé Nast Publications.

A lot of these high-roller questionnaires were just sent out as a fixed list of questions with gaps for the answers to be written in by hand. I didn’t expect the targeted high rollers had too much time on their hands but I did think they probably liked telling their stories of how they made it and figured that requesting short answers would be an attractive workload for them.

Film director turned brilliantly obnoxious restaurant critic Michael Winner, who was largely the basis for Dr Mick, our back-page ‘aggro uncle’ and a regular in the Platinum Rogues chart, knocked back the idea of a written exchange and invited me out to his famous 58-bedroom mansion in Holland Park, next door to Jimmy Page’s even more impressive gaff. I found Winner sitting ready and waiting behind his desk with his own tape recorder rolling with the intention of making sure he had a true record of the conversation. This didn’t bother me at all but when I started to ask the questions he turned to his side and began staring out of the window and answering airily like a pompous regional Roman governor, thinking he was plucking genius from the air.

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