Whoops, he’s done it again. There’s Richard Madeley looking like a complete
twerp in the current Heat magazine. He’s wearing a smock and a fright wig,
and he’s done up to look like John Lennon. His wife Judy Finni-gan is in a
Yoko Ono costume, and they’re both in bed. Crazy. But then Madeley is, I’m
afraid, a bit of a nutter.
I worked with them both 18 years ago, when they were fronting ITV’s daytime
juggernaut This Morning. My job was to find people willing to appear on the
show; Richard and Judy’s was to chat to a daily mélange that might typically
include a contest of Mr Spock-alikes, five models in hot pants, David
Cassidy, a child with leukaemia, Roy Hattersley and someone about to have
her tongue pierced. A blend of tabloid schlock and Good Housekeeping,
overseen by broadcasting’s most famous couple.
R&J, as they were known to us, have been married for more than two decades
and have four children between them (the two eldest are from Judy’s first
marriage). However, while Judy is unashamedly mumsy, Richard seems to
inhabit a no-man’s land between 30 and 50.
Actually he’s now 52 – eight years his wife’s junior – but could pass as a
decade younger, still floppy-haired and bursting with gung-ho spirit. I bet
it took him about five seconds to be persuaded into the Lennon gear, whereas
Judy probably had to have a lie-down and a chat with her agent.
On air, he’s neither dangerously sexy nor astonishingly witty. His great skill
is to appear relaxed, maintaining an air of genial optimism while the
chaotic capering that is live television unrolls around him. Toe-curling
moments were common on This Morning, and many were down to him: Madeley
doing his Ali G impression, for instance, or greeting Keith Chegwin’s
confession of an alcohol problem with the words: “You’ve got a lot of
bottle.”
He had a bit of a low point in 1990 when he was twice accused of shoplifting
wine from Tesco, but he cleared his name. That apart, the most transgressive
thing he ever got up to at This Morning was to skulk in the gents after the
daily transmission, smoking Benson & Hedges and reading The Sun. Out of
Judy’s reach, you see.
He has since given up the fags, but is still doing the sofa shtick, now on
digital TV, and has maintained the cheery blitheness that has helped him to
steer around so many awkward moments. Perhaps the key to Madeley is that
unlike, say, John Lennon, he has an almost total lack of cool.
Talking about his latest project – a well-written memoir called Fathers &
Sons – he recalls that the idea for it was hatched over lunch with his agent
in Pizza Hut. Not J Sheekey’s or Le Caprice, note, but good old Pizza Hut in
Stock-well, south London. And the venue certainly wasn’t chosen in a spirit
of knowing irony; he doesn’t do irony.
Does it bother him that millions know him as the slightly daft sop who’s
married to that tough cookie, Judy? Not really. Unusually, for a man in the
spotlight, he doesn’t seem to mind what people say. Wife’s bra outed at the
National Television Awards – so what? Berated for being lowbrow – who cares?
The Reader’s Digest recently asked him to write an article on all his
gaffes. Most of them (he says) have been invented. “Like I was meant to say
to an artist, ‘This is your self-portrait. Who is it of?’ As if! It
occasionally grates but, f***, it doesn’t matter. The worst thing you can do
on telly is take yourself seriously, and I never have. I have a very strong
work ethic. But about my profile, I don’t give a shit.”
He dates this Teflon attitude back to his early days at Gra-nada TV, when he
worked with the late Tony Wilson, who went on to found the Haçienda
nightclub in Manchester. “I kept seeing these signs all over Manchester
saying, ‘Tony Wilson is a w*****.’ And I was thinking that it would really
do me in if I read, ‘Richard Madeley is a w*****,’ all over Manchester. I
talked to Tony, and he laughed and said, ‘Everyone on TV is a w*****. Get
over it’.”
Madeley stretches out his long legs (clad in unfashionable denim) and feet
(shod in unfashionable shoes). “It was quite liberating, actually. I got to
this Zen position years ago. If someone wants to say, ‘I think that bloke
off the telly is a c***’, they have every right to say so.” Madeley looks at
me calmly. He clearly has no problem with swearing, since he does it as
often as he can.
So there they are in Pizza Hut, the TV star and his agent, and Madeley starts
talking about his grandfather Geoffrey, who had a pretty grim time of it, by
all accounts. In 1907, aged 10, Geoffrey was abandoned by his parents, who
emigrated to Canada with their six other children – departing in the night
and neglecting to tell him he would henceforth live with his uncle on a
farm. Geoffrey, it turned out, was part of the deal: he was to be his
uncle’s unpaid labourer in exchange for the family’s tickets to Canada.
As an adult, Grandpa Madeley ended up so ground down by his life of toil on
the farm that all the humanity was knocked out of him. After producing three
sons, he sent his youngest, Christopher, to a boarding school, where the
poor lad was tormented and bullied. Christopher Madeley was Richard’s
father. And, in turn, Christopher reacted to his own damaged childhood by
beating the living daylights out of his own son when he was eight.
The violence went on for about two years. Always on a Saturday, remembers
Madeley, when his mother was out. Some minor wrongdoing would have been
committed, and Richard would hear the shed door creak and see his father
getting out the long bamboo cane. “I was quite literally his whipping boy,”
he says. He’d be thrashed until he was on his knees, screaming.
The abuse came to an end when he was 10 and his father beat him for eating a
packet of Rolos. At the sight of the multiple weals on Richard’s arms and
torso, his mother told Christopher that if he ever touched the boy again she
would leave.
Madeley says that the act of writing brought back long-buried memories. “The
scraping of the shed door. Looking at the pictures on the wall as I waited
for him to come back in with the stick. I’d completely forgotten it all.” He
pauses. For a moment, I wonder if he is going to become emotional.
“I just, you know, moved on,” he continues, in that chirpy manner of his.
Emotional out-pourings are not a Madeley trait. Nor does he seem to blame
his father – who died 30 years ago – for what he did.
“I think it was the last spasm of outrage at his own treatment as a young
boy,” he says. “I forgave him because I could. It wasn’t as if he was a
drunk or a misogynist bully. He was a lovely man. These incidents were an
aberration. Instinctively, at nine, I was able to com-partmentalise them as
such.”
The book has a thumping plot and a clear sense of place and time. Was it,
ahem, written by someone else? “Ghosted? If anyone suggests it’s ghosted
I’ll punch them,” Madeley says, alarmingly.
Anyway, as he reminds me, he started out as a scribbler. His dad worked for
Ford in Dagen-ham, and Madeley left school at 16 to join the Brentwood
Argus. He wanted to get on. “I always felt like a man in a hurry. I think my
overwhelmingly up-beat approach is to do with starting young, but much more
fundamentally a reaction against Dad. I didn’t want to be an unhappy,
troubled person in the way I knew he was.”
What he finds intriguing is how the moral setting of a life can change. “For
me, shibboleths evaporate in a second. Did my father really hit me and not
get arrested? On my 10th birthday, did me and my friends really go into town
on a bus, no questions asked? It’s odd. Everything has changed for a number
of reasons one can only dimly begin to guess at.”
He’s jolly chuffed, however, to have at last done something that doesn’t end
with a roll of on-screen credits. “Everything so far in my life has been
footprints in the sand. The book is something solid, whereas television
isn’t. As we speak, it’s all going out past Mars.”
And if that isn’t a classic piece of Richard Madeley daft-speak, I don’t know
what is.
Fathers & Sons by Richard Madeley is published by Simon & Schuster
tomorrow, priced £18.99
