The World According to Gogglebox Read online

  SANDY: And the people were singing to you, the guys. And we got rushed in Leicester Square before that too. By the massive picture house. We were together, and we couldn’t move. They wouldn’t let us go. People from everywhere. Every nationality came that day. It was like when somebody does a book signing and people queue up.

  SANDRA: Yeah, I’ve got that going on now.

  SANDY: But we don’t go on Twitter while the programme’s on.

  SANDRA: When I am on Twitter, I play I Spy With My Little Eye. I just talk and play games with people. Normal conversations, you get me? And no one has said nothing wrong. One person said something bad. One. And that was my son’s friend. He must have tweeted my son, and said, ‘Oh, your mum’s talking too much.’ I just said to him, ‘Come off my page. Now.’ And he did.

  WOULD YOU NORMALLY WATCH TV TOGETHER?

  SANDRA: Yes, EastEnders. Wendy Williams. Some African programmes.

  SANDY: We watch everything. We’re TV addicts. And when you’re watching, you don’t sit there and say nothing to each other. That’s rubbish. Any family has something wrong with them if you all just sit there all silent, not even saying nothing.

  SANDRA: One time, we were filming and the door was shut and one of the lights blew. Do you think anyone came in to help? They left us in here. And when I was playing with my whip, watching Chatty Man, doing Britney Spears. And I took the whip and it went in my face. An accident. It fucking hurt. And they filmed it.

  SANDY: Things do happen, which is funny. Things which are unexpected. It’s not planned. It’s not us doing it. It’s like when there was the rat.

  I was sat here, and he came out and looked at me from over there. But it was filmed and it was excellent. It worked. You know it went into somebody’s handbag.

  ANYTHING YOUR PARENTS WOULDN’T

  LET YOU WATCH?

  SANDY: Dirty films. I mean, nothing really came on TV back then. Maybe a one-off tit or something.

  SANDRA: We never got what is going on today.

  SANDY: But then my mum wouldn’t allow us in the front room anyway to watch television. They always had a key and locked it, so we didn’t really get to watch TV. Not unless it was a day when my mum was in a good mood and she might give us, like, an hour or two to come and sit in the front room to be quiet. You know: West Indian families. Queen B’s Dominican, but I’m from Jamaican parents.

  SANDRA: I grew up with a lot of family. Everybody was in each other’s houses. Lots of kids, lots of families, too many people.

  SANDY: Yeah, we had that. But my mum was very stern. Because you’re talking about seven girls and two boys. So she had to be, like, proper on. You get away with murder now. I didn’t get my first TV until I left home. Remember? You couldn’t answer no home phone.

  SANDRA: We had a padlock on it, on the phone. So you had to rattle it to make a call.

  SANDY: Yeah. Rattle the button at the top.

  SANDRA: We had a phone box. And my mum made sure I paid, God bless her soul. When I first got my Giro, it was £11 a week. I was about fifteen or sixteen. And my mum took five and left me with six. I’ll never forget it. And that is the truth.

  SANDRA: I always use the Pot Noodle pots to drink out of. I had millions before, but then I threw them all away. I had a collection with lots in there.

  SANDY: You had a Jerk Chicken one.

  SANDRA: I use the pots. It’s big, instead of having a little small cup. When I drink, I drink big.

  SANDRA: Yeah, chicken and mushroom. Listen. Don’t get it twisted, you know. Everyone who watches the show keeps on saying, on Twitter, ‘Where’s the aeroplane? Where’s the Pot Noodle?’ You know, if they can’t see them. Guess what I said. ‘It’s in a vault. A Channel 4 vault.’

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  BAASIT: The Big Bang Theory. It’s intelligent comedy, but the main characters are idiots. And that’s what’s so funny about something like Frasier. He’s a psychiatrist, they’re well-to-do, but this stuff is very slapstick and silly.

  SID: I like Frasier’s pains that he goes through, his pains about everything in life.

  UMAR: Bit of a sadist really, aren’t you?

  SID: Yeah. I miss Tommy Cooper. And Morecambe and Wise as well. I think they were really good.

  BAASIT: Fawlty Towers.

  UMAR: The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

  SID: But the funny thing is, that sort of comedy’s not popular now, is it? Because Elton John had a go, didn’t he?

  UMAR: Ben Elton.

  SID: It didn’t look right at all, and he wrote it in the similar style as they used to do it.

  BAASIT: Only Fools and Horses is hard to watch now.

  BILL & JOSEF, CAMBRIDGE

  JOSEF: I hated Monty Python. What a load of rubbish. But I liked The Goons. I think The Goons were really funny. I like Fawlty Towers. They changed the name of the hotel every week. There’s one – how they got away with it, I don’t know – Flowery Twats.

  BILL: Wasn’t it a pity that Nigel Farage didn’t stand in Newark? Because Newark’s an anagram of ‘wanker’. (And ‘William Hartston’ is an anagram of ‘It thrills a woman’.)

  THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON

  CAROLYNE: We worship at the altar of Jon Snow.

  ANDREW: An absolute gentleman. And thank God for the most impartial news on British TV, Channel 4 News. We watch it every dinnertime, without fail.

  CAROLYNE: Religiously.

  LOUIS: We’re not allowed to have anything else on.

  CAROLYNE: There was a piece where Jon Snow had been interviewing Russell Brand, and then Krishnan Guru-Murthy said, ‘A man who looked like God interviewing a man who looked like Jesus Christ.’ Which was brilliant.

  LOUIS: Krishnan’s brilliant. He tweeted one time, ‘I just made too many pancakes.’ He’s got a life. He does stuff when he’s not on the news. And I love Maggie Smith. I don’t know what it is.

  ANDREW: Ever since you were a little boy you used to like Maggie Smith. She’s in Clash of the Titans.

  LOUIS: Yeah, she was the goddess Hera.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  SID: I like Nicholas Parsons. Although he doesn’t come on television any more. I think he’s a real gentleman. Also John Humphrys, the Mastermind guy. And it’s not that they’re boring; they’re still funny. They can be comical. And they’re very clever, intelligent people. And they’re not big-headed about it either. As opposed to Paxman. It’s a standard, isn’t it? That’s how normal human beings should behave really.

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  JUNE: Tim Henman is a genuinely nice person. He was a superb player and he never made excuses. It was always, ‘I didn’t play as well as my opponent today.’ And he had a lot of pressure. I think maybe if he hadn’t had quite as much pressure, he could have won.

  LEON: That’s right. I always say, if I’d been the umpire when McEnroe was in his heyday, he’d have got a punch in the face.

  JUNE: Although you warmed to him when he came to Calderstones because he wore an Everton shirt.

  LEON: He had a number ten on his back.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  GRAHAM: Kevin McCloud.

  KATE: Simon Pegg.

  GRAHAM: You went to Spondon Asda to get his autograph.

  KATE: I found him. I found Simon Pegg. He gave me a Jaffa Cake. I was very happy. I don’t like Jaffa Cakes, but I ate it anyway because I wouldn’t want to upset him. I love Simon Pegg. Like, almost in a wrong way.

  GRAHAM: There are other people you admire. Like Clare Balding.

  KATE: And I love Olivia Colman. She’s just absolutely marvellous. Wonderful. And Jessica Hynes. I think she’s great. And Kirsty Wark’s fab. I like all women, don’t I? I wonder what that says about me? Probably that I’m a bit of a feminist, which is probably right.

  GRAHAM: Simon Pegg’s not a woman.

  KATE: No, but he’s very much in touch with his feminine side.

  Bill & Josef

  CAMBRIDGE

  Bi
ll, 67, and Josef, 69, have been friends for

  seventeen years. Bill, a journalist, is a former

  British Chess Champion who has represented

  the country in many international tournaments

  and won several times. Josef, an accountant,

  is the current World Cluedo Champion and

  Scottish Monopoly Champion.

  HOW DID YOU MEET?

  BILL: Josef and I met on a charity walk, visiting all of the places on the Monopoly board. So it was a walk round London, but you had to go as fast as you could through all the sites, in any order you liked, but only using public transport. Of course, the army teams did best. Basically running.

  HOW DID YOU GET ON GOGGLEBOX?

  JOSEF: They’d asked me, and they wanted two people. But there’s no way my wife is going to appear on television. So I thought, ‘Who do I know who’s stupid enough to do this programme?’ So I phoned up Bill.

  BILL: No, you didn’t. It was a complete accident. We just happened to bump into each other. You just said, ‘Would you be interested in appearing in a television programme with me?’ And I said, ‘Is it stupid?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ So I said, ‘Fine – let’s do it.’

  JOSEF: I thought it’d be a one-off programme. Turns out I was wrong.

  BILL: When the Gogglebox team rang me to say they wanted us, they said, ‘Just one thing – that painting behind you … ’ I was sure they were going to say it had to be covered, or would have to come down. And they said, ‘Could we have the name of the artist?’ To ask permission to show it. It was painted by Rebecca Ivatts, who was a neighbour of mine. She lived next door and I knew she was only here temporarily. I was feeding her occasionally – giving her biscuits – and eventually I saw her paintings and that was the one that I really liked. So I said, don’t leave Cambridge without selling it to me. So when she left, I bought it.

  There was a really funny moment – she and her parents were in Cambridge, after she’d left, and her father was sitting here peering at the painting, and saying it had always been his favourite of hers, and he was glad it had found a good home. And he was just looking at the hands above and he said, ‘Er … Rebecca … those are your hands, aren’t they?’ And she said, ‘Yes, Daddy.’ And this look came over his face when he realised the rest of it was her as well …

  Bill as a finalist on BBC 2's The Master Game chess tournament, 14 February 1977

  HAD YOU BEEN ON TV BEFORE?

  BILL: Yes. I first appeared as a commentator on programmes we did on the Fischer–Spassky world championship match in 1972, then I won the first two Master Game series, on which I went on to become a commentator. (By far the world’s best TV chess programmes of all time, incidentally.) Play Chess, which I presented, was a spin-off from that. We got audiences of two million.

  I was British Champion before we had any good players. The generation after mine overtook my generation so quickly and comprehensively that there came a moment when I either had to work very hard to avoid falling even further behind them, or just take it all a bit less seriously and earn a living by writing about them instead.

  I also played Mastermind with Derren Brown on one of his programmes when he’d asked for some chess players to pit his wits against. I was very happy to let him get his tricks right, because I knew they wouldn’t use my bits if he got them wrong. I had dinner with him around that time, incidentally, and we agreed to meet in a restaurant in Covent Garden. I got there early and was shown to the table where I sat for about half an hour waiting for him. Then I wandered off to see if he was waiting somewhere else, and found him sitting at the bar wondering where I’d got to. My opinion of his mind-reading skills dropped considerably (though he’s a very interesting person to have dinner with).

  JOSEF: I’ve done Fifteen to One and Countdown. GMTV have broadcast live from my cottage, showing my collection of board games. And Collector’s Lot also featured it. I have approximately 180 editions of Monopoly and about 110 Scrabble – different languages and special editions …

  BILL: There are seventeen As in Malaysian Scrabble, you know. That’s the highest number of any letter in any edition.

  Josef as Colonel Mustard, winner of the World Cluedo Championship, 1993

  THE OSTRICH IN ANCIENT AND

  MODERN TIMES

  BILL: I used to know Russell Ash. I commissioned him to write five columns in place of me, to fill one of my spots. And he wrote the five pieces on books with bizarre titles, getting more and more bizarre, until the last one was about someone at the Field Museum of Anthropology in Chicago, a guy called Berthold Laufer, who wrote a series of pamphlets with absolutely ridiculous titles. And Russell wrote, ‘There is one title which establishes this man as absolutely the most bizarre book writer of all time, which is Ostrich Egg-shell Cups of Mesopotamia and the Ostrich in Ancient and Modern Times.’ When I got the manuscript of his column, I just happened to have a copy of that book in my bag, so I photocopied the title page and faxed it to him. And he rang me up and said, ‘I might have known. If anyone would have a copy of that, it would be you.’

  WHAT DO YOU THINK

  OF YOURSELVES ON SCREEN?

  BILL: I think, ‘That’s me.’ I don’t feel I’m doing anything special or unusual or different for the programme. I reviewed a book for the Independent years ago about eccentrics, written by a psychologist. And he made this stupid mistake – and the whole book was completely flawed – because he’d asked for people who considered themselves eccentric, which eccentrics don’t.

  JOSEF: Eccentrics are normal.

  BILL: They just consider everybody else is eccentric.

  JOSEF: Norman Wisdom presented me with an award for being one of the UK’s top ten eccentrics.

  BILL: Norman Wisdom is the only person to have been given the Freedom of Tirana, Albania, without also having won a Nobel Prize.

  JOSEF: Yeah. They’re massive fans. Anyway, I was given an award for being eccentric because of my collection of board games, and the fact that I dress up as Colonel Mustard when I’m playing Cluedo, and I’ve got a big Monopoly suit I’ve had made especially, and I’ve played Rummikub in the bath and other weird things. For example, Radio Luxembourg once had a competition and the prize was to be a princess for four days. So I entered. And I won. And they said, ‘But it’s a girls’ competition.’ And I said, ‘It doesn’t say in the rules it’s a girls’ competition.’ They said, ‘No, it doesn’t. Well, OK, so you won. You’re a princess for four days.’ The idea was, I was to be given a tiara and a mannequin parade, but they didn’t think I’d be interested in that, so instead I was given a stopwatch and taken to a strip club.

  BILL: Danny Simon’s recipe for a successful sitcom was basically: define your characters well, and leave them to do the writing for you. The characters should be human archetypes but taken one step further. They should have all human weaknesses but a little bit further than the viewer’s. And I think that’s the real key to the success of Gogglebox: that we’re all outrageous, absurd characters in a way that everybody is outrageous and absurd, but taken one step further.

  BEING RECOGNISED

  BILL: In the last week I’ve been identified by several people, which I find very surprising because I’ve had an extreme haircut. And so even in the wrong place, wearing glasses, disguised with a haircut, people still point me out.

  JOSEF: I’ve just come back from Alaska…

  BILL: The only American state you can type on one row of a keyboard…

  JOSEF: He’s full of rubbish like this. Anyway, the steward on the plane said, ‘Oh, you’re on Gogglebox, aren’t you?’ And I said yes. And one of his mates said, ‘What’s Gogglebox?’ And he said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to watch it. It’s my wife’s favourite programme.’

  BILL: Peru is the only country you can type on one row of a keyboard. It’s a different row, of course.

  JOSEF: We went to a Christmas fair in Southampton, near where I live, and this woman came charging up to me and said, ‘I’m arg
uing with my friends: are you on Gogglebox?’ I said yes. ‘But it says Cambridge on the show.’ I said, I travel to Cambridge every week to do the filming. ‘More fool you,’ she said, and walked off.

  BILL: A few years ago, Mark Borkowski – he’s a PR man – was writing a book called The Fame Formula. I’ve known him for years, and he knows about my mathematical upbringing, and he said he’d been thinking about the idea that everyone’s famous for fifteen minutes. And he thought that, even if that was true when Warhol said it, he didn’t think it was true any more. And he asked me if I could find out how long people are famous for now.

  So I did an analysis for him. I took people like the winners of Britain’s Got Talent, who’d shot to fame from nothing, or people who’d been sort of travelling along at a fair level and then won an Oscar – and I ended up with the discovery that you are not famous for fifteen minutes, you’re famous for fifteen months. And after that, you get back to the level of fame you were at before.

  Bill’s mug collection

  WOULD YOU NORMALLY WATCH TV TOGETHER?

  JOSEF: Oh no. If he came down to see me, I doubt if we’d watch television.

  BILL: I rarely watch television. The only programmes I watch are Saturday Kitchen and The Big Bang Theory.

  JOSEF: I know why you watch The Big Bang Theory. Who’s the most pedantic on that programme?

  BILL: What, Sheldon? I can identify with Sheldon.

  JOSEF: You are Sheldon. You are the most pedantic pedant I know.