I rolled about in custard with Sheena Easton & Annie Lennox thinking: ‘I get paid for this...’
Star looks back on 5 bonkers decades
weren’t that sure about him. He was very young and very nervous. And then in the second series, he worked up routines on David Bellamy and Trevor McDonald. And he grew and grew – he was fantastic. An amazing talent, Len.
“So I didn’t discover him, but I revived his career.”
Banking on the success of Tiswas, which peaked with 4.7 million viewers, OTT was an adult late-night show produced and presented by Chris and the very antithesis of woke TV.
“OTT was live, very much experimental TV. Some of it was brilliant. Some was truly dreadful.
“The classic one was the Rat Man. He came on the show with a boxful of rats which he’d stuff down his seethrough tights.
“People were screaming, standing
on their seats, going berserk. The place was in uproar. It was fantastic, a sensation. But then we had all these complaints about cruelty to rats.”
Reading-born, Midlands-bred Chris has barely been out of the primetime spotlight since those heady days.
But even he nearly turned down the chance to host Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the world’s most popular quiz show, after his good pal Kenny Everett had done so.
“I think it would have been very funny with Kenny - and a very different show. I said, ‘I’ll do a pilot, but I’m really too busy to do the actual show if it takes off ’. I could’ve turned down Millionaire, which would have been really stupid. Like the man who turned down The Beatles.”
Chris freely admits he disliked some of the contestants. “The job was to not show it. But there was one man, Richard Deeley from Nottingham: Dick by name, d**k by nature.
“I gave him a cheque for £32,000, which I think is a lot of money. He screwed it up and threw it across the studio floor and said, ‘We won’t be needing that’.
“I thought it was so insulting to the show, to me, but most of all to a dear old granny who would think £4,000 was a great deal of money. And there was this arse throwing away a cheque for £32,000.
“When he got his £64,000 question wrong, you could hear the audience going, ‘Yes! W***er!’” He had to go grovelling around for his cheque on the floor afterwards. What a t **** r.”
Of course Chris’s most famous contestant was Major Charles Ingram, who would have swindled his way to the jackpot in 2001 had it not been for the keen ears of a young editor who alerted bosses to the timely coughs from the audience.
As for Chris’s own fortunes, in 2014 he suffered a stroke on a plane. He
credits his full recovery to the swift action of paramedics, intensive speech therapy and a physiotherapist who “beat me up”.
His partner of 15 years, Jane Bird, helps ensure he stays healthy.
“The stroke was the scariest thing in my life,” says Chris. “I thought I was going to die in mid air.
“I was in good hands but also bloody lucky. And I’m looking after myself.
“I don’t drink whisky at all. I just thought neat whisky’s probably not a good idea. Jane’s been good at sorting out my diet and I don’t eat pies and chips. I’ve lost a bit of weight and am feeling pretty good. Actually, I’m annoyingly happy now.”
I could have turned down Millionaire, like the man who turned down The Beatles
It’s Not A Proper Job, by Chris Tarrant, is published by Great Northern Books on April 25 at £17.99.
CHRIS ON AVOIDING A MASSIVE CAREER BLUNDER