How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S3, Ep6 How to Fail: James O'Brien

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

Today's guest is quite possibly one of the most intimidating people to interview given his own reputation as a fearsome interrogator. But fine, I'll give it a go. James O'Brien is an LBC radio presenter who hosts a daily phone-in discussion show which attracts a million listeners a week. Clips of him dismantling the ignorance and prejudice of politicians, bigots and racists with his customary cool, hard logic have gone viral on more than one occasion.His first book, How To Be Right In A World Gone Wrong shot into the Sunday Times top 10 bestseller list last year and tackles everything from Islam to feminism via Brexit and Donald Trump. It is a brilliant and entertaining read and in it, O'Brien is not afraid to admit when he has been wrong (an infrequent occurrence, admittedly).He joins me to talk about failing at Physics GCSE, being adopted, going to a posh boarding school (and being expelled), how he got turned down by every single graduate traineeship on Fleet Street and ended up working as a tailor's assistant and selling Ronnie Wood a £15,000 Vicuna coat (true story). Along the way we also chat about the time Sean Connery hit him on the nose, his failure to record a CBeebies bedtime story and believing 'the angriest people are the ones who are most in need of help.'  How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and sponsored by 4th Estate Books The book of the podcast, How To Fail: Everything I've Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day is available to pre-order here. How To Be Right In A World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien is published by WH Allen   Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayJames O'Brien: @mrjamesobChris Sharp @chrissharpaudio4th Estate Books @4thEstateBooks  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. This season of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is sponsored by Fourth Estate Books. Spanning the sweep of the 20th century, We Must Be Brave by Frances Leodette is a luminous and profoundly moving novel about the people we rescue and the ways in which they rescue us back. I was lucky enough to read a proof of this novel a few months ago and it had me in tears. It will have you in tears too, I guarantee it. You can find out more

about We Must Be Brave at forthestate.co.uk. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. James O'Brien is many things. A radio presenter, an author, a husband, a father, and the face that launched a thousand viral internet clips.

This is the man whose forensic dismantling of everything from Brexit to Donald Trump on his daily call-in radio show, has broken the internet on more than one occasion. O'Brien started out as a showbiz reporter for the Daily Express before becoming one of Britain's most recognisable voices, hosting a phone and current affairs discussion on LBC, which attracts a million listeners a week. His put-downs are pithy, his logic unassailable, his politics self-avowedly liberal. Sometimes he is even funny. O'Brien's first book, How to Be Right in a World Gone Wrong, shot into the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list and tackles everything from Islam to feminism.

I realised quite early on, he writes, that even the most passionately held prejudices are vulnerable to the simplest of questions. So James, I shall endeavour to ask simple questions. Shouldn't be too hard. I'll endeavour to be passionately prejudiced. It's wildly intimidating coming to interview you, I have to say. It is one of the best in the game. Even on my way up here, we're recording at the LBC studios and the security guard on the door was like give him l girl the pressure got a lot of time for courtney but i'm very glad that i get to talk to you about failure and yes not brexit um just as well actually i've just done three hours straight

on brexit so although actually it's becoming hard to separate the two failure and brexit yeah i've done it already do you ever not have an opinion on anything recently yes i mean historically of course because that's normal but then you become a phone-in host drop a name early i met terry wogan just about five or six years ago backstage at the alan titchmarsh show rock and roll and And he said, ah, you're the fellow with the pungent opinions. And I thought, I don't know that I want to be the fellow with the pungent opinions. So oddly, this is pre-Trump and Brexit. I did find myself then thinking, maybe you don't have to go on every day claiming that you've got all the answers.

So no, there are issues I enjoy not having an opinion and even ones where I enjoy feeling my opinion change as the facts change so the temptation of picking a side and then just shouting furiously at the other side regardless of what's unfolding in front of you is one that I consciously resist. You're a father of two as I mentioned two daughters so in your home you're outnumbered three to one by women who wins arguments at home? Not me really to be honest arguments are more likely to be about who's better out of taylor swift and katherine mcgrath which i'm not really qualified to contribute to or to referee my wife and i don't really i mean we argue like couples argue but no

one ever wins those arguments do they the dishwasher never gets stacked differently and the laundry never gets put away in a tidier fashion. What Lucy has taught me, and I mention this in the dedication of the book, is that there are tactics that make winning arguments more likely. But being an adept deployer of those tactics doesn't actually mean your arguments are necessarily stronger than the ones you're employing those tactics to fight against. So you can end up winning arguments without necessarily being right. And I think if you're not going to turn into something of a stereotype or a cliche, the moments

where you realize you're wrong should be of much more value personally than the moments when you realize that you're right. And have you ever dried up in the middle of your show? Because when I listen to you on air, or when I look at one of those viral internet clips you're so brilliant at debating and having all the points at your fingertips and being fluent while expressing them thank you I've never actually I mean you get frogs in your throat and coughs and stuff like that but I've never and there have been moments where a couple of callers over the years have just had a better brief than I've had and I try not to be quite as short-tempered or punchy as I used to be but if you're going in with quite an

aggressive demeanor on my part and then the bloke or the woman on the other end of the phone line clearly knows more about the issue than you do then there is a gulping moment there's a kind of oh god I better remarch on my forces on this one or I better start trying to retreat with a little bit of dignity it doesn't happen very very often but i think you have to be aware when it does but no i mean that's the fear though this is the most terrifying question of all really is the idea and every monday and every time i come back from holiday there's a cold dark few moments in the night where you think what if i turn up tomorrow and i can't do it anymore what if i literally can't think of anything to say but so far so good you talk in the book which I loved by the way and I'm not just

saying that because I'm intimidated and sitting opposite you because you are very very smart and cogent in your thoughts in that book and you managed to do it all in in not very many pages no it's compact it It is, cogent. But you talk in that book about how you had your mind changed by someone who called in. Yes. Can you tell us about that particular exchange? Is that the tattoo topic or is that? That is the feminism topic, the one about filling out your jeans.

Oh, no, okay, yes. Well, there's a few. There's more than one example of me being wrong and changing my mind after, like a lot of men. And my background is in newspapers and at the more tabloidy end of the market rather than where I thought I'd be when I left university I thought I'd be a book reviewer for the Sunday Times but I ended up being a gossip columnist and a showbiz journalist on the Daily Express which was interesting it was a straight toss-up I suppose between deciding who you found more interesting Norman Lamont or Norman Cook

at that particular point in Britain's cultural history. So I went down that route. And also I went to an all-boys school, boarding. And so stuff that I'd never really stopped to question or to wonder whether it was bad just becomes part of you, doesn't it? It becomes part of your sort of mental furniture. And so the idea of complimenting a woman on her appearance never seemed controversial to me.

But when we started doing phone-ins on wolf whistling being bad and sundry other sort of open goals for a phone-in show I found myself quite uncomfortable sometimes when women were ringing me to tell me that they liked particularly older women oh we liked having our bottoms pinched in the typing pool and we like being wolf whistled and we like and and i couldn't work out where the line was between what's acceptable and what's unacceptable because clearly it's a very blurred line as we see with stuff like the president's club dinner and things like that so this woman rang in and she could tell sometimes you can tell that people are really surprised to find

themselves on the radio in a way they're my favorite callers because it means i've baited my hook in a very successful way so she's a woman in I think her late 40s or her 50s and she's recalling an incident from her 20s from her mid-20s when she was doing her articles in a city law firm and they went in on a Saturday which meant that she was wearing casual clothes as opposed to business clothes and she's in the lift with the partner who she is working with that weekend and obviously the office is much quieter than it usually is and the partner said they're in the lift so just the two of them may i just say i love the way you fill out those jeans right yeah now you you you of course you shudder but i wouldn't have realized why that was so much more unpleasant than simply saying you look great in those jeans or i love

your jeans and we worked it out together and of course what it meant was as she said it wasn't complimenting me on my jeans he was complimenting me on my bottom he was actually imagining my bottom the way you fill them out that is he has a mental image of me without my jeans on or and it often happens it was a proper penny drop moment when i thought crikey that is the difference you can i can compliment you on your scent or on your clothes or on your hair or on your but i can't compliment you in a way that makes it think i've thought about you in a sexual way i'm just laughing at the idea of you complimenting someone on their scent i often do that men and women well i work you see in beatys in worcester for many Seriously? Seriously. And I was the only man on the makeup

and perfume floor. I had the concession for Davidoff Cool Water and Jupe. What? Those are the smells of my youth. Well, there you go. I can detect them from five or that and white musk from the body shot, which still makes my tummy flip over. So those are the sort of early romantic moments. But no, I love perfume. So yes, I do often

compliment people on their scent. And it's a nice thing to do as well because it's to tell someone they smell nice it's quite visceral it is nice i noticed you haven't said that to me so i don't know what to take from the studio we're in has a very strong aroma of one of my colleagues um talking about the things that you are willing to be educated on yes takes me to your first failure which you've actually just mentioned to me which I'm fascinated by because you failed physics GCSE yes and you were as you mentioned at this very privileged yes boys boarding school yes ample fourth yes and you've failed which might be quite a hard thing to do when you're getting that level of education yeah I mean it did ample force quite an interesting so it's a

very broad charge so it doesn't have an entrance exam at 11 if you go to the junior school so there was none of that public school streaming that you sometimes get it wasn't pushy so there were other kids that were failing exams but not in my stream you know not in the in the top stream physics i got a d and then actually the same year i did an ao level in statistics because i'd sat six o levels a year earlier and then four gcs and two AO levels you weren't allowed to give up math so they made me do statistics for a year I got an E in that that was funny because I'd spent the whole year faffing about but to get a D in physics was yeah not very nice for someone who cast himself as in relief to the sports lobby you know I was one of the clever lobby and I know why

I got a D in physics I got a D in physics because I found it difficult and if I found stuff difficult at that age I gave up because there were some things without being too cocky there were some things i could be the best at so i knew i could come top or thereabouts in english and in history and later on in politics i knew i could probably get the lead in the school play i knew i'd win most debating competitions i knew i was good at this i'm quite good at tennis oddly enough for someone who's quite malcoordinated but on good day, I could pretty much take on anyone at tennis. But I was rubbish at physics and not very good at maths. And physics in particular, I just gave up on.

And rugby as well. It was very much a rugby school. I was in the same year as Laurence Delaglio, who went on to Captain England. And that's why I never played rugby, really, because I was in the same year as people who were absolutely brilliant. I've been thinking about this a lot, actually, as my kids are kind of deciding what sports they want to play and one of the stupidest things i ever did was not play sport because i couldn't be brilliant at it that's failure of sorts it's failure to be good but

then also failure to recognize all the benefits of doing something that don't involve being brilliant and winning so interesting you say that because i think i was exactly the same in that the things that i was not great at science maths sports i would then disdain yes it's not it's not enough just to be bad at them you have to somehow devalue them or debase them don't you and so well who'd want to be good at math so you end up describing the rugby lot as neanderthals and you end up describing mathematicians as geeks and you end up describing people who are good at physics as freak shows and actually it probably says more about us than it does about them you talk very movingly in your book about the fact that you are adopted and that because of that you're very aware of how

differently your life might have turned out which is what gives you this kind of liberal conscience well yeah i hope it's not just that because a sense, that's quite a selfish reason to be liberal. The sense that it's John Rawls, isn't it? The veil of ignorance. It could be me on the receiving end of these discriminations and these unfairnesses. Therefore, I will be opposed to the discriminations and the unfairnesses. Conscious growing up, people who aren't adopted are always much, much more interested in adoption than people who are adopted. So I understand why people find it interesting because it is out of the ordinary. But I was conscious growing up that I could have been born to my biological mother, which would have been a single teenager in rural Ireland. So it's highly unlikely I'd have been staying with her. Or if we were kept together, it would have been under the auspices of some dreadful religious order or some dreadful religious organization. I didn't work that bit out until I was older. But in terms of material and emotional comfort,

yeah, I've always been conscious of, and I only realized this at the Hay Festival, oddly, last summer when someone else asked me a question about something completely different. And I tried to work out why. And I just sort of had this image in my head of the me that didn't get adopted. And then possibly my politics is directed at people less

lucky than me so when you failed at an exam at school where your parents had obviously saved money to send you to did you feel a particular sense then of failing them because of everything they'd done for you catholic school as well so guilt in the dna it's not you know you didn't have to fail exams to feel guilty that's. That's just the icing on the cake. It's the way of life. The cake of guilt. Yeah. And I was very conscious that it was not something that they could afford, really.

I mean, they just about got through it. But the things that, you know, we would have had if I hadn't gone to that school in terms of cars and holidays and lifestyles, I've become very aware of since. But at the time, I knew it was costing them a lot of money. I knew that almost every school report I ever got said that I could work much harder I knew I was getting away with it because I was producing the goods in the areas that I like so yeah when I yeah when I failed it did feel like you'd let them down in a way that it wouldn't do if you weren't conscious of the sacrifices they were making to give you an education but that's an interesting thing because I mean a lot of therapists and psychologists are very persuaded that everyone who goes to boarding school has

abandonment issues there's a sense that even when you're furiously persuaded that you don't you couple those two things together the sense that your mom and dad are doing this to their own material detriment and emotional detriment they'd much rather have had me at home my mum especially and financial yet you've also got this deep down buried notion that you know i'd rather be going home tonight but i can't because my mum and dad are brilliant there's a sort of weird contradiction there which you are aware of but i never worked any harder so it can't have been affecting me that deeply my dad got a letter off my house master once but my dad was an amazing man and again i realized latterly since we've lost him just how amazing he was because he's letting out all this money to send me to this school and i'm

wasting some of it and he gets a letter saying off my housemaster was a horrible man and it said something like i feel i need to inform you that james is wasting his time in the theater wasting your money and uh spending far too much time socializing and my dad wrote back and listed these things. As for your final three point, it sounds to me like James has all the makings of a good O'Brien. And I just thought, oh, mate. Oh, that's lovely.

It really was at the time, because you're very lonely, even when you're not lonely, because your mates have got your back. But if, and I was always picking fights with authority figures, be they monks or teachers or both. And you might look like the guy with the massive ego but you're having a fight you're a child even if you're 17 you're having a fight with an adult and a monk has not just got the scholastic authority the school authority which everyone understands he's also got religious authority in that you're you know

you are told that these people have been chosen by god to be monks and you're calling them out for being hypocrites and frauds it's quite a lonely place to be so i don't know whether dad understood it that deeply but the notion that even if i ended up in a massive scrap with my house master my dad would have my back from 250 miles away meant meant an awful lot to me an awful lot strikes me that as someone raised a catholic you would have gone to confession and in a way what you do now you act as a sort of modern day confessional and i wonder where you put all of that stuff all of the anger and the bile that you receive yes what do you do with it at the end of the day well you have to believe in hope and redemption and you have to believe that the angriest people are the mons who are most in need of help there will be people who defy that analysis who actively seem to prefer

being furious or to prefer being hateful you learn pretty quickly not to give a hoot on one level you can't do it you can't do this job if you are going to be too sensitive or too thin skinned or you need a producer that doesn't let you see any of it, and that certainly happens as well. But I kind of don't laugh, but if there are people on social media who dedicate not just hours but years of their lives to trying to get noticed by someone who's got an overdeveloped ego, it's not hard to recast it as being quite flattering

in a very, very odd way. Are you saying that you've got an overdeveloped ego? I do. Well, yeah, you need to have an overdeveloped ego to do this job. But, I mean, I don't know how you describe people who put in shifts that you wouldn't believe on trying to be abusive and trying to get noticed by me i kind of take that as a compliment i mean some of them are so committed that if it was the other way around i'd be really worried be like the alan partridge episode where that bloke's got a shrine in his in his bedroom with little candles and

stuff like that the effort and the time that some people put into hating is a tribute to the fact that I must be doing something right. Did you learn anything from your failure at physics, GCSE? I mean, presumably you didn't learn anything about physics. Newton's third law of thermodynamics or something like that. I just remember the Van de Graaff generator. That was my favourite bit. Way ahead of me.

Yeah, I did. I learnt that it was the first actual time and a graph generator that was my favorite way ahead of me yeah i did i learned but i think it was the first actual time i couldn't get good grades by swatting up the night before and indulging in a little bit of bullshit in my exam science is the one subject isn't it that you can't be a generalist who's who's been up all night mainlining pro plus and then just waltzes into the exam regurgitates it all from, forgets it by tea time and gets on a good day at A, on a bad day at B. So yeah, I guess it was my relationship with hard work was defined by my failure in physics. And I realized I'm not very good at hard work. I'm not very good at long periods of dull application. I'm a show off.

So naturally, you became a journalist. Well, exactly that. I'm a generalist exactly that that was yeah harder than it should have been yeah so tell us why it was harder than it should have been because that leads us on to your second failure it does yeah i mean i because dad was on the telegraph he got made redundant my last year at ample fourth which i was so unjust in the great scheme of things because it meant that they didn't have the years of earning the good money he never got a job on quite the same scale as being on the staff on the telegraph so the years when he didn't have to find the money for the school fees he wasn't earning this so that really

hacks me off in retrospect i took a year off went to the lse last year at the lse i started thinking i better try and get into journalism absolutely nothing it was unbelievable the the guy that got sent to my dad when dad was in birmingham is the midlands correspondent he got sent a very brushy tail bright-eyed young oxford graduate who was destined for great things in the telegraph group and he came to shadow dad for a week and his name was charles moore who by the time i was in my final year at lse he was editor of the sunday telegraph and dad hadn't had any contact with him for four or five years. But I saw a poster for the Catholic Society at LSE, which I'm very ashamed

to admit, I hadn't previously been a particular luminary of the Catholic Society. But it said, Charles Moore's coming to talk about women priests, which was a big issue at the time. I think it prompted him to leave the Anglican Church and become a catholic actually so i thought all right yep i'll pop along to that for the very first time there's all these students there so what the hell are you doing pax mobiscom and at the end i go out to him that remind him who i am and and he's very very nice i said i'll give my regards to your father i'm actually hoping to uh to get into journalism and and you know and it's still i'm naive enough to think oh you know dad and dad help you out you'll probably give me a job aren't you that's because well you must get in touch with my secretary and we'll see what we can do so i'm thinking oh yeah result so i get in touch with this secretary and she said well

come in for a fortnight and i think i'll be fine i'll just do fortnight and they'll probably make me you know i don't know politics editor or something, or literary editor. And I turn up for a Fortnite work experience, and there are three other people there who have all just left Eton. And it's not a trial for a job at all, or it's basically just a kind of buggin's turn for public schoolboys

at the end of the Fortnite. That was it, it was goodbye. I got a byline in the paper. I sat next to a couple of people who were more or less my own age who were already very very successful journalists rachel sylvester was one of them and i did i remember sitting next to watching rachel at work and thinking oh no it's really hard being a journalist dad made it look so easy and at the end of that fortnight i went back to the shop i was working in selling suits and that was when i thought well I better I'm gonna have to apply so back to college my Saturday

job in the shop college and university ends and the Saturday job becomes more or less full-time and I'm I'm trying desperately to get taken on by various graduate traineeships and scholarships and you're selling suits yes are you measuring people yes yes I can still from a distance I could still kit out most people. Can you tell an inside leg measurement? Yeah, probably. Right. Usually.

Not sitting down. Okay. I wanted to test you on me. Well, you can't tell from here. But also, women are a very different shape. They have shorter trunks, usually. What? Okay, shorter trunks.

Longer legs. I never sold clothes to women. There wasn't that kind of shop. But I sold a lot. I sold, yeah, Aqucootum on Regent Street. You'd get proper posh people coming in. And I sold a cashmere coat to Paul Weller. And I sold a vicuna coat for £15,000 to Ronnie Wood.

And we were on commission. And this is going back 30 years almost. So that was a chunk of change. You'd probably buy a house with that back in those days. And he was such a dude and obviously so wealthy. This coat was the finest thing we'd ever sold in the shop we used to keep them and under lock and key and some of the older members of staff who were a little bit john inman out of all you be served they'd come over all quite quite emotional when someone tried one on i mean it was from from this special animal the vicuna is like a little llama or something i've

never and he not only bought one and it only came in one color this tan camely color which is i think close to the natural color of the animal but he liked it so much you know how cashmere is soft imagine something 10 times softer than cashmere as an overcoat and so ronnie would ask if we could dye him one navy blue and and the john inman characters nearly had they nearly faint oh my god no sir not in a million years so i couldn't possibly just want it can't you sort it out can't you just get a bit of stick it in a washing machine with a bit of blue dials i'd get 15 grand for a coat wouldn't have earned that in a year at the time so i loved i loved working there but it was reaching a point where i thought i'd actually

applied to be an area manager because i couldn't get arrested in the career that i wanted to go into and even begin to get arrested you're career that I wanted to go into and even begin to get arrested you're in your early 20s at that stage yeah early early to mid and I took a scenic road five years before I got a degree after leaving school so yeah probably 24 25 by now and so were your contemporaries going on and doing somewhere because I got chucked out of school I lost touch with a lot of my school friends and you got chucked out as in expelled yes did you know these are not in the book well it's no secret I got caught up in a big cannabis scandal at the end in the middle of my final year and four of us ended up kind of carrying the can for half the sixth form because we had a warped dead poet society if Enid Blyton

type worldview where you didn't dob anybody in ever so we didn't and then every other bugger did so we ended up getting thrown out of the school and they all got suspended but I got chucked out in the Easter holidays before my final term so I think in retrospect it was probably a lot more traumatic than I realised because not only did I miss out on, it was going to be a cake walk that final term, it was going to be prize

giving and all that malarkey and the school play so I got denied that which at the time I was very upset about. But looking back, it fractured a lot of my friendships because we never did that thing where you arrange to keep in touch or you agree to keep the bonds open. And oddly enough, it's only subsequent to the big sex abuse scandals and Facebook that a lot of my friendships from those days have come back around again. So that was an interesting experience and what happened then was i started in the shop but i didn't know what my school friends were doing really and my university friends were all very different so there were a couple who kind of got a break in journalism but one was in sweden so i wasn't jealous of that

most of the lads i knocked about with were either going into the city or oddly enough into teaching so again i never felt squeezed by them. I never had that Gore Vidal business about a little bit of you dying every time a friend such sees, but there was one day there was a lad I'd not got on great with being very good friends early on at school. He'd gone very much down the prefect route and I'd obviously gone very much down the opposite, whatever the opposite of the prefect route was. And we'd had a few set twos.

He was a big lad as well. I wouldn't say we were enemies, but he was someone that I was conscious of being in competition with. And he came in to buy a suit. God, I haven't remembered this for years. He came in to buy a suit, and I didn't clock who it was until it was too late, and I had to serve him.

Oh, how awful. And I'm on my knee. I'm on one knee in front of him measuring his inside leg. And I'm sure, actually, because, again, he's someone I've made friends with on Facebook since, but I'm sure he wasn't standing there thinking, ha, measure my inside leg, you little peasant. I'm sure he wasn't.

I know he wasn't. But, of course, I just got turned down for the umpteenth time from various newspapers. And in my head, he's laughing at me. Oh, James, did he recognize you? Oh, God, yeah. No, it wasn't that bad. He didn't even get to the end of it.

And then I go, I'm ever so humble, sir. We used to go to school together. That was bad, man. Yeah, that would be about 1993. When the film is made of your life, that's going to be a key scene. Do you think so? Yeah. But there was someone that you served in that suit shop who did change the direction of your life.

This is true, yes. So having utterly failed to get noticed by Fleet Street, all the normal tailors were off sick, actually. It was a terrible flu epidemic had gone around the whole shop. So the John Inman type characters, genuine are you being served type environment in the whole shop, not just the John Inman character, but Trevor Bannister's character as a Captain Peacock character. There's a Molly Sugden on the other floor,

on the female floor. You've got Miss Brahms. And John Major summoned the Taylors to Downing Street, which happened before, but not that often. Margaret Thatcher used to get aqua-scootin' suits. She was a sort of ambassadress for that look that twin set and pearls that wasn't she so john major summoned us to

downing street and we're a bit starstruck me and the other lad were glorified saturday boys but there was no one else to go and we go there we're going through the swatches of cloth and john major's like i quite like this one and we sort of think he's joking because it's it's brilliant white it's it's a bit like i mean tom wolf at the time it's not it's not even off white no no it's brilliant i mean it's really white it's john travolta and saturday night fever white and he said we've got that eu summit coming up in florence i think this will be perfect for so we sell him a white suit and i get back to the office back to back to the shop. And I think, well, that's a story. Because at the time, the spitting image, grey puppet with his pants on the outside of his trousers

and all that sort of thing. So I phoned them up. And I had a mate from school who was working on the column. That's someone I was jealous of, actually, Henry. But Henry was using me as a contact at the time. So I'd maybe pushed a couple of stories his way. But he didn't want to help me get onto the column because there's only so many shifts to go around.

But I ring his boss. And so i've got this story about john major and his boss says i'll give you 500 quid for it and i said can i have some shifts instead he said yeah you can have two shifts and that finally was how i got a foot in the door but really at the last minute i was due to be interviewed for an area manager's job so i'd have been driving around the southeast of england checking up on the aqua scooting concessions in house of fraser department stores and things like which wouldn't have been bad, but it was certainly not what I dreamt of being when I was a kid. So I started out not quite as a showbiz reporter, but on the Londoner's Diary on the Evening Standard, which is similar. We would be sent out night after night to go to these various parties and bowl up to celebrities and try and get stories out of them. Which on the one hand sounds great because you get to go to these parties and eat free canapes on the other hand is wildly intimidating were you were you and did everyone think you weren't yeah i think i got

a reputation i've got a bit of a resting bitch face and um when i'm nervous and shy i come across as haughty you see our paths never crossed in those days no i think you're a bit younger than me so we would never have been at the same parties. If only. Well, Charlotte Edwards, who edits Londoner's Diary now, also perhaps, I hope she doesn't mind me saying this, also perhaps has a bit of a resting bridge face. So I always thought she was just lapping it up.

She and I were, as she wrote this week in her other column, actually, we were very, we were great rivals, always squabbling. But I thought she found it all really, really easy. I have a feeling none of us did, actually. Well, this is why I wanted to talk to you about it, because did you find it, yeah, nerve-wracking? I'd be physically sick sometimes, genuinely physically sick,

before going into a room. And I would have always felt that for attractive women to go into that room was a lot easier than it was for a slightly sweaty, overweight man. But I actually now, in in retrospect i think we all found it pretty terrifying oddly henry who i mentioned a minute ago he didn't he was absolutely in his element he'd waltz into there and start chatting to everybody and he'd been out with so-and-so's daughter and he knew the earl of what's it and all that and they they seem to find it all really easy but i certainly didn't know the first one i ever did was an absolute nightmare dickie attenborough's

birthday party at the National Theatre. See, very few people speak this language in Isabel. I remember my first one, and it was a party with Dennis Thatcher and Tara Palmer Tompkinson, sadly, RIP. Yes, of course, both of them. But there you go, that's the kind of mix you get. And this one was unbelievable. So the lift doors open at the National Theatre,

and every face I see is famous, every single face. This was my first ever day. This was one of the shifts I got in return for doing the suit. And the lift doors open at the national theater and every face i see is famous every single face this is my first ever day this is one of the shifts i got in return for doing the suit and the lift doors shut again and i was just frozen i went downstairs drank a couple of whiskeys went back up tried again failed again samuel beckett and the only person i really spoke to was clive anderson who i think was the only person in the room more uncomfortable than i was about you know there's jeremy irons over there ben kingsley over there there, Ben Kingsley over there, Dickie Attenborough over there, and Annette Newman and Brian Forbes

over there. Everywhere you turn, there's a famous person. And I'm thinking, what's my job? I've got to go up to these people. I've got to interrupt them while they're talking to each other, seeming to be getting on famously. And I've got to try and make them say something that they might regret when it appears in the Daily Express two days later. So I get back to the office, and the editor's

going through the photos that Richard Young's dropped off, the kind of doy get back to the office, and the editor's going through the photos that Richard Young's dropped off, the kind of doyenne of the celebrity photographers. And the editor's going, did you talk to him? I go, no. Did you talk to her? No. Did you talk, well, they seem to be having,

I guess I did talk to him. Did he say anything interesting? No. And the whole list, I mean, 40 or 50 photographs in my memory, it might have only been 14 or 15 in reality. Every single one of them, I'm going, no, no, no, no, no. That was day one. Day two, they sent me to an Oscar winner's party at Alina's L'Etoile on Charlotte Street.

And there was a rumor Sean Connery was going to turn up. And he did. And I thought, well, I've got to get a line out of Sean Connery. And I'd done a little bit of research. I knew his son, Jason, had just made a film with Macbeth. He arrives. He completely ignores us. Marches past us.

He's heading towards the bit we're not allowed into, journalists aren't allowed into. And I shout after him, have you seen Jason in Macbeth yet, Mr Connery? Completely ignores us. So what's wrong, Mr Connery? I don't know why I said this, looking back. Are you a bit jealous you never got the chance to play the part yourself?

About his own son. And he stops dead. And all the other journalists sort of fade away slightly and i'm left standing there in my little notebook that i bought that day from smiths and he comes down and he hits me quite hard on the nose to make my eyes water he goes i played the part before you were born just do your fucking homework shunny like this like i've got a story and that was it that was it i still don't know genuinely you've got a watery nose and a story but it's worth it well if i hadn't come back that day I still don't know, genuinely. You've got a watery nose and a story, but it's worth it. Well, if I hadn't come back that day, I don't think I could have been, I don't know where I would have got my next chance.

Do you think that those social failures helped you learn to talk to people? Because I do think it helped me massively. You have to establish a connection really quite quickly. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But all good journalism does that. You should have seen my dad in action. So my dad could be with the head of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, or he could be with the Earl of Warwick doing an interview at Warwick Castle.

He could, dad could talk to absolutely anybody. And the way that they often say Etonians have this great democratic gift. My dad left school at 15. He went to a secondary modern in Leeds. And he could talk to absolutely anybody. And that's why he was such a brilliant journalist so when we were when he was covering the miners strike he'd be getting calls at home from arthur scargill and he'd be getting calls at home from the fellow running the coal board or from the you know even cabinet level contacts in the department of trade and industry so yeah actually looking back i wouldn't have said

that until you asked but yeah you have to learn to keep the conversation going and to make sure that the person you're talking to is engaged. Because the worst ones, do you ever remember when the comment would just peter out and you'd still be standing there holding your glass of warm champagne? Awful. I had a fail-safe question, though, that I would always ask. I bet you never told anyone else, did you? No. Because they'd have nicked it. What was it?

Scoop. Exclusive. My question was, who do you think is going to be the next James Bond? Oh, that's a cracker. Thank you. You'd get a line out of that on a really slow day, wouldn't you? Because whatever anyone says, you can sort of get a line out of it. Well, yeah, out of that you can. I never had anything like that.

And also, I was so bad at it. I'd turn the page. I'd turn to Londoner's Diary when I was on Hickey at the Express. I'd see a story from the party I'd been at that I knew. I'd say, hang on, he told me that as well. I hadn't realised it was a story. This is even after doing it for years. I was so rubbish at knowing what had a line to it and what didn't. So in the end, I'd just shovel everything. I'd file everything and let the editors decide what they were or weren't going to use. Your third failure is a mysterious one. I'm sorry,

we will get... We haven't will clarify the second the second failure has been turned down specifically by every single graduate traineeship on fleet street several times every single one every single one i interviewed alan ross bridger about his book not long ago and i couldn't let it lie i had to tell him good for you two years running alan two years running ross bridger you turn me down sent me back with my little tape measure and my tailor's chalk i should have been i should have been covering the fall of the burning war you bastard what did he say when he was very suitably apologetic and he said very kind things about the work i've done since to which i sent him a copy of the book actually i wrote in the front i said imagine how good this

could have been if i got onto that pesky train you could have had serialization right several volumes by now um The third one. Yeah, the third one is mysterious. Is it? Well, only because what you've said to me is recording two CBB's bedtime stories, which were never broadcast. How on earth did that come about? I did a job with Claudia Winkler many moons ago.

Quite odd, actually. I haven't seen Claudia for genuinely for years. But we presented together with Victoria Derbyshire. Gosh. Come full circle. We've done okay, haven't we, three of us, which is one of those really raucous late night debate shows. We made it for ITV in Birmingham for Central Television, Central Weekend Live, which was iconic for me growing up in Kidderminster. So I couldn't quite

believe it when they let me have a run out. So I knew Claudia and she'd done some CBB's bedtime stories that week because my daughter was of an age where we were beginning to watch them. She'd be my oldest. And for reasons I can't remember, the head of CBeebies came on to talk about something on the radio show. And I shamelessly said, oh, and my friend Claudia is doing such a good job with those bedtime stories. I'd love to have a go.

Absolutely shamelessly because I've got a little girl now. And I was thinking, imagine if Daddy's doing a bedtime story on CBeebies. There were two problems with it. One is that by this point, I hadn't seen Claudia for years. And to say live on the radio, my good friend Claudia was not only achingly showbiz, it was also untrue.

And I don't know whether that's part of the reason for what happened next. But the guy said, well, off air, he said, you must come in and do a couple. So I did. You know, I got my best clothes on and practiced. I used to do acting at school. next but the guy said well off air he said you must come in and do a couple so i did you know i got my best clothes on and practiced i used to do acting at school and i was really excited about and they sent me two children's books and i sat there and i said hello here's a story about a about a fish with a dish and i did it and i really went for it and it was a proper crew

it was all studioed and people working. And I never heard another... I never heard a word. I hate this story. I never heard another word from them. So I don't know whether this guy who ran CBeebies rang up Claudia and said, Oh, I've got your friend James introduced. And she said, Who?

Oh, that weird bloke I did something with in Birmingham five years ago. And he thought, Oh, well, I'm not... Or, and this is much more likely I was really bad but it's so sweet that this out of all the myriad failures a person's life encapsulates is one of your three well I should have been good at that Elizabeth you know it should have and it was oddly enough talking about all the nerves from the diary days I think I might have bottled it, actually. Although I thought I was doing, you know, that authenticity that you can see. You can tell when someone's not authentic.

And I've got a horrible feeling that I just did two absolute turkeys. Do you think you cared too much because you were thinking of your daughter? Yes, and not just my daughter. I'm thinking this could be it. I could be playing Hamlet by christmas i'm going to be discovered i've got so much going on in my head that i'm almost certainly overworking it horribly and they're all too polite i'd get a bit of direction so i but of course the worst thing about it and possibly the reason why it rankles so much is that no one ever told me so for months afterwards i'd

check the newspaper or check the sky tv guide to see who was doing kept thinking in the back of my mind one day it was saying tonight it's a fish with a dish read by james oh poor you it's like being ghosted by cbb's it's just cruel and now they've started getting really massively famous people to do like idris elba and stuff like that i could have been a contender but no that i don't know why that rankles so much, but it really does. It really, really stung. Maybe we'll find out.

Maybe someone will be listening to this podcast and will be able to let you know. Wouldn't it be great? They said, we lost the tapes. Oh, yeah. I won't believe you. Talking of your daughters, who you mention rather beautifully in the book,

and one of the things that I'm interested in asking parents about, because I'm not a parent myself, but whether being a parent is an exercise in failure management gosh i suppose it is actually and in fact i think possibly you do great damage if you don't recognize that so there's a danger i certainly fell into this trap of thinking that you can make childhood perfect for your children and i think it's very unhelpful, actually, if she comes home, if one of them comes home and says, I flipping hate Tracy in my class.

And I would have been a bit of an idiot. I'd have been a bit sanctimonious about it when I was younger. I'd have been saying, well, you know, who knows why Tracy has been mean to you today. And it's very important that you be nice to everybody. And that puts too much pressure on a kid. You know, I just hate Tracy. She might like her again next week,

but you don't have to be constantly trying to... A, people are sad sometimes and people are cross sometimes, and all the love in the world is not going to take away that sadness or that crossness. All you've got to do is make them as comfortable as you can while they're sad and cross. And B, nobody's perfect. And you see it at the school gate sometimes with mums particularly

who are trying to relive their own school days vicariously through their children. And yeah, I think the most important thing you can do as a parent is probably to recognise that failure is not just inevitable but necessary. And do you think you're a good father? I try my best. I really do try my best. And I have failed sometimes. And I've got a great role model in my own dad. But I don't think I could say I was a good father yet. No,

I'd hope they would. It's not for me to say. I think that's possibly the sign of a good father is that you don't say that you are. Yes. It's like politics. You shouldn't let anyone who wants to go into politics, go into politics. It should be some sort of psychological rule. I've got other friends who are parents who've done things differently, some of which I think I disapprove of, some of which perhaps I envy. But yeah, it is just that recognition of it's not your life that's being lived. It's not an extension of your life.

It takes a while for that penny to drop. You've made a very successful living from talking. And I wonder what you think about, and latterly writing, but mostly talking. Mostly talking. I wonder what you think of talking cures. I wonder what you think of therapy. I think everyone should have it. I mean, it's not something I've got much personal experience of, although I'm certainly intending to get more experience of it.

Because stuff like what I said to you earlier about the abandonment element of boarding school i think we carry stuff around for years without necessarily knowing what impact it's had upon us also the notion of thinking a bit more before you talk therapy often involves trying to develop some sort of inner voice or some sort of accompanying voice so i'll give you an example like one of my children was preparing a guitar performance the other night and i had a friend come around for dinner who i haven't seen for two years and when she announced she was going to do eight songs and i thought you can't do eight bloody songs i haven't seen so i haven't seen so since 2016 she's flying back to

australia in the morning but we started it before my guest arrived and I'm getting a bit antsy and impatient. And I just tried to find that voice and hear what that voice would say. And the voice said, mate, your little girl is playing the guitar. You're sitting on the sofa with your other daughter in your lap. Friend about to come. Where exactly is it you would rather be at this moment in time with your restless legs and your impatience and your. Oh, I hope there aren't too many songs left when my friend gets here. And and of course the answer to that is there is nowhere in the world i'd rather be at this moment and suddenly i felt all the tension and impatience just completely disappear and i think that's the kind of thing you learn in therapy wow that's an amazing skill it is isn't

it i mean well i haven't got a crack that's the one and only example i've got of it so let's not get carried away i'm not going to start writing self-help books. I think what I find immensely helpful about therapy is being able to check in with how you're feeling and what's happened to you in a more objective way. So you're not attaching all of these old feelings that one might have, abandonment issues or insecurity, or you're actually just checking in with what's happening right now yes and there's something about that logic that i find very appealing and helpful and calming and it takes you out of the solitary doesn't it and you feel part of something bigger i think which solipsism can be a little bit unhealthy sometimes yeah no i i'm a big fan definitely also just being able to talk about yourself for a session every week. I get lots of opportunities to do that. So there's no shortage in my life of opportunities to talk about myself.

On Sundays on the radio, I reckon I could get through the whole three hours without taking a single call. But you can't dig very deep into your own emotional positions without turning into, I don't know if you know when Tony Blackburn's wife left him many, many moons ago and he used his radio show to beg her to come back every day for about a fortnight. He was going, please, Cathy, whatever. I forget her name. So, no, you certainly never want to take it that far. Yeah, please never do that.

Lucy, never leave him. Don't subject us to it. James, it's been a delight. Did I give you hell? Can I go back to the security guard? Can I go back to Courtney? It took me by surprise a couple of times, actually. I'd bloke buying that suit that was bad man. That is such a symbolic moment isn't it on your knees in front of the guy your rival from school who's doing he

was a city lawyer by this point and he's buying the suits that I can't really afford to buy but I'm selling them even with a staff discount so no it's been real thank you. It's been amazing thank you so much James O been real. Thank you. It's been amazing. Thank you so much, James O'Brien. Thank you.