Richard Madeley: ‘My pointless TV life’
The gaffes, the shoplifting charge, then redemption in an autobiography about troubled generations of men. Don’t underestimate the TV sofa star
Do I need to tell you who Richard and Judy are? No, I don’t think so. So let’s skip that bit and jump straight to a TV studio in Kennington, where Richard and I are talking private lives and professional lives, and the bits that he and Judy allow to cross from one to the other. “We don’t have a tabulated form,” he says. “You just know what is appropriate. Both of us know. It’s an unconscious filter.”
If his daughter Chloe had really serious boyfriend trouble, he says, for example, they wouldn’t mention it. Not on their show, not in a book, not in an interview, not in their column. Whereas, when she suddenly started speaking like a character from Friends — this was a few years ago; it’s so over now — that was fair game.
Only one time that he can remember, did they get it badly wrong. “It was when we were on This Morning,” he says, and he laughs, and looks at the ceiling. “Tom and Dan, the twins, still shared a room. They got, like, divorced when they were 16, but this was before. We were trailing a phone-in for the next day about troublesome teenagers. And we went home and Judy [Finnigan] went upstairs to see if the boys were in, and they weren’t, and she said, ‘Look at this f***ing room!’ And I said, ‘Shall we take a Polaroid?’ And Judy said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ And we put it on the show the next day.”
That night, the twins were waiting for Richard and Judy when they got home. “They gave us a terrible tonguelashing” Madeley says. “And we apologised profusely. It was a terrible thing to have done. It wasn’t like we’d shown the porn mags rolled up under the bed, or anything, but we never did anything like that again.”
I doubt Madeley realises that, in telling of this violation, he has just repeated it. He talks so quickly, I doubt he has time. One word cascades after the next. In our 40 minutes together, he says, according to my transcript, just under 8,000 words, or three words a second. Later, I will play back the recording at half-speed, and still struggle to type it up. “I loathe artifice,” he says, a few moments (and a couple of hundred words) later. “If you are going to talk about your own life and experiences, it’s best to do it openly and without . . . well. It’s best if you try not to think about what you are doing.”
Online, you’ll easily find a list of Madeley’s “Top Ten Gaffes”, including the time he mentioned Chloe’s first period on air, and the time he said that he and Judy had tried Viagra, but only for fun. Contrary to legend, he insists that he never did say, “This autobiography, what’s it about?” Certainly, I can’t find it on YouTube.
He’s 53, Madeley, but could be at least a decade younger. We are meeting to discuss his second autobiography, Fathers & Sons, which has just come out in paperback. It tells of three generations, from his grandfather’s to his own. The point, he says, is an examination of the way that one generation leaves its mark on the next. The book begins in Shropshire, in 1907. Madeley’s ten-year-old grandfather Geoffrey wakes up alone in a big house one morning, and discovers that his whole family have secretly and deviously emigrated to Canada while he slept.
“It never struck me as particularly unusual,” Madeley says, “at first. It was only as the years went by at, you know, dinner parties, and you’d mention it and see people’s heads lifting up and they’d go . . . what? And I began to realise it was a fairly singular story.”
Geoffrey later discovered that Madelely’s great-grandfather had given him to a brother in exchange for enough money to start a new life in the New World. In Fathers & Sons, Madeley looks at the effect that this betrayal had, for generations, in a surprisingly crisp and sparse prose. Madeley cites Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea as a particular influence. He is now working on a novel. “I’ve discovered to my surprise and pleasure that I really enjoy it,” he says. “Maybe more than anything else I’ve done.” On balance, he reckons that he won’t be able to plug it through the Richard and Judy Book Club. “I’d probably go to jail.”
Madeley’s father was a journalist, a Brylcreemed man with Buddy Holly spectacles. Madeley writes of being beaten by him, regularly and with a stick, between the ages of 8 and 10. Even with such a public, open life, this was not something he had spoken about before. “It all came back,” he says. “The painting on the wall, the scrape of the shed door as he went to get the stick.” He hadn’t planned to put it in the book, but he knew he couldn’t leave it out.
The beatings stopped, suddenly, the first time his mother became aware of them. That was a particularly bad beating, so bad that Madeley couldn’t go to school, after he ate a forbidden packet of Rolos. His mother threatened to leave, and go to the police, and Madeley Sr hung up his stick. “It was the most gracious and honest apology I’ve ever had,” says his son. “He was open. He wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t my fault. Look, parents do much worse things to their children. He was a lovely man. With flaws as we all have, and one was a flaw I was exposed to. It could have been secret drinking. It could have been porn. And he never did it again.”
His own children, he hopes, will have less for which to forgive him. His son, Jack, writes the epilogue of the book, and says as much. Madeley says this moved him to tears. “I suppose all parent embarrass their children and if you are in the public eye the scope for doing that is magnified,” he says. “We all get on pretty well.”
Jack, 23, works for a management company, after toying with presenting and deciding that he could do without the attention. Of the twins, Judy’s 32-year-old children from a previous marriage, one directs pop videos, the other works for a US skateboard company. Only Chloe, 21, has followed in her parents’ footsteps, and now presents red carpet segments on the latest incarnation of their show.
“I’ve spoken to her,” says Madeley, with a shrug. “As has Judy. The elephant in the room here is that every single person in public life gets the shit kicked out of them. For every decent review or pleasant comment, there is a horrible picture or a caption. And you absolutely have to be prepared for that. And she says she is.”
Madeley’s first brush with proper, front-page celebrity, he reckons, happened in 1990, when he was charged with shoplifting a bottle of champagne in a Manchester Tesco. Speaking as a journalist, he says he could understand the fuss. “Amazing story,” he says. “Happily married couple who do a family show, and he’s just been accused of nicking stuff from Tesco. Jesus. What an amazing story. Listen, when I was sitting in the cell at Platt Lane police station, wondering what the f*** had happened, I knew the satellite vans would be parked outside.”
It all made, he says, for a strange sort of reality television. He’d go to the magistrates court in Manchester (“which, of course, I’d covered as a reporter millions of times. Regina versus Madeley? I like the Queen! I don’t want to be against her!”) and then drive as fast as he could to Liverpool, where This Morning was being filmed, having missed the start of the show. Often Finnigan would already be in the middle of an interview. “And she’d break off and say, ‘Everything all right?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, remand for three months’, and then I’d turn to the camera and say, ‘You know I can’t talk about it, sub judice, but we’ll get there one day. Anyway. What were we talking about? The exchange rate. Right.” He was acquitted eventually, after a doctor gave evidence about human error system, mistakes that occur when we repeat simple tasks. “Pilots do it,” he says, wide-eyed. “They can switch off the wrong engine.”
It’s easy to underestimate Madeley as a lightweight TV himbo (“These footprints in the sand!” he says, himself. “This pointless TV existence!”) but his is a journalistic journey that few can rival: from the regions, interviewing mums and madmen, to prime time, interviewing prime ministers (Blair) and presidents (Clinton). These days, mind you, it sounds as though he and Finnigan have a nice life. Richard & Judy, on UKTV, isn’t doing great (some give it only 20,000 viewers a day, as opposed to about 2.5 million on its Channel 4 predecessor), but this seems to come with its own rewards.
“We have three nights in London and four in Cornwall,” he says. “We get the Pullman from Paddington at 12.06, and it has a restaurant car. Lunch on the train, incredibly civilised, pull into Liskeard station at about half past three. After years and years of flogging our bloody arses off, we’re actually getting to smell the coffee a bit.” I suspect he probably means “the roses”. Still, you get the idea.
Fathers & Sons by Richard Madeley (Pocket Books, £7.99)
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