McCarthyism

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to work with Sir Pete McCarthy.  I’ve had a couple of brushes with him in the past – namely the episode with the fire alarm and the one with the poor quality phone line. With that track record, I have a slight feeling of trepidation about the whole thing.  On arrival at Maid Of Orleans you can imagine how delighted we all were to discover a strong smell of burning in the studio.

The smell has been reported, and since nothing is obviously on fire, we get on with the task of scene-setting and staging: rigging PA, audience mics, play-out, talkback and so on.  The job description for this gig is somewhat hedge-y; set up for a filmed interview between Don and Pete, and strew expensive instruments around the studio in a way that it looks good for cameras, and might tempt Pete to play them, but on the other hand whose presence isn’t too blatant or too obviously mic’ed up just incase Pete decides he doesn’t want to play them and we don’t want to make Sir Pete McCarthy look stupid.  

It is the last part of the remit which is in jeopardy when Ted sets up two stools for interviewer and interviewee.  Unfortunately in a mismatched hotchpotchy Maid Of Orleans kind of way, one stool is a foot higher than the other.  This might not be so much a problem excepting for the fact that Don the interviewer is very tall and Sir Pete is very short. This poses an issue either way you look at it.  Either you are set to ridicule Pete by making him look tinier than he really is, or it looks like you are trying to compensate for his diminutive height by putting him on a tall stool. In the end, we ask Ted to have another look for two the same height. 

Once Pete has arrived and we are setting up for soundcheck he sits on his stool and I move in to adjust the microphone up towards his mouth.  “Moving the mic up” he says.  “Yes Sir! That old chestnut!” I reply idiotically.  Somehow implying what with his great actual height this kind of wild over-compensation must happen all the time. 

You can read more awkward height-related celebrity capers here.

And so (oy-la-li) life goes on, with the technical to-do list getting somewhat cluttered as we approach the arrival of the studio audience.  In the ritual MOO scramble from A to B to C, I start tripping over some obscenely famous VIPs.  Prioritisation becomes fierce when we are faced with four wildly differing but parallel requests. 1. Find a left instead of right generic in-ear mould for Don 2. Put reverb on the safety announcement and mix some background music underneath to make it sound more important (really?) 3. Find some vibes for the green room, as the frontman of The Jelly, two members of Squish and a bunch of executives are in there eating crudités and it’s all a tad awkward 4. Blitz the dimmer-induced hum that has suddenly appeared over all our mics.  Its as much as we can do to dial up a Feathers playlist on Guy’s phone and stick it into a tannoy and focus on fixing the all-important task number 4, and it’s then it’s time to rock and roll again.

And so, Sir Pete tackles the interview in a most charming and candid manner.  The only remaining magical mystery come home time is the unexplained burning smell, which has now left the building.