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“There’s
a TV presenter coming to the Mermaid Inn on Saturday,” Ma told us. She had
heard from the neighbour, Lillian Wain. “Tony Francis. He works for a company
called Kingfisher Television. They do this programme, Heart of The Country,
which is broadcast all across the Midlands. You ought to go and have a word with
him…”
Which
is precisely what we did. On the big day we all dressed in our Los Angeles gear
and piled into the cream Volvo Estate. Jed, the Geordie landlord, who Metia and
I were sometimes doing a bit of work for on the weekends, was conniving with us
to make the trip a success.
We
all bustled in through the front door of the pub, ignoring Tony Francis, who was
looking round with some of his cameramen.
“Hello
Jed! Have you cleared us a space?”
We
were ‘practising in the restaurant’ to all intents and purposes. Tony
Francis was annoyed to see us.
“I
haven’t got time for you guys,” he began, or some other such cynical
sentence intended to convey how little he thought of our bursting in like a
bunch of show-offs.
“Don’t
you worry about us,” rejoined Metia, sharply. “We’re just having a
practise session in the back room.”
We
did. The haunting sounds of the panpipes and the quena filled the restaurant.
Los Angeles gave of its best.
“He’s
looking!” announced Fergus. It seemed the television crew was in the adjacent
kitchen, snooping on us. We were excited, but we played it cool. It paid off.
After
half an hour’s performance, we packed up our gear and went briskly through the
bar, thanking Jed for the loan of his room. Tony Francis was still there, and he
turned to stop us at the door as we swept out, much to our gratification.
“Hey,
just a moment, you guys!” he called. Satisfied that we had gained his
attention without having to humiliate ourselves, we turned gladly to greet him.
It is so difficult with these well known people. One doesn’t want them to get
the idea that they’re too valuable, but at the same time, one would dearly
like to get to play on their show, or whatever it is. And he was very nice with
us, and the outcome of the whole meeting was that we would appear on Heart of
the Country the following summer.
It
was great fun, being interviewed for the TV programme. “TV is all lies,
laughed the cameraman, getting out a golden disc and placing it in front of
Metia as she played the classical guitar in our back garden against a backdrop
of lupins. The weather was grey, but they knew all the tricks.
We
had to all pile into the car and drive off to the Roaches for a practise session
on the rocks. It took us eight takes to slam the boot of the Volvo in the right
manner, and then Felix, driving, rode it backwards over a pile of stones by
accident. Most of the time we spent in gales of laughter.
This
happened just before the trip to Wales, so I am not really giving you all the
facts in a chronological order, but we had started to kit out our caravan;
nearly finished, fortunately, as the early stages where all the walls opened
like a big flower didn’t look too good. Shots were taken of us at the kitchen
table, doing our lessons, climbing the ladder to paint the side of the caravan
with Los Angeles Logos, in Fergus’s shed looking at the toy wooden animals,
and they also interviewed each of us, a gruelling experience!
The
grand finale of the show was a concert, organised by Jed, at the Mermaid. Jed
and his wife, Margaret loved every minute of it, and Chris Thompson, the lady
chef, put on a sumptuous Mexican banquet for the occasion. The show was held on
a hot June Saturday night. Locals from far and wide, who had heard of the event,
filled the restaurant and the front bar, where spicy enchiladas were being
served. I remember whispering to Felix:
“Look,
the people from the petrol station are here!” Everyone was there. In the front
bar there was a richly varied assortment of people from the hills, Nev’
Williams the scrap dealer with his black beard and reticent air, Fran Firtle the
pinball wizzard, Frank Parker, the genius chemist turned wine maker, pig breeder
and Land Rover enthusiast, from the mushroom farm on Goldsitch Moss with his
wife Margaret, Alan Edgcox from New Mixon, Dave Swindells who owns the herd of
“blue” cows, and many other characters from round about.
In
the restaurant there was a mayoral party from Leek, some Japanese visitors from
Manchester, and a hundred of the more adventurous local people willing to try
the spicy dishes. The cameraman from the Leek Post and Times crawled on the
floor in front of the cameramen from Kingfisher TV, and everyone had a whale of
a time. The wine flowed, the music played, and, for once, we had both our
parents sitting in the audience together enjoying our efforts.
Much
later, the programme was broadcast on TV, and we all went to watch it at the
mayor’s house with his wife, Janet. After our fifteen minutes of fun we saw
Fred Taylor, the chef, cooking squirrels, and learnt that we were now his
favourite band! Coincidentally, the video of our stint on Heart of The Country
was the first picture of us that both Metia’s and my future boyfriends saw of
us. I have to laugh at that; I didn’t think it a very flattering portrayal
because I was quite well-covered at the time!
Fred
Taylor celebrated his seventieth birthday the following summer, and Tony Francis
hired Los Angeles to come and play for him as a treat. Fred was fishing on the
bank of this little reservoir in a place called Tring, and we had been collected
by taxi all the way from Staffordshire to give him a birthday surprise. The taxi
was a minibus, which came from Leek to fetch us, and took us off down the M1.
“Tring,
where they invented the telephone,” said Fergus idly to Max in the back seat
of the bus as we turned a corner and saw the village sign.
Tony
Francis and the cameraman were at the ready, and after a quick tune up, we all
made our way to the place where Fred was sitting, under the willows on the
water’s edge. Tony Francis helped me over a stile and Metia made much of it.
“Watch
out, we all know he likes brown haired women,” she warned. We played the
Lambada, and scared away (I am sure) all the fish. But Fred was delighted, and
we shared a buffet lunch with him at his local pub, and then played all the
catchiest songs, which made a group of old ladies get up to do a jig!
This
wasn’t the end of TV fame for the band. Tony Francis had us come and play at
his Christmas party that year, and then the ITV Newsreel rang us up and asked if
they could have a photo and turn us into a news item. We duly provided one, and
the band went on screen again, which we all thought was very nice.
It
always makes me laugh; Los Angeles must have been quite memorable, because when
years later Metia wrote off a car near Waterhouses, a couple stopped to see if
she was okay, and the first thing they said to her was:
“Oh,
haven’t we seen you on TV?” Metia could have cried. But that’s another
story.
©2003
StoriesByEmail.com
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