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‘Young and old!
‘All you need to do is send us a short ten-minute tape of you presenting a show. Not a real one if you don’t have one, just what yours would sound like if you did.
‘Good luck! (Terms and conditions apply.)
‘Let’s get the travel news now with Travel Tanya.’
‘Well …’ said Dad. ‘It’s really exciting, son, and I’m right behind you as always, you know that … but these talent competitions … well, they aren’t really about the best and most talented winning. Look at X Factor.’ He patted me on the shoulder. His brown tie was dotted with flecks of toast.
‘Your dad’s right, Spike, it’s probably just a very big marketing idea to get the whole town talking about the station. I heard the other day –’ SOUND THE-MUM-WHO-KNOWS-EVERYTHING KLAXON!!! – ‘that their latest audience figures are out and they have lost a load of listeners, so that’s probably why they are doing this. My friend Denise, who works in the accounts department, told me,’ added Mum.
‘And a dirt-cheap way to get someone to do his show while he’s off sunning himself in Barbados!’ said Dad.
‘Or … they could be looking for the next new super-star DJ!’ I said. ‘Why are you both being so mean about The Howie? He could be helping me change my life. You heard him, young and old – he’s talking to me! No one else is a young DJ in this town. He’s inviting me to enter so we can work together, master and apprentice. Like Yoda and Luke Skywalker. It starts with looking after his show, sure, but then one day the apprentice becomes the master and I replace him. But that’s a few years away. I’m telling you, this is meant to be. I just know it.’
Mum moved over to the kitchen counter and started doing her daily exercise routine. This involved wearing her gym outfit and bending, twisting and squatting while making mine and Amber’s breakfasts. Using bags of sugar as weights and punching the air with them. To any onlooker walking past our house at that very moment and glancing through the kitchen window, it would’ve looked like a mad woman in leggings squatting down and back up again for no real reason. Like some crazy game of hide-and-seek with strangers, all while waving groceries about.
‘One … two … three … OK, Spike, go for it … four … five … six.’
‘Just be careful, I don’t want to see you hurt – again,’ Dad said quietly.
I knew what he was referring to, of course: my disappointment over Fish Face giving Merit Radio to his son, Mutant Martin.
But this competition was not that. It was a proper competition run by a proper (and amazing) DJ, where the best person would win. Me.
My phone started buzzing in my pocket and I took it out. Messages from Artie and Holly.
The Howie’s announcement had reached them too. My uncontrollable excitement was only brought back down to earth at school. The morning passed uneventfully, with lots of ‘Did you hear Kool FM this morning? You have to enter!’
But then at lunchtime the radio dream bubble burst. Guess who popped it?
‘Hellloooooooo, pupils of St Brenda’s, this is Merit Radio and your fun-lovin’ – that’s lovin’ with no “g” as you kids like to say – host! Yes, it’s Mr Harris here, but you can call me Mr Harris or Headmaster or sir …’
‘Or His Excellency,’ I said loudly. It got a big laugh. I wasn’t smiling for long, though.
‘Some extremely exciting news to share with you all,’ continued Mr Harris. ‘Now, some of you may not be aware that Kool FM (the FM of course stands for FREQUENCY MODULATION. There’s your fun fact for today!) have launched a disc jockey competition and I’m sure you would all like to wish good luck to …’
Wow. He was going to wish me luck? Fair play. Even with that thick, fishy-scaly skin of his, he knew I was the one to win this. He had learned something from what happened between us, after all.
‘Good luck to … ME! Yes, that’s right, I will be entering Radio Star. No doubt you are cheering my decision in the dining hall right now …’
Cut to silence; total, gobsmacked silence. People looking at each other, frowning and confused. People looking round at me, all thinking the same as me. Is he seriously entering? Thinking he could do well? Win it, even? I just shrugged my shoulders and carried on eating my soggy jacket potato. Even the dinner ladies went quiet and laid down their serving spoons to look at each other. And then it got worse.
‘Yes, and also good luck to my son, Martin, who will be joining me in our entry, along with the brand-new member of our team … Katherine Hamilton.’
I dropped the glass of water I was holding. It smashed on to the dining-room floor.
‘Katherine will be doing a fascinating feature called Lost Property Corner. All the latest things left just lying around, so it could be your shoe, gym bag or underpants that Katherine will tell us about, and hopefully we can have some wonderful reunions live on the show.’
‘Reunions live on the show?’Was he mad? Who did he think would hear Katherine Hamilton describe their stinking PE kit and still want to go and claim it live on Merit Radio? Not me, that’s for sure. Mainly because my mum had gone to great efforts to sew my name into just about every possible item. In an ideal world, she’d have my name sewn into the back of my neck.
Katherine Hamilton.
Just hearing her name again had caused the blood to rush to my face and I could feel my cheeks turning hot and red. This was the girl I had once dreamed of marrying. Then she went and ruined our future life together by helping Fish Face to find me – by betraying me as Radio Boy. She grassed me up.
Yet even though she threw me to the lions (well, to the fishes), she still had this strange power over me. And I had planned to forgive her one day.
But maybe never now!
Everyone at school knew she was going out with … MARTIN HARRIS. My arch-enemy and nemesis. But now she was joining Merit Radio and entering Radio Star, against me! This was open-heart surgery. With no anaesthetic.
Was I in some weird computer game where players had to find new ways of making my life hell? Forget the Sims, this was the Slums.
This was the girl who had called my very own show telling me I was ‘the best’. Now she was all aboard the Martin Harris Love Train with his headmaster dad in the driving seat, wearing a train-driver’s hat. The three of them against me.
I started to feel sick at the thought of having to hear them together on the radio.
Suddenly all that came into my head was that song Grandad had crooned earlier, which, judging by his voice, sounded like it was called ‘What Becomes of the Broken-farted?’.
(#ulink_fa29c390-b87e-596f-aac9-b4ea0422a367)
The warning signs were there from the moment Grandad Ray joined our merry band of radio outlaws.
Dad had warned me too, and I’d ignored him. ‘Be careful, son, you are doing a kind thing, but remember: Grandad is very selfish. That’s why Nan threw him out.’
I just thought he was being mean – but he was right.
For his second appearance on the show, Grandad Ray carried his own chair into my shed studio. The old picnic chair I’d sorted for him obviously wasn’t good enough. So he rocked up with Dad’s office chair. My dad doesn’t actually have an office, it’s just a desk and swivel chair in the gap under the stairs. Grandad had hauled the chair all the way into the shed studio, and I soon realised it wasn’t for comfort. It was because it was a big chair and higher than any of ours. He now had a sort of royal radio throne, to look down on us from.
It got worse. For the next show I walked into the shed to turn everything on before Artie and Holly arrived, and found Grandad was already in there. Sitting in MY chair, behind MY microphone.
‘Just thought we could switch things up a bit tonight,’ he said. ‘I can do a bit more on air – you know, might freshen things up.’
I stood there, shocked, unable to speak. It was my show. He wasn’t just taking part, he was taking over.
Holly came in and within seconds had assessed the situation and, more importantly, what she could do about it. ‘Sorry, Mr Hughes Senior, but that’s Spike’s chair. I’m going to have to ask you to move, as the microphone is carefully calibrated to his voice and if you speak into it, your voice won’t sound as big and strong as it normally does.’
Genius, Holly – appeal to his vanity and ego. She then doubled that up with this:
‘Also that’s where the spiders’ nest is.’
‘ARRGGGGHHH!’ screamed Grandad Ray as he leaped up and scuttled back to his chair. After the show, I asked Holly how she knew he was scared of spiders.
‘You forget, I’m in the Army Cadets. We are trained to notice everything and read people,’ Holly said, looking pleased with herself.
‘Wow, that’s incredible. What a skill,’ I said admiringly.
‘Yup, that and the fact your mum told me he was,’ Holly said.
It had been three shows now and we were heading into tonight’s fourth with Grandad Ray on board. It was getting worse. Grandad was holding court midway through tonight’s Secret Shed Show, telling a long, boring story about performing at some comedy club in Blackpool. Holly was rolling her eyes in boredom and miming yawning behind his back. Clearly, she still hadn’t forgiven him for the ‘ginger hair’ comments.
Artie was politely feigning interest and my face was frozen into a fake grin. I was also trying to swallow a yawn. You know when you desperately need to have a big yawn but you can’t when someone is talking to you, as it’s too rude? So you have to try to swallow it. Not that it would’ve mattered if I had let out a huge yawn anyway – Grandad wouldn’t have noticed, as he was pretty occupied with what he thought was another fantastic story. The same one he’d told last week, and the week before that, I believe.
‘Did I ever tell you about the time the cruise ship I was working on was in a gale force fifty storm?’ Grandad asked, when his earlier story had mercifully come to an end.
‘Yes, I think you did, Grandad.’ But Grandad ploughed on regardless.
‘During a song – it was a particularly good rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” – a huge wave, must’ve been twenty thousand feet high,
at least, rocked the ship so hard I flew off the stage and landed on the front row. I went head first into a lucky lady’s bosom!’
‘That’s enough, Grandad! You told us this story last week and we got a complaint about that last bit from a listener’s mum who said it was “inappropriate”.’
‘Well, she sounds like a stuck-up, boring old whatnot. I always say if a story is worth telling once, it’s worth telling twice,’ Grandad said.
‘Maybe not for three weeks in a row, though, eh? Let’s play a song,’ I sighed.
‘Song? Do you want me to sing?’
‘NO!!!’ said all three of us simultaneously.
I hit the play button so hard and quickly the studio desk shook. It was more like a panic button than a play button.
Very quickly my Grandad Ray had overrun the show. Like a rotten apple that stinks out the rest of the thing the apples are contained in. No, that doesn’t work. Forget that. He was a cuckoo. You know what cuckoos do? A cuckoo lays its eggs in the nest of another bird. Just some stranger bird’s nest it doesn’t even know. The cuckoo babies hatch out of their eggs quicker than the other bird babies and they just kick them out of the nest, their nest, totally taking over.
Grandad was Cuckoo Ray.
What had I brought upon me, the team and the listeners?
And it wasn’t just the tendency to take over. Holly had started calling him the ‘Big Topper’ behind his back. Anything you had done, Grandad could top it. Not only had he done it, he’d done it bigger. Better. Scarier.
Like earlier in the show today, when Artie was telling us the story of what had happened to his hair.
‘My dad just said my hair needed trimming and he was perfectly able to do it himself. I said, “You’re not a professionally trained hairdresser, Dad,” but he said he’s been making cakes for years using all sorts of hand-held tools, shaping, cutting, trimming – so how hard can it be? Well, when I looked in the mirror I saw how hard it is. Look at the state of me!’
I have to say, Artie’s hair was truly in a very bad way. My mum, in her hospital, would have described it as being in ‘critical condition’. He looked like he had contracted a rare tropical illness where the poor sufferer lost random chunks of their hair. Although he mostly looked like a kid whose dad had cut his hair.
Guess who’d had a worse cut, though?
The BIG TOPPER, of course.
‘That’s NOTHING! I was once working in the Caribbean, back in ’78, I think, and we stopped off in port. I decided to enjoy some downtime and went to visit the local zoo. Well, it wasn’t too long before some of the ship’s passengers spotted yours truly and begged me to sing to the tigers; apparently they love a bit of old Frank Sinatra – I mean, who doesn’t? So I did. Now this was a pretty shabby-looking zoo that wasn’t very well maintained and one of the tigers got out and came after me. I guess it must’ve really loved my voice. It leaped over the shoddy fence. Who knew the old Toni Fandango magic works on humans and animals? Well, I tried running away, but it’s not easy in flip-flops, and I tripped, and the tiger was on me!’
‘Were you hurt?’ asked Artie. He didn’t ask out of concern, more in a very bored and tired way.
‘I was lucky. The keeper shot it with a tranquilliser dart and it fell asleep on top of me. Stank, it did. But it had taken several chunks out of my hair. So there you have it, I got a haircut from a TIGER!’
The Big Topper had struck again. Artie’s dad had butchered his hair. Grandad Ray had a tiger ruin his. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the tiger. It would’ve been coughing up Grandad Ray hairballs for weeks.
The show carried on.
‘Call in now,’ I said, ‘if your older brother or sister has ever done something really evil to you. Yesterday, Amber, my older sister, told me I was adopted and for a few hours I really did believe her. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Mum, Dad and Amber all love Marmite; I hate it. The evidence was compelling and overwhelming.’
We got some great calls:
Dev called in to tell us his older brother once put on a monkey mask and jumped out at him, giving him such a fright he fell down the stairs. Knocking a tooth out.
Arya’s older sister told her that a glass full of vinegar was delicious apple juice, so she took a huge swig. And was sick.
Ryan really wanted to play football with his older brothers. So they let him. Be a goalpost.
Nadia was invited by her older brother into a ‘magic lift’. She spent two hours waiting for it to take her up to Fairyland. To many, this ‘magic lift’ looked exactly like a bedroom cupboard.
Today was a great show. No way would Merit Radio and the gruesome threesome beat me in the Radio Stars competition.
‘I’m a little bit bored tonight, Spike,’ said Grandad casually as the record we were playing came to an end. ‘Too many flipping kids on the show.’ Holly and Artie nearly fell off their chairs.
I managed to say, ‘This is the Secret Shed Show. I’m Radio Boy. Thanks for all your calls tonight …’ while inside I seethed.
‘Bless them, eh? You can see why there ain’t too many radio shows by kids for kids!’ said Grandad Ray.
I really couldn’t find any words. I stared at the MIC LIVE sign. We were still on air.
‘Why do you say that, Ray?’ said Artie, in an ominous tone.
‘Well, son, I think only grown-ups know how to really tell a story. Even then, it’s only a few that are blessed like me to be storytellers. To be honest, kids just aren’t very good.’
Artie and Holly glared at him, their eyes burning holes into his head.
It was in that moment that I realised Dad had been right. Grandad ‘Cuckoo’ Ray had taken over the show. I glanced at the studio inbox where all our emails and texts came in. It was a non-stop blizzard of listeners asking who this rude old man was, ruining our show. The cuckoo had hatched and taken over the nest. Eaten all the eggs. You get the idea.
‘Erm, I don’t agree with that, Grandad,’ I said. Very quietly. It seemed almost wrong to disagree with him. But scared though I was of upsetting my beloved grandad, I had to defend my listeners. I’d be nothing and no one without them.
‘What’s that, Spike? Couldn’t hear through your mumbling,’ he said.
This time I spoke louder and clearly. ‘The callers made me laugh, more than your repeated stories. Anyway, that’s it for tonight’s Secret Shed Show. Thanks for listening – maybe next week we will talk about family members who outstay their welcome, or CUCKOOS.’
I killed all the radio mics before Grandad could say anything else to upset everyone. He took off his headphones and smoothed back his hair. Not as easy as it sounds, as the thick hair cream had attracted a few new cobwebs. Grandad quickly brushed them off as if they were a highly dangerous corrosive acid.
‘Those kiddies will try even harder next week, Spike, after my pep talk. Tough love it’s called, used it on your dad.’
‘So kids can’t tell stories?’ Holly said in a calm but ever so slightly demonic way. She was like a slow-ticking time bomb.
‘Look, sweetie, don’t get upset. These days all you kids get a pat on the head and told no one is a loser at sports day. Well, it doesn’t help you. There are losers in life. Fact.’ Grandad Ray replied as he replaced his fire-hazard comb. With all the hair grease on that, if it came within a mile of naked flame we would all go up in a fireball visible from China.
‘Like living in your grandson’s bedroom at your age? Fact,’ Holly replied, winking at him. Psycho-style.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, young lady,’ Grandad snapped back.
