No One Listens to Your Dad's Show

Christian O'Connell

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781838952907
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838952891
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

'Christian has achieved something very beautiful and funny with this book, weaving ordinary life and every day sadness into something hopeful and profound. I loved it.' Russell Brand As a radio DJ in London, Christian O'Connell appeared to have it all. He held the number one spot nationally, with a faithful audience of millions who'd listened to him for years. Celebrities flocked to come on his show and no other radio DJ had won more awards. But not everything was as it seemed. Minutes before going live one morning, something happened that changed everything and led to a decision of seismic proportions. He quit his job, moved to the other side of the world, where no one knew him, and took on the toughest radio market in the world - Australia. Why? i s the question he's been asked every day since landing Down Under. Until now he's never shared the real reason. No One Listens to Your Dad's Show is the story of Christian risking everything, uprooting his wife, two daughters and his dog to move to Australia. A move that lands him as a complete unknown in a country where, he soon finds out, no one wants to hear him on the radio. He was failing, fortysomething and falling apart. Until he wasn't.

PART ONE

1

The man in the shed

Never trust a stranger with your secrets, son.

MY DAD

I was sitting somewhere I did not want to be. A therapist’s office.

I always thought if I ended up in therapy, it would be a bit like a lifeguard having to pull you out of life’s swimming pool. Therapy wasn’t for me.

I was successful, I had awards and a nice house to show me that. The house had a big garden, a crunchy gravel driveway and, get this, I had a big kitchen with a KITCHEN ISLAND!

Look at me, Mum and Dad! Look what I’ve done!

Therapy was for fuck-ups. And I’m not one of those.

But now, I’m going to see a therapist.

As I walked to my first therapy session, I thought of the board game Snakes and Ladders. It felt like I had landed on a snake and I had slid down somewhere I didn’t want to be. This was not part of the plan I had for my life now at my age.

The pre–radio show anxiety attacks had gotten so severe I wasn’t able to do several shows, blaming a ‘viral infection’.

I thought my life as I knew it was over. What a cruel way to come undone, so that I couldn’t do the very thing I’d been rewarded for working so hard at and that I loved so much. What was I meant to do now?

My wife was, as ever, a rock. Saying we could sell the house, I could do something else.

This shows what a big-hearted caring wife I have, trying to take all the pressure off me.

But what else did she think I could do? Doing what I do, my skillset is tiny, negligible. At one point she’d said I could maybe open up a hairdressing salon.

What, like when Daniel Day Lewis left Hollywood for a few years to work as a shoe cobbler in Ireland? I’d said a few times how I would have loved to have been a hairdresser. I’d bought a top-of-the-range hairdryer so I could do my daughters’ hair after their baths when they were younger, but now I’m opening a salon?

Something else?

There’s only ever been this.

I checked the address again on Google Maps. He had said on the phone, ‘Walk down the alleyway at the side of my house and let yourself in through the gate five minutes before our session. You’ll find my office on the left.’

I did. It was a . . . shed?

What the . . .?

No, this can’t be right. I walked back out the gate fearing I’d just broken into someone’s garden and would have to give the lamest excuse ever when questioned by a startled homeowner: ‘I thought this was my therapist’s office,’ as I pointed to a shed.

Nope, this was the right place.

And it was a shed.

A very nice shed, but by all objective measures, a shed. To my knowledge, I don’t believe Dr Freud worked out of his shed, paint pots in one corner, Sigmund’s rusty old lawnmower in the other and the smell of turps in the air.

Not only is a shed a worrying indicator of the quality of a therapist, this one was also late.

As I waited, all I could think about was how I wasn’t a ‘therapy guy’.

I really didn’t want to be here, but I was totally exhausted from worrying about what was wrong with me. I couldn’t work. I needed to get my shit together.

Now this therapist was already pissing me off by being late for our first session. He works in his garden, how can he be late?

So, I sat in his shed annoyed at his time keeping. Was this some technique? Was he just watching on a remote camera, sipping his coffee and laughing? It was starting to feel more like waiting for a serial killer than therapy.

He finally wandered in, seemingly distant and cold, which made me feel even more on edge.

He sat down calmly, no apology about the time. Took a big sigh out, showed a welcoming half-smile and said, ‘Your name is familiar, but I don’t really listen to breakfast radio, tell me about yourself.’

With my job, people can’t wait to tell you, ‘Oh, I listen to someone else,’ when they ask what I do for a living. You wouldn’t say that to a plumber when he told you his job, ‘Oh, you’re not my plumber, I use Ray.’

‘Oh sure, yeah Ray’s great.’

What is it about my line of work that makes people want to tell me that I’m not their type? If they met Mick Jagger, do they immediately say, ‘Oh, I don’t listen to you, I’m more a Beatles guy.’

I bet they do.

I’d only come to get help from a therapist because my wife, Sarah, kindly suggested I go. She said, ‘You need help.’

Those caring, kind and tender three words my fragile male ego translated into, ‘You’re a hot mess and the kids are wondering why Dad is rocking back and forth staring out the window.’

I started to explain to him why I was there, about the panic attacks.

‘I know why you are here, you said on the phone, but it might help to tell me about yourself.’

A quick look on Wikipedia could’ve fixed that, but I guess that wouldn’t give him the chance to charge me by the hour. Plus, in fairness, Wikipedia says I was a thirteen-year-old National Nunchuck Champion in 1986. I guess there are worse lies to have told about yourself.

So, I reluctantly started to tell the man in the shed about myself.

•

I go back to 1998, when I got married at age 25. It was for society’s good as much as my own. I still have no idea what my wife saw in me.

When we first met, I had a job in telesales, selling advertising space in a photography magazine. That statement right there, it’s enough to drive any woman wild.

I’m talking headset with a mic, crammed into a cubicle in an office with hundreds of others, like battery hens.

My playboy assets were, well, nothing, except a huge crippling debt from university where I’d spent more time at the bar than raising it.

When Sarah and I started dating, my diet was mainly beer and toast, and I was mumbling into my pint glass about wanting to be a radio DJ or a stand-up comedian. I was doing the odd open-mic stand-up spot in London in very rough pubs. This was around 1996. Comedy was huge in London with many comedy clubs and some really great stand-ups.

Meanwhile, I was performing to six drunks on a Monday night in the East End on a milk crate ‘stage’ (six milk crates taped together). One night a fight broke out between two of the eight audience members. I carried on with ‘my set’ as everyone turned to watch the drunks fight, and I had the awful realisation that the fight was more entertaining than my stand-up. Which is why now, when I tour, I have two drunks fight on stage as my warm-up.

I had no real game plan. I was drifting and starting to sleepwalk through my life. Part of me was dying, and not just my liver. It was the part that had a dream and a belief that I could do something with my life. Sadly, that part had met the tidal force of real life and how it demands so much from you and cares very little for your fragile aspirations and hopes. It wants to keep you in a lane, to confine you.

Every morning felt like Groundhog Day, my soon-to-be wife would have to kick me out of bed to reluctantly start another day, ironing a shirt while listening to the morning radio and just wanting to be doing that.

They—the people on the radio—were, to me, in the Emerald City. I wanted to make my way there. But I had no idea how I could get from my tiny south London flat into a radio studio. I was struggling every morning to get the 7.22 a.m. from Crystal Palace to London Victoria station.

Sarah was a lawyer and hated it, because she has this thing called a soul. We’d drag our heels out the door every morning to begin days neither of us really wanted.

We got burgled a few weeks before our wedding and my financial situation was so dire the thieves left my credit card.

They had rifled through my credit card statements, which was easy to do as they were all in red, and pitied me. They probably thought, ‘Should we leave him some money or something?’

I was so broke I even had to borrow the money from Sarah to pay for my own wedding suit. Who marries this loser? If one of my daughters met a guy like me at that point, I’d tell them to walk away.

Our wedding rings cost $150 (£85) for the pair. For the record, two things: I have paid back the money for the suit, and I have offered my wife an upgrade on her wedding ring, something maybe around the $200 (£115) mark, because she’s worth it.

I actually love the fact our wedding rings were dirt cheap, it grounds me. It grounds us. It reminds me of where we came from. Burglars pitying me. To my wife, it’s a constant reminder of the poor choices she made in life—a good woman thinking I could change.

Just a few months after getting married I was in another sales job I’d been headhunted for. Accidentally, my reluctant sales career was going great. I was now working for a group of radio stations around Britain, selling sponsorships and promotions.

This was my wife’s idea. Get a job, any job, as near to radio as possible, and find a way in that way. I said this was a terrible idea as Howard Stern wasn’t discovered because one day the morning DJ didn’t turn up and they yelled out into the sales office, ‘Any of you guys funny?’

However, annoyingly, it turned out to be the first in a very long series of very good ideas my wife had. My wife lives to be right and say, ‘Told you so.’ If she had been married to JFK, she’d have suggested they not take the convertible...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Prologue: My last show on air, London, May 2018
• Introduction: The story I don’t want to tell you
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Epilogue What happened to me?
• Some words from the girls
• Thank-you note