Get yourself on a children’s TV show. Both Noel Edmonds and Chris Tarrant started out on kids TV and look at them today – one’s a pretentious pillock and the other’s a pretentious pillock who can’t keep his dick in his trousers – but both of them are multi-millionaire celebrities after starting out on children’s TV – just like we did!
Having got yourself on children’s TV, cut a record. It doesn’t matter if you can’t sing and if it’s crap, like ours was, it’s all good publicity and the kids will buy it in their hundreds of thousands just because they’ve seen you on the telly.
Make the crossover from children’s television to adult television. Demonstrate to the programme bosses that you’re ready to make the switch by occasionally dropping in adult words like bum and fart and the odd f-word when you’re reading the story on Jackanory or whatever children’s TV show you’re appearing on.
If you don’t speak with a natural accent, develop one. Speak in a strong regional accent like what we do and you’ll be able to talk absolute shite and get away with it because most of the audience won’t be able to understand a word you’re saying. Just keep it regional and shout a lot and it’s very difficult not to be a success. We are living proof of this!
Become a cheeky chappie. Neither of us are natural cheeky chappies, we’ve had to work at it. Before we became cheeky if one of our girl guests fell arse over tits and showed her knickers we would have been embarrassed and looked away. Now we say something like: ‘Nearly saw your breakfast there, love’, with a cheeky grin. But don’t say it if she’s anorexic though as she probably won’t have had any breakfast and it would be in bad taste. Say ‘Nearly split your kipper there love’ instead.
Become loveable. Not everyone likes cheeky chappies so you have to make yourself
loveable as well. It is a small step from having people feeling sorry for you to having them loving you. People of average and above average height feel sorry for short people so when we started out in showbiz at the age of twelve we worked hard at remaining really short by smoking like chimneys and spending two hours a day in a trouser press. Maybe Dec overdid it a bit but it has clearly worked.
Be yourself. This can be quite difficult, so you might have to work at it. Fortunately for us neither of us can act for toffee (although that doesn’t stop us having a go at it sometimes, just for a laugh like!), so we can’t be anything else but ourselves.
Finally, be very, very lucky.
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Razzamatazz
Hi. I’m Terry Ravenscroft, I’m aged 67 and…..whoooah, come back, I’m not ready to have the lid nailed down on my coffin just yet. Anyway I’m a very young 67. (About five years ago I went to see Pulp at the Manchester Evening News Arena. I was older than everyone else by at least 35 years. The eighteen-year-old next to me asked me if I’d ever been to the venue before. I replied ‘Yes I saw George Formby here once’. She’d never heard of him.)
This blog is going to be about my life and the way I see things. Before I retired I was a comedy scriptwriter for Les Dawson and Smith and Jones amongst others so there’s a sporting chance that some of the things I write will be funny. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog, although by no means the only reason, is because I have a website www.topcomedy.co.uk which I hope you will log on to occasionally. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like Dear Air 2000….
My hobbies are walking, playing crown green bowls, watching football, birdwatching , cooking, and, according to The Trouble, moaning. Oh, and I have a thing about Kristen Scott Thomas.
A couple of people I will be mentioning from time to time are The Trouble and Atkins Down The Road. The Trouble is my wife. I don’t call her The Trouble because it’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife, trouble and strife’, but because she has the habit of starting sentences, especially to me, with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Then goes on to complete the rest of the sentence with words like ‘you never listen when I’m talking to you’ or ‘you never see the other person’s point of view’ or some such other frivolous complaint. Atkins Down The Road is my best friend and lives, not surprisingly, down the road.
I started a weblog a couple of years ago but stopped doing it to write a novel about golf called ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ If you want to read the weblog it can be found on my website, if you want to read the novel it can be found on my other website, Razzamatazz, at www.razza.fsnet.co.uk along with lots of other things.
Hi. I’m Terry Ravenscroft, I’m aged 67 and…..whoooah, come back, I’m not ready to have the lid nailed down on my coffin just yet. Anyway I’m a very young 67. (About five years ago I went to see Pulp at the Manchester Evening News Arena. I was older than everyone else by at least 35 years. The eighteen-year-old next to me asked me if I’d ever been to the venue before. I replied ‘Yes I saw George Formby here once’. She’d never heard of him.)
This blog is going to be about my life and the way I see things. Before I retired I was a comedy scriptwriter for Les Dawson and Smith and Jones amongst others so there’s a sporting chance that some of the things I write will be funny. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog, although by no means the only reason, is because I have a website www.topcomedy.co.uk which I hope you will log on to occasionally. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like Dear Air 2000….
My hobbies are walking, playing crown green bowls, watching football, birdwatching , cooking, and, according to The Trouble, moaning. Oh, and I have a thing about Kristen Scott Thomas.
A couple of people I will be mentioning from time to time are The Trouble and Atkins Down The Road. The Trouble is my wife. I don’t call her The Trouble because it’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife, trouble and strife’, but because she has the habit of starting sentences, especially to me, with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Then goes on to complete the rest of the sentence with words like ‘you never listen when I’m talking to you’ or ‘you never see the other person’s point of view’ or some such other frivolous complaint. Atkins Down The Road is my best friend and lives, not surprisingly, down the road.
I started a weblog a couple of years ago but stopped doing it to write a novel about golf called ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ If you want to read the weblog it can be found on my website, if you want to read the novel it can be found on my other website, Razzamatazz, at www.razza.fsnet.co.uk along with lots of other things.
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