'I'm not an unpleasant person'
Terry Christian on middle-class snobbery, unfair criticism and his 90s youth show The Word
Why have you written a book about The Word?
I still get asked about it so much. I don't think a day has gone by when a person hasn't asked me about it. I recently went to a lap dancing club for a friend's birthday - not that I usually frequent those sorts of places - and the lap dancer told me she used to watch me when she was 11. I don't even want to picture that.
Are you trying to settle scores?
No, but the criticism [I got for the show] was like an avalanche. A lot of it comes down to a class thing, and all these assumptions made about you, so I thought, "Let's put it into a book." When Greg Dyke talked about the BBC as being "disgustingly white", he said at the same time that the BBC was far too southern and middle-class, yet nobody picked up on that.
People said you had a chip on your shoulder.
I hate this all-purpose phrase, "chip on shoulder". It's almost like a refusal to deal with any argument. It gets thrown at anybody with a view or opinion.
In the book you list some of the things critics called you: arrogant, moron, cerebrally challenged, a disgrace, unprofessional, a professional northerner, famously inarticulate, loud-mouthed, clueless.
Yes, and I was called homophobic. I was called racist. I would never be homophobic or racist.
Did any of that stuff upset you?
The racism thing really upset me - when they tried to get me on that, I exploded. I just felt down. I wasn't given a chance. I used to think: hang on, I'm not any kind of celebrity. I'm not swanning around in Hello! magazine saying, "I'm just like anybody else, I just like to buy things that normal people can't afford." So why were they so busy knocking me down? It was very anti-working-class. What did I ever do to anyone? It's like Steven Berkoff said: the middle classes act like a condom when it comes to the arts; they are preventing the dissemination of ideas. If you don't have ideas that fit in with their point of view, they try to blacken your name.
Piers Morgan used to ring you up quite a lot.
He used to just make stuff up. I used to find him quite funny. He was so reassuringly devious.
Did you ever think of moving to London?
I spent weekends there, but it's not somewhere I had lots of good friends.
Did you ever consider softening your accent?
I don't think my accent is that strong. You can understand what I'm saying. Has Jonathan Ross got less of an accent than me?
Were you deliberately winding people up on the show? I was trying to maintain a bit of dignity. The weird thing is that people really liked that show and it was really successful, and yet it never reflected on me.
At the time, the Mirror called you the most hated man in TV. Were you?
Well no, not really, I don't think so. I'm not an unpleasant person, believe it or not. I get on people's nerves sometimes, but who doesn't? If I want to annoy, I know how to do it, but I don't do it when it's unwarranted.
Was The Word a bit of an albatross?
Absolutely. I wanted to redress the balance with the book, to say: here's what happened, honestly.
What do you think of TV today?
Most of it is ****, absolute prize ****. It's always attacking the soft targets. If you are working-class, you are always portrayed as a victim - someone thick, like Jade Goody - or a villain, like Dave Courtney. You're never allowed to just be normal. It's like the contestants on Big Brother - it's all condescension humour or bullying humour.
Was The Word the beginning of freak-show TV?
Yes, I think so. We had that strand called The Hopefuls, which dominated everything. If we'd had a Beatles reunion on the show, the following Monday morning nobody would have been saying, "Didn't Lennon look great?" It would have been: "Did you see that bloke eating the worm butty?"
· My Word: Terry Christian, published by Orion, £17.99 is out now
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