So when you worked in Liverpool, tell me about your impressions of the Liverpool office.
Well, I must have worked on Exchange Flags twice, I can’t remember how long I was there for, I must have been there for at least six months, and of course Liverpool was really the poor relation and it was away from the main sort of panopticon of the Manchester office. You know, nobody really… to be honest it was a fig leaf wasn’t it really, nobody managed to give a shit about Liverpool. And so it was much more relaxed, much less high-pressure, a lot more fun actually, in the people there of course were a lot more fun because you didn’t have people like Rod Caird, you know, looking over your shoulder. And certainly by the time I worked there – I knew people in Liverpool anyway, so I had quite a social life, I knew Adrian Henri and Carol Ann, I spent a lot of time with them, and I spent a lot of time with Margi’s friends – and I knew people in bands there as well like Jane Casey and a couple of other people, Pete Wylie, people like that. And Exchange Flags, again was like a more fun What’s On – it was more fun because it wasn’t so high pressure, it was probably quite well run, I don’t remember who the presenter was, but it just seemed to be a lot more fun, and the people in the office were a lot more fun, you know, secretaries and everything, and you know, I always got on with them anyway because to be honest they were a lot more fun than the production staff, than the producer or the director. So I remember we had Orange Juice in, I think we had Pete Burns in again, and there are loads of complaints after Pete Burns had been in because he was so loud and I think that might have been the final band we had in, and we had…
My final act was to do this show called Sex Change Flags and I don’t know how anybody agreed to it, but anyway they did, and this is my thing about having fun – I thought television was fun, and so why not call it Sex Change Flags and why not have a bunch of whole sex changes, it might be quite interesting. And then of course so we had April Ashley in, who was very much a Grande Dame, and then we had a woman who become a man that was fine and then we have maybe another transgender person, and I was do fine, it was my last day in Liverpool and I’d been out the night before was very hung over, and I was maintaining… and then this 60-year-old docker came in in a red dress and high heels, red high heels, and I freaked and hid in the loos! I couldn’t take it! Oh dear… but it must have gone off okay, because I don’t remember getting into trouble for it. It was a sort of an end of term feeling really, and I don’t think anybody took Exchange Flags particularly seriously. So obviously, there’s a lot more fun…
Exchange Flags was in a lovely place, of course, it was lovely being in the Flags and the Town Hall. I really liked that aspect of it and I have always, again with my interest in architecture and urban zoning, I like that space, you’re near the centre of town, and of course my father worked… when he was younger, so I sort of had a family connection with Liverpool,
