Who are you? The armed Customs official at New York’s JFK airport looked totally bemused.
And not because he suspected I was some sort of covert Al Qaeda operative: judging by the ridiculous two-hour queues at JFK immigration these days, they must assume everyone’s one of those until they can prove otherwise.
No, the Customs man’s bafflement had been sparked by me saying I was coming to the Big Apple to appear on the popular breakfast TV show, Today. ‘But only celebrities go on Today,’ he observed, staring at me with open derision. ‘And I’ve never heard of you, Mr Morgan.’
I toyed with launching into a long-winded explanation of how massively famous I was back in the UK, a household name on the back of share-tipping scandals, offensive Achtung! Surrender front pages and fake photos.
But, instead, I resorted to the verbal equivalent of an instant passport to America: ‘I’m a friend of Simon Cowell’s.’
The Customs man reacted like a large vial of liquid nitrogen had just been injected into his right ear. ‘You know SIMON?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, and I am doing a new TV show with him here in the States, which is why I’m doing Today.’ A huge smile replaced the surly frown. ‘That’s amazing, man. What’s he like, Simon? Is he that mean for real?’
I nodded again. ‘Yes, but not as mean as me.’ The Customs man cackled sycophantically. His menacing demeanour suddenly a distant memory. ‘Man, you Brit guys are so funny. Have a nice stay here, Sir, and good luck with your show. Tell Simon I love his style.’
Oh the power of celebrity! Or more to the point, the power of a certain British celebrity Stateside right now. Simon Cowell, a friend of mine for 20 years, is currently the biggest TV star in the world, and possibly the biggest star in any form of entertainment in America.
His performances as a shockingly frank judge on American Idol, a derivative of the hit British talent show Pop Idol, have made him disgustingly famous and profanely rich. His new four-year deal is worth an absurd $100million. Love him or hate him – and Americans feel both sentiments in equally frenzied doses – nobody ever asks Cowell who he is.
And as of last Wednesday, many of them now know me too – as Cowell’s loathsome Brit mate who is playing a mean judge on a new talent show created by him called America’s Got Talent, which is currently – and trust me, I’m as stunned about it as you are – the No1 TV show in America.
My Hollywood adventure started two months ago when Cowell called me out of the blue and asked if I’d consider being a judge on a new million-dollar talent show he’d sold to NBC.
‘You can help me find the next Whitney Houston,’ he promised. ‘You’ll see some really fantastic acts.’
Juggler
I sat in the judge’s chair a month later and watched six pirates and a donkey perform a toe-curlingly awful dance while emitting a curious wailing noise, a man who sticks an oven on his head then fries eggs on it, and a juggler who drops everything he tries to juggle.
Not to mention the bloke who jumps inside a giant balloon and is then supposed to dance around in it, only for the balloons to keep bursting. ‘Most of all, Piers, it’s going to be great fun,’ Cowell had added. Now that bit was definitely true. It’s been utterly hilarious.
From rapping grannies, to the world’s oldest male stripper, to a 6ft 5in Russian called Leonid The Magnificent who sobbed and begged us to put him through to the next round on the basis of his tormented childhood – it has not been car-crash telly so much as a slow multiple motorway pile-up, but what the ratings illustrate is that everyone’s slowing down to watch.
America HAS got some talent, I hasten to add. I’ve seen an 11-year-old girl sing like Judy Garland; a latin boy band who could be bigger than Take That; a clothes-changing act that sounded tedious
but was so breathtakingly brilliant that it could win the contest; and an eight-year-old comedienne who prowled the stage firing wisecracks like Whoopi Goldberg on speed.
But most of the best entertainment has come from one of my fellow judges, David Hasselhoff. I once interviewed The Hoff on Malibu beach when he was at the height of his Baywatch fame, and remember thinking how great it must be to earn millions of dollars for running along a beach in a pair of red shorts all day next to a bikini-clad Pamela Anderson.
He may not be as successful as he once was, but boy is he famous.
Thanks to Baywatch and Knight Rider, Hasselhoff must be one of the most recognisable names in the world after Bush, Mandela – and Cowell. And he plays the big star on the show, procuring easy standing ovations just by putting his mouth to his wrist and saying: ‘Kitt, get me out of here,’ when a particularly bad act has performed.
Trailers
The sheer scale of the production dwarfs anything I have ever experienced working on UK television. The Hoff and I have huge matching trailers on the Paramount movie studio lot, along with the third judge, the pop star Brandy, and the show’s host Regis Philbin – who is a kind of cross between Parky and Chris Tarrant. We’ve been assigned bodyguards (I seem to have more because my acerbic Cowell-esque judging style is considered more ‘high risk’ for revenge attacks.
I thought this was a joke until I heard that Cowell dissed a few heavy guys at a New York audition show and afterwards they were waiting for him with baseball bats to discuss his withering verdict on their singing).
Chauffeur-driven golf buggies loiter permanently outside our trailer doors to ferry us 30 yards to the studio door. (I’m told true divas such as J-Lo and Mariah Carey use the buggies to travel the five yards from trailer to make-up.)
Small armies of people mill around to tend to the every whim of the ‘Talent’, or ‘Pampered High-Maintenance Prima Donnas’ as I prefer to view us. And let me tell you, it’s GREAT. Anyone who pretends they wouldn’t enjoy being treated like Tom Cruise for the day is lying.
I’ve been installed in a flash suite at the Regent Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills (the Pretty Woman hotel) for the ten weeks of filming, given a convertible sports car to run around in and generally encouraged to think I’m very, very very important.
Which is all marvellous, especially as nobody out here had ever heard of me until last week. No builders shouting, ‘Got any fake photos mate?’ no Spurs fans asking for share tips (‘Yes,’ I now reply – ‘sell Tottenham’) and no random people coming up to me in the street to shake my hand because they once saw me performing a duet of the Macarena with Timmy Mallett on This Morning.
D-grade fame of the kind I enjoy in Britain (I hope I’m not being alphabetically optimistic here) is an endlessly amusing, and occasionally rather irritating, affliction, mostly because the British public, quite rightly, think it’s great fun to abuse, heckle, and generally deflate the massively inflated egos of people who throw themselves on to the altar of celebrity.
America is very different. Fame there, in any degree, is a badge of honour and respect. Americans LOVE celebrities, they revere them, salute them, want to touch them, bask in their reflected glory.
It does not matter if you’ve sold 100million albums or murdered your entire college football team: if you’re famous – or infamous – in the US you have a meal ticket for life without most of the carping, envy and derision you would attract over here.
We mock Jordan, for instance, believing her to be the personification of talentless, pointless celebrity. Yet the American equivalent, Paris Hilton, is genuinely lauded for having worked hard at her ‘brand’ – that brand being fame itself. For her, working hard is showing an ability to make herself well known through her numerous soul-destroyingly daft antics.
Celebrity is all
Hollywood, in particular, is a place where you’re either famous or you’re nothing. Celebrity is all, a status so coveted that people would wipe out their entire families with machine guns if they thought it would land them a walk-on part in a movie. And working on a hit TV show is like putting £50 notes on your head and walking down Oxford Street, letting them fall off as you go ...everyone adores you. The difference between being just another anonymous Brit trying to make it in America and suddenly being in a ‘hit’ of any description is extraordinary.
I did 36 promotional radio interviews two weeks ago of the ‘So, who the hell are you and what are you doing in our country?’ variety so expertly enacted by that Customs man.
he general reaction from Minnesota to Miami was disinterest, boredom, and often – as with a Chicago breakfast show – a complete failure to find anything I said remotely funny. This week, after the show went to No1 in the ratings, I did another 36 interviews and they treated me like I’d just won the Olympic 100 metres in 5.6 seconds.
What was most striking was the sheer unadulterated enthusiasm for the show and its success. They didn’t feel an instant need to crush my spirit and start asking things such as: ‘So, Piers, what’s it like being a ridiculous Simon Cowell wannabe judging a load of juggling halfwits and stripping freaks? Must be a bit of a comedown from tea with Tony Blair eh, you dodgy share-dealing, fake-photo-publishing cretinous imbecile?’
That’s the sort of stuff I’m more used to on the ‘small pond’ interview circuit.
My UK friends are, naturally, horrified at this turn of events, fearing perhaps understandably that my head will simply swell to further alarming proportions. As Cowell himself observed when he rang to say the show was No1: ‘I’m not sure I should tell you this Piers, I feel like Dr Frankenstein when the monster came to life.’ But I know the moment the ratings dip I will be slung back home on a cattlebus, such is the harsh reality of the brutal American TV business.
Until that moment, though, I intend to enjoy every single second of the most enjoyable romp of my romp-fuelled career so far – getting paid to take the mickey out of Americans on prime-time American TV. I’ve finally found my vocation in life. |
