Trivia/Anecdotes

On his live chat show on BBC Radio 5 Live, Stephan Nolan talks to TV presenter Nick Owen about interviewing difficult guests...

The most difficult I think probably was Oliver Reed and I've interviewed him twice both on Breakfast TV and ten years later on Good Morning with Anne and Nick.. er, and both times he was very tired and very emotional.

I mean the first time he'd been up all night playing cards in the hotel near to the TV AM studios in Camden, urrm.. and.. you know.. he just was really..sort of out of it.. and err.. his eyes were just sort of glazed over - and you just didn't know what was behind.

I remember thinking of how on earth am I going to connect with this guy at all.. until I started talking about cricket which I'm passionate about and mentioned.. err.. um, err Ian Botham - who he obviously looked up to greatly... urm.. and.. suddenly he sort of engaged for a bit and that was quite good.

But I mean people like that can be quite intimidating - when he came on to.. err.. Good Morning with Anne and Nick about ten years later he actually came on about half ten in the morning with a.. yeah, you know.. a can of lager in his hand and err.. again you knew he was well out of it and people in make-up had had a bit of a rough time trying to sort him out..

The show had a chaotic feel about it, though in fact it was planned with almost military precision. "Boy did we work hard on that show! There were a lot of things the viewer saw as unplanned incidents that were actually carefully organised. But yeah, things did go wrong. On one show, we were meant to have Oliver Reed. Dear old Oliver came on 'House Party' drunk as a skunk in rehearsals, and never turned up for the show. He went off down the pub or something. We filled the time with something else."

Noel Edmonds on how Oliver Reed failed to appear on his BBC TV programme Noel's House Party

In their 2009 album Shore Leave, Vancouver-based band The Town Pants include a self-penned song entitled "The Unlikely Redemption of Oliver Reed". The track begins with Reed reciting his line from the 1973 movie The Three Musketeers: "You will find young man that the future looks rosier through the bottom of a glass"

According to legend, a milkman turned up early one morning at Oliver Reed's house to find the actor had been up all night and was not entirely sober. Legend is rather vague about the subsequent events, but the actor is supposed to have kidnapped the milkman and taken him to London for a two-day drinking binge of epic proportions. The milkman was duly sacked, but Reed took him on as a gardener and doubled his wages.