Christian O’Connell - Radio Boy and the Revenge of Grandad

Anyway, they knew all too well how much trouble could come from my spontaneous ideas. I’ll tell you a little secret: this wasn’t that spontaneous as I had planned to do it, but knew if I told them before the show they’d try to stop me.

‘I’ve got a present to open from under the Christmas tree,’ said our caller.

‘OK. Firstly, what’s your name?’

‘Nick.’

‘OK, Nick, describe the present to us.’

‘It’s huge, I can hardly lift it, almost the size of a door.’

‘Is this your main present?’ I asked. I was starting to get a little worried, as Christmas is all about the MP. The Main Present. Had Nick grabbed the big one from under his family’s Christmas tree?

‘Oh yes,’ replied Nick. I could almost hear him frothing with excitement. You know what Christmas is like. It almost makes you sick with anticipation. It can’t come soon enough. But for Nick, it would come right now, live, on my radio show. I looked at the terrified faces of Artie and Holly and hesitated for only a split second, then, excited by the power I had right at that moment, I shouted –

‘Open it, Nick!’

Suddenly, the full horror of what I was doing got to Artie and he grabbed his mic, yelling:

‘DON’T DO THIS, NICK! YOU’LL GET INTO HUGE TROUBLE!’

Holly’s mouth was wide open, like she was watching a car crash in slow motion.

‘DO IT, Nick!’ I demanded.

He did it. We heard the unmistakable sound of wrapping paper being torn off – no, more ripped apart like a bear attacking a tent. There was no going back now. I had put tonight’s radio show on a roller coaster. The question was, were we on the going-up bit, or plummeting down out of control?

Nick squealed in the most amazingly high-pitched way.

‘OH WOW! OH WOW! OH WOW!’

‘What is it, Nick?’ yelled Artie. Now he wanted to play my game!

‘It’s … it’s … it’s … an Xbox, a brand-new Xbox,’ said Nick, sounding as if he was crying with joy. The wonder of Christmas!

The moment was then shattered by the very loud footsteps we could hear from Nick’s end of the line, and the sound of a door slamming open.

‘WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING, NICK?’ yelled a very angry-sounding man.

‘R-R-R-R-Radio Boy made me do it,’ stammered Nick.

Oh dear. Time for me to hang up quickly and play a song.

Then I remembered: Evel Knievel managed to clear all thirteen buses. But he crashed on landing. Breaking lots of bones.

I suppose I should bring you up to speed with things.

The Secret Shed Show is still doing really well. Everyone now knows that I, Spike Hughes, am Radio Boy (which is kind of brilliant). At least people know I’m good at something other than being a total loser.

It’s official, I’m now 17 per cent less loser (not 20 per cent less, unfortunately, as my mum still insists on making me a packed lunch, whereas everyone else in my year just has the school dinners. ‘Delicious fresh fruit to keep you regular, Spike, and gluten-free bread with nutritious mung beans, watercress and celery.’ If you want to know what this tastes like, try eating an old shoe with a dead toad inside it).

I always just quietly bin the leathery sandwich, and the dinner ladies give me a cooked lunch for free. I can see the pity in their eyes.

Being Radio Boy hasn’t exactly changed my world that much, then. Let’s look at the pros and cons of being a newly-fledged radio star in my world.

Girls now officially find me funny BUT still just want to go out with the boys on the football A-team. I thought being ‘school famous’ would fix all this. Not so. Now I’m just their funny friend. A tap-dancing monkey is funny, but you don’t want it to be your boyfriend.

To be honest, it’s Artie that has been getting more of the attention from girls. They send him fan letters. He didn’t seem that interested at first (or so he said), but I noticed he’d started putting gel in his hair and wearing his dad’s aftershave. I say ‘wearing’; I think it’s fairer to say it wore him . Holly’s and my eyes watered within a metre of him and his scent.

Even worse, Katherine Hamilton, the girl I once wanted to marry, is now going out with Martin Harris, the school bully and the son of my evil headmaster. I try to tell myself they deserve each other, but it’s still like a stab to the heart whenever I see them together.

Our show would always be called the Secret Shed Show, but it wasn’t really secret any more – and even though I still went by Radio Boy, I had lost my anonymity. This created problems. The biggest was, of course, my mum.

It started innocently enough, with occasional peering in through the shed window mid-show. Then it escalated to bursting into the shed studio while we were doing the show. Yeah, don’t worry about the bright red glowing MIC LIVE sign, Mum. Just barge on in.

‘There is a cold draught in here, I’ll go and get your special jumper.’

‘Are those electrical leads even safe? We had a poor young boy on my hospital ward just the other week who had been literally fried like an egg by faulty wiring. Poor kid had a permanent grin on his face. Even in his sleep.’

‘Shall I make us all some nice soup?’

BTW:

My mum puts great faith in the restorative powers of soup. Like a simple bowl of soup is some highly potent ancient brew, not straight out of a can she just warmed up. My mum is a highly trained nurse, but her medicine cabinet appears to contain just three go-to things:

1 Soup.

2 Vicks VapoRub.

3 A cold flannel.

To my mum, this is the Holy Trinity of medicine. There is nothing that soup, Vicks or the application of a cold flannel cannot heal. If I was run over and lying in the road bleeding, my mum would go and get a stinking cold flannel and rub some Vicks on me before calling for an ambulance. By the time the ambulance had arrived she would have set up an IV drip, containing not blood, but chicken soup.

Anyway, my mum took to just bursting in on the show whenever she wanted.

So now there are two locks on the shed door. One on the outside to protect the broadcasting equipment from being stolen, and one on the inside to protect us from my mum.

‘Spike, is this door locked? What if the fire brigade needed to come and rescue you as your studio turned into a human bonfire? Oh, my poor angel, barbecued like a sausage.’

My mum wasn’t the only one trying to get in on the radio action, either. There was also Sensei Terry: our local postman, karate instructor and one-man neighbourhood watch. The man who rumbled the intruder in my garden, Fish Face, aka Mr Harris, my headmaster. Since then, Mum has given Sensei Terry permission to patrol our garden whenever he wants. It’s not exactly like being given the freedom of the city, but in his mind it’s exactly like being given the freedom of the city. The freedom to patrol at will in the garden of Number 27 Crow Crescent. The way he behaved, you’d have thought he’d caught the country’s most wanted criminal.