Johnny Vaughan was a voice that millions woke up with every morning for years, as host of The Big Breakfast and The Capital Radio breakfast show his enthusiasm made him one of the most energising presences out there.
His Discovery Show ‘Mud Men’ just had its third series kick off and we chatted to him about the show, the manliness of cannonballs and being the voice of the Olympics for Absolute Radio.
So, what can we expect from this third series of Mud Men?
You’re gonna get more mud, more fun, more adventure. It’s funnier, muddier and has much more digability than ever before.
What do you think is the best thing you’ve ever found out there?
I always love a cannonball. There are few things manlier than a cannonball. It’s so crude, so brutal; it’s just the ball mentality. Football for sport, cannon ball for war, it’s just the same design but a whole lot heavier! “Let’s just get a big, round heavy metal ball and chuck it at them.”
You get the different sizes washing up, they’re all named after birds of prey funnily enough as that’s the sort of size scale that people were used to back then. You find these little falconettes, they’re about three and half inches across and it’s a real buzz. Then you find ones that still have live gunpowder inside, they’re just so good to find.
Steve actually found an entire f*****g cannon in the water in Greenwich. He can’t get to it and only becomes visible on a certain tide a couple of times a year. That’s got to be the best thing ever to find!
As well as the Thames being self-excavating, it’s also self-preserving, sealing everything in there in anaerobic mud. It means that no oxygen gets to stuff that gets lodged down there, so the things you pull up are perfectly preserved, which makes it even more exciting.
Steve once found a strip of leather from a set of knickerbockers, with a gold Tudor rose on around the Tower Of London. Could have been Henry VIII’s! I thought it was a bookmark from the shop it was so perfectly preserved, not a 500 year old piece of history. It’s incredible.
The Mud Men TeamWhat can we expect from the challenges between you and Steve?
This time it gets really competitive, but unfortunately my, err, fitness problems are really shown up. We got on an assault course which was terrible. There was a section where you had to crawl under a net and through some tyres and it turns out all those tyres were filled up with water. It was effectively like a theme park you might call mosquito world, which isn’t one that I’d like to go to really. My whole body was bitten and I was so cross, it was vile.
We also go up against the police in a riot which got a bit exciting. We went down to the Police training centre down in Gravesend and had a laugh with them throwing bricks and firebombs at us. It was terrifying. There’s even a bit when I’m there asking how this fits in with me excavating things out of the ground!
Ok, we found an original Police whistle and some buttons and badges that started us on this adventure, but I wanted to draw the line there. Steve loved it! First we had to walk along whilst they threw petrol bombs at us and we had those big long shields. Steve turns around though and asks if we can do it with the little round ones! I was just sounded like Woody Allen complaining, especially when he then wanted to do it without any shield.
We also had an old school Olympics where we competed against each other. They’re really fun to do.
Was this something you’d ever done before the show at all?
No, Steve had the idea for a show and tried three other presenters who didn’t want to do it. He wanted enthusiasm though and I gave it a shot. I went down there after doing my shift on Capital Radio and loved it. It’s weird, the fact that there’s a camera and you’re making a telly programme reins you in. Normally, camera’s open up possibilities but here it’s more a case of I’m just doing my hobby!
It’s so absorbing and it’s annoying when you know the tides coming in and you’ve found a really good cluster of things and then they say “Johnny, can you talk a little about what you’re doing” and I’m just there thinking “No! I’m going to lose all of this!”. For me, it’s the best way of discovering history. Time Team’s a fantastic show, what they expose lurking around Britain are quite remarkable. But, they do rely on CGI a bit to give us a Roman villa when all you can see is a few bricks, the bottom of some stairs and a hearth.
It’s the little artefacts they find that I really love about Time Team though, the little things that show where humans have been. Not the ones who shaped history, but the ones who were shaped by history, everyday people. It’s not until you dig around the hearth and you find a spoon that you really get the power of place. That’s what we have on Mud Men. 500 years ago, a guy stepped off a boat and had his boot sucked off by the mud and it’s stayed there for all that time. For me it has a real resonance, that you can see that all these years ago a normal bloke like me was here, dropped this knick-knack and I’m the first person to have touched it in centuries.
It’s a long way from Tutankhamun, I’m not trying to come across as some sort of mud-caked Howard Carter, but I get a little bit of that thrill.
Do you think it’s important then to put across history in new and interesting ways then?
The biggest achievements in British education are making history boring and geography dull. How can everything that man’s ever done up until now ever be boring? How can this world we live in be dull? It saddens me that it ever can be. It’s a real challenge to make history boring, considering the people that have lived and the events that have happened, it’s the backstory of humanity! Its f*****g amazing! It’s not a challenge to make it interesting, but it is to make it dull.
You do that by underestimating your audience, by talking down to them and by only giving them four facts over the hour. Also, you have presenters that are unexcited by it! It’s why Time Team’s endured, they love what they’re doing.
When I was young there was a thing called ‘Programmes For Schools and Colleges’ and when you were sick you used to watch that and when you went back to school and the lessons were suddenly quite dull. That’s why I think Mud Men’s been popular, there’s a generation that loves watching these sorts of shows and it’s all a part of this rise in documentary channels we’ve got now.
You also worked with Absolute Radio at London 2012, what was it like being at the centre of the Olympic experience?
It was absolutely fantastic, just awesome. I had a fantastic team at Absolute and it was a nice change in pace. I’d done hit music at Capital for eight years and towards the end you do feel a bit like a funny dad. And no one wants to see their dad dance.
So it was great to play music that I selected and loved and being able to chat to every single gold medal winner on the day they won it was fantastic. It was a chance to do something a bit more grown up, talk to the most incredible guests and be at the centre of the unofficial Olympic experience. It was great down at the stadium, but it didn’t quite have the atmosphere of Hyde Park. To hear that cheer and be on stage with Sir Chris Hoy or Sir Bradley Wiggins, it was like a hero’s welcome. It was nice to be able to see what it’s like to be that popular. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have ninety thousand people cheering you constantly.
I’ve know a lot of them from when I did superstars, as our rowers and cyclists have really endured since then and it was helpful having seen them when they were first starting and when we’d played pool and had a couple of beers in La Manga. It meant we got different things out of them, it was brilliant.
I was on stage when Jessica Ennis’ boyfriend got booed and I saw him look really sad off stage! It was a horrific moment, he never thought he was going to be booed by forty thousand people would boo him just for going out with an Olympic gold medallist. It was a great thing to be a part of though, and really felt like me going to the next stage.
Would you be interested in coming back to radio full time then?
I’d love to. I always like anything live and daily, be it TV or radio, but it has to be something good as it take a lot of energy to do.
What is it about doing things live that really gets you interested?
When you do thing that are live, your worst bits might be there, but you know for sure that your best bits will too. There’s nothing worse than things that get chopped around. I like the relationship you can build with an audience on a daily basis, especially when they choose you. They like what you do, so you get a positive feel with them every day and it actually feels like a job.
You’re going in somewhere everyday working, not just waiting around, doing a bit of filming and then chilling for a while. You’re thee each day with a team and I really enjoy that part. They become your friends and it’s great. I hate all that stop/starting you get with pre-recorded TV. Everything’s funnier live, as they have a truth to them. If you haven’t done it, it’s hard to describe.
Series 3 of Mud Men starts on Tuesday 19 March at 10pm on History.
Tagged in London 2012 Johnny Vaughan