Eddy Says

Eddy Says: The rise and fall of Up For It on MTV part two – How Up For It ended (and how I got fired from MTV)

By | Published on Monday 1 August 2011

EddyTM - Up For It

So, carrying on where we left off last week, I got Zane Lowe his first job in UK media and things were going swimmingly. Unfortunately, I got a new boss not long afterwards, who was one of the biggest bell-ends I’ve ever worked with. We’ll call him Herbert.

He was one of the MTV Networks Europe people, whom I’d locked horns with months earlier while still working at MTV News, when Princess Diana died and he wanted us to cover the funeral. I pointed out that on the day she died, MTV was the only channel not hysterically covering the story. That day I watched MTV more than I’d ever watched the channel, just to get away from the collective madness precipitated by Diana’s untimely death.

He insisted we had to do it, and work unpaid on a Saturday. Money wasn’t the issue for me. As the only person on the team from Wales, I said: “She’s not MY princess, fuck this, we should be providing an alternative to the funeral! We should be programming music for people to get AWAY from the collective lunacy surrounding this shockingly over-rated and over scrutinised Sloane Ranger”.

We became enemies there and then.

Sometime later I heard other things that didn’t change my mind about him. In a meeting with Xfm bosses back in the day, this guy proudly talked about discovering Zane when he was at MTV. The Xfm bosses stopped him and said: “That’s odd. We didn’t think you were working at MTV UK when Eddy Temple-Morris got Zane hired…”

Cue uncomfortable silence.

So, this horrid little man joined MTV UK with Zane already in situ, and his first big idea was the beginning of the end for me. He saw the massive viewing figures we’d managed to get in a graveyard slot and his eyes seemed to go ‘ker-ching’. He wanted to move the show to the biggest studio, stick it in a prime-time slot, and cash in. I told him he would ruin the show. That there was no need to move it.

The whole charm of ‘Up For It’ was its immediacy, one camera that follows the ball. The unique set up meant it was spectacularly off the cuff. It was its spontaneity that made it so special. We did funny little acoustic sessions and made the best use of the space.

We even had a boyband competition in there – I put five 90s boybands through mental and physical tests in this cupboard-sized space. We had to be resourceful. With not enough room to swing a gerbil, I just took a brass rubbing of the abdominal muscles of whomever each band nominated as their ‘physical’ representative.

I put another through an intelligence test, which was, in itself, a glorious deconstruction of showbiz and how some people in it were thicker than pigshit.

“What’s the capital of Wales?”

“Ummm… Scotland?”

Grand Royal Magazine (the Beastie Boys mag) had recently come out and first coined the phrase ‘mullet’ in reference to hair. It made me laugh so much that I went on a mission to popularise the word with the ‘Wall Of Mullets’ feature in that little studio. People from all over the UK, Ireland and New Zealand, deluged me with pictures of their relatives with daft hair. It was childish, stupid, inane, but hilariously so, and struck a massive chord with a staggering number of children. Job done, as ordered.

Everyone from LL Cool J to The Super Furry Animals came on the show, with the Daf and Gruff, from one of my favourite bands in the world, famously telling me to go finger my grandmother at around 3pm on a children’s channel. It was a show that sailed close to the wind, but it was love it or hate it – and it was those things in equal measure – it worked in that space and should have stayed in that space.

Herbert didn’t listen. Now I’d have a director, he said, a vision mixer, full gallery, multi cameras. I’d have to have a script prepared the day before, and let the director know what I’d say, when I’d say it, and where I’d be standing when I said it, seven hours before transmission. Everything that was good about the show was hollowed out. The set. The ad libbing. The ricketty crapness that made it so special, so different from everything else around, was the blueprint for shows like ‘Gonzo’.

The death of ‘Up For It’ was relatively slow, it took two series. They wanted to do another but, and they HATED this, I asked for it to be stopped.

“You can’t stop an MTV series”, whined Herbert. “You’re a presenter, presenters don’t stop a series, we do!”

At the time I could feel Zane desperate to do his own thing, itching to get out of my shadow, and quite rightly too, he was far too good to be anyone’s sidekick, and I wanted him to spread his wings and fly. I loved the guy and still do.

“Read my lips”, I told Herbert and the assembled MTV brass. “This is the last series, I am not doing another. Give Zane his own show and I’ll come up with another idea”.

And with that, ‘Up For It’ gave up its ghost, and Zane went on to do ‘Brand:New’, and then joined Xfm to present the early evening show, which was brilliant. And you probably know the rest of the Zane story.

But back to me. One of Herbert’s cronies in the building was a director who was as ambitious as he was mediocre. We had a really important meeting scheduled one day. He didn’t show up. Let’s call him Alfonse.

“Where’s Alfonse?” I asked the guy who sat next to him.

“He’s gone to meet his dealer” was the reply.

I’d always despised the cocaine culture that was so prevalent at MTV in the late 90s. This man was the kind of director always more concerned with where his next gram came from than the job in hand. I fired off an angry and expletive email, demanding to know where he was.

He replied the next day with this: “I was in the building, I’m sorry our paths did not cross. Don’t swear on email, it’s against company policy”.

A red mist descended over my eyes at that point. The one thing that really gets me is lying. My next email began thus, verbatim: “Fuck company policy and fuck you, you lying cokehead, you were never in the building…”

Rather than manning or fessing up, the director took the email to Viacom Human Recources (Viacom own MTV) and demanded the letter and law of company policy. Sending an expletive-filled email to a colleague was a sackable offence, so I was called in by the same guy who I’d pleaded to previously to hire Zane and was told that I was “with great regret, being suspended indefinitely”.

Interestingly, he said that the content of my email was entirely correct – Alfonse was clearly a liar, and a cokehead – but the rules were the rules, and he had used them to his advantage, and my boss’s boss’s “hands were tied”.

I went straight to Human Resources, gave them my pass and my dongle, with the words “Here’s my badge and my gun” (come on, how often do you get that opportunity?), and followed the exit sign for the final time, with all the nice people in the building close to tears and all the MTV cocaine mafia punching the air with delight.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, not least because by that point I’d worked out that the lovely Lindsay, who did my make up before I went on air, was being paid £120 per edition, while I was being paid £90 to conceive, co-produce, write and present the show.

They had really got their money’s worth out of me, but what I got was an avalanche of requests to DJ – at clubs, gigs, festivals – and so my odyssey as a working DJ and remixer began. And Xfm was not far away, and there Zipper would wonderfully return my initial favour by paving my way at X.

Looking back on the decade after the MTV episode, I really cannot complain, as Calvin Harris pointed out in a tweet to me the other day: “Stop your crying, we have the best job in the world!”

He’s absolutely spot on.

X eddy

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