How Dare You?

Groucho Marx never wanted to be a member of a club that would have him. Maggie Thatcher thought there was no such thing as society. Oxford wasn’t listening.

It was chock of full of clubs, replete with societies, catering for all desires, most of them earnest. They were known by abbreviations, usually starting with ‘OU.’ This is not short for ‘oh you beautiful doll’, although half of the membership was. There was OUCA, consisting of people who wanted to be Prime Minister; OUDS, who all hoped Trevor Nunn would sign them for the Royal Shakespeare Company; and The OTG, whose members wished they were in the Cambridge Footlights. I was in OUBS (broadcasting) and OUSO (orchestra). My next-door neighbour, who kept me awake with his Wagner, was in the Oxford Union, and told me earnestly how he expected to be in the Cabinet before he was thirty. I asked him why. ‘Oh, power, obviously’, he replied, with naïve honesty. ‘How stupid of me’, I said, ‘here was me thinking you might say “to help people”, or something like that’.

If this sounds untethered to reality, which it certainly was, may I present to you a university society which made everything else seem tame in the extreme, a word they took very literally. I’m talking about The Dangerous Sports Club. This consisted of undergraduate toffs, usually dressed in top hat and tails, doing stupid things which would put the fear of God up their parents, who were paying for it, all while giggling mercilessly. Champagne was usually involved, to get just the right kind of buzz while you try to steer a grand piano down a ski run in St Moritz, or have dinner on an active volcano, or jump off Bristol Suspension Bridge doing a new thing they almost invented called Bungee Jumping. Presumably because drunk young people bounce, or maybe toffs are just born lucky, not many of them died, except for one poor unfortunate who allowed himself to be launched out of a trebuchet into – or in his case, near too – a net. That did not land well.

I was thinking about them this week, listening to The Bottom Line on Radio 4, in which Evan Davis, who so far as I know has never started a company, asks questions of people who have, in wide-eyed fascination, as if observing a particularly excitable puppy. The topic this week was risk. The guests tried to aver that we entrepreneurs don’t think what we do is risky, because we are passionate about it, and driven by a desire to make the impossible possible. It’s all about calculated risk, to fulfil a vision, one of them said. I agree with this, from my own experiences pushing water uphill for a living …

… and it brought to mind Tip Tipping.

This is not, as you may imagine, a handbook on gratuity etiquette.

It’s the name of a chap I interviewed back in the Middle Ages when I was a TV Producer. I was making a series of short films for a newfangled thing called Sky, each of which explained the mystique of those weird jobs they have in the film industry, things like Best Boy and Gaffer and Key Grip. Reel Work, we called it, with staggering wit, you will agree. Sky hired me because I’d just produced a series called Rough Guides for the BBC and was briefly deemed to be hot. I know that’s hard to imagine.

So it was that we set up our tripod on a film shoot, and pointed it at Tip Tipping. He was a stunt arranger, having moved into films after being a Para and then a member of the SAS. He sat, his burly forearms on display, next to a few friends, who also did stunts for their day job and jumped out of aeroplanes for fun. Tip explained how everything they did was carefully planned, all risks assessed, because a) it’s nice if you don’t die, and b) the Director might want a second take. He was one of those people with a huge personality, who just invites you in, has you smiling and laughing, even thinking ‘I wouldn’t mind trying that’. After I said ‘cut’ and we put the gear away, he opened a bottle of whisky and started on the real stories, the ‘squeaky bum’ moments, when they laughed, but only afterwards, and never in top hats. ‘And then there was Richard Branson’, he said.

He explained that Mr Virgin had called them up, before his flying balloons across the world period, to say he’d done some parachute jumps but never freefall, and would Tip and his pals care to teach him? They did all the training, and went for the first jump.

‘Branson was grinning and gurning, giving the thumbs up, loving the adrenaline’, said Tip, ‘and we got to the time to pull the cord. And he didn’t pull the cord. “Pull the fxxxing cord” we gestured to him. More grinning. Still didn’t pull the cord. So I flew across and pulled it for him, then pulled mine. We were twelve seconds from hitting the ground’.

‘When we landed, I went across and said “you are a madman” ’.

‘Hey, I’m so sorry’, replied Branson, ‘the buzz was just so great. Let’s do it once more. I promise it won’t happen again’.

‘No way’, replied Tip.

‘How about Twenty Grand a man?’

So they went back up. And it happened again. This time, when Tip pulled his cord, they were eight seconds from the ground.

One of Tip’s pals, another Para, was into base jumping. But he’d broken most of his bones, several times. He couldn’t really run any more, it was more of a speedy stagger. So when, some years later, he went base jumping in Norway, he didn’t get far enough away from the cliff, banged into the wall, his chute didn’t open properly, and he ended up spending the night on a ledge, with two broken legs. Other base jumpers tried to rescue him, and a helicopter, but they could not get to him. The next morning, realising his situation was impossible, he rolled off the ledge.

Tip himself was killed aged thirty-four, recreating a parachute accident for a BBC TV Series called 999.

And these guys thought Richard Branson, world-famous entrepreneur, was a member of a club they’d rather not join.

I guess there’s risk, and there’s risk. And some people are just - O, U know what I mean.