S5 E3: Jon Ronson, journalist

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. Because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa. Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors. Hello friends, I am in my kitchen. It's another episode of Comfort Eating and I am channeling a writerly snack in homage to today's guest. It's the humble fig roll.

1:03It's designed plastic. It's actually a post-Italian fig roll. It's called Settembrini. I've chosen this because my guest is a writer. This is portioned. It's neat. You can have one at the end of each paragraph. It's not too crummy. You won't get it in your keyboard. So shortly, I've got writer, journalist and author John Ronson. His books include Them, Adventures with Extremists, The Psychopath Test, You've Been Publicly Shamed and The Men Who Stare at Goats. This latter one was made into a Hollywood movie starring George Clooney. Just saying. He's a podcaster too, maker of hits such as The Butterfly Effect and The Last Days of August and lately he's been making a second series of BBC Radio 4's Things Fall Apart which is a series of strange unexpected human stories from the history of the culture wars.

2:08Oh and soon he's running some writing workshops in Dublin, London, Bristol, Edinburgh and Manchester. I think I need one of them. So do sign up. Right I'll just have one more of these.

2:24Who has ever just eaten one?

2:35John Ronson, welcome to Comfort Eating. Grace, thank you. You're in a studio in New York. How did you get there today? Because I have heard through my spies that you are actually a runner. Yeah, I do. I run three or four miles a day, not like insane running, but I try and do it every day. I try and do it seven days a week. Seven days a week. That's a lot. I do love it. What I've started doing is running along the piers in New York City, so you can run right out into these kind of industrial piers and then run back again. There's kind of a pathetic reason why I started running, which was when they were turning my book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, into a movie.

3:21I was staying in the same hotel as George Clooney, who was starring in the film. And I was negatively comparing my body type to his. Oh, God. I'm thinking, you know, I've gained a bit of weight and look at George Clooney. He's at the gym at five o 'clock every morning. And so I started running and that was probably 2008. It was the image of George Clooney at 5am perspiring on a running machine that changed your attitude to exercise. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought. I thought, you know, I've been a slob for decades. Now I want to be more like George Clooney. This is where I find out what my guest likes to eat behind closed doors.

4:08What is journalist, author, filmmaker John Ronson choosing for a snack? I have the snack here and you have the snack in New York. Yes. Okay. I've been informed not to take the plate off because it could be pungent. I'm opening it up now. Oh, my God. I mean. Oh my, no. Do you know, this is the first time I've ever taken the plate off something and then immediately put the plate back on. Well, the thing is, like I never knew that something that I did privately at home would suddenly be judged by Grace Dent on a podcast. Everything you do privately at home, I judge, right? I need you to know that.

4:55I'm going to take the plate off again. Oh, John. Okay. Why are you so disgusted? Right. It's a tin of tuna. There's definitely a tin of sweet corn in there. Is this mayonnaise and butter and cheese? It's just, it's a plate of what the innards of a sandwich. Yeah. If it was in a sandwich, you wouldn't be so disturbed. Right. It's basically, it's just without the bread. I'm glad that you brought up the word disturbed because is this cottage cheese in here? Yes. It's tuna, cottage cheese, sweet corn, mayo, no butter, some salt and maybe a little bit of vinegar for the tang. Give it a try. Some salt as well.

5:44Hang on, I'm going in.

5:49It's quite nice. It's the cottage cheese that's thrown me. You see, now I've started, as so often happens on comfort eating, and that is actually delicious. It looks bizarre. It just looks like a huge splurge of white and yellow with sweet corn floating in it. OK, when would you eat this? Well, usually not at 11 o 'clock in the morning, which is the time that it is right now in New York City. It's more of an evening dish, I find. If my wife's out and I can't be bothered to get a takeout, I'd open up a can of tuna, I'd swirl it all in together and eat it in front of the TV. Why is there no bread with it?

6:29There could be bread. But also, do you not sometimes find bread superfluous? It's superfluous and fattening. So it's like a no bread sandwich. I've got some around the back of my tooth.

6:48Let me take you back. Okay. 1967. You're born in Cardiff and you grew up there with your mum, dad and older brother. What were you like as a little boy? I can't imagine you as a little boy, John. I was, you know, I was uncomfortable in my skin. I was unremarkable and, you know, nervous and quiet. Did you feel unremarkable? I felt that I was treading water until I could start my life properly, which would be after Cardiff. What's a normal day in your house like? It was suburban. We lived in a suburban house in a pretty nice part of Cardiff called Lisvane. I spent a lot of time on my own. I remember, you know, in my own private head games, pretending to be like a spy.

7:40but really when I look back on pretending to be a spy it was basically just the permission for me to just stand in a hedge or a bush and not be noticed for like hours. So really I think my games of pretending to be a spy or a soldier was really a way for me to just be on my own in a hedge. How long have you ever stood in a hedge? I mean probably some hours. I love this feeling that even by the age of seven or eight, you're treading water waiting to go. Yeah, I think I instinctively knew that Cardiff wasn't for me. My grandparents lived in London, so frequently we'd go to London and I'd lose myself in London, even at the age of like 12 or 13.

8:28I'd just jump on a bus and just wherever the bus would take me, I would just stay on the bus until or the conductor came over to take my money, then I'd jump off the bus and then jump on another bus and I'd spend all day doing that. It was all about learning about a world outside of the world that I was growing up in, which I just didn't fit into. But this is Wales in the 1970s. The culinary traditions there, very strong. You've got cowl, Welsh rarebit, lava bread, Welsh cakes, barabrith. what's being cooked at John Ronson's house? Is it that type of thing? Well, some of those things you just said I've never heard of.

9:10So I clearly never at Barrow Brith unless I know the English word for it. I love the fact that you just think I've made some of these things up. So when you get in from school, what's cooking? Like meat and two veg, that kind of stuff. Yeah. I did some binge eating when I was a kid. Definitely some of my unhappinesses manifested in binge eating, like a whole packet of biscuits after school, chocolate digestives. How long did you do that for? Probably about two or three years. I think I was probably a bulimic who never threw up, so I just gained weight. But then I lost it all the minute I got to London.

9:54And nobody noticed? I remember we had a cleaning lady, you noticed. We had a cleaning lady who watched me eat a whole bunch of biscuits and basically said something like, that's a lot of biscuits. She was warning me that this was dysfunctional. What did you think? I thought, you're probably right. And there's clearly something going on here. It was a couple of years. It was probably between the ages of about 14 and maybe 17. and then by the time I moved to London, I just immediately became thin. Did you just kick the habit? Yes. Yeah, I left it behind and it never came back again. It was evidently a manifestation of not being in the right environment.

10:40Just being trapped like a sort of coiled snake, a coiled spring, just biding my time until I could get to London and everything would be okay. Your career is all about conversations and talking to people. Was this instilled into you at home, like around the dinner table? Were family dinners a thing? No, not really. Do you remember the show The Tube? Absolutely. Okay, so it was Friday about 5.30 in the afternoon, so just after school. I was given permission to eat on my own in my bedroom and watch The Tube on TV. I didn't have to sit with my family. So my mother would make lamb chops and mint sauce and potatoes and I'd eat it on my lap alone in the room.

11:30It was at the front of the house, had a little sink, little pink sink to one of those little clunky chunky clunky tvs watching the tube just sat there i am also massive massive i mean exactly like he is one of the reasons i managed to get out of carlisle was the tube like it was watching watching pollyates i just wanted to be pollyates and i wanted to hang out with jills holland still kind of want to hang out with jills holland i feel the same way about all of those things when i noticed that jills holland was following me on Instagram, the 14-year-old me wouldn't have believed it. I love that sense of kind of getting away from them, the freedom that it brought.

12:08But you've said that you were just absolutely dying to get out of Wales. Is there a moment you can pinpoint when you just think, oh my God, I've done it? Oh, yeah. I started college, Polytechnic of Central London, and my mother dropped me off at the Hall of Residence and the guy in the next room, a guy called Dippin Joshi, said, oh, do you want to come out with us tonight? And I was it. I just unshackled myself and everything that had happened in my life up until that moment. And I went out for the night in London and it was like a reset. That's when my life began.

12:57In the late 80s, you happened across a band, the Frank Sidebottom Band, who invited you to join them playing on keyboards. So you quit Polytechnic in London and you moved with the band to Manchester. This is an experience that's since been turned into a feature film starring Michael Fassbender. You and the band spent a lot of time on the road. Was this as rock and roll as it sounds?

13:31Well, I mean, there was always some awkwardness. At one point, Frank fired most of the band except for me and decided to get in more proper musicians. And then it just became a lot of hostility in the band. Like these professional musicians just hated the fact that all I could do was play C, F and G. And so it became that hierarchical. That feels very rock and roll, though. The open hostility of people together on the road. Yes. I tried to reflect that in the film Frank that I wrote with the Maggie Gyllenhaal character taking a complete baffling dislike to my character. Did you have an image of what a rock star would be like?

14:13So you sit at home, you're watching the tube, you think, one day I might be a rock star. I'd love to be a rock star. I wasn't sure that they were real. I remember when I was like 12, I'd go to shows at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff and the first shows I ever went to were The Specials and David Essex. And I just couldn't believe that they were real. I remember thinking there's no way that David Essex would come to Cardiff. And it must be some sort of hologram or some blow up doll that becomes David Essex for the duration of the show. And then they deflate him and then take him. That was what I was imagining that I was going to see before I went to my first gig.

15:02But then you become that to other people. you turn up in people's towns and you're the one on stage. I would say that the Frank Sidebottom, oh blimey big band, didn't have quite the mystique and kudos of David Essex. But they, I mean, look. But no, it's true. But Frank Sidebottom, for people that are listening who have never heard or don't know who Frank Sidebottom is, Frank Sidebottom was a big cult indie hit in the 80s. very very cool he's kind of an ironic northern wannabe pop star but he's got a huge papi and maché head and i remember watching him on telly and the quiet anarchy combined with music combined with the northerners i thought it was bloody amazing and you were in that band that is really cool john it really was amazing but because we were like a sort of parody of a of a band And the audience, in a way, their excitement and their kind of screaming and cheering, they were kind of a parody of an audience, too.

16:11It was like we were all in on it together. I mean, during this time as an international rock star, as we've established, what were you eating? Well, me and my, probably my closest friend at the time was Mike West, who was the singer in The Man From Del Monte, which was this other band that I managed at the time. And we went out for a period of maybe 18 months, two years. We went out to eat together to the same Chinese restaurant pretty much every night, certainly five or six nights a week. And I had exactly the same dish every night. And so did Mike. I can't remember what Mike's was, but mine was roast duck noodles in soup.

16:53And I had that every day for at least a year. Where is the Chinese restaurant? Where is it? It was called the Winoir. That was the name of the restaurant, the Winoir. Me and Michael go there and add a roast up noodle and soup at the Winoir. And I'm interested in just in trying to figure out why we behave the way that we do. I'm interested in why I always had exactly the same meal. There was something about the repetitiveness of that that I found sort of strangely comforting. And I think that occurs in lots of areas of my life to this day. I'll wear the same coloured clothes, same T-shirt, same fabric, same hoodie.

17:26I've got a neighbour, we live upstate New York for much of the time, and I've got a neighbour, she said to me the other day, Laura, she kind of looked down at my clothes, and she said, so that's just it now, right? That's just it. Ha ha ha!

17:46I think if you're not worrying about all of that stuff, then you can spend more of your brainpower working on your stories or whatever it is that motivates you. I think that people shame people for eating the same things all the time. But no, I totally agree with you. I like the reassuring nature of the same cup porridge with the same handful of berries thrown in it and the same amount of honey. And I will do that day after day after day. I think there's a strength in that. Absolutely. The food, everything, the routine, at what time you get up in the morning, whether you have a shower before you work, the clothes that you put on.

18:33For some reason, I find it very comforting if all of that is as unwavering as possible. And then in the middle of that, I'll go off and have some adventure for my writing where I'll do something very dangerous and very out of my comfort zone. And I'll hate it. I'll hate every second of it. but I have to accumulate the material so I can go back to doing what I want to do which is this perpetual routine of getting up, putting on the same t-shirt and then just working away on the story and the privacy of my house but I often think that as a journalist you should hate it because otherwise you're one of those gung-ho war reporters who just loves being in war and loves the adrenaline of it and I don't think you want to read somebody like that if you're going to go to a war it should be somebody who hates war and just really wants to be back at home I thoroughly completely agree with you, this idea of when we glorify these crazy gonzo journalists, whereas I pretty much resent all of the time that I have to be outside of the house.

19:34Right. So in a way, I think we're the best journalists because you want to suffer. People want you to suffer for your stories. So believe me, I suffer every time I go out of the house. There's a form of suffering involved.

20:00Hello, Grace Dent here. One more thing. If you love comfort eating, then you'll love my new book, Comfort Eating, what we eat when no one's looking. It's available order now. There's an e-book and an audiobook if you want me to read it to you, with chapter headings like Why Butter Makes Everything Better and Why Potatoes Are Proof of a Higher Power, How Can You Resist? Comfort Eating is packed with funny, moving stories about my family and my childhood, as well as recipes and stories about recording the show.

20:45I'm going to take you back to 94. You published your first book, Club Class. In the late 90s, you present a late night panel show called For the Love Of, where you interview eccentric groups of obsessives about stuff like ghosts and Princess Diana, conspiracy theorists. How and why do you get from music to writing and presenting? When I was living in Manchester, obviously the Man from Del Monte and Frank Sidebomb didn't pay that much. Although Frank paid us like£40 a night to be in the O 'Blimy band, so it wasn't nothing. But I started writing for the local listings paper, City Life. And we weren't paid at City Life, but if you went to see a movie in the mornings at the corner house, they'd give you free sandwiches after the film.

21:38so I ate three sandwiches for my tenure at City Life. So how do you get from City Life to telly? Well, it was very clear that I wasn't cracked up to be in the music business. It wasn't for me. The Man for Del Monte would have been a very successful band if they'd been managed by somebody else. But I had a flair for writing and I started doing my own column in Time Out and I was offered a TV show on the back of that from Janet Street Porter. Wow. So hang on a minute. So you're self-admittedly quite an anxious person and then Janet Street Porter asks you to come in for a coffee? What happened was, funny story.

22:24So my old media lecturer said, I'm going to send some of your time-out columns to Janet Street Porter to see if there's a TV show in it. And the next thing I know, I'm sitting there with Janet Street Porter and Janice Report is going, you know, I think it's a brilliant idea. And I'm nodding, having no idea what the idea is. Like I didn't know why I was there. I didn't know what conversations had been had. And the next thing I knew, I'd been given, I don't know, a few hundred thousand pounds to make my own TV series, the BBC Two. So I suppose they thought, OK, if I can have these little mini adventures every week in timeouts, then I can have adventures on television too.

23:04And the first time you saw yourself, what did you think? Well, I hated doing the Ronson Mission, the TV show. This sounds really odd and ungrateful because here I was at 25 having my own show on BBC2. There wasn't arrogance. I was just very uncomfortable doing it. And I didn't really understand the reason why, although I do understand it now. When I was just writing, it was just me and a little notepad or maybe a little recorder. when I was making the Ronson Mission it was a bus full of people with a giant camera and we'd turn up at somebody's house and I would have to perform and this was the opposite of what I had grown to love this wasn't being a writer this was being an actor so that's why I hated it and the show was bad there was an article in I think The Guardian or somewhere at the time that listed it as one of the five worst shows ever to be on the BBC.

24:04I guess its main legacy was that Louis Theroux was a fan of it and that helped inspire him to do what he ended up doing. So at this point, do you know that Louis Theroux is watching what you're doing? I met Louis, I was friends with Adam and Joe and I went round to Joe's house and Joe said, there's somebody that I really want you to meet. And it was Louis and Louis was like, oh, you know, I want to do what you're doing or I want to get into TV. I think he was already starting to make stuff with Michael Moore at the time. When you first set eyes on Louis Theroux, did he, because he was kind of really tall and he's got that kind of boyish handsomeness, did you think, oh shit, now he's going to start making documentaries?

24:46No, that came later when he became very successful. And I felt like the Pixies must have felt when Nirvana got big. Ruby Wax has spoken openly about being very angry about Louis Theroux Yeah, I mean it was probably bruising I mean for her, for me because we predated him and he just leapfrogged over us and was just very good at it I mean I watched in the 90s I had to stop watching because I wasn't comparing myself to him and partly because every time I bought something out the reviews always mentioned Louis we were like conjoined twins and that for one of us to grow stronger, the other one had to die.

25:30And I mean, in the end, it was fine because I started writing books and that's when I relaxed into thinking this is what I want to do. In 2001, you publish them, Adventures with Extremists. NIST does, it sees you go to jihadi training camps, dictators, home auctions. you literally do go on adventures with extremists and across your career you've managed to get access to loads of people who must be really wary of journalists but as you've got better known is it harder to get to these kind of people yeah it really varies sometimes being better known gives you access to some people that you wouldn't have otherwise had access to.

26:23And it does the opposite. It makes people more wary. And I remember when we were doing Tottenham Hattola, which is the first chapter of them, I remember Omar Bakri saying to me and Saul at one point, you're not documentary makers, you're students.

26:40And the fact that we were so non-threatening and the camera that we had was so small and we weren't like journalists. We were just shuffling around. You've spent such a lot of time with some of these people. Have you had any memorable meals with unlikely people? Yeah, I had a bunch of breakfast smoothies with Alex Jones. Alex Jones, the far-right radio show host. Is he quite calm at breakfast? No, he's never calm. He's never calm. For an introvert, you don't want to hang out. Also, he's tireless. He never tires. And I tire a lot. Do you like him?