Jay Rayner: Why Trying to Be Liked Is a Recipe for Failure

0:00Who says Halloween only lasts one day? With Wayfair, one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home. From larger-than-life yard decor and moody lighting, to festive accents for every room in the house, Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place. Because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night. They're made all season long. Shop Halloween decor now at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. This is a global production. I didn't go to Paris to review a Michelin 3 star to make a name for myself, but by God it did. It was of imposter syndrome in a way, isn't it?

0:40I knew what I was going to do and I knew it was going to have an impact. When did you become aware of that? When did you realise your mum was famous? They threw me out for four months and it became headline news. No, I'm sorry, you should have been allowed the right to screw up in private. You know, when people say check your privilege, I've checked mine and I've got loads, isn't that great? And as I went into these newspaper groups, I pulled the files on myself and I removed them. Did you really? Yeah.

1:09Jay Rayner, welcome. It's a delight to be here. You have one of those multi-leaved business cards. Journalist, broadcaster, author, bon vivant. It's not a portfolio, it's a filing cabinet. Musician, all of that. And that's just latterly as well, of course. if we go back far enough, there's even more on the list. I presume you've had lunch. I have had lunch. The offices of Global are, of course, just down from Chinatown. And there's a particular place on Gerrard Street, which is a confusing street. I mean, I look at all the people wondering, trying to work out where to go, and I think you have my sympathies because there's a whole bunch of places I know nothing about.

1:45But there is a restaurant called Four Seasons. In fact, there are two of them side by side. Don't go in the one on the right. Nobody knows what happens in there. The one on the left does very good Cantonese roast meats. And I go and I sit there by myself with a magazine to read or my phone and eat Cantonese roast meats and some morning glory. No rice because I try to avoid the carbs because of Anno Domini. And then it was a short stride to hear. And your joy in those moments is undimmed by the lengthy exposure to fun. I mean, it is pathetic, I sometimes think, that I still enjoy these things. And I think actually when it comes down to it, that's why I have been doing the main job that I'm known for, which is as a restaurant critic for The Observer for 26 years and now for the Financial Times for another two.

2:35The reason I've been able to do it for that ridiculous length of time is that I still love restaurants. I am also a man of appetites. It's a love that started young. yeah I think the interesting story is that both my parents were working class kids from very meager east end Jewish backgrounds and they did very well for themselves my mother Claire became a very successful agony art journalist broadcaster and one of the interesting things I think in the late 60s early 70s was journalism as an airlock through which bright working class kids could move up socially in the world and part of that was being introduced to restaurants and she loved them my father less so he never really felt comfortable in them but my mother loved them and she introduced me to them i mean i remember a particular thing when i was like 10 years old being taken to rules just her and me it was a day when she'd take took me out to see the offices she worked in the offices of the sun and women's own these great publications and uh the first time i got to eat oysters sitting next to my dear old mum um and just thought wow the adult world this is quite It's precocious, isn't it?

3:40Oh, it's disgusting, yes. That's lovely. It is precocious. I think I was less skilled at being a child than at being an adult. I was waiting for childhood to be finished. I like that. And you chose rules, of course, for your first column in your new birth at the FT. It seemed like an obvious choice. It was a lovely piece. You need first principles. Who am I and what am I about? You've got a moment, 980 words in which to introduce yourself to a new readership. And I thought, I can do it through this. I have history and I haven't actually ever written a review of rules. And you leave, I've just come up with a line that you'll probably object to.

4:22I was thinking you don't leave much on the plate, but you do leave a lot of yourself on the page. Up to a point. It's a version of me. I think all columnists do that. All writers do that. We create a version which is very close. But I could see your mum in Rules. I mean, I'm of an age where I was familiar with her growing up. And I mean, she was ubiquitous at some points, it seemed. I could feel your mum in your review of a restaurant. Well, I think the thing is that at the point when Claire was on television, there were only three and then four channels. Yes, that's true. So if you were on telly, 10 million people saw you because you had nothing else to watch.

5:00and so if you ever catch those clips of you know um a night with that ITV used to do and it's Les Dawson whatever and they cut to the audience and it's full of celebrities all of them are there that's all there was that's literally all there was enough to fill the seats and their partners and she was part of that group um when did you become aware of that when did you realize your mum was famous i actually think it was i always knew it did you so i i i said once that claire fell famous in 19 did you call her claire i mean no i didn't know you called her mummy no i well do you want the full story yes i do okay so um up to a certain age i called her mummy yeah uh as a small child and then she and my sister did the same and she was seven years older and eventually my mother said this this is this can't go on for anyone this is ridiculous and she wanted us to choose other names now famously my mother would get lost on occasion or be late particularly be late coming downstairs and my father des took to standing at the bottom of the stairs and he chose the ugliest name he could think of to shout up the stairs and he shouted and she was known in the family as ada okay adrian diz um and some people found it slightly over from about the age of 10 i called her ada that's nice um all the way until the end when um we'll talk a bit more about her because i mostly because i'm fascinated but when you use the word meager to describe ada and desi's childhoods how did you become aware of that meagerness I think it was gently dawning.

6:45My paternal grandparents lived, I think it's called the Hallfield Estate over in Paddington. I wasn't very fond of them, but Des. Why not? They weren't very nice people. Fair enough. They were cross and angry most of the time, and they guilt-tripped my old dad a lot, but he still felt it necessary to take us there once every couple of weeks. And that was a small council flat. And it was clear that they had come from the East End and that was a step up. And I think a lot of Desi's guilt was to do with that. He looked after them and he made sure they were right. But there was a lot of that. Claire, I never knew my maternal grandparents.

7:26Claire always said that they were, her line was, if I had a turn bob note, my father would steal it from me and my mother would find a way to get it out of me emotionally. Good Lord. They're both crooks, was her view. So she shook the dust from her sandals when she left home. It's a more extraordinary story. They ended up, he was always on the run. Her maiden name by the time Des married her was Chetwynd. And that name was chosen by my grandfather, who was a resourceful chap. He'd moved the whole family. I think it was to Gloucestershire. I sometimes get the counties wrong. But it was the middle of the Second World War.

8:03And he chose the name of the local aristocracy on the grounds that nobody would question why a man from the local aristocracy was not in the forces. So he became Chetwind. And it worked. But it meant that this very Jewish family had this very Anglo surname, bizarrely Anglo surname. They moved to Canada. She fell very ill. She had a thyroid complaint, ended up in an insane asylum as a result of this. Her parents never once came to see her. And a resourceful doctor said, you need treatment, and we've got to get you out of Canada. on the Cunard line they have to take you free of charge if they brought you here and then you are marked insane so we'll stamp your passport insane, you'll be deported insane back to the UK and that's what happened into the care of her aunt and uncle, my great aunt and uncle Max Muriel who became a kind of surrogate grandparents, that was at the age of 15 and she never saw them again and I never met them I've often wondered what the qualifications are to be an agony aunt.

9:05A bit of trauma helps. Well, I suppose it gives you an extraordinary... Well, it's an interesting question. You know, I'm... She was kind of the first, in a way. Well, not really. No, I know. Marge was ahead, and you can say that Daniel Defoe wrote one in the 18th century. There were a lot of them, but she was certainly one of the key ones. She came from a nursing background. nursing provided her with the security that she needed. And so she did have a medical background, which a lot of them don't. But there are other things, you know. I'm 60 now, and you see your parents as adults, don't you?

9:45And I know that, I always thought this was interesting. This is probably more detail than anybody wants to hear from a son about their mother. I know that Des was her first and only lover. Right, okay. And yet she became a great expert on sex and human relationships, which suggests to me a vastly inquisitive mind. I was going to say that the curiosity must be the key to that. Yes, absolutely. And a desire to help people. Oh, yeah, an absolute desire. She was nosy. She was fascinated in relationships which helped with the novels that she wrote. But not to the exclusion of the people closest to her.

10:21Sometimes, I don't think at least, but sometimes people who belong to the world can sometimes feel a bit distant from those technically closest to them. I don't get that sense. Oh, no, no, no. No, there wasn't. I mean, she did try to keep certain things hidden. Sure. That story, I've told you a lot of it I didn't know until I was in my 20s. Okay. In fact, possibly older. She wrote her memoirs. She wasn't going to. And then she found out that somebody was writing an unauthorized volume and she was furious. So she decided to write her own. And that's where I got most of the story. So it's a warm and happy home.

10:52Oh, yeah. Yeah. With a bit of... My dad was a depressive. I think he loved his depression. It's a very flippant way to put it, but I think he did nurture it in a certain way. So there was that hanging over it. But it was, yeah, it was a warm home. And what about food at home? Was it a big deal, a big part of the... Well, it was. We were a noisy North West London Jewish family. The very first line I ever wrote as a student journalist, I decided when I was about 15, I was lucky in that I worked out I wanted to be a journalist. And I chose my student, the university, because it had the biggest student paper in the country, Leeds.

11:27And I wrote a particular line, I am a Jew by food, I worship at my mother's fridge. And I looked at the line, I was 19 when I wrote it, and I thought, oh, hang on, there might be something here. I'd been an editor at that point, I was trying to find my voice as a writer, but it was true as well. Jews communicate through food. We sit at the table, we talk, we talk over food and at food and we interrogate food. And, you know, the old Jackie Mason joke, non-Jews come out of the theater and go, do you want to drink? And the Jews come out and go, what are we going to eat? So, yeah, but that's the curious thing is the real impact of my mother was wanting to be a journalist.

12:07Right. Every day, three or four newspapers came into the house and we were each given one to read over breakfast, I think because she didn't really want to talk to us. and I got the Daily Mail and there was a, well maybe I chose it but there was a column in there called Dermot Pergavy's America which was a miscellany column by a man with a fantastic name Dermot Pergavy if you're going to have a byline and it was just stories from across the states and I read it every day and I eventually concluded gosh, to be able to write this stuff you have to know this stuff and to know this stuff you have to see it and bit by bit I concluded that I would be fascinated by the life of a journalist and that really was, because Claire was a journalist, and I was introduced to great tabloid editors, to the great newsmen, they were mostly men of Fleet Street and I liked them I liked their company.

13:01And were you comfortable and confident in their company? I was a bit precocious in that way, I mean look you know when people say check your privilege, I've checked mine and I've got loads, isn't that great? I was from a very comfortable middle class background i was articulate i understood how the business worked i mean there were occasions in my teens in the old days when you had to read copy over to copy takers claire was busy and she would hand it to me so my probably my first interaction with national papers was reading my mother's copy to copy takers yeah um comma new paragraph yeah at the old line this happened more when when i became a general journalist because i was totally a general journalist for the first I don't know 13, 14 years when you're calling copy takers and you hear them say is there much more of this?

13:50I got in just at the end of that. I don't think I only ever did it twice but my dad who was on the Telegraph it was the background to Saturdays at home was because he was filing for the Sunday Telegraph and we'd always hear that. Quite long obviously quite big for the Telegraph. They're big old articles It takes a while to file 2 ,000 words to copy takers. It just does So you wouldn't have had any kind of sense that this was too rarefied a world. I mean, it was the world you grew up in. Oh, no. No, absolutely. I've always said, actually, that if you looked at my parents between them, a lot of careers that other people might see as unobtainable, to me, were completely obtainable because they were what they did.

14:28So on my mother's side, she was a novelist. She wrote nonfiction books. She was a broadcaster on radio and TV. She was a journalist. And she was also, and you can put it in another bracket over here, a famous person des my father had trained as an actor at the guild hall he was in tony quail's first uh company at stratford the precursor of the rsc and various other things uh he became a painter a very fine painter even if he didn't ever feel he got the acknowledgement he deserved um and he was her agent um discussions of book contracts went on across the table so all of these things these very attractive possibilities were present in my life and their friends were actors broadcasters were that crowd from you know sitting in the audience in the 1970s

15:24so what about away from family what were you like at school what do you remember about school did Well, the key thing to, and there are overlapping stories, I wasn't very good. I was sent to, not really. I was sent to a fee-paying school, Haberdasher's School for Boys, Elstery, which turned out a lot of comedians, Sacha Baron Cohen, Dave Bediel, Matt Lucas, all of those. But I was always seen as a bit of a dullard. There's a particular teacher, his name's Michael Lompier, who told me that I could not work on the school magazine because it was only for people. you're quite enjoying me actually taking the moment to name him I've made it my life's work I think you should harbour a graduate I could not work on the school magazine because it was only for people with a realistic prospect of working in journalism that's brutal so you, Michael Lombry, I've never been able to find him, always wanted to tell him and then sort of most famously and it was famous because of who my mother was, I was thrown out of school for getting very stoned at an after party for the school play and they threw me out for four months and it became headline oh what was that like again it was quite formative yes um i mean i i suppose it was sort of traumatic but actually when i look back on it i think it was interesting there was a particular time i went off with a a friend to an to a party overnight and we'd heard that something was going to break in the Sundays and we bought every single paper and I turned every page of every Sunday paper looking to see if I was in that I wasn't as it happened but that stuck with me a few years later when that became part of my job as a young journalist when you were told here go through the papers make a list um it did result in various headlines and here's the kicker when I who's 16 I was 16 17 when that happened okay and so there were it was front page on the standard and on those stands that used to be on the street.

17:27Claire Rayner's sonics. Agony of Agony Art. Right. Agony of Agony Art. That's a good headline. Yeah. Do you know what was infuriating? It was sold by, the story was sold by two, in quotes, friends of mine at school, and they only got 150 quid out of the Daily Mail for it. Even then, it was nothing. That's more than infuriating, Jay. That's a betrayal. It was a betrayal. And beautifully, they've constantly tried to apologise over the years. Look, look. You know, life moves on. You just have to deal with that one. But there is a kicker, I have to tell you this, because you will like this story. After I'd been the editor of the student paper, one of the interesting things was in the late 80s, the nationals were all trying to grab readers when they were students because they thought they'd have them for life.

18:12And so they were launching student supplements. And every one of us who'd been the editor of a big student paper got the call. So I worked my way around the student supplements of the Independent, the Observer, the Telegraph, Time Out, whatever. And as I went into these newspaper groups, I went down, desperate to make sure that nobody made the connection between this dodgy past. And I went down to the old print newspaper cuttings libraries, and I pulled the files on myself, and I removed them. Did you really? Yeah. Straight in the bin? Straight in the shredder? No, I took them home. Or did you keep them home?

18:43I've got a copy. I did eventually write about it for The Guardian in 93 or 94 but by that point it was on my terms and I already I think by then, sorry it's going to sound terribly grand, I'd won Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards so I didn't need to worry so much For younger people listening we should probably establish why you did that because it doesn't I got expelled from Ampleforth in 1990 for cannabis, not suspended, I expelled him because Oh, you're one step above me. Well, it was a posher school, so that made the news because of the school. Jesuits were involved, weren't they?

19:19Benedictines. Benedictines, old boy. Benedictines. But that made the news because the school was very posh. Right. And boarding and public school. But it's hard for my kids to understand how anyone can get into trouble for weed. But it was a proper stigma, and that's why you wanted to destroy the evidence of it, because you thought that... I just didn't want any editor who was thinking to employ me to kind of cross this. Exactly, yeah. I wanted to find out. Well, it wouldn't matter now. It wouldn't matter. Well, it wouldn't get reported now if you were 16. I don't think they'd be... I don't know.

19:47Maybe not. I think if the... Just as an example, if the child of a prime minister or cabinet minister was sanctioned for any kind of narcotic use, yeah, now that would... Maybe. Well, actually, I don't know, because there are certain rules now about... Yeah, I think there are. There are age limits. But anyway, too late to save you. How did mum and dad respond to it? Actually, do you know what? Just as a fellow, someone who's been through something very similar, how did you tell them? I didn't really need to did I because the school phoned them they'd been on the blower already basically there were a lot of people who were fingered for this most of them coughed and they got one week and I decided to hold out I'm not entirely sure why and they eventually claimed they had a witness and I crumbled my dad was furious I think there was an element and it was put to me like this but with some guilt that would come later on their part which was that this very affluent lifestyle that we had was built on Claire's reputation and that what I had done put that at risk but then shortly after that my old mum reeled back from that very heavily and said no I'm sorry you should have been allowed the right to screw up in private and I took that from you so she was very sympathetic and I remember her telling me that at which point I then said it was a fantastic party and she said I bet it was what an amazing thing for her to have done though well I mean she understood it was right I know but still that doesn't mean that they're going to do it you know I am aware not in the same way but I have a forward facing life people recognise you are DTV or whatever and I am aware that that can have implications for the people around you and you have to be careful with that they didn't sign up for it necessarily they've been dragged along in the slipstream of it and she had clocked it early I don't know what she would have made of the age of social media no she would have found it I think quite complicated well it is yeah just the final bit on your mum I think that involvement in the envelopes coming through the letterbox I mean you got you would be involved in her work.

22:05Oh, do you mean the letters? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, so there were a thousand letters a week that came in through a PO box, and they were all answered. The most significant difference between the problem page or agony column of the 70s and 80s, and now, now, the only one that gets answered is the one that's answered on the page. Right, yes. Whereas Claire answered every single one. And the main way that I got involved was that occasionally if she had an issue which she thought was a little more universal, as in there would be more people who would have that issue. For example, premature ejaculation or the menopause or a specific one, married couples and their love lives have died off.

22:46She would offer a leaflet, partly brackets. My dad had done a deal where he'd worked out it was quite profitable to handle all this. And we could get 15 ,000 requests for this leaflet. They would come in sacks. The envelopes had to be opened. The covering letter read to see if there was anything else that he'd be dealing with. and then the envelopes the stamp collection envelopes filled with perfect pocket money job for a 10 year old and i was you know i could recognize the symptoms of of the menopause at 50 paces as a 10 year old i knew uses for natural yogurt had nothing to do with dinner thank you anytime did it have any deeper impacts because i mean was it a cringe-free childhood then i mean because some people would cringe now at the thought of their mother talking about any of this stuff but no i i it was cringe-free yeah and actually i rather reveled in the fact that some people were uncomfortable with it i liked their discomfort one of the things that it did bring was a genuine sense of the multiplicity of human experience there were gay and lesbian people around my life trans people around my life from a very early age and sexuality and who you want to love and who you want to have physical relationships with were, it was just part of the world.

24:05And I'd been introduced to that from a very young age. And indeed, I remember actually thinking, whichever point it was, when gay marriage was legalized, being absolutely baffled that it had taken that long. It felt like a very long time. And, you know, really, many of my parents' closest friends were gay and it just seemed so odd to me that this was ever an issue. It was quite a... Ahead of its time sounds a bit glib, but it was a very, very rare environment that you grew up in as a child with two happily married, as you say, sort of monogamous, lifelong, faithful parents living in such a modern...

24:46Well, up to a point, because actually I see it within the context of that phrase showbiz. of people who were actors, people who were broadcasters. Do we call them the demimonde, my dear? And it was very much part of the world in which I moved. So it didn't seem that extraordinary to me. And yet she maintained an ability to connect with the ordinary as well, with the absolute normal people. Yes, no, she absolutely did. She had that touch. So you've settled on journalism. Yeah. And again, it's sort of quite calculating in a good way. You work out that Leeds is the biggest. It has the biggest student newspaper in the country.

25:32At that point, it covered, it was called Leeds Student. They changed the name to The Griffin a few years ago, which is a terrible thing to do. It just makes it sound like something out of Slytherin or, you know, Hufflepuff. The editorship was a full-time job. You got paid and you had to be elected. But this informed your decision to go to Leeds. Yes. That's interesting. Yeah, it had a good politics department. I wanted to do politics. But it was very much the fact that the paper looked like a proper paper and you had to be elected. Right. And I'll kind of make this the last reference to my mother, maybe.

26:03But it was, I got into my head that if I could get elected, then I would never have been accused again of having gone into journalism through nepotism. You sweet summer child. Yeah, because students are cynical types. Didn't make the slightest bit of difference. And it would take me another 20 years to come up the line with the line, which was, God knows, you know, why having a mother who was an expert in premature ejaculation could get you a job on MasterChef. I fully acknowledge that all the things I've talked about, you know, the idea of access to these careers was there. Sure. But I don't think.

26:44Well, getting elected is a big deal. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no, you know. And it was a great, it was an extraordinary thing to do, putting out a weekly paper with a circulation of 25 ,000. I reckoned at the time that it was probably the greatest power I'd ever have as a newspaper person. I think that's probably true. What did you bring to it? What were you good at? I was very good at a campaign. I remember there was one point when funding was being challenged and I ran the front page completely blank with just the words in 12 point in the middle you'll have less than this to read on Fridays if the university gets its way put the front page on the back, that was good I was threatened with a libel action because by the music college because they had banned the lesbian and gay songs it's like there's a theme here and we ran a lot of stuff and they threatened to sue me.

27:41I remember seeing that on a billboard. I was good at features as well, you know, at working out what would be readable on a Friday. So very conscious not just of what journalism could do for you but what journalism could do for the world. I think you had to. Not everybody is. Well, look, there was one thing which was people who accused you of being a careerist. I'd go, yeah, I am a careerist. I want my career to be in this. And that's why I'm going to be as good at it as I possibly can. And the greatest judgment... It's a weird thing, careerist. Isn't it? Oh, you're a careerist. You come to university and you set your sights on a career.

28:18You silly boy. How shocking. How foolish of you to do that. But also, you had to do the job properly. One of the things that still makes me laugh, there was competition between student papers, particularly between the Leeds paper and Mancuny and the Manchester University paper. and I used to send a reporter over to cover Manchester University demos just to freak out the Mancunian staff because they'd say, what are you doing? He'd say, oh, we cover everything. So a sense of mischief as well. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You had to have mischief. And you needed that on one of your first jobs on a national when you were at the Observer and the Diary Columnist.

29:01Yes. So I'd gone all the way around the nationals Very quick. So what were you doing? Like six months? Oh, no, like six weeks. Oh, okay. And then starting to offer features. I worked for a tabloid press agency and wrote features for the Mirror and the Express. And then I was introduced to someone, a chap called Nick Wapshot, who was launching the first tabloid section of a national broadsheet. It was actually just for the London area on the back of the property boom in 1988. So you're looking for a birth? I was, sort of. Yeah. And I wrote, it was a researcher, I did a property use for him. At the launch party, he said, what do you think of our new baby?

29:40And I said, in the precocious way of a 21-year-old, oh, it's great, but it's got the worst diary column I've ever read. It was terrible. And he sacked, two weeks later, he sacked the person who was 20 years my senior and gave the job to me. I only did it for four months, but I would recommend, well, it's a different world, so it's possibly stupid to try and recommend anything to anyone now. but at that time being a diary columnist was a brilliant job because you had to find small stories um things that would become a story and i went to parties i barely you know bought any food myself because i lived on canapes and champagne um and had an awful lot of fun i just how i got in as well that was my early which diary was on hickey at the express well you know what i mean it just is yeah yeah yeah and it's it's it's a very hungry thing a diary column and sometimes you get a story that goes further or whatever.

30:32Why was it only four months? So the kicker was they did an episode they did an edition from New York to celebrate the election of Bush 1 and the editor said you can go if you can get a free plane ticket so I called Virgin who just launched that service and I said I'll give you a credit on the page they flew me up a class I was 22 and I got on the plane and sitting at the front of for Economy were three nuns. Three nuns flying virgin. My job was done. So I went off to New York. I had a high old time, met Quentin, Chris, interviewed Sammy Davis Jr. I mean, just amazing things happened. But while I was there, I got a call from the deputy editor to say, got your column.

31:14It's fine. By the way, Nick's moved. He's going to be the political editor. And there's a new editor. And I had two thoughts. One had been dawning for a long time. This was too fast. I was 21, 22. and I reckoned that if the career was worth having, if I resigned and went freelance, I could do it again and I should. And honestly, people around me thought I was mad. Wow. But I honestly thought that. And the other one was, also, I'm going to be sued at some point because I don't know what I'm doing. Right. And I am the protege of somebody who's moved on. Okay. So you'd have felt safer if never. I flew back to New York, went straight to the office and resigned to the new editor.

31:57This is the opposite of imposter syndrome in a way, isn't it? No, it's literally imposter syndrome. No, it's not. It's not because you weren't pushing forward and trying to overcome and bullshit your way through. You thought I shouldn't bullshit my way through. I thought I shouldn't bullshit. I also thought, but that thing, if I can do this, I could do it again. Yeah. If I'm any good. as it happened that interview with sammy davis jr i'd happened to land it while i was there by accident i hadn't told them i had it and as i was coming to the end of my observer thing of just like one week a pr said there's a chap at the guardian who likes your stuff and i called him up his name was roger alton he would go on to be editor with the observer and i called roger and said i hear you like my comment yeah he had a terrible phone manner he said yeah what do you want to do i said I've got an interview with Sammy Davis Jr.