NSG’s David Lancaster caught up with the much loved former Brookside actor, Find It, Fix It, Flog It, and Channel 4s The Great House Giveaway presenter Simon O’Brien, to talk about Damon’s wake, Russian cops, re-commissioned military tanks, the Rough Guide, and cycling through the Wirral. 

DL: Hi Simon, once again, thank you for giving us the chance for an interview with yourself. I hope you and your family are well, how did you all manage to get through the nightmare that was 2020, did you manage to keep busy?

 SO’B: No problem, Yer, 2020 was weird, I was filming one series of Find It, Fix It, Flog it, and also I was filming another series of something else towards the end of 2019. The other series being The Great House Giveaway. So we were in the middle of Find It, Flog it, Fix It, and towards the end of GHG, and we literally finished the last days filming for GHG the day before the first lockdown started, so we got that one in and done, but Find It, Fix It, Flog It had to go on hold, coz with that one we have to travel around everywhere and that couldn’t happen anymore. So fortunately in the first lockdown, we had that lovely weather and I love my bike and I was really busy, and as well as doing acting and presenting, I’m the city region’s cycling and walking commissioner, and during the first lockdown, everyone started cycling and walking in their thousands, so I was really busy getting out that message, to just keep it going, and then the gov’t announced they were going to put in emergency measures to keep people cycling with ‘pop up’ cycle lanes, so I had all that stuff going on. When I wasn’t busy doing that stuff with Liverpool City Region I was playing badminton in the garden with my daughter and with my wife, with a glass of wine in my hand. That was the first lockdown, but when that finished I was almost back on the road straight away, coz with Find It, Fix It, Flog It, we don’t really go into peoples houses, we just go into their sheds and their gardens, so it turned out that we could film it socially distanced and we could do it so it was ‘covid safe’ but without it looking like that, coz the channel had told us that they didn’t want anything that looked too ‘covid’ coz if they were to show it a year or so later it would look crazy, but we worked out that using long lenses on the cameras, standing back and Henry and I staying separated and not messing about so much, that we could get it done. All we needed to say to the people who’s sheds and garages we had been in was to stay away from them for 72 hours, so we trundled on. It was really weird as I get the train everywhere and there was no one on the train except me and everyone said that the trains wouldn’t be safe, but funnily enough the trains were the safest places in the world.So I just travelled around like that and it was weird coz no one else was really travelling and I was seeing all these interesting places all deserted, all over the country. So I was lucky that I could keep going through that and I kind of ‘piggy-backed’ through the different lockdowns and tiers and coz we could demonstrate that we could do it safely, I’ve been allowed to work most of the way through. Anyway, we nearly got it finished and we had 2 days left to film, the ‘valuation days’, where the people who’s stuff we have, all get together in a big barn in Oxfordshire and we work out what it’s all worth and we see if they make any money, and we had 2 days to finish and get this series out showing no signs of covid at all in the episodes… then this new lockdown happened! So we now have to film them remotely on a Zoom wall, no one is allowed to come and join us, so 2 days to film on that and that’s it then. After that, I’m just sitting in for the lockdown again and getting on with my cycling and walking. So it’s been alright for me, but it’s been much harder for my wife. She works out of the mansion house at Calderstones park, she teaches adults and kids sewing skills, which is very hands-on and all in one room together, so she’s been locked down for almost a year. It’s been really hard for her. I’ve been really lucky to be able to make some money and work because we fall into that category, ‘The Forgotten’ as we’ve been called, the ‘self-employed’, we didn’t get any furlough, so if I hadn’t have been able to work and if I hadn’t been able to film ‘covid safe’, then we’d have been absolutely screwed. So that’s how we got through the last 12 months really, and er… I drank too much red wine.

DL: So, going back, it all started for you with Brookside, playing young Damon Grant. Would you say Damon was a bit of a scally? What happened to Gizmo and how did the Brookside thing all come about for you ?? 

 SO’B: I got a day off school to go to the audition. I only went coz it meant I could get off double maths and that’s really the reason why I went. They came around our school, New Heys, and one of my mates, (he’s still my mate now) he’d done some Willy Russell films, like “Our Day Out” and that kind of stuff and when Channel 4 were casting it, they’d got hold of his name and come to the school and said they’d like to audition this lad, my mate. But our teacher had the foresight to ask if they could send some other pupils along for the audition too, as it would be a good experience for them. I put my hand up coz Tuesday afternoon, as I say, was double maths. I was doing my A levels at the time, and that’s how Brookside came about for me really. Was Damon a scally?, er, yer I suppose he was, but he was only a bit of a scally, he wasn’t a gangster scally. He was just a naughty lad, just mischievous. Those were the days, the 80s when young people didn’t have much to do sadly. Unemployment amongst teens and early twenties in Liverpool was nuts, it was like 1 in 3 didn’t have a job, so… idle hands Yano, and that’s kinda what Damon’s character was. Gizmo, (Robbie Cullen), I saw him not too long ago, Robbie went on to work in The Everyman Theatre, doing youth theatre and he’s worked in theatre for many years now, putting on productions and working in education and stuff, so he’s still ticking on, doing the creative stuff.

DL: During your time on Brookside the show was very political and also tackled some gritty storylines, including Damon’s demise. With Jimmy McGovern writing and with Sue Johnston and Ricky Tomlinson as your onscreen parents, were you aware that you were amongst greatness? you must have learned so much from them. Any funny tales to tell from those days ??

 SO’B: Ha, no, I just knew that I didn’t know what I was doing but I knew that they did. Ya know what, if you look at the roll call, Ricky, Sue, Amanda Burton amongst the cast to mention just a few, then the writers, Jimmy McGovern, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Andy Lynch, Chris Bernard, these guys went on to write amazing stuff. Frank Cottrell-Boyce writes his first ever episode of Brookside, then fast forward a bit and he’s writing for the opening of the 2012 Olympic ceremony! He’s wrote tonnes of books too, as has Jimmy. You could tell a good writer when you were reading the scripts coz they were easier to learn, and it would get into your head easily, I dunno why, but it just did. I just learnt my trade off Ricky and Sue really. When Damon had died I had to go onto the set to collect all my stuff, and there was filming going on that day, but they were on a tea-break. Damon’s coffin was in the front room of the Grant’s house. I thought it would be a good idea to get in the coffin, but I couldn’t get in it, it was a bit too small, but it had one of those shroud curtain things hanging underneath it, so I got under it and hid and waited. When they returned to film they were doing this really heart wrenching scene, looking at the coffin and saying “poor us, poor us” etc etc, at which point I grabbed hold of Ricky Tomlinson’s legs and shouted“I’m not dead, I’m alright!!!”, and they shit themselves, all of ’em. They had to peel Ricky off the ceiling. So my parting shot was to scare the shit out of them by coming back from the dead.

DL: Now we are a music magazine, so I have to ask you, what was the first album you ever bought? and did you catch any of the great Liverpool bands in the 80s?? What music do you listen to now?

 SO’B: Yer, I saw all or most of em really. Even though Liverpool was a bit depressing in the 80s the music scene here was amazing. The best concert I saw was probably Echo and The Bunneymen, but I was a massive fan of The Icicle Works, I thought they were fantastic. I went to see Frankie Goes To Hollywood and I also enjoyed all the “Larks in the Park” concerts at Sefton Park, all them bands playing for free, amazing, that scene was just crazy really and so good. My first album, ha…my mum actually won a holiday to Jamaica, I was about 11, and she didn’t know what she was buying really, but as a present to me, she brought this album back, she had no idea who it was, but she said that everyone was listening to this guy and everyone seemed to like him out there. She gave me ‘Rastaman Vibration‘ by Bob Marley. She didn’t really realise what Bob was all about, she just brought it back as a souvenir, but I put it on and it just changed my mind, blew my mind, so for me, Marley is like a god. But that album as I say was a gift, the first album that I actually bought for myself was ‘Out of the Blue‘ by E.L.O., so there ya go, I guess that’s what you’d call eclectic taste. More recently, im a big fan of Doves ,I really like them, and a few years back I got into Empire of The Sun, apart from that, I’m a big fan of whatever my daughter wants to play, so far too much Katy Perry.

DL: After leaving Brookside, you went into children’s TV, Fraggle Rock is the one that stands out really. What was it like working with Sprocket the dog and Jim Henson’s puppets? Why kids telly??

 SO’B: Simple reason for the kid’s telly… it doesn’t really apply now, but back in those days if you were in a soap opera you would end up being ‘type cast’ and you’d have to wait a while afterwards to get another acting job, as I say it doesn’t really apply now, but back then there were so few channels and if you were well known as a character you really wouldn’t get many parts. Damon was very popular with younger people so it seemed like a good idea to try a bit of presenting as I had a bit of a following from younger people. So that really was how I started presenting, just doing kids telly, and it was a really useful string to my bow. Fraggle Rock, well, what a company that was to work for, Henson’s were amazing, one of the best companies I’ve worked for, coz they treated everyone the same, that’s why they make such good stuff. From the person making the teas to the big execs, they look after everyone exactly the same. Up til Henson’s came around, puppeteers weren’t seen as artists, they were just seen as like, divvys with strings and sticks, and it was Henson who first realised that these were real, creative artists and he treated them like stars. So they all fought to work for him and he had the cream of the crop. As for working with Sprocket, you realised how good the puppeteers were because, after a while, you forgot that the dog wasn’t real. There was one time, (I’d been working there a week or so), I was driving along in this old Model T Ford that we had and Sprocket the dog is sat next to me and the puppeteers are lying on the floor of the car and as I finish the take, I turn around to the dog and said, “I thought that went quite well”, and the dog nodded and I said, “do you think they’ll make us do another take?”, then I realised I was talkin to the dog and not the puppeteers, so Sprocket became real, which is a bit of a surreal thing. That shows just how good they were, even when the take had finished, if I said something to the dog, they’d just carry on being the dog, it was just weird, but it was an amazing job.

 DL: After the kid’s TV you take another job, presenting the travel show, Rough Guide with Magenta Devine. This job must have been a dream, travelling all over the globe and stuff. Magenta looked really cool on the telly, was she good to work with, and what was your best trip? Again, any funny stories ??

 SO’B: Magenta was brilliant to work with, everyone told me she’d be really hard to work with as she had this reputation, but I never had any trouble with her whatsoever, we just got on and had a laugh. Yeah, it was the only job I’ve ever had that my mates wouldn’t let me talk about in the pub coz I’d be like, “I’ve just been to …” and they’d be like, “we don’t wanna know where you’ve been.”Back then if you went on location you could be somewhere like The Bahamas for two and half weeks, nowadays you’d be there and back in two days with money being so tight. So, you really got to know places and got know all the stories properly, and that’s why the end product was so good. It was a real privilege. Since I was very young, I’d always wanted to see the northern lights, it just stuck in my imagination when I was a kid. We did Rough Guide to Alaska, and in the hotel, we stayed in you could actually set your alarm by asking the reception staff and the night porter to wake you up if the lights appeared at any time during the night. Well, it was the most amazing thing in the whole world. The whole experience of Alaska really. It still feels really rough and kinda ‘out there’ and, really wild yano. We were filming dog sledding and as we finished we were about 3 miles out of town and I told the crew that I’d walk back as I wanted to enjoy the scenery. So as I’m walking back I have this kind of rushing noise in my ear, and it was silence, the first time in my whole life that I’d ever been anywhere where there was no background noise at all. So when people say that the silence is deafening, I kinda know what they mean, coz your ears kinda search for noise that isn’t there, as we are so used to it living in a city and it was like having a waterfall in my ears, and it was just nothing. So, yeah, Alaska was the most amazing place to go to, and to see the northern lights was a dream come true. A funny story, haha, ok…Let’s think of one that is printable, The maddest, baddest place I went to was Moscow, not long after Glasnost and the wall in Berlin coming down, so it was still a bit like the Wild West. We were driving through the city in this little Trabant car and the Russian police stopped us for no reason and they all had machine guns, something that we aren’t used to here. So this guy points his machine gun at me in the car and starts screaming his head off at me in Russian, and I didn’t know what to do, so I just said to him, “Listen, I don’t care what you say, Duncan Ferguson should be scoring more goals than he does.”Our director starts shouting then, “what are you talking about?”, so I say, “well, I don’t know what he’s talking about so I thought I’d do the same mate.”So, I was just sitting there talking about Duncan Ferguson while this Russian copper was pointing this gun at me, shouting his head off, going nuts! In the end, he just waved us on, I think he just wanted to show us he had a really big gun and was dead ‘ard, anyway, I still hold by that, that Duncan shuda scored more goals! But as I say, The Rough guide is still the one job that I’m not allowed to talk about with me mates.

DL: If you could choose any presenter from any period of TV to present a show with, who would you choose and why?

 SO’B: I think it would be Stacey Dooley of all people, coz I’ve kinda watched her career over the years. She started off with youth telly on BBC Three and she just got her break like I got mine, so similarities there as she just got picked to do one show and she really took that opportunity, and the BBC spotted something in her. What I like about her is that she’s very intelligent and she’s very considerate about what she does and she’s not scared of jumping in at the deep end, and she’s never changed. She’s still got her strong North London/Luton accent and even though she’s very clever, it’s nice that she’s never tried to be anything different. She really does get to travel to loads of weird places, so if I presented with her, I’d get to do that too.

DL: You also presented Standing Room Only in the early 90s, a football show that was a real favourite of mine. You must have had some great times on that show with Alister McGowan and with Janet Street Porter in charge. It sort of revolutionised football shows on TV, making them funny and cool to watch. Would you ever work on football shows again?

 SO’B: I don’t think we could do it now, because the Premier League is so powerful, we’d probably end up in court within seconds if we did a show like that nowadays. If you dare to say anything against the Premier League or if you were to say anything anti about the big clubs, then they’d just close you down. Back then we just had a laugh and took the mick, it would be nice if there was a bit more of that these days. When you watch the football chat shows now, even when they’re trying to be a bit comedic, they’ll be a little bit funny, but they never have a go at the establishment. So it would be impossible to make Standing Room Only now. Mentioning Janet Street Porter, she did an amazing thing for us, opening up a little window if you like. The media is generally run by people who’ve been to Oxbridge and are kinda ‘well to do.’ That’s slowly changing now, but in the mid-80s she set up DEF II over in BBC Manchester and she intentionally got loads of raw talent that didn’t come from those usual backgrounds. She got lots of working class people in to do it, and she let them go crazy, and that’s what Standing Room Only was, it was loads of people who knew a bit about football just having a laugh. She did lots of programs like that and those people have gone on to run the industry, they’re the commissioning editors now. All the people I worked with on SRO, if I was to do a roll call of them, you’d see how they’ve all had Stella careers. If you give someone who has a bit of talent a break and a bit of encouragement, they can achieve great things. I’m still in touch with most of ’em now. I now go and try to get work off them, as I say, these are the big bosses now, and I go “alright, remember me? “So, again yeah, Standing Room Only, what a great gig, getting paid to go and watch footy, brilliant!

 DL: After a short time working on an American sitcom, you return home and eventually start work on the property and renovation shows, very successfully with To Buy or Not to Buy and To Build or Not to Build. Another great change of direction in your career really, how did you get into that? 

 SO’B: It was a chance conversation in the BBC bar over in Oxford Road,  M’cr. I’d just finished the very last series of RG and I was just chatting to someone who asked what I did in my spare time, and what I’ve always done with my spare time is renovate houses. The house where I live now, (I’ve lived there all my adult life) when I bought it, it was a shell, you could stand in the cellar and look up at the sky. I just love doing houses up. So as an actor or presenter, you can have very busy periods but then not do anything for months, so in those times in between, I realised that doing up a house would give me something to do. It stops me from stressing about my next job, but it also means that I’m being productive with my time and not just getting bevvied in the pub in the afternoon. So from that, once I’d finished my own house, I kept my eye open for other little projects, I’ve always got some derelict place on the go that I do up when I’m not working. So yer, I was talking to some producer and when he heard I knew about the property he told me to put it on my CV, and he said I should be talking about it on TV. That’s when I started doing little bits on property shows and To Buy or Not to Buy came along. As I say, I still do houses up now, I did one last year with some friends/neighbours of mine. Their mum died and they were gonna just sell this house at auction, I told them not to as they’d be sick when they’d see the full value of it when it was fully renovated. They couldn’t afford to do it up, so I did a little profit share with them. I did the work and we went halves on the extra profit we made. I just can’t help it. I just love doing old properties up!

 DL: Now, more recently you have been raiding sheds and barns up and down the U.K. with your mate Henry Cole on the show Find It, Fix It, Flog It, another big success, and it seems like this show is on telly every day now.  It must be really enjoyable travelling around finding your bits and bobs, again, do you have any funny travel stories from this period? Any finds that couldn’t be shown on the telly?? 

 SO’B: Ha, oh yer, there’s been plenty of finds that we can’t show on TV, haha. Different show, but on The Great House Giveaway that I’ve just done, we went up into a loft, and there was a collection of, what can only be described as ‘exotic men’s magazines’ and VHS videos, and unbeknownst to us, the person who was doing the house up put them online for sale. A box of blue movies! they actually made three and a half grand!!! Apparently, there is a collectors market out there for that kind of retro porn. So that’s the kind of crazy stuff we find when we are travelling around. With Find It Fix It Flog It, the weirdest place we ever went to was to see this guy who was into old military stuff. We’d been to a few of these places before, people who collect tanks and give out tank rides and stuff, and some people are just into collecting anything to do with the military. Anyway, we went to this one place and it turns out that this guy had a license to buy de-commissioned British tanks and then re-commission them, put them into containers and sell them to crazy dictators in Africa, and that’s what this guy was doing for a living. He didn’t care about telling us. All the time I was thinking, what a disgusting way to make money, but I had to be nice to him otherwise he wuda told us to piss off and we wouldn’t have been able to film the show. It was the strangest place, walking into this huge warehouse with all these guys working on a de-commissioned tank, getting it live again to send it over to Africa. Crazy crazy people !!! We went into this other place too, we visited some bar and this guy opened two big doors and hanging from the ceiling were swastikas. We said to him “what’s this?” and he replies with “I know what your thinking, but you have to admit they had a certain style”… Nazis!!!, that’s the only place where I’ve refused to go in and film. I said no way am I filming in there, the guy was a crazy far right nutter, a bit like those ones in America now, our own version of them, except he’s not allowed to own an AK47 machine gun, which is a good thing really. So yer, we meet some really really strange characters. Another fella we went to see had containers and containers and more containers full of absolute rubbish, just a horder, nothing in there you could find worth having and he was moving house and he was paying an absolute fortune to have these containers moved to his new place, we were laughing so much, we were thinking about his new neighbours as he was turning up with all this junk, haha.

 DL: I hear that your great love and your favourite hobby outside of renovation and upcycling is cycling itself, you like to get out on your bike whenever you can. Is it true that you’ve been working with the city council to improve cycling safety in Liverpool? This obviously ties in with your work as a green campaigner. Could you tell us a bit more about those two passions of yours and how do you find the time amongst your work schedule ??

 SO’B: Erm, ok I was always a bit of a hippy and I’ve been a member of Greenpeace for many years. I was a vegetarian back in the days when people thought it was okay for vegetarians to eat chicken. So, I’ve been veggie for 30 years now and, in about 1987, I got into ecology and all that sort of stuff and I remember being stuck at these traffic lights in my Peugeot 205. I had a Greenpeace car sticker on the back window and the hypocrisy of it all kinda hit me in the face. So, I sold the car and kept the sticker, and then with the money I made from the car, I went down to see Norman Tierney the bike man in Aigburth, gave him this wedge, and asked him to build the best bike that he could for me, and I still ride that bike now, my ‘Tierney tourer.’ So, it was a kind of angry young man’ statement, getting rid of my car, but what I realised after about a year, was that I was less stressed, I didn’t get any road rage and I was fitter than I’d ever been and I could eat and drink whatever I felt like, also, I could do all my paperwork and stuff when I was sitting on the train. So, even though I’d done it as this great statement, I found that my quality of life improved massively. Then, if we roll forward a few years. I started badgering the council for better conditions for cyclists. Liverpool is appalling compared to the structures of European cities for cycling. We are so backward here, not just Liverpool but the whole country. That penny now is finally dropping, so a couple of years ago I started off as Liverpool’s city cycling commissioner and then expanded out to be Liverpool City Region’s cycling commissioner. So that’s an ongoing piece of work really to give cycling and walking more of a chance. Not to say, let’s get rid of cars, I’m a realist, it’s just to give a bit more space to the people who need to get out on their bike safely and walk around safely. I think people do have a suppressed desire to do it, and the first lockdown demonstrated that. As soon as people had a chance to walk down the middle of the road they did. As soon as there was no traffic, everyone got on their bikes with their kids, and so, there has to be a balance. That balance has never been struck in this country, they’ve done it in more forward thinking places, and my job now as the commissioner is to persuade everyone that having a bike lane outside of your house is not a bad thing, but a good thing, and I have the backing of Steve Rotherham and some of the politicians right up at the top. The other week, a new proposal was put out about a new multi million pound route that runs from Birkenhead to New Brighton being set up, so I went and rode it to see what it could be like, as some people have been kicking off and objecting to it. Over in Wallasey, there are these massive houses with ‘off road’ parking for 5 cars with signs in their windows saying “Say no to cycling chaos! “They don’t want cycling outside their houses, so… I ‘spose we’re always gonna get that, some people just don’t like change, but that attitude is archaic and it has to stop. So that is my passion really, and that’s why I do it, and it’s a real privilege to have a role promoting it, I’m a pig in shit basically.

DL: So going forward, you have a new show ‘The Great House Giveaway‘, again another property development show that I’m sure will be another huge hit. What else have you got in the pipeline for 2021 and do you have any lockdown tips for us all? How can we all stay sane ??

 SO’B: Hahaha, yer, don’t drink as much as I do, erm…Basically, The Great House Giveaway has absolutely gone off the scale, the first series literally became the third most watched programme ever on Chanel 4, and it was only a little day time show, so they’ve just ordered another 60 episodes, so if you wanna know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of years, I’ll be going to an awful lot of auctions and meeting lots of people who’ll be covered in cement dust. They just commissioned loads, which is unbelievable for me because my job is so precarious that I don’t know what I’m doing from one month to the next. So to have such a big hit like that is a real bonus and Find It, Fix It, Flog It is ticking along too, we’re hoping to get re-commissioned on that, so that’s what I’ll be up to really for the next couple of years as I say. Lockdown tips for staying sane …er, we just play cards, my daughter is now an absolute master of Jim Rummy and we’re introducing her to the dark world of poker. What I always do also, is try to get up at the same time each day. It’s just too tempting, especially when it’s dark and cold to sleep in. I just try to keep some kind of routine, I know loads of people who don’t get up till like half eleven and stuff coz they think “why should ya’ I’m furloughed?,” but I think you could be heading into a dark place doing that, so I always make sure that I’m up and about by 8.30/ 9 O’clock as I have the day ahead of me then. It is hard to do sometimes when the weather is lashing down and it’s cold, but that’s my tip, just keep getting up in the morning.

DL: Thank you for giving us the chance to interview you, anything else you’d like to add?

 SO’B: No, nothing else to add really, just thanks and good luck with the magazine, nice meeting you.

Watch The Great House Giveaway and Find it, Fix it, Flog it on the links in pink below.  

The Great House Giveaway

Find it, it, Flog it, Fix it