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The Scotsman Magazine - September 2002
Comic timing
Liese Spencer
When he was a teenager growing up in Bangor, Northern Ireland, Zane Radcliffe used to sell a magazine published by his friend Colin Bateman "door to door, in the freezing cold, for not much money". Years later in London, walking down Watford High Street, he suddenly came face to face with a life-size cardboard cut-out of his old boss, slap-bang in the window of Waterstone’s. "It gave me quite a shock," he laughs.
But between dreaming up bizarre ad campaigns for Pot Noodle and Tango, Radcliffe had been doing a bit of writing himself, so he decided to look up his friend, now a very successful author, for some advice. "Colin told me to send my manuscript to every publisher around, then wait for two years until someone plucked it out of the slush pile. He couldn’t believe it when, just 12 weeks after finishing the text, I’d bagged myself a two-book deal."
London Irish, the book that Transworld snapped up so greedily, is a blackly comic thriller which sees Bic, its hero, graduate from stall-holder at Greenwich market to Most Wanted Man in Britain. Half-Scottish, half-Irish and completely disillusioned with London, there seems to be a fair bit of Zane in his leading man.
"I was fed up with London when I wrote it," agrees the 33-year old author, who recently relocated to Edinburgh to take up a job with the Leith Agency. "But there comes a point when the story and characters take over. Suddenly you realise that you haven’t eaten for nine hours and you’re still in your boxer shorts. Still, it’s funny because the first place Bic goes outside London is Edinburgh... that was all written before any of this happened, so it’s become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Born in 1969, the year the Troubles started, Zane left Ireland for London on the day the IRA called a ceasefire. But although politics form a backdrop to his first novel, he doesn’t want to write solely about sectarianism. "I’m actually not a very political person at all," he protests. "I grew up in a largely Protestant town but my parents were never big church-goers." Both retired now, his mother was a schoolteacher and his father a sales rep for the big aftershave labels such as Old Spice, Blue Stratos and Mandate. Zane was the strongest-smelling eight-year-old in town.
"During the Twelfth of July fortnight my parents were very keen to get me and my sister away from the place." When they weren’t visiting relatives in Scotland, the family would go abroad. "They were both scared of flying so Dad would drive us to Greece or somewhere." Forced to remain clean-shaven the rest of the year, as soon as he got behind the wheel, Radcliffe senior would begin growing The Beard. "All my family holiday snaps show me standing next to Grizzly Adams. I think my dad was a frustrated Bohemian."
He once painted the trees in their garden brown. Another time he sprayed their Christmas tree with Cedarwood aftershave, "Y’know, why? It doesn’t smell of pine at all." And then there were the amateur dramatics that Zane and his sister had to squirm their way through. "He famously took to the stage on`ce in Hello Dolly, opened his mouth to sing and inhaled his false moustache. It was actually very serious - he was choking, turning blue. But we were crying with laughter."
You can see where Zane gets his off-beat sense of humour, not to mention his name. "At school no one got beyond ‘you must be IN-Zane’," he says. But there was something about coming last in the alphabet that rankled. When he was seven Zane had a Six Million Dollar Man T-shirt printed with his name. Except that the legend above Lee Majors’ face was "Robert". "It must have seemed like the most normal name you could have," he says wistfully. (Ironically, when he began working in advertising, nobody batted an eyelid. "People in the ad world make up new names for themselves all the time. I knew a woman called Tiger Savage.")
When he left school he went to Belfast to begin a degree in English at Queen’s College. His mother was unimpressed. It wasn’t a vocation, she said. What was he going to do with it? Write a book?
"Yes, I’ll write a book," decided Zane.
"Sure, what are you going to write about, you haven’t lived," came the reply.
London Irish goes on sale the day we meet for our interview and, reports Zane, Mrs Radcliffe is at this very moment "hassling" the bookstore in Bangor for a first edition.
But in a way she was right, he concedes. At 18 he knew very little and certainly nothing about the Troubles. " Bangor is a nice, middle-class, touristy little town. But Belfast opened my eyes a lot."
In Queen’s debating hall, for instance, there would be Ian Paisley Jr on one side of the student union and Bernadette McAliskey’s daughter on the other. But the bluster was of the standard undergraduate variety: "You can’t help sniggering behind your hand, until you realise these people will end up running the political situation in a few years."
Did he get involved? "Oh, Christ, no. I’m quite open-minded, you know: ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’" Radcliffe did his bit for anti-sectarianism, though: "When I was at Queen’s every girl I went out with was a Catholic," he says.
Indeed, in 1994, on his first day in England, he picked up a copy of the News of the World to see a photograph of his last girlfriend under the headline "IRA Mata Hari". "I was stunned," he remembers. "But I didn’t think it was sinister; I just thought, ‘Oh, you silly girl.’ She was getting in with the wrong crowd. But it does make you realise how close you can be to all that without knowing."
His first day of work with advertising giants Saatchi and Saatchi was similarly inauspicious; he’d chosen to begin his career the week a scandalous schism split the empire in two. Still, neither a Saatchi divorce nor a Northern Irish accent stopped him from succeeding. (These days his accent is soft, "blanded out", he says, by London.)
As well as an award for his spoof curryhouse ad for McDonald’s, perks of the job include plenty of travel: "The old ad man’s trick - stick ’em on a beach." He’s just back from a three-week recce in Iceland ("I still haven’t eaten a Big Mac in my life, but I have eaten puffin and hump-backed whale") and is about to head off to Thailand and India. His new campaign for Tennent’s breaks in October and, although he doesn’t want to give too much away, he will say that they’re hoping for "a bit more of an international flavour".
Although he’s been writing since university, he reckons that, like Salman Rushdie and Fay Weldon before him, copywriting helped hone his fiction. "I’m used to writing very short scenes. On TV, you have 30 or 40 seconds; on a poster, seven words. So every one counts. I hope the novel works that way too: quite economical and punchy. The sort of books I like reading are a bit of a romp."
Getting up at 5am to write before work, he’s already in the middle of his second book. "It’s much longer than the first one!" he laughs. "The stabilisers are off."
And he’s settling into Scotland too. Last month he went to his first Hearts game. "It was during the Festival and there was this American guy who obviously thought he’d take in some soccer. It was a warm day but he was completely wrapped up in new hats and scarves. He couldn’t get his head around the idea of Bovril. He kept saying, ‘What? You guys drink meat juice?’"
American tourists are just one of the many things Zane won’t miss about his days in London. "For the first few years I loved it," he says, "but it’s getting more violent." In the weeks just before he moved to Scotland, one man was pushed under a train, while another stabbed two women on the tube before "cutting his own throat in front of the rush-hour crowd".
He feels safer in Northern Ireland.
"I love going back. But I’ve got to admit I don’t like Dublin any more. To me it’s not the real Ireland - it’s all stag dos. But Belfast’s great. Since peace broke out, there’s been a real buzz. That was the starting point for the second book - nobody’s really written about the new Belfast before."
At home in Edinburgh, Radcliffe still has the newspaper from the day he left: "Peace", it proclaims on the front page.
"I couldn’t help feeling a bit sceptical," he says, "but there is hope because there are six-year-old kids running about who’ve never known violence. All I ever knew was the Troubles. I was used to Mum having her driving licence checked on the way to school. But Belfast’s had a taste of normality. There’s money there now, which changes things. People have more choices, a different attitude. They have a sense that they can be something… But we still tell people who’ve never been that it’s really awful. Because otherwise it’ll turn into Dublin, won’t it? So don’t go. It’s crap."
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