Eddy Says: The rise and fall of Up For It on MTV part one - How it started

I still get emails every week from ecstatic fans of this little show I used to do on MTV UK. People stumble onto me on Facebook and Twitter, remember the happy days of their youth, belting home from school early to watch me in the afternoon, and they get in touch, always positively. I’m delighted and amazed to say.

One of the resulting questions I’m asked more than any other is “Why did you stop doing ‘Up For It’/MTV?”. It’s too long story for a tweet, so here’s the full scoop.

When I arrived at MTV, fresh faced and dough eyed, from Radio 1 – as I wrote about recently, in a kind of prequel to this piece – I was put into MTV News, because they hadn’t figured out what to do with me. Edith Bowman and I were the talking heads and there were a handful of people assembling ‘news’.

It was a broadcasting joke. The MTV News team, at that time, consisted of two or three nice but hapless journos who didn’t know or care a jot about anything musical. They had teletext on the screen and a little radio tuned into Radio 1. THAT, my friends, was the sum total of their UK news gathering operation. They waited, like seagulls for a fishing boat, on the nightly feed from MTV USA, where they might actually glean a story or two that hadn’t been in the UK public domain already.

While I was there, MTV UK News broke two stories. Just two. I got them both, through random connections: We broke Charlotte Hatherley joining Ash because I knew their manager, and The KLF daubing “What the fuck is going on?” in massive letters on the Southbank, because one of their crew called me while they were doing it.

Months later, when my soul was all but sucked out by that pitiful news studio lozenge, I thankfully got a call from the boss to say she had a two hour slot in the afternoon, 2pm-4pm, which was branded as ‘Up For It’ – a really 90s thing, full of Britpop and logos that looked like The Jam’s or Oasis’s. She said I had to come up with an idea for a “radio show on the telly, to get kids watching” – that’s what they wanted more than anything – children! – and she had zero budget to do this. I’d get 500 quid for a set, no studio (that cost money), no director, no expensive cameras, no production of any sort. When she said zero, she meant it.

So, I put my head together with Jim Parsons, Head Of Production at the time, a veritable production genius and one of the best people I’ve ever worked with. He suggested we use ‘the flat’ at MTV, a little bedsit in the bowels of the building from its TV-AM days, where important breakfast telly presenters used to stay the night if they needed to be there really early. It’s the room where, it is widely reputed, Ulrika-ka-ka-ka Jonson got her first showbiz break.

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