Charlie Parsons, creator
Channel 4 asked me to make a youth arts show called Club X but it was a disaster. I told them: “Young people don’t watch arts programmes. Let me do something entertainment-based: a mix of celebrity interviews, cool music and quirky global stories, all in a crazy live format. A show for young people, made by young people.” When they said OK, I got a team together and The Word was born.
I decided the presenting duo should be north and south. That’s how we ended up with Terry Christian, this mouthy guy from the Madchester scene, and Amanda de Cadenet, a posh-sounding It Girl. Polar opposites but a brilliant contrast. We always wanted presenters who weren’t the usual Oxbridge-educated, Soho media circuit types. That’s why, later, we went for people such as Katie Puckrik and Huffty. The show’s look was influenced by Ready Steady Go, Hairspray and Bridget Riley. A 60s American pop vibe with a mad studio audience.
We recruited Jo Whiley as music booker because she had brilliant taste. Bands had to perform live, no lip-syncing. It meant we missed out on pop acts but got the likes of Nirvana and Oasis. Its unpredictable live nature led to amazing moments such as L7’s guitarist Donita Sparks dropping her trousers and Kurt Cobain saying: “Courtney Love is the best fuck in the world.”
We launched in August 1990 at 6pm. Five weeks in, Michael Grade, then chief executive of Channel 4, moved it to 11pm, where we could be more outrageous. The Word became the post-pub show for the 90s generation. It changed viewing habits. We got ratings of 2m in a slot where no previous programme had got more than 300,000. It lacked polish but had real energy. The aim was to get talked about the next day – often unflatteringly, but it didn’t matter.
In the beginning, we shocked by accident. The stunts actually designed to shock didn’t happen until three series in. The idea with The Hopefuls slot was that anybody could get on TV if they did a dare, like snog a granny or lie in a bath full of pig shit. It was a precursor to reality TV and social media: a way for ordinary people to be famous. It was quite un-PC. We wouldn’t be able to do the drunken Oliver Reed interview nowadays. It was exploitative but he’d been drunk on TV before and knew what he was doing.
There were dangerous moments. One presenter, Alan Connor, got kidnapped by German pornographers. Another night, the police surrounded the studio because somebody phoned to say their friend was speeded up to the hilt, had a gun and wanted to kill Terry Christian. During the ad break, we searched the audience. Nobody was armed, so we just carried on. Grossly irresponsible but what fun it all was.
Eventually a backlash came. Not from viewers, who still loved the show, but from the channel. They were constantly in trouble with the regulators and cancelled us after five series. I don’t think Grade particularly enjoyed being called “pornographer in chief” by the tabloids either.
Katie Puckrik, presenter
I was a professional dancer at a loose end in 1991 after touring the world with Pet Shop Boys. A friend said: “This TV show is looking for a new host. No experience necessary. You should go for it.” So I cobbled together a showreel. Thousands applied and they filmed the audition process for a spin-off called Word Search. Alongside me in the final 20 were Davina McCall and Jez Nelson. For the next round, I had to interview this horrible Liverpudlian politician called Derek Hatton and a boyband who were like unruly puppies and groped me. I was thrilled when I got offered the gig. I’d never seen The Word until I was on it.
I introduced the infamous L7 performance but missed Nirvana because I was doing an outside broadcast at a disgruntled viewer’s house. He’d written in complaining that we never had decent bands on, so I took the Bay City Rollers to play in his kitchen. That was the beauty of The Word. It was so random and slapdash but that’s the way people’s brains work. You want a taste of the hippest stuff but also to be amused. I loved its blend of British seaside variety and hot young things. It was like a fever dream. One minute I was interviewing Zsa Zsa Gabor, the next I was encouraging a young man to eat a cereal bowl of maggots. Maybe that’s a metaphor for life.
I did hard-hitting stories, too: exposés on teen cosmetic surgery and Scientology in Hollywood. I met some sex addicts, which was a new concept at the time. When I got back to my hotel in West Hollywood afterwards, the guy I’d just interviewed was found up a tree, peering into my room. My first interview was with Demi Moore and she practically called it off when I asked her about nudity. Hollywood PRs had no idea what they were letting their clients in for. Humourless A-listers would sit on a sofa in the studio with risque questions being put to them in a roomful of baying teenagers.
The wheels constantly came off. That’s what made it leap off the screen, but it probably took years off the life of everyone who worked on it. The Word wouldn’t get made today. People are way too bet-hedging. This was the pre-internet age, before all the portals of opportunity were locked down. The Word predicted reality TV, Jackass-style stunts, TikTok pranks. It was a crucible of 21st-century culture.
