This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
The series starts in Philadelphia, but you didn’t exactly cover yourself in glory there, did you?
We started there because that’s where the Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago. But I think you’re talking about Kensington, the district of Philly that’s basically an open market for drugs.
I was there with Sarah Laurel, who runs an addict recovery programme. Unfortunately, we were in a big white car with blacked-out windows and cameras mounted on it, so everyone thought we were police. Bottles started smashing into the car. Impressively furious, Sarah got out to deal with it.
While you cowered in the vehicle…
Ross Kemp would have jumped out of the car and gone running in there with her. I’m just not him, that’s the trouble. But Sarah looked at me with even more disdain when I asked about her life story. Because she was an executive in a hotel chain before becoming addicted to opiates herself, then eventually ended up on crack and working in a strip club – and I asked her what she was working as there.
I thought perhaps she’d gone in to turn it around, like a Peter Jones or Gordon Ramsay thing (incidentally, that’s a show I’d desperately like to see made). But she was a stripper.
Awkward. So you wouldn’t recommend Kensington to the casual holiday-maker.
Probably not. Though we went straight from there, just a mile down the road, to Joe’s Steaks + Soda Shop and had this fantastic traditional Philly cheesesteak. It was the same in Las Vegas: we saw eight miles of storm drains filled with 1,500 homeless people – then met Piff the Magic Dragon at the Flamingo hotel. He’s a very dry English comic magician who dresses up as a dragon pretty much all the time.
You went to Nevada to see an Englishman dressed as a dragon?
Well, I also saw the Hoover Dam, which is staggering and beautiful. They built it to be stunning, and there’s not a bit of it – from the Art Deco design to the brass inlay everywhere, to the vast turbines – that doesn’t draw a gasp of admiration.
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Meanwhile, in Florida, you met someone called the Python Huntress. Is that a superhero or something?
That was in the Everglades – which, it turns out, are the agar jelly tray of wildlife, because anything can thrive there. About nine years ago, a hurricane destroyed a pet shop and nine Burmese pythons escaped into the wetlands. They clearly had the time of their lives because there are now estimated to be 500,000 of them. The Python Huntress says they’re destroying the ecosystem – so she’s hunting to kill. You can hunt with her (pythonhuntress.com), and she’ll skin what you catch and send it to whichever cobbler or handbag-maker you’d like.
Did you run into any other eccentrics on your travels?
One of the episodes is about West Virginia, where we met Mark Hatfield at the Hatfield Family Distillery – or “Moonshine Mountain”, as it’s also known. For the last few years, he’s gone straight, after some family members turned him in, but before that he and his family had been making illegal moonshine up there for generations. I think he was complaining that he made a lot more money when he was doing it illegally, but I only took in about a quarter of what he said because I was lashed. I was only drinking these little thimble-sized mouthwash cups, and it may say more about my constitution than the moonshine, but you can see it in the photography: my eyes are very shiny and pointing in different directions.
You were a bit braver in West Virginia than in Philly, at least. You stepped into the wrestling ring, right?
Only as the referee! They were hurling each other out of the ring, so there was no way I was going to don the spandex and get in there among them. They had these terrific names though, like The Lunatic or The DreamKiller. What would mine be? Maybe something playing on my initials: “Double A” or “The Battery”. If I could just find someone called “Assault”, we’d be a hell of a team.
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