You know, when everybody's telling you your ace, you're the leader of the pack and you're brilliant, you know, it doesn't take long before you start believing it. When you're told there's categorically no God and you've grown up in an MTV, a celebrity culture, and now suddenly you have everything, page free girlfriends and all these things and everyone's going, I wish I had your life. You're so busy looking down on everyone else. You don't really look up anymore, I found. Hey, welcome everybody. This is Simon Gilbo with Inspired, and I'm

really excited this week because we've got Warren Furman with us. Warren Furman's a name. Probably

won't ring bells to you until I relate it to the Gladiator show. So he was ace back in it. Warren,

hi by the way. When was that? Was that in the mid-80s, late 80s?

It was 1927. Well actually it feels like 1927. It was actually finished in 2000.

Right. How many years did it run?

I went from 1994 to 2000. It was given a lifespan of three years, but actually it ran for a lot longer.

Because it was so popular.

Yes.

Yeah, so it was my staple I seem to remember Saturday nights. We'd sit around with Cilla Black and Blind Date.

And then you came after that, didn't you? Yes, yeah, but it wasn't live. People thought it was live, but it wasn't. It was all, it was all filmed in like a month and which was lovely because I only had to work a month a year, which was a dream job for me. Wow. So, well, we'll come to all that in a second, but, you know, that's what you're known for,

but obviously there's so much more to you than that now, and it's been an amazing journey,

which I'm really looking, we're all really looking forward to hearing.

So, Warren, let's just go back.

Tell us a bit about your upbringing and how things panned out back then.

Okay, so I grew up on a council estate in Harlow, just outside, in Essex, just outside London, one of four brothers.

My dad was a roofer, and it seemed at that time, Simon, everyone was a roofer in Harlow.

You know, most people got on the M-Eleven, went into London and fixed roofs. And I hated it.

My dad said, you will all be roofers. And I just thought, I don't want to be a roofer. I was a skinny

kid. It was always raining. You know, my dad said, the secret to happiness is to work hard and play

hard. But actually, we didn't really have a happy upbringing because the bad weather and, you know, the

over supply of roofers from Harlow, we were always skin. So I wanted to do anything other than

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