I guess it’s time for me to share this story now. It’s not that I want to revisit that time particularly- as it was such a painful period in my life- but you guys have asked me about it & I am not one for keeping secrets. So, here goes...
As I said many times before, MTV is an amazing company to work for. But sadly enough, it is a terrible company to get fired from. Each one of us, former MTV employees, have our own painful story of ‘being dumped by the one we loved so much’.
To be honest though, my ‘ending’ was much to my own doing. I had tried to leave MTV for years. Every time when MTV was letting people off (something that would hang over the offices for months and caused a horrible nervous atmosphere), I would go into the boss’s office and offer my resignation. Yet every time I was told that they didn’t want me to go and would offer me more money. So each time I stayed.
The reason why I had wanted to leave was that I had been there for so long. There was nothing new for me to learn & I saw no new challenges in my daily work. The ‘feel’ of the company had also changed over the years and had become very ‘corporate’. I craved a new challenge. Plus, I had having freaky nightmares about me being an old lady who was still hanging around the MTV dressing rooms (I looked like that crazy old woman from the movie ‘Whatever happened to baby Jane’). So anyway, I felt that I needed to move on.
But I never had the guts to actually leave (apart from those feeble attempts whenever they were laying off staff). The main reason for this was that I felt safe and accepted at MTV. It was my home away from home, as I had left my mother’s house at the age of 18 and moved straight to London. So MTV had become my new family in this foreign land. I grew up at MTV and in front of the MTV cameras.
The perks of being a VJ was also something that I had grown accustomed to. MTV would give me hefty clothing allowances every month, plus a personal stylist to shop with. Like most other VJs, I used the MTV taxi service all over town, I sent my parcels through the MTV postal service & used the MTV phones to call my family in Holland. I had also grown accustomed to travelling non-stop (my average was 2 foreign countries a week). Plus I was more than used to my ‘access all areas’ lifestyle.
But in the lead-up to being fired I had done something that I had never done before. On the Harald Schmidt show (a big German talk show) I announced that I was leaving MTV at the end of that year. But when that date came nearer and nearer I got cold feet and hoped that everyone would forget about my big announcement. I did say ‘no’ to more and more mainstream shoots and projects on MTV and started to spend more time away from the company. But I didn’t expect to actually leave.
Then, one day, I was called into the office of a new boss. I had no idea why she wanted to see me. She just said ‘Simone, we’re taking the Partyzone off air. You are fired’. It was so unexpected and such a shock that I started to cry. And I hated myself for that. If I had known what she was going to say, I’m sure that I would have been fine. I felt so stupid for crying, especially as her office had big windows and everyone could see me. I walked out of her office humiliated & that was not the way I had intended to leave after all those beautiful years.
It was all made worse though when my dear friends and colleagues came straight up to me and said ‘Simone, we’re so sorry for you’. It turned out that everyone had known, apart from me. And no one told me. Not even James or Tania, my two best friends at the company. They said ‘We were told not to tell you’.
James and I had always had a ‘suicide pact’. We promised each other that we would leave the company together. But I was leaving alone. He also didn’t have the guts to follow through (as you know, we are still very close friends, so I have obviously forgiven him for this).
The rest of my period at MTV (the final days) was all a haze. There were no goodbyes, apart from a short tape that my colleagues made, with lots of ‘Good luck Simone’ and ‘We love you’. They also collected some money amongst themselves and gave me a bracelet that I still wear to this day.
My last shoot was with a crew that I never worked with. It was on top of a snowy mountain and at the end of the shoot, they forgot about me and left. So there I was, stranded on top of an Austrian mountain, feeling more lonely and betrayed than I had ever been.
No one had actually told me if my other show, the German version of the Dancefloor chart, was ending too. So I came back to the studio, filmed my show and asked afterwards ‘So what happens now? Are we still filming next week?’ No one seemed to know. And that was the last I ever heard of my German crew. No goodbye at all.
And obviously, it was not true that Partyzone or the Dancefloor chart had ended. It was only me that had been taken off air.
So there you go. It may not seem like such hurtful or shocking a story to you, but it was an awful period in my life. My main feeling was that of being betrayed by my own ‘family’. I just wished that it had been done differently. I was fine about the leaving part, but it’s the way that it was done that was so horrible. Still, others were fired in even worse ways than that at MTV. I’ll say it again ‘MTV is a great company to work for, but an awful company to be fired from’.
By the way, I still am good friends with many old MTV colleagues, including the big, big boss Bill Roedy. He is the sweetest man and is the best boss I have ever had. So it’s not the people that I ended up angry with, but the corporate monster that is now MTV.
Ray Cokes recently came and spend a few weeks with us in Belize and Aruba & we had a wonderful time catching up. During his stay with us he got licked by a jaguar, cuddled by a Boa Constrictor, we shared an afternoon with wildlife documentary makers, swam with a turtle, discussed the meaning of life with other Jungle Dome guests over glasses of wine and he got to strip off naked in front of a female security night guard.
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