Englishman who beat Beckham to Madrid

AT the age of 27, bachelor Tim Parfitt wangled himself a job helping to launch the Spanish version of Vogue, the style magazine. He expected to stay six weeks. Nine years later he was still there - by then with a wife and family. In the last couple of years he ran the show in Spain for publisher Conde Nast, including launching men's magazine GQ there, writes Steven Russell.

As he reflects now, it was a pivotal time ­on both the personal and professional fronts - a rites-of-passage period that's captured in his humorous book A Load of Bull: An Englishman's Adventures in Madrid. It's a fast-paced, tapas-fuelled, sleep-deprived ride through the city before it was even a glint in David Beckham's eye.

It explains the culture clash awaiting a Hertfordshire boy, with lunch usually not eaten until about 2.30pm and lasting, two, three - perhaps even four - hours. Worse, the unwary could find themselves chewing on sheep's testicles.

Supper might not feature until 10pm or 11pm. Sleep came much, much later than he'd been used to in England. Candles were burned at both ends.

Then there was the ongoing battle with the language, where the wrong tone and context could have huevos meaning eggs or something much ruder. And even today Tim admits he still can't roll his Rs adequately.

There was also some unwanted attention from the local paparazzi along the way; when they got married, Tim and his bride found their pictures plastered across five pages of Hola!, the Spanish version of Hello! magazine. His name was misspelled - Timoty Porfitt enjoying 15 minutes of celebrity.

There is dance-floor humiliation at a hot, sweaty and smoky salsa club, despite the attempts of his friend Adolfo - a Venezuelan sex god - to improve Tim's success rate with the ladies. “I looked like Quasimodo attempting the can-can,” admits the author.

The book begins in the January of 1988. Spanish Vogue is due to hit the streets in about the third week of March. TV commercials are set; a poster campaign in place for the magazine kiosks. New arrival Tim finds the production schedule in a mess and realises early on that the deadline for the 350-odd-page, 150,000-copies edition is never going to be met without major changes.

Luis Carta, the charismatic, Marlon Brando lookalike, patriarch of the Spanish operation, takes Tim on a walk through the offices, pointing out imperfect finishing of walls, ceilings, fixtures and fittings. “They don't know how to finish anything properly in this country,” he bemoans. “Naaaaaadaaaaaa! This is why you're here.”

Tim rewrote the production schedules and the pace picked up. His six weeks becomes another three months. The first Vogue comes out on time; and then the finance director asks him to stay on after June. Conde Nast doubles his salary.

Even with his greater influence, business wasn't all plain sailing, of course. For one thing, there was the headache of regional and national holidays. Not only that, staff were adept at the “puentes” tactic - bridging. If a public holiday fell in the middle of the week, they would add other vacation time to link with a weekend and thus create a long stretch of holiday.

But despite all the vexations, and the price his system was paying for all the late nights and mountains of food that were part of Spanish life - not to mention “incarcerated flatulence” - Tim had fallen for Madrid and its people in a big way. When he arrived, it was only 13 years after the death of its often brutal dictator General Francisco Franco, who had ruled the country for more than three decades. Spain was in the process of changing, and life had vibrancy.

Tim was made assistant publisher, and his responsibilities and involvement grew - including work on an interior styling magazine called Casa Vogue.

Things took a monumental leap forward on the personal front when Tim, now 32, became friendly with a Vogue fashion department worker - and then met her sister.

Kirsa van Pallandt, 29, had legs to die for. Her parents had been singers in the late 1950s to late '60s: as Nina and Frederik they'd entertained with harmonies and pop-based folk and calypso songs.

Kirsa, who had grown up in Los Angeles and London, among other places, had two young children. Her former husband had been a Spanish soap actor - hence the paparazzi interest in her “new love”. Tim was besotted and he and Kirsa were soon an item.

Toby, their first child, was born in the summer of 1994. Sadly, Luis Carta, due to be godfather, died unexpectedly at the age of 58.

Tim had essentially been groomed by Luis, and was grateful if surprised to be made managing director of Conde Nast in Spain.

He writes: “It was a sad way to inherit a job, but even Luis would admit that it was going to be fun. Fun but difficult. I was going to have to restructure, modernize, computerize and relocate us, change Vogue editors, launch GQ, hire, fire and 'retire' - all in this language that they called Spanish and which I still didn't really have a good grasp of.”

How did it go? Well, if A Load of Bull sells in any number, expect a prequel/sequel . . .

A Load of Bull is published by Pan Macmillan on July 14, priced £10.99. ISBN 1405046198

SO we know about the nine years in Spain. What happened before then - and how did Tim and family come to be living in Suffolk?

He was born in 1960 and grew up in Letchworth. One sister went into acting, another opted for fashion design. His brother joined the family business - electrical temperature control. “Being the youngest, I was allowed to get away with that, and went into publishing,” he jokes.

He really wanted to write - he'd penned parodies of teachers at 17, and at 18 had written a “dreadful” novel that he still has in a drawer, “along with about 200 rejection letters”.

Newspapers appealed, but a car accident in 1978 on the way to an enrolment interview at Harlow college - which ran a journalism course - stymied those ambitions. He ended up on crutches and with a broken foot.

Tim was persuaded to go to the Polytechnic of East London for a degree course specialising in law, but walked out after six weeks. “I just knew I didn't want to do law; I wanted to write.”

The same day, he walked into the black-glass Daily Express building in Fleet Street to try to get a job, but was rebuffed. He decided to try magazines.

“I walked to Vogue House, Hanover Square, and asked for a job. And got one - because I reminded the personnel director of her nephew!”

Tim started in the production department, dealing with the “mathematical jigsaw” of the flatplan for Vogue - a key blueprint that sets out where the adverts fall and where the editorial space lies.

It gave him an invaluable grounding in the economics of magazines: how much advertising was needed to make viable a certain-sized edition. “At the age of 19, 20, I sometimes had to tell the editor of British Vogue that she couldn't have a full page for the motoring column; it had to be a half-page!”

All good experience, but it wasn't furthering his writing ambitions. He took six months off to try to become a freelance writer, “and never made any money out of it”.

In 1983 Vogue acquired Tatler magazine, and asked Tim to return to help with its production. I'll come, he told them, but I still want to write. Tatler created a column for him - a hybrid advertorial section in which he wrote about shops - but it was a start.

While he was production editor on the magazine, Tim was also looking at the chances of getting writing work in Spain, where his parents had a holiday home. When he returned in the autumn of 1987 from

an exploratory trip, it was announced that Conde Nast was launching a Spanish Vogue. Talk about fate . . .

Two men from Spain visited London on a fact-finding mission and Tim was asked to show them around. He made the most of the opportunity, suggesting he could fly over if they needed help. “So I almost invited myself to Madrid.” The seeds were thus sown for his arrival at the end of January and the six-month stay that became nine years.

He admits he was nervous at the daunting nature of the challenge.

“I had never even done the gap year thing. I had a lot of mates who had gone off and toured Australia, or whatever, and I was this middle-class, happy kid from Hertfordshire that had never really been away from home for longer than a lads' weekend.”

Despite that, he was enraptured.

“It sounds odd, but from my first impressions of Madrid I honestly felt as if I'd lived there before in another life. I believe that Spaniards have saved the best of the country for themselves,” he smiles. “The Costas - and they're lovely - they've given to us; and the best of Spain is inland: Granada, Seville, Andalucia - places inland. It's such a wonderful country.”

Tim was managing director of Conde Nast Spain for about two-and-half years.

The family left Spain 10 years ago primarily because his father died. Tim felt strongly then that he wanted to be in England. They lived initially in Hertfordshire, then - because they loved east Suffolk and confirmed the area had good schools - rented first at Sudbourne, moved across to Grundisburgh, and now have a beautiful and airy home just outside Woodbridge.

Suffolk had found a place in Tim's heart thanks to a holiday in the early 1990s in his sister's cottage at Shingle Street. Now East Anglia is home to Tim and Kirsa, Clara and Adrian, Toby, Oliver, nine, and Hugo, six.

He admits missing Spain dreadfully. “We go back as much as we can. We spend the whole of August in Majorca; we go and rent an old farmhouse out there, and have friends in Madrid and Barcelona.”

After returning to England, Tim set up Conde Nast's contract customer publishing division in London, and invested in regional publishing. He's worked for other publishing groups here, and has been consulting for companies in Spain.

He's just started a new full-time job as an executive with a big media group - one that takes him regularly to the north of England, and to London a couple of days a week. “But my ideal would be just to write!” he grins.

A confessed film junkie, Tim's also written a script for a romantic comedy - involving a kidnapped matador. There are hopeful signs.

“We have a Spanish co-producer, we have an English co-producer, and we're now trying to find an American third party to complete the picture. We have had the script requested by Ben Stiller's agent and Matthew Perry's agent, from Friends. And we also have the most famous matador in Spain signed up to play the role of a kidnapped matador. So it's in development - although nobody's put any money on the table.”

So he's writing a follow-up to A Load of Bull, progressing the film project, trying to write a novel, too, and is busy in the publishing world - not to mention duties as a father and husband. How does he do it all?

“Slow trains. They can be so bad. If you're stuck for two hours, you get on with it. And I have a beautiful and understanding wife who allows me to write. I think that's the key.”

Tim has a signing session at Browsers bookshop in Woodbridge at 2.30pm on Saturday, July 8. Also, a launch party for A Load of Bull is being held at the Ipswich branch of Waterstone's at 6.30pm on Thursday, July 13. Tickets are £3, redeemable against the purchase of a copy. To reserve tickets, call 01473 289044.