Martin Kemp told his son’s You About? podcast that his father once wrote the apprenticeship manager to try to get him out of a binding training contract so he could join a band.
On Roman Kemp’s show, Martin Kemp described asking to leave his print apprenticeship at 17 and the extraordinary letter his father sent on his behalf: "When I was an apprentice compositor in print, my dad wrote the manager a letter when I wanted to leave to be in a band." He read the letter’s tone aloud: "Dear sir. You have to excuse Martin from his apprenticeship. Will you release him early because he wants to be… a rockstar?"
Kemp said the paperwork of the time made that request risky: "I was only 17 and you can’t, because apprenticeships in those days — you are locked in. You are locked in for five years." He said his father nevertheless put faith in him and pushed for release, believing the music career could become real. "Do you know, I think there was a big bit of my dad that wanted it to come true," Kemp told the podcast.
The detail landed because it reverses a common expectation about working‑class training schemes and family pressure. The number in the room is five years — the length Kemp described as the apprenticeship term — and the age is 17, the moment he decided he wanted another life. Those are the facts he returned to during the interview, and they are what make the story matter now: a single sentence on paper that helped change a career.
The conversation on Roman Kemp’s podcast folded into a wider, visibly emotional reflection on family and memory. Kemp said that when his father wrote the letter, "we had nothing," and that the gesture stayed with him. He recalled losing both parents in 2009 — his mother dying 48 hours after his father — and described how old home movies have kept their presence alive. "Both of my parents have passed on now, but I’ve got memories of them and it feels like I can still smell them when I see old clips," he said.
Kemp told the podcast about a gift from his wife: "We had a load of old tapes of the kids and a few Christmases ago, Shirlie bought me a camera that can play them all." He said he watched those tapes closely and was overcome: "I hadn’t seen these tapes in years, so I was watching them back through this little lens on the camera with my eye up against it, crying my eyes out." That recollection framed the letter story as more than a career pivot — it is a memory that still evokes pain and gratitude.
The friction in Kemp’s account is simple: apprenticeships then were formal, binding arrangements meant to keep a young worker in place, yet his father’s informal, written plea appears to have succeeded. Kemp repeated the paradox: formal contracts, informal rescue. He has told versions of the episode before, but said on the podcast that he keeps returning to it because it crystallises both his father’s faith and the precarity of their circumstances then.
There is a contemporary footnote. Roman Kemp, who hosts You About?, will appear on The Great Celebrity Bake Off: Stand Up To Cancer on Channel 4 on Sunday, April 26 at 7pm — a scheduling detail his father made light of during their chat as the interview moved between career stories and family life.
What matters most from Kemp’s account is clear: the letter was not a bureaucratic formality but an act of belief that helped free a 17‑year‑old from a five‑year tie and set him on another path. The closing fact of the podcast is also its moral: the small, undramatic interventions of a parent can have outsized consequences, and for Kemp that single note of support remains one of the defining moments he carries from his parents, even after their deaths.
