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Of course this was a more innocent time when grown adults pretending to be young children were greeted with less suspicion.
It may seem a dereliction of duty for me not to make a joke comparing Eamonn Holmes and Gus Honeybun at this point, however Ruth and Eamonn still regularly host the kinds of TV shows on which I would hope to promote this book and, while I wouldn’t expect Eamonn to have read the whole thing, to take him down in the opening pages seems a gamble.
I grew up in a village where the bus came once a week. If you wanted to go from my village of Haytor Vale to the nearest town of Newton Abbot and you couldn’t drive, you’d better want to go on a Tuesday morning.
Gus Honeybun wouldn’t exist now (for a start I imagine he was made of material that would be considered a fire hazard) and if he did exist it would be on a minor channel competing against hundreds of other channels and everything on the internet for our attention.
Like living next to a noisy road it is amazing how quickly you get used to a crack in your TV screen. In fact we kind of missed it when it was gone – it was useful for judging marginal offside decisions.
To this day I have no idea why such a crucial job was put in the control of a nine-year-old, but I suppose to be fair they did only ever have to count up to four.
I think we can all agree there is such a thing as too much swimming from Leeds.
In 1985 the crew for a film called The Circle of Doom added a tenth rock when shooting a scene, and days later the only tape of the film was – pause for dramatic music – lost in the post. It seems an oversight not to send something recorded delivery when you know you have messed with some cursed rocks hell bent on revenge, but what do I know?22
Parkinson says that even his own mum thought it was real, phoning him up afterwards and asking what had happened to Pipes – strangely more concerned about the fate of an evil ghost than her own son.
And why not? Isn’t that how we’d all like to go, surrounded by our family and watching Neighbours? Either that or at a murder mystery weekend.
Can you separate the art from the artist? Are you allowed to enjoy Annie Hall despite the fact it was directed by Woody Allen?
I never really got to the bottom of what this phrase ‘present to himself’ meant and how it differed from just buying something, but it is a technique I have taken on, and as such I would like to use this platform to thank myself for being so generous in recently buying myself a SodaStream.
If this was a TV drama my total willingness to bow to the peer pressure and fit in would have led to me trying heroin or being caught stealing an All Saints CD from Woolworths, but thankfully neither of these things were an option due to my lack of access to hard drugs or a Woolworths.
I just clicked on a random episode online which began with him announcing, ‘I’m here in the scorpion house at London Zoo.’ Fuck. That.53
I wish I had just got into shoplifting instead.
However, such was Southampton’s reliance on him that when Alan Ball took his first training session as the club’s manager in 1994 he put the team on the pitch, pointed at Le Tissier and said, ‘Our tactic is pass it to him.’ This is not the game plan of a team in the best league in the world, it’s what an under-11s team does when they have a player who has hit puberty early.
Full disclosure: Exeter City and Torquay United were actually nearer to our house but Plymouth were that little bit better so I chose them. What a startling lack of ambition to be a glory supporter but to still only choose Plymouth Argyle.
‘Well, it does seem unlikely that my car would be lifted up by a crane and dumped into the sea but this man can’t be Jeremy Beadle – he has a slightly bigger beard than I would expect.’
Such was the influence of The X-Files on me, had you asked me in my early teens what the FBI’s activities involved, I would have said 10 per cent tracking down the world’s most wanted criminals and 90 per cent suppressing knowledge of alien life forms from the masses. A job they were seemingly doing so badly that a 13-year-old boy on Dartmoor was on to them.
It all felt other-worldly and sad, but if I am honest with myself, I didn’t feel caught up in the collective mourning of the nation as we now remember it. If anything, the grieving crowds outside the palaces pushed me away from being a part of it. I found these people mourning a woman they had never met like she was their own parent so strange and incongruous that I struggled to identify with what was going on. I didn’t feel it was the week I had learned how to cry for the first time. I had cried plenty of times, often at far less tragic events than this, it has to be said.
As they swing past the camera they are lost in the moment and you can just hear Prince Harry say to his mother, ‘Can we do it again?’ In the back of the cart sits a fourth person, a middle-aged man in a suit, whose training as a bodyguard has led to him sitting on a log flume trying not to be noticed. That was as close as Diana’s life got to normality.
In comparison such is my inbuilt aversion to watching adverts these days, there is no point in my life when I am more alert than when waiting for the ‘Skip Ads’ button to come up on the advert before a YouTube video, clicking it the moment it appears so I don’t have to watch a sixth second of a completely inoffensive sales pitch from Domino’s.83
My dad was ahead of the curve, even in the 1990s he had a 2020s aversion to watching the adverts. If in control of the remote he would insist on muting the breaks so we could talk as a family (usually a discussion about why we couldn’t just watch the adverts like everybody else).
When third-tier Wycombe Wanderers faced an FA Cup quarter-final against Premier League Leicester in the middle of an injury crisis, they sent Ceefax a press release asking any interested strikers to contact them. Roy Essandoh got in touch, passed the trial and was named as a substitute.
the whole thing had the air of a student house party that was going to end up costing the tenants their deposit.
Or perhaps when MPs in Cornwall told the government that they were going to have to appoint a Minister for the Eclipse, surely the most underwhelming role in the history of governmental office. Some people are tasked with keeping world peace and trading with international superpowers, others are tasked with seeing that everyone has enough toilets when the moon goes past the sun over Bideford.
in the year 2000 it felt to me like the least appetising premise for a TV show since Michael Buerk said, ‘I’m here at Britain’s biggest cattle prod factory, a place you would assume nothing could go wrong . . .’
