This from Lorna Wallace’s winning entry to a Burn’s night poetry competition held in New Zealand entitled: ‘A Scot’s Lament fur her American Fellows (Oan their election of a tangerine gabshite walloper)‘. A coruscating critique of Donald Trump in which his demeanour is described thus:
Poutin’, glaikit through this farce,
His mooth wis pursed up like an arse,
His Tangoed coupon glowin’ like
A skelped backside.
The entire poem can be heard or read here.
The rugby coach and big girl panties …
There was a refreshingly honest touchline interview during today’s televised rugby match between Saracens and Exeter.
Under a new directive interpreting the punishment for various acts of foul play, Sarries had seen a player sent off for a dangerous, head-high tackle. Alex Sanderson, the Sarries coach and an advocate of more stringent policing of dangerous tackles, not only acknowledged the red card to be fully justified, but also commented that he would have had no complaint if a second Sarries player had also been carded at the same time.
His quote reflected a degree of irony vis-à-vis his advocacy for a safer game:
“Karma’s come back and bit me in the a**e“.
A nice Graun interview with Christopher Lloyd (‘Doc’ Brown in Back to the Future). He seems as eccentric in life as the ‘Doc’ does in the film.
I first remember Lloyd as one of the actors in the sitcom ‘Taxi’ from the late 70s and early 80s where he played the drug-addled rôle of ‘Reverend Jim’ Ignatowski.
One of the online comments to the Graun article reprised the following exchange from an episode from 1980. It made me laugh, particularly as despite reading it 30-odd years after its original run, Reverend Jim’s lines played back in my mind in the same woozy, befuddled and bewildered tones that Lloyd brought to the character, so not so much a quote as an excerpt:
Elaine: Jim, you changed your name TO Ignatowski?
Jim: Yeah, you know … it was the 60s and everyone was changing their names to stuff like Sunshine, Free, Moon Unit…
Alex: Well Jim, why Ignatowski?
Jim: Say it backwards.
Bobby: Iskwotangi.
Jim: Uh oh, that’s not even close to Starchild, is it?
I was too young to party at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club in the late sixties, one of the original Northern Soul all-nighter venues, but I did get to tread its boards circa 1976 during its disco incarnation as Placemate 7 – perhaps that’s why I never properly took to clubbing. Disco? Me? Really?
I did venture to other nightclubs though. Three(ish) to be exact(ish). A Mancunian friend called Bernard, who I had met during my ill-fated time as a student in London, visited me in Kendal a few months after I had dropped out from the prestigious North East London Polytechnic (aka NELP) and suggested we go to an all-nighter at the famous Wigan Casino.
We were so naïve we didn’t know what it involved (seemingly drugs, an ability to ‘dance your own steps’ and a strong Lancashire or Scottish accent). We left before it really got going – before two actually in what was probably a first for Wigan Casino.
I still like the music, but Northern Soul purists would trash me for keeping the faith via the medium of a couple of ‘Best of’ CDs and not by the possession of rare and exclusive original 7 inch vinyl singles.
A year or so later, a group I was with was turned away from the Mecca nightclub in Dundee due solely to my less-than-sartorial outfit (jeans and no tie). Fortunately, the city’s Barracuda club had no such sensibilities and thus, in June 1979 I stepped into a nightclub for the third (fourth if you count the Mecca) and last time.
So, you ask, what is the point of all this nostalgia? Well, although not a Northern Soul mainstay and probably a bit too disco for my liking, Stevie Wonder had released his double album Songs in the Key of Life just before my visit to Placemate 7 and while on the dance floor there I recall having to avoid the over-amorous attentions of one of my sister’s flatmates with whom I was dancing to Wonder’s Sir Duke.
Needless to say, any mention of Stevie Wonder (or Sir Duke) since then has immediately transported me back to that dance floor. And “No!”, I didn’t take advantage of the situation. I’ve always been “too much of a gentleman for your own good” (Anne Somervell, pers comm, New Year’s Day 1981) – frankly, as a naïve North Country lad I was also terrified!
So, the astute among you may have guessed that these ramblings were inspired by a recent mention of Stevie Wonder. And you’d be right as finally I get to the quote that made me laugh. Here is Stevie Wonder’s take on the current American Presidential election:
“Voting for Trump is like asking me to drive!”
The sight of them ducks …
Another memory from one’s youth fades 🙁
Jean Alexander who recently died aged 90 played Hilda Ogden, a pivotal character in Coronation Street during the soap’s heyday of the 60s and 70s.
Hilda was married to Stan, a hopeless and hapless layabout played by Bernard Youens. Everything in her life with him seemed to disappoint her. Yet when the make-believe Stan ‘died’ off-screen shortly after Youens himself had died, Hilda’s grief-stricken reaction was incredibly moving and remains memorable even 32 years later (Alexander won a Royal Television Society ‘best performance’ award for the scene).
I stopped watching ‘Corrie’ shortly afterwards when it ditched its warmth and humour in an attempt to match the more gritty ‘reality’ (aka ‘misery’) of the nascent EastEnders. (The same sad descent into miserable social issues also befell the Archers so ever since I have inhabited a soap-free zone). Anyway, this is for Hilda …
Your nagging just fell on deaf ears
While Stan carried on downing beers
But you sat there and cried
On hearing he’d died,
With genuine sorrow and tears.
The title of this post comes from one of Hilda’s last lines. She had a mural on her living room wall (that she always mispronounced as her ‘muriel’) and three plaster flying ducks (all of which Stan had damaged on the occasion that he let his bath overflow). On leaving the soap, Alexander’s character was to move away from the Street and her home of years at which point Percy Sugden suggested that she’d be glad to see the back of her decor.
Hilda’s reply was as dramatic as her response to Stan’s death: “I’ve come in here more times than I care to remember – cold, wet, tired out, not a penny in me purse – and the sight of them ducks, and that muriel… well, they’ve kept my hand away from the gas tap and that’s a fact“.
Postscript: The newspapers quoted some classic Hilda one-liners when reporting Alexander’s death; here’s a couple of them:
“Elsie Tanner’s heart is where a fella’s wallet is – and the bigger the wallet, the more heart she’s got”.
“Quite right Stanley, I wouldn’t give them to a working man, but since you don’t come under that category there’s no problem is there? Now get them ate”.
I was at primary school when Dad’s Army first aired on UK television, but I still remember the fuss there was over a comedy being produced about the Second World War. After all, the realities of war were still to the fore in the minds of many. Initially, my folks didn’t let me watch it, but when it became clear that it was inoffensive humour based on the real life experience of Jimmy Perry, one of the writers, they relented. And thanks to the multiplicity of TV channels its repeats are still going strong fifty years later.
Possibly the most famous quote from the series arose in the episode where Captain Mainwaring’s hapless platoon was detailed to guard a captured U-Boat crew and in which the gormless Private Pike so irritated the submariners’ Captain (played superbly by Philip Madoc) with the rhyme: “Whistle while you work, Hitler is a twerp. He’s half barmy, so’s his army, whistle while you work” that Madoc demanded his name. “Don’t tell him Pike!” was Mainwaring’s reply in a phrase that has since entered the British lexicon.
As is well known, Perry, who recently died, wrote a number of other sitcoms with ‘It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum‘ and ‘Hi-de-Hi!‘ probably the next best known. His co-writer, David Croft died a few years ago, but their obituaries both referenced the other as integral parts of the whole. So, based on Pike and the submariners, I give you my valediction to them both:
You taunted a man from the Reich
With a rhyme that he just didn’t like.
It made him exclaim:
“You! Give me your name”,
So Mainwaring said: “Don’t tell him, Pike!”.
(Non-native English speakers, and probably some native ones, should note that ‘Mainwaring’ is pronounced ‘Mannering’. My apologies for the last line. It does scan, but you have to get the phrasing right – Frank Sinatra’s speciality; he’d have found it a doddle to say!)
Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer have been quite earnestly described as the comedic equivalent of the European avant-garde Dadaist art movement of the early 20th century. (In fact Reeves, an art school graduate, presented BBC4’s recent ‘Gaga for Dada’ programme).
In short this means people either ‘get them’ or they don’t. I do, but I’m the only person I know that does. Hence no-one else that I know has watched more than a smidgen of any episode of their TV series ‘House of Fools‘; a programme that I found to be laugh-out-loud funny.
All of which means that no-one reading this is likely to understand why I laughed at Vic Reeves’ quote when he recently discussed a cruise ship advert that he had just seen:
‘The fjords – we aren’t the best cruise ship, but we go from Dover.’ I thought: well that’s not far. And I’m very fond of pickled fish.
… just don’t call it surreal
Postscript: I’ve just realised that one of my favourite jokes is (i) Dadaist not Surrealist and (ii) consequently, it no longer makes sense:
“… and now the football results, Real Madrid 3, Surreal Madrid Fish“
A former captain of the Australian rugby union team, John Eales, was nicknamed ‘Nobody‘ by his international team-mates in recognition of his excellence and consistency. It was a play on words insofar as: “Nobody’s perfect“.
Eales was, but I have to confess that occasionally (and despite my best endeavours) I’m not perfect (no, seriously!). And sometimes that is even made clear to me by my nearest and dearest 😉
It’s at those times that I take solace in the words of Tim Dowling, Guardian columnist and downtrodden husband:
“I have long maintained that the secret to being a good husband and father is taking the time to point out to one’s wife and children that they could do a whole lot worse“.
I even printed it out in coloured foil, framed it and put it in Management’s Christmas stocking a few years ago …
… or if you prefer Homer Simpson’s take on the situation: “I won’t lie to you, fatherhood isn’t easy like motherhood” 🙂
A Tim Jones tweet from last Sunday evening …
“It’s that time of the week when men in sitting rooms across the land are told to shut up 😉 #Poldark“.
But I’ve news for him. I did already.
💖#Demelza💖
A not-so-guilty secret of mine is the enduring appeal of the bawdy ‘laugh-out-loud’ passages in Tom Sharpe’s novels, and since his demise I have to say that I’ve missed them. So how did a family discussion on the geographical origins of the surname ‘Otway’ (family friends) bring Sharpe’s prose back to mind?
Well, it seems that Management couldn’t remember John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett’s rendition of ‘Really Free’ (not that it had anything to do with our conversation). Nor did she know that the song had come to the public’s attention via an appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Writing in the Independent a few years ago, Robert Chalmers reflected on the event in pure Tom Sharpe fashion:
“… Otway vaulted on to a PA tower and overbalanced. He brought down the speaker stack but fractured no bones when he landed on the sharp corner of a bass cabinet as the impact was cushioned by his testicles“.
Pure Sharpe!
You can watch it here.