Open Channel D (for David)

Scrapbooks. We’ve all kept them. Some are priceless mementos of things private and personal. Some are records of big news stories, earth shattering events. Some are a record of a magnificent obsession, like – say – your love for a particular actor, film, band, TV show. Mostly, these things end up in an attic somewhere, taken down years afterwards and studied with love.

In one case, a scrapbook had a most peculiar afterlife. Actor David Banks was an obsessive Man From U.N.C.L.E fan when he was a nipper. It hit him hard, and he started voraciously collecting everything he could about it. He clipped from the Radio Times. He did cutaway drawings in an exercise book of all the gadgets used by Napoleon and Ilya. He made a collage cover.

Then, presumably, into the attic it went.

In the 90s, David was at a Doctor Who convention. He was one of several people associated with the programme who was raising money for that weekend’s charity auction. He sold off his treasured U.N.C.L.E scrapbook to a very drunk idiot in the audience.

That idiot was me. I’ve treasured that scrapbook, protected it through disaster – my flat seemed oddly prone to flooding and I’ve lost count of how many things got mulched over the years. It’s gone everywhere with me, and I still protect it. I’m like some sort of Knight Templar of the U.N.C.L.E scrapbook. Years back I scanned it in order to preserve it for the ages. Never could work out how to host it anywhere. It seems I can now do it here, so I present – with love – the Cyberleader’s personal U.N.C.L.E scrapbook. I do hope you enjoy it. It’s terribly precious to me.

(If by any chance David sees this and wants it taken down, I’ll do so gladly. I hope if he does see it, it brings back some happy memories.) Click on the link to view.  UNCLE scrapbook

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That Doctor chap. The stranger. He said he heard a movement coming from inside the pipe line on the beach.

Found a thing I wrote the last time I worked my way through Doctor Who from the start (yes, the last time – it’s a thing that happens distressingly often). I’d stuck it up on Facebook then, so excuse the excitement regarding the Omnirumour. Obviously I’d just heard about Enemy and Web coming back. I’m quite taken with this – as a snap response to a story I thought held no more surprises for me, it’s rather telling. How could I have missed how fantastic Victor Maddern was? I’ll give an honourable mention to Clifford Rose in Warrior’s Gate here – I’d managed to completely forget him when I put this together first time around. Special NoPrize if you can guess which guest performance I’m referring to.

Image is of course, c. BBC.

Listening to Fury From The Deep this morning I was struck by several things, some more interesting than others (and possibly not interesting at all to anyone else, but they caught my attention) – for a start, Victor Maddern is incredible. It’d never really struck me before but Robson’s loss of control is more unnerving than anything else in the whole story. Parasitic monsters descending upon humanity are all very well, but one man’s inability to deal with a developing crisis situation and slipping into screaming, ranting fury is so much more frightening. Out of all of the beleagured authority figures in this season (Parry, Padmasambhva, Clent, Robson, Bennett) he’s the one who appears dangerously unhinged. Makes the gentler but still stern figure who pops up in the closing minutes of episode 6 even more impressive. You can see why people would have followed him in the first place. It’s a shame you don’t see him like that before he starts spiralling out of control – we drop into the story at a point where he’s already pretty far gone – but it doesn’t detract from Maddern’s achievement. The Children’s Own Programme That Adults Enjoy is packed full of ranting cartoon maniacs, but you don’t get too many shiver-up-the-spine performances like this one. You won’t get another until Simon Rouse fifteen or so years later (although my all time favourite Doctor Who performance isn’t too far round the corner – 6 serials after this one, in fact).
There’s another lovely little heart-to-heart between the Doctor and Victoria lurking in episode 4, mirroring the one in Tomb but one that shows that the frightened little girl comforted at the start of the season is now even more frightened despite all the Doctor’s reassurances. I’m finding all sorts of lovely little coincidences and moments as I work through 60s Who, and this one’s very striking. That there’s a little pause for a comfort conversation at the start of Victoria’s travels, and then one at the end – well, it’s very satisfying. As Victoria reels off the list of all the things they’ve encountered that have terrified the shit out of her (Daleks, Cybermen…) the Doctor interjects with one she’s missed – “Yeti”. I predict that should Fury ever reappear Troughton will have a look of joy on his face, rather than sympathy. The Second Doctor wouldn’t be able to help himself. He loves all this scampering about, dealing with the bad stuff. It’s one of the many things that makes him fantastic.
And finally – thanks to the drip-feed of returns since the early eighties… more of season 5 now exists than doesn’t. 22 episodes in visual form, soundtracks for the other 18. If you’d told me that back when I was 13, looking despairingly at that list in the back of Haining’s “Celebration” book, I’d have squeaked with excitement and fainted. Probably. Should anything further develop from the Omnirumour (and I’m hoping fervently it does, but counting my blessings for what we currently have) I’ll probably squeak with excitement and faints again. At least I’m consistent.

Review – Scarred For Life Volume One – The 1970s by Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence

Try as I might I can’t pinpoint the exact date, but I can tell you with absolute certainty the moment when I first came face to face with mind-numbing, paralyzing, blood-freezing terror. I was four years old and it was around about 1.35 on a weekday afternoon.

I was ambling about the living room, doing something incomprehensible as children often do, when I was stopped in my tracks by an unspeakable horror emanating from the television set in the corner. It was The Herbs and aided by his unspeakable acolytes Gordon Rollings and Ivor Wood, Michael Bond flayed my soul.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I loved The Herbs. I love it even more now that I’m ostensibly grown up and all sensible. Parsley, Sage, Knapweed and the others (but especially Dill) were an established favourite and a highlight of my tiny little life. Not on this day though. Oh, no. Not on this day. On this day, evil invaded the herb garden in the form of Belladonna, The Witch. As she turned other characters into weeds, slowly but surely taking over the Garden, the screen grew darker. She cackled, lit in the most Hammer-Horror-esque manner. It looked – just for a moment – like SHE MIGHT ACTUALLY WIN, and that would be the end of all my friends. No amount of frantic chanting the magic incantation “Herbidacious” was going to bring them back this time.

I didn’t see the end of it. I was panic stricken, terrorised. Frantic. I tried to run out of the room. I might even have smacked into the door, I was so scared. Couldn’t watch the end of it, so I missed my hero Dill saving the day (and teaching a handy lesson in the process – had I stayed I’d have realised that Dill was frequently used to ward off witches. I’m sure it would have served me well at some point).

The trauma stayed with me for months. For a very long time afterwards my mother could bring me smack into line by simply taking the two false teeth she had out, contorting her face and cackling just like Belladonna. I’d instantly stop misbehaving and become a very good boy indeed. Here’s the thing though – it became a cherished memory. That delicious, safe thrill of being scared witless within the security of four good solid walls, the visceral impact of the bloody thing -that stayed with me. Long after the gibbering panic faded, I remembered that day with total clarity. I still can. It seared itself into my memory to the point where I can recall precisely the layout of that entire room, even down to the ornaments sitting on the fireplace. It scarred me, but in a good, healthy, thrilling way.

I wasn’t alone. Not by a very, very long chalk was I alone. It seems that growing up in the 1970s and 1980s was packed with terror and darkness. You couldn’t watch television, go to the cinema, read a book, do anything at all, without something imprinting itself so deeply onto your brain that even decades later it’ll suddenly leap out on you when you least expect it. Almost always when it does, your reaction is delighted surprise and you greet the memory like an old friend and a variant on the tried and tested “oh, THAT’S what it was!” or, “Oh god, I remember that!” Our experiences as a child shape us and make us the people we are. To judge by the volume of gleefully irresponsible material we were either subjected to or actively sought out when we were told not to, the childhoods of my particular generation should have kept psychiatrists the length and breadth of the country busy for a very long time. Instead, we carry those memories with us forever and we hold them close. Well, most of them anyway. We’re Scarred For Life, but we don’t mind one bit.

Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence obviously cherish those memories as much as I do because they’ve handily avoided a lifetime of expensive therapy by writing them down. Scarred For Life Volume 1 – The 1970s is a gigantic doorstopper of a book, clocking in at over 700 pages. It’s a delicious compendium of the familiar, the half-remembered and the deliriously obscure and I’m more than half convinced that both of the authors spent their childhoods lurking on the periphery of my own, unseen but always there like The Shape in Sapphire and Steel , so closely do their experiences and memories echo mine.

There’s easy money to be made out of knocking together a cheap book of lazy reminisces. Talk about Bagpuss for a bit. Throw in a mention or two of Geoffrey from Rainbow, laugh at the silly clothes and the cheap sets or naff special effects and you’re landed. Published for Christmas, cluttering up the charity shops by January. Scarred For Life isn’t interested in all of that. First and foremost, it’s a celebration, a loving collection of things that enriched the lives of the authors and which they evidently still love. That love shines from pretty much every page. The tone of the whole thing is very definitely “wasn’t this great?” It should trigger off some healthy back catalogue sales for Network, and it might just bankrupt you were you to scurry off to ebay and try to score some of the other phantoms from your past that will be evoked by this enormous celebration of shredded nerves and sleepless nights.

That’s where it scores over so many other books which celebrate our collective pasts. The breadth of ground it covers is enormous. I love and cherish certain books about television, primarily Phil Norman’s exemplary A History of Television in 100 Programmes and JR Southall’s lovingly compiled compendium of Television memories You And Who Else. By the time this one’s done with television we’re only 300 pages in. There’s a whole universe of other things to talk about, things which only occasionally get covered but which – I guarantee you – will set off a train of thought which will end up with ghosts sitting in your mental carriages that you didn’t even think you remembered. Cinema. Books. Board Games. Even Sweeties. Lots of books cover one or more of this little lot. Scarred For Life does it all at once. It’s daunting, it’s exhaustive, and I couldn’t stop reading it.

We start with a quote from and a dedication to the late and very great Robert Holmes. A brisk “Right, let’s scare the little buggers to death”, and we’re off. Following an enthusiastic introduction from Johnny Mains – a man who knows this stuff backwards – we launch headfirst into the bewilderingly eclectic world of 70s television. Kicking off with a section on children’s television we launch straight in with The Owl Service. When your first lengthy article is about Alan Garner you know you’re going to be alright. Ace of Wands, The Tomorrow People, Grange Hill – all here, all present and correct. So also are The Feathered Serpent, 4 Idle Hands, Escape Into Night, The Changes, Shadows and more. Stephen Brotherstone’s memories of being so scared of the titles to Shadows that he actually tried to escape the room but COULDN’T REACH THE DOOR HANDLE, necessitating the tying of a piece of string to the handle to prevent any future recurrences, reminded me very much of my own childhood terrors. At least he didn’t run headfirst into the door. Unlike me. The piece on The Tomorrow People is accompanied by a wonderfully sparky and funny interview with the world’s oldest teenager, Nicholas Young. John himself, as self-deprecating and witty as ever. A lovely little bonus.

HTV’s remarkable stable of crazy, surreal and downright weird serials is next. Sky, The Clifton House Mystery, Children of the Stones and King of the Castle remain some of the oddest, freakishly strange bits of television I’ve ever seen. I was prompted to watch a couple of episodes of Sky and King of the Castle after reading this and they’re every bit as much of a late night bedtime-after-cheese nightmare as the authors make out. They’re also still magnificent television.

We dive headlong into the bleak world of the grownups with a section on the grim, abandon-hope-all-ye-who-enter here stuff that British tv companies spun out by the yard back then. Callan, Shadows of Fear, Play For Today, Gangsters and Alternative 3 all spotlighted here, all – in their own ways – vigorously off-kilter and woozy. The piece on Gangsters in particular reminds of how bloody odd it was to start with, and how utterly unlike anything else you’ve ever seen it became. The Alternative 3 bit left me shaking my head with disbelief, as April Fool becomes a-myth-that-cannot-be-debunked. No matter how many times some people are told it’s a hoax, they choose to believe instead it’s a cover-up and more fuel to support their own pet conspiracies. So it goes.

This dovetails nicely into A Very British Dystopia . We were obviously either doomed, in the process of dooming ourselves or already doomed and didn’t know it in the seventies and Doom Watch, The Guardians, Survivors, 1990 and grumpy old Nigel Kneale’s final Quatermass didn’t let us forget it. The Guardians in particular gives off an aura of “you’re all screwed, you might as well forget it” that makes it fairly unique – thank god – but it’s still television that would have rivetted you to the screen on first broadcast. It still does. I’m particularly pleased to see 1990 getting some attention – I’ve always loved it and 1970s television for me peaks at one point during series 2 when Edward Woodward and John Paul share a scene in which they basically just grit at each other in their own unique manner. John Paul doing his patented hands-on-desk, you-bastard glare that he used to hurl at Simon Oates, Woodward with that particular brand of “just one word, you sod. Just one word and I’ll lamp you” suppressed violence that he and he alone did so well.

Sci-Fi UK and English Gothic are up next, so brace yourself for pieces on UFO, Space 1999 – Dragon’s Domain (a wonderfully pawky but fundamentally affectionate dissection), Star Maidens and Blake’s 7. I’d always believed that Star Maidens was shockingly poor. It actually isn’t – although it’s almost terminally confused in what it wants to be – and I was pleased to see that the authors agree. English Gothic shivers it’s way through A Ghost Story For Christmas, The Stone Tape, Dead of Night, Beasts, The Omega Factor, Sapphire and Steel and Late Night Stories Read By Tom Baker. Every single one parked in my DVD collection, and somewhere in the back of my brain. Indeed, by this stage in the book the only thing that I didn’t actully know either from the time or from actively seeking it out later was 4 Idle Hands. I’ve since seen the first episode and yes – it’s wonderful.

This particular section is a personal treat because so many of my own personal Scarred For Life moments derive from these shows. “The Signalman” gets watched every Christmas Eve without fail here and “Baby”, from Beasts, remains the only piece of television drama to actively traumatize me in adult life. I watched it once. I will never watch it again. Not just because it terrorized me so much, but because I want to keep that particular memory pure. I don’t want to go back and discover that the power it carries has faded.

If you’re writing about Seventies television there are several gigantic elephants blocking up the room that really need to be addressed. How We Used To Live covers quite a few of them in detail. The Black and White Minstrel Show, Love Thy Neighbour, On The Buses all present and incorrect, but there are also thoughtful pieces on racism, sexism and squalor, the “something for the Dads” syndrome and Jason King. We finish up this section with a piece on Romany Jones, a show which I’d more or less blocked from my memory along with its horrid spin off Yus My Dear. The latter in particular is unwatchable now and it’s one of the few shows covered here that I can’t ever sit through. Or justify. Or apologise for.

The television section is rounded off with You’re Nicked! The Sweeney, G.K Newman’s masterful Law and Order and New Scotland Yard are all examined here and I was chuffed to see the latter given some attention. Seemingly forgotten now, it is bleak, brutally nihilistic and every bit as downbeat as the others and it needs reappraisal sharpish. Performances as good as the ones given by Woodvine and Carlisle don’t deserve to languish unappreciated and I really wish it was more loved than it is. Thankfully it gets a fair shake here and is allowed to sit proudly alongside its rather more famous brothers. Quite right too.

Interspersed throughout the television section are little pieces on The Art of the Title Sequence. I have quite a thing for title sequences. Done well and done right, they enhance a programme beyond measure. Randomly thrown together clips or will-this-do montages don’t cut it. With a decent title sequence you can set the scene. You can establish a mood. You can even – in the case of Survivors – compress an entire episode’s worth of setup into under a minute, letting you get on with telling your story right from the get-go. Several of the finest of the era are covered here, lavishly illustrated with screengrabs which will remind you of just how much of an art form it is.

A cursory glance around this blog will reveal that I have more than a passing interest in Doctor Who, so I’m pleased to note that the next section turns the spotlight on the years when the dandy and old teeth-and-curls bestrode Saturday nights and did indeed scare-the-little-buggers-to-death. I’m even more pleased to note that it does it by looking at some of the odder little tributaries that led off from the main show during the seventies. Here you’ll find pieces on the Blackpool exhibition – I did manage to go but right at the death of it, shortly before it closed down. There’s a marvellous piece on the Radiophonic Workshop, without whom I’d have missed an inroad into areas of music that I might otherwise have completely ignored; also without whom my adult years would have been considerably less atonal and skronky. There’s a nice piece about the Doctor Who back up comic strips from Marvel too, which point out the remarkable coincidence of the Time Lords becoming involved in a Time War. Sadly never completed due to creative disputes,  that arc may look oddly familiar to latter day followers of the mothership. My favourite piece though is definitely the one on the swivel-eyed lunacy of the World Distributors Annuals. I have an unhealthy obsession with these – indeed my single all-time favourite piece of Doctor Who writing is Gary Gillat’s remarkable demolition of one particular annual story in his A To Z book – so this one’s off to a winner so far as I’m concerned. The alleys and byways of Doctor Who are almost as fascinating as the actual show itself so it’s a pleasure to be reminded that these particular diversions in the seventies are as well thought of by others as they are by me. Even if they only occasionally resemble the thing they’re supposed to be spinning off from.

Next up – and justifiably given an entire section to themselves – are the Public Information Films.  Frequently weird, occasionally unnerving and often downright bloody terrifying, these things are the bedrock of any Scarred For Life experience. The way they’d often crash into the middle of whatever else you were watching, scare the shit out of you and then leave again without so much as a pause means they’ve embedded themselves in all our consciousnesses and they’re given a good going over here. Split into sections covering areas like Everything Kills, Stranger Danger, Country Vile, Remember Remember and One For The Road, I guarantee this one will stir up more forgotten memories than any other. Certainly they did for me. As a result I’ve had one particularly funky piece of music stuck in my head for nearly a week now. When you read the book, you’ll know EXACTLY which one I mean.

Much credit is given in this section to director John Krish and rightly so – some of these films have stuck in my head for decades now along with the messages they conveyed and it seems that nearly every single one of the ones that did were directed by him. It’s good that he’s given time to shine. He deserves it. I hope he knew just how much of an effect his work had on us. Not only that, but just how many lives he may have saved. That’s not a bad legacy.

Having said all that, the most fun I got out of this particular section was the one on the Green Cross Code PIFs. Not only David Prowse’s remarkable turn as Green Cross Man, but that amazing time-capsule of seventies celebrity where Kevin Keegan, Joe Bugner, Alvin Stardust and Les Gray from Mud dispensed road-crossing advice with varying degrees of aggression. Every single one of these has remained with me in the same way as the frightening ones have, proving there’s more than one way to get the message across, even if I can’t for the life of me understand how the hell they thought SPLINK would ever work as a viable acronym. When Harry Hill’s TV Burp suddenly ram-raided a piece on Emmerdale by bringing in Alvin Stardust to recreate his particular Green Cross Code PIF it felt like meeting an old mate. You’ll meet lots of old mates in this section, some of them more welcome than others. Once I’d got over the shock of finally realising that yes, that was British Horror Movie stalwart Edward Judd in the “Think Bike” section (“Think Once. Think Twice. Think Don’t Drive Your Car On The Pavement”), the piece on “20 Times More Likely” revealed that my beloved Squeeze are on the soundtrack with “Wild Sewerage Tickles Brazil”. First time I heard that I KNEW I’d heard it somewhere before. Just never could work out where until now.

Next up things get very strange indeed, as we careen into the truly absurd with Scarred by Toys and Games. I never craved the dubious joys of owning a ventriloquist’s doll (although I still get the same shiver that everyone else does out of watching Dead of Night and Eric Morecambe’s attempts to wrestle his into something resembling working order leaves me weak with laughter). I collected Top Trumps but oddly enough, never really played them. My experience with board games in general is limited to the ones everyone knows. Monopoly, Cluedo and the like are about as far as I go, to be honest. Actually, that’s not altogether true. I was obsessed with “Operation”, and god knows I tried to give that Doctor Who one from the eighties with Tom’s face on the front a go, despite being hampered by a complete inability to a. understand the rules and b. find any bugger willing to play the damn thing with me. Much of this section is brand new to me and as such, left me boggling.

We’re eased in relatively gently with a piece on Ventriloquist Dummies. That is, until we’re confronted with the full nightmarish horror of Mr Parlanchin. I was going to bung in a picture of the wee sod here but no, I’m not having him squat evilly in the corner of this review. Google him if you dare but don’t expect to sleep tonight. There are many of him for sale on ebay. Presumably people who bought him then couldn’t get a decent night’s sleep for fear they’d hear a gentle “thump” on the end of the bed followed by the wooden creak of him advancing up towards the pillow towards your face. Brrrrr.

Anyway. After that, we get back to relatively safe territory with Top Trumps. Like I say, I never really played the damn things, but the collector gene is strong – the idea of something you could collect and trade and swap to fill in gaps was quite big in our school, with the horror ones obviously high on the list of cherished wants. As SFL’s article rightly points out the swipes from other pieces of art and photos are really frighteningly blatant – not that I realised that at the time. I do now, though. Death’s Horror Rating of 100 seems about right, even if – by definition – he really should have a maximum Killing Power rating too. Where did that other five percent go?

Next up, and this one really had me knuckling my eyes in disbelief. Inappropriate Board Games is probably the most accurately named piece in the book, even if it does namecheck my beloved “Operation”. Some of the rest, though… “Alien”? “Seance”? Good god. Mind you, most of the ones I do recognise seem a bit off-kilter in the cold light of day. I mean, “Mouse Trap” isn’t exactly normal, is it?

On the other hand, it’s no “Bermuda Triangle”, “Game of Jaws”, “Game of Dracula” or “Escape From Colditz” either, all of which are covered here. Much is made of the legendary unplayability of the latter, along with the fact that it just looks bloody lovely when you take all the bits out of the box. I didn’t know that someone trying to sell one of the very first production runs fell foul of ebay’s rules owing to the presence of a certain symbol on the packaging. The book is peppered with great little stories like that. It’s much more than just a rundown of Things That You Remember. It’s scrupulously researched as well and packed with stuff that you never knew.

One thing I certainly never knew about was the existence of a game called “I Vant To Bite Your Finger”. I spent a fair amount of time blinking in disbelief at this one. I’m still not sure if ever existed, but no, there it is. There are copies on ebay, which is where the photo to the right comes from. Lordy. I’d just about got over that one,when I hit the final article, which concerns that hardy perennial Nuclear War. Speaking as one who suffered horrendously from Nuclear Terror in the eighties, I’m deeply and truly glad I never knew this particular game existed until now. The fact that it’s actually a passionate and heartfelt piece of social commentary masquerading as a board game really doesn’t make it any easier. That photograph on the box is enough to bring anyone out in a cold sweat. Unless you’re made of sterner stuff than I am, which let’s face it, you almost certainly are.

With that under our belts it’s time to take a trot through the dark and savage underbelly of seventies cinema and SFL wastes no time in reminding us what a grim place the world could be – at least, as refracted through the despairing lens of certain seventies film-makers. Kicking off with an explanatory piece The Savage Cinema of the 1970s, we then careen off into a brutal universe of terrors. The slew of satanic horror movies; dystopian Sci-Fi by the bundle. When Animals Attack, including the legendary “Night of the Lepus”, (one of the very few non-Star Trek credits after 1969 on DeForest Kelley’s CV. He must have seen something in it that we didn’t).  The Savage Cinema that gave us the likes of “Deliverance”. Folk Horror. “Watership Down” quite rightly gets a section to itself, as does “The Medusa Touch” before we fetch up with a wondrous look at Pop Music films of the Seventies, which means two things – David Essex and Slade. Both get their due and both sections are full of surprises – not least the existence of an independently produced series of plays about Jim Maclaine Jr, the offspring of the Essex character from “That’ll be The Day” and “Stardust” and – possibly my favourite revelation in the entire book this – the original plot idea before someone came up with “Slade In Flame”. I’ll not spoil it for you because it made me hoot with laughter for more or less an entire day. Nasty and dark “Slade In Flame” may be, but I’ll listen to “How Does It Feel?” anytime you like. That said, it wouldn’t have fitted in with what the film was originally going to be about. Let’s just leave it at that.

It’s good to see these films getting a bit of exposure. You can read about the magnificence of much of seventies cinema in a plethora of publications. I’ve not read too much about Waris Hussein’s “The Posession of Joel Delaney” elsewhere, though having digested with unease the summary offered here, perhaps that’s just as well.

Oh, and I have a cherished original copy of “Alien – The Illustrated Story” too. Every bit as good as the film, if somewhat gorier. Ridley kept it all in the shadows, in the main. Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson… not so much.

When I was a horrible little schoolboy – more years ago than I care to remember – some classmates and I collaborated on a novel. At least we tried to, but our English teacher caught wind of it and smitten with repulsion, threatened to take drastic action if we continued. It was called “The Machete Killings” and whilst we weren’t exactly original, you couldn’t get us under the Trade Descriptions Act. There was a machete. There was an awful lot of killing(s). You’d have known what you were getting, were there a market for round-robin horror novel written by a bunch of bloodthirsty schoolboys. It’s possible there might well have been a market after all, as Scarred By… Books and Comics makes abundantly clear.

I mean, just look at what we were passing around the classroom, devouring like one of those naughty magazines you’d find stuck in a hedge or floating in a puddle. The Pan Book of Horror Stories. Killer Crabs, Men of War and Stone Killers. Skins, Angels and the New Pulp – New English Library. The legendary, almost mythological Dracula Annual. Action. 2000ad. The jaw-dropping cruelty of Girls Comics in the 1970s. That last one gave us a quite a night here. My simple reading out of some of the plot summaries had us scurrying to the web to see if we could find examples of how horrible they actually were. Nine times out of ten, they were worse. Thankfully, there’s a loving piece on The Deranged Art of Ken Reid to take the taste away. When a piece littered with examples of Ken Reid’s art is actually less freaky than a piece on Girls Comics, you know things are bad.

It must be said, there are more references to things in this section of SFL that chime personally with me than any other. I must have devoured much of this nonsense avidly as a kid because virtually every article had me crowing with delight as I recalled past obsessions, whether it was Guy N. Smith’s never-ending procession of “Crabs” novels; Sven Hassel and THAT logo; the visceral, blood spattered terror of the “Pan Book of Horror Stories” series; rounding up with “Action comic and dear old “Hookjaw”. Funnily, I don’t remember “Kids Rule OK” – the one that really seemed to spark the outrage that brought about “Action”‘s downfall – at all. Seen from a distance of several decades, it’s horrible. Really, really nasty. Strangely I have no memory of “The Crunch” – DC Thomson’s attempt to plough the same furrow as “Action”. None whatsoever, despite the fondness expressed here. Must have been far too bound up in my weekly 2000ad fix to even notice it.

Other things mentioned here passed me by – for instance, New English Library and their endless “Skinhead” novels. I won’t be seeking them out. However, SFL does kindly provide a list of some of the more bobbins novels to come out of the period, and I may not be able to rest again until I have found and read “Devil Daddy”. Speedboating Satanists on the Thames. A plague of Progeria. A suspected alien visitor, who turns out to be yer ACTUAL Wandering Jew. Face it True Believer. This one’s got it all. Doesn’t half put Roy of the Rovers vs the Hooligans in the shade.

Hungry after all that? I know I am. Don’t worry, SFL has you covered here as well, as we stampede  headlong into Scarred By Food . Many of these items are by their nature considerably more ephemeral than the others and so the pieces here are packed with things that this reader was astonished to recall. Whether it’s “Horror Bags”, “Phantom Chews” or “Trebor Mummies”, this is a glimpse into a shadowy netherworld of mouth-watering delights, crammed into greedy maws and then forgotten. Except of course by the thriving collector’s market who somehow managed to save never-ending examples of the wrappers and packets most of us chucked away.

Thanks to them we can now recall “Count Dracula’s Deadly Secret” (black Ice Lolly with blood red jelly filling); “Fumunchews” (gawd help us all); the “Big D” peanut displays featuring the charms of “Big D Bev” aka Beverley Pilkington, who would slowly be revealed the more peanuts the thirsty drinker bought; the rather-late-to-the-party “Freak Out” Ice Lolly; ending up at the definitely-couldn’t-happen-today Sweet Cigarettes. I had no idea that they came in ordinary (dark coloured) and menthol varieties (white). Not that the distinction would have mattered at the time but such fidelity in the cause of corrupting the nation’s youth by stealth must be applauded, albeit not condoned.

No examination of 1970s media would be complete without at least a peek at one our major obsessions. It seemed that you couldn’t spit back then without hitting an alien, a ghost or a prehistoric monster. You couldn’t move without being abducted, probed and dumped again in some desolate backroad somewhere, and evidence that God was an Ancient Astronaut was in abundance. Oh, and Uri Geller bent some spoons using just his brain. At least until he met Johnny Carson. You’ll find all of the above and a hell of a lot more besides in Scarred By The Paranormal, the closing chapter of this epic trawl through all of the things that made us go “argh” in the seventies.

Following the introductory The Great Paranormal Boom of the 1970s, we’re off – potted biographies of Erich von Daniken, Uri Geller and that happiest of Happy Mediums Doris Stokes to get us started. As the article points out everyone seemed to have a copy of “Chariots of the Gods” and none of them seemed to have the same cover. Ours was white with blocky lettering and the obligatory blurred UFO on the cover. Yours was probably entirely different. Uri’s ever-proliferating claims get examined in detail, as does Doris and her habit of ensuring the theatres she played at were peppered with a certain amount of…. sympathetic friends. All fascinating stuff, especially the stuff about the old spoon-bender getting something of a public comeuppance at the hands of Carson. I’ve Seen The Saucers – UFOs in Popular Culture is next and if you think that a certain Brummie Band with a penchant for Beatlesesque melodies and string sections is about to put in appearance you’d be right. ELO – for it is they – are suitably covered, as are many others from David Bedford to UFO (of course) right through to Zappa and his von Daniken-baiting “Inca Roads”. Along the way you’ll trip over Judas Priest, Bowie, The Stranglers (“human flesh is porky meat / heeeeeeeeeeee!”) and Dr Funkenstein himself, George Clinton. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, as the Top of the Pops themed countdown of UFO based songs included here helpfully emphasizes. One suspects Prog leanings in at least one of this book’s authors – there’s an awful lot of it in this section and this reader for one, couldn’t be happier.

A cracking piece on UFOs in Comics is next, kicking off with that beautiful “Keep Watching The Skies” cover 2000ad came up with and covering all points after that. Starlord, Marvel US, even Gold Key – all here and more.

As you might expect, UFOs in Books is meaty indeed. Well, publishers do like a bandwagon and they jumped on this one very hard. UFOs from Ancient Earth. UFOs from Beyond The Earth. UFOs from beneath the Earth. All here, until somewhere around 1977, and post Close-Encounters, it all begins to get more personal and focusses on the one-to-one experiences of people who claim to have got a bit closer to your average alien than just the outside of a saucer sighted a couple of hundred feet up. People start aiming UFO books at children too – I distinctly remember a few finding their way into every school library I was ever inside. I even read a few. More than a few.

The colossus of Close Encounters looms over UFOs in Film and Television – as you might expect it would – but along the way we dredge up some remarkable oddities. The mighty Shatner’s “Mysteries of the Gods” is in there of course, but I had no idea that Rod Serling had been tapped for a couple of documentaries or that James Earl Jones was so obsessed by the story of Betty and Barney Hills that he bought the rights to their story, eventually lodging it with NBC and starring in “The UFO Incident” alongside Estelle Parsons. I scurried off and found a copy and it really is rather good. Certainly better than “The Disappearance of Flight 412”, which this section is rightly rather lukewarm about. Ah well. They can’t all be belters.

There’s just time for a look at Close Encounters itself and its nearest television counterpart Project UFO before we leave the aliens behind and wrap up with a peek at the paranormal. Usborne’s peerless World of the Unknown – All About Ghosts, Monsters and UFOs is first up. I had all three of these. I loved all three of these, and I’d completely forgotten them until last week when I read about them in here. Gorgeously illustrated, relatively non-sensationalist in their approach, they fired the imagination of this young reader and I don’t doubt that they sit on book shelves the world over doing just the same to children even now.

Bigfoot, Nessie and The Devil’s Triangle is next up, enabling us once more to marvel at how wonderful Doctor Who’s “Terror of the Zygons” is – forget the crap monster, and marvel at the atmospheric loveliness and the haunting melancholy that threads through the damn thing. My hero Alex Harvey gets a mention thanks to his bizarro “Alex Harvey Meets The Loch Ness Monster” album, plus “Water Beastie”, which found its way onto the perpetually underrated final SAHB album “Rock Drill”. Sadly since this book covers the 70s there’s no room in the Bigfoot section for The Goodies rollicking take on the subject – however, I don’t doubt with the next volume there’ll be room for it since they manage to take out Arthur C. Clarke and His Mysterious World in the same salvo.

We’re nearly done, but there’s room for a look at the short lived Fantastic Journey series, tying us into the antics in and around The Devil’s Triangle, before we end this epic trawl of all our yesterdays with a look at some of the most notorious and occasionally scary happenings of the seventies. Borley, Amity and Enfield; the Nationwide Werewolf (yes, THAT Nationwide, the one with Bough, Lawley et al). This one wraps us up with the story of strange goings on in Hexham – hairy, slavering manifestations, and shrunken stone heads found in a garden.

All of which leaves us on an eerie, unsettling note. We’ve travelled all the way from Alan Garner and a disturbing exploration of sexuality and mythology, through all points in between, fetching up with Michael Barrett and a spectral werewolf. What an odd decade the seventies were. What a tremendous book this is. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Every article’s a treat. Lavishly illustrated, lovingly written and packed with stuff I’m dying to revisit, this will keep you busy for ages. I couldn’t leave it alone – it’s one of those “just one more article” books. Eminently dippable – you can read just a few, but the whole thing is immensely satisfying. A round of applause to the authors. I urge you to grab a copy. Read it. Then read it again and buy several for your friends. It really is a joy. Trust me. We’re promised volume 2, covering the eighties. I was there then. I’ll be here for the book. If it rekindles as many warm (and occasionally terrifying) memories as this one, I’ll be satisfying.

Oh, and Parsley endures. Dill saved him, so I needn’t have worried. That’s what you get for missing the end of things.

Scarred For Life Volume 1 is out now. Purchase a copy directly from http://www.lulu.com/shop/stephen-brotherstone-dave-lawrence/scarred-for-life-volume-one/paperback/product-23116461.html

Instructions to claim your free colour ebook version can be found on page 2 of the print edition.

Hancock’s Half Hour – The Harry Secombe Episodes Part 4

Well, here we are. After three weeks of Harry Secombe covering for an indisposed Tony Hancock we’re back to where we started. The regular cast assembled on 8th May 1955 to pick up where they left off with a recording session at the Paris Studios for transmission a mere two days later. Business as usual? Not quite. There’s a debt that needs repaying so it’s time for a fighting fit Hancock to pay “A Visit To Swansea”.

Kenneth Williams is on duty again as announcer, as he introduces…

KEN … Bill Kerr, Sidney James, Andree Melly and Kenneth Williams in… Hancock’s Half Hour

Still no sign of Hancock’s name in the opening credits. No sign of Harry either. Kenneth continues…

KEN Harry Secombe having successfully deputised for Tony Hancock for the last three weeks, he has now left London for his hometown Swansea, With no one left to impose upon, Bill Kerr has had to find alternative ready-made accomodation, the alternative being Hancock’s empty flat, and the “ready-maid” being Andree Melly. Or so he thinks.

We open on Bill and Andree listening to a recording of Harry singing – the script specifies “Heart of a Clown”. “Must be one of the best records he’s ever made”, comments Bill.

ANDREE Wonderful. I’m going to miss Harry.

BILL So am I. He took all his money with him.

It would appear that there’s enough money left for three or four weeks, after which, it’s time for drastic measures – Andree will have to go out to work. Bill pleads exclusion on account of his war wounds…

ANDREE You told me you were in the cookhouse.

BILL We had more casualties there than any branch of the Australian army.

Bill leaves to conduct some important business – once he’s found his billiard chalk. Andree takes a few minutes to listen to Harry again before carrying on with the washing up, at which point…

TONY Ah, home again at last. Hancock’s Haven. The swallow returns to his nest. Three weeks away, and… hello, I left the gramophone on. Hasn’t done the record any good by the sound of it.

There’s an important task to be performed here. Andree’s supposed to be a regular cast member but she hasn’t actually met Tony yet – she came over from France with Bill. This could be awkward.

ANDREE Is that you Bill? You’re back quickly. I wasn’t expecting you till… oh

TONY Good Evening.

ANDREE Good Evening.

TONY Who are you?

ANDREE I live here.

TONY Well, that solves me problem of what to do in the evenings, doesn’t it? How did you get here?

ANDREE Mr Kerr said I could stay here. He said it would be alright.

TONY Well, it looks as though HE is.

ANDREE Oh, you know Mr Kerr?

TONY Yes, we’ve met.

ANDREE Of course! I’ve just realised who you are.

TONY (Pleased) Have you?

ANDREE Yes. You’re the labourer Bill was going to send round to clear this place up!

At which point Tony clocks the devastation left after one of Bill’s all night parties. A few beer stains on the wallpaper – “me contemporary two tones. Ruined!  One and six and three a yard.” Some cigarette holes in the carpet – and the chair Tony sits down in having come over all faint (the FX instructions add a simple (TERRIFIC CRASH) at this point).

There’s a scored through section in the script here –

ANDREE Well you see, some things got broken.

TONY Add Mr Kerr’s name to the list, will you?

Rather sweetly Andree breaks down in tears on Tony’s behalf. Tony attempts to comfort her – Andree recovers.

ANDREE You’re very sweet.

TONY I have me moments.

ANDREE I’ve heard so much about you. From Bill.

TONY Have you?

ANDREE Yes. I don’t think you’re ugly.

TONY Of course not, don’t let me face mislead you. Methinks Mr Kerr and myself will be having a few words.

BILL (way off mike, singing) I can’t give you anything but love, baby…

TONY Ah. Hear the gentle lark.

Bill enters, speculating how much they could get for Tony’s radiogram (“about thirty seven pounds” comments Tony drily), at which point Bill clocks just who’s got there ahead of him. He attempts to salvage the situation.

BILL Where have you been all these weeks? We’ve had no word! We thought you were dead.

TONY Quite a little wake you had here last night.

BILL I was only drowning my sorrows. You’ve no idea how upset I’ve been. The mental agony of not knowing where you were. Not sleeping at nights, pacing my room, wondering where to find you, looking everywhere for you.

ANDREE That’s right, he searched my room dozens of times.

Tony attempts to explain his absence by taking off on one of his trademark flights of fancy – “when Whitehall calls, one doesn’t question”. On being pressed further he explains –

TONY I can’t divulge it William, but I CAN tell you this. The gayness has gone right out of Budapest. Oh yes, I know the ghoulash at Pauls is quite piquant, and the Tokay at Nikolai’s – ah! But it’s only surface, William. Underneath… well, it’s nasty. Quite, quite nasty.

BILL Seaview Hotel, Bognor Regis.

TONY Eh?

BILL The label on your suitcase.

Eventually Tony cops to it. He’s had a cold in his head and it took him seven weeks to get over it. “With the size of his head, it could be”, murmurs Bill.

At this point it’s worth pausing to realise that Harry’s been covering for Tony within continuity as well – standing in on the radio show the fictional Hancock, Sid and Bill do for the BBC. All of which leads to this  unsurprising revelation – Tony isn’t altogether comfortable with the reaction Harry got on his show while he was away.

TONY I must admit, he was very funny. I laughed. I laughed a great deal. I thought I was going to cry.

BILL Harry did a wonderful job. He made you look a bit sick. You should have heard the people laugh.

TONY Well, of course they would. Look at the shape of him. Short little fat bloke. Don’t know what they see in him.

Another deleted section follows –

BILL What talent the guy’s got. Sings like a dream.

TONY So can I. (SINGS) “Be my love, for no-one else can end this yearning…”

BILL My, what funny dreams you have.

Andree and Bill begin to apply pressure on Tony to thank Harry for covering. (“He got paid!” protests Tony). The others think that’s not sufficient, and Tony should show a bit of gratitude.

Another deleted exchange –

ANDREE It WOULD be a nice gesture.

TONY I could think of better ones.

Since Harry’s gone home to Swansea Bill and Andree suggest paying Harry a visit – “that’s practically abroad!” “Not as far as Budapest”.

There’s a train leaving shortly so with a blast of “Genevive Hancock” (Disc 5, Band 1 of the BBC’s music library, Hancock’s Half Hour for the use of) and a nifty crossfade, we arrive at Paddington.

Deputised to get the railway tickets Tony has the misfortune to get Kenneth Williams at the booking office. The script direction reads (PRECIOUS) which I presume comes out as Kenneth’s traditional Snide character –

KENNETH Oh, I do envy you. Swansea. It’s so beautiful at this time of the year. I took the wife there for a holiday last year, she likes Wales, you know, and we had a lovely time, really, only five days rain during the whole week we were there.

This exchange goes on for several pages with Kenneth utterly refusing to allow Hancock to get in. There’s much play about his sister-in-law. She’s got a bad back, apparently.  When he finally does get the upper hand Hancock turns the table on him, spinning one of his tall war stories and showing Kenneth just how to bore for Britain. Eventually though, both run out of steam –

TONY Oh, er… three returns to Swansea please.

KENNETH You’ve got the wrong window.

TONY What do you… look, please… can’t you try to make an allowance just this once? I’m in a hurry. My train leaves in two minutes. Please, can’t you possibly give me three returns to Swansea?

KENNETH I very much doubt it… this is the Underground.

Tickets finally procured our heroes make a mercy dash for the train, only to be blocked by a ticket inspector – Kenneth again. Bear in mind by this stage Tony and Kenneth have been at it for about five or six minutes of solid to-and-fro dialogue –

KENNETH So you’re going to Swansea, eh? Lovely place, you’ll like it. I’ve got a brother on the Underground goes to see his sister-in-law there every year. It’s her back, you know, gets seized up… OOOOOOOW, my shin!

They dash for the train, now well and truly leaving the station (“Come on Bannister, grab my hand”, exhorts Bill to a knackered Tony) but it’s all to no avail. They’ve got to wait for the next one but thankfully this gives Bill time to go and stock up on reading material. Once comfortably on board with five hours to go to Swansea he settles in for a literary feast.

ANDREE You’ve dropped your glasses.

BILL Oh thanks.

TONY Funny glasses, aren’t they?

BILL (ENGROSSED) Mm? Oh, they’re my reading glasses. They make everything stand out much clearer.

HANCOCK Show us those books. Diana Dors in 3D. Sixteen classical poses in 3D. Artistic nude studies in…

BILL I’m interested in photography!

Tony attempts to interest Bill in the passing countryside – “I’m more interested in Diana Dors than in Pigs and Sheep” – at which point a certain absent member of the cast finally joins them. Sid’s on board, doing carriage to carriage retail – car seat covers, coal, electric light bulbs – “I’ve been from one end of the train to the other”. He asks them where they’re off to.

ANDREE Swansea. We’re trying to locate Harry Secombe. Tony wants to thank him for taking over his radio show when he was ill.

SID THANK HIM? Cor blimey, if I was in your shoes Hancock, I’ve MURDER him.

TONY Oh, that’s a silly attitude to take. Just because Harry was a big success. I mean, it was good for the show, I was pleased that he got all the big laughs, I mean, if I wasn’t such a well-established favourite, it might have worried me, but it’s… it’s…. I’ve still got me fans, one or two of them still write, it’s not that… well, I… what did you say you’d do if you were in my shoes?

SID Murder him.

TONY What size boots do you take?

SID Tens.

TONY Here’s nine and a half, see what you can do.

Following a deleted sing-song (Bill’s promising rendition of “Eskimo Nell” cut short when he remembers the presence of Andree)  Sid suggests they beguile the hours with a game of cards.

TONY No thank you, I’ve played with you before. Strip poker, remember. I had six suits in the wardrobe and I still had to go to work next morning in a barrel.

Bill – forgetting for the moment that Andree is indeed still present – begins to regale the carriage with a dirty joke or two and is interrupted – oh yes – by Kenneth, this time in the guise of an innocent looking Vicar, looking for somewhere to sit. Turns out he’s visiting a relative in Swansea, who has a bad back. As Tony comments, he probably has a relative working on the Underground.

The Vicar seems a nice old soul – albeit one dressed in a sharkskin suit and recently returned from America – “I’m a sort of Billy Graham in reverse”. He “inadvertently” reveals that he’s got two thousand quid on him – he’s raising money for a new church roof. Sid senses an opportunity and invites him to join the card school. Shortly –

KENNETH Well, there we are…. I think that just about cleans you out, doesn’t it gentlemen? That is the expression, isn’t it? Well, good day to you, gentlemen, it’s been such a pleasant journey.

The rest of this scene is scored through. It carries on –

KENNETH … we should have an excellent roof for the church now. Er, before I go, you wouldn’t like to make a little donation to the box, would you?

TONY No, but if you’ll tell us where it is we’ll be your first applicants.

Finally the train pulls in at Swansea.

TONY Rev, just one thing before you go.

KENNETH Yes?

TONY Can we have our suits back?

The only address anyone has for Harry is 32 Penwellyn Road. Eventually our tired and weary travellers arrive, to be greeted by Andree doing double service as a Welsh landlady.

TONY I’d like to speak to my dear friend Harry Secombe please.

ANDREE So would I. He left here four years ago without paying his rent. Are you friends of his?

TONY AND BILL No.

TONY Have you any idea where I can find him?

ANDREE Oh no, I couldn’t tell you man, I haven’t stepped foot outside this house for three years now.

TONY I’m very sorry to hear that. What’s wrong with you?

ANDREE It’s my back, you know. I get seized up.

Incredibly, the gag about the sister in Swansea is STILL going… so everyone beats a hasty retreat. Hours of footsore wandering later they encounter the hardest working man at the BBC – at least for the purposes of this script. Yes, it’s Kenneth again, this time playing a little Welshman.

KENNETH Oooh, you’re foreigners from across the border, aren’t you?

TONY We’re English.

KENNETH Well, never mind. We can’t all be Welsh, can we? Now, what can I do for you?

BILL We’re trying to find Harry Secombe.

KENNETH Oh aye, young Harry bach. A fine lad is Harry. I heard him on the electric talking wireless without pictures last week, in that Hancock’s Half Hour. Smashin’, he was. Much better than that fellow whose place he took. What was his name anyway? Oh, he was a dead loss anyway. Harry bach showed him up proper, he did. You’ve never heard such laughs. I wonder this Tiny Hancock has got the nerve to try and follow Harry bach. Of course, Harry’s got the advantage. He’s Welsh, you see.

Finally, Harry’s found. Working down a coal mine. He does it when he’s not working for the BBC because he can’t afford coal on the money they pay him at Auntie. “A grand worker, is Harry. Very handy with the shovel”. He’s working down the mines right now, in that mountain just over there.

TONY There’s no mountain over there.

KENNETH Isn’t there? Cor, he must have knocked up loads of money this week, then.

Sadly their luck’s out – Harry’s just gone down the pit and won’t be back up for eight hours. They’ll have to wait. Or will they? Just coming off shift are three burly Welsh miners – incredibly, Ray, Alan and Kenneth – and they’re just the same size as Tony, Bill and Sid. You can tell they’re Welsh miners, they’re singing “Sospan Fach”.

Having duffed up Ray, Alan and Kenneth for their outfits Tony, Bill and Sid head down the pit. They’re also singing “Sospan Fach”. Just to allay suspicion.

Wonderfully Tony gets sidetracked, having one of his little chats with Alan Simpson. Even more wonderfully, he reveals that these little chats are a feature of the fictional Hancock’s Half Hour he appears in as well. Alan’s interjections are included here in brackets.

TONY … I’m looking for Harry Secombe. He did the radio show for me (I know) Well, you were there. Did he speak to you? (Not a word) No little chats? (Ignored me) I’m not surprised, he’s very unsociable…

Hancock’s jealousy gets the better of him, as Alan rashly reveals that he preferred Harry to Hancock and gets a pickaxe for his pains.

TONY Did my pickaxe go into your head? (Yes) I’m sorry. (It’s alright, it’s only the sharp bit) It’s made a nasty hole, hasn’t it? (Don’t worry) Never mind, somewhere to put your cigarette ash, isn’t it? (Well, exactly). I’ve got to be going now. Give my regards to the wife and the fifteen kids (Sixteen) Well, I haven’t seen you for a few weeks, you lose count. Goodbye. See you next week. Nice man. EVERYBODY hates him.

There’s been a small fat pit pony following our heroes around. On closer inspection it turns out to be none other than Harry. At long last, Tony has the chance to discharge his obligations and thank Harry for his generosity and kindness.

TONY I’ve prepared a little speech. Ahem. I’d like to say on behalf of myself and the assembled cast how much… don’t this coal dust get up your nose? … how much I appreciate your stepping into my radio show and taking it over for me and making it such a success.

HARRY Oh Tony, it was nothing.

TONY Nothing, he says. Flipping nigh ruined me. Well, anyway, thank you.

HARRY Not at all. It was a pleasure. Any time.

TONY There won’t be any more times. I’ll get along to that studio in a wheelchair. Never again will I let anybody else take my place. I’ve learnt my lesson. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go back to London to do me broadcast… so I’ll just say goodbye Harold, thank you, and… oooooooow!

BILL What’s wrong?

TONY Me back! It’s seized up! Help! Me back. It’s the damp. I shouldn’t have come down. Get a doctor. Ooooow! I can’t move!

HARRY Oh, that’s a bit of bad luck. The doctor only comes down here once a week.

TONY But me radio show. It’s tonight!

HARRY Well, don’t worry about it, Tony, I’ll do it for you. I’ll finish up with a song. That’ll get them. Come on lads, we’ll be late for the show. (Goes off singing) “If I had the heart of a clown…”

TONY No. Come back. Bill. Sid. Don’t do it! It’s my show. Pick me up…

KENNETH This has been Hancock’s Half Hour with Tony Hancock, and his old friend Harry Secombe.

With that, it’s all over. Thankfully “The Holiday Camp” – the next episode to be broadcast – still exists and “Hancock’s Half Hour” continued as normal. What a wonderful way to ease yourself back into things though. Out of the four scripts that kicked off series two, this is far and away my favourite. There’s an easy flow to it with a slight end-of-term feel –  a real “thank god, we got through it” sense of relief. The only place it really strains is in attempting to write Andree into her proper place as a series regular – by the next week she’s just there, living with the others and acting as Hancock’s (occasional) love interest. Easy to forgive though.

There’s so much else to enjoy, from the running gag about the sister with the bad back, to Kenneth’s virtual domination of the show with his multiple characters, to Sid’s once-an-episode fiddle backfiring on him spectacularly. The succession of jabs taken at Hancock and his towering jealousy when he discovers he wasn’t missed one bit are a highlight – you can only imagine the levels of aggrieved, suppressed rage Hancock would have injected into those lines. The way the show ends as it began with Harry singing “Heart of a Clown” is lovely as well. That they could pull this off at such short notice… well, it takes my breath away.

All told, these four episodes are a beautiful example of grace under pressure. Under almost impossible conditions, they did it. They really did it, and I can only hope that somewhere out there copies of all four survive. To judge by the scripts they would have been absolutely top-flight Hancock’s Half Hour, even lacking the star. One of the show’s charms was always the supporting cast and I’m sure Sid, Bill, Andree and Kenneth gave totally of their best. They always did. Harry Secombe stepped in for his old friend and held it all together, giving Hancock the time he needed to get back to full strength. I only hope at some point in the future we’ll all get to hear him do it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hancock’s Half Hour – The Harry Secombe Episodes Part 3

Here we are then. Week three of Hancock’s Half Hour, without Tony Hancock. It’s been a strange run of episodes so far. Everything is almost normal but not quite, simply because of the gaping Hancock shaped void at the centre of proceedings. We’re almost there,though. For one more week then, let Kenneth Williams – doing extra duty as announcer this week – usher us into this strange little alternative universe as he presents Hancock’s Half Hour, Series 2 Episode 3… The Racehorse.

KEN We present Bill Kerr, Sidney James, Andree Melly and Kenneth Williams in Hancock’s Half Hour… and in place of Tony Hancock Who is indisposed – meet Harry Secombe!

Though his regular meal ticket, Mr Tony Hancock Esq, is still absent, Mr William Kerr is still living off the fat of the land… Mr Harold Secombe Esquire. And with Andree, his French amorata to look after as well, Mr Secombe is finding it increasingly difficult to feed three mouths on the miserable pittance he gets from the BBC.

 

Interesting to note Andree’s an amorata. A word you can imagine Ken rolling gleefully around before delivering it in that way that only he does. You’ll also note that in this universe Harry’s also working for a pittance at the BBC. Not stated whether it’s his own series – like the in-continuity one Hancock’s got – or whether he’s part of another show altogether. Not much time to rewrite at this stage, presumably.

Meanwhile, things are fraught at the breakfast table.

HARRY Food, food, for pity’s sake, food. Three days ne’er a bite has passed these lips. I’m a living skeleton. Food. Food…

ANDREE Harry, calm down. Breakfast’s ready.

HARRY (Slobbering) Breakfast. Ha ha. Where is it? Where is it?

ANDREE Here you are. Bean on toast.

HARRY Come now, Andree, you must get your English right. In English the plural has an “s” on the end. Like sheeps. Understand?

ANDREE Yes. And you’ve still got bean on toast.

Times are hard and it’s all Kerr’s fault. Harry gave him ten shillings three days ago to go and get some food, and… well, you can guess where this is going to end up, can’t you?

BILL Well you see, Harry, I bumped into an old Army pal and well…

HARRY How much can we get on the empties?

BILL I didn’t booze it.

HARRY What did you do with it?

BILL I wouldn’t throw money down the drain like that.

HARRY What did you do with it?

BILL I’ve got more sense than that.

HARRY WHAT DID YOU DO WITH IT?

BILL We need food, and food costs money, so I did the only sensible, logical thing.

HARRY What?

BILL I bought a horse.

HARRY Quick, light the oven, I want the fetlocks.

Bill got himself a good bargain, or so he says. Seven and six for a prime racehorse, the thing that’s going to make their fortune. Where’s the rest of the money? Horses have to eat so Bill’s spent the rest on some hay. “I wonder what it’s like with chips?” ponders Harry.

The horse is presented to the rest of the household to a less than enthusiastic response.

BILL There you are, it’d take a keen eye to find out why I only paid seven and six for that horse.

HARRY (Flat) It’s only got three legs.

BILL Huh? Where, let me see… one two three… I’ve been cheated! So that’s why he had it standing up against that post.

ANDREE Yes, and that front leg looks a bit stiff to me.

On tapping said leg it turns out to be wood. Backed into a corner Bill defends himself by claiming all it needs is a good trainer. “He’ll have to be a good carpenter too!” is Harry’s only response.

Andree asks whether the horse – who turns out to be a she – has a name.

BILL Sabrina.

HARRY What did you call her that for?

BILL Well, I’m hoping she’ll be well out in front.

Seasoned Hancock watchers will know that Galton and Simpson peppered their scripts with references to fifties culture, and here’s a belter. Norma Ann Sykes – aka Sabrina –  appeared every week with Arthur Askey on “Before Your Very Eyes”. You can probably guess what everyone’s referring to here. Regularly mentioned in dispatches by The Goon Show as in “by the sweaters of Sabrina!” and the like, her name will appear again in latter Hancock scripts. I love it when Galton and Simpson do this. The casual, throwaway mentions of things that would be utterly familiar to the listening audience give you a real feel for a vanished world, one you’ll never know. All we can do from this remove  is peek in from the outside.

Needless to say, Bill’s made another foresighted arrangement for the training of the lovely Sabrina. The Sid James Racing Stables at Epsom are awaiting their pleasure.

HJARRY That man’s been warned off every racetrack in the country!

BILL Only under one of his names.

With a clip-clop-bonk, clip-clop-bonk, they’re off. Only as far as the nearest bus stop, though. “It’s a long way to Epsom”, protests Bill. “It’s been raining – her leg might get warped”.

Once on board, things get even stranger.

HARRY We’d better take her upstairs. The people downstairs might object.

BILL What to?

HARRY To her smoking.

BILL Don’t be ridiculous. You know very well that pipe isn’t alight.

Every bus needs a conductor and Kenneth Williams is on hand. However, he isn’t happy with a horse being on board his bus. He’s reluctant to have her stay on the grounds that she might interfere with the other passengers. Sabrina’s already eaten an old lady’s straw hat.  Harry’s offer to buy her a new one falls on deaf ears – she’d prefer the old one. “Her hair was still in it”, Kenneth tartly explains.

Thanks to Andree’s blandishments the conductor reluctantly allows them to stay on but not before Bill attempts to blag a three and a half on the grounds that Sabrina’s under fourteen. As it turns up they end up walking anyway. Sabrina keeps stamping on the floor with her wooden leg, meaning the driver thinks someone wants to get off. Interfering with corporation business is a capital offence in Kenneth’s book so it’s off they have to get.

Several hours later…

BILL Young girls of today have no stamina, that’s the trouble…. Lead a horse for fifteen miles and they’re finished.

ANDREE Well, here we are, boys. (PAUSE) Well, shall I help you down off the horse?

Having arrived at the establishment of “Honest Sidney James, the owner’s friend”, they find Sid on the phone to someone called “Nobbler”.

SID I want you to put two hundred pounds on the other horses. No, not money. Weight. I want to make sure…

Sid’s rates are fifteen guineas a day. Since Harry doesn’t have that sort of money, he agrees to a quarter share. One slight problem there. The cry goes up from Sid – “Who’s whipped my share??”

SID Do me a favour fellows, be reasonable. Do the kind thing, take her away and put her out to graze.

EFFECTS: NEIGHS

HARRY See, you’ve offended her now. She heard that. Her hearing aid must have been switched on.

Bill wants Sid to train her up to Derby winning standards. Sid remains unconvinced.

SID Billy, she’s only got two good legs… and they’re not even level.

ANDREE You could put a book under one of them.

SID That’s alright when she’s standing still What about when she races? She’ll be lopsided.

HARRY A definite advantage when she goes round the bends.

SID Only right handed ones.

Reluctantly, Sid agrees to give her a trial. Sabrina Clip-Clop-Bonks off. Enormous crashing noise off-stage. “Don’t worry Sid”, says Harry. “That won’t happen when her glasses arrive”.

You get the feeling that Ray and Alan are absolutely flying with this one, having a ball in seeing just how ridiculously decrepit they can make this poor broken down nag. They’re not done yet.

Several days later, and Sabrina’s out on a trial gallop of two hundred yards.

SID She had one six hours ago.

KENNETH It’s the same one. She’s got another hundred and twenty five yards to go.

Despite all this, Harry has entered Sabrina for the Britannia Steeplechase. Sid is horrified.

SID You must be off your chump. Besides, there’s not a jockey in the country who’d ride her.

ANDREE That’s why Harry’s going to ride her.

SID Well, good luck to him. I hope… WHA??!

ANDREE Harry.

SID Him? Jockey?

HARRY And why not?

SIDNEY Well, you’re the right height, whichever way you measure.

HARRY My size doesn’t matter. Steeplechase jockeys always weigh more.

SID Yeah, but not more than the horse.

BILL I think Harry’d make a good jockey. He gets on well with Sabrina.

SID Blimey, what a pair. His weight and her wooden leg. If the going’s soft, there’ll be a bloke following behind planting potatoes.

Some time later, the training seems to be working. Sabrina can now jump over two whole fat worms and the jockey doesn’t have to dismount and throw her over the fences like he used to. Race time is three o clock. . “Gastonia Yankee”’s on twenty to one. “Red Lion Street” hundred to eight. “Sabrina” seven hundred and fifty eight thousand to one. Yesterday, seven hundred and fifty nine thousand to one. “Just as I thought”, comments Sid. “They’re getting the wind up”.

Sabrina is led to the starting line.

EFFECTS CLIP CLOP, CLIP CLOP

ANDREE Oh Sabrina, you silly girl, you’ve forgotten something, haven’t you? Go on, go back and get it.

EFFECTS CLIP CLOP BONK, CLIP CLOP BONK

Beautiful.

Down at the racecourse Sid is despondent. Even after going round the paddock poking the other horses with a syringe stuck in the end of an umbrella, he’s still lost a heap on the first three races of the day.

SIDNEY I’m not sure, but I think there’s someone on this course who’s got a bigger umbrella than mine. I’m going to complain to the stewards, this course is full of crooks.

Bill’s put threepence on Sabrina – he wired home for it. It’s his share of Grandpa’s inheritance – “I was always his favourite”.

Harry arrives, wearing his new riding gear.

Sid ponders how they found enough material to make his silks –

ANDREE Oh, I just sewed together a pair of curtains.

BILL Where from?

ANDREE The Palladium.

SID I like the riding breeches. Did you have them made specially?

HARRY Of course not. These are my cricket flannels. My legs have always been this shape.

The weigh-in follows. Needless to say, Harry breaks the scales spectacularly. “I wonder what would have happened if I’d put both feet on?” he ponders.

It’s all up to Harry now. Sid’s given him his riding instructions.

SID The usual stuff. As soon he gets over the first fence, tip a bagful of marbles all over the track. That’ll bring a few down. And I’ve had petrol poured in the water jump. All he’s got to do is drop a match in as he goes past. If nobody cheats, we might win this.

The race begins. Things got off to a predictably bad start –

BILL Two hundred yards behind the field. Three hundred yards behind the field. Four hundred yards behind the field. Ten yards behind the field.

SID What happened?

BILL They’ve lapped him.

Somehow they stagger through to a promising position, although only because Harry goes first – Sid excitedly noting, “Blimey, look at that horse holding onto Secombe for dear life!”

It’s a close run thing, but Sabrina’s done it – Ken announces the winner, by a short leg – Sabrina.

Back at the flat glasses are chinking, and everyone’s happy.

BILL For the first time in our lives, we’re rich!

ANDREE You’ve got Sabrina to thank for that. You ought to be grateful to her.

HARRY I haven’t forgotten Sabrina. I went out this morning and bought her a lovely present.

BILL What did you get her?

HARRY Something she’s always wanted. Come on, I’ll show you, she’s out in the yard… there she is. Complete with present.

ANDREE Oh, Harry, how sweet.

BILL What a wonderful idea.

HARRY She’s very pleased with it. I’ll call her over. Sabrina, come over here, dear.

EFFECTS Horse neigh, followed by CLIP CLOP BONK BONK, CLIP CLOP BONK BONK.

With that, we’re into the end music.

What a lovely, silly script this one is. Galton and Simpson flying with an utterly ridiculous premise – pushing it as far they can go, but never cruel with it. The balance feels shifted slightly – it’s very much Sid who gets all the best lines, with Andree and Bill stooging somewhat this week. Harry doesn’t do anything that Hancock wouldn’t have done in this one – a few cracks about his weight but otherwise it’s very much business as usual. It has a really sweet ending – you can hear the audience going “aaaaaawwww” over the final gag, and it feels like it could have been one of the great radio episodes. Sadly, barring miracles it seems unlikely we’ll ever find out.

With that Secombe gracefully steps back, allowing a fully recovered Hancock to return to his place at centre mic. Following this unexpected bump in the road Hancock’s Half Hour settles back into its accustomed groove, and business continues as usual. Except it doesn’t, not quite. Hancock has a debt to pay, and he’s going to do it. Join us next time for Hancock’s Half Hour starring Tony Hancock AND Harry Secombe in … A Visit To Swansea.

Hancock’s Half Hour – The Harry Secombe Episodes, Part 2

Right, where were we then?

Several centuries ago I started to take a look at the mysterious episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour on radio which Tony Hancock isn’t even in. That first installment can be found here https://ladydontfallbackwards.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/hancocks-half-hour-the-harry-secombe-episodes-part-1/.

Listeners in 1955 didn’t have to wait this long to pick up where we left off but at long last, it’s time to see what happens in episode 2 of series 2, The Crown Jewels. Rehearsed and recorded on the 24th of April 1955 and transmitted on the 26th of April 1955, this episode no longer survives in any recorded format. However, the script does and it’s this that we’re looking at to try and get a flavour of what S-S-S-Secombe’s Half Hour might have sounded like.

Anyone who missed the previous week’s antics in France would be forgiven for thinking it’s business as usual as the usual doleful sig plays in. However, our announcer (credited as Michael Brooke on the script’s title page, simply as “Reggie” thereafter) soon puts us right :

 

REGGIE We present Bill Kerr, Sidney James, Andree Melly, and Kenneth Williams in Hancock’s Half Hour, and in place of Tony Hancock…meet Harry Secombe!

 

 

 

after the theme plays out we hand over to Kenneth Williams, directed by Ray and Alan in the stage directions to play it “very John Snagge” :

 

KENNETH In the continued and unfortunate absence of Tony Hancock, Mr William Kerr the international vagrant has been compelled to find some other way of providing himself with succour. The sucker in this case being Handsome Harold Secombe. Mr Kerr has rooted himself in Mr Secombe’s London flat, where he freely enjoys the amenities that are offered. Well, not actually offered, but well…

We fade to Harry’s little box in town, where “Finger of Suspicion” is playing in the background. Bill’s been at the drinks cabinet and is making substantial inroads into Harry’s supply of scotch.

 

HARRY There were four bottles left last night!

BILL I’ve had a cold, Harry.

HARRY You had a cold. Four bottles of scotch for a cold. Bill, promise me one thing. Move out before you catch Pneumonia.

 

Harry soon finds out that his supply of fags is virtually all away as well. Bill has his own justification – he’s doing it all for his mate.

 

BILL I like you. I don’t want to see you end up as a dipsomaniac with a smoker’s cough.

HARRY The sooner Hancock comes back and collects you the better…

 

Andree has moved in as well. She’s upstairs, getting ready for Harry and Bill to show her the exciting fleshpots of London Town.

 

HARRY I’ve worked out the routes to take her on. If you’re coming with us, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, The Tate Gallery and the Tower of London.

BILL And if I don’t come with you?

HARRY Hyde Park, Regents Park, St James’s Park and Hampstead Heath.

 

If ever there was an exchange crying out for Hancock’s voice, there it is.

Andree enters, wearing a provocative dress. The neckline’s a bit daring, and our boys are a little taken aback.

 

ANDRE ….Dior calls it his Empire Neckline.

BILL Oh well, that’s another Empire fallen.

ANDREE Oh, you Englishmen. You have such nasty minds. If I wore this dress in France nobody would notice.

HARRY That’s the trouble with Frenchmen today. They’ve lost interest in everything.

 

The tour begins. Covent Garden first stop and Andree wants to savour the local atmosphere. Harry warns her to cover her ears, because an enormous worker balancing fifteen baskets on his head is about to walk into a wheelbarrow. Cue GRAMS crashes, followed by Kenneth Williams in as precious a voice as he can manage:

KEN Oh, spit. This just isn’t my day. That’s the third lot of daffs I’ve dropped this morning. I might as well go home. Makes you sick. It does, really.

 

A handwritten exchange – presumably worked out during rehearsals – is penned in here:

 

HARRY And he looks so tough.

BILL With a voice like that you’ve got to be.

 

Another moment of pure Hancock arrives, with Harry flannelling furiously to cover up a severe lack of London knowledge.

 

ANDREE Ah, that must be Nelson’s Column

HARRY Quite correct. Built by Nelson in 1895 as a look-out post from the top of which he could keep his eye on the movements of the galleons as they made their way towards Plymouth Hoe. Note the hordes of pigeons still hanging around waiting for him to come back with a message from the fleet.

 

Hancock may be absent, but his voice can be heard ringing through many of these exchanges. Much tortured mangling of London history later, we fetch up at the Tower.

 

HARRY …and this of course is the famous Bloody Tower, built in 1132 for the imprisonment of enemies of the crown, and where you’ll remember in 1543 James Robertson Justice had Richard Todd thrown in when he caught him going at it a bit heavy with Glynis Johns.

 

Thankfully Kenneth arrives as the official guide to put Andree right and he isn’t too impressed with Harry’s grasp of events.

 

KEN The man’s off his chump. That’s not what they learned me at school… Madam, will you PLEASE tell that revolting child to get his jammy fingers off Anne Boleyn’s Tomb!

Several pages worth of debate later, we arrive at the room housing the Crown Jewels. Unsurprisingly the ranks of the Beefeaters have been swelled by one.

 

BILL …. Harry, you’ve met Syd James.

HARRY Why yes of course. I’m sorry, Mr James. I didn’t recognise you in the Beefeater’s uniform and black mask.

BILL How long have you been a Beefeater, Syd?

SYD I joined this morning. If all goes well I resign tonight.

 

Syd appeals to Harry’s sense of patriotism to secure his assistance in removing the Crown Jewels for safekeeping. There are thieves about and the jewels need to be taken to a safe location to protect them. One hacksaw and several bars later, the job’s nearly done.

 

HARRY …we must help Mr James transfer the jewels. Don’t you realise the honour that has befallen us? We will go down in history. Harold Secombe and William Kerr who were instrumental in removing the Crown Jewels of the British Empire.

Shortly after –

SYD Hold this, will you?

HARRY What is it?

SYD A Brick.

HARRY No, no, please. Allow me. You might miss.

 

So, Harry is naive, patriotic and kind-hearted, easily manipulated by people he trusts. Neddy Seagoon is hanging around in the shadows, giggling and blowing raspberries.

Job done, Syd discovers Harry plans to show Andree the Tate next and offers them a lift. After all, the thieves might strike there next and those paintings might need to be transferred for safety as well. Unfortunately, the Rozzers are onto them the minute they drive off.

 

HARRY It must be the crooks. They must have seen them take the jewels. The cunning devils. Look at them… disguised as policemen. They won’t catch us. Faster man, faster. We must get to the Tate Gallery and take those paintings before they do.

 

At the Tate Syd gets to work. before too long an entire row of “Toulousey Lautrecs” and a “Dotty Kelly” are preserved for the nation (“Might sell well in Dublin”, muses Syd). Andree wants to go and see the Elgin Marbles next.

 

SYD No, you don’t want to bother with them. I think we ought to go round and save Lord and Lady Docker’s stuff first.

ANDREE I want to see the Elgin Marbles!

SYD There’s plenty of marbles at Lady Docker’s place…

ANDREE Mr James, the Elgin Marbles are ancient Greek Statues

SYD So what?

ANDREE They’re beautiful.

SYD No.

ANDREE They’re priceless.

SYD I’ll go and get a lorry.

 

Before too much longer, the evening papers break the news of the sensational robberies. Shortly thereafter, Syd disappears.

 

ANDREE He’s gone… when you got to the bit about heavy sentences he muttered something about South America and letting two other men take the blame.

HARRY Who could he have meant?

ANDREE I don’t know. But both their christian names were Charlie.

 

Bill meanwhile has been reading the description of the felons given, and presents the news to Harry with a flat, dead “Hiya Charlie”. Now, at long last, Harry gets a chance to do a bit that plays to his strengths.

 

BILL The descriptions of the criminals are as follows. One man in a beefeater’s uniform. One short fat man with enough hair for three people. One thin Australian…

HARRY A short…fat…man….and…a….thin….Austral…. (GULPS)

 

The game’s up and our heroes make plans to try to get out of this mess. Harry suggests they leave the jewels in an empty railway carriage. Bill vetoes it – “the number of times they get cleaned out, they’ll still be missing for the next coronation”. Eventually they decide to try and put them back where they found them. Job done, Harry thinks they can all relax.

 

HARRY You’ll be able to sleep safely tonight, Andree

ANDREE Why? Are you going to have Bill locked up?

 

Along comes Kenneth Williams, this time as a stern-faced representative of the law (no room for Snide in this one but Ken more than makes up for it by playing more or less everybody else)

 

HARRY Found those jewel robbers yet?

KEN Yes, I think so.

HARRY Ahem. Yes. Lovely moon out tonight.

KEN Yes, quite a picture as it glints on the old Koh-in-noor stuck on your nut there.

HARRY Pardon?

KEN I think you’d better come along with us… your majesty.

 

Turns out in the dark, Harry’s nervousness has got the better of him. If he hadn’t been caught comments Bill, the next monarch would have to be crowned with a size-ten bowler.

Finally we arrive back more or less where we started, with Harry continuing his history lesson. Well, almost.

 

HARRY … and over there, we have the prison walls, built in 1763 by the convicts themselves.

ANDREE How interesting, Harry.

HARRY Yes, there’s not much I don’t know about this place. This is my cell here, and it has quite an interesting history, in 1847 it was built by….

etc, fades into theme tune.

With that the announcements roll, the music fades in and Hancock’s been successfully covered for another week. Multiple clues can be gathered from the script as to how broadly it would have sounded – the GRAMS instructions are all present and correct, with the details of which pieces of music are to be used and where. Galton and Simpson also give Kenneth Williams a few pointers, with their indication of the type of voice they’re after (I can just hear his John Snagge impersonation reverberating down through the ages). Andree is presumably still lumbered with her accent – it’s still fairly cut-glass when we reach the actual surviving episodes from this series. Bill’s still fairly sharp, albeit naive, although he’s exhibiting signs of the permanently unemployed, boots-on-the-pillow layabout he’d soon become. Syd’s character is fully formed, and on the fiddle – no tweaking necessary. He’s found someone else to twist in Hancock’s absence and he’ll take full advantage. Harry? He plays on the page as part Hancock, part Neddie Seagoon. Equal parts pompous but kind-hearted innocent and frantic, hyperactive giggler. It’s an impossible situation for Harry to take on but I’m sure he aced it.

Hancock would remain absent for a further episode – frantic antics involving Harry and a foolish investment in a racehorse, before returning himself to harness for episode four.  We’ll hopefully look at both of those soon. In the meantime, I’ll let Reggie have the last word.

 

REGGIE You have been listening to Hancock’s Half Hour, with Harry Secombe, Bill Kerr, Andree Melly, Sidney James and Kenneth Williams. Incidental music was by Wally Stott and recorded by the BBC Revue Orchestra conducted by Harry Rabinowitz. The script was written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and the programme which was recorded was produced by Dennis Main Wilson.

CLOSING THEME (To to & End)

 

And who can argue with that?

 

Who is That Man?

It started with a wall.

At least that’s where I saw him first. You wouldn’t have believed it if you’d been there. You really wouldn’t. The very few people I told about it looked at me as if I was making it all up. They shook their heads in despair. I knew what they were thinking. “There he goes again. Telling his stories, confusing reality with something he saw once, in an old film. Just nod understandingly and get away from him as fast as you possibly can.”

It happened, though. I saw it, others saw it. They put it down to coincidence and circumstance but I KNEW.

He was standing there, leaning against a wall in the most exaggerated, theatrical manner you could imagine. One leg crooked against the other, one arm stretched up over his head, palm flat against the wall.

He looked a mess. Clothes, far too big for him. His trousers an enormous patchwork, more patch than trouser leg. A huge hanky sticking out of his jacket pocket. Violent ginger fright wig jammed on his head. He was old, too. God, he was old.

The eyes – they were young. They sparkled, mostly. There was a joy of living, a vivid and keen delight in just being alive. They radiated energy out of that ancient face.

I’d seen him so many times before. Seen that pose. I knew what was coming. A policeman came round the corner. You don’t see them too often these days, but they’re out there, if you know where to look. The gods of comedy had sent him along, just in time. This one was taking his job just a bit too seriously, I was delighted to note.

“Oi, you! What do you think you’re doing? Standing there all day. Haven’t you got somewhere to go? Move on, will you?”

The old man didn’t move.

“What do you think you’re doing? Think you’re holding that wall up?”

The old man nodded, vigorously.

“You think it’s going to fall down if you move?

Another nod, followed by a cheery grin that said, you’re going to get a bit of surprise in a minute.

“Come on….”

The policeman grabbed the old man by the arm and pulled him away. And slowly, with an almost balletic motion – the wall collapsed.

Amongst the chaos, the old man disappeared. I don’t know where he went; I was leaning against a wall of my own, laughing myself into a choking fit.

Every day, for the next few weeks… I kept on seeing him. Everywhere I went, this demented force of nature seemed to appear before me. Leaping like a satyr into the middle of normality, disrupting then disappearing. I was sitting in an internet cafe and I heard someone curse soundly a couple of computers up.

“Ah, bollocks. I’ve forgotten my damn password.”

At which point, the old man leaned over from the next PC, opened his coat and produced a gigantic fish with a sword sticking out of its mouth. He pointed at it, then at the screen in front of my cursing colleague, then back at the fish. Nodded his head vigorously and smiled THAT smile again.

The bloke at the PC turned to me, wonderingly. We shared a glance. I knew that when we both turned back, the old man would be gone.

“Swordfish, right?” I said.

“Yes…” said I-forgot-my-password-man.

“I’d change that if I were you”, I said, and left the internet cafe before they giggles overwhelmed me.

Next time I saw the old man he was being hauled away from a local lemonade stand. How the hell he found the only lemonade stand in the country, I don’t know. Yet there he was, lemonade dripping from his bare feet as the police hauled him off, the vendor looking in horror at the open top of the barrel of lemonade they’d just dragged the old man out of. I knew that the health and safety people would shut him down, but I also knew that the bastard deserved everything he got. He’d short-changed me the day before last.

It couldn’t last. He was becoming “a public nuisance”. Every new disruption, every new “outrage” got him hauled up before the local authorities. He made headlines with the “paste a naughty picture over the top of every public notice” campaign. The repeated theft of crockery from local hotels got him into court – the cascade of knives, forks and spoons that erupted from his sleeves when he got there was enough to send him down for thirty days (I swear a couple of plates and a soup tureen came down in the cascade too).

They got him eventually. After he devastated the local immigration office with a bunch of rubber stamps, franking everything and everyone he could get his hands on, they called in the doctors. The presence of an ancient horned gramophone strapped to his back with Chevalier ’78 spinning on the turntable was a particularly nice touch, I thought – but it proved to be one touch too many. They put him away. The ancient old man with anarchy in his eyes disappeared from public view and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. People could go about their business again, untroubled by the possibility that they might find themselves holding a casually hooked leg. Phone calls could be carried out in normal voices, with no risk of the human on one end of the line being replaced by a carefully modulated sequence of horn squeaks in lieu of conversation. In short, life returned to normal. Things were dull, but normal. The old man? Forgotten. A problem for someone else.

I couldn’t rest. I had to speak to him. You see, I had to tell him. I knew. Knew who he was. Knew what he did, why he did it. I had to tell him that someone recognized him, remembered him, and valued him for everything he gave us. I wanted to see him, just to say “thanks”.

It took a bit of doing. They hid him well but I found him. God, the hoops I had to jump through, just to get them to admit that he even existed. Grudgingly after several months of nagging, I was granted an interview. I was nervous, frankly. How often do you get to talk to a force of nature?

The nurse led me down through the traditional warren of corridors. Everything smelt musty and forgotten. These places do, they always do. It seemed to take forever to reach his room but I knew we were getting near because I heard him before we ever reached him. The harp melody rang through those forgotten corridors, clear and strong.

When I was growing up those bits were always the bits I fidgeted through, waiting to get to the lunacy I knew was waiting on the other side. Now I’m older I realise that he was always a master of pacing, as were his compadres. They all knew. They knew that you can’t keep laughing constantly. You have to take a breather every now and then. You need to stop, recharge your batteries and when the next onslaught hits, it’ll be twice as funny because you’ve had the chance to process the stuff that came before. Always the master of pacing, that one.

I peeked in through his door. He was sitting there, rapt with concentration. The fingers glided over the strings of the harp, teasing the melody out. I never ever knew what it was called, but it was the one that kept on turning up in their films, the one that went “sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at suppertime”. His brother made great play of it when he was shooting the keys on that old piano of his as well.

I stood in the doorway and listened. He seemed utterly at peace. Consumed by the music like he always was. He couldn’t constantly be running around disrupting the world, deflating the pompous. I always felt that this was where he wanted to be, where he could rest. Just for a few minutes. The fingers started to spin that wonderful glissando down the strings and I knew that he was nearly done. He looked up at me and smiled gently.

I walked over to him and sat down. He looked at me, silently.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” I said. “Arthur died, all those years ago but it’s you.” He gave me the innocent, I-don’t-understand baby face. “It’s ok, I’m not going to tell anyone.”, I said. “I always knew you were still out there, somewhere. The world’s full of idiots and maniacs. Every bit as much as when you were around the first time.”

He threw me a gookie.

“You’re still loved, you know.” (baby face again). “We grew up with you. We never forgot. We never will. I know you’re probably going to go away for a bit. You have to. I’m sorry about the way you’ve been treated. It’s not right, and it makes me angry.” As I’d hoped, this brought forth the “I am furious” face, complete with the straight arm fist swing. I waited til he’d finished.

“They don’t mean to hurt you. They just don’t know. They don’t know who you are. I do. I can’t help you, but I wanted to come here, just for a few minutes with you. Just to say…. Keep on being silly. Don’t let us get too serious. And thank you.”

He looked at me solemnly. Just for a moment. Then as I turned to leave, I heard him speak. Just two words. Low, soft… spoken with a voice rich and dark, smoked with amusement.

“Honk. Honk”.

I walked out before he could see the tears in my eyes. Behind me, “Sugar in the Morning” started again.