Richard Bacon on BBC 5 Live – Live from his house

This Monday, Richard Bacon’s BBC Radio 5 Live show came live from his house in Belsize Park. It was to celebrate an anniversary – of what, you’ll either know or you won’t, but if you don’t, it’s not going to be me who tells you.

Set up in his living room, I was on-air in the role of the Presenter’s Friend – and there were moments that had an almost dream-like quality.

Sitting in Richard’s lounge next to Chris Evans, opposite philosopher Alain De Botton and Britain’s Got Talent finalists Stavros Flatley, and watching an oompah band perform Britney Spears’ Toxic at half past midnight is undoubtedly an unrepeatable moment in life.

And what a lovely photo to end with (taken by Richard’s sister-in-law Kirsty) of guests Danny Wallace and Alex Zane, whose expressions really sum up the sheer enjoyment of the night. I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun doing a radio show than I did doing this one.

You can hear the whole show here on the BBC’s iPlayer, but it’ll be taken off within the week….

Veglio’s at Tottenham Court Road station

Walking to work last week on a bright, clear morning, I came up from the Northern Line to find that Tottenham Court Road station had been knocked down. It’s part of the block that used to house the Astoria on one side and the Metro club on the other, demolished to make way for the new Crosslink rail system.

The demolition revealed a long-covered sign for a restaurant: Veglio and Co’s Cafe. A common enough Italian name, it’s enjoying a brief moment in the sun with the demolition of numbers 1-15 Oxford Street.

The Hitler Oak

In 2007, despite local protest, an oak tree in the grounds of a school in Hendon, North London, was chopped down.

It was a local landmark, stood fifty feet tall, and had been given to the school by a gold-medal winning Olympian seventy years before. Riddled with a fungal infection, there was concern that one of the branches might fall off and injure a child. The school caretaker said that “if we hadn’t brought the tree down this year, it would have come down with the wind next year.” The stump was turned into a round table for the children to use at playtime.

And although it’s just a stump, it retains the name it’s had since being planted in 1936: the Hitler Oak.

Every athlete who won a gold medal in the 1936 Berlin Olympics was given an oak sapling personally by Adolf Hitler. His hope was that eighteen-inch tall German oaks would be planted all across the planet, where they would take root and grow strong.

The one planted at Hendon School was won by a former pupil Harold Whitlock, who won the 50-kilometre walk, and who chose to plant it at his former school, rather than in his back garden, in case he ever moved house.

Whitlock’s fellow British athlete, the rower Jack Beresford (whose victory over a heavily-favoured German sculling team made Hitler storm off the platform he’d been watching the race from) did the same thing, planting his tree in the grounds of Bedford school, but it was cut down to make way for new sports facilities and a theatre some years back.

Of the 130 oaks that Hitler dispensed, many have disappeared without trace – but some survive across the world, still growing, their legacy largely forgotten. Jesse Owens’ tree still thrives in pride of place at James Rhodes High School in Cleveland, Ohio.

Whitlock’s was the last of the British Hitler oaks, but his son Ross told the Observer: ”I’m fairly relaxed about it. We’ve got a couple of saplings here growing from acorns that fell from the tree. Maybe we could give one of those to the school and it would be ‘Son of Hitler Oak’.”

Nothing interests me more than these sort of strange historical stories. Nothing. It combines two things I loathe – fascism and sports – and transcends them both. Magic.

The Worst Strip Bar Name Ever

I’m not a connoisseur of strip clubs by any means – I’ve twice been to Stringfellows under duress, and came away both times with fistfuls of stories of my own awkwardness and discomfort that I still tell years and years later – but I saw this one in Edinburgh and it took my breath away. The unique and implicit combination of women dancing, serial murderers and dead bodies being carried through the streets at night by two men makes for the most uncomfortable business proposition I’ve ever seen. Whoever came up with it should be on some sort of register.

Nice to see they’ve also used the image most associated with Marilyn Monroe – another strong woman who was never taken advantage of by men, and who didn’t end up dead before her time. Oh…hang on. 

It reminded me that there was a chalk board on the front of a nasty looking pub in King’s Cross that I used to pass in the early hours of the morning when I was working on a radio breakfast show. They used to have strippers on throughout the afternoon and night, and one of the many boards that covered the doors and windows to block out the view of passers-by boasted “Jacks on the hour, every hour.” I thought it must mean they had blokes on, which sort of went against the rest of what the boards were offering – bit odd to mix the two, you’d think you’d go with one or the other to maximise your profits. But ‘Jacks’ turned out to be a bit of rhyming slang – Jack the Ripper, stripper.

If you call women that, you too should be on the same register as the man who named Edinburgh’s Burke and Hare Stripbar.

If you’re keen to read about Edinburgh’s most celebrated Resurrection Men and serial murderers Burke and Hare, hey! Wikipedia is still up and running here.

The Testament of Jake Thackray (2001)

JAKE THACKRAY

Let me tell you how apes gibber and wolves roam and crows wait.

How children are abused and good men despised and the weak always punished and people done and done and dispossessed and then done and done again.

And how little is done to stop it and how much cock talked.

And how I would rather make people laugh than make them do anything else.

Let me tell you anything. And then…and then you’ll start believing it.

                                                                     Jake Thackray, Jake’s Progress

In 1999, the record label EMI released The Songbook Series. The idea was a simple, but novel, one : a handful of respected, slightly underground, creative sorts were asked to make a compilation of songs to be released on a album that would bear their names on the cover.

The ensuing series was eclectic to say the least :  Robert Crumb’s beloved ’30s jazz bands jostled for space alongside fellow comic artist Peter Bagge’s Rockin’ Poppin’ Favourites. The series also featured Gilbert Shelton (creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), author Iain Banks, illustrator Savage Pencil and the poet Ivor Cutler.

Most of the albums were rather patchy : it was interesting to see the track listing, but less enjoyable to actually sit and listen to the collections. As a compiler, it must be hard not to just lump one type of music together that you like at that given moment, and to resist the temptation to put on music that you might not like, but feel that you ought to.

That said, Hunter S.Thompson’s selection was so unselfconscious in his choice, it actually made him seem rather mundane and disappointing, After the excesses of the novels that made his name, his inclusion of Rod Stewart was a particularly surprising disappointment.

It was left to his many-times collaborator Ralph Steadman to construct the highlight in the series, which he dubbed I Like It. The album comprises of a genuinely enjoyable and harmonious selection, encompassing William Burroughs and Vaughan Williams, Spike Jones and Billie Holiday, Norma Waterson and Mussorgsky. “My choice is balanced by the desire to be moved to laughter or to tears,” Steadman writes in the sleeve notes. “The result is a subconscious choice from my collective memories and my yearnings for a perfect world. In some ways it is a psycho-analysis in sound and in that way a revelation of the private side of my nature.”

Nestled amongst those aforementioned names is a track called The Blacksmith and The Toffee Maker. It is a jewel in an already impressive crown. It is based on an incident from Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie. And it was where I first heard “some of the most original and delightful lyrics of our time” by “the kind of singer who gives poetry a good name.” His name is Jake Thackray.

Thackray’s songs are astonishing. His voice is thick with rhymes, riddles and what seems to be an accent midway between Doncaster and Leeds. They form a canon of folk songs written out of time : not reworked tunes that rural men once sang at the turn of the previous century, but entirely original compositions that could have been written at any point in England’s history.

Tight, taut, melodious songs about kith and kin, sexual lusts, lonely people waiting in hope, of being worked into the ground and of driving yourself there over the years. Always tinged with equal measures of humour and menace, lying furtively behind the sway of the guitar, and the bounce of Thackray’s over-pronounced gait of voice. No irony or rough mockery, but pathos, and excruitiating detail, and sorrow. Titles like Salvation Army Girl, The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle and The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington.

“When you first hear him Jake seems to remind you of several other singers,” wrote Bernard Braden on the reverse of the album Jake’s Progress, “You try to put him in the North Country niche, but he won’t fit, because there are bits of Noel Coward in the wit of the lyrics, and even in the clipping of his syllables. Sometimes he seems to swallow words as if didn’t care whether you heard them or not…but he knows what he’s doing…all the time.”

For two years, I’ve been searching for Thackray’s back catalogue. I’ve been trying to find out more about the man. I know that not many people have heard of him nowadays, but those of a similar age to my mother recognise the name. I found out that he used to perform weekly on the television programme Braden ’s Week, and he did so for two years. That Esther Rantzen worked on the programme, and wrote the foreword to his book of song lyrics. And I know that he’s still alive.

It took me some months to track down any of Thackray’s albums. Finally, in one of the vinyl exchanges in Notting Hill, I discovered two : Jake’s Progress (1969) and On Again! On Again!(1977). They were startlingly cheap – a couple of pounds each. I had been under the apprehension that Thackray must just have passed me by for all those years. I was sure that the albums were hard to track down because they were always snatched up by someone who admired the man. I’m not sure this is true. I now think they don’t turn up often because no-one thinks anyone would be interested in buying them. And this, I don’t understand.

Very few people I meet have ever heard of Thackray. His records are exceptionally hard to find. So it follows that biographical information about him is somewhat sparse. Over the course of eight months, I found only two references to him on the millions of pages on the sprawling internet: one in German, selling a copy of his 1997 EMI compilation CD, Lah Di Dah, the other a transcription of the title song in French (the song originally appeared on his first album, The Last Will And Testament of Jake Thackray.)

This was to have been the part of the book where I write autobiographical notes for you to read. I tried to do it but gave up. I’ve also tried, and given up, writing songs about myself. Not because I am secretive, or ashamed, or modest, or idle, or saintly, or winsome about it ; but because it just bores me. I’ve no interest in my autobiography. I’ve read it.

He states his case in plainer terms on the back of 1972’s ‘Bantam Cock’, following a tale about his bantam hens :-

 I tell you this to avoid telling you anything else. It is songs that count and not the singer. Listen to the songs. If you don’t like them much talk to members of the opposite sex. Or go to bed early. Or both.

In 1977, however, Star Books, a notorious churner-out of paperbacks relating to television celebrities, published Jake’s Progress, a collection of Thackray’s lyrics (or as the cover had it, “rollicking, frolicking, uproarious verse”). Alongside three albums worth of lyrics, Thackray contributed some fourteen pages of notes, musings and stories (from where many of the quotes have been taken).

It is not easy to separate fact from fiction, and that seems to be what Thackray intended.  He seems to revel in not only leading the reader up the garden path, but in constantly telling them that they are being misled. Biographical detail is there, but it’s mentioned in passing, building up the to stories he wants to tell. And are these stories true? Thackray tells of his system for evading questions when he feel inclined :

I say : “Look, I can’t or don’t want to tell you the truth about what I think or feel. But I can always lie. If you let me lie about it, I can say all sorts of things and we can pass an hour or two together. Go on – let me lie.” And they smile at the charm of it all and say – “All right then, go on, lie a bit.” So I do. I lie and lie and say all sorts of things and they listen and listen and listen and then…and then they start believing it.

A CD release in 1991 of 22 songs by Thackray – a ‘best of’, of sorts – contains a single side of notes that equals the sum total of what I know for sure about him. He was born in Swaledale “in the former West Riding of Yorkshire in 1938″, and (in his own vernacular) before he was a performing man, Jake Thackray was a teaching man. And before that, he was a ten-year-old Catholic boy with a scholarship to St. Michael’s College, a Jesuit grammar school.

His form teacher was also the head of English, “a man who developed and worked hard on his scorn, flexed it like a bodybuilder does his muscles. And then he used to beat us up with it.” Thackray relates a story in which his essay, entitled ‘My Environment’, had detailed his parents, neighbours, sisters, brothers, friends. “He was just a nosy bugger, that’s what ; he didn’t want literature, he wanted information”. Thackray was awarded full marks for volume (“It was an inch thick, my essay”) and full marks for imagination.

But “I wanted the TRUTH!”, roared the six foot six Father, “These aren’t real people. You’ve made them all up! You’ve made them up! You’ve been reading books by Piers Dudgeon and listening to radio plays. These people of yours don’t exist.”

I had been living with these people for ten years but if a Jesuit said they didn’t exist, they didn’t.

The main problem had been Thackray’s portrayal of a neighbourhood ‘no-good’ named Arthur Wilkinson.

If there was any trouble, drunkeness, window breaking, noise at nightime, fighting and swearing, vegetable marrows interfered with, unexpected pregnancies, missing bicycles, it was Arthur. If a good housewife took the washing off the line and there were items missing she would say to her husband, “John, at the pub tonight, just check what Arthur’s wearing.” He had no job and yet he rattled his trouserpocket change as well as another man ; he was always telling stories and laughing a lot, and this irked people. He was a poacher – but not one of your Home Counties poachers who who lift a fat trout here, a delicate pheasant there. If he could eat it, he would kill it. Geese, pet rabbits, crows : he used to kill cows. He was a stupendous man and all the children worshipped him and he worshipped them. I know I learned a lot more from him than from the Head of Finer Feelings. From then I made people up.

Perhaps the above is true ; perhaps it is not. That is the story that Thackray wants us to hear. It is slightly ironic that rather than immediately become a troubador, making up his songs about imagined characters (which would fit in and follow on so well from that story), he became, like that scornful Jesuit Father, an English teacher. He attended Durham University, and upon graduation, spent four years teaching in France (a period described more mysteriously on the back of an album as “four years of Continental living”).

In France, Thackray discovered George Brassens. Thackray feels “no sense of shame in saying that I think he is the greatest songwriter in the world, bar none. He is head, shoulders, chest, knees above anyone else I can think of. Nothing he does is poor.” Brassens “sings only now and then and only his own songs and only to his own people.” Two of Brassens’s songs – La gorille and Je rejoindrai ma belle- were adapted by Thackray, under the titles Brother Gorilla and Over To Isabel.

Listening to Brassens now, almost twenty years after his death at the age of sixty in 1981 – and having come to hear Thackray first – the similarities between the two are striking. The sound, the folky music coupled with an urgent delivery, even the song titles: Elegy of a Wax Taper verses The Blacksmith and the Toffee Maker, Oncle Archibald against Grandad. The description that Brassens gave in an interview regarding his compositions could have been said by, or about, Thackray : “The themes [in the songs] are uncommon. I think, overall, they comprise good features, more or less. I’ve begun to recognise nearly all of them : nature, God, life, death, friendship (love and friendship, it’s the same thing)…Well, perhaps there’s other things, but, right now, they escape me.” When Thackray performed a series of concerts in the late 1970s, it was alongside his hero, Brassens.

Thackray returned to Leeds after France and was a teacher for somewhere in the region of six years, during which time he also played rugby league.”What I did all day was be a teacher and read and at night go and see Sheila and drink and laugh in the Packhorse”.

I presume that he married Sheila, as he states he has “done all the falling in love and getting married afterwards that I could ever want to and am currently living happily ever after.” They have children, three boys (“Big family man,” I was told, “Huge. Nothing else to do in Monmouth.”). The Packhorse pub is still standing and serving Tetley bitter on the other side of the road to the main Leeds University buildings, and is now a haunt for aging Teddy Boys with bryllantined quiffs and shabby cuffs.

Thackray had begun to write songs tailored for his pupils, with the intent of “amusing and entertaining them at the same time.” As Thackray describes it,

And then I turned into a performing dick. As if I’d been fairy wanded and ting! There I was, a full time performing dick. I know the Wednesday when it happened. In the morning I was a mediocre teacher, chucking the blackboard at forty people every forty minutes. In the evening, a mediocre singer, coming on after Vi Tye (housewife and stripper) at the music hall in Leeds.

How this change came about is not well documented. Thackray had done some performing on BBC Radio’s ‘Northcountryman’ programme, which seems so apt that it could have been devised solely with him in mind. Through the talent-spotting of the BBC Scottish Radio Orchestra’s musical director, Brian Fahey, Jake was introduced to a record producer Nick Newell. Newell took Thackray to the Abbey Road studios, and persuaded Jake to become a professional entertainer. The Last Will and Testament of Jake Thackray followed.

And, as Thackray writes it, he ended up “on television a lot and had to write quick and agile for a living.” Early appearances on Look North (the BBC’s early-evening local news for the Yorkshire area) and The Beryl Reid Show lead to a regular appearance on both The David Frost Show and Frost In America. These were followed by a two year stint on The Braden Beat, and later, That’s Life.

Every week, Thackray wrote a new song. “Jake usually selects a subject by Tuesday”, wrote Braden,

Our designer, John Giles, spends several days arranging a suitable set for a song about an old lady who lived in a room above a rural post-office. On Saturday afternoon, Jake wanders in with a look of abject apology. The song hadn’t worked out to his satisfaction, so he’s written instead a number about a trendy girl who lives in sin in Swiss Cottage. It’s a mark of the quality of Jake Thackray that Don Giles happily goes to work improvising a new set which will be seen on the air in a matter of hours.

Esther Rantzen’s introduction to Thackray’s book echoes this process :

On Monday, Jake would comission a picture of a bull – he’d say he was writing a song about a noble thriving championship bull. On Tuesday we’d ring him, just to check that the bull was still noble, still a champion, and still thriving. Jake would mutter a little, and say perhaps we might throw in a sheep or two, because somehow the song seemed to be moving towards sheep. On Wednesday the designer would arrive with a bull, a dozen sheep, and a nervous expression. On Thursday, Jake would ring to say that he just thought he’d mention his Uncle Fred. Our designer would make a rough sketch of Uncle Fred. On Friday the lyric would arrive in the office and there would be a marvellous, wicked song about love and lust and what he did to a lady and the problems it caused him. So the bull and the sheep and Uncle Fred would be rapidly painted out, and the designer would lose his nervous expression, because at least now he knew where he was, but the producer would look suddenly distraught because he knew that Jake had worked into the lyric fifteen ethnic Yorkshire expressions for intimate parts of the body, and the producer had to work out which parts were rude.

Thackray had been playing folk clubs and small theatres, “clubs and theatres where you just sing and the people laugh and the people laugh and clap, drink, flirt, sit close together for one good night together”, but he had progressed to venues like the Albert Hall, the London Palladium and the National’s Queen Elizabeth Hall (where 1971s Live Performance! was recorded). He even appeared on a Royal Variety Show, alongside Louis Armstrong and Tony Bennett. Perhaps the most unlikely gig that Thackray performed was for the Royal Family at a private concert in Buckingham Palace.

Despite this impressive list, Braden refered on the back of Jake’s Progressthat Thackray was “an acquired taste”, mentioning that

when our series first commenced late in 1968 letters poured in demanding his instant dismissal. Now most of them ask for an autograph, a photograph and, occasionally, an assignation. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Jake’s staying power is that a number of people who first wrote in to complain about him wrote again to say they’d changed their minds.

Listening to the lyrics, it isn’t hard to understand why people were unnerved by Thackray. His voice is sonorous and sharp, his lyrics powerfully earthy and pungent. A country girl “Under the trees, flashing her eyes / On her back in the bracken where nobody sees her / Knees in the moonlight long after midnight.” The Salvation Army girl who’s “whispered to me that she might / Be all things bright and beautiful tonight.”

There are songs about the landlord’s three daughters, moles in places where no-one’s ever seen, cocks tupping Bantams, and one entitled Isabel Makes Love Upon National Monuments (the song concerns the sorrow of the Albert Hall, so far denied “the imprint of Isabel on his parquet floor” despite “so many ticks in her National Trust catalogue” – everywhere from the Cenotaph to the Forth Bridge proudly shows “Where Isabel’s white shoulder blades have briefly reposed.”)

But Thackray is not just a baudy balladeer. In turns, he is as romantic a songwriter as any other, although his rules are slightly different. A song like The Blacksmith and The Toffee Makerrelates not to love as “the mighty thunderclap variety, the head over heels and passionate burning kind with never ending happiness and daily joy the result” where “Golden boys and girls only need apply.”

In this story, the two people are nothing. He is a balding, bow-legged blacksmith ; she is a little ugly spinster, ageing, whiskery. Nevertheless they are in love as much as anyone ; it is a love story, a lovesong, for all that.

The Ballad of Billy Kershawconcerns a young country-ploughman (one of Thackray’s earthy puns) who sexually services women – but Billy “never sought the best / The beautiful, the golden ones that most ones would/ But just the ugly ones, the poorest, the despised, the dispossessed ; / (Where else would a hunchback get a cuddle, by the way? / Harelips care to kiss, or so they say.)” And all the time doing it (and them) “never for profit or applause”, only for “the common comfort”, “the passing happiness”, “the consolation” and “the silvery laughter that it caused.”

Thackray never plays what he sings for laughs. Sometimes reading the lyrics, he may not seem a million miles away from Mike Harding or Pam Ayres territory, but Thackray is never sentimental, never building towards puns or an easy laugh. His demeanor, too, is not geared towards amusement. Braden writes that “some people find his looks faintly sinister, but those are people who haven’t seen him smile.”

In the seven photographs of Thackray that adorn his albums and book, he is not smiling. He tends to be in the middle of talking, or looking away from the camera at something else in the distance, as if he is a man who does not have time to be photographed – the artifice of the showbusiness world he has found himself in does not seem to appeal to him. He, like Brassens, sings his songs in his language to his people. Perhaps this is part of the reason that Thackray isn’t remembered in popular circles today.

Braden makes reference to Thackray appearing to be “very shy”, and deduces that Thackray is very “wary of people who inhabit the Southern Counties and that, rather than show his dislike, he pretends to be shy.” If he wasn’t over keen on Southerners, imagine how uncomfortable he would have been working in television, where his prejudices must have been surpassed spectacularly. Dealing with record labels working out of Chelsea, TV executives in Shepherd’s Bush – hardly Thackray’s favoured territory.

He now lives in Monmouth. The last, and latest, piece of news regarding Jake came from the mouth of Barry Cryer, who had met him a couple of years before in Cheltenham. Cryer was recording the Radio 2 comedy show I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue, and Jake had rung up Barry and said he’d like very much to come along and see the show being recorded. Thackray had been very keen to meet Humphrey Lyttleton, who he clearly held in high regard. Cryer mentioned that Thackray had had a drink or two when he arrived, but his family were surrounding him fondly. Cryer said he was still performing in small folk pubs, and, despite the meagrest of advertising, the place would be packed from floor to ceiling when Thackray walked out. He mentioned to me that he might have Thackray’s home number, but that it was more than likely it would be the answerphone, if the call was answered at all.

Regardless of my fawning appreciation, and the CD notes referring to “such a large and loyal fan following”, Thackray is, to most intentions and purposes, forgotten. This shouldn’t have happened. Had Thackray been an American singer-songwriter, rather than a Yorkshireman, it goes without saying that, by now, major retrospectives of his career would have been issued in fat CD boxes, and Eric Clapton would have approached Thackray with ideas for a collaboration album.

The only difference being, had Clapton asked, Thackray surely would have told him to fuck off.

That’s why he isn’t remembered.

And that’s exactly why he should be.

 Your rosebuds are numbered,

Gather them now for rosebuds’ sake.

And if your hands aren’t too encumbered,

Gather a bud or two for Jake.

                                                    The Last Will And Testament of Jake Thackray

***************************

Jake Thackray sadly died in 2002, a year after I’d written the above. I came very close to seeing him performing that year – he was booked at a pub folk club in Bridport in Devon in the summer, which I managed to arrive a day late for, and so never got to see him. It’s the one regret I can’t quite let go.

Since his death, his work has been widely rediscovered. The broadsheets all gave him glowing obituaries – the Guardian called him a genius – Radio 2 broadcast a documentary about him on Christmas Day 2003, and the Arctic Monkeys started name-checking him in interviews. It’s a shame Thackray wasn’t around to see any of it.

EMI released an essential near-complete 4CD boxset of his studio work entitled ‘Jake In  A Box’, which ia available at all the big stores. There are also a few fascinating live CDs, which are harder to find - not just the complete version of ‘Live Performance!’ but a couple called ‘Live At The Lobster Pot Volumes 1 & 2′ and another recorded in Germany that allow you to hear an unedited version of Thackray live. Sometimes you can hear the nerves, and in the German one there’s one bit of between-songs patter that lasts for over 20 minutes, but they’re astonishingly good listening all the same.

There are now many more mentions on the internet of him and his work – whereas in 2001, he was mentioned twice, there are now 30,000. There is even a dedicated site – http://www.jakethackray.com/.  Not just that, but there’s a fair few songs he’s performing live right here on You Tube. It’s an entirely good thing.

A decade on, I still think Jake Thackray makes the best music I’ve ever heard.

Shame. Shame On You.

The first four parts of a series I started to write, where I publicly shamed people who had wronged me from my birth until present. These four were all guilty of wronging me while I was at Grimsdyke First and Middle School, Hatch End, 1981-2. 

SHAME ON YOU, Mrs Craggs, teacher at Grimsdyke First and Middle School, Hatch End. During the period 1981 to 1984, you refused to acknowledge children who asked to go to the toilet, but instead remained hunched over your desk, marking in a quantity that could not possibly have been necessary for a class of 30 five year olds. The slightest of head movements was your reply, a movement that could be the involuntary shudder of the old, a movement that was so minute that it could have been caused by the rills of the breeze across your old woman hair. When the question was reiterated, the same would ensue, perhaps an angry eye from the pinched face cast over the questioning, wee-needing child, but no visible or audible affirmation. When the question was timorously asked once more, Craggs would rise in a fury, tiny mouth spurting forth the words “I’ve already said you can go, you stupid child!”, her arm outstretched into a point towards the door. And when the children had learnt to spell their names, as proved by a post registration test for two or three, they were allowed to stop their practice and play in the sand pit. I had passed, but no one had told me that I could play – so I continued spelling my (now learnt) name, as I had always done before. And you, Mrs.Craggs, on spying I was writing and not playing, did not tell me that I was now entitled to play with the buckets and trowels : instead you berated me, and told me I’d have to retake the test when everybody else had passed it, and thus I would never get to go in the sand. And I waited, I waited for people to spell names like “Tunnicliffe” and “Cruttenden”, all the time becoming a powerful speller, driven by the notion of revenge. You punished a child for a victimless misunderstanding. Shame on you.

SHAME ON YOU, Mark Cruttenden, for taking so long to learn how to spell your own name. While you half-heartedly copied out your moniker, there were others, who through no fault of their own, were required to stall their education until you had mastered it. Why didn’t you apply yourself better? Why didn’t you face the task with dignity? Why didn’t you step back, and declare “this is the label by which men shall know me! I shall do my best to learn it myself, and not make a mockery of it from the word ‘go’” ? It doesn’t matter why not ; all that matters is that you didn’t. Shame on you.

SHAME ON YOU, Matthew Tilbury, for stealing my Football Smurf when I lent it to you. You said that you didn’t have it, and that you’d bring in all your Smurfs from home to prove to me you didn’t have it. When Robin Brayne said that you’d just leave that one at home, you said that you wouldn’t, and then I accused you of having it, as your speech indicated that it would have to be at your home in the first place for you to conciously not bring it in with the others. I believe that you did have it, even if you do not have it now. I would have kept it in a box in the attic : you probably do not remember it or know where it is now. Shame on you.

SHAME ON YOU, Mrs Gaylord, for once claiming that I was hiding when you blew the whistle after playtime. I was in an alcove, but we had to stand still, and I was frightened that if I moved, I would get into trouble. I could see you from where I stood, but you pointed at me, amongst others, and made us miss part of the afternoon assembly in which Mrs.Heller was telling us one of her Goldie the Bear stories. Instead, you made an vunerable, innocent child do Stern maths with a lot of indimidating, older rulebreakers, like Lee Stothers, who laughed when you went away and made a fart noise with his hands. When the maths punishment was over, you marched us to assembly, where we entered in a long line, and Mrs.Heller stopped the story to express her annoyance and told us that Goldie was “disappointed” with our behaviour. No bear story has ever seemed so cruelly denied, and no tears shed have been hotter. You caused those unnecessary tears, Mrs.Gaylord. Shame on you.

Battle Picture Weekly (1975-1988)

As a kid, I loved comics. The Beano was delivered weekly, and that was really the key title for me in 1981. I’d pick up Buster and Whizzer and Chips on a fairly semi-regular basis, absolutely loved the newspaper sized Summer Specials, went wild for the small, book-length Comic Libraries, and would occasionally, slightly begrudgingly, pick up The Dandy if there was nothing else.

I never liked the Dandy – it seemed somehow inherently glum, and, although I didn’t quite realise it at the time, it’s hugely Scottish (it was, like The Beano, published by DC Thompson in Dundee, but it had far more bleak, highly intricate, quite old-fashioned strips that constantly referenced being Scottish, like the strip about the Highland dog – so brilliantly parodied by Viz as Black Bag – and The Jocks & The Geordies, neither of which I’d ever heard of, living in a suburb of North West London.) It just seemed a bit bleak – but recently, I’ve been flipping through a book of The Broons, and just marvelling at the artwork by Ken H. Harrison. I’ve never seen a comic strip with such astonishingly well-proportioned, natural-looking body movement in my life. Incredible when you think he drew thousands of these, each week, to such a high standard.

Then came Oink!, which changed my life as a child – a kind of junior Viz, I thought (and sort of do still think) it was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen and it totally blew the old-fashioned Beano out of the water. After that, it was Marvel Comics – I can still remember the very first Marvel comic I bought, a copy of Uncanny X-Men 210 in a newsagent in Headstone Lane, which I was so amazed by, I wrote the script out word for word so I could read it like a book. It started with an ethereal mutant being shot dead as she ran terrified through a train depot. I can still, 23 years on, picture the bottom panel on the first page as clearly as if it was in front of me now.

But the leap to American comics meant I missed out on the next stage of British comics – and in the mid-1980s, there was either 2000AD (which I kind of hated – it was too sciencey for me, and I’ve never much liked science-fiction, or space, or aliens, or black and white, so it was never in with much of a shot) and the war comics published by IPC. I recently picked up a pile of Battle Picture Weekly, and they’re absolutely nuts.

Devised by long-time UK comics writers Pat Mills and John Wagner, the title was a surprise hit, running from 1975 until 1988 when it merged with The Eagle. But it’s not the comic strips that make it mental – in fact, the long-running Charley’s War, a WW1 serial set on the Somme, is regarded as one of the greatest episodic British strips of all time – Word Magazine “called it simply the greatest British comic strip ever created.” (you can get it in a collected volume here.) And both it and Johnny Red (a British fighter pilot flying for the Russians) were cited as massive influences by Garth Ennis, the acclaimed writer of Preacher.

But it’s the bits in between the strips that make the comic so jaw-dropping today. The issues I have are from 1981-1982 – the period when Britain went to war against Argentina, and the comic regularly details the weapons being used in the conflict – each issue, there’s detailed information pages about, say, the Exocet missile, troop carriers or US-army issue pump-action shotguns. It’s just a really odd, glorious celebration of death, war and guns…for children.

The best (i.e. most mad) bits are the reader contributions, which 99% of the time are about the Nazis, who, as the bad guys, were most exciting to children of the 1970s. Mainly because you knew your grandad had fought them, so they were more real and tangible a threat that Stormtroopers and Sand People from Star Wars. Imagine either of these reader contributions being used in any magazine today, let alone a comic. 

Backstage at the Pleasance 1998-2009

Up at the Edinburgh Festival for a week doing shows on BBC Radio (yeah, I made that sound grander than it actually was), I went backstage at the Pleasance to one of the little dressing rooms with the delightful comic Justin Moorhouse. It must have been decorated in the late-1990s as the pictures were all of a fresh-faced Noel Fielding, a fresh-faced Chris Addison, a Lee Mack looking exactly the same, and a bearded Parrot – a Glaswegian comic who was massive at the Festival in the nineties but seems to have totally disappeared for the last ten years. I was chatting about him with Danny Wallace the other month, and we began to list as many of the names of the journeyman comics who you used to hear about all the time, who all had their own shows at Edinburgh, and who have slipped through the cracks during the 2000s – people like John Moloney, Tony Burgess, Noel Brittan, Jason Freeman, Anton…

They might all have done exactly the same as I did – got fed up with it and move on to something else. In my case, I left stand-up pretty quickly – a decision made incredibly easier by getting an offer to host a cable telly show for more money than I was getting for doing the live work, which would last for almost two years, and filming three times a week in London instead of  every night, all across the country. People ask me a lot if I miss it, and I honestly can say that I haven’t missed it once. Not once. Not even for a bit.

There in the dressing room of the Pleasance, under a thin layer of some kind of transparent-gluey-wallpaper paste to keep the posters looking pristine, was one for a gig I did with Lee Mack at the University of Edinburgh a decade ago. It was nice to see it there – it’s probably the only physical thing that remains of my stand-up career. Apart from, of course, my massive influence on today’s generation of comics, my vast sprawling country house and my intense, eternal dislike of the mean-spirited and unfriendly comedian Ian Cognito. He was a good comic, though. I used to look forward to the opener with the hat, the nail and the hammer every single time I saw it. He just wasn’t very nice to me.

I got a charming actress called Jess to snap me with the poster, so in return, I’ll plug the really enjoyable show she was in at the venue – Ivan Brackenberry’s Hospital Road Show (the creation of former XFM breakfast show host Tom Binns.) It’s touring the country, so go see it.

The poster must have been there for eleven years, which isn’t bad considering my stand-up career lasted all of eight months. 

Funny to think how many little mentions of you from over the years might sit waiting in places for years and years, hoping that you’ll somehow chance upon them one day. I’m glad I found that one, eleven years later in a private room that’s not open to the public that I only went into by chance.

Born Under A Bad Sign No.5: Le Trip

I am in a port in the South of France, walking through a car-park with my parents. My dad, who is sixty-eight, has made it clear he didn’t want to walk around today, and would have preferred to stay on the terrace of his flat, soaking up the sun like a fat, hairless cat.

Everyone in the South of France looks brown and gold, both from the sun and the vast amounts of ostentatious jewelry they parade around in. A lot of the women look like giant walking cigars, their gold bikini bottoms like the small branded loop of paper you get on one end, and their dry, sun-crisped hair like wisps of slow-moving smoke. Most of the men look like those massive tree-shaped fiberglass climbing frames you used to get in tatty service stations and in down-at-heel pubs in the 1980s. Whatever their ages, they all look like they could be relatives of Giorgio Armani.

My dad is grumbling fairly constantly, and even when he isn’t, he’s registering his disapproval of our cultural trip by dragging his feet along the ground and occasionally tutting. We’re walking back to the car after an hour, when suddenly he stumbles on a tile jutting out of the floor, which forms a decorative rim around a palm tree. He’s right next to me – I feel his body tense through my arm – but as I try and steady him, he’s already flipping off another tile placed directly where he tried to steady himself. It almost flips him over, he dives suddenly and soundlessly, his hands and arms underneath him, and lands with a thud on his face.

As he rolls over – his eyes wide, his face an explosion of bright red and dark black blood which seems to be coming from everywhere – he can’t work out what’s happening. My mum runs over to him, saying “Oh!” sadly over and over again. Somehow, as I hold his shoulder and tell him to sit still, that he’s fallen over, that there’s some blood, just to sit still, I discover two things.

The first is that I’m excellent in this kind of situation. My nerves are jangling but I survey the damage quickly and efficiently – his sunglasses have gouged into his face, leaving deep sinkholes in his nose and forehead. He’s also scraped the flesh off the end of his nose and upper lip. It’s like someone has pushed his face through a plate glass window. I grab some tissues from my mum and tell him to hold them in place while I sort out what to do next. I decide he must go to hospital. He does not argue, as he’s stunned. Before that though, I need to work out how, in a foreign country, he gets to the hospital.

The second thing I discover is that my basic conversational French, unspoken for a decade, is wide enough to quickly and efficiently explain the situation to passers-by, and immediately take control of them too. I shout in French to a group of middle-aged people passing on the other side of the square, “My father is fallen. He is injury. The face is blood. Lots of blood. He is old man. Could you me help?”

They stare back, slightly blankly but not without interest. Maybe they need more controlling, something I am happy to do as I am in control, and kind of impressed at my leadership abilities in a stressful situation. Many people would go to pieces. I have not. “Have you the serviettes? (In the heat of the moment, I can’t think what the word for tissues is. I think, in retrospect, it is ‘tissues’.) The blood. The nose, it is injury. Blood is a lot. My father.” A fat woman starts rooting in her bag, and fishes out an unopened travel packet of tissues. Instead of rushing over, she just holds them out and I have to trot over to get them. She doesn’t look that keen on giving them to me, and says nothing when I thank her. I take them back to my dad, who looks like Sissy Spacek in Carrie (right down to the wide-eyed, slightly ethereal look she has on the DVD cover), and call back to the group. “Misters and misses, could you telephoning the ambulance?” The woman who gave me the tissues suddenly shouts back, “Look, I told you we don’t speak French.” She sounds like she might be from Manchester.

Firstly, she didn’t. I know this because if she did, I would have spoken to her n English rather than struggling to make myself fucking understood in a language I can barely speak. Secondly, the word “ambulance” is the same in both English and French, so it was pretty obvious what I was asking for – she managed to work out that ‘serviette’ meant ‘tissue’, so she’s got form. And thirdly, my dad looks like his face has exploded, so she could have taken a wild fucking stab in the fucking dark.

By this time, a crowd had gathered, and some of the older French locals (most of whom rarely leave the plastic seats they occupy from lunchtime until late at night) had wandered over to look. Two of them helped my dad over to a low wall, his colourful shirt now stained with a cravat of rust-coloured blood. Dad was stabilized, I’d got some free tissues – now was the time to call for an ambulance. 

I had no idea what the number was, but I knew that in the South of France, the firemen are used for medical emergencies. This is because the French do not have a public health service, so do not have any ambulances that you can just call. Les Pompiers do it instead, picking you up in a red minivan and taking you to hospital, where before you receive any treatment, you hand over either your insurance details or credit card. I turned to the man nearest to my dad – thinking he was showing the most interest and concern, so he would be the one most likely to do exactly as I told him.

“Mister, if you please, to get the firemen,” I said. The man’s eyes widened and he looked shocked. He almost instantly said “What?” once, took a step back, then silently mouthed it a second time. I repeated myself, slightly more slowly, “To get the firemen.” He looked at me puzzled. I pointed at my dad. “To get the firemen. Quickly! The firemen!” He rubbed his head. He didn’t look like I’d asked him to call the firemen out to take my injured father to hospital – he looked more like I’d told him to give me a blow job, for fuck’s sake.

It was only the next day, when I was telling the story of the slow, lazy, stupid Samaritan to a native French speaker that I discovered that I had, in fact, told him to give me a blow job. Where I should have been shouting “faire les pompiers!”, (meaning “to get the firemen!”), I had been shouting “faire le pompier!” which meant “To give a blowjob!” I’d said it about five times to him in quick succession, the last three practically shouted.

I would have thought that, given the circumstances, the old man would still have understood what I meant. I was clearly a foreigner, and left out two S’s in a sentence, and looking at my father spurting blood, I can’t understand why he thought I’d be asking for a blowjob, instead of the much more likely, almost identical sounding request for the firemen.

Why on earth would he even think I wanted a blowjob? One minute I’m asking for serviettes, asking people to help me because my father is old and injured, clearly in distress – the next moment, without any noticeable change in either my tone of voice or situation, I’m suddenly demanding oral sex from an elderly, presumably heterosexual man, in front of my distressed mother and bleeding father.  Maybe he thought I needed something to calm me down, and thought he’d help.

And just what the fuck were the French thinking when they decided to make the request for firemen in their language almost indistinguishable from a demand for oral sex? Think how many countless lives have been lost in the confusion and awkwardness. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

I told my dad about the mistake later that day, while he half dozed through a cocktail of antibiotics, anti-inflammatory pills, painkillers and local rose. He laughed so much, he burst open the stitches that were holding his upper lip together.

My mum told me to go next door and get them to call the pompiers. I walked outside, and my hand paused over their doorbell. I thought better of it, and came back in, pretended I’d rung, but that they must be out.

We drove dad to the hospital ourselves. On the way, I wondered if any French people had thought they were getting a blow-job, and just ended up meeting a fireman.

Born Under A Bad Sign #4: Errol’s Car

It’s a Monday afternoon, and I’m walking back through an affluent area of London, hoping to get to the tube just before the rush hour starts. It’s a stiflingly muggy day, and I’ve been working for the last three hours with a friend writing some jokes for a speech he has to give. While I was at his house, I enjoyed a cup of coffee that his wife made. Proper coffee from a cafetiere with a plunger. 

One of my unrealised dreams is to be able to drink proper coffee from a cafetiere without the caffeine affecting me almost instantly, and bringing me out in an immediate full-body sweat. But much worse than the sweat is the five hours of uncontrollable anxious paranoia that follows. While I recognise very early on that the paranoia I’m suffering from is simply a chemical reaction to the coffee, the realisation does absolutely nothing to quell the anxiety. It’s a bit like being on fire – just because I know the exact reason why I’m suffering from the strange and overwhelming symptoms, it doesn’t actually rid me of the physical sensations.

Sweating and feeling a bit nauseous, and having passed a man with a bottle of beer who I think is trying to hide in a front garden so he can attack me as I wander by, I hear someone call out my surname. I’m nearly at the station – I can the steps leading up to it from where I am – a gruff man barks “Haynes!” I look up. 

Crossing the road towards me is a bald headed man in a suit, carrying a small valise under one arm. It takes me a moment to place him – his name is Errol, and he was in my year at school. I’ve not seen Errol for thirteen years. I’m slightly surprised that I place him so quickly, but then again, you never forget the school bully’s face. Even when you’re both now in your mid-thirties, and he looks entirely respectable. 

He puts his hand out to shake mine, and in the confusion as I try and process this unexpected situation, I instinctively attempt to hug him. I suppose I’m trying to show him that we’re good old pals despite the span of years (and the fact I once prayed – for one of only half a dozen times in my entire life – that he’d be killed somehow), but he reacts in no way to the hug, and this makes my actions seem entirely out of context. It marks me out immediately as being both hugely over familiar and conversely, entirely alien to standard social situations. Standing much to close to me – an unforeseen disadvantage to my initially coming too close by hugging him – and staring unflinchingly into the side of my face, he asks what I’ve been up to.

Close up, Errol is spectacular. Even as a child, he possessed a totally expressionless face and cold blank blue eyes – being bullied by him at twelve was akin to being menaced by a Great White Shark in grey twill shorts. It also made it seem that Errol’s cruelty wasn’t so much something he enjoyed inflicting or chose to do, so much as something that nature had simply hardwired into his system. 

He bullied because he was a bully. He gave you wedgies because he gave you wedgies. He lobbed a full Coke can across a room into Trevor Deeley’s face in 1993 because he lobbed full Coke cans across rooms into Trevor Deeley’s face in 1993. Why was Errol such a terrifying bully? You might as well ask the same of the Great White Shark.

I ask him if he lives round here – he says no, he’s just been in to see someone about business. I ask what he’s been up to. It turns out he works behind the scenes in some sort of horse-racing business online. I have no idea what this is, and even though I ask him in a friendly way to explain further, he doesn’t even try. Instead, he asks me where I’m off too now.

I presume he’s about to suggest we go for a pint in a local pub. I look all sad, scrunch my face up and half-heartedly blow my lips out in exasperation, saying I’m absolutely bushed, just on my way home, and am going to try and beat the rush hour. He asks me if I still live in Finchley. This startles me – how does he know where I live? I reply that I do, and he says that he does as well, and would I like a lift back there in his car?

I’m excited at this turn of events, and tell him that would be great. Without saying another word, he turns on his heel and we walk to his car, which is parked in a car park at the back of a supermarket. He has a sports car, but it’s about ten years old and all dented and dusty-looking. On the passenger seat is a large pack of baby wipes, and there’s children’s soft toys all over the back seats.

I get in as he puts his valise in the boot, and put my seatbelt on. As it clicks into place, I suddenly think “What the hell am I doing? Where’s Errol going to take me? What’s he going do to me?” I suddenly start picturing being driven for forty minutes to a reservoir in the middle of nowhere, him impassively stopping the car, and telling me to fucking get out right now, before driving off and leaving me to try and get home. The coffee isn’t helping things.

Errol gets in and before I can make up an excuse about needing to collect my dry-cleaning which I’d just forgotten about, we’re off. He drives very sensibly, but I presume this is just to lull me into a false sense of security. He mentions that he’s got to make it back for six as his children’s nanny leaves then, and if he’s late, he has to pay for a full extra hour. I think he’s just saying this to further put me off the scent.

We start driving towards Hampstead – that’s a good sign, that’s on the way home. Suddenly, he takes a right, and we’re in a suburban street I don’t recognise. My nerves start to scream. He’s telling me that he’s moving out of Finchley to be near a good state school, as he’s currently paying eleven hundred pounds a month to send his four-year-old to a private place in Belsize Park and he can’t afford it. It’s the same one that Melanie Sykes’ child goes to. He thinks she’s “bang tidy” and tells me that “she looks a million dollars, every single morning.”

He’s smiling a lot, saying that he and his wife have decided not to have another for the time being, and asking me if I have kids. I don’t. I imagine he’s fighting the irresistible urge to call me gay. That moment will come when he stops the car and I’m standing next to the reservoir. Then he will shout it, really scream it at me, as he speeds off. Patience, Errol. It will be sweeter. That’s what he must be thinking. Wait until then.

We’re driving down a road that comes out just past Golders Green. My heart leaps with relief as I realise we’re going in the right direction after all. But just before we get there, he turns again, down another nondescript road. Have I seen Paul Kettner? He’s doing well for himself. Got a house in Hampstead, nice house as well. Works in property finance, has really landed on his feet. I half hope he’ll stop the car now, punch me and push me out. Let’s just get it over with.

The waiting is the hardest part. The hope that the inevitable won’t happen, while knowing that it will. I begin to give up – like an elephant does when it knows it’s going to die, and just calmly marches into the jungle. No fuss, no difficulty – just accepting the inevitable with a heavy heart and a defeatist attitude. I think of begging for mercy now, but I think this might just make him react, and that I’ll still end up at the reservoir, but I will have been punched quite a lot beforehand. I could tell him we’re both adults now, that Errol doesn’t have to do this – but this is just what Errol does. It’s what he is. You might as well tell Wayne Sleep not to dance, or Bruno Tonioli not to shriek when he’s on television.

Minutes tick by and we carry on weaving down the quiet suburban roads. Errol’s telling me that one of our mutual friends who lives in Brussels might stay there for good, even though he finds the city a bit boring. He asks if I’ve spoken to him recently, and when I whimper, defeated, that no, I haven’t, he cheerfully grins (I’ve never seen him do that before) and says “Well, he’s still the same old Adam! I love him, but there’s no changing that boy!” He shakes his head slowly. “He said we should all try and get together. He always says how much he misses seeing you.” I hate Errol so much.

And suddenly, without warning, the car comes out into the road I live off. “There you go!” Errol smiles. “No traffic – whereabouts is it? It’s door to door service today!” I still can’t quite work out what went wrong with Errol’s plan, but clearly something has. I think about telling him where I live, but say it’s off down a side road, and make him drive past my house for a minute and then get out. He’ll never know where I actually live now! Ha! He thinks he’s so fucking clever, but guess what? I outsmarted him! Fuck you Errol! Yeah!

I get out. Errol turns the car, winds the window down, waves and gently toots the horn. He drives away. I breathe a sigh of relief as I watch his indicator flick and his car turns off further down the road. He must be gutted. His plan failed, and what ended up happening was he inadvertently gave me a lift home! How must that make him feel? I hope he can’t sleep tonight, the twat. It’s a delicious situation.

It takes me about four minutes to walk home, and when I get inside, I feel a wave of relief washing over me, and have to sit down. I got the better of Errol. I make myself a cup of tea to calm myself, and realise that the next time I see him, I’d really better be on my guard.

He’s bound to want to get his revenge.