www.paulcoia.com
But for a twist of fate I could have been born American. If my grandparents, who had sailed from Italy, had found decent pasta on Ellis Island they would probably have stayed. As it was, they took one look at the cuisine and rushed back to the docks eighty years ago, taking the first boat out and landing in Glasgow where the local haggis pizza and deep fried Mars bars won them over.
Recently I was in Chicago coaching the executives of a chocolate company, which was handy as I love chocolate and I love Americans too. Any nation that can take a sporting event in which no other country takes part and call it The World Series has got to be impossibly self centred, have loads of chutzpah or simply enjoy a great sense of humour. And that’s humour with a “u” by the way.
Writing this blog means I receive many emails from all around the world, but the Stateside ones usually just tell me off for my spelling. If you have a word processor package and the spell check slips from UK English to American English you’ll know just how different the two languages are. You say tomato, I say marinara.
The fact that the Americans have different spellings from us in Britain is due to a guy named Noah Webster who, in 1828, decided that English was just too posh for him as it was descended from Greek and Latin. Noah hadn’t much time for the classical languages having probably majored in Media Studies and I.T. so, like a spelling World Series, he decided to devise English that was solely American.
His dictionary, bound in Moroccan leather, became hugely popular in America but was ignored by the rest of the world till Hollywood intervened as Hope and Crosby journeyed to Africa with Dorothy Lamour singing one of the worst lyrics in movie history. “Like Webster’s dictionary we’re Morocco bound”.
Noah wanted to plough through the English language with his spelling plow and weed out the U in “colour”, “harbour”, “humour” and “favour”. He moved the actual sound of the words to centre, sorry center, stage and you know I think he was absolutely right. What’s wrong with spelling words in the way they are pronounced? It seems to me that Webster simplified things, unlike Hillary Clinton who coined the word misspeak which has five too many letters as it simply means “lie”.
So where I have problems with the language is not with the spellings. It’s the words. In the UK we travel upwards in high rise buildings using lifts. In The States they’re known as elevators while “lifts” are things Hollywood stars wear in their shoes. Here, bathrooms are rooms with baths in and often separate from the toilet, but over there when they ask for the bathroom the mean the loo. If you’ve ever had to clean difficult stains from your bath after an American visitor has left, you now know why.
In the UK we hold our trousers up with braces but over the water it’s suspenders which hold up your pants. When you think that to Brits suspenders are garter belts for ladies stockings and that pants are underwear, you have the recipe for total confusion and a few face slaps too.
George Bernard Shaw said that we are two nations separated by a common language, and he was obviously right. When I was a student, I worked in a Glasgow hotel as a waiter and night porter. One job was to ring the rooms to wake guests, but our head receptionist, Norma, had worked in a smaller hotel where waking someone in the morning involved knocking on their door. She used to ask people on checking in when they wanted “knocking up” in the morning. Every nationality understood her except for our American friends for whom getting “knocked up” means something completely different. They thought that hotels offering this level of personal service were going a bit beyond their remit.
I love the fact that America has the Statue of Liberty inscription vowing to shield “your poor, your huddled masses, and your celebrities you no longer want.” It’s solely down to their charity that we were able to offload Sarah Ferguson and Paul Burrell who both now make fortunes selling tat in malls and on shopping TV, saving them the indignity of holding garage sales here and getting rocks thrown at them.
They’ve also, graciously, taken to their bosom Naomi Campbell, a woman more unbalanced than a three wheeled Jeep but who could clean up the scary market next Halloween. Seeing her back here from her American home this week, and getting arrested for spitting at policemen as she was arrested on a plane, graphically shows why we should be grateful that The States has such compassion. We now just have to persuade them to take Andrew Lloyd Webber.
So you won’t find me having a go at America even though they have a go at me for my English spelling. Whether I’m doing business in New York, lying by a pool in Florida, or visiting relatives in California, I feel at home and I’m always grateful to be there.
Unfortunately I’ve come to realise, or realize as Webster would say, that you can’t have everything. Their chocolate sucks.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
The Land of The Me
www.paulcoia.com
I’ve found myself suffering from celebrity fatigue this week. Reading about petulant stars in the papers every day means you can get too much of a mood thing and find yourself with toothache from chewing over their bitter sweet public lives. They resemble a box of chocolates, all with self centres.
The more outrageous our celebs behave the better their PR people feel, and someone should really call in the parents of all involved and give them a good telling off. Take Mariah Carey, the singer, who once memorably said on the death of the King Hussein of Jordan “I loved Jordan, he was one of the greatest athletes of our time”. She abruptly halted an interview at the weekend because the host underestimated how many albums she’d sold. While you or I would have laughed it off, in The Land Of The Me her self important behaviour gained a thumbs up from her record company and acres of Press coverage.
Last week I wrote about celebrity TV health advisors with their internet degrees which are only useful when rolled up and used for colonic irrigation, and blow me if American celebrity Demi Moore doesn’t come out this week and say she’s on a health kick involving leeches. Of course leeches are nothing new in Hollywood, being tiny slug like creatures who usually get fifteen percent of their client’s earnings, but Moore’s leeches were the real, slimy, jungle bred deal.
The thought of having a creature like that stuck to you for hours makes me feel ill so goodness knows how the leeches felt.
The first rule of Celebrity is never, ever, get any older. Ms Moore is almost twenty years nearer to sitting on fluffy clouds with a harp than her current boyfriend so she’s ripe pickings for any charlatan who promises to make her look younger. If her body’s a temple, the front balconies have already been renovated, the rear porch has been lifted and underpinned, and now she’s looked at the settlement and cracks and has decided the building needs rendered.
Her celebrity ex husband, meantime, is getting his ear hair smoothed by a female who is younger than this year’s daffodils and has fewer lines than a spear carrier in a silent movie.
The story was covered on Sky News, delivered by a new star who looked a bit like their old one, but in a lopsided, distorted, just had a mild stroke, kind of way. It turned out she was indeed the old one back from plastic surgery having been signed off by her surgeon who, I assume, is an unsuccessful cartoonist. The poor woman now looks so plastic she could be swiped at Tesco in exchange for a week’s groceries.
One very well known daytime TV celebrity who brought out a keep fit video recently based on her dancing and trampoline fitness regime, sold it as a way to get the pounds to sail away. In fact they’d sailed away on good ship Surgery as she’d had her stomach stapled and the video company was paying someone to sit all day long in front of her fridge to stop her bingeing.
So why are these people so abnormal? I’m sure the explosion of gossip mags and web sites has made the mystique of celebrity disappear so they constantly have to reinvent themselves and change appearance in order to look interesting. In short, today’s celebrities are all suffering from the paparazzi virus and are going for treatment in ever sillier ways which is all feeding my celebrity fatigue.
I now dread seeing Amy Winehouse’s flaky skin and tattoos, Posh Beckham’s cellulite, Britney Spears’ bald bits or Kate Moss’s anything at all. I no longer want to read about the hundreds of men who have slept at the Paris Hilton or see videos of them enjoying their stay. I want, in short, for our celebrities to go away and shut up.
They weren’t always like this. Rock Hudson kept his sexuality secret through all his career yet if he were alive today he would feel pressured in to clubbing nightly while wearing tight rubber shorts. His screen wife, Doris Day, would be adopting Vietnamese babies, Mae West would be in Hello magazine every week with a new husband, and Bogart and Bacall would have their own fashion ranges.
Even fiction would have to change to reflect modern spotlight life with Sherlock Holmes in and out of rehab for his “habit”, Hercules coming out as a steroid abuser and Frankenstein’s monster wearing sunglasses and big hats to cover the surgery work whilst protesting he’d walked in to a door.
I say let’s ditch these modern day celebrities and look for ones we deserve. The old fashioned type with a bit of mystique and charisma. The unattainable who rationed their appearances and let their work do the talking. No more pretend millionaires existing on overdrafts but back to the real ones carelessly buying up islands and yachts to get away from the public and enabling us to get away from them.
Celebrities! Can’t live with them, can’t live without their millions…….. as Heather Mills might say.
I’ve found myself suffering from celebrity fatigue this week. Reading about petulant stars in the papers every day means you can get too much of a mood thing and find yourself with toothache from chewing over their bitter sweet public lives. They resemble a box of chocolates, all with self centres.
The more outrageous our celebs behave the better their PR people feel, and someone should really call in the parents of all involved and give them a good telling off. Take Mariah Carey, the singer, who once memorably said on the death of the King Hussein of Jordan “I loved Jordan, he was one of the greatest athletes of our time”. She abruptly halted an interview at the weekend because the host underestimated how many albums she’d sold. While you or I would have laughed it off, in The Land Of The Me her self important behaviour gained a thumbs up from her record company and acres of Press coverage.
Last week I wrote about celebrity TV health advisors with their internet degrees which are only useful when rolled up and used for colonic irrigation, and blow me if American celebrity Demi Moore doesn’t come out this week and say she’s on a health kick involving leeches. Of course leeches are nothing new in Hollywood, being tiny slug like creatures who usually get fifteen percent of their client’s earnings, but Moore’s leeches were the real, slimy, jungle bred deal.
The thought of having a creature like that stuck to you for hours makes me feel ill so goodness knows how the leeches felt.
The first rule of Celebrity is never, ever, get any older. Ms Moore is almost twenty years nearer to sitting on fluffy clouds with a harp than her current boyfriend so she’s ripe pickings for any charlatan who promises to make her look younger. If her body’s a temple, the front balconies have already been renovated, the rear porch has been lifted and underpinned, and now she’s looked at the settlement and cracks and has decided the building needs rendered.
Her celebrity ex husband, meantime, is getting his ear hair smoothed by a female who is younger than this year’s daffodils and has fewer lines than a spear carrier in a silent movie.
The story was covered on Sky News, delivered by a new star who looked a bit like their old one, but in a lopsided, distorted, just had a mild stroke, kind of way. It turned out she was indeed the old one back from plastic surgery having been signed off by her surgeon who, I assume, is an unsuccessful cartoonist. The poor woman now looks so plastic she could be swiped at Tesco in exchange for a week’s groceries.
One very well known daytime TV celebrity who brought out a keep fit video recently based on her dancing and trampoline fitness regime, sold it as a way to get the pounds to sail away. In fact they’d sailed away on good ship Surgery as she’d had her stomach stapled and the video company was paying someone to sit all day long in front of her fridge to stop her bingeing.
So why are these people so abnormal? I’m sure the explosion of gossip mags and web sites has made the mystique of celebrity disappear so they constantly have to reinvent themselves and change appearance in order to look interesting. In short, today’s celebrities are all suffering from the paparazzi virus and are going for treatment in ever sillier ways which is all feeding my celebrity fatigue.
I now dread seeing Amy Winehouse’s flaky skin and tattoos, Posh Beckham’s cellulite, Britney Spears’ bald bits or Kate Moss’s anything at all. I no longer want to read about the hundreds of men who have slept at the Paris Hilton or see videos of them enjoying their stay. I want, in short, for our celebrities to go away and shut up.
They weren’t always like this. Rock Hudson kept his sexuality secret through all his career yet if he were alive today he would feel pressured in to clubbing nightly while wearing tight rubber shorts. His screen wife, Doris Day, would be adopting Vietnamese babies, Mae West would be in Hello magazine every week with a new husband, and Bogart and Bacall would have their own fashion ranges.
Even fiction would have to change to reflect modern spotlight life with Sherlock Holmes in and out of rehab for his “habit”, Hercules coming out as a steroid abuser and Frankenstein’s monster wearing sunglasses and big hats to cover the surgery work whilst protesting he’d walked in to a door.
I say let’s ditch these modern day celebrities and look for ones we deserve. The old fashioned type with a bit of mystique and charisma. The unattainable who rationed their appearances and let their work do the talking. No more pretend millionaires existing on overdrafts but back to the real ones carelessly buying up islands and yachts to get away from the public and enabling us to get away from them.
Celebrities! Can’t live with them, can’t live without their millions…….. as Heather Mills might say.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Healthy Eating
www.paulcoia.com
As I sit here, bloated from the massacre of chocolate Easter bunnies and tired from undoing my trousers to let my expanding gut out to meet the neighbours, I’m reflecting on the fact that we live in health obsessed times.
I quite like living in this millennium because unlike when rickets, scurvy and the workhouse meant you were dead before your father had hitched up his baggy pants and returned with his flat cap from the fields, we will all live now to be one hundred and eighty, have skin that glows like a saint’s halo and our regular visitor, Mr Constipation, will be so yesterday. At least that’s if the diet devils are right.
No one can escape the all pervasive advice on what’s good and bad for health just now, and it’s made communal meals a nightmare. Host a dinner party and one friend will be avoiding red meat while another will be going cold turkey on starch – that’s cold, organic and corn fed, turkey of course. A further mate will want low carbs whilst yet another will be on some diet that means they can only eat buffalo that grazed on a west facing slope and must be washed down with Holy water bottled by Evian at Lourdes.
These supposedly good food days have spawned the likes of Gillian McKeith, the woman who definitely isn’t a doctor but is allowed to poke around on TV in other people’s poo. Funnily enough, when her name comes up I always think of back passages as I’d love to lure her to a dark one and send in the boys to sort her out. I can’t decide whether she really does get people to live longer or it just seems long because of her being so relentlessly annoying. Don’t you just want to smack her chops with a sackload of organic peaches, preferably still in the tins?
Even the less ghastly health witches in her coven make me feel life’s not worth the effort.
This week I read one of them giving some advice for how to tackle Athlete’s Foot. She wrote in a national newspaper, The Daily Mail since you ask, that we should crush cloves of garlic, smear them between our toes, and then wrap our foot in a cloth before going to bed. Now just stop for a moment and think about this. Can you imagine the smell or the comments from your bedmate? It would be a great form of contraception but just picture the dreams you’d have as giant Italian sausages, dressed as Dracula, chased you through town. Unless you work in a pizzeria might the pong hovering around you next day cause problems much worse than Athlete’s Foot? Perhaps it would clear a seat or three on the train to work, but what a completely useless, impractical, idea.
Another guy I interviewed on radio, after asking me to move our chairs closer to the window to let in good vibes, demanded to know what medical problems I had, saying he was going to use his powers of ancient herbal remedies to cure me. Despite knowing better and realising these happy clappy, dippy, hippies are a con, I mentioned my sinuses and, of course, he said he had already guessed that was the problem. His internet bought certificate presumably boasted a degree in Herbology, Feng Shui and Mind Reading.
He decided that my cure was contained in a jar of supermarket beetroot juice. I wasn’t to drink this red vinegar but, rather, gargle with it and instead of spitting the stuff out, I should expel it by forcing the gunk down my nose. Stupidly I tried and it not only blew my few brain cells to smithereens but for weeks I had a red tip to my nose that looked like I was on a permanent bender.
If you think it’s difficult to set yourself up as a health and fitness expert, think again because the papers can’t get enough of this rubbish. One of them printed this week the following tip. “When mixing ingredients in the kitchen, don’t use an electric blender but do it manually. This will use four calories per minute and give your wrist muscles a workout.” When I read that, I wanted to find the writer and give my wrist muscles a workout by making a well known gesture right under his nose.
But this modern day witch doctor stuff continues to gain momentum and take hold. My well meaning pal at the gym has been studying food intake and allergies and despairs at my belief that good food went down hill after school dinners. He reckons we are all either Protein or Carbohydrate people. Find out which type you are, he says, then stick to your food type and you’ll live forever, fly like Superman and all your kids will become beautiful millionaires.
I filled in his exhaustive questionnaire only to find I’m exactly half way between the two types. The last thing these people want is to be stuck without an answer so, after admitting he’d not come across this before and, after careful examination of his books, he advised that I should only eat porridge - for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So, if you’re thinking of inviting him and me over for dinner, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Mind you, invite me on my own and I’ll eat any old shit you serve up. Unless, of course, Gillian McKeith’s been poking around in it first.
As I sit here, bloated from the massacre of chocolate Easter bunnies and tired from undoing my trousers to let my expanding gut out to meet the neighbours, I’m reflecting on the fact that we live in health obsessed times.
I quite like living in this millennium because unlike when rickets, scurvy and the workhouse meant you were dead before your father had hitched up his baggy pants and returned with his flat cap from the fields, we will all live now to be one hundred and eighty, have skin that glows like a saint’s halo and our regular visitor, Mr Constipation, will be so yesterday. At least that’s if the diet devils are right.
No one can escape the all pervasive advice on what’s good and bad for health just now, and it’s made communal meals a nightmare. Host a dinner party and one friend will be avoiding red meat while another will be going cold turkey on starch – that’s cold, organic and corn fed, turkey of course. A further mate will want low carbs whilst yet another will be on some diet that means they can only eat buffalo that grazed on a west facing slope and must be washed down with Holy water bottled by Evian at Lourdes.
These supposedly good food days have spawned the likes of Gillian McKeith, the woman who definitely isn’t a doctor but is allowed to poke around on TV in other people’s poo. Funnily enough, when her name comes up I always think of back passages as I’d love to lure her to a dark one and send in the boys to sort her out. I can’t decide whether she really does get people to live longer or it just seems long because of her being so relentlessly annoying. Don’t you just want to smack her chops with a sackload of organic peaches, preferably still in the tins?
Even the less ghastly health witches in her coven make me feel life’s not worth the effort.
This week I read one of them giving some advice for how to tackle Athlete’s Foot. She wrote in a national newspaper, The Daily Mail since you ask, that we should crush cloves of garlic, smear them between our toes, and then wrap our foot in a cloth before going to bed. Now just stop for a moment and think about this. Can you imagine the smell or the comments from your bedmate? It would be a great form of contraception but just picture the dreams you’d have as giant Italian sausages, dressed as Dracula, chased you through town. Unless you work in a pizzeria might the pong hovering around you next day cause problems much worse than Athlete’s Foot? Perhaps it would clear a seat or three on the train to work, but what a completely useless, impractical, idea.
Another guy I interviewed on radio, after asking me to move our chairs closer to the window to let in good vibes, demanded to know what medical problems I had, saying he was going to use his powers of ancient herbal remedies to cure me. Despite knowing better and realising these happy clappy, dippy, hippies are a con, I mentioned my sinuses and, of course, he said he had already guessed that was the problem. His internet bought certificate presumably boasted a degree in Herbology, Feng Shui and Mind Reading.
He decided that my cure was contained in a jar of supermarket beetroot juice. I wasn’t to drink this red vinegar but, rather, gargle with it and instead of spitting the stuff out, I should expel it by forcing the gunk down my nose. Stupidly I tried and it not only blew my few brain cells to smithereens but for weeks I had a red tip to my nose that looked like I was on a permanent bender.
If you think it’s difficult to set yourself up as a health and fitness expert, think again because the papers can’t get enough of this rubbish. One of them printed this week the following tip. “When mixing ingredients in the kitchen, don’t use an electric blender but do it manually. This will use four calories per minute and give your wrist muscles a workout.” When I read that, I wanted to find the writer and give my wrist muscles a workout by making a well known gesture right under his nose.
But this modern day witch doctor stuff continues to gain momentum and take hold. My well meaning pal at the gym has been studying food intake and allergies and despairs at my belief that good food went down hill after school dinners. He reckons we are all either Protein or Carbohydrate people. Find out which type you are, he says, then stick to your food type and you’ll live forever, fly like Superman and all your kids will become beautiful millionaires.
I filled in his exhaustive questionnaire only to find I’m exactly half way between the two types. The last thing these people want is to be stuck without an answer so, after admitting he’d not come across this before and, after careful examination of his books, he advised that I should only eat porridge - for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So, if you’re thinking of inviting him and me over for dinner, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Mind you, invite me on my own and I’ll eat any old shit you serve up. Unless, of course, Gillian McKeith’s been poking around in it first.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Mel
www.paulcoia.com
I had a dream last night about Mel Gibson.
Now this wouldn’t normally be noteworthy as we would be just racing round the streets with our feet up on the Chevvy dashboard, sorting out the baddies and admiring each other’s haircuts. As heroes we would tend not to notice the impossibility of the car accelerating round corners while both of us had our feet up on the front window.
I’ve met Gibson before and he seems a good bloke in a not very tall guy kind of way, but in my dream he was standing on stage in a tuxedo and towering over me. He was announcing on TV “And the Award for the best Award awarded at an Awards show goes to………..”.
I woke up in a sweat, relieved to find, firstly that I hadn’t shrunk, and secondly that the awards season seems to be over for another year. With the Empire Film Awards last week following the Oscars, The Grammys, Baftas ,The Brits, Golden Globes, Emmys and all the others, the beginning of the year seems like one prize giving day after another. I’m the only person I know who hasn’t won anything, although I still have hopes for the Scots Italian Paul of the Year Awards.
I thought The Brits were the most entertaining of the ceremonies, hosted by Sharon and her litter of Osbornes in such a hopeless, bad audition, style way that it was addictive. Ozzie, who is the Prince of Darkness and the King of Confusion, was given just six words to say all night - “Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Paul McCartney” – and he even got that wrong, saying them at the wrong moment and getting stopped half way through. Now that takes some doing.
But at least the speeches didn’t go on too long. Gwyneth Paltrow started it at the Oscars a few years ago by thanking everyone in the Chinese Yellow Pages – or are they known as White Pages over there? – and then bursting in to tears. Now, to quote the spam emails I get, length wins every time. Last month, when I hosted a ceremony for those working behind the scenes in cinema, one acceptance speech went on so long I thought I would miss the plane – for my summer holidays next August.
Awards ceremonies, of course, should recognise achievement, but looking at the Royal Television Society Awards and The Radio Industry Awards of this week I noticed newscasters John Suchet and Fiona Bruce receiving trophies for reading the news on TV. Now I’m sure they’re both top people who buy The Big Issue, chant for peace and spend weekends giving swimming lessons to endangered polar bears, but come on! An award for reading out loud? My ten year old daughter just gets a gold star.
I think my favourite award ceremony of the past few weeks has to be the Photo Marketing Association of America who held their function in Florida to celebrate all that’s good about American photography and, after careful consideration, gave one of their top prizes to a Photo Kiosk!!! Yep, the winner was an inanimate booth made of steel and plywood that sits in a shopping mall. As I wasn’t invited along I don’t know if the booth got up on stage and thanked the carpenter who made her what she is today, but I hope she found space to complain about the number of people who have entered her over the past twelve months.
I must here admit to my shame that I’ve compered my fair share of these awards ceremonies, some good, some laughable, and I think the silliest award ceremony I’ve ever hosted was for The Most Comfortable Shoes of the Year, sponsored I seem to remember by Odour Eaters. To watch winner after winner thank buckle makers, machinists and shoelace manufacturers was sole (cheap gag) destroying.
Later, at the charity auction, I tried to raise money with a pair of boots worn by England’s centre forward who had played badly in that week’s international soccer game. I opened with “as worn by Gary Lineker, so almost unused.” It was met with stony silence.
And that’s the problem at these ceremonies as humour tends to be in short supply, especially after a few drinks. Those who win get drunk and those who are unsuccessful fix a grin, seethe underneath and then go home and stick photos of the winners on their kids’ dolls and push pins in.
But who needs a trophy anyway? When you’ve been given your award there’s always the problem of what to do with it. If you modestly put it in your toilet out of the way, visitors think you’re deliberately playing it down in a show off way. And if you put it away in a drawer then what’s the point of having it?
So, when I get awards, I proudly show them off in my display cabinet at home for all to see. If you want to come round to look at my First Communion medal, my Scouts Skills badge or my Highly Recommended pennant from the Glasgow Under Tens Elocution Festival, you are more than welcome.
Just don’t tell Mel about the Scouts badge. Heroes don’t do cookery.
I had a dream last night about Mel Gibson.
Now this wouldn’t normally be noteworthy as we would be just racing round the streets with our feet up on the Chevvy dashboard, sorting out the baddies and admiring each other’s haircuts. As heroes we would tend not to notice the impossibility of the car accelerating round corners while both of us had our feet up on the front window.
I’ve met Gibson before and he seems a good bloke in a not very tall guy kind of way, but in my dream he was standing on stage in a tuxedo and towering over me. He was announcing on TV “And the Award for the best Award awarded at an Awards show goes to………..”.
I woke up in a sweat, relieved to find, firstly that I hadn’t shrunk, and secondly that the awards season seems to be over for another year. With the Empire Film Awards last week following the Oscars, The Grammys, Baftas ,The Brits, Golden Globes, Emmys and all the others, the beginning of the year seems like one prize giving day after another. I’m the only person I know who hasn’t won anything, although I still have hopes for the Scots Italian Paul of the Year Awards.
I thought The Brits were the most entertaining of the ceremonies, hosted by Sharon and her litter of Osbornes in such a hopeless, bad audition, style way that it was addictive. Ozzie, who is the Prince of Darkness and the King of Confusion, was given just six words to say all night - “Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Paul McCartney” – and he even got that wrong, saying them at the wrong moment and getting stopped half way through. Now that takes some doing.
But at least the speeches didn’t go on too long. Gwyneth Paltrow started it at the Oscars a few years ago by thanking everyone in the Chinese Yellow Pages – or are they known as White Pages over there? – and then bursting in to tears. Now, to quote the spam emails I get, length wins every time. Last month, when I hosted a ceremony for those working behind the scenes in cinema, one acceptance speech went on so long I thought I would miss the plane – for my summer holidays next August.
Awards ceremonies, of course, should recognise achievement, but looking at the Royal Television Society Awards and The Radio Industry Awards of this week I noticed newscasters John Suchet and Fiona Bruce receiving trophies for reading the news on TV. Now I’m sure they’re both top people who buy The Big Issue, chant for peace and spend weekends giving swimming lessons to endangered polar bears, but come on! An award for reading out loud? My ten year old daughter just gets a gold star.
I think my favourite award ceremony of the past few weeks has to be the Photo Marketing Association of America who held their function in Florida to celebrate all that’s good about American photography and, after careful consideration, gave one of their top prizes to a Photo Kiosk!!! Yep, the winner was an inanimate booth made of steel and plywood that sits in a shopping mall. As I wasn’t invited along I don’t know if the booth got up on stage and thanked the carpenter who made her what she is today, but I hope she found space to complain about the number of people who have entered her over the past twelve months.
I must here admit to my shame that I’ve compered my fair share of these awards ceremonies, some good, some laughable, and I think the silliest award ceremony I’ve ever hosted was for The Most Comfortable Shoes of the Year, sponsored I seem to remember by Odour Eaters. To watch winner after winner thank buckle makers, machinists and shoelace manufacturers was sole (cheap gag) destroying.
Later, at the charity auction, I tried to raise money with a pair of boots worn by England’s centre forward who had played badly in that week’s international soccer game. I opened with “as worn by Gary Lineker, so almost unused.” It was met with stony silence.
And that’s the problem at these ceremonies as humour tends to be in short supply, especially after a few drinks. Those who win get drunk and those who are unsuccessful fix a grin, seethe underneath and then go home and stick photos of the winners on their kids’ dolls and push pins in.
But who needs a trophy anyway? When you’ve been given your award there’s always the problem of what to do with it. If you modestly put it in your toilet out of the way, visitors think you’re deliberately playing it down in a show off way. And if you put it away in a drawer then what’s the point of having it?
So, when I get awards, I proudly show them off in my display cabinet at home for all to see. If you want to come round to look at my First Communion medal, my Scouts Skills badge or my Highly Recommended pennant from the Glasgow Under Tens Elocution Festival, you are more than welcome.
Just don’t tell Mel about the Scouts badge. Heroes don’t do cookery.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Here Comes The Mirror Man
www.paulcoia.com
I often end up talking to myself and even though the company’s boring I always win any arguments. I don’t do this just because no one else wants to talk to me - well most of the time anyway - but I caught myself at it again this morning whilst looking in the mirror.
Now it would be pointless for me to get in to a bragging contest about my problems being greater than yours but, whatever your worries, at least you don’t have to see my reflection first thing in the morning. I have one of those faces that look fine in real life but wonky in the mirror, what maths teachers would call unsymmetrical but I like to call Shrek like as I always wanted to look like a movie star.
I did think that my Hollywood looks were getting the recognition they deserve on Wednesday when I took a window seat in Marble Arch and sat with a sandwich. The sandwich wasn’t a great conversationalist so I ate it and noticed a girl looking at me through the window and smiling.
Another two girls did the same and my ego started to inflate but was soon punctured as a hairy builder in a safety vest followed suit. I then realised that the window was tinted, acting as a mirror outside, and they’d been admiring themselves instead of me. Serves me right, but apart from rare occasions like this I’m no vainer than anyone else who looks at their reflection fifty times an hour. On Wednesday, however, I admit I went to see a plastic surgeon.
Before you make assumptions, this has nothing to do with my generous nose which made me hide away in my teens as it grew and now ensures my shoes never get wet in the rain. Nor was it to fix my ears which seem to be getting bigger each day and now receive Freeview and a couple of dodgy German porn channels. If we meet and my ears suddenly prick up you’ll know why.
But I did go for plastic surgery this week and the result of my visit has been a bit problematic as inwardly I still feel like James Bond but outwardly I look as if Oddjob walked all over my face wearing stiletto heels. Each time I look in the mirror at my face full of sticking plasters my wife tells me there aren’t enough of them as she can still just about see me. I think she secretly hopes that when the plasters come off, just like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, I’ll disappear.
I’ve been stared at in the street and pointed at on tube trains, and to everyone who’s asked I’ve simply said, very quietly, “Face Lift!” That soon shut them up.
The truth is much more mundane of course as I simply had moles removed. Three of them have been sitting on my face since I was little so it was like seeing much loved family pets getting put down. I don’t know what I was expecting but the treatment was as painless and straightforward as life threatening, emergency, surgery can be. Unfortunately they didn’t remove my exaggeration gland at the same time.
I had sat in the waiting room with all sorts of people, some normal others barking mad, and there was the expected sprinkling of lilo lipped Wimbledon Wives dropping by for a bit of plumping, whilst the Botox fairy had obviously been drunk when visiting some. I spoke to a poor soul who was there for his first consult and had eye bags so large even British Airways couldn’t lose them. God help his patients!
Then, after ten minutes, I was shown in to a small room and asked to lay down on the bed. The surgeon, a nice straight talking South African named Fleming, arrived soon after. “Take off your shirt Mr Coia, we don’t want blood all over it and ruining the pattern.” What?
Blood? I hadn’t thought of that. This was starting to get serious. I imagined he’d have a magic rubber which would just erase the moles, but here he was getting scalpels ready. I noticed a crack on the wall above my head. “What about your ceiling?” I asked to change the subject. “Don’t worry”, he said, “it won’t spurt that high unless I make a real mess of it”. I think he was kidding.
After a few minutes with a marker pen, he gave me some local anaesthetic and then proceeded to scrape away. It was over in a few minutes, job done and patient survived, although patient nearly fainted when he was shown the removed moles. I don’t know what I was expecting but these things looked like large M&Ms and I’ll never eat another one again - that’s the M&Ms I mean, not the moles.
I left with instructions on how to change my plasters and smear stuff made from seaweed on my skin which speeds up the healing. So I’m fine till the tide goes out.
The reason I had the moles removed is that they were getting bigger every week and were headed for meeting somewhere around my chin leaving me looking like a chocolate button. So I like to think there were valid, medical, reasons for my visit to the surgeon rather than just my vanity.
But hang on. Writing about it in a blog? Now that really is vain. I must discuss this further. Just me and my mirror.
I often end up talking to myself and even though the company’s boring I always win any arguments. I don’t do this just because no one else wants to talk to me - well most of the time anyway - but I caught myself at it again this morning whilst looking in the mirror.
Now it would be pointless for me to get in to a bragging contest about my problems being greater than yours but, whatever your worries, at least you don’t have to see my reflection first thing in the morning. I have one of those faces that look fine in real life but wonky in the mirror, what maths teachers would call unsymmetrical but I like to call Shrek like as I always wanted to look like a movie star.
I did think that my Hollywood looks were getting the recognition they deserve on Wednesday when I took a window seat in Marble Arch and sat with a sandwich. The sandwich wasn’t a great conversationalist so I ate it and noticed a girl looking at me through the window and smiling.
Another two girls did the same and my ego started to inflate but was soon punctured as a hairy builder in a safety vest followed suit. I then realised that the window was tinted, acting as a mirror outside, and they’d been admiring themselves instead of me. Serves me right, but apart from rare occasions like this I’m no vainer than anyone else who looks at their reflection fifty times an hour. On Wednesday, however, I admit I went to see a plastic surgeon.
Before you make assumptions, this has nothing to do with my generous nose which made me hide away in my teens as it grew and now ensures my shoes never get wet in the rain. Nor was it to fix my ears which seem to be getting bigger each day and now receive Freeview and a couple of dodgy German porn channels. If we meet and my ears suddenly prick up you’ll know why.
But I did go for plastic surgery this week and the result of my visit has been a bit problematic as inwardly I still feel like James Bond but outwardly I look as if Oddjob walked all over my face wearing stiletto heels. Each time I look in the mirror at my face full of sticking plasters my wife tells me there aren’t enough of them as she can still just about see me. I think she secretly hopes that when the plasters come off, just like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, I’ll disappear.
I’ve been stared at in the street and pointed at on tube trains, and to everyone who’s asked I’ve simply said, very quietly, “Face Lift!” That soon shut them up.
The truth is much more mundane of course as I simply had moles removed. Three of them have been sitting on my face since I was little so it was like seeing much loved family pets getting put down. I don’t know what I was expecting but the treatment was as painless and straightforward as life threatening, emergency, surgery can be. Unfortunately they didn’t remove my exaggeration gland at the same time.
I had sat in the waiting room with all sorts of people, some normal others barking mad, and there was the expected sprinkling of lilo lipped Wimbledon Wives dropping by for a bit of plumping, whilst the Botox fairy had obviously been drunk when visiting some. I spoke to a poor soul who was there for his first consult and had eye bags so large even British Airways couldn’t lose them. God help his patients!
Then, after ten minutes, I was shown in to a small room and asked to lay down on the bed. The surgeon, a nice straight talking South African named Fleming, arrived soon after. “Take off your shirt Mr Coia, we don’t want blood all over it and ruining the pattern.” What?
Blood? I hadn’t thought of that. This was starting to get serious. I imagined he’d have a magic rubber which would just erase the moles, but here he was getting scalpels ready. I noticed a crack on the wall above my head. “What about your ceiling?” I asked to change the subject. “Don’t worry”, he said, “it won’t spurt that high unless I make a real mess of it”. I think he was kidding.
After a few minutes with a marker pen, he gave me some local anaesthetic and then proceeded to scrape away. It was over in a few minutes, job done and patient survived, although patient nearly fainted when he was shown the removed moles. I don’t know what I was expecting but these things looked like large M&Ms and I’ll never eat another one again - that’s the M&Ms I mean, not the moles.
I left with instructions on how to change my plasters and smear stuff made from seaweed on my skin which speeds up the healing. So I’m fine till the tide goes out.
The reason I had the moles removed is that they were getting bigger every week and were headed for meeting somewhere around my chin leaving me looking like a chocolate button. So I like to think there were valid, medical, reasons for my visit to the surgeon rather than just my vanity.
But hang on. Writing about it in a blog? Now that really is vain. I must discuss this further. Just me and my mirror.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
God Save Our Anthem
www.paulcoia.com
I am not one to jump to conclusions and brand people as stereotypes, but I do make exceptions now and again. I firmly believe, in my caring, non judgemental way, that anyone who rings a TV or radio station to complain is a sad, lonely wallflower who is hated by their neighbours, has too many cats, probably owns a shopping bag on wheels and eats out of Tupperware on park benches.
I read this week that the Colonel and Mrs Angry brigade have picked up their telephones and complained to the BBC about wall to wall coverage of this season’s Six Nations rugby. This, of course, is what happens when the older technophobe generation can’t let off steam by writing a blog each week.
The nub of the complaint is that the Home Counties homeys feel Saturday afternoon TV should be sport free and filled with old black and white movies, although personally I’d rather eat slug pellets off a sweaty wrestler’s bum than watch Bette Davis do her eyebrow acting for ninety minutes.
However, at the risk of sounding as if Mr Tupperware is my best friend, I want to make a complaint too. Even if you hate rugby you’ll recognise my feelings here as my issue is that my team, Scotland, are so bad we couldn’t win a match if the other team were blindfolded and drugged, then bound hand and foot with barbed wire and allowed to play only one half. We are so woeful our players couldn’t find the line if it was made of coke and there was a police sniffer dog strapped to each player.
It’s become so bad I’m thinking of changing nationality. Not to English you understand – after all, I’m annoyed rather than mentally unstable. No, I’m thinking of becoming a Kiwi. A bit of a thigh slapping dance before the match, stick your tongues out at the opposition, grind their faces in your tattoos then home to wander the mountains with Master Frodo. Sorted.
But until my nationality application is heard I’m left wondering why we, the Scots, are so awful at sport. Our football team didn’t qualify, again, for the European Championships this year and it’s a given that we have no tactics, skill, speed, communication, flair or inventiveness. But other than that we’re fine.
I think, however, I’ve identified a reason for our disasters that the commentators have missed. It’s not just the strips which look like my ten year old daughter put them together from off cuts in her dressing up box. I think the real reason we’re losing every game is that we have such a boring, useless, uninspiring national anthem. At the risk of sounding treasonable, it’s time to say The Flower of Scotland is pants. If it’s a flower then it’s a pansy!
As Scottish fans singing God Save The Queen seemed more and more stupid with our resurgence of national identity, we turned a few years ago to a folk song from The Corries about sending the English home again to “think again”. Which is fine when you’re winning, but when you can’t even send the Lichtenstein Over Sixties Ballroom reserves back with a few things to think about then it’s empty posturing. Add to that the sight of Ronnie Brown of The Corries singing it before matches with his ad libbing of “Come On” every few lines and you expect he’ll soon throw in “Get In There”, “You Beauty” and “The referee’s a Hun”. You can see why we’re a laughing stock.
To listen to the Welsh anthem is to be moved to tears by passion and pride. The Italian one seems to me to have the right dose of military sounding noise and the French one might sound like an old Beatles song but is stirring and unassailable.
Because of religious issues over a united North and South team, the Irish get two anthems. One is the traditional one that is even available as a download sung by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (how cool is that?) and the other is the result of a competition won by Phil Coulter, the man who wrote Shang A Lang and Puppet On A String. Now that’s class.
Billy Connolly pointed out that the English anthem was a dirge and should be replaced by the theme from The Archers and even Lord Goldsmith announced two months ago that God Save The Queen needs updating for a modern, integrated society – perhaps to the catchy God/Allah/Jehovah Save The Queen (Whoever He Is).
I reckon that if Ireland can choose their anthem with a contest then so can we. Let’s have a national X Factor style show to write new anthems for Scotland and England. We’ll get hold of some talented song writers and ask them to write something inspiring we can all sing with pride. Terry Wogan should act as host and we’ll have the English ones sung by folkies in pullovers and the Scots ones by The Proclaimers in kilts. Then we’ll throw it open to a telephone vote.
The passion of the Welsh anthem and the ferocity of the New Zealand Haka must be worth ten points as the opposition get scared even before kick off so, whichever song wins for Scotland, we have to have the fear factor too.
Perhaps we could get Ronnie Brown to sing in tune. It may not scare anyone but at least it would confuse them.
I am not one to jump to conclusions and brand people as stereotypes, but I do make exceptions now and again. I firmly believe, in my caring, non judgemental way, that anyone who rings a TV or radio station to complain is a sad, lonely wallflower who is hated by their neighbours, has too many cats, probably owns a shopping bag on wheels and eats out of Tupperware on park benches.
I read this week that the Colonel and Mrs Angry brigade have picked up their telephones and complained to the BBC about wall to wall coverage of this season’s Six Nations rugby. This, of course, is what happens when the older technophobe generation can’t let off steam by writing a blog each week.
The nub of the complaint is that the Home Counties homeys feel Saturday afternoon TV should be sport free and filled with old black and white movies, although personally I’d rather eat slug pellets off a sweaty wrestler’s bum than watch Bette Davis do her eyebrow acting for ninety minutes.
However, at the risk of sounding as if Mr Tupperware is my best friend, I want to make a complaint too. Even if you hate rugby you’ll recognise my feelings here as my issue is that my team, Scotland, are so bad we couldn’t win a match if the other team were blindfolded and drugged, then bound hand and foot with barbed wire and allowed to play only one half. We are so woeful our players couldn’t find the line if it was made of coke and there was a police sniffer dog strapped to each player.
It’s become so bad I’m thinking of changing nationality. Not to English you understand – after all, I’m annoyed rather than mentally unstable. No, I’m thinking of becoming a Kiwi. A bit of a thigh slapping dance before the match, stick your tongues out at the opposition, grind their faces in your tattoos then home to wander the mountains with Master Frodo. Sorted.
But until my nationality application is heard I’m left wondering why we, the Scots, are so awful at sport. Our football team didn’t qualify, again, for the European Championships this year and it’s a given that we have no tactics, skill, speed, communication, flair or inventiveness. But other than that we’re fine.
I think, however, I’ve identified a reason for our disasters that the commentators have missed. It’s not just the strips which look like my ten year old daughter put them together from off cuts in her dressing up box. I think the real reason we’re losing every game is that we have such a boring, useless, uninspiring national anthem. At the risk of sounding treasonable, it’s time to say The Flower of Scotland is pants. If it’s a flower then it’s a pansy!
As Scottish fans singing God Save The Queen seemed more and more stupid with our resurgence of national identity, we turned a few years ago to a folk song from The Corries about sending the English home again to “think again”. Which is fine when you’re winning, but when you can’t even send the Lichtenstein Over Sixties Ballroom reserves back with a few things to think about then it’s empty posturing. Add to that the sight of Ronnie Brown of The Corries singing it before matches with his ad libbing of “Come On” every few lines and you expect he’ll soon throw in “Get In There”, “You Beauty” and “The referee’s a Hun”. You can see why we’re a laughing stock.
To listen to the Welsh anthem is to be moved to tears by passion and pride. The Italian one seems to me to have the right dose of military sounding noise and the French one might sound like an old Beatles song but is stirring and unassailable.
Because of religious issues over a united North and South team, the Irish get two anthems. One is the traditional one that is even available as a download sung by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (how cool is that?) and the other is the result of a competition won by Phil Coulter, the man who wrote Shang A Lang and Puppet On A String. Now that’s class.
Billy Connolly pointed out that the English anthem was a dirge and should be replaced by the theme from The Archers and even Lord Goldsmith announced two months ago that God Save The Queen needs updating for a modern, integrated society – perhaps to the catchy God/Allah/Jehovah Save The Queen (Whoever He Is).
I reckon that if Ireland can choose their anthem with a contest then so can we. Let’s have a national X Factor style show to write new anthems for Scotland and England. We’ll get hold of some talented song writers and ask them to write something inspiring we can all sing with pride. Terry Wogan should act as host and we’ll have the English ones sung by folkies in pullovers and the Scots ones by The Proclaimers in kilts. Then we’ll throw it open to a telephone vote.
The passion of the Welsh anthem and the ferocity of the New Zealand Haka must be worth ten points as the opposition get scared even before kick off so, whichever song wins for Scotland, we have to have the fear factor too.
Perhaps we could get Ronnie Brown to sing in tune. It may not scare anyone but at least it would confuse them.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Catwalk Catastrophe
My name is Paul and I’m a fashion victim.
I don’t mean I’m a victim of fashion like, say, David Beckham who wears clothes only once, or his wife who slavishly follows the latest designers and spends a fortune to look like mutton dressed as, well, mutton. No, I’m a fashion victim in the way that a hit and run patient is a traffic victim. Like the virgin Queen Elizabeth the First, I just don’t get it.
I’m sure it wasn’t always this way. I think we all must reach a certain age when any clothes at all just look wrong on us as we head for the flat cap and anorak phase of our lives. Perhaps there should be a law that states everyone over forty must walk around naked although, in my case, I fear people would assume I’d gone for the crumpled linen look.
Take that forty something sex symbol Tom Cruise for example. This week I spotted him at an awards thing dressed in a grey double breasted suit with a blue V neck pullover and shirt and tie underneath. What was he thinking? Even my granddad wouldn’t wear a pullover with a suit - especially not now that he’s passed away. You could say he wouldn’t be seen dead in it.
But I’m no longer sure of my critical faculties. Perhaps Tom’s at the cutting edge and this is a new look we’ll be going for in six months. I draw the line, however, at the shoes. Lifts are for high rise buildings.
My kids constantly tell me that shirts have to be worn outside the trousers, but does that include with a suit? They tell me that my Timberland boots (or my Yellow Shoes as they call them) are old fashioned and look like Billy Connolly’s banana shoes which are now stored in a museum somewhere. And as for the smooth leather biker’s jacket I bought in New York, I’ve been allowed to wear it just once – to a fancy dress party.
Perhaps then there’s a chance that I’m not a fashion victim after all but a victim of women bullying me in to what to wear. I don’t remember Tom Cruise looking like a media studies teacher before he married so this is a recent development and my theory is that men are fine till women get their hands on them.
When I was single, fashion was never a problem and I wore whatever I wanted. Granted there may have been a few mistakes, and the white bomber jacket with blue criss crossed lacing across the front may have been ahead of its time (a time that, admittedly, hasn’t yet come) and the tight cheesecloth shirt with a tie dyed collar was an acquired taste, but generally I think I got it more right than wrong.
And then came along the great opinionated stylist that every marriage provides you with free of charge. It started with me being warned that under no circumstances was I to turn up scruffy for the wedding or stand at the altar in a luminous coloured suit. My compromise, or bit of rebellion, was to wear a sober, full dress kilt outfit but with outrageous multi coloured silk underwear underneath. I still sweat when I remember the embarrassment of stealing those knickers from my busty neighbour's wash line!
Since then I’ve been more lager lout than Lagerfeld. I’ve fought and tried to resist all hints and bullying from my wife about what colours suit me and what styles are best to disguise a beer belly, so now I have no opinions of my own. Often I’ll buy stuff just to annoy her, the latest being a beenie hat I purchased last weekend which has now, mysteriously, disappeared. I’ve based my fashion sense for so long on being contrary that I now no longer know what’s right or thong.
Perhaps I need a stylist. One of the great things about hosting TV shows is that someone else picks your clothes for you. No stress, no worries. Except, I once had a stylist at Sky TV who, mysteriously, kept misplacing my clothes only for them to reappear the following week. I finally discovered she had been taking them home to her husband each weekend so he could look good on the Hampstead dinner party circuit. The words Dry and Cleaning had never entered her vocabulary and the deposited matter would have made for a particularly difficult final year forensic exam.
Unless you’ve had to do it you can’t possibly understand, but I urge you to try wearing trousers that another bloke has been wearing before you. Even a full Turkish bath with two hairy all in wrestlers lashing the grime out of you as they beat you with wet towels won’t make you feel clean. Excited perhaps, but not clean.
So what am I to do? Listen to my wife and kids or ignore them and do what I did as a single bloke? It’s not as if I’m allowed to reciprocate and offer advice in return. Unless every new outfit my wife buys is greeted by me doing summersaults with whoops of joy and shouting that it’s just perfect, I’m in the dog house. It’s not fair but I guess it’s repeated in every home across the land.
I’ll have to live with it and admit defeat in the fashion stakes. From now on, when it comes to clothing, I’ll have to learn to look up to my wife. After all, Tom Cruise looks up to his wife doesn’t he?
I don’t mean I’m a victim of fashion like, say, David Beckham who wears clothes only once, or his wife who slavishly follows the latest designers and spends a fortune to look like mutton dressed as, well, mutton. No, I’m a fashion victim in the way that a hit and run patient is a traffic victim. Like the virgin Queen Elizabeth the First, I just don’t get it.
I’m sure it wasn’t always this way. I think we all must reach a certain age when any clothes at all just look wrong on us as we head for the flat cap and anorak phase of our lives. Perhaps there should be a law that states everyone over forty must walk around naked although, in my case, I fear people would assume I’d gone for the crumpled linen look.
Take that forty something sex symbol Tom Cruise for example. This week I spotted him at an awards thing dressed in a grey double breasted suit with a blue V neck pullover and shirt and tie underneath. What was he thinking? Even my granddad wouldn’t wear a pullover with a suit - especially not now that he’s passed away. You could say he wouldn’t be seen dead in it.
But I’m no longer sure of my critical faculties. Perhaps Tom’s at the cutting edge and this is a new look we’ll be going for in six months. I draw the line, however, at the shoes. Lifts are for high rise buildings.
My kids constantly tell me that shirts have to be worn outside the trousers, but does that include with a suit? They tell me that my Timberland boots (or my Yellow Shoes as they call them) are old fashioned and look like Billy Connolly’s banana shoes which are now stored in a museum somewhere. And as for the smooth leather biker’s jacket I bought in New York, I’ve been allowed to wear it just once – to a fancy dress party.
Perhaps then there’s a chance that I’m not a fashion victim after all but a victim of women bullying me in to what to wear. I don’t remember Tom Cruise looking like a media studies teacher before he married so this is a recent development and my theory is that men are fine till women get their hands on them.
When I was single, fashion was never a problem and I wore whatever I wanted. Granted there may have been a few mistakes, and the white bomber jacket with blue criss crossed lacing across the front may have been ahead of its time (a time that, admittedly, hasn’t yet come) and the tight cheesecloth shirt with a tie dyed collar was an acquired taste, but generally I think I got it more right than wrong.
And then came along the great opinionated stylist that every marriage provides you with free of charge. It started with me being warned that under no circumstances was I to turn up scruffy for the wedding or stand at the altar in a luminous coloured suit. My compromise, or bit of rebellion, was to wear a sober, full dress kilt outfit but with outrageous multi coloured silk underwear underneath. I still sweat when I remember the embarrassment of stealing those knickers from my busty neighbour's wash line!
Since then I’ve been more lager lout than Lagerfeld. I’ve fought and tried to resist all hints and bullying from my wife about what colours suit me and what styles are best to disguise a beer belly, so now I have no opinions of my own. Often I’ll buy stuff just to annoy her, the latest being a beenie hat I purchased last weekend which has now, mysteriously, disappeared. I’ve based my fashion sense for so long on being contrary that I now no longer know what’s right or thong.
Perhaps I need a stylist. One of the great things about hosting TV shows is that someone else picks your clothes for you. No stress, no worries. Except, I once had a stylist at Sky TV who, mysteriously, kept misplacing my clothes only for them to reappear the following week. I finally discovered she had been taking them home to her husband each weekend so he could look good on the Hampstead dinner party circuit. The words Dry and Cleaning had never entered her vocabulary and the deposited matter would have made for a particularly difficult final year forensic exam.
Unless you’ve had to do it you can’t possibly understand, but I urge you to try wearing trousers that another bloke has been wearing before you. Even a full Turkish bath with two hairy all in wrestlers lashing the grime out of you as they beat you with wet towels won’t make you feel clean. Excited perhaps, but not clean.
So what am I to do? Listen to my wife and kids or ignore them and do what I did as a single bloke? It’s not as if I’m allowed to reciprocate and offer advice in return. Unless every new outfit my wife buys is greeted by me doing summersaults with whoops of joy and shouting that it’s just perfect, I’m in the dog house. It’s not fair but I guess it’s repeated in every home across the land.
I’ll have to live with it and admit defeat in the fashion stakes. From now on, when it comes to clothing, I’ll have to learn to look up to my wife. After all, Tom Cruise looks up to his wife doesn’t he?
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