It’s the middle of February and the Northern Rock story means economics man Evan Davis on BBC news each day looking more and more like an effeminate Tintin. It can only be weeks till he abandons Captain Haddock and joins a Village People tribute band, though I worry he may be a bit too camp.
So, time to switch off and head somewhere with no telly to celebrate the pagan festival of half term.
For those without kids, this week off from school is supposed to be a break for the little people but turns in to a nightmare for the parents as we get pestered for weeks that “Tamsin’s going skiing for half term” or “Zach’s off to the Caribbean” or, if you live near us, “Tristram and Isolde are setting up a vegan collective at their Algarve villa with their mum and dad”. The days of staying home are over. How you spend half term is a statement about how you’re spending your money.
For us it was off to Lake Windermere so we packed the car, safe in the knowledge that cries of “are we there yet” would be avoided thanks to the new DVD video monitors in the back seat. They worked wonderfully, with beautiful, crisp pictures and remote fast forwarding to the good scenes. Next trip I’ll hope to get the sound working too. Thank God I’d brought some detective stories on CD as the thought of six hours playing I Spy would make amputation seem preferable.
One gizmo that did work was our new GPS which guided us there with no problems. I’m not bad at directions but, as Debbie was navigator, we could have ended up in Kowloon rather than Kendal. She’s like Jade Goody who this week told a reporter that she wanted to open a gym in the North of England. “Somewhere like Cornwall”, she said.
Jade Goody – where O levels go when they want to be left alone. Imagine playing I Spy with her. “I spy something beginning with, er, what’s it called again, er, is it Kicking K?”
But I digress. We arrived at a marvellous country house in a place called Graythwaite surrounded by the most eccentric topiary I had ever seen. These hedges looked like a series of giant top hats resting on top of deodorant cans but were, in fact, chess pieces which had preservation orders on them. The owners can knock down the centuries old house, or build an abbatoir with a disco ball on top, but can’t touch the topiary other than to trim it. Such is the quaintness of Cumbria.
We opened our curtains in the morning to see bicycles fly past the window with no cyclists on board. It was surreal for a few minutes till we remembered the road passed by our window and the cycles must have been on top of car roof racks. Cyclists, walkers, mountaineers. They all love the Lake District.
I think it’s because there it’s like stepping back in time, in a nice way. Some car parks operate an honesty box policy where they rely on your sense of fair play to put money in but others, like the University of Cumbria, operate a dual tariff where it’s dearer at weekends but they don’t tell you. They very kindly then leave a present on your windscreen when you return.
The quaintness is amplified when you realise that getting the Sunday papers means a drive for three miles to a lone garage only to find the papers don’t actually arrive till ten o’clock. Television and radio reception is bad enough to have made John Logie Baird and Marconi give up and take to repairing kettles so bad news just doesn’t figure here, and I was beginning to see why everyone was relaxed and chilled. Literally. The temperature each morning was so cold the topiary turned white and I turned blue.
Whilst I scraped windscreens, the kids picked eggs from the yard and it would have been rude to refuse the full fry up breakfast which was the best meal of the day. We ate at a lakeside hotel where they’ve just found out that JFK has been assassinated and the new fad is something called nouvelle cuisine which has just arrived on the stage coach. Little plates with zig zags of juice separating a cuckoo spit of potato from a splinter of meat that someone had obviously flossed from their teeth made me think I’d just been given a dirty plate. I ordered bread and butter pudding and I could have sold it as art at Christies. Unfortunately I wanted to eat it. I lost it under my pinky nail and couldn’t find it again.
And there lies the problem for me. I could come to love the lack of contact with the outside world, would relish news of the Beatles splitting up reaching me sometime next month, and the freezing cold and treacherous roads wouldn’t bother me. But I need my food. Still, it beats the Portuguese vegan collective hands down. As Evan Davis might say, bigger portions please.
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I received a few calls over the weekend offering commiserations and asking if there was anything friends could do for my family. If you want to know why go to http://www.allmediascotland.com/articles/2310/18022008/coia_case_of_mistaken_identity
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I'd Do Anything
I thought I had a great idea for a daily celebrity game show. The loser gets to choose his punishment from two alternatives – being eaten by a crocodile or sleeping with Amy Winehouse. Unfortunately the BBC has turned the format down saying that the crocodile would be full up by Wednesday and stop eating.
That one man vacuum of self doubt, Piers Morgan, this week said “No” to one production company who wanted to make a show in which he would be asked to fake his own death. I must admit I was personally shocked at how far things have come and I simply couldn’t believe it. Piers Morgan turning down a chance to get on a telly programme? Who’d have predicted that?
Although some of Morgan’s detractors will be up in arms that it was only to be a pretend fatality, the company will, no doubt, find some other publicity hungry mug to do their show because the one thing celebs hate more than being hounded is being ignored.
I mentioned recently that my wife and I were sounded out about appearing on the Wife Swap show and that we had declined. Since then the series has started transmission on Channel Four and the “wives” I would have had to invite in to my home so far have involved the lesbian ex model Samantha Fox or the collagen filled, gender confused, Pete Burns. It’s a freak show, yet fading stars and never weres are queueing up to get on it.
In fact they’d do anything. Many years ago an illusionist came to me with an idea for a quiz in which, for each incorrect answer, contestants got an electric shock through their seat building in intensity until, in the final round, they were made unconscious. I told him it was too dangerous and no one would volunteer to take part but, looking back, how stupid was I? If they weren’t already committed to I’m A Celebrity or Wife Swap they’d be signing up quicker than you can say Christine Hamilton.
It was in a Simpsons episode that a wise TV host (voiced by Star Trek’s George Takei) explained the Far East and celebrity love of TV humiliation. Homer’s family had won a trip to Japan in a quiz and, as the reasons for the cruelty in Japanese game shows were listed, Takei explained the tacky. “You reward knowledge, but we punish ignorance”.
And as a breed there are few more ignorant animals on God’s earth than the greater spotted celebrity - wearing concealer stick of course. It would be a fool who would bet against them signing on for a show where a wrong answer meant they had to select their first born for drowning.
There’s something wonderful about seeing the famous suffer and face deprivation because, deep down, we feel they deserve it. Their cushy, freebie laden, life and huge earnings make them ripe for a fall and I could list many famous faces I’d gladly watch suffer having met them and put up with their ill mannered, self obsessed, rants and demands.
But, here’s a thing. This week, in one afternoon, I met three familiar faces who were simply very normal. I interviewed a member of the Eastenders’ cast, Natalie Cassidy, who could not have been nicer or more down to earth. I then went out for a walk and bumped in to boxer Chris Eubank who was taking time to have his photo taken with a fan and then I met singer Craig David who turned out to be charming, polite, and generous with his time.
I’m thinking, therefore, that we need to protect some of these famous faces from themselves and I propose that it should be a condition of entry to the celebrity reality shows that you have to have a certain quota of people willing to state that you are a narcissistic, evil, unfeeling diva who deserves to die. In other words if you’re nice, you’re not in. Let’s make these shows only for the unpopular.
The downside is we’ll have wall to wall former Big Brother saddos and ex pop stars but, when they fall apart, get injured, go bankrupt or curl up with embarrassment, we can congratulate ourselves on a job well done.
Then if Pete Burns comes in to my house, it will be to fix my telly, not appear on it.
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Want to know if your favourite celebrity is hot or not? Here’s a way to find out. Nip down to your local Woolworths and have a look at the unsold, discounted, celebrity calendars left over from Christmas. Currently in my local shop for 69 pence you can get your hands on any one of the hundreds of Jonathon Ross calendars collecting dust.
He’s a nice bloke, I’m sure, but if I wanted a dodgy haircut and suspect fashion leering at me from my office wall I’d frame one of my old Eighties publicity photos.
That one man vacuum of self doubt, Piers Morgan, this week said “No” to one production company who wanted to make a show in which he would be asked to fake his own death. I must admit I was personally shocked at how far things have come and I simply couldn’t believe it. Piers Morgan turning down a chance to get on a telly programme? Who’d have predicted that?
Although some of Morgan’s detractors will be up in arms that it was only to be a pretend fatality, the company will, no doubt, find some other publicity hungry mug to do their show because the one thing celebs hate more than being hounded is being ignored.
I mentioned recently that my wife and I were sounded out about appearing on the Wife Swap show and that we had declined. Since then the series has started transmission on Channel Four and the “wives” I would have had to invite in to my home so far have involved the lesbian ex model Samantha Fox or the collagen filled, gender confused, Pete Burns. It’s a freak show, yet fading stars and never weres are queueing up to get on it.
In fact they’d do anything. Many years ago an illusionist came to me with an idea for a quiz in which, for each incorrect answer, contestants got an electric shock through their seat building in intensity until, in the final round, they were made unconscious. I told him it was too dangerous and no one would volunteer to take part but, looking back, how stupid was I? If they weren’t already committed to I’m A Celebrity or Wife Swap they’d be signing up quicker than you can say Christine Hamilton.
It was in a Simpsons episode that a wise TV host (voiced by Star Trek’s George Takei) explained the Far East and celebrity love of TV humiliation. Homer’s family had won a trip to Japan in a quiz and, as the reasons for the cruelty in Japanese game shows were listed, Takei explained the tacky. “You reward knowledge, but we punish ignorance”.
And as a breed there are few more ignorant animals on God’s earth than the greater spotted celebrity - wearing concealer stick of course. It would be a fool who would bet against them signing on for a show where a wrong answer meant they had to select their first born for drowning.
There’s something wonderful about seeing the famous suffer and face deprivation because, deep down, we feel they deserve it. Their cushy, freebie laden, life and huge earnings make them ripe for a fall and I could list many famous faces I’d gladly watch suffer having met them and put up with their ill mannered, self obsessed, rants and demands.
But, here’s a thing. This week, in one afternoon, I met three familiar faces who were simply very normal. I interviewed a member of the Eastenders’ cast, Natalie Cassidy, who could not have been nicer or more down to earth. I then went out for a walk and bumped in to boxer Chris Eubank who was taking time to have his photo taken with a fan and then I met singer Craig David who turned out to be charming, polite, and generous with his time.
I’m thinking, therefore, that we need to protect some of these famous faces from themselves and I propose that it should be a condition of entry to the celebrity reality shows that you have to have a certain quota of people willing to state that you are a narcissistic, evil, unfeeling diva who deserves to die. In other words if you’re nice, you’re not in. Let’s make these shows only for the unpopular.
The downside is we’ll have wall to wall former Big Brother saddos and ex pop stars but, when they fall apart, get injured, go bankrupt or curl up with embarrassment, we can congratulate ourselves on a job well done.
Then if Pete Burns comes in to my house, it will be to fix my telly, not appear on it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Want to know if your favourite celebrity is hot or not? Here’s a way to find out. Nip down to your local Woolworths and have a look at the unsold, discounted, celebrity calendars left over from Christmas. Currently in my local shop for 69 pence you can get your hands on any one of the hundreds of Jonathon Ross calendars collecting dust.
He’s a nice bloke, I’m sure, but if I wanted a dodgy haircut and suspect fashion leering at me from my office wall I’d frame one of my old Eighties publicity photos.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Older, Wiser, Fitter
This week I’ve become fixated with old age, the years when people will turn up to my birthday candle blow outs in firefighter costumes and the usual Hip Hooray will change to Hip Replacement. I know I’ll soon appreciate reading glasses more than beer glasses, get confused between prostrate and prostate, and be so keen on female company that The Spice Girls will start to seem fanciable.
Alright, so the latter is never going to happen and if it did it would have more to do with cataracts than anything else, but it can’t be long till Sporty Spice changes her name to Gently Exercising Spice, Ginger to Blue Rinse, Scary to Embarrassing Auntie and, with the others, get their bus passes whilst Posh invites Hello magazine to photograph her bunion operations and laments how the Girls’ popularity dropped quicker than her boobs.
The Spices have cut short their world tour citing family reasons, but I think it’s more to do with having too many late nights on tour and missing their Horlicks. The girls have stockpiled money for their old age and I wish them the best of luck when they get there as there will be precious few other benefits. I have come to the simple conclusion that the older you get, the older you get. There’s nothing else.
Forget the propaganda of Wiser, or More Comfortable, or Wealthier. Each day simply means another twenty four hours nearer the kind lady in the nursing home mashing up your dinner or helping you look for your teeth.
Many couples who are friends of ours have reached that stage of life where they are suddenly turning in to decrepit versions of the toy Daleks in Woolworths, those remote controlled models that are pre programmed with just five phrases. They repeat the same words to each other over and over again - I Loathe You, I Hate You, It’s Off, I’m Leaving, and I’m Back Again and it’s self evidently ironic that the older we get, the more childish and immature we seem to become. It is then a short leap to dribbling and filling our nappies.
Personally, I have no problem in admitting that I am 32 years old. I have no problem with that because it’s not true, but I do have a problem in recently feeling bound for the scrap heap. What has brought this to a head is that I have been told by a doctor to stop running.
Following pains in my knees after doing heavy, competitive running classes three times a week, my specialist looked at the MRI photos with a smile and told me I’m part of the gym bunny generation he’s seeing every day – those idiots who have devoted their spare time to running machines and weights and have, consequently, knackered their bodies.
My shock absorbers have gone and I’m failing fast. I’m told by the Sports Injury specialist that if I don’t give up running now my racehorse chassis will move from thoroughbred to donkey and I’ll end my days ground in to glue and dog food at the local abattoir.
I guess I should feel lucky as I am still allowed to do other exercise like rowing or swimming, but these have always seemed to me to be a bit pansy compared to running, football or rugby. However, some of my gym generation pals are not so fortunate. One of my 5-a-side football mates, Mike, has had to give up all fitness because he has had a hip replacement – at the age of forty two. Another pal who had an operation two weeks ago will get his hip replaced in Spring. He’s forty four.
So perhaps now you see why I’m fixated with old age this week. The Forty and Fifty Something generation, who were convinced that exercise was the way to a long and healthy old age, may have been right. Our hearts are healthier, our lungs bigger and our circulation better than most. It’s just that we’re going to have to be wheeled around in chairs to show all those things off. I always expected that “Limp” would be a condition I would encounter when I get to my Seventies but I had another part of my anatomy in mind.
So what can I do? I’m going to cheer myself by having a mid life crisis and will get my hair highlighted, buy a Porsche, become friends with Ashley Cole, get sick in cabs, do drugs and join a running club. I may not live for very long, but it’s a better way to go than drowning during a girly swim on my hundredth birthday.
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TV presenter Jeremy Beadle, who died last week, was a kind man. I first came across him when he called Radio Clyde and asked to speak to me. He said he’d been driving through Glasgow and had enjoyed my show. I walked ten feet tall for weeks after that.
We met up on a few social and work occasions and were together on a friend’s stag outing to Spain for a few days where he brought a whole suitcase full of practical jokes and gags. In restaurants each night he dropped tin cards that sounded like plates smashing, and it was very entertaining to watch waiters jump out of their skins.
He was a great big kid, which was apt as many, many children are alive today because of his tireless charity work. Unlike most of us he really did make a difference.
Alright, so the latter is never going to happen and if it did it would have more to do with cataracts than anything else, but it can’t be long till Sporty Spice changes her name to Gently Exercising Spice, Ginger to Blue Rinse, Scary to Embarrassing Auntie and, with the others, get their bus passes whilst Posh invites Hello magazine to photograph her bunion operations and laments how the Girls’ popularity dropped quicker than her boobs.
The Spices have cut short their world tour citing family reasons, but I think it’s more to do with having too many late nights on tour and missing their Horlicks. The girls have stockpiled money for their old age and I wish them the best of luck when they get there as there will be precious few other benefits. I have come to the simple conclusion that the older you get, the older you get. There’s nothing else.
Forget the propaganda of Wiser, or More Comfortable, or Wealthier. Each day simply means another twenty four hours nearer the kind lady in the nursing home mashing up your dinner or helping you look for your teeth.
Many couples who are friends of ours have reached that stage of life where they are suddenly turning in to decrepit versions of the toy Daleks in Woolworths, those remote controlled models that are pre programmed with just five phrases. They repeat the same words to each other over and over again - I Loathe You, I Hate You, It’s Off, I’m Leaving, and I’m Back Again and it’s self evidently ironic that the older we get, the more childish and immature we seem to become. It is then a short leap to dribbling and filling our nappies.
Personally, I have no problem in admitting that I am 32 years old. I have no problem with that because it’s not true, but I do have a problem in recently feeling bound for the scrap heap. What has brought this to a head is that I have been told by a doctor to stop running.
Following pains in my knees after doing heavy, competitive running classes three times a week, my specialist looked at the MRI photos with a smile and told me I’m part of the gym bunny generation he’s seeing every day – those idiots who have devoted their spare time to running machines and weights and have, consequently, knackered their bodies.
My shock absorbers have gone and I’m failing fast. I’m told by the Sports Injury specialist that if I don’t give up running now my racehorse chassis will move from thoroughbred to donkey and I’ll end my days ground in to glue and dog food at the local abattoir.
I guess I should feel lucky as I am still allowed to do other exercise like rowing or swimming, but these have always seemed to me to be a bit pansy compared to running, football or rugby. However, some of my gym generation pals are not so fortunate. One of my 5-a-side football mates, Mike, has had to give up all fitness because he has had a hip replacement – at the age of forty two. Another pal who had an operation two weeks ago will get his hip replaced in Spring. He’s forty four.
So perhaps now you see why I’m fixated with old age this week. The Forty and Fifty Something generation, who were convinced that exercise was the way to a long and healthy old age, may have been right. Our hearts are healthier, our lungs bigger and our circulation better than most. It’s just that we’re going to have to be wheeled around in chairs to show all those things off. I always expected that “Limp” would be a condition I would encounter when I get to my Seventies but I had another part of my anatomy in mind.
So what can I do? I’m going to cheer myself by having a mid life crisis and will get my hair highlighted, buy a Porsche, become friends with Ashley Cole, get sick in cabs, do drugs and join a running club. I may not live for very long, but it’s a better way to go than drowning during a girly swim on my hundredth birthday.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TV presenter Jeremy Beadle, who died last week, was a kind man. I first came across him when he called Radio Clyde and asked to speak to me. He said he’d been driving through Glasgow and had enjoyed my show. I walked ten feet tall for weeks after that.
We met up on a few social and work occasions and were together on a friend’s stag outing to Spain for a few days where he brought a whole suitcase full of practical jokes and gags. In restaurants each night he dropped tin cards that sounded like plates smashing, and it was very entertaining to watch waiters jump out of their skins.
He was a great big kid, which was apt as many, many children are alive today because of his tireless charity work. Unlike most of us he really did make a difference.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Paul gets Burned
This week I attended my second, ever, Burns Supper and for those of you whose knowledge of Scotland is limited to watching Mel Gibson defeat his dialogue coach in Braveheart, let me explain that these suppers are to honour Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns.
It’s a bit like England remembering William Wordsworth, Germany honouring Johan Goethe, or Australia celebrating Rolf Harris.
These annual get togethers are quite formal and consist of the haggis – a food delicacy whose ingredients you just don’t want to know – being brought in to the accompaniment of a bagpiper. It is laid on a table and stabbed – that’s the haggis not the piper - by someone wielding a dagger while reciting poetry. Think Sweeney Todd with bow ties.
Now you may mock but we Scots love Burns night and take it very seriously, or at least some of us do. The first time I attended one of these great happenings, I was asked to do the poetry bit and stab the haggis until it surrendered. For some inexplicable reason I then had a moment of devilry and said I was going to reply on behalf of the haggis. “Ouch. What the hell did you do that for?” Everyone laughed except the guy who was supposed to pay me. He said I’d committed sacrilege, would be damned to the bad fire forever, and would not be getting a penny of his money. Thankfully I was saved by the evening’s cabaret which consisted of a well known, chart topping, singer who went down like Shane McGowan at a dental hygienists convention and made me look world class.
Because of his way with the ladies, Burns left us the tradition of praising women or “the lassies”, which is formalised in the traditional Burns supper, and I was asked to do that last week. It consists of a few remarks and jokes directed, in the best possible taste, against women. “I’ll never forget how I met my wife. I just opened my wallet and there she was”.
A lassie then has to reply and this was done magnificently by Terry Neason who said her granny had passed on great advice when she was growing up. Terry’s nan said all men were either hungry or horny. “So, if he doesn’t have an erection, make him a wee sandwich”.
Robert Burns loved women, all of them, whether beautiful or the barnyard side of ugly, and eventually he had thirteen kids by five different partners. He was the Ulrika Johnsson of his day. He was also a great spotter of trends and wrote to a Miss Chalmers - September 23rd 1787 since you ask - about his thoughts on women. “I am charmed by the wild but graceful eccentricity of their motions”. So far as I can see this was the first time a man had noticed that women spend all their time in the toilet.
Why is it that men go for a leak, but women “freshen up?” The difference, as far as I can see, is about twenty minutes. We males go straight in, over to the urinal marked ten beers or less, and then out again. But Burns recognised that while we hold our willies, women hold meetings.
Today the Child Support Agency would be chasing Burns and impounding his royalty cheques whilst he would be held up by the Daily Mail as a prime specimen of working class waster who fathered kids as a hobby and then scarpered leaving them to the tax payer to feed.
A great poet. But, perhaps, he should have devoured fewer lassies and gobbled more sandwiches!
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After last week’s knocking piece on the British Airport Authority, I found something they’re good at. Revenge!
On Thursday they managed to delay my plane’s landing, lose the steps to the aircraft so that we stood for half an hour begging to get off, and then misplaced my luggage for over an hour making me miss my connecting plane and spend the night on the floor of London Heathrow’s Terminal One.
No danger of oversleeping tho’ as my wake up alarm, which sounded twice, was the terminal’s fire bell activated by workmen cutting through wires during their all night drilling and hammering.
I promise I’ll never slag off BAA again but this Karma thing takes a bit of getting used to. I’d have had more sleep bedding down in a Taliban village with a crucifix painted on my front door.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just a thought if you’re watching BBC’s primetime Saturday night show, The One And Only, which is a hunt for a singing celebrity lookalike who will win a three month residency in Las Vegas alongside Elvis, Cher, Tina Turner and others. Cliff Richard has now been knocked out of the race but what if he, Kylie or the Robbie Williams doppelganger won?
The owner of the Vegas club couldn’t possibly hire them as Cliff, Robbie and Kylie are about as famous in America as the bloke who delivers my milk. So guys enjoy it while it lasts but I wouldn’t be buying those casino chips just yet if I were you.
It’s a bit like England remembering William Wordsworth, Germany honouring Johan Goethe, or Australia celebrating Rolf Harris.
These annual get togethers are quite formal and consist of the haggis – a food delicacy whose ingredients you just don’t want to know – being brought in to the accompaniment of a bagpiper. It is laid on a table and stabbed – that’s the haggis not the piper - by someone wielding a dagger while reciting poetry. Think Sweeney Todd with bow ties.
Now you may mock but we Scots love Burns night and take it very seriously, or at least some of us do. The first time I attended one of these great happenings, I was asked to do the poetry bit and stab the haggis until it surrendered. For some inexplicable reason I then had a moment of devilry and said I was going to reply on behalf of the haggis. “Ouch. What the hell did you do that for?” Everyone laughed except the guy who was supposed to pay me. He said I’d committed sacrilege, would be damned to the bad fire forever, and would not be getting a penny of his money. Thankfully I was saved by the evening’s cabaret which consisted of a well known, chart topping, singer who went down like Shane McGowan at a dental hygienists convention and made me look world class.
Because of his way with the ladies, Burns left us the tradition of praising women or “the lassies”, which is formalised in the traditional Burns supper, and I was asked to do that last week. It consists of a few remarks and jokes directed, in the best possible taste, against women. “I’ll never forget how I met my wife. I just opened my wallet and there she was”.
A lassie then has to reply and this was done magnificently by Terry Neason who said her granny had passed on great advice when she was growing up. Terry’s nan said all men were either hungry or horny. “So, if he doesn’t have an erection, make him a wee sandwich”.
Robert Burns loved women, all of them, whether beautiful or the barnyard side of ugly, and eventually he had thirteen kids by five different partners. He was the Ulrika Johnsson of his day. He was also a great spotter of trends and wrote to a Miss Chalmers - September 23rd 1787 since you ask - about his thoughts on women. “I am charmed by the wild but graceful eccentricity of their motions”. So far as I can see this was the first time a man had noticed that women spend all their time in the toilet.
Why is it that men go for a leak, but women “freshen up?” The difference, as far as I can see, is about twenty minutes. We males go straight in, over to the urinal marked ten beers or less, and then out again. But Burns recognised that while we hold our willies, women hold meetings.
Today the Child Support Agency would be chasing Burns and impounding his royalty cheques whilst he would be held up by the Daily Mail as a prime specimen of working class waster who fathered kids as a hobby and then scarpered leaving them to the tax payer to feed.
A great poet. But, perhaps, he should have devoured fewer lassies and gobbled more sandwiches!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After last week’s knocking piece on the British Airport Authority, I found something they’re good at. Revenge!
On Thursday they managed to delay my plane’s landing, lose the steps to the aircraft so that we stood for half an hour begging to get off, and then misplaced my luggage for over an hour making me miss my connecting plane and spend the night on the floor of London Heathrow’s Terminal One.
No danger of oversleeping tho’ as my wake up alarm, which sounded twice, was the terminal’s fire bell activated by workmen cutting through wires during their all night drilling and hammering.
I promise I’ll never slag off BAA again but this Karma thing takes a bit of getting used to. I’d have had more sleep bedding down in a Taliban village with a crucifix painted on my front door.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just a thought if you’re watching BBC’s primetime Saturday night show, The One And Only, which is a hunt for a singing celebrity lookalike who will win a three month residency in Las Vegas alongside Elvis, Cher, Tina Turner and others. Cliff Richard has now been knocked out of the race but what if he, Kylie or the Robbie Williams doppelganger won?
The owner of the Vegas club couldn’t possibly hire them as Cliff, Robbie and Kylie are about as famous in America as the bloke who delivers my milk. So guys enjoy it while it lasts but I wouldn’t be buying those casino chips just yet if I were you.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Booby Prizes
I was in Frankfurt this week or, to be more accurate, in Frankfurt airport, and I noticed how different the terminal is from any similar building here. The B.A.A. - that’s British Airport Authority or Bloody Awful Amateurs depending on your viewpoint - should go have a look.
It’s not just that the German version was cleaner than a UK hospital operating theatre, brighter than Einstein, more efficient than Ulrika Jonsson’s womb and better decorated than the Tate Modern. It wasn’t just the reassuringly thorough security that made a Pharaoh’s casket, locked inside a sarcophagus, sealed inside a pyramid and buried one hundred miles under the sands of Giza, seem an open invitation to pilfer the king’s golden pick ‘n mix.
The ambience in Frankfurt is comfortable and the food is actually fresh, unlike here where a mouldy old airport happy meal is likely to have a promotional tie in with the latest new silent movie release from Charlie Chaplin.
And another big, wonderful, difference from our airports is that, unlike BAA, they know that we simply need to get on a plane quickly and go home, not stop and buy raffle tickets for a prize we’ll never win. I don’t want to have to squeeze past a big shiny motor car standing in the middle of the concourse with a countdown clock hectoring me in to buying fifty pound tickets before the life changing draw is made.
Usually there are photos of smiling faces, attached to bodies which will never fit in the low slung sports seats, accepting the keys to a new Porsche or a yellow V2 rocket.
What I always want to see is a photo of the winners six months later after the the local hoodies have sprayed their tag on the bonnet. When they realise a Ferrari needs a new clutch at roughly every five thousand miles would the smile, perhaps, look a little more strained? Might the insurance quote of several thousand pounds make their complexion just a fraction pale? And that Russian oil well they’ve had to purchase to slake the thirst of their new beast, would it make them feel just a little bit queasy?
Winning a top prize can be the beginning of misery. Ask some of the lottery winners who have fallen out with family and friends, been inundated with begging letters or spent the lot and got in to debt.
A recent game show offered each week a brand new holiday home. The programme makers, sensibly, hadn’t bought the house, just put it on hold, and each week they took the winners aside after the recording and said something like “Do you want the expense of flying there every few months to check on it? Do you really want to cough up for local taxes and have foreign cowboy plumbers rip you off? How about if we just offer you a few grand instead?”
By the end of the series, the savvy makers had saved a fortune as not one single winner had opted for the house, but the audience had been treated to a journey round the estate agents of the world and watched keys to paradise handed over every week.
Perhaps I’m simply jealous as the only things I’ve ever won are a calculator and a trip to a James Bond premiere that wasn’t. I still have a photo from the local newspaper with me proudly holding my Sinclair calculator and wearing a dodgy beard. I look like the male model in those Joy Of Sex pencil drawings who moonlights as the Open University professor that fashion forgot.
The prize of the Bond premiere was won in a computer magazine and I turned up, washed and brushed, expecting to meet Timothy Dalton, only to find that it was simply an advanced screening. The closest I got to a star was an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike selling the ice creams. I would have asked for an autograph but I felt she may have been offended.
This week it’s Heathrow, Zurich and Glasgow airports for me. One of them won’t have a shiny sports car clogging the place up and that suits me just fine. If any of you have won a great prize which turned in to a disaster, do let me know. And shares in BAA don’t count!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whilst in my Frankfurt hotel I managed to catch their version of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. Instead of Ant and Dec presenting, they have a small Danny de Vito look alike who really, really wants to be Timmy Mallett and wears garishly decorated shirts and hats to show how wild and wacky he really, really is. His co host is a blonde woman who would not be out of place as a careworn hostess on a flight to the Outer Hebrides who’s hoping the Scottish gloaming will hide her wrinkles.
The contestants, to a man and woman, looked like they’d wandered off a tour bus on a day out from a nursing home and I’m sure one asked what time tea would be served in the nice botanical garden. I can’t understand German so, sadly, I can’t tell you what the show is called but I’ve a feeling it might be ‘I’m a Celebrity? Remind Me Who I Am’.
It’s not just that the German version was cleaner than a UK hospital operating theatre, brighter than Einstein, more efficient than Ulrika Jonsson’s womb and better decorated than the Tate Modern. It wasn’t just the reassuringly thorough security that made a Pharaoh’s casket, locked inside a sarcophagus, sealed inside a pyramid and buried one hundred miles under the sands of Giza, seem an open invitation to pilfer the king’s golden pick ‘n mix.
The ambience in Frankfurt is comfortable and the food is actually fresh, unlike here where a mouldy old airport happy meal is likely to have a promotional tie in with the latest new silent movie release from Charlie Chaplin.
And another big, wonderful, difference from our airports is that, unlike BAA, they know that we simply need to get on a plane quickly and go home, not stop and buy raffle tickets for a prize we’ll never win. I don’t want to have to squeeze past a big shiny motor car standing in the middle of the concourse with a countdown clock hectoring me in to buying fifty pound tickets before the life changing draw is made.
Usually there are photos of smiling faces, attached to bodies which will never fit in the low slung sports seats, accepting the keys to a new Porsche or a yellow V2 rocket.
What I always want to see is a photo of the winners six months later after the the local hoodies have sprayed their tag on the bonnet. When they realise a Ferrari needs a new clutch at roughly every five thousand miles would the smile, perhaps, look a little more strained? Might the insurance quote of several thousand pounds make their complexion just a fraction pale? And that Russian oil well they’ve had to purchase to slake the thirst of their new beast, would it make them feel just a little bit queasy?
Winning a top prize can be the beginning of misery. Ask some of the lottery winners who have fallen out with family and friends, been inundated with begging letters or spent the lot and got in to debt.
A recent game show offered each week a brand new holiday home. The programme makers, sensibly, hadn’t bought the house, just put it on hold, and each week they took the winners aside after the recording and said something like “Do you want the expense of flying there every few months to check on it? Do you really want to cough up for local taxes and have foreign cowboy plumbers rip you off? How about if we just offer you a few grand instead?”
By the end of the series, the savvy makers had saved a fortune as not one single winner had opted for the house, but the audience had been treated to a journey round the estate agents of the world and watched keys to paradise handed over every week.
Perhaps I’m simply jealous as the only things I’ve ever won are a calculator and a trip to a James Bond premiere that wasn’t. I still have a photo from the local newspaper with me proudly holding my Sinclair calculator and wearing a dodgy beard. I look like the male model in those Joy Of Sex pencil drawings who moonlights as the Open University professor that fashion forgot.
The prize of the Bond premiere was won in a computer magazine and I turned up, washed and brushed, expecting to meet Timothy Dalton, only to find that it was simply an advanced screening. The closest I got to a star was an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike selling the ice creams. I would have asked for an autograph but I felt she may have been offended.
This week it’s Heathrow, Zurich and Glasgow airports for me. One of them won’t have a shiny sports car clogging the place up and that suits me just fine. If any of you have won a great prize which turned in to a disaster, do let me know. And shares in BAA don’t count!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whilst in my Frankfurt hotel I managed to catch their version of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. Instead of Ant and Dec presenting, they have a small Danny de Vito look alike who really, really wants to be Timmy Mallett and wears garishly decorated shirts and hats to show how wild and wacky he really, really is. His co host is a blonde woman who would not be out of place as a careworn hostess on a flight to the Outer Hebrides who’s hoping the Scottish gloaming will hide her wrinkles.
The contestants, to a man and woman, looked like they’d wandered off a tour bus on a day out from a nursing home and I’m sure one asked what time tea would be served in the nice botanical garden. I can’t understand German so, sadly, I can’t tell you what the show is called but I’ve a feeling it might be ‘I’m a Celebrity? Remind Me Who I Am’.
Monday, January 14, 2008
You Give Me Fever
You don’t have to be a genius, or a fan of rolling news networks, to notice that the country is in the grip of a deadly virus right now. This epidemic makes people lose weight, feel nauseous and dizzy, take to their beds, lie in misery, shun all contact, feel unlucky and pray for respite.
The illness, known to experts as Divorce, is all consuming with feverish patients watching helplessly as the pounds drop off from their bank balances. These poor souls even have to tolerate jokes like what does a divorcée miss most about dinner parties? The invitation!
January is, according to Relate, the top month for divorce as couples who have decided to give the kids one last Happy Christmas, or who have endured festive weeks gorging on a cocktail of Toblerone, Baileys Irish Cream and their partner’s boring company, make a new year’s resolution to give up on “the vows”. With four hundred and six British marriages per day being terminated, the Divorce epidemic is striking down more people this month than at any time for the past twelve years.
But I think I have detected a theme. I can understand why so many couples were depressed, and thus divorcing, twelve years ago. 1996 was a year of disasters such as the Manchester bombings, Chinese Earthquakes, terrorist atrocities in Docklands, and the launch of The Spice Girls. It can be no coincidence that, a dozen years later, the record rate of marriage breakdown parallels so closely the reunion of Scary, Sporty, Baby, Dozy and Chav.
The celeb world they inhabit is going bananas just now - a kind of bananas split – with more break ups than they can shake their shtick at as the McCartneys, John Cleese, Britney, Marilyn Manson and others rush to say “I don’t any more”. It can only be a matter of weeks till Mattel, makers of the celebrity Barbie, release the Divorce Lawyer outfit for her and the Penniless Hobo kit for Ken.
And divorce seems to make these people say and do silly things. Sister Heather Mills of the Sisters of Perpetual Self Delusion, who has never done any wrong whatsoever in her life, would now seem to be unbalanced (insert your own, prosthetic leg, joke) whilst her oddly coiffed ex comes across as meaner than a bank manager at bonus time. As if that’s not enough, unless the ex Beatle also divorces his hairdresser, he’s soon going to have to put up with the Ginger jokes as well.
Meanwhile, John Cleese has just ended his third marriage, though the titles of his books should have given his missus a clue when they tied the knot. I’m sure she enjoyed his cheery best seller Life and How To Survive It, the snappily titled Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and the hilarious What You Need To Know About Hormone Replacement Therapy, but I can’t believe she didn’t spot a theme, and run a mile, when his Living With Depression was published.
But celebs have always treated divorce as a minor inconvenience. It’s not till it hits a bit closer to your home that it really makes you sit up and take notice.
A friend of mine in the States came home from work on her husband’s fortieth birthday. She left work early as a surprise and, bearing champagne and sexy undies, arrived home to find her husband had shaved his head, added a tattoo, and thrown all her clothes out in to the yard. There had been no warning signs and she was out, replaced by his mid life crisis. Two restraining orders later, she got the divorce and has not spoken to him since.
Another friend, a fitness fanatic, decided divorce was certainly an option when he discovered the guys at the gym were all using the same exercise bike. Problem was he’d married that bike twelve years before.
I have been talking this divorce thing over with my first wife recently - she’s also my current, and only, wife but I’m taking nothing for granted. We have been seeing great friends split up at alarming rates and the only thing we’ve learned is that everyone is miserable, whether it’s the couple, children, relatives or friends.
There’s the awkwardness of wondering which of the couple to stay in touch with. Do you feel sorry for them or give them the courtesy of acting as if nothing’s happened? And how can we stop this misery happening to others? What lessons can we learn?
I thought that there should be a law brought in that you can only marry your partner after a committee of your friends has given them the once over and then taken a legally binding vote. This seemed fine till Debbie told me that if such a law had been in force fifteen years ago, her friends would never have allowed us to marry. Harsh, but fair.
However, no matter what your feelings on divorce, sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say it’s definitely the only thing to do. This week in Poland, a man slipped off to a brothel in Warsaw while his wife of fourteen years was out at work. It was his first ever visit and after checking in he discovered that the madame assigned to him looked a bit familiar. It was his wife.
I wonder if she made him pay?
The illness, known to experts as Divorce, is all consuming with feverish patients watching helplessly as the pounds drop off from their bank balances. These poor souls even have to tolerate jokes like what does a divorcée miss most about dinner parties? The invitation!
January is, according to Relate, the top month for divorce as couples who have decided to give the kids one last Happy Christmas, or who have endured festive weeks gorging on a cocktail of Toblerone, Baileys Irish Cream and their partner’s boring company, make a new year’s resolution to give up on “the vows”. With four hundred and six British marriages per day being terminated, the Divorce epidemic is striking down more people this month than at any time for the past twelve years.
But I think I have detected a theme. I can understand why so many couples were depressed, and thus divorcing, twelve years ago. 1996 was a year of disasters such as the Manchester bombings, Chinese Earthquakes, terrorist atrocities in Docklands, and the launch of The Spice Girls. It can be no coincidence that, a dozen years later, the record rate of marriage breakdown parallels so closely the reunion of Scary, Sporty, Baby, Dozy and Chav.
The celeb world they inhabit is going bananas just now - a kind of bananas split – with more break ups than they can shake their shtick at as the McCartneys, John Cleese, Britney, Marilyn Manson and others rush to say “I don’t any more”. It can only be a matter of weeks till Mattel, makers of the celebrity Barbie, release the Divorce Lawyer outfit for her and the Penniless Hobo kit for Ken.
And divorce seems to make these people say and do silly things. Sister Heather Mills of the Sisters of Perpetual Self Delusion, who has never done any wrong whatsoever in her life, would now seem to be unbalanced (insert your own, prosthetic leg, joke) whilst her oddly coiffed ex comes across as meaner than a bank manager at bonus time. As if that’s not enough, unless the ex Beatle also divorces his hairdresser, he’s soon going to have to put up with the Ginger jokes as well.
Meanwhile, John Cleese has just ended his third marriage, though the titles of his books should have given his missus a clue when they tied the knot. I’m sure she enjoyed his cheery best seller Life and How To Survive It, the snappily titled Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and the hilarious What You Need To Know About Hormone Replacement Therapy, but I can’t believe she didn’t spot a theme, and run a mile, when his Living With Depression was published.
But celebs have always treated divorce as a minor inconvenience. It’s not till it hits a bit closer to your home that it really makes you sit up and take notice.
A friend of mine in the States came home from work on her husband’s fortieth birthday. She left work early as a surprise and, bearing champagne and sexy undies, arrived home to find her husband had shaved his head, added a tattoo, and thrown all her clothes out in to the yard. There had been no warning signs and she was out, replaced by his mid life crisis. Two restraining orders later, she got the divorce and has not spoken to him since.
Another friend, a fitness fanatic, decided divorce was certainly an option when he discovered the guys at the gym were all using the same exercise bike. Problem was he’d married that bike twelve years before.
I have been talking this divorce thing over with my first wife recently - she’s also my current, and only, wife but I’m taking nothing for granted. We have been seeing great friends split up at alarming rates and the only thing we’ve learned is that everyone is miserable, whether it’s the couple, children, relatives or friends.
There’s the awkwardness of wondering which of the couple to stay in touch with. Do you feel sorry for them or give them the courtesy of acting as if nothing’s happened? And how can we stop this misery happening to others? What lessons can we learn?
I thought that there should be a law brought in that you can only marry your partner after a committee of your friends has given them the once over and then taken a legally binding vote. This seemed fine till Debbie told me that if such a law had been in force fifteen years ago, her friends would never have allowed us to marry. Harsh, but fair.
However, no matter what your feelings on divorce, sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say it’s definitely the only thing to do. This week in Poland, a man slipped off to a brothel in Warsaw while his wife of fourteen years was out at work. It was his first ever visit and after checking in he discovered that the madame assigned to him looked a bit familiar. It was his wife.
I wonder if she made him pay?
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Traditions
I guess every household has its own traditions at this time of year, whether it’s breaking resolutions, tipping that discarded, crispy, Christmas tree over the fence into a neighbour’s garden or expressing surprise to the bin men that the Christmas envelope you left for them must have been nicked.
The Scottish tradition of “first footing” is important to Scots everywhere and, each New Year’s Eve, my Dad visits and goes outside at one minute to midnight so he can ring the bell and be the first visitor of the new year. Our family’s variation on the theme is to merrily ignore the door bell and leave him freezing on the porch step.
Of course traditions don’t have to be as old as Nicholas Parsons to be worthwhile and some have only been going for a few years. In our house, for example, one tradition we have every New Year is that I sit the kids down and video them answering questions. It’s not so much a pilot for a new quiz show as a look back over the past year with them remembering their holidays, school friends, adventures and activities.
I have these tapes going back around eight years so it really is a fantastic family record of growing up. Except, of course, it isn’t, as we never, ever, watch them.
In good moments I have visions of my kids sitting down with the tapes in years to come and laughing uproariously at the way their voices, faces and fashions have changed over the years. They’ll forget me dragging them against their will to do it, prompting them from behind camera and making them sing whatever nursery rhyme or song was their favourite at the time. They’ll fall on their knees with angelic choirs on fluffy clouds ringing in their ears as they sing their thanks in soft focus and probably in Latin. Then they’ll text their thanks to me in Heaven.
But the reality is they’ve both told me that, when I go to meet the great Director in the sky, these “end of year” tapes will go in the big wooden box with me.
And yet I still tied them down again last week, forced truth drugs down their throat and did a review of their year and, for the first time, I think I noticed a little bit of interest. No rushing off to catch Coronation Street, email their friends or grab the Ipods. They actually cooperated and were inspired afterwards to go find more memories by digging out their baby books.
Now I realise that those of you without kids will probably think, at best, that this is pointless and, at worst, you’ll be reaching for the sick bag. But hey, it’s a parent’s lot to be misunderstood. Childless friends of mine think those of us who intentionally put little people on the planet are a waste of skin and self important, totally pointless and deserving of the debts we run up. We are the Kerry Katona of life’s pecking order.
In truth, though, we probably bring it on ourselves. When my first daughter, Annalie, was born I was broadcasting on Radio Two, filling in for Ken Bruce. Terry Wogan congratulated me at the changeover and various others popped in with big cigars and I felt duty bound to share my joy with the world. I was elated like never before till I read the duty log - that’s the record of calls received from listeners - and found many variations of “Tell Coia to shut the hell up. You’d think no one had ever given birth before”. I was gutted.
Yet I now know how they felt because I’ve come to understand that kids are great, intelligent, funny and talented only when they’re your own. I’m afraid to say that other people’s kids just don’t hack it and when an acquaintance tells me a story about how funny their kid is, or what a clever thing he said the other day, I feel exactly like those cynical, jaded radio callers.
So, with that in mind, it’s with trepidation that I share with you what my eldest found in her baby book. Among the curls from her first hair cut, lists of kids at her first party, photos of her with Santa, and a tatty piece of plastic that revealed itself to be her hospital bracelet, I’d written something she’d said when she was three and which I’d long forgotten.
As she’d started loving the sound of her own voice, Annalie was repeating everything she overheard including my being told off by my wife for only driving with one hand on the wheel. For days I was harangued by this tot from the back seat and then, one day, she wandered in to the loo where I was standing answering a call of nature. She stared aghast and tutted loudly. “Two hands on your willy Daddy, two hands”.
Although those end of year tapes may well be going in the box with me when I go, I’ll be holding on to them with both hands and I’ll come back to haunt future generations of my family by slipping the cassettes in to their tape players every new year.
For now, though, I’d better go and let my Dad in.
The Scottish tradition of “first footing” is important to Scots everywhere and, each New Year’s Eve, my Dad visits and goes outside at one minute to midnight so he can ring the bell and be the first visitor of the new year. Our family’s variation on the theme is to merrily ignore the door bell and leave him freezing on the porch step.
Of course traditions don’t have to be as old as Nicholas Parsons to be worthwhile and some have only been going for a few years. In our house, for example, one tradition we have every New Year is that I sit the kids down and video them answering questions. It’s not so much a pilot for a new quiz show as a look back over the past year with them remembering their holidays, school friends, adventures and activities.
I have these tapes going back around eight years so it really is a fantastic family record of growing up. Except, of course, it isn’t, as we never, ever, watch them.
In good moments I have visions of my kids sitting down with the tapes in years to come and laughing uproariously at the way their voices, faces and fashions have changed over the years. They’ll forget me dragging them against their will to do it, prompting them from behind camera and making them sing whatever nursery rhyme or song was their favourite at the time. They’ll fall on their knees with angelic choirs on fluffy clouds ringing in their ears as they sing their thanks in soft focus and probably in Latin. Then they’ll text their thanks to me in Heaven.
But the reality is they’ve both told me that, when I go to meet the great Director in the sky, these “end of year” tapes will go in the big wooden box with me.
And yet I still tied them down again last week, forced truth drugs down their throat and did a review of their year and, for the first time, I think I noticed a little bit of interest. No rushing off to catch Coronation Street, email their friends or grab the Ipods. They actually cooperated and were inspired afterwards to go find more memories by digging out their baby books.
Now I realise that those of you without kids will probably think, at best, that this is pointless and, at worst, you’ll be reaching for the sick bag. But hey, it’s a parent’s lot to be misunderstood. Childless friends of mine think those of us who intentionally put little people on the planet are a waste of skin and self important, totally pointless and deserving of the debts we run up. We are the Kerry Katona of life’s pecking order.
In truth, though, we probably bring it on ourselves. When my first daughter, Annalie, was born I was broadcasting on Radio Two, filling in for Ken Bruce. Terry Wogan congratulated me at the changeover and various others popped in with big cigars and I felt duty bound to share my joy with the world. I was elated like never before till I read the duty log - that’s the record of calls received from listeners - and found many variations of “Tell Coia to shut the hell up. You’d think no one had ever given birth before”. I was gutted.
Yet I now know how they felt because I’ve come to understand that kids are great, intelligent, funny and talented only when they’re your own. I’m afraid to say that other people’s kids just don’t hack it and when an acquaintance tells me a story about how funny their kid is, or what a clever thing he said the other day, I feel exactly like those cynical, jaded radio callers.
So, with that in mind, it’s with trepidation that I share with you what my eldest found in her baby book. Among the curls from her first hair cut, lists of kids at her first party, photos of her with Santa, and a tatty piece of plastic that revealed itself to be her hospital bracelet, I’d written something she’d said when she was three and which I’d long forgotten.
As she’d started loving the sound of her own voice, Annalie was repeating everything she overheard including my being told off by my wife for only driving with one hand on the wheel. For days I was harangued by this tot from the back seat and then, one day, she wandered in to the loo where I was standing answering a call of nature. She stared aghast and tutted loudly. “Two hands on your willy Daddy, two hands”.
Although those end of year tapes may well be going in the box with me when I go, I’ll be holding on to them with both hands and I’ll come back to haunt future generations of my family by slipping the cassettes in to their tape players every new year.
For now, though, I’d better go and let my Dad in.
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