Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Happy New Year


2013 began disastrously for me with a burst pipe last Sunday.
This wasn’t just any old leak…this was a fountain of water on mains pressure spraying from under my sink.
If I was selling the animation rights to this story (which I am, if anyone is interested?), I would be portrayed as bobbing up and down on top of a giant, gushing torrent of water, as might be seen in an episode of “Top Cat” when Benny Ball opens up a street hydrant, with hilarious consequences, much to the disdain of Officer Dibble.
The next hour is a blur of me filling buckets and basins with water, trying to get hold of emergency plumbers and trying to shut the mains water off, (something I’ve never needed to do before).
I got a hold of one plumber who said he’d send someone round, but then called back to say it wouldn’t be for 8-10 hours.
I cancelled, reasoning that in 8-10 hours I would be starring in a tribute episode of “The Undersea World Of Jaques Cousteau”.
Eventually, I found another one who could be round in less than an hour.
An hour later, the plumber and the “cancelled” plumber both arrived simultaneously, (he maintained that the cancellation message hadn’t been passed on to him).
There then followed an argument of about 20 minutes as the cancelled plumber demanded a call-out charge, with the other plumber waiting to start the job, with me arguing and simultaneously emptying buckets of water into the bath.
Eventually, the cancelled plumber left (no payment, not my fault), and the pipe was fixed.
It was at this point that I could have reasonably expected Jeremy Beadle to appear, were it not for the fact that he is sadly no longer with us.
Happily,  it was a snip at £150, (well it did take half an hour, so fair enough)
It turns out, that you can isolate the mains water by adjusting valves under the combi-boiler ; but regrettably I didn’t know that, (I do now).
I have to look on the positive aspects of all this…at least I was in when it happened.
If I’d been out the result would have been catastrophic.

I’m still gobsmacked by all the Jimmy Savile revelations…
I have to confess as liking him a lot when I was a kid.

He was the first person that I saw in real life whom I’d only previously seen on television.
I was 9 years old, and on a family holiday in Scarborough ; he was fooling around in the main street, on the back of a lorry shoving bales of hay around with a pitchfork (no idea why!).
A crowd had gathered around to watch and he was bantering away with everybody much to their amusement.
I was mesmerised by this.
Jimmy Savile! The guy who presented “Top Of The Pops”. Jimmy Savile off of the telly! …in real life! There…right in front of me!
I bored my classmates at school for months afterwards with my celebrity spotting lifestyle anecdotes.
This was a time when there were relatively few people on television, and as a consequence “tv celebrities” were much more revered.
Of course nowadays every bastard is on tv and the associated Hollywood-esque glamour has drastically faded.
I hated “Jim’ll Fix It” (too twee), but liked his radio shows, and generally
regarded him as a one-off, harmless maverick.
But this now seems on a par with saying that Hitler could paint a bit.
I always thought I was a fairly good judge of character.
Jesus…!

In the early 80s, a friend of mine, Fiona, assured me that it was common knowledge “in the business”, that he was a necrophiliac.
I remember laughing uproariously about this and taking great delight in repeatedly rubbishing  this “fact”.
The necrophiliac allegation hasn’t been proven, (possible problem with witness testimony?), but I’m treating this as a “no smoke without fire" scenario, and I’d like to take the opportunity to apologise to Fiona for my summary dismissal of the veracity of her initial claim.

I’m currently keeping my fingers crossed that Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper will survive unscathed in the current climate of “entertainer
re-assessment”.

1 comment:

Dickie said...

We saw Valerie Singleton she we went to Wembley in 79. Does that count?