Category: 70s

The moment, after a journey of not 100-yards, when I’d crashed my mum’s Triumph 2000 into a tree next to a garage behind my Balham flats, I knew I was destined never to become a driving examiner.

I failed my first car driving test in Sutton and aside from having far too few lessons, it was an incredibly bright day and I realised how Saul of Tarsus must have felt on his way to Damascus (he probably wouldn’t have gone via Sutton).

On the notice board inside the test centre, there were posters encouraging people to become examiners; the ones I’d met weren’t the happiest: dicing with death several times a day and getting no reward were key reasons. Ironically, the test centre was close to the local hospital where I’d once been given Pethidine (if Jimi Hendrix had been a driving examiner, he’d have worked there).

When I was 14 in 1971 my mum was keen for me to learn to drive. The garages behind our flats were quiet and an alternative as the open fields in SW17 were long gone.

It was an automatic car but took me no time to get the two pedals mixed up as we hurtled towards a tree. I didn’t drive for a decade – deeply scarred, although not as scarred as the Triumph 2000!

I had more success with a motorbike and passed first time. Nowadays, the instructor follows behind giving instructions via a walkie-talkie; in 1978, when I passed, you were sent off and told to return in fifteen minutes; as long as you made a hand signal leaving the test centre and returned with a limited amount of blood on your bike, you passed.

I’m still not a good driver; it is inherent. My father took 12 tests to pass.  It took me two and was glad to rid myself of L-plates, which for me meant liability, rather than learner.  It still does.

It’s been many a year since I submerged U-Boats into my Mr Matey; bath times are different now I’m older.

In my south London flat, growing up in the 60s, no bath time was complete without a fleet of plastic destroyers and rather too much Mr Matey acting as dangerous mid-Atlantic cliffs and waves as I re-enacted the Battle of Jutland and scenes from The Cruel Sea.  I was Noel Coward in my bath (without the smoking jacket, obviously).

However, as you get older, and as a boy discover there are other things to play with in the bath other than replica Bismarcks, a sophistication comes over you and Mr Matey is eventually replaced by Radox and then anything from Kiehl’s as you get older still.  Plastic boats and rubber ducks are replaced by candles as you try and re-enact scenes from Barbra Streisand’s A Star is Born.

I can only assume Queen Elizabeth I only bathed once a year as no-one had invented Mr Matey or, in her case, Miss Matey. It might have saved Sir Walter Raleigh’s head if he’d brought some Bronnley Bath Cubes back from the West Indies rather than tobacco.

I still enjoy a bath; although I just lie there these days, my myopia bearing testimony that I should really have stuck to manoeuvring my replica HMS Victory more during my adolescence!

A new A Star is Born film is out; a new one was a due as it keeps the sequence of one every other decade going.  Although -3 in 1954 when the second one came out, it is my favourite, as I enjoyed James Mason playing Rommel in it.

However, it was the 1976 version which I saw at the pictures: The Granada, Clapham Junction.

It was a time when they still had B-movies at the cinema.   The B-film before the Barbra Streisand classic was a grainy, black & white film about Ernest Rutherford and him splitting the atom.  There were no songs like Evergreen in this film; not even a clip of the future 1^st Baron Rutherford for Nelson humming Don’t rain on my parade.

Aside from me and my aspiring Barry Norman mates, there was a bloke sitting down the front (arguably better than sitting in the back)) of the cinema. Thirty-minutes into the atom-splitting film the nutter turned around to me and my mates and asked: “Is this the Barbra Streisand film?”

The lack of naked bath scenes and an aging star driving into the distance (not to mention the lack of songs) were the giveaways.   We suggested it wasn’t but stick with it as we’d paid our 4/6 (or whatever cinema entrance was in 1976) and there is a bath scene!

The main attraction started. Towards the end the Streisand character sings at a concert and several lights are lit from within the audience.  This was the cue for the nutter to get his powerful, out-of-control French lighter out to join in the memorial of a lost friend.

Within seconds the Fire Brigade was called, he was frog-marched out by a fleet of usherettes and submerged in a giant water tank, lighter held aloft, singing “Hello Dolly”.

That’s showbiz!