Category: comedy blog

Driving home for Advent

Published on by mickyrichards19572 Comments

Assuming everyone has been good this year, you should all be expecting Santa to visit.  If you’ve not been good, expect your chimney to suddenly develop large cracks in its masonry.

As a child, waking up in my Balham flat, I would eagerly look forward to what Christmas Day would bring (preferably in the form of presents). 

One year I remember receiving the Rupert annual.  I was never a fan of his column (obviously not written by him) nor of the Daily Express in general; they seemed to be obsessed with finding Martin Bormann (the Nazis’ answer to Reggie Perrin). 

I was quite disappointed – I had wanted the Supercar annual and it was on that Christmas morning I decided to invest in a decent pen and start an “improve your hand-writing” course.

Christmas lunch would be held one floor down in my flats at my Nan’s.  She was an excellent cook. Although, in later years, she would mistakenly place threepenny bits in the turkey, rather than the Christmas pudding.  Many a Christmas afternoon was spent at the emergency dentist. 

I was always allowed to have a glass of Pimm’s.  There was little alcohol in it; this was replaced with more fruit than you’d find on a Carmen Miranda hat.  

The evening was spent playing Newmarket, with many halfpennies up for grabs.   I would get very involved and still wake up screaming “Whose got the ace of spades?”. 

Hoping not to get the 2026 Rupert Annual – or his distasteful trousers – this Christmas.

Happy Advent.

Plastics & Rubber weakly

Published on by mickyrichards19573 Comments

My job, in advertising, for the past fifty-years, has been to identify which media my clients should spend their advertising money with.

My role would be to meet people who would sell me their wares with the hope that I would spend my clients’ money with them.  This would often involve leaving their newspaper or magazine with me.   Some were great:  Punch was always a welcome addition to my reading list; Woman’s Weekly (although “famed for its knitting”), less so (I’m more a crochet man myself); leaving a copy of Vogue was a complete waste of time for me – although it did solve the problem of a particularly wobbly dining table.

Because, like my dad before me, I specialised on the business-to-business aspect of my clients’ activities, I would get given some very odd (but relevant for their field) magazines.

Commercial Rabbit (if you’re vegetarian, stop reading here) was the most comedic name I ever came across (and put ads in).   It was aimed at people breeding rabbits commercially (the clue’s in the title), not bunnies who had an entrepreneurial streak.

Tunnels and Tunnelling (so good they named it twice) was one I thought was aimed at Great Escape fans – not, as it was, construction engineers.   Every month, there’d be a new pick glued onto the front cover.  It wasn’t quite the same feeling I got when Shoot! would produce its annual league ladder.

I was very diligent as a young lad in advertising and would often take work home.  Although, my train carriage became unnecessarily busy when I revealed the latest copy of Plastics & Rubber Weekly.

Mustn’t grumble

Published on by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

“White rabbits, white rabbits, white rabbits” is something people say to ward off evil spirits; Chas ‘n’ Dave fans and anyone who was in Jefferson Airplane should they come round.

It is the less violent option to “Pinch, punch, first of the month”.  There is, of course, a suffix to this: “..and no return.”.   If this happened in any of the south London playgrounds where I was brought up, this would have introduced total carnage.  Although, having attended a grammar school, we’d have kept our caps on whilst fighting.

Luckily I went to a school where medieval superstitions weren’t encouraged.   Although, there was a black cat; a series of ladders erected by the prefects at playtime and umbrellas deliberately opened during geography lessons.  The Stevie Wonder album Talking Book was obviously banned.

We were never allowed to knock on wood as the school walls were unstable.

We weren’t allowed to cross our fingers as the maths teacher told us “if the wind changed, we’d stay like that”.

One of the reasons I did so badly during my O-levels was the constant need to hoover up salt the teachers had thrown over their shoulders.

I’d have given them the “evil eye”, but my eyesight was so bad.

Uniformity

Published on by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

I’ve never worn protective equipment during my work; I’ve never even had a lanyard.  (I’d love to have had a multi-coloured ribbon hanging round my neck with a photograph which, if it was on my passport, I’d be refused entry to any plane, boat and probably train).

At school there were teachers whose subjects determined they should wear some form of protective uniform: the biology master had a white coat (with pockets full of amoebas); the woodwork master had a brown coat (with pockets of examples of wooden toast racks that were never leaving the woodwork room, such was their deformity) and the PE master had a red coat because he was the Devil incarnate; his coat pockets held Pandora’s Box.

My Nan had a polyester housecoat: her coat pockets contained several sprouts she’d cleverly swiped from my plate to avoid any potential Spring and Port Wine situations during Sunday dinners and two former pet mice and a three-year old Fishermen’s Friend.

Barbers had similar coats – much shorter and more purple.  Their pockets contained a million combs; a million pairs of scissors; a million dollops of Brylcreem and something for the weekend – probably a lanyard.

Listen with Auntie

Published on by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

Are you sitting comfortably?  Once I get my hand out of Archie Andrews,  then I’ll begin.

Listen with Mother started 75-years ago this week.  We’re probably all of an age that we’re only sitting comfortably if we’ve a series of support cushions on our favourite chair.

Radio has been an ever-present in my life, except for a few weeks when I owned a Walkman.  I got bored with it as the only CD I had was “Reginald Dixon’s Greatest Hits”.   I’ve had a dread of the seaside ever since.

On the wall of our Balham flats were radios which played the Home, Light and Third programme.   The Third Programme rarely got played as none of my relatives were classical music fans.   They thought Brahms was something you got after too many Christmas snowballs; Chopin was something you could do on Balham High Road and Schubert was something you got in a Lucky Dip bag.

I would binge listen to any comedy on the radio.   It showed my possible career choices: rag ‘n’ bone man; archdeacon; Bluebottle. 

During the late ‘60s I desperately wanted to be called Julian and have a friend called Sandy.   Now, that would have been bold.

Very sad Sooty never made it on the radio.  Bye, bye everybody and hello Paderborn.

Cue queuing

Published on by mickyrichards19575 Comments

Although it’s mid-January as I write this, I remember how different Boxing Days were.

This was THE day sales started; the day you started thinking about your summer holiday (preferably without Cliff Richard and his bus); the day you wondered what it might be like to have servants to give presents to.

These days sales are ever present. There are so many different excuses: Black Friday; Cyber Monday; Ruby Tuesday (when rings are cheap); Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (for people seeking Alan Sillitoe memorabilia) and Monday, Monday (for Mamas and Papas fans).

Boxing Day would be the day people would queue outside shops overnight and wondered why they never had the strength to carry to bargain three-piece suite back home.

The bumper issues of both the Radio Times and TV Times would carry page after page of potential holiday destinations. 

There would be snow on the ground as the entire family pored over the double issues knowing that mentally they were in the warmth of the Shanklin sun as they decided upon the family’s holiday destination before a marathon game of Newmarket began.

On Boxing Day 1967, my family decided to go to Majorca; seven months later I discovered the meaning of the word gastro-enteritis.

Looking back, I’d have preferred to have spent fourteen-days in the queue outside MFI.   Although, it would have taken me a fortnight to have erected a one-man tent and got the Primus stove going.

Bon voyage and don’t drink the water.

Noggin the Nog is a no no

Published on by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

I’ve not believed in Santa since 1967 when, as a ten-year-old, my mother wanted to take 100% credit for buying that year’s Rupert annual.   I didn’t even like Rupert – Happy Christmas on two levels.

As a kid you believed these characters, especially those on TV, really existed.  Whenever I bathed I always assumed, at some point, Thunderbird 4, Flipper or Stingray would appear out of my Mister Matey bubbles; I’d have thought Bill and Ben were real, except I lived on the fourth floor of a Balham block of flats and didn’t own a garden box, let alone a selection of discarded flowerpots.

Living in a block of flats – with, obviously, no chimney –  gave me my doubts about Santa’s existence.  I was a real goody goody (apparently the type of person Santa rewards), so I ticked one box.  However, I could have been Mother Teresa, there still wasn’t a chimney.

I desperately wanted to meet Mike Mercury and, as an homage, in the early sixties, created a floppy record whistling the theme tune to Supercar at the Battersea Festival Gardens.  

They say, never meet your heroes; the fact the Clangers lived on a moon, far, far away and neither parent drove (or flew), this was always going to be unlikely.

Mike Mercury is probably in his nineties now, so that’s probably not happening either! I’ll never get that record autographed.

Half man, half haddock

Published on by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

I was destined never to follow in the footsteps, or arm movements, of Johnny Weissmuller, Mark Spitz or Orca.  

My complete inability to swim; pathological fear of water and dread of putting on a brightly coloured hat were reasons enough to believe south-west London swimming baths and me were not a perfect match.

My mother befriended a family who were, as far as I was concerned, probably mermaids (the women always wore long dresses); their ability in the water made Flipper look sluggish.

Aged 8, in 1965, and swearing at the instructor my mother forced me to have, had me banned from Balham Baths; sniggering and pointing at the “No Petting” sign at Clapham Manor Baths ensured I was thrown out and given a detention during a school swimming gala.

Latchmere Baths, worryingly next to Battersea’s Coroner’s Court, was where I discovered declaring I had a verruca got me put straight back on the 49 Bus straight to my Tooting secondary school.

While I realise it is a useful skill to have, I cannot swim.  I carry a set of water wings with me if ever I travel into to the City and have to cross one of London’s many bridges.

Night Swimming is my favourite R.E.M song; I can only assume Michael Stipe doesn’t mind wearing goggles.

Le lighter de ma Tante

Published on by mickyrichards19572 Comments

Cliftonville in 1968. 

Not skiing in the Alps; not being a Bedouin living in the Sahara for a week; not visiting Washington DC.  Two generations later and it seems the school trip is slightly more exotic than it was when I was eleven!

A boarding house (do these things exist anymore?) just outside Margate was our final primary school year’s school journey.  It was so bleak and the food inedibly awful, it could have been an SAS training school for eleven-year-olds.

If Grand Designs had have been on in 1968, Kevin McCloud would have suggested getting Fred Dibnah in – pronto.

Many of us had rarely ventured outside of SW17, let alone visited Kent.  It might well have been Mars, such was our disbelief of it being so far away.  It didn’t take us long up Balham High Street to see who’d not taken their Kwells.

At secondary school the trips weren’t much better.  The day trip to Boulogne and Dunkirk were arranged ostensibly to hone our French speaking skills.  We did learn ou est les flick knives? and Combien this lighter that was possibly once a flame thrower?

No wonder Elon Musk is so keen to get to Mars – he’s probably had to stay a week in Cliftonville.

“DYB, DYB, Sausage”

Published on by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

I remember my first night at Cubs; the first time my woggle had left my flat.

The meeting was held in my primary school hall – it seemed odd going to the hall in the dark and not having to sing “All things bright and beautiful”

There were lots of big boys – probably about ten.  In my eyes, that was nearing old age.

Having never read The Jungle Book it puzzled me as to why people were called Akela, Shere Khan and Baloo.  No one was called Martin, Peter or Lorraine – popular names in the early sixties when I first wore my new (incredibly itchy) Cub jumper.

There was lots of running around, especially when Akela called.  It was nearest I’ve ever been to becoming feral.

On my first night we were told about several things we’d have to learn by heart and recite ;  I guess the Masons are the same – only with more use of pigs’ bladders?

We would learn about knots – handy if you were thinking of a career in kidnapping; cook sausages – Cubs wasn’t very Vegan-friendly and get the chance to gain badges to put on your itchy jumper.  Might that make the jumper less itchy?

In time I’d get a badge which showed I could send messages using an Aldis lamp with one hand while cooking sausages with the other – and all the time making sure my woggle never caught fire.

Sausages are off, love.