Category: humor

These days everyone can pretend to be David Bailey. Most people have phones, in which are built-in cameras which would put Lord Snowden to shame.
I am conscious, when growing up in south London in the ‘60s, that these photo opportunities for me were rare. The one I use on social media was taken when I was four in 1961.
I remember the preparation and actual taking of the photographs took an age, plus there was the added resentment that my bedroom had become the make-shift studio. I did not want my photo taken (an attitude I still have, fifty-nine years later) and I think it shows as poor Sooty, with whom I am posing, gets strangled making me look like I’ve been brought up in Boston rather than Balham.
The desire to play with Sooty and my thirty-odd other hand puppets, rather than looking angelic, never faded. With the exception of the mandatory primary school photograph (without Sooty), there remain few photos of me. Neither parent owning a camera didn’t aid matters. Although my mum did borrow an aging relative’s Box Brownie during one summer holiday; she held no ambition to become the next Annie Leibovitz (although she did like her posh biscuits).
Other families usually had one relative adept at taking still and/or moving pictures of their offspring and you’d dread the invite round to someone’s house to witness their holiday that year with a blurry, shaky, grainy silent memory of that summer in Bognor courtesy of their cine-camera.
I wonder if I’d had a puppet of Sweep things might have been better?

And, smile 😊

As a football fan, I’ve been lucky to have watched the beautiful game at the Bernabéu; the San Siro and both German Olympic stadia in Berlin and Munich; but the zenith of my footballing viewing has got to be Sandy Lane, former home of Tooting & Mitcham FC.
Here I watched a charity game between Tooting & Mitcham and a team of celebrities – think Robbie Williams’ games only in 1968 – and in Mitcham.
I went because my comedy hero, Marty Feldman was playing. Great writer and actor, no Charlie Cooke.
The game, like most charity games, had an unexpected celebrity kick it off. In this case it was Mark Lester, who played the title role in the film Oliver. Like Diana Ross at the 1994 World Cup only with more begging.
I am one-year older than Mark Lester, but even at that tender age, although you dreamed of playing with grown-ups, when reality kicked in (literally) you wanted to hurriedly produce a note from your mum excusing you from the first half.
Mark Lester kicked off and immediately trotted back to the safety of the dug-out, changing rooms or Nancy.
But, imagine if he’d stayed on and discovered that Tooting & Mitcham had Oliver Reed in their starting XI? He’d have terrorized the poor urchin for ninety-minutes.
Picture the scene: Young Mark gets the ball from the comedy equivalent of Jimmy Greaves, dribbles inside several Tooting & Mitcham defenders, is about to shoot, balances, raises his leg and then suddenly hears the death-cry behind him of ‘Bullesye!’
This was 1968; you couldn’t do that now, FIFA have introduced a rule which says you can’t have a pit-bull terrier playing at centre-half.