Category: teenage crush

In the late ‘70s I joined an Am Dram group (still have shirts with stage make-up on).  We’d mostly perform in a Balham school hall, where there was more a smell of rotting plimsolls than greasepaint.

Having started with one line, I worked my way up to be given larger parts.  This impressed some of the younger girls in the group.  Well, one in particular.

We’d just performed a revue at the old Tooting Bec (Mental) Hospital.  Tough gig as many of the audience couldn’t clap as they still had their straitjackets on.

During the revue I’d sung, danced (albeit in a ballerina costume) and acted.

It was at this time when I’d started my career in advertising and earlier that day had bought the book, “Teach yourself advertising”; still haven’t finished it nearly fifty years on.

The show finished, and Tooting’s answer to Nurse Ratched had returned her cares to their rooms, we left the hospital to return to our respective homes.

As we approached Hurley’s on Balham High Road there were just two of us left.  Me and a girl in our troupe.  As we got to her house I was invited in for coffee, except it wasn’t for coffee it was for “coffee”.

With a fear of girls even now, being alone with a girl filled me with dread, especially after the door had been locked, the pet Alsatian, Himmler, tied up, no obvious sign of a percolator and the announcement of “mum’s out for the evening” I went into blind panic.

I stood up, announced that I had bought a new book and needed to read it before the morning and left, coffee-less.

Oddly I have three children, but back then, you could get all sorts of things off the Freeman’s catalogue. 

On January 22nd 1966, These boots were made for walking entered the charts; to celebrate this fact, I erected a life-size poster of Nancy Sinatra, sporting (there is no other word) a pair of pink boots, across my bedroom wall.
This was, in my nine-year-old opinion, arguably the most artistic thing hanging in SW17 that year; next year Nancy was usurped by a picture of Julie Andrews confronting the Gestapo.
A nine-year-old interested in thigh-length boots, I hear you say? Not what you’re thinking. At nine I was still recovering from seeing Action Man naked (my parents had taken the cheaper option and not ordered any uniform) and was quite content playing with my Hot Wheels (this is not a euphemism) to worry about leather-clad women. No, the real reason is that I wanted to work in a shoe-shop.
Clark’s in Tooting High Street had a pneumatic money carrier, which, as a nine-year-old, I assumed launched you into space. The woman who worked in there also looked a bit like John Glenn, so my assumption seemed valid. Although, given the sandals my mum forced me to wear, defying gravity was going to be tricky, there were more holes than shoe. There was also this secret desire to be able to say (without being smacked) “Uranus”, should anyone ask me where I was heading.
As I got older, nude Action Men and Hot Wheels took a back seat and thigh-length boots came to the fore. As did increasingly more frequent trips to the opticians.
I never worked in the shoe-shop, but, ironically, throughout my career in advertising, I have talked a load of old cobblers.

When people are asked to name their favourite album, no one ever mentions Top of the Pops – Volume 18.

I would play it endlessly in my south London flat, listening to the songs which were in the charts at the time. I’d listen to them under my eiderdown on Radio Luxembourg. But, on these records, none were by the original artists.

I was fourteen in July 1971 and had the lowly weekly income of 50p, these LPs quenched my musical desire cheaply (which was ironic given one of the songs on the record was “Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheap, Cheap”).

During this time there was a proliferation of impersonators on the TV. It was my naive belief that if they could mimic Harold Wilson, they could also do Harold Melvin. I did not appreciate at the time that these covers were done by professional session musicians who were as good at doing Ted Nugent as Mike Yarwood was Ted Heath.

During these times there were rivals to the Top of the Pops LP series: Hot Hits being one. However, you tended to be loyal to one, bit like either preferring Monty Python to The Goodies, Max Factor to Rimmel or Harry Potter to anything by Dostoyevsky.

But, dear reader, I bought these LPs purely for musical pleasure and not because the album covers showing women in provocative poses. I was 14 and still thinking about which new I-Spy book to get. Honest, guv.