Breaking The World Record For Coin Catching With Paul Deacon, Woodfield Avenue, 30 December 1974

In 2004 I was honoured to have formed part of a team, as a NewsRevue writer, that really did win a Guinness World Record – explained and illustrated in the piece linked here and below:

Ultimate Love and Happy Tories, Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner, Café Rouge Holborn, 3 March 2017

But I had clearly forgotten that, 30 years previously, I was involved in another world record feat. The reference in the diary dated 30 December 1974 clearly reads:

Paul Deacon came for day – we broke world coin catching record.

Ok, so perhaps that record was not independently authenticated and certified. Perhaps the world coin catching record is not quite so prestigious as longest running live comedy show.

But a world record IS a world record and we broke it.

We went on to spoof the event in a rather childishly silly (even by our standards) recording we made in April 1977, by which time coin catching had become known as coin tossing, it seems:

Execution Scenes, Coin Tossers And Miscellaneous Silliness Recorded With Paul Deacon, 12 April 1977

I have no recollection of the rules of coin catching and how the world record was established. The 1977 recording might contain some clues, but only to the extent that “rules” and “establishment” probably played a very small part indeed. I’ll guess that the coin was tossed in a conventional “start of a match” stylee and then caught (or not),

More importantly, this diary entry is the first mention of Paul Deacon in my diaries and I actually think that day might well have been the very first time that the two of us got together during the school holidays to lark about.

In which case it was genuinely a milestone or seminal event, even if not genuinely a world record.

Postscript One

Paul Deacon has chimed in with some essential additional details:

Haha. I seem to recall I was good at stacking coins on the back of my elbow then catching them with a flick of the arm downwards. Also spinning a coin one handed. What a sad lad

Postscript Two

A link to this posting kicked off quite a controversy on the Alleyn’s 1970s Alumni Facebook Group. A veritable Coincatchgate.

For those readers who are members of that group, here is a link to that controversy.

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