Schubert The Sheep, emulating Timmy The Dog
I have one very clear memory from the first few days of November 1982, about which the diary is entirely silent, plus one discovery on that diary page which baffles me as I really cannot remember the occasion at all.
2 November 1982 – The Launch Of Channel 4
Television played a minuscule part in my life at Keele, until the arrival of Alan Gorman in Barnes L54 equipped with a snazzy “starting University present” from his parents – a portable black and white television set and a licence to use it.
My first recollection of watching that television with Alan was the launch of Channel 4, an event that had been talked about in the news media with great fanfare.
I know that said fanfare had reached my parents, as I remember my mother once telling me that she had been watching Countdown since the day it was the very first broadcast on that new channel. I can imagine my dad having meticulously tuned the family television set to a Channel 4 Test Card days or even weeks before the big day.
My diary is silent on this matter, but I remember one aspect of that event very well.
We, by which I mean Barnes L54, gathered to watch Five Go Mad In Dorset that evening. That Comic Strip film had been trailed at length as a centrepiece of Channel 4 launch day.
The arrival of Channel 4 actually presented a problem to the Students’ Union, which had an extension with several rooms, only three of which were designated television rooms. In a world with only three television stations, this worked rather well, but the addition of a fourth TV channel was the subject of much debate. Should The Quiet Room be converted into a fourth TV room (no). In which case, what method should be used to select which of the four channels would be viewed in which of the three TV rooms? I’m not sure how that was resolved, but I suspect that Five Go Mad In Dorset would have been watched in at least one of the TV rooms that night.
Here is a link to a YouTube of the film. Trigger warning: it is rich in parody of non-woke opinions such that it couldn’t possibly be made without major script revisions today…or a special “licence to offend” from the current Home Secretary, (November 2022) that would no doubt be granted.
It felt very different from the TV comedy I had watched with my parents and I suppose it felt like comedy for our generation…not least because we were laughing at the mores of our parents generation.
In particular I remember Alan and I laughing so much at this film that evening. One other thing I recall well was having to explain rather a lot of the jokes/cultural references to Hamzah, who was from Brunei. Once we explained a joke, Hamzah would laugh, but it was not the same laugh as his natural laugh at universal gags; gags that he understood straight away. His laugh at explained jokes was that slightly forced laughter that one tends to hear at performances of Shakespeare or Greek comedies.
We watched several of those Comic Strip films over the coming months on the days they were first broadcast in an “appointment to view” style, which I’m sure is just what Channel 4 was after with people like us.
3 November 1982 “Repaired Furniture”
I’m struggling to recall an evening repairing furniture. Frankly I’m struggling to recall the furniture to which I might possibly have been referring.
I have a feeling that Ahmed (who didn’t make it as far as ’82/’83 in the end) and I inherited some furniture from Jo and Margaret at the end of the previous academic year, when we resided with them (in my case briefly) in Barnes M65.
I vaguely remember a sort-of two seat sofa of non-descript look and vintage. Perhaps also a chair. I suspect that the furniture was not in the best of repair, so presumably we made a collective decision, as a flat, to repair it.
Now I have to be brutally honest here, especially in the absence of any memory of the evening in which I, according to my diary, “repaired furniture”. It is extremely unlikely that I made any positive, physical contribution towards the repairs.
At Alleyn’s School, handicraft was far and away my worst subject. Mr Evans, whom I recall trying (without success) to provide me with some patient, kindly tuition, gave up on me very early in my first year of secondary school. Actually I believe he gave up on all of us – I think he had some sort of a breakdown, no doubt triggered by his inability to transfer even a modicum of woodwork technique to one keen but relentlessly ten-thumbed new boy. That left me at the mercy of Mr Midgely, whose teaching method, especially when directed at less able boys, primarily involved ear-pulling and back-of-head -clipping.
No.
“Repaired furniture” can only possibly mean that the others – Alan in the main, I’d guess – repaired the furniture, while I directed operations and probably, helpfully, made the tea (aka dinner), something I was pretty good at doing. “Lashings of ginger beer” will not have been involved, but Alan and I might have downed some cans of cheap supermarket pale ale, which, in those days, could still be procured for as little as 26p a can if you were lucky. That I do remember.
Oh gosh, that is an improvement. Well done everyone.