Stairlift to Heaven (7 page)

It all reminds me of a sketch I once wrote for my radio series Star Terk Two, in the eighties.

A NEWSAGENTS SHOP.
DAVE
WALKS UP TO THE COUNTER WHERE THE
NEWSAGENT
IS SERVING.

DAVE: Could I put a Valentine’s Day message in next week’s Advertiser, please?

NEWSAGENT: Of course. What would you like to say?

DAVE: ‘To my darling Jenny, lots of love, Dave.

NEWSAGENT: (WRITES IT DOWN) ‘To my darling Jennypoos, lots….’

DAVE: Jenny.

NEWSAGENT: What?

DAVE: Just ‘Jenny'.

NEWSAGENT: No ‘poos’?

DAVE: No.

NEWSAGENT: It isn’t any extra.

DAVE: I don’t want a ‘poos’, thank you.

NEWSAGENT: Suit yourself. (WRITES IT DOWN) ‘To my darling Jenny, lots of love, Davey Wavey.

DAVE: Dave.

NEWSAGENT: Pardon?

DAVE: Just Dave. And another thing, you don’t spell ‘lots of love’ like that.

NEWSAGENT: You do. (SPELLS IT OUT) L..O..T..Z..A..L..U..V. Lotzaluv.

DAVE: Yes well when I went to school it was three separate words, ‘Lots’, ‘of’ and ‘love’. So I’d like it like that, please.

NEWSAGENT: Well you’re the one who’s paying I suppose. So that’s ‘To my darling Jenny....megasqidgeons of love, Dave’.

DAVE: ‘Lots’ of love.

NEWSAGENT: ‘Megasquidgeons’ is another way of saying ‘lots’.

DAVE: Not on my Valentine’s Day message it isn’t.

NEWSAGENT: ‘Oodles of squidgeons of love’?

DAVE:
‘Lots’
of love.

NEWSAGENT: ‘Lots of squidgeons of….?

DAVE: Just ‘Lots of love’!

NEWSAGENT: Right. ‘To my darling Jenny, lots of love, Dave….(UNDER HIS BREATH)…ey diddle dum doos.’

DAVE: What?

NEWSAGENT: Nothing.

DAVE: What’s that you’ve written down?

NEWSAGENT: What you told me.

DAVE: Let me see. Move your hand....My name is not Davey diddle dum doos!

NEWSAGENT: Oh come on, this is a Valentine’s Day message; people always use silly names for Valentine messages.

DAVE: Well I don’t.

NEWSAGENT: Oh lighten up for God’s sake, it’s only a bit of fun.

DAVE: No it isn’t, using silly names is stupid and childish. So I’ll just thank you to put ‘To my darling Jenny, lots of love, Dave’.

NEWSAGENT: Very well then, if you insist. (WRITES IT DOWN) ‘To my darling Jenny, lots of love, Dave.

DAVE: Thank you.

NEWSAGENT: And your full name and address please?

DAVE: Mr Dave Droopydrawers, 22 Acacia Avenue....

****

March 14 2007.
TREE SURGEONS.

It’s spring again, the time of year when you get men in green boiler-suits knocking on your front door asking you if you want any of your trees topped, lopped, felled or otherwise assaulted. The tree-felling close season is over and they’re raring to go with their screaming chainsaws at the drop of a tenner. “That one needs to come down. What, tree that size? It wouldn’t surprise me if the roots aren’t right under your conservatory already, leave it much longer and your floor will be like the deck of the Titanic at iceberg time, just you see if it won’t.”

Tree surgeons are only marginally easier to get rid of than Irishmen who have some tarmac left over from a job up the road and who for a mere couple of hundred pounds will re-tarmac your drive with it to the depth of the thickness of the walls of a condom.

A few years ago, tired of the annual intrusions of the tree-fellers, I devised a plan to rid myself of them with the minimum of fuss. I would simply tell them that my house was for sale, and I was therefore not about to spend any money on it as obviously this would only be to the benefit of the new owner. It had always worked like a charm. Until yesterday.

“Good morning sir, Ace Tree Surgeons,” the ace tree surgeon on my doorstep announced. “Do you want any of your trees’ branches pruned or trees felling?”

On his green boiler-suit, underneath the letters Ace Tree Surgeons, was a little motif of a tree surgeon at work on a tree, should I think he was a man from Mars. As he went through his opening spiel the ace tree surgeon was expertly eyeing our small oak tree and no doubt the probable distance of its roots from our conservatory.

“Sorry, we’re moving house,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, disappointed.

He almost went, but then turned and stood his ground, clearly not completely happy with my excuse. “Where’s your sign?”

My reply was the old standby of a person found out in a lie. “What?”   

He pointed across the road to the ‘For Sale’ notice planted on the Rigby’s front lawn. “Your ‘For Sale’ sign? Where is it?”

My first thought was to tell him that a tree surgeon had cut it down yesterday in mistake for my oak tree whose roots were about to undermine the floor of the conservatory, but he was a big bloke and I wasn’t at all sure he’d appreciate the wit of this cutting riposte. “Kids stole it,” I said, “Little sods will pinch anything round here.” and closed the door quickly before he offered to massacre them for me with his chainsaw, only a tenner.

****

April 3 2007.
PETER KAY.

About a couple of months ago I wrote some comic material, some short routines, and sent them to Peter Kay via his agent. I hadn’t done any scriptwriting for ages but I was inspired to after my daughter had loaned me some of Peter Kay’s CDs, one of which was ‘Live at Bolton Albert Hall’, which I had enjoyed enormously. A funny man, Peter Kay. Performing the sort of material I could write. I wrote. There follows an extract from one of the scripts I sent to him, selected not because it’s the best one but because it’s about being old.

.....
I mean you can’t set foot outside the house nowadays without bumping into about two dozen old people in a walking party. Why can’t they stop in and sit in the corner smelling of mothballs and trumping like they used to?
(PULLS A FACE, WAFTS AWAY A SMELL. CALLS)
‘Get some more moth balls when you go out would you, Dorothy’. But no, they’re all out there, in the gear - bob hat, waxed jacket, corduroy trousers, waterproof leg bindings, map, compass, binoculars, haversack, one of them special walker’s sticks with a spike in the end and enough equipment for an assault on Everest - and they’re only going for a half-mile walk along the canal. They used to call it rambling. They should still call it that because they all ramble.... ‘Nice here isn’t it’….‘Lovely. Not as nice as Turkey though’….‘What?’.....‘Not as nice as Turkey’....‘Right. Although given the choice I’d always have chicken .....’

You can tell the leader because he’s got a beard and more badges on his waxed jacket than the others.
(WALKS SMARTLY ON SPOT, TURNS TO CALL BEHIND)
‘Try to keep up will you.’

‘It’s these new boots.’

‘Did you treat them with dubbin like I told you?’

Hey, that brings back memories, dubbin. When I were a kid we used to have to rub it into our football boots - when football boots were football boots, not these carpet slippers they wear nowadays. ‘And Giggs is running down the wing with the ball seemingly stuck to his feet.’ If he’d rubbed about a pound of dubbin into each boot like we had to the ball
would
be stuck to his feet. The problem wasn’t getting the ball to stick to your feet it was trying to get it off once it had stuck there. There was no blasting it into the net from the edge of the penalty area in those days, if you wanted to score you had to run into the net.
(HE RUNS PONDEROUSLY, DRAGGING ONE OF HIS LEGS, AND THROWS HIMSELF INTO AN IMAGINARY GOAL. THEN DETACHES AN IMAGINARY BALL FROM HIS FOOT AS THOUGH IT WERE AS HEAVY AS A CANNONBALL, TOSSES IT AWAY IN TRIUMPH BUT WITH A GOOD DEAL OF EFFORT)
Well footballs were heavy in those days. Bend it like Beckham? If he kicked one of the footballs I used to have to play with the only thing that would bend would be his foot.

‘Well, did you treat them with dubbin then, like I told you to?’

‘They didn’t know what dubbin were at Tesco’s. She said try t’ deli counter. They’d never heard of it either so I bought an onion bahji.’

‘Did you think of trying a shoe shop?’

‘They don’t have loyalty cards at t’shoe shop.’

‘I’m tired, can we stop for a rest?’

‘We’ll be late for our bar snack if we stop, it’s booked for twelve and we’re already an hour behind schedule.’

‘I hope they know I can’t eat chips with my stomach.’

‘I want to go to the toilet.’

‘Why didn’t you go before we set off?’

‘I didn’t want to go then.’

‘I went before we set off but I want to go again, it’s me prostate.’

‘Have you tried rubbing dubbin on it?’

And so it goes on. ‘Try to keep up’ ‘Can we stop for a rest’ ‘I want to go to the toilet’ I reckon that once people reach the age of forty they mentally start to go back in years instead of forward so by the time they’re seventy they’re ten again. If a man is aged seventy nine it’s like he’s one year old again - no teeth, no hair and no control over his bodily functions. And once they get into their seventies they start being childish again. Telling tales about each other, that sort of thing. ‘Her next door is behind with the rent again. And Hitler was alive when she last paid her poll tax. I believe she’s thick with the postman as well’. They say that in Bolton, ‘thick with somebody’ when they mean friendly with them. They don’t say ‘thin’ with them if you’re unfriendly with them though. They say you’re being a twat with them....’

I never got a reply. So about a month later I sent them again, in case they’d got lost in the post. Nothing. I could believe they’d got lost once but not twice. I was disappointed, because even if Peter Kay had thought the scripts weren’t the sort of thing he was looking for he could at least have had the grace to reply. I remember many years ago sending some material to Jimmy Tarbuck when I was trying to get started as a scriptwriter. He wrote me a very nice note back, saying thanks very much for my interest but he already had a couple of scriptwriters he was happy with.

A week or two later I played another of the CDs my daughter had loaned me. This one was from his first television series, ‘That Peter Kay Thing’. About halfway through, talking about his birth, Peter’s character said, “My mother was a long time in labour with me because it was two days before the doctor realised she still had her tights on.” A very funny line. In fact just as funny today as it was when I wrote it for Les Dawson as part of his opening monologue for an episode of ‘The Dawson Watch’ we did about the National Health Service in 1979.

So apparently although my material wasn’t good enough to warrant a reply, much less good enough to buy, it was quite good enough to steal. I wrote again to Peter Kay, saying as much. And guess what? I didn’t get an answer again. I will say no more. Except that I still think he is very funny. But not thin with me.