Where Did It All Go Right? (38 page)

The 12-hour epic mini-series based on Alex Haley’s book was first shown in 1977, but when it was repeated in 1978 I saw every episode and hung on its every development, tracing the bloodline of African slave Kunta Kinte through Kizzy, Chicken George, Tildy and Tom. This was some powerful education. They say half the American population watched the final episode and many whites did so through a kind of national guilt. Well, not me – I watched guiltlessly, with an obsessive interest in the plight of the slaves. And the punchline is …

Roots
, so my diary tells us, was ‘ma favourite programme’. On 24 October, I write, without a hint of irony, ‘Just saw de final episode ob
Roots
. It wuz de gratest programme of all time.’

Surely ‘ob all time’?

This though was my phonetic tribute to the black diaspora, to civil rights, to race relations.
³
Kunta Kinte was my new hero, and I would prove it by talking – and writing – just like him, just as I had previously done with the Fonz. I drew good likenesses of the
Roots
characters from memory, just as I had done with the cast of
The Poseidon Adventure
, the drivers of
Wacky Races
and – hey! – the Harlem Globe Trotters before that. I knew more about where Alex Haley’s ancestors had come from than I did about my own. I understood the bigotry and violence and segregation and yet I couldn’t quite square that with my own demeaning use of the word ‘ob’.

I had a long way to go. We all did. Bloody hell, they only shut the
Black & White Minstrel Show
down in 1978.

* * *

So I wasn’t a racist, just confused. I was a rampant homophobe though. Everybody was. Poof, queer, poofter, woofter, homo, mo, bummer, bum chum, bender … these were all genuinely felt terms of abuse at school, and as stinging an insult a boy could use on another boy (we never considered that there could be female poofs). At upper school, when being a poof started to mean more than being a pansy, the playground folk devil was Noel Collier. He was an older boy, a sixth-former, who had the reputation for being a bum chum. The traditional response to passing him in the corridor was to pretend he had touched your rear end (bum bandit, shirt lifter, turd burglar) and whip him aside while jerking your body away from the clear and present danger. There was a whipping sound that went with this pantomime and it was something
like
cccchhhw-tcherrrr
! Sort of a throat-clearing rising to pursed lips and the sound of steam being let off; a bigoted
Ivor the Engine
. I have no idea where this came from, but it was the universally recognised fanfare of homophobia at Weston Favell.

Unlike casual and even accidental racism, the demonisation of poofs was deep-seated in the family (and may well linger, albeit in a less vehement, more suburban way). Nan Mabel and my mum were the worst offenders, talking about someone (always male) being ‘a bit that way’ or ‘a bit funny’ or ‘one of them’. What they were scared of, I don’t know, but a slave to convention will always have many enemies. As far as Mum was concerned, of all the crimes I could have committed in my teenage years, turning out gay would have been the most heinous – worse than being on drugs, getting someone pregnant or even having my ear pierced.

It’s no wonder then that the combination of this blind orthodoxy at home and the constant stereotyping of homosexuals on TV (John Inman, Larry Grayson, Dick Emery) established in my mind the most Neanderthal attitudes to sexual preference. I bet Noel Collier wasn’t gay. He probably glanced the wrong way in the showers once. Stock insults grew from the tiniest acorns. I know he didn’t deserve the mockery of the lower years, that’s for sure, and I really hope he went on to live a gay life, as in happy.

I did a lot of my learning, good and bad, in front of the television.
Roots
may have taught me that black people had had a rough time of it, but not all telly was so educational. Mike Yarwood taught me that all politicians were buffoons, which wasn’t such a bad grounding, but at the same time
It Ain’t Half Hot Mum
taught me that anyone effeminate was a poof and therefore inferior in some way to other men, and Indian people wobbled their heads and said oh deary me. It’s getting on for a worldview, but hardly sophisticated.

I thank
Mad
magazine for dragging me out of the mire. I started getting this monthly fix of US satire in 1977,
⁴
although it was the
subsequent
investigation of back issues from the late Sixties and early Seventies that really opened my eyes. Here, magazine by magazine, was a journey through America’s most turbulent years – Vietnam, Watergate, civil rights – and from a left-leaning, hippy perspective. Here’s what I learned from the jokes in
Mad
: the police are brutal, peace signs are good, smoking causes cancer, the environment is being destroyed by big cars and pollution, Nixon is a crook, drugs involving syringes are bad, drugs you smoke are good, and advertising is a confidence trick. Quite a difference from Dennis Healey saying ‘Silly Billy’ and Mr Humphries being free.

If only
Mad
had been enough to turn me into a 13-year-old libertarian. But influence on what I suppose we must call my politics, social and sexual, came from all quarters, and most of it was a long way from
Mad
’s informative insurgence. Puerile peer pressure at school was just as persuasive, and I accepted every playground convention without interrogation. When puberty set in, for instance, acne became an invitation for merciless ‘micking’ (the local vernacular for taking the mickey), even among friends: Dave Griffiths’s problem skin put us into pun overdrive, adapting song titles like Paul McCartney’s ‘Pimply Having A Wonderful Cyst-Pus Time’.

Parents were also a source of related mockery, if they were too poor (which meant you were a ‘tramp’), or too old, or, in my own mother’s case, too young and glamorous. It got back to the kids at school that she had a black skirt with a split in it – very risqué! – and the subsequent baiting reflected this. The fact that my dad mumbled was also a target for mickery (‘mumbly, grumbly dad!’). I took it like a man, just as Dave took his and Collier took his. At that age you’re beholden to the most brutal form of natural selection: forge alliances with the strong and stamp on any sign of weakness, difference or oily skin – including your own.

During the punk purge, Gaz Smith (for no-one was immune from micking) was pilloried for having an Elvis record in his house. It was probably his parents’ but that didn’t matter. ‘You luuuurve him,’ went the taunt from a disloyal Si Triculja when Presley died. A reasonably well-respected kid with impressive Oxford bags (the kind with the pockets) called Andy was given the nickname
‘Budgie’
because his father bred them. Couldn’t shake it. He was Budgie until he left that school.
⁵
Burns was christened Willy Wetpants after the long jump indiscretion. Mr Eales the music teacher was legendary for his hairpiece – kids would blow at it when he wasn’t looking, and call him Wiggy. The fiery Mr Hughes had obviously had a brain operation – the scar was there to see – making him fair game. Compassion? Empathy? Benevolence? If it was too hard we couldn’t understand it.

The catalogue of sins that fed the culture of micking was vast: hair, skin, clothes, voice, parents, physical imperfection, or any deviation from the norm, whatever that was. It’s no wonder being a
cccchhhw-tcherrr
carried such an enormous penalty.

* * *

I’d love to say I rose above all this but I didn’t. I was just a kid who wanted desperately to fit in. When my old mate Hirsty was deemed a poof, I could no longer mix with him. (Still, he’s a vicar now, so I’m sure he’ll forgive me.) At least I grew out of it eventually. Not everybody does. I know plenty of otherwise perfectly nice people in their thirties with intolerant, right-wing views, and they live in London, not the sticks.

I feel fortunate to have experienced enough real life since moving to the capital and soaking up true cosmopolitanism that
all
childhood prejudices have been cleansed. My deep love of hip hop today has echoes of my appreciation of
Roots
in 1978 – the black experience, in particular the urban American one, is foreign to me but exerts an irresistible allure. It’s happened to many a white boy before me and since. When I rap along to The Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Let My Niggas Live’ in the car (all the while guilty as hell for burning up fossil fuels), it is an intense but private pleasure. ‘Keep it that way,’ says my wife.

Today, some of my best friends really are gay! But I never really
hated
homosexuals at school, because frankly I had no idea what or who they were. I’d never met one. I thought they were like Dick Emery’s Clarence and I’d never seen anyone like that. (Noel Collier didn’t mince, wear floppy hats or carry a handbag.) I certainly hadn’t entertained anything as specific as the notion of anal sex, Honky Tonks.

So I do feel needlessly guilty for some of the myopic and ill-informed prejudices I harboured as a teenager, but it’s not as if I joined the NF or went queer-bashing, and just as every plate of soba noodles I eat today cancels out a Lord Toffingham lolly I consumed in my youth, so – I like to think – every enlightened thought I have in my thirties compensates for an unenlightened one I had in my teens.
⁶

Anyway, the most insidious influence on me as a malleable adolescent wasn’t
Love Thy Neighbour
or Si Triculja, it was my seemingly innocuous, laid-back Dad. When I approached voting age, he tried to blackmail me into becoming a Conservative by telling me that if Mrs Thatcher and the Tories were ousted, he would instantly lose his job, and wouldn’t be able to afford to give me my monthly allowance any more. And I believed him. Because I believed everything, and we are all Tories until proven innocent.

1
Nan and Pap Collins lived in a part of town that used to serve the factories. I expect they saw the first immigrants in the Fifties and Sixties as a threat. Nan never said anything offensive, but Pap’s claim about Butch barking at woggies didn’t even impress me as a tiny kid.

2
This was 1978, so we must have been aware of the up-and-coming Davidson and his trademark routines from the ITV sketch show
What’s On Next?
(1976–78) – he didn’t get his own show until 1979.

3
Another stylistic precedent was Ugandan despot Idi Amin, the subject of a humorous, fictional column in
Punch
, collected in a book which Uncle Jim introduced me to, and which I got for Christmas in 1975. This was written phonetically – dis, dat and so on – and I thought it was tremendously funny. It explains the pre-
Roots
presence of ‘de’ in my diaries. Again, you can wish it away all you like, but this was the Seventies: a confused and confusing time for all in the so-called New Commonwealth.

4
Mostly for the movie spoofs, which continue to delight me to this day, especially the Seventies ones (‘The Poopsidedown Adventure’, ‘The Ecchorcist’, ‘Rockhead’, ‘Airplot ‘77’) drawn by Mort Drucker, one of the most influential artists on my own drawing style. The man’s a god.

5
I hated Andy whatever-his-name-was. He deliberately ‘spilled’ water over a really good painting I was doing in art, out of jealousy one assumes. But then he was called Budgie by his
mates
and that must have led to a lot of pent-up bitterness. I screwed up the soggy artwork and methodically painted it again, but he was still called Budgie in the morning.

6
I experienced a very odd strain of guilt at college. A girl I went out with whose parents were in the throes of a messy divorce made me feel guilty – deliberately or otherwise – for coming from an unbroken home. I realise now that all this unnecessary pain and hand-wringing was just part of being a tortured art student. We worried about nothing.

1980

Selected Extracts From My Diary

ANOTHER BOOTS PAGE-A-DAY
diary, oatmeal in colour and hand-decorated with a Joe Orton-style collage under transparent sticky-back plastic for protection. The collage features cut-out members of the almost-ran punk band 999 and their distinctive raffle-ticket logo, Marilyn Monroe
, The Elephant Man,
Gene Hackman (now officially designated My Favourite Actor) and a Dymo label reading
‘
ANDY COLLINS. BLOODY PRIVATE
’.
I’m not sure it’s sincere – the diary wasn’t exactly secreted away under lock and key. I suspect it’s just the self-consciousness of a 15-year-old
.

1980 is a car crash to look at, initially. Punk (still going in Northampton remember) dictates the design style and again, it’s a glorified sketch book, much of it filled with variable-quality cartoons of film stars, punk heroes and my mates (clearly for the reader’s benefit – bloody private indeed). Thankfully, things smarten up as the year progresses and punk subsides. Plus, the entries get longer again around August. No theories as to why
.

Meanwhile, in-jokey school catch-phrases take over from Python quotes, and the real swearing begins …

Monday, 7 January

Got my record library order form back, which means I can go and get the Ruts LP I ordered before Christmas. Ace. Went up Craig’s this morning.
¹
Dad got me the Undertones album. It is really grate. Magic sleeve.

Saw
Question Of Sport, Give Us A Clue, Coronation Street, In The Family
. Saw
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
illegally. Clint film. Norty bits.
²

Thursday, 24 January

Got
NME
. Ace. They had the best group in the world on
Nationweird
today … yes, the Shadows. No, you ignorant twat, the Undertones. Them. They had live film of ‘Get Over You’.

I made up the numbers in our inter-form rugby. We lost 14–8. Saw
Watch This Space
. Craig, Pete et me went up de Supacentre. Craig got the Specials EP and I got ‘London Calling’ by the Clash. Plus
Smash Shits
.