I am not Des Lynam – Huzzah!

There are some things I look back on nostalgically.  These include:

• Angel Delight (I know you can get it now, but it’s not the same)
• Watching Doctor Who on Saturday nights with the whole family.  The only time we were allowed to watch television and eat our dinner in front of it.  Always spag bol on a Saturday.
• Getting Beano and Dandy delivered every week.
• The early years of Smash Hits, viz Black Type.
• The Banana Splits, Chorlton and the Wheelies and The Red Hand Gang
• Space Dust, Spangles and Curly Wurly’s so big you could prop them against the side of a house and use them to elope with.
• Being able to buy an astonishing amount of sweets for tenpence.
• Free milk at school break in real, but miniaturised, tiny milk bottles with foil on the top.
• Getting a Christmas hamper every year that my mum saved up for with stamps, and used to let us unwrap.  We always knew Christmas was just around the corner when that box arrived.  It always had tinned tongue, spam and Newberry Fruits in it.  Inskustin’ as Tallulah would say.
• Meeting a mad old lady who kept a pet chicken inside a sweetie jar as a pet.

There are other things about my childhood years that I don’t miss at all and am thrilled to bits will never come around again.  These include:

• Everything shutting on a Sunday except out of town furniture warehouses and garden centres that only sold plants.
• Everything shutting on Bank Holidays, Christmas, Birthdays, unseasonally wet Tuesdays and early closing days.
• Not being able to get a decent cup of coffee for another twenty five years.
• Spending weekends with my parents at Steam Fairs, motor racing meets, horse races and Morris dancing festivals.
• Wearing blue national health glasses and cutting my own fringe
• Having to watch Silas, The Monkees and old Elvis films repetitively every summer holidays and The Sound of Music every Christmas.
• Having only three channels of television to choose from, most of which shut down during the day and which on Saturdays and Sundays invariably revolved around sports, religion, religion, sports and antiques, the only bright spot of which was Doctor Who.

We have Sky television.  We have Sky plus.  We do not have Sky films or Sky sports, because the films always seem to be the films I have either already seen, would never want to see, or made for tv movies starring Sally Fields looking anguished and gurning into mid air because her son was swapped for a raffle ticket when she wasn’t looking and now she has to take a three legged coffee table to school in an old blanket and hope that nobody will notice that it isn’t her son.  Eventually everyone dies of leukaemia usually.  We do not have Sky sports, because I hate sports with a passion.

I realised today, when accidentally bumping into a news item about the Olympics, how very, very lucky I am to be here now.  Not because of marvellous advances in medicine or longevity of life, or the fact that Guinness now puts widgets in the bottom of their cans so that their beer still has a head on it, although that is one of the greatest leaps forward of the twenty first century.  No, it is because I no longer have the worry of turning on the television, or indeed the radio, only to find that it is wall to wall sporting events that kick everything you might actually have wanted to watch out of the schedules and means that you never will find out if Jemima regrouted her kitchen successfully and made a killing, because Kirsty and Phil are now on at 3.00 a.m. on BBC2.

My parents are quite keen sports watchers, which is entirely different to being a keen ‘active’ sportist, but is a hobby in itself.  If it was sport, if it was televised, they would watch it.  They now feel the same way about sport and antiques programmes.  I can just about stomach the antiques programmes as long as I don’t have to watch too much of Angela Rippon’s lissom glide into old age, but I cannot stand watching sport of any shape, size or sort.

I can understand if you are a sportsperson, the desire to watch other people being sporty.  It’s your job or your hobby.  You’re keen.  It means something to you.  You can imagine yourself charging about with a lacrosse stick, mud flying round you like a halo whilst being filmed for posterity.  I have never been able to understand the fascination that sport holds for those people whose idea of sport is a quick jog to run to the bus stop before the bus speeds past.  It is weird.  It is slightly pervy.  It is voyeuristic.

My parents are all year round sports watchers.  They will watch tiddlywinks on Channel Four.  They will watch late night poker or hurdling for the under fives.  They will watch Lithuanians playing squash being commentated on by Dutchmen.  They are hard core couch sportists.  There is something vaguely admirable about this commitment to their obsession.  I don’t really understand it, but I admire their consistency and drive.

What is most annoying to me are these Johnny Come Lately sports enthusiasts, the people who would no more think of watching Bolton Wanderers versus Charlton Athletic Ladies team off season on a rainy Thursday than fly through the air.  These are the fair weather sportists, the ones who only watch when England are in something big, like the World Cup, or watching tennis when Tim Henman actually gets past the qualifying heats so that people don’t mistake him for a groundsman.  These are the people who are out in force at the minute watching the bloody Olympics.  People who wouldn’t know one end of a lacrosse stick from another.  People who didn’t even know that twirling ribbons on a mat and swimming with a nose clip on were Olympic sports.  People who are medal whores.

People who never visit a Leisure Centre are now turning into Des Lynam and pontificating wildly on public transport, just because we’re not putting forward our usual shambolic show in the world of sports.  I’m sure it’s all very wonderful and a show of great national pride, blah blah, but I’d be much happier if literacy rates were higher, or the need to have the NSPCC disappeared overnight because parents suddenly learned how to love and be responsible for their children and I don’t think that’s going to be achieved just because we got a gold medal in the coxless pairs in a competition that is supposed to celebrate global unity but which is hosted by a country that has one of the most appalling human rights records of the last century.  Perhaps that’s just me being bitter and cynical.

The children did like the diving.  We caught the end of the men’s diving which was being beamed onto a giant video screen in the city centre on Friday afternoon.  Tallulah was most impressed.  Apparently she’s now going to be a diver as well as a Hollywood actress and an artist.  She asked me whether they’d be alright if she still wore her armbands.  I said they undoubtedly would.

Anyway, my grumbling isn’t going to change the world, but it has made me feel a bit better.  What has however made me feel a lot better is that with nine hundred channels of television to choose from I no longer have to watch any sport at all, ever, if I don’t want to, which just goes to prove that modern life is not all that rubbish.