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I don’t think it’s too much of a non-sequitur to follow this up by saying that I did not learn how to be successful at meeting women at university. My one and only attempt to chat a girl up was not an honours performance. On the encouragement of my friend Natasha to go over and “Just say something natural to her – it’ll be fine” I unleashed this Milk Tray Man classic: “Hey, would you like to hang out with me some time and listen to some reggae?” To be met with a fairly unequivocal: “Are you taking the fucking piss?” The phrase, “Hey, would you like to hang out with me some time and listen to some reggae?” echoes round my head every so often at which point I usually faint or punch myself in the face, even though it is now 23 years later. I was delighted to find out in 2001 while watching the film Ghost World that this is actually still the international gold standard test of douchebaggery in chatting up women and I am right to feel mortified.
To be fair, another completely natural thing I could have said to her was: “Would you like to come back to my squat, smoke cannabis resin through a half-eaten apple and look at my Revolting Cocks picture discs, while I hum the Raiders Of The Lost Ark theme quietly to myself?” so things could have been worse.
I think – Paula notwithstanding – that I actually learned more from TV when I was at university than any other source. I certainly spent more time watching TV than I did reading poetry or whatever during those years. (As I write this, I’m on a weekend away for a friend’s wedding and looking out of a cabin window at the damn fine trees of Birnham Wood in Scotland. They’re Douglas Firs, named after the Victorian plant hunter David Douglas, they grow much higher than the native Scots pine and are native to North America – thanks, Twin Peaks.)
My favourite show – after Twin Peaks – was a German detective procedural called Schimanski. The show went out at about 3AM midweek on Yorkshire TV and all the main characters were fat sweaty alcoholics who seemed to spend all of their waking hours pouring their hearts out to prostitutes and getting into fist fights outside brothels. Schimanski himself was a moustachioed, foul-mouthed roaring oaf who was drunk, violent and smoking cigarettes at all times; and often wearing mirror shades and an army surplus jacket like a badass. But what really gave the programme its edge was how it was dubbed into broad regional British accents including Scouse, Welsh, Geordie and Cockney. During one episode, Schimanski asked his long-suffering boss what he was doing for Christmas only to get the reply, in rich Welsh dialect: “In my village near Cardiff, we get the fattest boy we can find, tie him to a lamppost, cover him in lard and taunt him with rats.” Due to this and the fact that each episode made less sense than a Thomas Pynchon novel, I began to suspect the people involved with dubbing it into English were taking their job less than seriously.
After Schimanski ended at 4AM it was time for bed – unless you were on LSD and then it was time to start reading all of Ceefax. (Highlights: Bamboozle, music letters and the news. Lowlights: the cheap holiday pages and the weather.) If more than one person was on LSD, epic, bitter games of a card game called shithead would commence to see who would go to the 24-hour garage situated over our garden wall to buy cigarette papers, which were, when all was said and done, much easier to use than a can of coke or an apple when you were tripping.
In August of 1990 when the Gulf War started, we watched a lot of it on low-grade acid. Television was just taking its first faltering steps towards rolling news. My black and white portable was taking its final faltering steps towards a skip, however. It had been in my family ever since I could remember (the mid-1970s) and I had a feeling it was even older than that. The casing around the screen was mainly built out of wood. I had to stop people from leaving lit cigarettes resting on it after it caught on fire once. I remember sitting there one night with Firthy and Stimmy listening to the match pre-amble from George Bush Snr while we were coming up, when the horizontal and vertical hold went dramatically and his head started stretching and stretching until he looked like Jabba The Hutt saying: “This is the new world order.”
Firthy groaned in terror: “Why is George Bush talking about New Order?”
Stimmy started laughing demonically. He was holding a smoking apple in one hand and jets of smoke were billowing out of his nose and joining a halo round his head as fractals and sparks shot out of his ears: “HA HA HA! It’s the war! On drugs!”Previously: Menk, by John Doran – Wandering Stars of Whom It Is Reserved, the Blackness of Darkness ForeverYou can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.