Under the Microscope

by Dave Spikey

  We should have a national walking-stick amnesty. Bring all those unused sticks back into the hospital. All you malingering skivers who’ve pretended to use them when you’re out shopping or going down the pub, just in case you bump into somebody from the social, give them back, you cheats! Think of the money that would save in disability allowance and walking sticks.

  The Beautiful Game

  FOOTBALL, LIKE LIFE, is often a story of disappointment illuminated by moments of unlikely triumph. It is for such fleeting glories that, every Sunday morning, tens of thousands of men and boys roll and stumble out of their beds, grab a sports bag and, with eyes barely open, head down to the park pitches. Come rain or shine, sleet or snow, this disparate collection of men and boys assemble with their teammates to brave muddy pitches, windswept parks, psychotic opponents and challenging shower facilities. In freezing changing rooms, where icicles hang from broken showers, they strip, shivering, and quickly pull on their team’s shirt … and in that moment become united. Throughout the land, they stand in strips of many colours on a multitude of rain-sodden pitches, like some massive abstract rainbow waiting for a whistle to blow. This is the strange and magical world of Sunday league football.

  I played and loved Saturday and Sunday football for thirty-odd years. I played alongside and against a great assortment of men and boys; some of whom became lifelong friends, and a few who remain enemies. It is a wondrous world: the camaraderie, the craic, the satisfaction of a good team performance and the elation of winning against all odds during a hailstorm on a bitter cold January morning.

  An enthralling aspect of this world is the diversity of the players you find within each team. I played for sides that had a rich mix: doctors, lawyers, accountants, brickies, printers, begger-men, thieves. Men who would never normally mix off the pitch (only because their social spheres would never collide), but who nevertheless became, in that instant of pulling on their team shirt in the wet, freezing park changing rooms, a band of brothers.

  I’d always been reasonably good at football and when I started work in Haematology, Ken, one of the seniors, asked me if I fancied training with the team he played for, ‘Harper Green’, which was just down the road from the hospital. I jumped at the chance and soon became a regular for them. They played in the Mid-Lancs league, which was a reasonably good standard, and the lads were great down there. I only remember good times in the years I played for them.

  A year or so later, someone from the regional health authority organized an inter-pathology football competition and we decided that we could get a decent eleven players from the department. We were lucky because our hospital had a good football pitch situated behind the psychiatric wards and we played a couple of games there. Sean was a good player, Glenn was pretty good, but the star was our boss Harold, who had played for Bolton Wanderers as a young man before his cruciate ligaments ruptured and his blossoming career was cruelly ended. He couldn’t move about much on the pitch, and occasionally in the lab his leg would lock up and he’d cry out and then fall over behind the bench. One minute he was there, the next he wasn’t. The thing was that although he couldn’t run much, if you gave him the ball anywhere around the penalty area, he would almost always score.

  We won the competition, which royally pissed off the lads from (I think) Rochdale Hospital, who’d organized it in the expectation of winning it, as you do. The highlight for us was beating the mighty Manchester Royal Infirmary on our pitch.

  We decided that we had the makings of a good team and so decided to enter the Bolton Federation League the next season. It became clear that we would need reinforcements in order to turn out a side every week, to cover on-call cover and other commitments which would deplete our current squad. We drafted in friends and family and we did alright. It was great craic and we played together for many years. Because we eventually included two or three of the doctors in the team, there was the added benefit of retiring to the doctors’ mess after the games for a few pints of Lees Lager (Loopy Juice). We had a goalkeeper, Dr Roy, who was exceptionally good – he had the chance to turn professional, I think, but chose medicine – and he was worth ten points a season with the saves he made. He was (and is) a top bloke and long-standing friend, who weirdly became my GP after he left the hospital.

  Roy was (he’s retired now) a fantastic GP. You could never get an appointment to see him, he was in such great demand. I once phoned for an appointment and Mrs Goebbels, the receptionist, told me that he had no appointments and she offered me a date ten days hence. I said with more than a hint of sarcasm, ‘I might be dead by then,’ whereupon she replied deadpan without missing a beat, ‘If you are, can you make sure somebody phones in to cancel your appointment.’ Roy would come in early before surgery if I had any health worries (and I have plenty, believe me); it is a bit weird though having a best mate feeling your balls for lumps and your stomach for bumps.

  On pre-season tours, we visited Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham and, er, lots of other places lost in the mists of time, where we drank a lot, laughed a lot and played a few of games of football.

  I always roomed with Dave M on tour and we got on very well. Dave was quite a steadying influence on the team and the organizer who sorted out hotels and travel. Part of his remit included him wearing a traffic cone on his head and leading the rest of us in repeated choruses of ‘We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz’ as we made our way back to the hotel after a drunken night.

  Dave usually wore a suit, collar and tie on our nights out, possibly a legacy of his day job in the bank, and he had the ability to fall asleep on his bed after a night on the piss and not move an inch for ten hours. It was unsettling waking up during the night and seeing a well-dressed corpse laid out on the next bed.

  The only time this didn’t happen was in a grotty hotel in Nottingham, where the mattress overlapped the cheap base of the bed and he didn’t get his balance right. I woke to discover that he had disappeared. This was so unlike Dave that I panicked a bit and started to search the room – only to discover him lying undisturbed on the floor in between the bed and the wall; still very smart he looked. Suit and waistcoat still buttoned and tie in a neat Windsor knot.

  We didn’t hit it off with the owner of the grotty Nottingham hotel, who resembled (right down to the handlebar moustache) and behaved in many ways like the late great Jimmy Edwards of Whacko! fame. That’s Whacko! – a sitcom set in a boys’ school – as opposed to Waco, an all-action drama set on a ranch in Texas. As he served us breakfast on the Sunday morning after a typically heavy night on the town, his voice boomed out across the small dining room, ‘And with the dawn commeth full repentance.’ Eleven sets of bleary eyes turned towards him and we all, as a man, replied, ‘F**k off, Whacko!’

  He tried to wreak his revenge later in the day after our game by announcing that he was shutting the hotel bar at three o’clock. This was in the days when all pubs closed on Sunday afternoons, but we expected, as residents, to be served in the hotel. Not unless we got back by three, he explained – and the game didn’t finish until 2.30. We devised a plan, which was that Roy, as the fastest driver with the fastest car – a Triumph 2000; maroon, of course – would dash back after the game and order us in a couple of rounds, which should tide us over until some bars opened again at five-ish.

  I decided to ride shotgun and as the final whistle went – I forget the score (as if that’s important!) – Roy and I dashed to his car and raced away, pausing only to pick up a traffic cone at high speed, me leaning out of the open passenger door to achieve the impressive pick-up (yes, I know!). We got back to the hotel bar at about ten to three. ‘Whacko’, as he was now known, was serving a handful of customers dressed in their Sunday best.

  Then it was my turn. I said, ‘Sixteen pints of lager, seven pints of bitter …’

  Whacko interrupted, ‘Sixteen?!’

  ‘Yes please, and seven pints of bitter.’

  ‘Is that it?!’ he said.

  ‘Oh,
and a pint of mild,’ Roy added.

  Whacko stared at us for a second and then said, ‘You are joking?’

  So we exchanged glances and then Roy said, ‘Alright then, make it eight pints of bitter.’

  Listen to This

  IT WAS DURING my early years playing Saturday and Sunday football for Bolton Hospitals and Ace Shutters (!) that I first noticed that maybe I had a talent for comedy. All those years listening to radio comedy on a Sunday afternoon after Two-Way Family Favourites with my mum and dad must have helped. The Navy Lark, The Clitheroe Kid and the fantastic Round the Horne; then early television comedy with Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and Phil Silvers as Sgt Bilko.

  I loved Phil Silvers; he was a genius with his rapid patter, his caustic asides, his veiled piss-taking of his competitors and his amazing array of comedy ‘looks’ – he had this great range of comedic glances and pauses and double-takes. I’ve always thought that Eric Morecambe must have been influenced by Phil Silvers because he has a similar comedy armoury to add to his innate comic gift.

  One of my happiest memories is watching Morecambe and Wise with the family and me and my dad laughing so hard that we could hardly breathe and sliding down the chair almost onto the floor together trying to get a breath in between the laughs.

  I’ll make an admission now that may lose me a degree of credibility: I never really thought Laurel and Hardy were that funny. I thought that all the situations and scrapes they got into, all those adventures and escapades, were very similar. I thought their dialogue in those situations was very, very samey and they didn’t throw up any surprises for me. They both had their character and behavioural traits and repeated them over and over.

  On the other hand, I really enjoyed Abbott and Costello, which was more the straight man versus idiot team, which is why I was also a fan of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, who were actually Abbott and Costello with songs and Dorothy Lamour.

  Add into the mix a few Kenneth Williams EPs of my dad’s, and the Goons, who (more points going here), apart from Spike Milligan (‘Hello, I’m the famous Eccles’), I didn’t really get, and then add the creativity and quick thinking I must have inherited from my parents – and suddenly I discovered, many years later, that I could make people laugh.

  Not only that; it would appear that in most cases I was the quickest with a remark or a quip and, tellingly, my view on humorous events was slightly skewed and so more surprising – which is, of course, one of the major constituents in the practice of the art of comedy.

  Of course, it helped that I was surrounded both at work and in the football changing rooms by colleagues and friends who were also naturally funny. In those circumstances, getting the laugh becomes a bit of a competition. Remember, in those days, we only had the news, early developments in popular culture and a mere four TV channels, which meant that we all had the same popular topics for comedy criticism and deconstruction in the staff room, the pub and the changing rooms. At work, Sean and Harold were very quick and funny, as were a couple of the girls, and at football there was Tony, who laughed louder at his own jokes than anyone else did.

  My first foray into performing any sort of comedy came via the medium of the hospital pantomime. My friend Dr Steve, who I knew from football, somehow got involved in organizing this one year; for some reason, he wrote it in rhyme, which is of course quite limiting from a comedy point of view, however I went to see it and loved it! Loved all the hospital in-jokes (in rhyme) and the sound of an audience’s spontaneous laughter. The following year, when Steve asked if I wanted to help him write the script, I jumped at the chance (as long as it wasn’t in rhyme).

  We wrote Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and I gave myself a small part. I didn’t really want to perform, but we were short of volunteers and, after all, we needed seven of the little fellers. Because of copyright issues, we weren’t allowed to use the original dwarfs, so we made up some others. I played ‘Cosmo’, who was based on Les Dawson’s slightly pervy character ‘Cosmo Smallpiece’, who was popular back then.

  My daughter Jill, who was only about six at the time, came to see the show and was so impressed that she wrote about it in her ‘news’ book at school. Her teacher showed me the entry when I attended parents’ evening. It said, ‘Last night I went to see a pantomime. My dad was in it and he kept saying “knickers knackers knockers” and putting his hand up Snow White’s dress.’

  When Dr Steve moved on to General Practice, I took over the organization of the panto and drafted in Sean to help. I thoroughly enjoyed writing and directing them, and continued to have very little ambition to perform. Over the next few years, the shows increased in popularity and we had to hire bigger and bigger halls in which to perform. At the height of the popularity, we were selling out the main hall at Bolton Technical College for five nights in a row.

  Of course, when you are directing someone who can’t deliver your crafted comedy lines, patience runs thin on both sides and sooner or later a performer will say, ‘I’ll tell you what, stick your stupid panto up your arse,’ and walk out. This happened only a week or so before one show and I had no alternative but to take over the role. I was a bag of nerves, not at all comfortable on stage, but once I got into it and the laughs started coming, I was hooked. I was used to getting a massive thrill from writing and directing and hearing the reaction from the wings, but this was way different; this was spine-tingling.

  Sean and I were asked by Dot, one of the phlebotomists, to take small chorus parts in the Church Road Am-Dram panto one year and we jumped at the chance. Tony F directed the show (which was Red Riding Hood); a man with no discernable talent for comedy, who once stormed into the dressing rooms during the interval of one show and shouted, ‘Listen, everybody! Less laughter onstage!’ – in a panto!

  The truth was that it was very hard not to laugh onstage, especially when one of the characters got out an electric guitar in the middle of a woodland scene, plugged it into an amplifier disguised (badly) as a tree stump and accompanied Red Riding in boring song and dance, while the rest of us ‘Merry Men’ stood around like lemons.

  Sean and I decided the scene needed something extra. Backing vocals. So we suddenly joined in: ‘Shooby doo wop a shooby do wap, do wap.’ A startled Red Riding Hood fell over, so we improvised a dance routine loosely based on the moves made famous by ‘The Shadows’ to distract the audience.

  It was for much the same reason that we were thrown out of Bolton Premier Amateur Operatic Society’s rehearsals for The Boyfriend. Too much laughter onstage! Humourless snobs, most of them. Most but not all.

  In 1983, Bolton Royal Infirmary was celebrating its centenary – and we were asked to put on a show to celebrate. Sean took command and came up with the genius idea of producing the production as a time-travelling experience, jumping through the highlights of the past century. For instance, we could materialize in the roaring twenties, or the war years, or the flower power era etc.

  Together with his brother Harry, he put together medleys from individual eras, which all the performers threw themselves into. In between the musical numbers, and to fill time to dress the next set and facilitate costume changes, we decided to perform hospital-based sketches, which were written by myself, Sean and Rick (who worked in admin and played football with us). We included a sketch set in a hospital Accident and Emergency waiting room, where Rick and I played two domestics in the Les Dawson–Roy Barrowclough style. We lampooned hospital culture, waiting times and private medicine, and the largely hospital-based audience lapped it up.

  At one stage, the girls’ chorus performed ‘Cabaret’ – without realizing that the chairs used in the routine had a hole at crotch level, which acted as a focal point when they straddled them in their leotards and fishnet tights … Paula, a nurse, danced with Paul, a recent recruit in Haematology, in another energetic routine: he in shorts, headband and legwarmers; she in a very tight yellow leotard with no underwear. My dad was heard to remark, ‘I’ll never eat another custard as long as I live!
’

  Most of us had to have a stiff drink before getting onstage to undertake something so ambitious and I mean ‘stiff ’ – 11 per cent ‘Carlsberg Special’ stiff. This did cause some problems; I ripped the arm off somebody’s leather jacket during the ‘Beat It’ dance routine having thought (mistakenly) that, for a laugh, somebody had sewn up the sleeve. What had actually happened was that I’d put my arm down the lining. I blamed Catherine and made her cry. Sorry, Catherine.

  The show was such a huge success that we had to add a second week. Sean’s production was inspired both onstage and front of house, where he had the idea of rigging up rope lights, a special projector that projected the passing years onto a curtain, synthesized music and usherettes dressed as air hostesses, who handed out programmes in the form of time-travel passports to the Laser Train Revue.

  The show turned out to be Sean’s swansong for Bolton Hospitals, as he surprised us all by leaving the department to take up a Chief Biomedical Scientist post at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. His opportunities at Bolton in this rapidly expanding ‘new’ science were limited, and our loss was definitely Huddersfield’s gain.

  O Kay!

  SOON AFTER I divorced, I started seeing Kay on a regular basis. We had been going out ‘unofficially’ in the months leading up to the divorce and she had ended her relationship with her boyfriend, Phil, around the same time. This was, of course, all very messy and unsatisfactory and people got hurt, and we both still carry some guilt about that, even though it was almost thirty years ago.

  I’d actually known Kay since secondary school, although she was in the technical college and I was in the grammar. She had started going out with Peter, a great lad with whom I occasionally played football, when she was about fourteen, and they were an item until they both left at sixteen. They were married soon after; Kay had a daughter, Jenny, the following February. Then, by an absolute mad coincidence, she started work in the Department of Pathology at Bolton General almost exactly a year after I did. I remember walking past Blood Transfusion and thinking, ‘I know her!’