by Alan Davies
Well, that’s all very well for you to say, Newbys, with your functional relationships and family jaunts up the Matterhorn and suchlike but some of us are going mad with Sheeneitis as there’s little else to do at the moment. I’ll stop when Grange Hill comes on, OK? I have a crush on Tricia Yates, and Tucker Jenkins has enough of Barry Sheene about him to enjoy.
The Newbys were actually very tolerant in the face of repeated incursions into their property, with footballs and cricket balls finding their way over their fence, several slats of which were bashed and cracked. They rarely complained about my scrumping (their crunchy red apples which were nicer than those on any of our three trees. I didn’t call it scrumping then, I called it nicking and I thought I was good at it and moved unseen). The most exciting time, though, was when I set off their burglar alarm, with a boomerang that did not so much come back as go next door.
Barry Sheene was, in fact, a double World Champion, in 1976 and 1977, and a national hero. We had a car racing champion in 1976 too, James Hunt, but he was a posh’un and it perhaps said something about you, which of them you preferred. Hunt was a racing driver, which was apparently cool and something to wish to be, without appealing to me, but then it was also a commonly held belief that all boys wanted to be train drivers, which was not true. I didn’t. Why drive something that has to go on someone else’s tracks? Especially as the drivers could no longer hang perilously from an open-sided cab like Casey Jones while they were a-steamin’an’a-rollin’.
Hunt had a funny peculiar round-shouldered gait when he competed on Superstars, which counted against him. He was also a bit ill-tempered in competition and sounded posh. It was not cool to be well-spoken, like my dad. It was cool to sound working class and a bit cockney, like Barry Sheene. Nowadays, the peculiar mixed-race, hip-hop inspired patois of Britain’s youth causes mirth and exasperation in equal measure when adopted by adolescents in the bespoke kitchens of Southern England. Similarly, in the ’70s, it drove parents mad that their kids wanted to sound like the Artful Dodger and not Oliver.
Sheene also had a beautiful blonde better half called Stephanie (routinely described as a glamour model) who could be seen in photographs looking too good-looking for Pan’s People, which is saying a lot. Pan’s People dancing on Top of the Pops was the closest thing to erotica anyone in Loughton could experience. Unless they caught the 20a bus to the Green Man roundabout where the Green Man pub advertised ‘Sunday Lunch ’n’ Strippers’ on a giant blackboard by the road.
Sheene’s fame went beyond fans of bikes or even sports. He’d gone household. He featured on the first record I ever bought. The Barron Knights had their own brand of musical spoof. On a record called ‘Live in Trouble (Part 1)’, they did a version of Brotherhood of Man’s ‘Angelo’, about Ann and Jo, which had the lines:
Long ago, outside a chip shop in Walthamstow,
Was a young rocker called Greasy Joe.
He put on his helmet and said, ‘Let’s go.’
He was keen,
Off up the High Street like Barry Sheene,
Doing his best to look very mean,
Till he met Anne on her new machine.
This was hilarious to me. Though for years I maintained that ‘Wig Wam Bam’ by Sweet was the first record I ever bought, the truth was that it was bought for me, rather than by me, aged seven. No, the first time I went in to Pop Inn on Loughton High Road with my own pocket money, it was to buy a Barron Knights record. As a hoarder, I still treasure it. It’s a remarkable memorial of what passed for entertainment in the ’70s.
Sheene always had a fag on, which I hadn’t noticed at ten but had down as cool at eleven. Smoking was ace and I couldn’t wait to get started. Outside Loughton tube station was a fag machine. Just sitting there on the pavement. It should have said ‘fags for kids’ on it. Smoking was difficult. It took commitment and effort. This was primarily because it was rank. It smelt like football grounds while tasting like shoes but I was determined to have my dream look. The cool smoker. This was a sure fire way to impress my peers too, which I was rarely able to do throughout my school-days.
It worked too. The coolest kids in my year were impressed by my smoking. That they were work-shy vandals whose principal aim at school was to flob (spit) higher and further than anyone else was unimportant. They were the rebellious, cocky, couldn’t-care-less kids and I aspired to their periphery. We had one thing in common: we hated the school and everything in it. Now we had a second thing in common. Fags.
Coming by fags was difficult but I had the ‘fags for kids’ option which no one else appeared to know about. Fags were great but inhaling was grim and took a while to master. It put me off smoking and I didn’t really get the hang of it until 1980 whereupon I smoked for twenty-seven years, with occasional breaks of anything from a week to a year while I attempted to give up. I’m not blaming Barry Sheene or other hero-smokers for my subsequent addiction; after all we always had Mr Baker the PE teacher barking away at us that each cigarette was five minutes off your life. That sounds bad until you point out that each episode of EastEnders is thirty minutes off your life. None of us did though, principally because EastEnders didn’t start until 1985. Still, you definitely had to want to smoke and I did.
To be Barry Sheene meant being immersed in motorcycle racing from birth. Sheene says in his 1976 autobiography (The Story So Far – the title said so much) that the day he was born his father phoned a friend to say: ‘I’ve just been presented with the winner of the 1970 TT.’ As it was, Barry Sheene never liked racing on the Isle of Man as, ironically for a man with an astonishing history of breakages and metal reinforcement, he felt it was much too dangerous and only rewarded those racers most familiar with the thirty-eight-mile road circuit.
We went as a family to the Isle of Man in the mid-’70s to watch the TT. Motor sport was always an enthusiasm of my dad’s. He had a previous life as an amateur rally enthusiast who competed in many events as a navigator (principal requirements: meticulous route planning and an ability to fold maps in the dark). These appeared to have been his most exciting days and he still has a cabinet full of odd little trophies from rallying. Consequently, we would always have motor sport on TV if there was any being shown and I still remember the excitement when Formula One was first shown in colour, thereby enabling the viewer, at last, to identify the cars.
Motorbikes flying round the streets, hills and mountains of the Isle of Man are terrifically exciting for a boy already in possession of his own race circuit at home. Despite the noise- and adrenaline-fuelled excitement, when we weren’t watching the racing I had my nose in Anna Sewell’s decidedly non-macho Black Beauty, which remained my favourite book until about 1983.
On one occasion we were standing near some racing sidecars. Low-slung powerful machines on which the rider virtually lies face down, with a platform attached to the side that some crazed volunteer would roll around on to help cornering. Barmy. A young boy was fiddling with one of the bikes. He looked dirty and mechanicky but was, in reality, about ten. I watched him and he tampered seriously with some moving part for my benefit, looking cool. He then stood up, asked me to mind the machine, and went off. My dad found me (I had a gift for getting lost) and I said I had to stay and look after the bike. He tutted and walked away, with me following, protesting pointlessly. He didn’t believe that any racer would leave their prized machine in the hands of a strange nine-year-old. Shows how much he knew.
I felt bad about letting that kid down. It was the closest I ever came to some kind of ‘in’ with the racing fraternity. But I was hooked; I loved the noise, the speed and the glamour. Despite a crush on Stacy Dorning from the TV series that lasted a decade, I was leaving Black Beauty behind; I wanted to be like Barry Sheene.
David Starsky
I also wanted to be like Starsky out of Starsky & Hutch. Starsky & Hutch was an American cop show set in Los Angeles about two thirty-something detectives who smiled and bantered their way through episodes while effortlessly catchin
g crooks in ’70s’ three-piece brown suits. This was shown on Saturday nights on BBC1.
The BBC always ran an American cop show on Saturday nights prior to Match of the Day and by the time Starsky & Hutch came on in the late ’70s, I was allowed to stay up and watch. For years there had been shows about serious tough solo cops like Cannon and Kojak but Starsky and Hutch were different. They made policing seem fun as they raced around in a noisy red Ford Torino with a white stripe down the side. This was the best car ever and it was Starsky’s. He was the bouncy, funny, dark-haired one who had burgers and shakes on top of the dashboard at all times, particularly prior to a chase. Hutch had a knackered old car which Starsky always rebuked him over. Hutch also liked health food and chastized Starsky over his diet. Ooh, they were a right pair.
Hutch was more contemplative, less mischievous, than Starsky who was forever being insubordinate to their boss, the captain at the precinct, who was unfailingly furious with them both. He was a round angry black man played by the late Bernie Hamilton, who was eighty when he died, which makes the show seem a very long time ago.
The other main character was Huggy Bear, who knew what ‘the word on the street’ was and without whom the boys would never have caught anyone. Antonio Fargas had a relaxed comic screen presence and a memorable character name that somehow survived his non-resemblance to a bear and his no-hugs acting. He was, by the way, not a pimp, as portrayed in the catastrophic film version of the TV show which, infuriatingly for devotees, changed the characters around and made Starsky the serious one. What rot. He was a maverick and so he should always be
I was devoted to Starsky and Hutch and I knew everything there was to know about them through the Starsky & Hutch Fan Club. What personal details would anyone want to obscure from the viewers? Everything that mattered was clearly going to be in the fan club literature. I knew, for example, that in reality it was tall, blond and handsome David Soul, who played Detective Ken Hutchinson, who actually liked burgers and Paul Michael Glaser, who played Dave Starsky, who was the health foodie in real life. Isn’t that ironic? I remember that. I did not look that up.
There was an occasional official mini A5-size magazine and unofficial (whatever that means…) magazine/poster publications were very popular then too. A normal-looking magazine would open out into a huge poster with sixteen pages of articles and photographs on the back. One of those devoted to your favourite TV show or band was worth spending your pocket money on. I had two Starsky and Hutch posters. 25p each. My dad couldn’t understand the extravagance. On one occasion he absolutely thrilled me by pulling a Starsky and Hutch magazine from his briefcase when he came home from work. Later that same evening he wrote down the cost of it (30p) in his daily cash book. Money was the most important thing in the world.
For me, TV was the most important thing in the world. We weren’t a literary house, an artistic house or a musical house. We were a TV house. It was never off. When me and my brother and sister sat down to have our tea, our TV on wheels was pulled up to the table as if it was a fourth sibling. This meant we didn’t have to talk. It meant Grange Hill, Boss Cat, Wacky Races, and Rentaghost over our fish fingers.
One evening I was sitting on my own watching Coronation Street (one of the best sitcoms on telly in the late ’70s) when Vera Duckworth tucked her fag in her mouth, thereby freeing her hands, so she could Blu-Tac a poster of Starsky and Hutch on her wall, with a few amusing suggestive remarks to her watching friend. The penny dropped that ladies had Starsky and Hutch on the wall, ladies like Vera Duckworth. I recall feeling that Vera and I should not have the same posters.
I didn’t fancy Starsky and Hutch, did I? I joined the fan club. I had shop-lifted an I’m a Starsky & Hutch fan sticker for my school briefcase (yes, a briefcase. My dad bought it for me. On the first day it only had a recorder in it. I covered it in Mr Men stickers from packets of Ricicles and in time it was replaced with the obligatory Adidas bag). No, I wasn’t in love with Starsky and Hutch, well, not madly. I idolized them, certainly. They were funny and laid-back as well as tough and good-looking. These were all attributes that seemed immensely desirable. So much so that I began to imitate Starsky. I’m hopeful that this behaviour went unnoticed by my peers. It involved a slight swagger, a rolling gait to affect casual self-assurance, something no twelve-year-old has (self-assurance that is; there are many gaits on show among boys expanding, hormonally and otherwise, into puberty).
I carried a toy revolver stuffed down my back into the waistband of my school trousers. That was where Starsky kept his gun. Hutch went for the shoulder holster but Starsky just shoved his gun down the crack of his bum. What if it went off when he sat down? He could shoot his nuts off. Or maybe one of them anyway, unless they were squashed together, and he did wear tight jeans, made tighter still by the gun expanding the waistband.
I only had a cap gun, which rarely had caps in anyway, since caps were something that I found difficult to make last, so my nuts were safe. Indeed, they may not have dropped yet; my genitals had been making slow progress, which our family doctor put down to junior Y-fronts. I was able to hold my dad responsible as he bought the pants in our house and his were massive after all. I didn’t say anything, too embarrassing.
I never pulled the gun out at school, or wore it if we had PE and I’d have to get changed. It just sat there secretly and allowed me to fantasize about being a cool American. America was an obsession for everyone who liked telly, since Americans were never off the telly, in cop shows, films, cartoons and sitcoms. They had a seductive, hypnotic effect on England that perhaps lingered from the GI invasion of the early ’40s and grew as cinema and then television took hold. Everything they did was so much more informal, loose, their conversation an appealing mix of colloquialism and grammatical shortcuts that washed through stuffy old English. They didn’t say: ‘Do you know, I think I’ll have a glass of water?’ They said: ‘I guess I’ll be a-partaking in a little ol’ drink of somethin’ right now an’ hell if water ain’t such a dreadful notion.’
Even more than us kids, our parents were smitten with American film stars and were forever saying things like ‘Here’s lookin’ at you, kid’, ‘Get off your horse and drink your milk’ or ‘You dirty rat’ in strange mutilated RP accents unrecognizable as either English or American. America was cool and we all wanted to go there.
American guys were good hero fodder too. In England we did have The New Avengers, enjoyable for the startling beauty of Joanna Lumley as Purdey, racing about in a yellow TR7. We also had The Professionals throwing disillusioned ‘birds’ out of Capris, unable to explain why, as they went off on a secret mission with the butler from Upstairs, Downstairs. Then there was Blake’s 7, Dr Who, who was a weirdo, Dr Weirdo in fact, or The Sweeney, but that seemed like a lot of whisky and cigarettes even for a budding smoker, plus they were on late on a school night.
In fact it was a depiction of American school life that really delighted England in 1978. I went to see Grease five times. I’ve never been to see a film in the cinema more than once before or since. Some would have you believe that punk and new wave were the big thing that year but, out in suburbia and all over the country, people were mad for Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta. Some time later the American Mad magazine, which ran strip cartoon spoofs of films, ran a Grease strip which culminated in Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy character deciding that, in order to get her man, she would become a ‘SLUT!’ with the tagline: ‘What a great message for the youth of America!’
We were oblivious to the negative imagery. She looked great in her skin-tight strides. We lapped up Grease and everything American (the Australian actress included). Terry Wogan talked about Dallas so much to his 400 million listeners that you had to watch the show to enjoy his radio show. So we did. There were Westerns on every weekend and American cartoons like Scooby-Doo, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines and The Flintstones. All of it seemed cooler, less constrained and restrained and no one wanted to go to their own hideous sch
ool when the fantasy world of Rydell High was there at the Woodford ABC.
At that time songs went to number one in the charts for two to three weeks if they were lucky. You did well if you had a number two or three. In fact anything in the top ten was a big hit. ‘The One That You Want’ was at number one for nine weeks. Unheard of. They followed that up with ‘Summer Nights’ for seven weeks. A total of getting on for four months at the top of the charts. Virtually every other song in the film charted too. It was cultural carpet bombing.
Boys wanted to be T-Birds and girls Pink Ladies even though, collectively, they were as thick as a cart of planks. Within a year I was thirteen and may have denied ever seeing Grease at all but for a little while I couldn’t get enough of it.
The first time I went was with some friends from school. As we jostled on to the bus, I pressed the ticket button on the driver’s machine. It was on the passenger’s side as you stood in front of him and he used to reach over with his fingers and strike it a glancing blow. I put my 10p down and hit the button. He gave me my ticket and my 10p back and threw me off the bus. Obviously none of my mates would wait with me for the next one so I turned up at the cinema on my own. At the end of the film, when the lights came up, I realized I’d been sitting just a few rows away from my mates. I walked out with them but didn’t say much. I thought Danny Zuko and Kenickie were the coolest people in the world and I was posturing, acting tough, in an effort to mimic them. Ironic really, given how effeminate John Travolta was in the film. One of my mates said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and that was the end of that.