Life's Lottery

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Life's Lottery Page 68

by Kim Newman


  The City

  At once a physical area, the City of London, and a term for London considered as a money and securities market. By the way, the ‘City’ in the business sense does not encompass the much larger geographical entity of London.

  council estates

  The rough UK equivalent of American housing projects.

  Derek Leech

  See: ‘The Original Dr Shade’, ‘SQPR’, ‘Organ Donors’, The Quorum, Seven Stars, ‘Going to Series’, Where the Bodies Are Buried.

  wrote off

  Totalled. The expressions have similar origins. To ‘write off’ or ‘total’ a car means that repairs would cost more than replacement. What is being written off is the investment in the car.

  the Lanes

  A warren-like area of Brighton; in 1977, full of gift shops and antiques places

  the Evening Argus

  The Brighton local paper

  Wetland

  The Somerset Levels, mostly moorland reclaimed from marshland by drainage schemes.

  Glastonbury Tor

  A tower atop an artifical hillock; a notable feature of the county.

  http://www.glastonburytor.org.uk/

  ‘There are rules’

  cf: James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story.

  Flash Gordon serial

  ‘Flaming Torture’ is Episode Six of Flash Gordon (1936).

  Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle

  From the Gerry Anderson TV series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Spectrum, the colour-themed good guy organisation, had SPVs stashed in hiding all over the world and Captain Scarlet could make use of them if necessary.

  http://members.tripod.com/chris_bishop_ca/spv.html

  CND

  Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

  http://www.cnduk.org/

  E

  Ecstasy

  WPC

  Woman Police Constable

  Danegeld

  A form of tribute/protection money paid by Wessex folk to mediaeval Danes in return for not being invaded, raped and pillaged.

  Les Mains Sales

  A play by Jean-Paul Sartre

  Mademoiselle Quelou

  Has a tiny appearance in Time and Relative. Not to be confused with the character played by porn star Selen in Asia Argento’s autobiographical film Scarlet Diva, though I assume we both took the name from French filmmaker Quelou Parente (Marquis de Slime).

  jobsearch

  A peculiarly 1990s bit of newspeak renamed the unemployed ‘job-seekers’

  negative equity

  When the worth of your house plunges but you’re still having to pay off the inflated price you paid for it.

  postal order

  A piece of scrip convertible into cash at a post office; now obsolete. Billy Bunter was always borrowing money and promising to pay it back when his postal order arrived — but it never did.

  Sellotape

  UK equivalent of Scotch™ tape

  Take the money, open the box

  In the ITV game show Take Your Pick (1955-68), contestants eventually had to choose between taking the money they had already won and taking a mystery prize in a box which could be valuable or worthless. The studio audience would compete to shout advice, ‘take the money’ or ‘open the box’. Hosted first by Michael Miles, this was the first UK gameshow to give away cash prizes. You can see why the reference fits into this novel.

  The Cob at Lyme Regis

  The distinctive stone harbour; it’s a key location in the film and book of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. John Fowles turns up in his own novel towards the end to toss a coin in order to decide which of the endings you read first.

  A POUND OF FLESH

  Besides referencing The Merchant of Venice, this evokes the Vincent Price film Theater of Blood to anyone my age, referring to the death of the character played by Harry Andrews. ‘It must be Lionheart, only he would have the temerity to rewrite Shakespeare.’

  Club Whoopee, Rio de Janiero

  A joke from MAD Magazine; Club Whoopee was the name of an early 1980s cabaret band I was in. see: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~smedlo/music/CLUBWHOOPEE.htm

  The Black Museum

  Scotland Yard’s collection of gruesome murder weapons and other macabre evidence. See the movie Horrors of the Black Museum — the most famous item is the trick binoculars with spikes that plunge into the user’s eyes when the focus is adjusted.

  http://www.met.police.uk/history/crime_museum.htm

  Patrick McGoohan

  Special Guest Murderer on Columbo as often as Robert Culp. See the episodes: ‘By Dawn’s Early Light’, ‘Identity Crisis’, ‘Agenda for Murder’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

  Avon and Somerset

  At one point, a redrawing of the county boundaries in the West of England created a new administrative entity called Avon in the North of the ancient county of Somerset around the city of Bristol. This was vaguely rescinded later, but the police force of the area remains the Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

  http://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/

  biro

  ball-point pen.

  J Cloth

  A brand of disposable kitchen towel.

  Tony Blair

  Labour Prime Minister.

  Jeffrey Archer

  Tory politician and schlock novelist; part of his self-generated myth is that he sank enormously into debt and wrote the best-seller Not a Penny More Not a Penny Less in order to escape. A few years after this, he went to jail for perjuring himself in order to win a big-money libel suit.

  Reggie Perrin

  Created by novelist David Nobbs in The Death of Reginald Perrin (1975), this character became a national institution after Leonard Rossiter played him in the TV series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976). Perrin fakes a suicide and starts life over again, rather like Flitcroft in The Maltese Falcon. ‘Doing a Reggie’ became police slang for this scam. See: http://www.pf757.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/reggie/index2.htm

  John Stonehouse

  A former Labour cabinet minister in the Wilson government, Stonehouse saw a series of businesses collapse in the 1970s and perpetrated several major frauds. In 1974, he left his clothes on a Miami beach to give the impression that he had committed suicide and fled to Australia on a fake passport. He was later arrested, convicted and jailed. For more real-life Reggies see: http://www.pf757.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/reggie/Real.ht

  Postman Pat

  Created by writer John Cunliffe and developed for television by Ivor Wood, Postman Pat is a British children’s character who has come to represent an idealised version of yesterday’s dedicated Royal Mail delivery person. See: http://www.postmanpat.org.uk/

  DSS payment

  UK equivalent of a welfare cheque

  Sainsbury’s

  A supermarket chain

  The Teletubbies

  Very popular UK TV kids’ characters, controversial in America because it was assumed the one with a handbag might be gay.

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/teletubbies/

  Crackerjack

  Popular BBC-TV children’s show of the 1960s; it always begun with the announcement ‘it’s Friday ... it’s five o’clock ... it’s time for Crackerjack’. Imagine a more educational Krusty the Klown.

  http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/overview3.htm#crackerjack

  Thunderbirds

  Gerry Anderson puppet series.

  Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo

  Australian TV series, imported to Britain in the 1960s, well before Australian soaps (Neighbors, Home and Away) began to fill in odd, popular hours of British air-time.

  http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/overview9-1.htm#skippy

  Plasticine

  UK equivalent of silly putty

  April Dancer

  Yes, there was a third choice I forgot to mention earlier. Though Mary Ann Mobley was cast in the role in a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode/backdoor pilot, April Dancer was played by Stefanie Powers in a brief run of The
Girl From U.N.C.L.E.

  http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/tgfu.htm

  The Champions

  Unsuccessful ITV adventure series (1968-9) about secret agents who gained mild mystic powers in Tibet.

  http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/champions.htm

  Space Kidettes

  A 1966 Hanna-Barbera cartoon series: http://www.bcdb.com/pages/Hanna-Barbera_Studios/S/Space_Kidettes/

  the Herald

  The local paper. See ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried 3: Black and White and Red All Over’.

  Never Mind the Bollocks

  By the Sex Pistols

  A Day in Marineville

  A tie-in with the Gerry Anderson TV show Stingray.

  NME

  The New Musical Express; in the 1970s, much more than a pop music paper.

  Launderette

  UK equivalent of laundromat

  Doesn’t compute

  Catch-phrase from Lost in Space.

  bender

  A type of plastic sleeping bag/cocoon, much in use at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.

  The Exorcism

  Perhaps the single most frightening TV hour of the 1970s, this play by Don Taylor was broadcast in a series called Dead of Night. Taylor’s script was briefly a West End theatre production in 1975, and the four-hander has often been done in little theatre ever since.

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0573111200/qid%3D1069501699/202-5020252-8517466

  Habitat

  Terence Conran’s chain of upscale furniture and household goods stores. A ’70s fixture.

  Betamax

  The loser’s home video, though many maintain its technical superiority over VHS to this day. Check out the ‘condolence book’ http://betamax.palsite.com/condolence/condolence.cgi?VIEW=View+Book

  ‘Super Trooper’

  A hit for Abba.

  the Batcave

  Under Stately Wayne Manor, the HQ of Batman and Robin.

  care-in-the-community

  A 1980s scheme whereby patients with mental illness were released from institutions, theoretically to be looked after by relatives or social workers; in effect, a collection of disturbed individuals were thrown onto their own devices. You can imagine how much good that did.

  http://stopabuse.org/CARE.html

  A Rambo band

  A headband, like that worn by Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo films. The film director Richard Stanley started wearing hats because he deemed the headband fashion no longer acceptable after it had been usurped by Stallone.

  sheep-worriers

  Dogs that persistently bother sheep, which can legally be executed by farmers — sometimes leading to unpleasant altercations between the owners of frisky pets and the owners of smoking shotguns. For the record, Sheep Worrying was also the name of a 1970s-80s arts collective I was associated with. For a brief history of that, see: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~smedlo/music/sheep.htm

  recce

  recon, reconnaissance

  The Archers

  ‘An everyday story of country folk’; from 1950 onwards, BBC Radio’s longest-running soap opera. The daily instalments are edited together and repeated on a Sunday morning.

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/catch/ http://www.whirligig-tv.co.uk/radio/archers.htm

  Two-Way Family Favourites

  Originally Forces Favourites, this wartime BBC Radio request music program continued into the 1970s. It was specifically for the families of those serving overseas in the armed forces.

  http://www.whirligig-tv.co.uk/radio/twff.htm

  Round the Horne

  A seminal 1960s BBC Radio comedy show, hosted by Kenneth Horne. Best-remembered for Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick’s use of gay slang in the ‘Julian and Sandy’ sketches.

  http://www.johnbarber.com/rth.html

  The Clitheroe Kid

  A BBC Radio sit-com (1957-72), in which middle-aged but diminutive comedian Jimmy Clitheroe played a naughty schoolboy. In retrospect, vaguely disturbing.

  http://www.jimmyclitheroe.co.uk/

  Down Your Way

  Long-running and excruciating BBC Radio show (first broadcast in 1946) in which a smug presenter visited a region of Britain, interviewed various locals about their work and played a piece of music they selected. Week after week, we hoped some old lady who made corn dollies in Little Whumpington would request ‘Fuck Like a Beast’.

  http://www.whirligig-tv.co.uk/radio/downyourway.htm

  Sing Something Simple

  1959-2001. A program of easy listening favourites performed in surreally somnolent style by the Cliff Adams Singers.

  Gardeners’ Question Time

  Originally entitled How Does Your Garden Grow?, this was first broadcast in 1947 and continues to this day. Nobody ever asks the team of experts about growing marijuana.

  http://www.whirligig-tv.co.uk/radio/gqt.htm

  The God slot

  Early Sunday evening prime-time on BBC1, usually occupied by Songs of Praise or the like.

  Mary’s little cousin Beth

  Appears briefly in Jago. In the Where the Bodies Are Buried stories, she is revealed to be a serial killer.

  Andrew Lloyd-Webber

  Composer of long-running musical stage shows; one of those enormously successful people whose output no one will own up to liking.

  PG Tips

  Brand of tea, long-promoted on television by cheerful chimpanzees.

  http://www.unilever.co.uk/ourbrands/brand_pgtips.html

  Survival Kit

  See also: ‘Organ Donors’

  The Guardian

  Leftish-leaning daily paper, aka the Manchester Guardian.

  The Statesman

  The New Statesman. A weekly political periodical with a left-wing slant.

  http://www.newstatesman.co.uk

  Privatisation

  The process, enthusiastically pioneered by the Thatcher Government, of selling off state services and industries into private ownership. Caricatured as ‘selling off the family silver’, this contributed to the bubble economy of the 1980s and, arguably, the lower quality of public services like transport and the utilities.

  http://www.humanrights.de/doc_en/archiv/s/socpar/8_9/P26-27.htm

  John Smith

  Briefly leader of the Labour Party, his death made way for the accession of Tony Blair as party leader and eventually Prime Minister.

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/12/newsid_2550000/2550803.stm

  New Labour

  Like a detergent, the Labour Party successfully rebranded itself as New Labour in the mid-1990s.

  The Spice Girls

  Remember them?

  http://www.geocities.com/antispicegirlsonline/

  Syreeta

  Appears in Jago. This is an alternate timeline to that.

  Leech’s Comet

  The newspaper features in ‘The Original Dr Shade’, ‘Organ Donors’, The Quorum and ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried 3: Black and White and Red All Over’.

  National Lottery Live

  The telecast prize draw.

  Anthea Turner, Dale Winton, Bob Monkhouse, Carol Smillie

  Presenters of the Lottery draw on television.

  Mystic Meg

  ‘Psychic’ whose predictions about the winners are used to pad out the National Lottery draw show.

  http://www.dogbomb.co.uk/board/showthread.php?threadid=5117

  Simon Mayo’s Confessions

  At the time when this scene is set, the show on before the Lottery draw on BBC1.

  http://www.ukgameshows.com/atoz/programmes/c/confessions/

  The Independent

  Youngest of the UK’s daily broadsheet papers.

  Great Shades of Elvis!

 

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