True Tales of Bastardness involving Poo (and related smells)

Should I ever have cause to write an autobiography, I would expect the opening chapter to be all about poo.

It seems that my childhood (and parts of my adult life) can be measured out in poo anecdotes. In most cases, the pleasure gleaned from these episodes centres upon the impact of the faecal matter on other people. Few things have caused me more mirth than the sheer nausea, violent retching or offended horror experienced by the victims of these acts of bastardness.

And so I would like to document for your delight (or disgust) my top ten turd-related true tales, in reverse order, because it’s apt to begin at the bottom:

10. Shit-stained pants behind the sink
My mother insisted that my brother and I wear plain white y-fronts while we were growing up. This was a shockingly shortsighted decision on her part. Our response was to leave skid marks along the gusset which would have required a chisel and blow-torch to remove once she’d discovered them dried-out and tucked behind the bathroom sink, where we erroneously believed she’d never find them. Perhaps if she had taught us to wipe our bottoms properly, she would not have fallen victim to this practice.

9. A Human Poo behind the Garages
Whilst playing out in a narrow alleyway of bushes behind the garages near our house, I lazily decided to spare myself the walk home (about 100 metres) and so dropped my pants to have a shit there and then. Foliage in the vicinity was not the most robust, but what the hell, I could always tuck that day’s pants behind the bathroom sink.
Our neighbour, who’d been playing out with us (yes, there was an audience for this base act) grassed me up to his mum, who then told my mum. When accused, I naturally denied the crime; but our neighbour’s mum had been round behind the garages to verify the accusation. I suggested that the evidence she had discovered was probably a dog’s poo, but she claimed that she knew the difference between dog and human poo.
What was she? A fucking shit expert? My mum must have thought so, because on her testimony I was banged to rights.

8. Stinkbomb in a Phone Box
Straying slightly away from poo, this was my favourite prank played on total strangers. There was a phone box outside our house, so we took the number, waited next to it until someone happened to be walking up the hill towards us and then smashed a stink bomb inside. Then we’d run back inside the house, ring the number and look mischievously out of the window at the poor passer-by stepping inside to answer the phone, being subjected to that most foul of manufactured smells.

7. Shat in My Shorts
At first glance this sounds like a run-of-the-mill occurrence. However, the shorts in question cost me £20 in 1990 from a Rolling Stones concert at Wembley stadium. Bermuda shorts (all the rage in 1990) emblazoned with the Stone’s Tongue design. And the shitter who shat in my shorts was my brother.
Self-conscious about his narrow waist, he would wear several layers beneath his jeans and on this occasion he chose to make my very special expensive Stones Bermuda shorts the bottom layer. He was in a club in Manor House called The Catacombs, dancing to The Doors, when he felt a fart brewing. As it turned out, there was a lot more to it and he shit himself. In my fucking shorts. He disposed of them in the gents (down the loo rather than behind any sink) and returned to the dancefloor.
Bastard.

6. Exploding Poo
Back in the 1970’s, before dog owners were ordered to scoop up their pets’ plops, you really couldn’t go anywhere as a kid without stepping in shit. If we spotted one in advance, we’d often lance the canine waste matter with a stick and throw it at each other.
Come the 1980’s, there was less opportunity for such bastardness in the UK – but no less in France. On an exchange trip, me and my mate Wayne bought the obligatory pack of bangers and had the idea of sliding one inside a dog’s turd. We lit it and ran. The effect was all that we’d hoped for, but for the fact that some of the fall-out hit Wayne. Ironically, he was the fastest sprinter in our year at school, but even he couldn’t outrun exploding dog shit.

5. Fartspray: the brainchild of a bastard
Joke shops were well stocked with Fartspray back in the 80’s. Not that it smelt of fart. It was far worse than that. My brother was used to me farting on his head (sometimes bare-arsed for maximum effect) but he and our cousin were totally unprepared for being locked in our coal-shed and having me liberally spraying it through the gap above the door. Sadly, I had to let them out quickly, because they were close to taking the door off its hinges in their desperation to escape.

4. Floater in the Bath
I’m sure I was still made to share a bath with my younger brother until I was at least 6 or maybe 7 or 8 at best. Perhaps the trigger for ending this slightly unsavoury practice was the growing frequency of one or other of us to either piss in the bath, or on a few occasions, to squeeze a nugget of poo out and see if it could float towards the other before he had a chance to spot it and jump out. Mum must have got tired of the resultant screaming on these joint bath nights and let us have our own baths from then on.

3. Enacting the Chinese Proverb
Do you remember, as a kid, someone saying: Old Chinese proverb say, He who goes to bed with itchy bum, wakes up with smelly finger? Well that gave me an idea. (I’ll apologise to the reader now, because as we hit the top 3, the anecdotes become increasingly impossible to stomach.) I would deliberately itch my bum until my finger was so potently smelly that I couldn’t bear to move it within a foot of my nose. Then I’d grab my little brother in a headlock with one arm and with my free hand – the one with the offensive arse-residue on its index finger – I’d cover his mouth and make sure that the finger was wedged against his nostrils.
I put my hands up to this – it was abuse. People who criticise the Americans for Guantanamo Bay, really need to question whether I should be on trial for Human Rights violations before the US government is.

2. Nutella
I’m not getting paid for the advertisement, but I would like to thank Nutella for this number 2 prank. Chocolate spread, out of context (i.e. not in a jar or on bread) looks exactly like poo. Exploiting this fact, I played this prank on someone – I can’t even remember who – and I would encourage everyone to try it, because the effect was worth recording and sending to You’ve Been Framed.
I smeared chocolate spread quite thickly onto a scrunched up bundle of toilet paper and placed it on the floor next to the loo. Then I called the victim in and accused that person of being responsible for the shitty tissue missing the pan. As they were denying involvement in this apparent act of carelessness, I picked up the tissue and shoved it all into my mouth.
The look of horror and immediate retching of my victim meant that I had to swiftly unplug my mouth, because I was laughing so hard I nearly choked on it.
(You know what, now that I think about it, for this prank I was an adult and the victim may have been my own son. Is that bad?)

1. Why the fuck did I do this?
My favourite poo-related prank of all time tops the list for two reasons. Firstly, the impact of this action on the victim was the most extreme; and secondly, it was never intended as a prank and it was a completely illogical thing for me to do.
Again, thinking about the house in which I did this, I was at least 6 years old, but couldn’t have been much older, because it was so incomprehensively dumb.
I went into the bathroom to use the toilet and I decided that for a change I would poo in the bath instead. FOR A CHANGE? I recall my decision clearly. I wanted variety in my life. I asked myself, why should we always have to poo in the toilet? Let’s try something different.
So, I pooed in the bath. Not like I did when my brother was in the bath with me, when the poo would float a while on the surface of the water and you could offer a defence to your mum that it was an accident. NO! This was a shit in a dry bath. I had the foresight to dispose of the subsequent tissue in the actual toilet, but then I was confronted by the inevitable and horrifying realisation that you can’t flush a bath.
There’s something about the water in a toilet that minimises the smell of poo. This I concluded as I reaped the reward of witnessing a turd hit the dry surface of the bath. I also have a theory that much of the smell is contained within a poo and is released when it breaks. Well this one certainly had its surface crack on impact.
I knew what to do next, though. I shouted to my little brother to come and see. Innocently he responded to my call and walked straight in. Hit by the stark image of that misplaced poo and the wave of stink emanating from its pores, my brother immediately turned back into the hall and vomited all over the floor.
My mum, called into action to deal with both the poo and the vomit, plus her eldest son’s sheer brainlessness, was far too furious with me to allow me to enjoy the moment straight away. But I’ve dined out on the memory for almost 35 years since and for that reason as well this is my number one number two tale.

Bastards on Kids' TV

Kids’ TV shows over the last few decades have been as much a breeding ground for bastards as my boxer shorts are for bacteria. We may well feel nostalgic for the halcyon days of our youth, spent arse-to-carpet, inches from a TV screen that baked the irises in our dead-looking eyes; but did we ever consider just how vile and cruel some of our idols were?

Easily the worst was Mr Benn. Here was a man whose face would have been a regular feature on Crimewatch had it been on telly in the early 70’s. If the police were searching for a serial killer, then Mr Benn ticked every box on the profile. He was approaching middle age, lived alone, was unemployed, had no friends or close relatives, loved dressing up and was a complete fantasist. Who knows who was buried under the paving slabs in the back yard of 52 Festive Road? Even more unsavoury was the fact that he lived in a street full of children. I’m sure their parents told them never to accept sweets from the funny man in the bowler hat and pinstripe suit. But I bet he offered; the nonce.

The fact that Mr Benn undertook some form of moralistically saccharin good deed on every adventure behind that changing room door should not fool you into believing that he was totally altruistic. The thieving bastard usually nicked something to stick on his mantelpiece back home. And he never told the shopkeeper what had happened to him. If he had any concern for other people’s health and safety, he’d have reported the risk - any other customer could easily wander into a different world and be eaten by a dinosaur or attacked by a dragon. All he had to say was, “You want to get that door fixed mate,” but he never did, the selfish git.

Another bastard from that time was that fat sloth Bagpuss. Look, he’s the only fucker in the shop who gets to go outdoors, but all he does is lie on his saggy arse and sleep. And then, when Bagpuss wakes up, all the other toys in the shop wake up, discover something that’s broken, discuss what to do and then work together to fix it. Does Bagpuss help? No fucking way. Lazy shyster. Imagine if Gabriel the Frog fell off his shelf and suffered internal haemorrhaging; Bagpuss would just sit there and let him die. If the frog was close enough, Bagpuss would probably then eat him. If he wasn’t such a sack of inertia he’d have attacked and eaten all the mice on the mouse organ and Professor Yaffle ages ago.

But Emily loved him. And I bet she was an obese, slothful and spoilt little cow as well.

I think I don’t trust quiet people very much. Mr Benn said very little, and the same with Bagpuss. Add to that list Bod. Yes, Bod, that androgynous agent for the Khmer Rouge, the silent assassin of Middle-English agricultural folk, the inspiration for Chucky, the cold-blooded evil-faced matchstick-legged bastard. He made Damian from The Omen look like Jake from Tweenies. Here comes Bod… quick, shoot the fucker in the head before he harms us, he’s the bastard son of Pol Pot and a jackal.

Mind you, the worst of all the silent bastards was Sooty. The fact that ITV refused to transmit the things he whispered in Matthew Corbett’s ear suggests that it was pure hatred and filth. Corbett had to play this charade that Sooty was saying something nice and innocuous rather than some obscenity regarding his deviant carnal desires for Sue or a remark about how he wanted to torture Sweep, medieval-style.

“Oh really Sooty? He says he’d like to play a game with you Sweep.”
Meaning that he wanted to stab Sweep in the head with infected syringes, set fire to his squeaker and force him up a cow’s arse with a broom-handle.

This epidemic of bastards in kids’ TV shows was not consigned to my childhood in the 70’s. When my own children were young, I was once more confronted with bastardness in sheep’s clothing, particularly in Teletubbies and Balamory.

It wasn’t any particular Teletubby, nor was it even Noo-Noo that made me uncomfortable and afraid for the safety of my children. It was the weird woman who had tea parties in the woods – Funny Lady. Fuck me, she was a bunny-boiler and a half! You suspected that her motive was to ingratiate herself with children in order to gain access to one of the Dads, initiate an affair, murder the wife and sell the kid into slavery in a Mumbai shanty town. Not very funny, Funny Lady!

As for Balamory, well, where do you start? Miss Hoolie the nursery teacher - whose teeth originally belonged to someone with a much larger head - was clearly suffering the usual mental tribulations of a stereotypical single, friendless, bullied-at-school, emotionally retarded, mildly unattractive women in her 20’s. You knew something was going to snap one day and she’d drive a bus-load of her pupils off the edge of a cliff after being sexually spurned by the dribblingly inept PC Plum.

Balamory is full of bastards. Even worse than Miss Hoolie is Suzie Sweet who runs the shop. She has Paul Daniels’s expression, cold-eyes with over-compensating grin, the face that tells you she is the Scottish coastal village sweet shop version of Voldemort. And don’t be fooled by Archie, pink jumper-wearing aristocratic inhabitant of the pink castle (literally, not figuratively.) Between them you can imagine a plot whereby they racially purify the village by fooling PC Plum into arresting Josie Jump and Spencer the painter and then get Edie McRedie to set up Balamory’s own Guantanamo Bay in which Jump and Spence are tortured as terror suspects because they are black and therefore must be Muslims.