The Leviathan of Bastardness that is Football

Why am I a football supporter?

Why am I a season-ticket-carrying, Arsenal-tattoo’ed, former fanzine –contributing, Hornbey-esque pilgrim to a particular square of partially-authentic grass upon which eleven men in the iconic colours of red with white sleeves ply their trade?

Perhaps it’s the history.  Emerging originally from the grimy urban squalor of Industrial Victorian Britain, football rewrote itself a much more glamorous history in 1992 when the Premiership was born.  I love immersing myself in the infinite data available on everything post-1992 that lets me thank SKY for granting me appropriately-priced access to every kick of the ball by every one of the Premiership’s greatest ever whatevers; and whatever they are great for, it’s something greater than the so-called great players of the time before the Premiership, when football was slow and hardly on telly and watched by hooligans and poor folk.

Perhaps it’s the sense of community.  When I stroll along the street to Arsenal, via a car-journey and train ride, walking side-by-side with other local fans from the immediate global vicinity of North London, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, King’s Lynn and South East Asia, I feel that I am amongst family.  When I look around me inside the stadium, I am warmed by the diversity of the audience, a sea of faces that truly reflects the richness of our society.  Everybody is welcome, except a few gays and Muslims and the economically disenfranchised lower classes.  And together, we share football.  The friendly banter between rival fans that only spills over into brutal hatred and prejudice from a tiny minority of intimidating evolutionary throw-backs who attend ubiquitously and charm a larger group into participating in their bile.

Perhaps it’s the sportsmanship.  The way in which two sets of competing athletes make such bold sacrifices in order to win.  These might be sacrifices of integrity and fairplay, but at the end of the day, like, obviously, you know, they all shake hands with those who have cheated and dived and feigned injury and moaned and argued with officials and exchanged abuse with the crowd and spat and thrown water bottles around for some urchin to collect up.

Perhaps it is the competitiveness of it.  The excitement of an underdog winning an FA Cup every two decades.  The mystery of whether the richest team will win the league, or if the 2^nd or 3^rd richest will do it this year.  The joy of watching talent nurtured and developed to the benefit of a club who can then sell that player to someone who does win trophies and thus avoid administration and bankruptcy.

Perhaps it is the enormity of the sport.  The media coverage that saturates the internet and TV channels with minute-by-minute news about who said what about whom and what that might suggest could happen in terms of transfers or not; every quote by a source, real or spuriously anonymous, is seized upon and lauded like a Churchillian utterance in terms of significance and profundity.

Perhaps it is the unparalleled entertainment.  Where else other than a gig, the theatre, a restaurant, the local park, a social gathering, the cinema, an art gallery, a museum or any other sport can you get such entertainment for half the price?  And the amenities are something else.  As long as you’re not a woman and therefore not really expected to attend football in large numbers, then you can enjoy tiled toilets with troughs that are thirty feet long with minimal queuing.  And should you be hungry at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon - which many people are because it is 2 hours after lunch and 3 before tea and your brain is conditioned into thinking it needs additional sustenance – then you may access a limited range of just about affordable beverages and hot snacks, which amount to a small fraction of the cost of your ticket.  Like maybe only 1/10.  (I love a £7 slither of pizza when I just paid £70 for 90 minutes of being outclassed by Man United.)

Perhaps it is the only place where I can be myself.  As a casually-racist, homophobic, middle-income, financially wasteful, indiscriminating consumer of anything put in front of me; a man with a need to verbalise unselfconsciously his own internal angst and psychological damage in the form of overt affectations of passion that translate in real terms into aggressive and abusive obscenity; an inherently biased, unreasonable and blind-to-reality protester of every vice demonstrated by a rival but deliberately overlooked in my own team and behaviour; and a tireless customer of an exploitative business that kids me into thinking that my support is valued;  then yes, at football I can truly be myself.

No, I don’t have a Bucket List, but I do have a Fuck-It List

The whole idea of having a list of things you want to do before you die is one of the most disingenuous fucking concepts that we humans indulge our vanity in.  Oh, I so want to do that before I die!  WHEN else would you be able to do it?

I don’t have a Bucket List.  This fact might make me slightly less interesting at a dinner party of people who don’t know each other very well.  It might make me slightly less interesting as a human being; because, let’s face it, the sorts of aspiring activities Bucket List compilers compile on their Bucket Lists are the kind of things many people do purely to appear INTERESTING.

Oh, you parachute, do you?  That makes you SO interesting.  Please tell me about it.  I don’t parachute.  I must be so fucking dull.

And that’s on my Fuck-It list.  Parachuting.  Will my life be any less fulfilling if I never parachute?  No.  I’ve been in a plane and I’ve enjoyed the view and at no point did I ever nurse the desire to jump out.  It’s scary.  I’d leave a trail in the sky as if I was in a stunt team known as the Brown Arrows.

Climb Everest?  Fuck it.  I love a good mountain, and I’ve enjoyed the odd climb.  I say climb, I mean walk upwards.  All that proper climbing with ropes and hooks and trusting your life to something that was on discount in Millets a week before is not my bag.  I’ve taken cable cars and trains up some Swiss peaks and absolutely loved it, been emotionally moved by the experience, but I didn’t feel the need to be able to boast about it afterwards.  You’re paying for the name with Everest, aren’t you?  It’s like the mountain version of Hollister when George at Asda will do.

OK, I’ll make a concession.  People climb Everest for the challenge rather than the view.  Fine.  People parachute for the challenge.  Fine.  Test yourselves out, take some personal pride out of the experience, feel good about yourself.  But don’t do it so that you can tell people you’ve done it, because that makes you a wanker.  I’m not knocking the people who do these things for themselves.  I admire them.

It’s not really those personal challenges that I am venting my usual unreasonable wrath towards.  It’s the other sort of shit people put on their bucket lists that make me think fuck it.  I checked out Bucketlist.org on the Internet and perused the Most Popular section.  And it really emphasises the paucity of people’s aspirations:

·       Attend a Masquerade Ball.  Meaning, go to a pointless party of dickheads who like dressing up.  Fuck that.

·       Jump into a Pool Fully Clothed.  WHY?

·       Rope Swing into Water?  What, in the hope that you are one of the 30+ people to appear on You’ve Been Framed every episode and have Harry Hill HILARIOUSLY refer to you as a celebrity you bear a passing resemblance to, if people squint?

·       Walk Barefoot in the Rain.  I’ve done this enough times when I’ve had to go out to the shed in shitty weather, so that can go on my Fuck-It list as well.

·       Publish a book.  Because anyone can?

·       Set a World Record.  What for?  Having the saddest Bucket List ever?

·       Try a Fried Snickers.  Why not combine this with the previous one and it’ll be the last thing you do before you die, anyway.

I like the way the website combines cheap ideas like eating fried Snickers bars with prohibitively expensive suggestions like swimming with dolphins, which yes, we’d all love to do, but paddling with ducks is about the closest most people might get.  So, instead of a load of amazing-but-unlikely-to-happen ideas or silly-arse-self-indulgent-pointless-poncing-about ideas, he’s my Bucket List for ordinary folk.  Five sensible things to do before you die:

·       Take out some life insurance

·       Lock the back door

·       Make sure everybody knows that you don’t give a shit what’s played at your funeral, because you won’t be able to hear it

·       Sell all the unwanted shit you possess that your family would only give to charity shops anyway and spend the money on booze and takeaways (or a holiday swimming with dolphins)

·       Beat up someone who tells you they’ve parachuted, because it was on their Bucket List and then say, “Well done.  Now try and guess what’s on mine.”

Gig Bastards

I’d love to tell you about all the amazing gigs I’ve been to in the last 25 years; from standing in front of one musical idol – I am Kloot’s John Bramwell – in the Half Moon Pub in Putney, able to exchange conversation, to magical times watching so many other heroes – Dylan, Neil Young, Bowie, Floyd, Ryan Adams, Springsteen -  to eventually bowing to pressure from my wife and children in the nose-bleed section of the O2 and dancing to Madness, only to prompt my daughter to humiliate me by laughing raucously at my running-on-the-spot-ska-style-dad-dance.

I’d love to share those good times with you, but I won’t.  I don’t do “good times” in this blog.  I’d only bore you.  You have your own and shouldn’t give a casually neglected shit about mine.  So, I will stay close to form and share with you the BAD bits; because even when the concert is good, there are usually GIG BASTARDS to dribble some piss on your soul.

What prompted this grumpy reflection was watching the Stones at Glastonbury last week.  No, I didn’t go.  No, I didn’t want to go.  I saw them in 1990 and, like anyone else who has done so since the late ‘80s, did so because I thought it would be my last chance.  I looked upon that crowd of young, huddled, lost-in-the-moment festival goers and thought THANK FUCK I CAN WATCH THIS ON TELLY.  Oh, it’s not as good as being there, you say?  Well, true, I don’t have some selfish 20 year old on her boyfriend’s shoulders obscuring the view of the TV screen.  Nor a flag-waving cunt with an equally retarded sense of social circumspection.  I don’t have an over-malleable plastic container of warm beer that I queued 30 minutes and paid £7 for.  And I don’t need to cut a path of polite excuse me’s through 500 people to take a communal piss in a trough which affords the user a free unsolicited steam facial.  My sofa was better than being there.

Not always the case of course.  Being there IS usually what it’s all about.

Not when I saw Oasis at Wembley in their final year, though.  A series of external factors were at work anyway that night.  It was midweek.  I was driving and therefore sober.  I waited outside the tube for my brother-in-law and gazed with appalled disgust at a steady stream of the worst kinds of tossers you’d ever see at a gig.  Mouthy, swaggering, drug-pushing, aggressive, laddish, evolution-by-passed  arseholes.  We watched the gig from the rear of the pitch in order to avoid the worst of the beer-hurling moshiment of these fucking apes, and this meant essentially viewing the concert on TV screens, as Liam and Noel were mere pin-pricks on the horizon.  (A superfluous use of the word PIN there perhaps.)

A million miles away, on the opposite end of this spectrum of Gig Bastards, was proof that one seemingly-innocuous man has equal capacity to spoil your night as a thousand

geezers.  Don’t laugh, but I went on my own to see Jethro Tull at my local venue in St Albans.  YES, IT WAS FULL OF BEARDY-MEN, ALRIGHT?  And it was a nice sedate atmosphere in which to LISTEN to the songs and, you know, tap your foot a lot and maybe nod your head and think NICE and COOL and the such-like.  Well, all jolly lovely unless one beardy man two seats down from me decides to give his mate – next to me – a running commentary on what album each song came from and what year that was.  And occasionally sing along.  His mate had clearly no interest in Tull nor any discographical details, was often yawning, checking his phone or at one point actually properly sleeping.  When I challenged the bloke to shut up as we’d not paid to listen to him (it was St Albans, I didn’t want to call him a cunt just yet) he defended himself vigorously with a petulant cry of I’M JUST TELLING HIM ABOUT THE BAND, HE DOESN’T KNOW.

I have moaned in a previous blog about people that go to gigs and stand at the back chatting, brainlessly oblivious to the fact that it isn’t rock and roll on stage and so each heartfelt torch song (again, I am Kloot being a case in point) is punctuated by the inane chatter of a couple of gig bastards who really should’ve saved the money and gone to a proper pub that doesn’t provide live musical accompaniment to your tales of mundane fucking rubbish, you loud-mouthed ARSE!

For some reason, any gig I go to in Hammersmith finds me seated near to probably the same American girl with a voice that pierces through the music like an over-amplified violin being smashed into a sheet of plate glass.  Being English, you put up with it for a few songs, hopeful that she’ll adapt to our culture, before resorting to a few head-turns and fuck-off looks, before eventually saying DO YOU MIND? just before the encore.

Finally, a lesser common gig bastard that I have encountered was Bill Oddie.  I say encountered; I saw him walking down the stairs at the Royal Festival Hall just before a Martha Wainwright gig.  (Incidentally, Martha Wainwright herself is a gig bastard for chastising the crowd I was in at the Roundhouse for being English and therefore too quiet and making me think, oxymoronically, “fuck off and sing”.)  Back to Bill Oddie.  He’s not a gig bastard because he spoilt the gig or anything.  He’s a gig bastard because he’s a bastard and he was at the gig.  And wearing his fucking bird-watcher jacket.  Bearded cunt.

Bastards Popping Round

A neighbour of a Twitter chum emailed her to let her know that he would be phoning later to arrange an opportunity to come round and visit.  She then tweeted to share the irony of a neighbour emailing her to let her know that he would be phoning later to arrange an opportunity to come round and visit and I replied to ask why her neighbour didn’t come round to tell her that he’d emailed her to let her know that he would be phoning later to arrange an opportunity to come round and visit, just in case she hadn’t checked her emails.  I suggested that she ask him why, but cautiously advised that she phone to ask him rather than go round.  But to email first.

We milked the absurdity of this social farce as far as we could, within the constraints of 140 characters and the patience of our shared audience:  So, about 2 more tweets then.  And it prompted me to muse that in the old days people just popped round.

When I was growing up, the woman next door was always just popping round to chat to my mum.  And she’d say, “I’m just popping round.”  And my Dad would think, “She’s fucking round!” – replacing POPPING with FUCKING because there was no FUCKING POPPING about it.  No more that Hitler or Napoleon POPPED round Europe.  No more than Jack the Ripper POPPED round fucking Whitechapel.  But my mum liked our neighbour popping round and I must say that, casting a rose-tinted eye back into the past, I like the idea that people used to just pop round.

But I wouldn’t want anyone fucking popping round nowadays.

I LOVE people “visiting”.  You know, pre-arranged.  So, I’ve Hoovered and I’m not in the middle of something and I haven’t recently created a toxic breathing environment in the lavatory and I won’t begin to sink into an abyss of anxiety about how long they might STAY  round.  Even if I REALLY LIKED them.

Back to the past and all that bollocks about how you could leave your door open during the war and people would just pop in unannounced.  I guess, with no easy access to porn in those days, the likelihood of being caught in a compromising situation was limited and no more embarrassing than listening to Vera Lynn on the radio and wearing your wife’s knocked-off nylons while you did so.  People had nothing to nick in those days anyway.  Years later they had porn.  On Betamax.  So they locked their doors.  And if anyone wanted to pop round they’d have to knock.  Then at least you could pretend that you weren’t in.  But not if you’d just turned on the waste disposal, because then your sink would be making a noise like someone driving a 13 foot high bus through a 10 foot high metal tunnel.

Popping round in those days was always justified with a REASON and that reason was always a cup of coffee.  “Just popping round for a coffee!”  And would my Dad would mutter, “Why?  Doesn’t she have any fucking coffee then?  Next time just phone and we’ll post you a spoonful or flick some over the fence; save you the fucking walk.”  And my neighbour and my mum would stand in the kitchen and drink coffee and chat (or shout if the waste disposal was on) until my neighbour decided that she should leave, saying “I’d better go” but without any justified reason, because she really had fuck all else to do; and my mum would say, “Yes, I best get on,” and would go upstairs for another coffee and a fag and an hour of telly before “getting on” with anything.

Anyway, just so that you know, I’ll be tweeting to tell people that I’ve written this blog, but I thought I’d best mention in the blog that I’ll be tweeting and just to be on the safe side, I’ll mention in the tweet that… well, you get the picture.  If not, I’ll pop round and explain.

The Game of “Who’s the fucking busiest?”

There’s this game at work.  It’s called “Who’s the fucking busiest?”

I say “game” – it’s more of a default conversational belch.

I say ‘It’s called “Who’s the fucking busiest?”’ – but no one calls it that.  No one admits to even playing it.  But they do.

The rule is this:  If someone asks you “How are you?” and you say “Fine” then you lose.  Because FINE means NOT BUSY.  And the person asking secures the higher ethical ground in the context of the ethics of “BEING BUSY” BEING THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE IN STOIC MARTYRDOM.

To have any chance of winning, you should answer, “Busy.”  But no cunt wants to know HOW busy you are.  You saying BUSY is a gauntlet thrown down, to which the only counter is to OUT-BUSY you.  “Tell me about it!” the first protagonist will respond, paradoxically NOT wanting you to tell them about it, but instead to LISTEN to THEIR boasts of being busy.  Metaphorical cocks-at-the-urinals time.  “Yeah, me too.  Busy as fuck.”  Because as we all know, ‘fuck’ is a busy thing isn’t it.

The BUSY-OFF begins like two bulldogs in a barrel of raw beef.  The accomplished game-player will reel off a list of ALL the things they HAVE to do, because of course being busy is about the quantity of tasks and not the length of time it takes to do any of them.  After five minutes of listening to this mundane list of massively unimportant nuggets of information, you start wondering to yourself, “If you’re so fucking busy, why do you spend five minutes telling me what you have to do instead of fucking off to do it.”  And you know you’ll not be the only recipient of that self-pitying spiel that day.

God help you if you ASK someone to do anything.  “I’ve not got time to do that.  I’ve got to blah blah, blah blah, blah…” – five minutes of fucking blah-blah-blah-ing like a blahcunt from Cuntsville, New Blahdom.  You could’ve done it by now, you think to yourself, listening like an inert carbon-based lump of disinterest.

These sort of self-contradictory, self-lauding aspirants to globally-honoured stoicism are the last people you should ever tell ANYTHING about your leisure interests or experiences to.  Don’t light that touch-paper with “I did a bit of gardening at the weekend” because you’ll get back, “Wish I had time for gardening!” – the implication being that you aren’t busy, because you did SOMETHING ELSE.

I remember the reaction of some colleagues to this blog.  “Fucking hell, you must have a lot of time on your hands.”  Because of course, it takes HOURS!  And it’s not like I do it to relax, do I?  I can’t be busy enough. 

“You must have nothing better to do!”

Well, I kind of think that doing this is A LOT better to do than spending your life in a permanent state of one-up-man-ship moaning and boasting in this irritatingly cuntfest of a game called “Who’s the fucking busiest?”

Now fuck off, I’m busy!

The Unbearable Softness of the Ante-dental Panic Poo

I am an incredibly lucky bastard.  This does not, however, prevent me from bouts of unfounded anxiety.  My pathological fear of wasps might stem from never having been stung.  I apply this irrational pessimism to my health as well.  I am never ill – much to the envious disdain of friends and family, who are goaded into wishing me ill-health every time I taunt them with the boast, “I do not suffer from human disease, because I’m fucking Superman.” (For the record, “fucking” is used in its adjectival sense there, not as a verb.)  Nevertheless, I often fret over any tiny imperfection in case it might be some form of CERTAIN DEATH.  I am too proud (*scared) to actually bother a doctor with any concerns, except once when I had chest pains and it turned out to be caused by eating my dinner in front of the telly too often.

Which brings me to dentists.  As a child, I had one tooth pulled out and one filling.  Not bad for someone whose mother must have been on commission from Tate and Lyle.  As an adult, I stopped going to the dentist for about ten years, but since our kids needed to be taken, I have attended regularly and only had one additional filling and a reboot of my first filling.  So, yes, I am lucky with my teeth.

But I still loathe and fear every visit to the dentist.

Me and the kids had an appointment this morning.  The panic was evident in the poo I had before leaving the house.  I won’t disgust you with the details.  I feel the identifier “panic” before the word “poo” pretty much says it all.  It isn’t a warm day, but by the time we’d arrived, my shirt looked like it had done a series of Tenko, it had that Japanese-held POW clinginess to it.

Dental surgeries are by their nature, quiet and clean places.  But this merely enhances their chilling nature.  Horror feeds off that silence.  Dental surgeons and assistants creep past the waiting room door in scrubs and face masks like disciples of Joseph Mengele, freaking you out with sinister, devilish smiles.  The waiting room is adorned with photographs of teeth.  Not nice teeth.  Fucking disgusting teeth.  I don’t understand why dentists feel it necessary to show us how shit our mouths WOULD look if we DIDN’T come here.  FOR FUCK’S SAKE, WE ARE HERE – WE WON’T GET SHITTY TEETH LIKE THAT!  I mean, gums are pretty gruesome anyway, but to plaster a wall in blown-up images of Shane MacGowan’s dental history serves no purpose other than to inspire more fear and nausea.

This same strategy was employed in the maternity ward where our son was born.  There was a poster claiming to be reassuring, telling us not to worry if our baby came out looking a little odd or misshapen, because that was normal.  And to substantiate this assertion, it then showed a gallery of about 30 ABNORMAL new-born babies, with elongated heads, Picasso-esque features and skin like a rhino’s diseased ball-bag.  At first glance, you’d believe it was an anthology of Doctor Who's enemies.

Returning to the dentist…

Both of my kids went in before me and came out within minutes.  Neither had any problems.  One half of my brain attempted to fool the other half by thinking, “The kids are fine, so I should be too!” [No logical link]  “The dentist isn’t checking carefully enough, so I should get away with it” [Not a logical aspiration].  And then the other half of my brain fought back and exclaimed, “This is the perfect set-up for an ironical outcome.”

It’s that fear of an ironical outcome that I am often plagued with.  Like when I put the car in the garage for a seemingly small problem, I fear it’ll cost hundreds to resolve.  Going to the dentist, with its fear of the unknown, where the judgement of one person can cost you dearly, is just like putting your car in the garage, but with added physical pain to bolster the financial one.

They have this new thing now where you have to put safety glasses on as soon as you get in the dentist’s chair.  Dark safety glasses.  So you can’t see what they’re doing.  The chair menacingly reclines, and she pulls the retractable lamp down from the ceiling, asking if I’ve had any problems recently.  But her fingers have already stretched my cheeks apart, like a vet delivering a calf, and in my head I want to ask, “DO YOU EXPECT ME TO TALK?” but I know the answer will be, “NO, MR BASTARD, I EXPECT YOU TO DIE.”

Then it gets all fucking Bletchley Park, as she checks each tooth and speaks in code to her assistant.  I hear a series of numbers and letters and I panic, thinking WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY MEAN?  I am certain they mean something bad, particularly if she pauses for too long on one tooth, or says “zero zero.”

ARGH! ZERO ZERO?  THAT MUST MEAN THEY’RE GOING TO PUT ME TO SLEEP AND EXPERIMENT ON ME AND I’LL WAKE UP WITH MY TEETH SOWN INTO MY ANUS AND THEY’LL TAKE A PHOTO OF MY BLEEDING TOOTHLESS MOUTH AND PUT IT IN THE WAITING ROOM NEXT TO A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FREAKISH TOOTH-FILLED BOTTOM!

But in reality, what happened today was that my teeth were fine, it cost a mere £18 for all of us and I texted my wife to update her on the outcome with the boast WE ARE THE FUCKING TOOTH KINGS.

Going for Gold

At the very moment that I learned about Margaret Thatcher’s death, I was watching a 1988 episode of “Going for Gold” on telly. 

This show was the pull factor that prevented me attending early afternoon lectures for most of my 2^nd year at university.  Digesting a lunch of Supernoodles or pig’s liver required a sedentary half-hour, post-Neighbours, in the company of Henry Kelly and a range of socially retarded misfits competing for the prize of “European Quiz Champion.”  The pure fact that contestants hailed from all over Europe (well, this side of the crumbling Iron Curtain anyway) appeared enough of a significant fact to warrant such a lofty assertion.  The stark reality confronting us viewers when these hapless morons opened their mouths was altogether contradictory.  Surely they weren’t quiz champions of their own countries, were they?  I mean, they sort of knew absolutely fuck all about fuck all.

One particular moment of neurotransmitter non-functioning was when Henry Kelly asked “What common liquid is technically known as H20” and 3 contestants guessed wrongly.  You could have guessed this level of highbrow intellectual challenge was coming during the show’s opening titles as the contestants were encouraged to give a quirky wave to camera as it focussed on them one by one.  If I’m being kind, I could say that the mix of nationalities resulted in a diverse array of idiosyncratic gestures which reflected what might have been the norm or perhaps even quite cool in each of their respective cultures.  However, I wasn’t kind, so I’d sit there with my housemate Phil and together we’d piss ourselves stupid pouring ridicule on every grinning contestant as he or she did a Fonzie thumbs-up, a window-cleaner wipe, a dead fish flapping in a net, a near-as-dammit Nazi salute or a jolly-sailor-bugger-you-later fisting of the air.

Henry Kelly was perfect for the role of quizmaster.  He was truly excited by it all, and was forever bobbing up and down on his toes as if someone was regularly tickling his balls, giving literal meaning to that anachronistic nugget of our homophobic past, “light on his loafers”.  With gentlemanly grace he’d ask the contestants about themselves and appear genuinely interested to hear that each one had a hobby that was so mind-numbingly dull that within half a sentence of hearing about it, anyone less generous would have driven burning kebab skewers into their ears so as not to have to endure the rest of the response.

There was an elimination round before the “first round proper” and we could never fathom why that wasn’t just called the first round.  The style of many questions required Henry Kelly to describe something or somebody in the first person, like so:

“Who am I?  I am a German born composer, famous for writing symphonies including the most famous one, Beethoven’s fifth…”

BUZZZZZZ!!!!!

“Hans from Denmark?”

“Is it Mozart?”

“No, Hans from Denmark, it isn’t Mozart.  I’ll continue.  Including the most famous one, Beethoven’s fifth.  My first name is Ludwig and my surname begins with B and rhymes with Hatehoven, but I am not Tchaikovsky…”

BUZZZZZ!!!!

“Lucia from Italy?”

“Tchaikovsky?”

You were kind of waiting for someone to buzz in early, after “Who am I?” and answer “Henry Kelly.”  And if he asked, “What am I?” then me and Phil would barrack the telly with a string of insulting terms, many of which would be considered hate-crimes now that it is no longer 1989.

For the “Grand final of finals” of the European Quizmongs, Henry Kelly would don his dinner jacket and bow-tie, itself worth twice the cost of the studio set behind him (and I’m sure it was a rented suit) and a tangible titter of gormless excitement would emanate from the audience.  The winner of the first series (a certain Daphne Fowler , famed Egghead, Brain of Britain, Fifteen to One double-winner and general “awful bore”) won a trip to the 1988 Seoul Olympics.  I like to think that the losing contestants were sent to North Korea.  For good.  In subsequent years, the grand prize was a gold-mining expedition to Australia, which probably meant deportation.

Sadly, Going for Gold was eliminated from our screens in 1996, but its legacy has been the culture of moronic TV text challenges that you now get on so many prime-time family shows:

What liquid is technically known as H2O?  Is it (a) Water, (b) Gibraltar or (c) Bring your daughter to the slaughter?  Text your answer to 08700 700 700.  Texts cost £2.50 each and those of you who text the correct answer will go into a draw to win the grand prize of Henry Kelly’s dinner suit complete with testicle-access flap and the scent of ineptitude.