Pace yourself

 I read an interview with Chris Tarrant in the paper. The 72 year-old presenter had recently had a stroke and was now attempting to relaunch his career as a broadcaster of gravitas with a series of historical documentaries for Channel 5, Hitler's Holocaust Railways with Chris Tarrant.

 One claim in the feature sticks in the mind - "Tarrant is a confident man. He once boasted of drinking 20 pints, smoking 60 cigarettes and sleeping with four women in a single day."

 It's a curious boast.

 I find 60 cigarettes in a day easy to believe.

 Sleeping with four women in a single day is credible. Drinking 20 pints in a single day is also credible. But combining both in the same day is more difficult to comprehend. If the four women were prostitutes, or he was attending some kind of orgy it would make sense, but then that doesn't sound like something that someone in his position would boast about.

 How many of the four women did he already know, I wonder? Presumably he was already a public figure when this day occurred. Fame can have a curious aphrodisiac effect - I once spent an evening in the University of Birmingham Students' Union with one of the 'stars' of (poorly-regarded Channel 5 soap opera) Family Affairs and - watching a flow of shouting drunken girls proposition him - I observed that he could easily have had sex with four women in succession, providing he had no inhibitions about very quickly finding a place to do it in. But not after more than - what? - ten pints?

 Maybe the chain-smoking Tarrant had sex with the four women during the day and then - in a fit of remorseful emotional confusion - got hideously drunk afterwards. But, again, that wouldn't sound like something to boast about to me.

 The one conclusion that I did draw from this compelling claim was that if Chris Tarrant evenly paced his three activities over the course of the day, then you would imagine that the fourth woman would have got the rough end of the deal.

A Comedy On This Day: Dad's Army - Ring Dem Bells (5 September 1975)

 The first episode of the eighth series. If you've got a programme as well-established as Dad's Army was by 1975, with much loved regular characters, you only need to have one very good idea per episode. A premise that's original, can be easily described and creates an image in the mind will is probably be enough to carry your audience. "The platoon dress up as Germans" is just one such idea.

 Having dressed them up, the eventual plot that stems from this idea ends up as a bit of a runaround. Far funnier are the little character bits that arise from the change of costume - Pike dressed as a German officer playacting behind Mainwaring's desk when he's alone in the office, or Wilson's approval of the "awfully smart" Nazi uniform.

 The reason why they are dressed up as the enemy is because they're extras in a film. The 'Crown Films' people that the platoon deals with are the part of this story that most extends the Dad's Army world. Instead of glamorous characters, they turn out to be a pair of unpreposessing cockneys played by John Bardon and Hilda Fenemore, who often appeared as variations of these roles, and it's diverting to see a bit of London visit Walmington-on-Sea. Neither has very much distinctive to do, but costume woman Queenie's combined solicitousness (calling the soldiers 'dear' as she measures them up) and practicality rings true to me.

A Comedy On This Day: Man About The House - The Last Picture Show (4 September 1975)

 When I'm watching Man About The House I often find myself thinking that Robin is just the type of person who I'd really dislike. There's an unappealing cockiness, taking the form of being unwilling to take anything seriously and a lack of regard for anyone else. There's an odd sequence when Chrissy brings her new boyfriend Neil home and Robin immediately starts impersonating him and agreeing with him in a sarcastic way that the boyfriend doesn't register but Chrissy does. And it makes me think, 'But Chrissy is supposed to be your friend! She'd have good cause to be upset by your behaviour!'

 The bespectacled boyfriend is an interesting period character, a film buff of the 1970s and - as one of him female friends who bumps into him when he's on a date with Chrissy tells him that "you were on that panel at the BFI" - some type of film scholar, to boot. He turns out to be a film-obsessed monomaniac, assuming that Chrissy knows all about nitrate stock, Melies and Edwin S. Porter and will be happy to come the cinema society with him to see two hours of Eisenstein offcuts. His downfall comes when he gives Chrissy a birthday present that he would want himself, a cinecamera (Robin of course gives her nothing) and is honest about her filmmaking efforts.

 The boyfriend is supposed to be a crashing bore, but such care and detail has gone into making his film history talk authentic and accurate that I'm afraid that my ears pricked up with interest whenever he launched into his boring lectures. He is certainly inconsiderate towards Chrissy, but then so is Robin... The film buff material reaches a peak of interest when Neil takes Chrissy to a film history exhibition of stills from early silents at the NFT! The exhibition set is only a few pokey panels in the Teddington studio, but Production Designer Alex MacIntyre has gone to some effort to get the exhibits right... I like to think that Thames had these items in stock from some Arts programme.

"Competent and combative"

 A dubious privilege of having attended a quite-famous public school is the opportunity to read obituaries of your teachers, an experience unknown to most other people. This school finally stopped sending me an annual print copy of The Old Grundian a few years ago, but I do still look at the online copies, just to check that no-one who I remembered has died.

 I learn that Mr B, my form master and mathematics teacher when I was a first former, is no more. When I was twelve I was terrified of this man. What do I remember of him?

 On my first day at school, talking to some other boys - who I had been at primary school with, but who had left to go to Grundwich a year earlier, when our classes were being allocated. "You don't want to get Mr B - he's a bastard." And a sense of confirmed fatalism when my name came up for his class.

 Our classroom still had wooden desks all facing the teacher's desk. How did he address us? The one recurring phrase that I do remember was, instructing a boy to come up to his desk, "Slither hither, wretched toad", said for his own amusement. He had a heavy physical presence. Most men - and particularly teachers - show flashes of a certain residual boyishness at some moments, but I never saw that in him.

 You never felt that he was speaking to a boy as an equal, having an ordinary conversation without a side to it. I recall one algebra lesson when a boy asked (not cheeking him - Mr B wasn't a teacher who you'd treat in that way), What's the point of this? I mean, how will it ever apply to our lives? With most of what we do I can see how it will go on to help us with money or measuring things. He refused to answer and we were disappointed in him. Disappointed for his not recognising the genuine spirit of enquiry and for his failure to covey an enthusiasm in maths, something that he was clearly very good at. I suppose that his best side would probably have been seen if you were a gifted mathematician at A-Level.

 Apart from mathematics, the other thing that he was interested in was sport. During the weekly class free period, he would put a little transistor on his desk and listen to test match commentaries. His valedictory speech to the class on the last day of summer term told us that we should spend our summer going to events like athletics meetings with our friends ("and you should have made plenty of those over this year") rather than wasting our time watching television. I didn't follow this advice.

 Mr B had a temper on him. College gossip recounted that he had been suspended a few years ago for brawling with an Art master. A curious thing about my memory of that year is that I remember his reputation for hitting boys, perhaps throwing things at us, but I can't clearly recollect his actually doing it, although I do recall the atmosphere of severity when he had been displeased with a boy. I don't know whether I've blanked out the memory. Maybe as a sensitive boy I wasn't capable of processing it at the time, or perhaps it didn't actually happen at all.

 One thing that I do remember. Because I was a boy who was brought to tears on most days at school, other boys would scathingly ask me, well, why didn't you cry when Mr B hit you, then? The object of the question was to prove some shamming or hypocrisy on my part, because if I didn't cry if the teacher hit me then it would in some way invalidate the authenticity of the many other occasions when I was brought to tears. But I don't think that he ever did hit me. Its the sort of thing that you ought to remember. Plus I don't think that I was the sort of insubordinate boy who would have brought out that kind of rage in him.

 The lasting impression that he left on me is that I don't think that I've ever come across a man with less femininity in his nature. I had the strong sense that he was the type of man with no interest in or understanding of women's things. Obviously this doesn't come up very much in a boy's school  but I do recall all the other masters in his position referring to wives or families on occasion, or just conveying a fluent interest in the wider world beyond school. For the type of boy that I was, having spent the previous seven years at a co-ed primary school around the corner, growing up alongside girls and boys with mostly women teachers, Mr B was exactly the sort of schoolmaster that I shouldn't have had, at that age and in that institution.

 Reading his obituary, thirty years after I last saw the man, is a sobering experience. I'm surprised to learn that he was only thirty-nine when he taught me. Twelve year-old boys aren't very good readers of the age of grown-ups but he exuded the sense of someone older. The obituary doesn't reveal any surprising details or aspects of his nature. He doesn't appear to have had any personal attachments. Mathematics, school and sport really were his life, even to the extent of regularly attending College matches and tournaments after he had left the school, a participation that is presented as admirably committed rather than illustrative of a sadly empty retirement.

 But my lasting impression is of the sense of something suppressed, that something being what are our best qualities - warmth, openness, kindliness. I'm struck by the lack of warmth in the obituary, with the best that can be found by way of colourful character detail provided by recollections of his "unsparingly critical observations". Mr B was a sarcastic schoolmaster, I think. One of the few things I've learned in life is that there's nothing as freezing as sarcasm. It shrivels people up, which is what its designed to do. Its invariably a bad thing to deploy, always reflecting badly on the person who uses it. I'd definitely rather be forgotten than be remembered for my unsparingly critical observations.