Life's Lottery (83 page)

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

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

Female pop group.

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

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’.

The telecast prize draw.

Presenters of the
Lottery
draw on television.

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

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

Youngest of the UK’s daily broadsheet papers.

Perry White’s catchphrase on the 1990s show
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

A 1972 Hammer horror film. It features a living, bleeding severed hand and plenty of torn-out throats. Before you do the research, I think I mention it for its associations, not because it actually was on television that evening.

You
know
he thinks the band sound better with Phil Collins.

National Health Service.

Celebrity-focused magazine, obsessed with anodyne gossip. Mild-mannered equivalent of a US supermarket tabloid.

Superheroine staple of the ZC Comics universe. Mickey Yeo kills her in
The Quorum.

BBC1 Saturday evening show in the 1990s, hosted by Noel Edmonds, who played purportedly humorous practical jokes on minor celebs and members of the public who then had to pretend to be amused. Spun off the unaccountably-popular pretend children’s TV character Mr Blobby. Its popularity was almost certainly a sign of the apocalypse.

The UK version of
American Gladiators.

The BBC’s long-running TV soap.

Sit-com about a curmudgeonly old git.

The ITV surreal thriller series, not the Marvel Comic.

A feature of the initial television ads for the Lottery.

See
Guys and Dolls
.

Private, fee-paying.

See ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’.

UK chain of hamburger restaurants, named after the character in the
Popeye
cartoons. Superceded by the arrival of American-style fast food chains in the 1980s. But they’re still hanging in there, even if my local Wimpy closed down and was replaced significantly by a Starbuck’s.

The town where Liberty Valance was shot.

Gas tank.

Wrote the gay pride anthem ‘Glad to Be Gay’ in 1977. He briefly went through the absurd indignity of being harried by the tabloid press for having a long-term relationship with the woman he later married and had children with. In case the reference here, filtered through an embittered and cynical character, is ambiguous, it should be noted that Robinson strikes me as a genuinely decent, even heroic, public figure.

In the UK, the BBC-TV series
Dixon of Dock Green
(1955–76) manages to be the equivalent of both
Dragnet
and
The Andy Griffith Show
at once a reassuring police procedural about how crime is swiftly beaten and a family fantasy about the caring, fatherly copper. George Dixon (Jack Warner), who was shot dead in the feature film (
The Blue Lamp
) from which the show spun off but resurrected for a long run, epitomises the image of the bobby on the beat.

The second most famous Nazi anthem ever written by Jews (after ‘Springtime for Hitler’), this John Kander and Fred Ebb number from
Cabaret
was most remembered at the time this scene takes place for a performance on the satirical puppet show
Spitting Image
in which a newly-reelected Thatcher government sang it to an effect more chilling than comic.

Those who refused to pay the community charge/Poll Tax as a protest.

Radio and TV children’s quiz show.

Catch-phrase of Hughie Green, host of the long-running ITV ‘talent’ show
Opportunity Knocks.

Site of battle during the retaking of the Falklands in 1982.

19 October 1987.

Lottery presenter. Long-time UK-TV (and film and radio) personality, recently a surprise cult figure as the voice of Mr Hell on
Aaaagh! It’s the Mr Hell Show
.

UK release title of the 1972 caper movie
The Hot Rock.

Charlady, domestic servant.

Certificate of Secondary Education.

Pompous, inept bank manager/home guard officer played by Arthur Lowe in the sit-com
Dad’s Army.

UK equivalent of Girl Scouts.

Criminal Investigation Division; the rough equivalent of a Major Crimes Unit.

The process whereby a politician holding public office is replaced by his or her party as a candidate at the next election; it’s a particularly humiliating way of lame-ducking someone who refuses to resign gracefully.

Derek Leech’s Sunday tabloid.

Welfare.

See: ‘The Germans Won’ in my collection
Unforgivable Stories.

‘Mirror, Mirror’.

Captain Pike in ‘The Cage’ aka ‘The Menagerie’.

Sausages or sausage-meat cooked in Yorkshire pudding, also known as toad-in-the-hole. No amphibians are actually involved.

Gravel-voiced cockney character actor, most often seen as comic criminal dimwits (
Two-Way Stretch
,
The Wrong Arm of the Law
,
Vault of Horror
).

The hulking thug in Raymond Chandler’s
Farewell, My Lovely
– played by Ward Bond, Mike Mazurki and Jack O’Hallorann in various films.

Randomising machines used by the National Lottery, which was then operated by a company called Camelot.

A long-time BBC-TV Saturday evening fixture, this show selects several of the many football matches played on Saturday afternoon and screens them with the duller stretches edited out. Struggling these days thanks to live, unedited football matches on many cable sports channels.

Masturbate.

Jigsaw-like arrangement of irregular slates or tiles, used for patios or garden paths.

Boots favoured by fashionable hardnuts.

Toilets.

You know the drill: one-potato, two-potato, three-potato, four…

Coconut-filled chocolate.

Candy.

In the 1980s, the Thatcher government allowed tenants of council-owned houses to buy the properties; one effect of this was a drastic reduction in the availability of affordable public housing.

In
The Quorum
, Candy is told as a teenager at a séance that she will work for the gas company.

Glossy music monthly.

Star bowler of the Somerset county cricket side in the late 1970s.

Batman’s gadget-filled apparel; sometimes, it seemed as if he was likely to keep an autogiro in there.

UK equivalent of state’s evidence.

Six blokes interlocked and holding each other’s buttocks struggling to control an ovoid ball with their feet.

You head-butt Sean.

Testicles.

Jail.

A Derek Leech Company.

Fingerprints.

ITV’s listings magazine, far more tabloidy than the BBC’s
Radio Times.

Putty-like adhesive material used in place of thumbtacks.

Women’s prison.

Daily national newspaper, printed on distinctive pink paper, with an especial bias towards business and money matters.

Site of the marvellous opening chapter of
Treasure Island.

German character actor, typecast as Nazis. He was in
The Colditz Story
and
Where Eagles Dare.

Dick Dastardly’s sidekick in the TV cartoon show
Wacky Races
; his distinctive grumbling sounds like ‘rassin frassin grassin Dick Dastardly!’

Biscuit-chocolate-and-toffee bars, sold in packs of two.