Read Where Did It All Go Right? Online
Authors: Andrew Collins
Where Did It All Go Right?
contents
Introduction: Ask the Family
: The facts of my life 16
Preface: Down the Welfare
: In search of hardship and trauma
3: Down the Field
What did I actually do with myself as a child? (mainly, ‘go down the field’)
5: Spook and Fancy
Being ‘good at drawing’ and how this ‘talent’ made me different but oddly the same
6: Has It Got an Aspirin in It?
Good health
7: Supermousse
I was what I ate
9: A Sip of Tonic
Being spoiled by Nan Mabel and Pap Reg
10: Big Boys Don’t Cry
The Poseidon Adventure
and other fears
12: Uncle Punk
Punk rock: it arrived too late, but not too late to change my life
13: Ma Favourite Programme
Worldview
14: I’m Not in Love
The unsavoury influence of girls on an otherwise uncomplicated boy’s life
.
15: Alan’s Flat
The gay years: how my Mum learned to start worrying and hate my new friends
16: Wayward Up Lancaster
He’s leaving home, 1984
WHERE DID IT
ALL GO RIGHT?
Andrew Collins
To Mum, Dad, Simon and Melissa.
It’s a family affair.
introduction
Ask the Family
We shipped ’em in all the way from
Northampton – the Collins family!
Noel Edmonds,
Telly Addicts
(1990)
Who went from the Hotel du Lac to the Bangkok Hilton?
Come on, I’ll have to hurry you
My family, the Collins family, appeared as contestants on
Telly Addicts
in 1990. We managed to reach the dizzy heights of the semi-finals and took home a
Telly Addicts
board game and four fleecy-lined
Telly Addicts
sweatshirts. This brush with the limelight may seem like the wrong place to start a book about being
normal
, but as much as anything it’s a sign of the times. It’s more
normal
to have been on a TV quiz show than not. I knew someone when I was working at the
NME
who’d been on
Fifteen to One
(as had his girlfriend), and I later worked under a bloke who’d been on
Blockbusters
. My sister-in-law was close enough to
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
to have recruited me as one of her phone-a-friends (they callously disqualified her for taking more than the allotted time to answer the qualifying phone question about the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, which she gallingly got right). Further, my brother was on
Crimewatch
(as an officer of the law, I might add), my future wife could be seen dancing to Hall & Oates’ ‘Maneater’ on a 1982 edition of
Top of the Pops
, her brother was an extra on
Grange Hill
, and you could see my Uncle Allen’s head in the crowd when
Jeux sans Frontières
came to Northampton. (This
was
after
he’d lost his rag with some noisy Europeans in the row behind and thrown a pair of their dustbin-lid cymbals on to the field of play.)
So – hold the front page – Warhol was right. Tragically, the 15 minutes of fame granted by contestanthood on a TV quiz show quickly fades (even in Northampton where nothing ever happens). But let us not lump
Telly Addicts
in with all the other quiz shows: in those days it was special. It was about families. Most quiz or game shows want you in ones or pairs – or in meritocratic school groups for things like
Beat the Teacher
and
University Challenge
. At that time only
Telly Addicts
and
Family Fortunes
traded in the nuclear unit, and you have to admire their commitment to a dying currency.
Of course there used to be the eugenic
Ask the Family
with Robert Robinson, open exclusively to the families of university lecturers, and only then if they had two sons. It wasn’t until the Eighties, when the American show
Family Feud
was translated back into English, that the proletariat were invited to leave the sofa
en famille
and flaunt
their
knowledge on TV. Knowledge aptly accumulated not from reading books but from watching TV – literally so in the case of
Telly Addicts
, where families were put on a prop sofa and given a prop remote control, to make them feel at home.
Telly Addicts
moved with the times in 1994 and relaxed the rules to allow workmates and friends to join in: tantamount to a requiem for the family unit in this country. Back in 1990 though it was still a place for mums and dads and sons and daughters, and we were right there, on display in the petri dish of early evening BBC1: a happy, normal family of addicts. The point is – and how unlike television as a rule – this was no façade, no lie. Although I’d left home by then and had my own sofa and telly in London, we
were
a happy, normal family.
Mum, Dad, my younger sister Melissa and I really did get on famously, and when I occasioned to visit Northampton at weekends, we really might sit on a sofa together and watch telly. (It would have been a fine thing if the show had accepted five-person teams and our brother Simon could have joined us there in front
of
that studio audience at Pebble Mill, but he was in Germany with the army at the time, and unable to take the day off for such frippery, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the reduced likelihood of the Russians invading.)
I was 25, and wore the same white, oversized, partially laced hip hop trainers on all three editions of
Telly Addicts
, letting the side down below the ankle but otherwise very much a team player. In the first round we beat the Young family from Stevenage by a whisker, 18 points to 16. (‘There’s an atmosphere of relief, mingled with a little surprise,’ said Noel Edmonds at the end of the show.)
In the quarter finals, we were up against the Gawthrops (Nick, Deb, Chris and Russ, all jumpers and cardigans). Another close-run, low-scoring clash, the
Hotel du Lac
was the last of my three individual questions in the Spotlight Round. I’d actually ‘passed’ on the first: Who presents
The Late Late Show
? (the roguish Gay Byrne, as any addict
not
under the studio lights could tell you), but I’d salvaged my reputation by correctly naming Dr Who’s robot dog from a library shot (eas-y!): K-9.
Then …
Who went from the Hotel du Lac to the Bangkok Hilton?
A pretty upmarket question for a light early evening BBC1 quiz show I trust you’ll agree, and I fluffed it. They had to hurry me. ‘Don’t know,’ I said – college boy! – scoring one lousy point out of a possible three, bringing the family’s total for that round up to an anorexic four points.
1
You have to bear in mind that for this decisive round the studio lights are dimmed, a clock ticks in the corner of the screen and there’s no conferring. Suddenly it’s not like sitting at home on the sofa with Mum, Dad and Melissa any more. We were neck and neck before the Spotlight, and now, having gone first, we were on 17. The stoic Gawthrops were on 13. They only needed five points – out of a possible 12! – to win.
As you can imagine, we were willing them from the darkness to blow it. They did. The Collins family from Northampton scraped through to the next round, where we would be defeated by the Allmans. Still, it wasn’t the winning, it was the being on
television
three times. It made Mum, Dad and Melissa locally famous for a while, with people coming up to them in shops and everything.
2
I went back to London, having quietly enjoyed playing a family again. I never wore the sweatshirt, not even in irony. The lining was too hot.
* * *
I don’t hold with the convention of biographies that says you must trace the subject’s ancestry back to at least the Reformation. What use is it – I mean really – to know that Clint Eastwood’s great-great-great-great-grandfather owned a tannery in Long Branch, New Jersey?
3
It’s largely a fact for fact’s sake about someone long dead. Our family goes way back in Northampton – it is our heartland – but I don’t know how far back. One day I will actually use the Internet to trace my family tree and find out if I really am distantly related to Bootsy Collins (let’s hope so), but for now, here’s all you need to know.
The
Telly Addicts
team:
My dad is John William Collins.
4
A voluble, witty, kind-hearted conservative with more than one chin, a fine head of hair for a sixty-year-old and a
c’est-la-vie, que-sera-sera
, could-be-worse-could-be-raining attitude to life, fortified by forty years in insurance, which is to my mind his greatest attribute. If I have anything undiluted of Dad in me it’s this.
My mum is Christine Anne Collins née Ward, a small woman on a permanent voyage of discovery whose lack of academic colours at school never held her back (she is the very essence of
self-taught,
and not a flower whose growth has been inhibited by Dad’s formidable shadow). Blonde, trim and reliably glamorous without ever looking cheap, she is a volcano of impetuous emotion compared to Dad, and there’s your yin and yang. She pronounces broccoli as ‘broccolai’ and cereals as ‘surreals’ and I don’t know why it’s only foodstuffs.
Melissa is now in her very early thirties, and a proud mother of three with husband Graham,
5
but to me she will always be between about five and twelve, pre-boys, pre-vanity. The only sister of two older brothers, she used to annoy us gently as if it were her calling, though we rarely actually got annoyed (it was mostly sticking her head round the door with the cartoon greeting
’Cha!
, when we had mates there).
6
Melissa was cute, supremely aware of her own ability to amuse and she seems to have forgiven Simon and me for telling her there was a Dr Who monster living in her cupboard.
Honorary
Telly Addict
:
Simon was quite simply my best mate until puberty (mine) drove its inevitable wedge between us. We can still turn on the best-mates tap whenever we meet, and have latterly enjoyed a sporadic email correspondence, but his uniformed careers have generally kept us physically distant, especially the army, which stationed him in such godforsaken places as Hanover in Germany and Colchester in Essex.
7
An unbroken succession of hat-wearing jobs – army, prison service, police – have eroded Simon’s hairline, but he always wore it short anyway so it’s not such a tragic loss. From where I’m sitting,
he
seems to be a model father to his two daughters with wife Lesley,
8
and I admire him now as much as I always secretly have done from my unbroken succession of poofy jobs.