TTYF! SICK(ISH) REVIEW OF THE YEAR 1997
Written mostly by Kevin Warne (KNW)
with some less funny bits from John Harrington (JH)
It may have been the
year in which our own tatty little zine Take That
You Fiend! finally failed to negotiate the underpass
but as my co-editor said after several flat years it was
far too good a one to let by without comment.
We used to pretend this
was a sick review and indeed when we started in 1982
people actually complained about the content. This
quickly passed as Ben Elton, Paul Merton, Jeremy Hardy
and all the other "alternative" comedians now
inhabiting prime time panel shows first made their
collective appearance. Our sad little efforts are now
mere token bits of mucus in the handkerchief of life
rather than sick.
1997, it was indeed a
good year dominated by three historic events. Firstly
John Major and the Conservatives got, in the words of my
co-editor, an
industrial strength kicking on May 1st, then we gave Hong Kong
back to those nice cuddly Chinese communists and
finally, after a two hundred year absence in their
country, the French revived the art of making royal
jelly..
Cartoon
from http://www.hrtree.demon.co.uk/diana.jpg
The year started with
the a flurry of new life, Dolly
the sheep was cloned, just in time to find lamb taken off
the menu due to BSE. After Mars in 1996 more life was
found on the moons of Jupiter as NASA continued the solar
system tour desperately trying to justify the budget.
John Major finally
named the date of his own execution as May 1st. A month
earlier would have been a more apt date if he believed
the optimistic claptrap he was peddling to Conservative
foot-soldiers about the Tories chances of being
re-elected. Election night saw the end of the road for
many a political career as the Conservatives got buried
in one of the biggest landslides since Aberfan. Tory MPs
become extinct north and west of the English border and
an endangered species in most urban areas. New Labour,
No Cat as Humphrey got his marching orders.
Many people cited the
moment Portillo lost his seat (I wondered what that smell
was - did you know "to lose your bottle" means
to shit yourself? Cockney rhyming slang: bottle &
glass = arse) as the greatest moment of the year,
possibly of their life. Some of us worry, however, if
Portillo is in the process of undergoing the same
transformation as Gandalf did in Lord of the Rings,
where he comes back from death far more powerful. The
good grace with which he accepted defeat (in contrast to
David "Up your hacienda, Jimmy" Mellor) and his
subsequent reinvention as a recalcitrant wet indicate
that this is a very accomplished politician (read:
two-faced power-mad unscrupulous bastard). We have not
seen the last of him.
In June Britain gave up
its last major colony (not counting Bradford) by handing
back Hong Kong to the Chinese. The sun finally set on
Empire and the royal yacht Britannia.
This started, someone
suggested, a tidying up of the loose ends of history
before the millennium with apologies for past atrocities
like the Irish famine, Japanese treatment of war
prisoners and those dire fashions in the seventies.
Platform shoes made a comeback underneath two of the
shorter Spice
Girls; luckily flares, dodgy shirt collars and wide
lapels didn't follow. Schools banned platform
shoes over a certain height - again
.
The last days of a hot
summer saw a country in shock as Montserrat found out how
tight fisted the new Labour government were going to be
with compensation. Oh, and some minor royal got killed in
a car crash.
Diana showed Grace
wasn't the only Princess this century having difficulty
negotiating corners. I doubt it was quite what she had in
mind when she teased the press several weeks earlier
about a big surprise. Instead of staying at the Ritz she
decided to crash with her boyfriend. Several million
soap-watching women took to the streets and hijacked the
nation's conscience with the kind of outpouring of
national grief we laughed at in North Korea in '96.
As an anti-monarchist
might say, "the death of Princess Di, well it's a
good start". The much fancied double with the Queen
Mother didn't happen. Interestingly the BBC claimed a
total of 31.5 million people watched the funeral on TV,
one of the largest audiences of all time. I say
interestingly because even allowing for another two
million watching live on the streets what were the other
25 million in the country doing that day? (*JH - I was
watching Scooby-Doo on Cartoon Network. I'd have got away
with it too if it hadn't have been for those meddling
kids.)
Princess Di might have
been all over the radio, the dashboard and the steering
wheel one Sunday but she wasn't the only one suffering
from overexposure. The Spice Girls seemed to be
everywhere launching Channel 5, talking to Mandela and
sacking their manager. Posh Spice increased the obscene
repertoire around the football grounds of England by
going out with David Beckham.
The only Spice free
places appeared to be the Nevada desert where Thrust
2 broke the sound barrier and a strange green far
away land where four Teletubbies
live in a nuclear bunker and run around trying not squash
rabbits. They speak silly baby language, how can children
be expected to learn to talk properly complained the
generations brought up on Bill and Ben, the Clangers and
Spotty Dog out of the Woodentops.
And so to those we have
lost in 1997. It has to be said even without the usual
suspects like the Queen Mother and Ronald Reagan obliging
it was a bumper year for noted stiffs.
The film industry lost
two more Hollywood giants in James Stewart and Robert
Mitchum with a noted supporting cast of Burgess Meredith,
Brian Keith, Red Skelton and Ronald Fraser. Jeffrey
Bernard really did get unwell, Sir James Goldsmith
retired from politics and everything else. Princess Di
and Dodi Fayed were quickly followed by Mother Theresa
and cricket lost Denis Compton.
Memories of the
seventies were jogged by this year’s losses. Back
then I watched Dr
Who (Terry Nation and Sidney Newman, who created
the character) and if I couldn't get to channel switches
fast enough before remote control I sometimes caught
sight of Opportunity Knocks (Hughie Green) and Mind
Your Language (Barry Evans). I wondered what some
women saw in a bloated Elvis Presley as they wondered why
he never toured England (Colonel Tom Parker - great
manager but lousy chicken recipe). I winced listening to
country crap whilst Lynyrd Skynyrd carried on the Buddy
Holly/Glenn Miller tradition of snuffing it between gigs
in a light aircraft (John Denver). I watched a lot of
natural history programs (Jacques Cousteau), some
wrestling (Big Daddy) before the football (Billy Bremner)
and tried to avoid the first Mastermind (Magnus
Magnanimousofyou-myson) shows, the jazz ones (Stephane
Grappelli), John’s dire record collection (Ronnie
Lane of Faces/Small Faces and the fantastically named
Randy California of Spirit), other people’s naff
records (Brian Connolly of the Sweet, Harold Melvin,
Billy Mackenzie of the Associates was no longer alive and
kicking at the country club) and naff pulp fiction
(Harold Robbins).
Other notables included
Deng Xiaoping who didn't survive to see Hong Kong
returned and Gianni Versace. Paula Yates not only lost
her father but the father of her child when Michael
Hutchence put in a stonking bid for the I can handle
drugs certificate. Does Jack Straw's son qualify for
the I can handle drugs (and get away with it)
certificate in 1997 when we didn't know who he was or
1998 when it finally came out?
On the sporting scene (writes
John Harrington) for a brief period Labour's election
victory and the consequent change of the mood of the
nation seemed to be having a beneficial effect on our
sporting fortunes. In rugby we stuffed the Springboks, in
cricket we whupped the Aussies in the one day competition
and took a surprise 1-0 lead in the Ashes series, in
football we qualified for the World Cup and came within
the width of a post of being the first team to beat Italy
at their gaff in a world cup qualifier (oh yeah, we won Le
Tournoi, a meaningless tournament that became less
meaningless when we won it), and I'm told by people who
watch tennis that a "Brit" did quite well at
Wimbledon.
I put "Brit"
in quotation marks because Rusedski is not a proper Brit
as he was born in Canada. To be a true Brit you've got to
be born here, unless of course you are Lennox Lewis, in
which case even though you were born here, really you are
Canadian because you subsequently moved there.
Another Canadian with
mixed reviews in Britain was Jacques Villeneuve who,
according to the British press, made hard work of winning
the world Formula One title in the Williams; our Damon,
of course, would have had the title wrapped up by the 9th
race of the season. The British press continued to
perpetuate this fallacy even though Hill, in his
flightless Arrows, was frequently being out driven by his
team-mate, Pedro Diniz, a seventeen year old taxi driver
from Sao Paolo.
The real villains of
the F1 circuit however were, as usual, the Germans. Heinz
Harald Frentzen for taking Damon's Williams drive away
and Schumacher for being just a bit too bloody good and a
bit too bloody German.
In boxing, Iron Mike
Tyson bit off more than he could chew in taking on
Evander Holyfield for the second time and sadly none of
Prince Naseem's opponents realised the way to beat the
jumped up little prick is to attack him with a
flame-thrower at the weigh-in.
Was it the Ryder Cup in
1997 or the year before? Time passes quickly except when
you are watching Leeds United play.
In keeping with the
TTYF! tradition of schadenfreude I was most amused by
Mike Siggins' despair at the BBC who, having ignored
baseball all year long, caught him out on Breakfast TV by
giving the result of the last game of the World (i.e. USA
and a small bit of Canada) Series before he had a chance
to watch it on Channel 5. By all accounts it was a
thriller with the Atlanta Braves beating the Cleveland
Indians. I must admit I watched a bit of it myself but
then I had to find something else to do at four in the
morning once TTYF! folded.
The Tour de France was
won by someone who wasn't Miguel Indurain. Don't ask me
who it was, I'm only the designer of one of the best
cycling games of all time - Reiner Knitzia probably knows
sod-all about modern art.
|
