TTYF! SICK REVIEW OF THE YEAR / DECADE/ CENTURY/ MILLENNIUM 1999
Written mostly by Kevin Warne (KNW)
with some less funny bits from John Harrington (JH)
1999, what a bargain sounding year as
no end of "not so funny as they think they are"
writers quipped. Such a bargain in fact it only lasted
nine months for most of them as they scribbled their
thoughts in September to catch the deadlines for the
January editions leaving themselves time for the endless
polls and reviews of the decade, century and millennium.
Nice to know, in one poll, the teenagers of this country,
that font of considered wisdom, decided Robbie Williams
was a more influential musician these last thousand years
than every classical composer bar Mozart. It could have
been worse, had the poll been conducted twenty-five years
earlier Beethoven et al would have been eating the dust
of Donny or even Jimmy
Osmond.
It was a year that passed quickly in a
world of ever faster change where the advent of e-mail and the
internet mean I feel very old fashioned and dated waiting
until Samoa has said farewell to the year before writing
about it. A review in the first week of January, what a
slouch.
Politically it was the year the
government of Tony the infallible reached
"mid-term" still riding high aided by the
opposition of William the hopeless. This, despite a
failing health service and transport problems so severe
Two Jags Prescott had to create bus lanes on the
motorways to allow our Tone to avoid them. It was the
year Michael Portillo, the man who provided one of our
favourite images of the twentieth century by getting
ousted at the election (two years ago!), ended his
wilderness walk and, thanks to a considerate Allan
Clarke, started his 2007 general election campaign. Out
of the closet and out of the wilderness at the same
time, a formidable achievement. The party he wants to
lead continued to crumble like the proverbial leper's
handshake, a third world organisation bankrolled from a
third world tax haven.
The country suffered some shocks during
the year; Jill Dando left large numbers distraught at the
thought of suffering Gaby Roslin on New Year's Eve and a
Korean jumbo caused grief in Essex when it crashed on
take off from Stanstead but sadly missed Harlow. The
English cricket team restored some sense of normality by
failing in the World Cup and losing to the Kiwis.
Meanwhile, in football, Manchester United added to the
nation's woe by winning the treble (FA Cup, Premiership
and the European Runners-Up Cup) and England manager
Glenn Hoddle lost the plot by claiming "at this
moment in time I never said them things about those
people". He was talking about the physically
impaired but not the England football team. His demise
let in lucky Kevin Keagan, the man who spent most of the
year on planet Zog, the only place where they still think
England can win a major championship.  The only man who ever
has, Sir Alf Ramsey, died, not a wealthy man, shunned and
appallingly treated by the Football Association who
nevertheless still shamelessly called on his long ago
triumph to suggest England should be seeded in Euro 2000.
Sir Alf: the
most famous Essex boy ever?
Abroad, Clinton escaped impeachment and
maintained a grip on the presidency while another family
dynasty finally lost any pretence of their's when John F
Kennedy Jnr crashed his plane. The usual rock throwing
between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir moved up a
notch as both went nuclear and the Russians continued to
beat up the Chechens. We also had the obligatory Balkan
war to keep the Western defence industry going with the
Chinese being taken out for a change instead of providing
the take away.
The year had more than its fair share
of disasters both natural and man-made, perhaps a sign of
more to come. Planes seem to fall out of the skies more
regularly than normal and a good year on the railways,
safety wise, came to an abrupt end just outside Paddington.
The fact that trains and planes are still several times
safer than travelling by car did not stop the
"something must be done" merchants calling for
millions of pounds to be spent on making these modes of
travel safer whilst the motorist is allowed to carry on
killing people and polluting the environment at an
astonishing rate. (In fact statistics indicate that if
you spend your whole life in a plane you will live for
1,820 years).
 If you think the
Paddington train crash was bad you obviously didn't see
the wedding photos of Posh and Becks or catch the staged
romance between gingers Evans and Haliwell. Which
adaptation will evolve faster in humans: the bigger brain
or the extra two fingers lodged permanently down the
throat?
Being the last year of everything there
was a lot of tidying up. The Germans and Japanese settled
claims for past war crimes with the dwindling band of
surviving victims, except for British POWs because we
need their investment (the Germans and the Japs, not the
POWs who remain a bloody nuisance and a drain on our
resources). Several other former colonial powers made
muted apologies for past excesses but we are still
waiting for Arsenal to apologise for that awful green and
blue away kit of several years ago.
It was a better than average year on
the deceased front. We had some underrated female
entertainers like Dusty
Springfield and Madeline Kahn pass on and a bumper
crop of thespians. Bob Peck stalked his last dinosaur,
Oliver Reed quaffed his last drink, DeForest Kelly (Bones
from Star Trek) announced "I'm dead Jim" and
Derek Nimmo laughed his last drain like laugh. Buster
Merryfield (Only Fools and Horses) went to the great
tower block in the sky and Derrick Guyler, long forgotten
desert rat and janitor from Please Sir!, simply wore out
according to his relatives. George C Scott (Patton),
Victor Mature and Dirk Bogarde added the heavyweight
dimension. Stanley Kubrick died as his last film was
released.
Bones
(well he is now)
"I'm dead,
Jim"
At the lighter end Ernie Wise joined
Eric and Johnny Morris took his animal voices with him
while Rod Hull killed himself helping Emu adjust the
aerial during a Manchester United game. This will
doubtless lead to a pernnial quiz question: "In what
year did Hull go down as a result of Manchester United
losing to Inter Milan." (not to mention the joke:
What does Rod Hull use to do his washing? Ariel, followed
by Bounce). Whilst almost on the subject of sport Payne
Stewart, the golfer, died in a bizarre flying accident
which was harsh justice for the only US Ryder Cup team
member who seemed genuinely mortified by his team’s trampling
on the game’s traditions, and American greats
Wilt "the Stilt" Chamberlain (basketball) and
Walter Payton (American Football) went too. In politics
we wait years for ex-politicians to go and then they
snuff it as soon as we've forgotten they are still
around; Willie Whitelaw, the man who secretly negotiated
with the IRA back in the eighties while Ken Livingstone
was slayed for publicly talking to them moved on. Joshua
Nkomo led the international field by some distance.
As for the future we had much talk of
the internet revolution and the arrival of e-commerce
which offered opportunity for explosive growth in credit
card fraud. The mobile phone proliferated allowing people
to fry their brains into a vegetative state commiserate
with the rubbish they were talking.
Thirty years ago the snake oil salesmen
calling themselves scientist predicted we would be either
living on the moon or down here driving electric cars
powered by free electricity generated by clean safe
nuclear power stations although as I recall they didn't
say much about home computers, mobile phones or the
internet. Now they claim they can see the day of the
cloned humans and genetically modified babies and food.
1999 was the year the world human population passed six
billion.
As the year came to an end I laid awake
one night listening to another of those increasingly
frequent gales and thought of the natural disasters of
the year; earthquakes in Greece, Turkey, Taiwan and
Columbia, floods in Europe and Venezuela, avalanches in
Austria, storms in Pakistan, here and America and drought
across Africa. Maybe, I thought, while this over
confident ape arrogantly suggests it can almost play God
mother nature is flexing her muscles and clearing her
throat ready for the new millennium when she will start
to deal with this plague on her planet.
And so to the awards
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