Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  I was also in awe of my cousin Leslie Anne, who had played in the garden with me during a Santa Barbara visit when I must have been about three and she was eleven, leaving me with an impression of a glamorous tower of legs, long brown hair and a big American smile. I’ve made it sound as though she was just a big pair of very hairy legs with a mouth, but actually she was a fairly standard beautiful cousin.

  By 1982, however, things were different. Leslie Anne had just started college and this time when she came over she seemed irritable, rolling her eyes when her mother spoke and barely saying a word to her dad. ‘How could she not get on with Uncle David and Aunty Leslie?’ I thought. They’re both so nice and they have such cool jobs. And look at that pool!

  One afternoon Aunty Leslie came back from work at her real-estate firm with a briefcase that she set on the glass table in the living room. ‘This isn’t mine,’ she said to me and my sister. ‘It belongs to a client who’s buying a house. Take a look inside.’ We opened the briefcase and found it filled with wads of cash, like something from a TV cop show. Leslie let us take out the wads and throw them in the air as we cried, ‘We’re rich! We’re rich!’ Mum laughed. Dad smiled weakly. Leslie Anne passed the room and shook her head. Then we spent a while picking up the bank notes from the fluffy white rug and putting them back in the briefcase.

  Uncle David was a sterner presence than Aunty Leslie, but he got more fun in the evenings when the adults started drinking. During the Second World War he’d been in the RAF, but now he worked at Vandenberg Air Force Base, testing some new rockets called M-X missiles. He knew people at NASA and brought me back a giant poster showing a detailed cross-section of the Space Shuttle that the previous summer we had watched making its first flight on TV. Uncle David could only have been cooler in my eyes if he’d turned out to be partly bionic.

  The Summer of Spielberg

  Before returning to the UK’s entertainment Middle Ages, I tried to convince Mum to take us to the cinema as many times as possible. One of our first outings that summer in America was to see Tron, a film whose premise – bloke gets sucked into a video game – was so precisely what I wanted to see, it was hard to admit to myself that despite a few amazing moments, I had enjoyed my bag of candy corn more than the actual movie (though I was still delighted when Mum bought me the poster).

  ‘You kids have to see E.T.,’ said Aunty Leslie. ‘It’s about a little boy who finds an adorable alien in a shed and they go on bike rides. It’s a really neat movie, you’re going to love it.’ My aunt’s description did not supercharge me with eagerness to see E. T., but my sister was keen so I tagged along, hoping for some more candy corn. American schools had just gone back so when we saw the film one afternoon half the audience was made up of elderly couples, and when the lights came up at the end, most of them were still seated, consoling one another as if at a funeral. ‘Come on, let’s go!’ I said to Mum, but she too was still sitting and staring ahead, weeping quietly. Though I’d loved the film, seeing all the adults cry unsettled me. In those days you only really saw adults crying if something very bad was happening. Post E.T. it was a blub-o-rama.

  The night before we had to fly home, cousin Leslie Anne took me and my sister for one last trip to the movies. The 1979 James Bond film Moonraker was playing in a double bill with a new movie that Leslie Anne said was ‘kinda like E.T. but not so lame’.

  Though Moonraker is not generally considered one of the great Bond films, that night in Santa Barbara I thought it was thrilling, scary and hilarious – I mean, come on! It’s got punch-ups on top of swinging cable cars, a guy called Jaws who has metal teeth, rocket packs, space laser fights AND a pigeon double-taking at a hovercraft gondola driving through St Mark’s Square in Venice! What more do you want?

  However, I was confused by the bit at the end of Moonraker when the video screens at mission control suddenly flash up an image of Bond and Dr Goodhead (‘A woman?’) floating nude around a space capsule covered by a sheet. ‘My God, what’s Bond doing?’ says an embarrassed official.

  Without looking at the screen, Q replies, ‘I think he’s attempting re-entry.’ The line got a big laugh from the Santa Barbara audience and I knew it must have something to do with sex but couldn’t get my head round the specifics, especially as I’d misheard the line as ‘I think he’s attempting rear entry’. But that didn’t make sense, surely? ‘Ohmigod!’ groaned Leslie Anne. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that whole movie.’

  My sister, who was just 12 at the time, was flagging after Moonraker and there was some debate about whether or not to stick around for the second film, but after a toilet break we rallied and headed back in … for Poltergeist. Leslie Anne shifted uncomfortably and looked over at us from time to time as it became apparent that Poltergeist was basically a full-on horror film with evil spirits that steal a little girl then terrorise her family with self-stacking chairs, violent trees, melting faces, a portal to hell and a clown toy that was disturbing even before it got possessed and started to strangle the little boy with the big teeth.

  What prevented me from finding Poltergeist genuinely scary was the same tone of pleasant middle-class American suburbia that had pervaded E.T. Everything from the family dynamic at the centre of the film to the way it was lit and shot was so similar to E.T. that I assumed Poltergeist had also been made by the same guy.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  In fact, as I found out years later, Spielberg was going to direct Poltergeist while he was still working on E.T. but couldn’t for contractual reasons, at which point he brought in Tobe Hooper. Hooper had been responsible for a film that Tom had told me about at school, a film that, even more than Alien, sounded likely to leave me permanently traumatised but in a less enjoyable way: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. With Spielberg producing and Hooper directing (though to this day there is disagreement about exactly who did what), Poltergeist was initially given an R (or 18) certificate until Spielberg successfully argued it down to a PG. While it may not have deserved an R (a rating that probably would have sunk Poltergeist at the box office), it certainly didn’t deserve a PG. Steven Spielberg cares more about money than traumatising children, that’s the point I’m trying to make here, and no, I wouldn’t be saying that if he’d got me involved in Tintin as well as Joe and Edgar Wright. I was born to play Captain Haddock.

  * * *

  By the time Poltergeist was finished my sister was in tears and Leslie Anne was terrified that my dad would freak out when we got back, but as far as I was concerned I’d just had one of the all-time great nights out.

  On the flight home we experienced unusually heavy turbulence as we flew through a valley of storm cloud and my mother, an ex-BOAC flight attendant, wept in fear. Or maybe she and Dad had argued again. Either way, Dad didn’t seem too sympathetic and I took my cue from him, thinking Mum was overreacting. I was yet to develop a fear of flying at that point, and listening to my Madness tape amid the violent lurching and the flashes of lightning was like being on a ride at Disneyland.

  Westminster

  Back in rainy England, Dad had managed to secure me a place at Westminster, a prestigious and expensive public school in central London, although, as he had got a last-minute cheap deal, unusual terms and conditions applied, one of which was that I couldn’t start until January the following year.

  So I spent the autumn term at Westminster Under School, no longer boarding and in uniform again for the first time since Cub Scouts. I was also joining a group of 13-year-old boys who had known each other for years, many of whom looked and sounded like Jacob Rees-Mogg. In fact, one of them was Jacob Rees-Mogg. Though far from being underprivileged myself, I was different enough for some of the more Lord Snooty-ish boys in my class to treat me like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman when she visits the posh Rodeo Drive boutique to buy some non-sex-worker clothes.

  At home I had my own room for the first time and decorated it with pictures of David Bowie, the Tron poster I’d brought back from California and arty
full-page cigarette advertisements from Sunday magazines (then considered the acme of the ad man’s craft). I sat at my desk listening to Radio 1 on the Sanyo radio cassette recorder I’d finally wangled for my thirteenth birthday (the lo-fi charms of my crystal set having faded by then) and wrote letters to my friends from boarding school, now scattered across the country at other private institutions.

  Bad news came one day from Alison who told me she wouldn’t be able to see me over the Christmas holidays because her family was moving abroad. It crossed my mind that she was making this up because she had a new boyfriend, but if that was the case it was a fiction she maintained for the next two and a half years, during which time we stayed in semi-regular contact without ever actually seeing each other.

  When I wasn’t writing letters, I was drawing pictures of robots, spaceships, imaginary album covers and film posters.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  I hadn’t seen Blade Runner when I drew a poster for it that autumn, so my design was characteristically literal: a hand running a big machete blade through the words ‘BLADE RUNNER’. Though I was intrigued by the title, the official posters I’d seen in America during the summer made me think it looked like one of those dreary private-detective films with grumpy men in overcoats drinking whisky, chewing matchsticks and being disagreeable with unhappy women. In a way I was right, but I hadn’t factored in the flying cars, gymnastic robot people and thrilling music. I went to see Blade Runner on my own towards the end of 1982 at the Fulham ABC and I emerged afterwards dazed and besotted, though more preoccupied than was necessary by Deckard’s impossible precious photo-enhancing machine, which could look round the corners of a room inside a two-dimensional photograph. OK, it’s science fiction, but there’s no need to take the piss.

  * * *

  That autumn I spent many evenings at my desk with a blank tape loaded into the Sanyo, poised to hit record and play if a good song came on, whereupon I’d listen to it repeatedly, straining to make out the lyrics. Then, as if to satisfy some archival instinct, I’d write them down on sheets of Dad’s Sunday Telegraph letterheaded paper. I was careful to keep the reams of scrawled transcriptions hidden away for fear that Pa would come across them. It wasn’t that I imagined he would have beaten me with his belt while derisively reading out my misheard lyrics to ‘The Message’, ‘Pass the Dutchie’ and ‘John Wayne Is Big Leggy’, but I knew he would have been sad that instead of at least trying to write nineteenth-century naval adventure stories I was copying down the mouthings of creeps. And I didn’t want Dad to be sad.

  The problem was that, like most parents who love their children, Dad was unable to be consistent with the application of his values. When he was home he tried to steer us away from the most crass and deadening aspects of modern culture and technology, but when he was abroad all bets were off, as Mum lacked the time or the inclination to enforce his campaign of disapproval – a fact that probably drove him nuts and was no doubt the source of some of their rows.

  But Mum couldn’t be held solely responsible for allowing my pop-culture addiction to flourish. Now and then, perhaps feeling guilty for being away so much and keen just to see us all happy, Dad would capitulate big style.

  The Best Day of My Life

  Tom had an Atari 2600 games console and I thought he was the luckiest person I knew. If I wanted to play Space Invaders, and I wanted to all the time, I had to wait until we were on holiday somewhere with an arcade nearby, then plead with Mum and Dad to give me a few 10p pieces and let me loose for half an hour.

  Essentially, Tom had a whole arcade in his front room. We had Pong. Don’t get me wrong, Pong was great and I’ll never forget the quasi-supernatural wonder of being able to control what was happening on our TV for the first time, even though it was just moving a white line up and down the side of the screen to the sound of ‘bip’ and ‘boop’, but the Atari was an entirely different species of amazing.

  For a start it was called ‘ATARI’, a word that looked cool, sounded cool and was always accompanied by a logo that resembled three jet-plane vapour trails converging en route to space, which I think we can all agree is cool (when it popped up as a neon sign in Blade Runner I let out a little hoot of nerdy joy). Then there was the console, with its sports-car and bachelor-pad design aesthetic of futuristic black plastic ridges and fake wood veneer. The Atari console was also heavy and, unlike our Binatone Pong machine, it felt serious and powerful. All of this meant full arousal before even plugging in a game cartridge, an act that in itself made one feel like an employee on a starship (though admittedly, quite a low-level employee on quite a stupid and pointless starship).

  Ever since playing Space Invaders on Tom’s Atari the previous year, I seldom missed an opportunity to suggest to my parents that we should get one, too, though I knew it was one of the longest of long shots. Dad already thought we spent too much time in front of the TV, so why would he invest in a device that would keep us away from books and nature even longer?

  One evening, when he was in a good mood, I told him that video games improved hand–eye coordination and were an important part of helping young people adjust to a machine-based future. He chuckled and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Well, I dare say you might be right, old boy.’ ‘Oh shit,’ I thought, ‘I think the motherfucker might be cracking.’ (NOTE: That’s a modern translation of my 13-year-old thoughts.)

  Sure enough, that December Dad returned from another trip to America carrying a mysterious package, and on Christmas Day I found myself tearing away a corner of wrapping paper to reveal the Atari logo on the box of the 2600 with not only the Combat game cartridge included, but also my beloved Space Invaders. ‘But it’s not just for you, Adam. You make sure Clare and David get to play it, too,’ commanded Dad.

  ‘Of course, sure, whatever! Thanks, Dad! Thanks, Mum! This is the Best Day of My Life!’

  Any anxieties Dad might have had about turning his children into dead-eyed video-game junkies were offset by the satisfaction he felt at having bought the console in the US, where it was about half the price it was in the UK. But the Best Day of My Life took a knock when I tried to plug it in.

  In the days before travelling with a wide selection of electrical devices became commonplace, Dad had forgotten about the voltage difference between the US and the UK. The disappointment I felt was an entirely new kind of disappointment: a deep existential melancholy with some hopelessness mixed in. Dad got angry; partly with me for not dealing with the situation more stoically, but mainly with himself for going against his instincts and revealing himself as a voltage moron.

  Much as he probably would have liked to have thrown the American Atari in a skip and have my memory wiped, Dad knew this was a genie that couldn’t be squeezed back in the bottle. When the shops opened again on Boxing Day he went out first thing in the morning and spent all the money he’d saved with his transatlantic bargain on a power transformer the size of a shoebox, which would enable us to switch on the console. That’s when we discovered that the American Atari wouldn’t work on a British TV set. So much for the special relationship.

  When I put in the Space Invaders cartridge and turned on the machine I could hear the sounds of the game, but the picture was just a scrolling Venetian blind of oranges and blacks. I sat there for hours vainly twiddling the TV’s tuning knob, praying to God that the mess of lines would suddenly resolve into a coherent picture so I could start shooting down invaders, but apparently God did not consider this request a high priority.

  Knowing that I would probably become a danger to myself and others if the situation was left unresolved, Dad eventually buried the pain of all the money he’d wasted and went down to WH Smith’s at the end of the road where he bought a British Atari 2600 and the Best Day of My Life began again.

  If anything the painful struggles I had bravely endured up to that point – the heartbreak of first the voltage problem, then the NTSC/PAL débâcle – just intensified the joy when our TV screen was finally fil
led with blocky yellow crab-like invaders and the harsh 8-bit sound of their inexorable marching reverberated around the room.

  I suppose one obvious punchline to this particular story of parental love conflicted by technology would be for me to tell you that I got bored of the Atari after just a couple of weeks, but I didn’t. Our relationship was deep, loving and lasted many, many months.

  One of Dad’s concerns was that video games would destroy our imaginations, but looking back, it’s clear the opposite was true. Without a reasonably serviceable imagination, you wouldn’t get more than a few minutes of gameplay out of the Atari before being driven mad by how basic the technology was.

  The artwork on the Atari game packages resembled posters for blockbuster movies with lushly realistic paintings of men in action-packed situations (and the occasional woman running away from something), but the gulf between the artwork and the actual gameplay was comically vast. On the package for a game called Outlaw, for example, a couple of bearded cowboy desperados fired six-shooters in a rocky canyon at sundown as a covered wagon pulled by a team of stallions hurtled by. What you actually saw when you played the game, however, was a rectangle with some blocky shapes within it to represent two cowboys and a cactus. If your blocky bullet hit a blocky cowboy in the blocks, he would sit down suddenly with a disheartened electronic fart. It was basic but fun, and on a couple of memorably joyful occasions even Dad sat down to play a few games, claiming that it appealed to his love of all things Wild West.