by Alan Davies
Twenty-five years later I managed to get Thierry Henry to sign my programme at White Hart Lane the day Arsenal won the league title there (for the second time). I told Henry he was ‘a legend’, he said, ‘Thank you’ and I remembered the first rule, get out, he doesn’t want to talk to you, you are thirty-eight, if you were twelve it might be tolerable but thirty-eight? Shut up and walk away. Well, dance away, Arsenal have won the league and everyone’s dancing, except the Spurs stewards, who look livid.
It was around 2004 that I was asked to take part in a Comic Relief charity football match, preparation for which would involve an indoor training session at Highbury, run by Liam Brady. I agreed immediately. Arriving on the day, I was told that Liam, who is in charge of Arsenal’s youth academy, wasn’t going to take a training session and instead wanted us to play an eight-a-side game against Arsenal’s under-fifteens. My heart sank. I was nowhere near up to playing against kids like that when I was fifteen, or ever in fact.
We went on to the indoor Astroturf pitch and, as if by magic, Liam Brady appeared. He was going to take us through a warm-up. He had us run across the pitch six times. I was out in front, running and smiling and getting noticed by Liam. After the sixth crossing we stopped to catch our breath. Immediately Liam said:
‘OK, good, now again, eight times. Let’s go!’
After three I was struggling, by five I was at the back of the pack where I stayed, not smiling. Liam called out: ‘You flattered to deceive earlier, Alan.’ I tried to return his smile but my grimace wouldn’t shift and now of course Liam had noticed me and cut me to the quick.
The game started. Brady himself played at the back. At one point I ran over to close him down when he was in possession. He stopped dead and looked at me. He then lifted his left foot up so it was in mid-air over the ball. I stared at it. It seemed no one else was on the pitch. He began moving his foot from side to side and immediately my head was moving too, as I watched his foot, like a dog following its master as he moves a biscuit around in front of him. I snapped out of it and lunged for the ball. He whipped it away smartly and passed it to one of his trainees. They moved so fast. We were 6–0 down in a matter of minutes and I’d been personally toyed with by Chippy Brady. It was great.
Brady’s finest hour for Arsenal came in the 1979 FA Cup Final against Manchester United at Wembley. A year after the Ipswich disaster the Arsenal team had reportedly pledged amongst themselves to go back to the final and win the cup. I was glued to the television as I had been in ’78 only this time the house was empty. The whole family had decamped to deepest Essex to a family party. How could anyone hold a family party on Cup Final day? No one in our family ever held parties. I was excused from going. I would have been a terrible guest.
I had a scarf on and two rosettes stuck on the telly trolley. Arsenal were in yellow, which some Arsenal fans considered lucky as they’d won the cup in 1971 in yellow. They had also worn yellow against Ipswich so that was a straw clutched.
Supermac couldn’t play and Brian Talbot who Arsenal had bought from Ipswich came in. Graham Rix also started. Pat Jennings was his usual immense presence in goal and Patrice was captain. Most importantly Brady was playing and he was fully operational, only twenty-three but already the Players’ Player of the Year.
Early on Brady dribbled across the pitch, eluding tackles (‘Sweet skills from Brady,’ said John Motson). He fed Stapleton who played in Price and his cross was bashed in by a combination of Talbot and Alan Sunderland. One nil. I jumped around the room. Then Brady ghosted past two defenders to the bye-line and chipped the ball on to the head of Stapleton for 2–0. He’d crossed it with his right foot, he never used his right foot. I could go and try to copy that since I never used my left.
The goal had echoes of two others scored in the cup run. In the fourth round v Notts County my dad came with me to Highbury. We saw Brady beat four players along the bye-line before playing the ball into the net off Talbot’s backside. Then, away to Nottingham Forest, he drifted over a free kick that Stapleton managed to head over Shilton for the winner.
In the second half the game was uneventful but I was only interested in the outcome. I didn’t know the difference between a good game and a poor one. I had no idea of tactics. I just wanted to win. With five minutes left it was still 2–0. Pat Jennings had hardly been busied all game. Then United scored and I became concerned. Immediately they equalized and I collapsed to the floor, tears shooting horizontally out of my face.
‘NOOOO,’ I wailed. ‘No, no, no!’ slapping the carpet, blubbing, managing to find two syllables in ‘N-o…’
The game restarted and it looked like extra time would follow. Brady picked the ball up in midfield, moved past an opponent and forced himself into United’s half. Holding off a second challenge, his socks round his ankles, he drew another defender towards him before passing gently to Rix outside him. The ball, as ever from Brady, rolled perfectly, so Rix didn’t have to break stride. He lifted a cross deep in to the United area and Sunderland slid it in.
‘Yes!’ I screamed. ‘Yes! Yes!’ I was crying again now. ‘YEESSS, YES, YES, HA HA HA Y-E-S.’
I was on my knees, touching the screen. The ref ended the game. Arsenal had won 3–2. I was emotional for ages.
My family returned in the evening. My brother said nothing. My dad and my sister told me they’d had the game on at the party and that they’d been cheering Arsenal, that someone else there wanted United to win and that they’d been supporting my team, which I was pleased to hear. They knew I’d have a meltdown if Arsenal had lost but Brady had pushed the team home and was a hero to a generation of fans. He was the best player in the country and he was ours for ever!
Valerie Harper
There was a feeling amongst my peers that, culturally, American was best. We’d been swamped by their popular entertainment and body-rotting soft drinks. We revered their fast food. When the friend who borrowed my Police album told me the band was English, I expressed surprise. He said, ‘I know, they’re so good you’d think they were American.’ British sitcoms on TV were losing their appeal. They suddenly felt dated, rooted as they often were in a theatrical style of writing and performance. There were exceptions, Yes, Minister in particular, but generally I felt I was growing out of my old favourites. They were being usurped by a batch of original and more contemporary American sitcoms that BBC2 were finding a home for in the early evening. Shows like M·A·S·H, Taxi and Rhoda, with Valerie Harper.
In 1979 Quadrophenia was released and a gang of half a dozen fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys boarded a 20 bus in Loughton to go to the Woodford ABC to see it. A thirteen-year-old tagged along. This was a hugely exciting excursion to see the much-anticipated mods and rockers film. A British film set in the ’60s about kids running riot, about freedom and youth, with great music. We piled off the bus and headed into the foyer trying to look eighteen as it was an X certificate. The tallest boy went in front as we stood behind trying to look like a gang as opposed to a gaggle. ‘Seven for Quadrophenia,’ he said, wearing a serious expression, as we all did. Seriousness denoted maturity, kids smile at strangers, adults don’t. The woman in the kiosk didn’t flinch, didn’t take her hands out of her lap, and looked at him:
‘You’re not old enough.’
‘Yes we are.’
‘How old are you then?’
‘Eighteen.’
She smiled at this.
‘No you’re not.’
‘I am but the rest aren’t.’
‘None of you are.’
He gave up. This was hopeless. If one had got in he could have opened the fire escape for the rest but it wasn’t happening.
‘We’ll go somewhere else then,’ a few of us said, in defiance.
‘Yeah, we’ll go to Gant’s Hill.’
‘OK then,’ she said.
We didn’t go to the Gant’s Hill Odeon (where, oddly, we’d been to see Star Wars the year before on a school trip). It was quite far away and we knew we wouldn
’t get in. I wasn’t held responsible as the youngest; none of us had even tried to get in to an X before. It was an absurd certificate for that film even by old standards. There is a scene where Jimmy (Phil Daniels) has sex with Steph (Leslie Ash) in an alley but you don’t see any flesh below the neck. We all became smitten with Leslie Ash, after we had eventually seen the film the following year; even though her character was cruel and self-centred, she was fit. We didn’t say fit though; I don’t remember what we said. If you liked a girl you fancied her, that was about it.
Finding our own entertainment was not easy. It had to be of no interest to parents. I was well on my way in this regard, struggling as I was to share my dad’s weekend passion for Max Bygraves sing-along albums or Bing sodding Crosby. I was going to have to find my own favourites since my brother had been ignoring me since 1976 and my younger sister was, in my eyes, too young and sisterish. I imagined her as five years old until about 1987, when she turned nineteen.
Previously, family TV shows like The Good Life had been the norm at home. Picture the scene: one television only, no VCR, or hard drive recording, no watching illegal downloads on your phone on the bus. You had to be in at the right time and you had to watch Tom, Barbara, Margot and Jerry with your family. Fortunately, they find it funny too, so you’re all happy for thirty blissful minutes of Penelope Keith. It won’t be until you’re thirteen that the desire to dislike anything they like and to like something they don’t know about, thereby forging an emerging identity and sense of self, will become increasingly overwhelming.
There were comedy shows available that appealed to young adults and as I was on my way to being one of those, I watched them. Shows we did not watch as a family included Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Kenny Everett Video Show.
Kenny Everett’s eccentric nonsense dressing-up show was consistently hilarious, with a cast of characters undreamt of by other comedians. He also featured the Hot Gossip dance troupe, with a nice line in fishnets, buckles and splayed-legged choreography. They made Pan’s People look like Brownies and rapidly accelerated the hormonal development of a generation. They were also intimidating, in an S&M way, which is why Pan’s People are more fondly remembered. Hot Gossip were dirty, frankly, and only the confident could have dealt with them. That the confident included Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who married one of them in Sarah Bright-man, was so shocking as to be mentionable only in a whisper.
Not the Nine O’Clock News was a revelation and became essential viewing for teenagers. Rowan Atkinson was an odd-looking comic wonder. A silly voice, a silly face and a silly walk, the full set, all in one bizarre package. He was hard to watch as he contorted his face into odd and ugly shapes for our amusement but he was unique and very funny.
Meanwhile, the bridge from the old style sitcoms to a more adult take on life was being provided by those American comedy shows. Unfettered as they were by a tradition of seaside postcard innuendo, they depicted adults in adult relationships with adult aspirations and adult disputes.
It would be unfair to suggest that no British sitcoms dealt with characters with a complex and credible emotional life. Carla Lane’s Butterflies with Wendy Craig as Ria fantasizing about an affair, despite a good if unexpressive husband at home, was very popular.
Equally, the American shows were as prone to sanitized home environments and unbelievable characterizations. The Fonz in Happy Days was as daft as they come. How did he become so popular? It was unbelievable that he would snap his fingers and girls would flock around him, or that he was a tough guy who could win fights gymnastically while combing his hair. Why did he practically live in a diner populated by high school kids? He was as plausible as Spiderman. His function was as some kind of neo-cult leader who operated as an idol for young people (both in the show and watching at home) who were more intelligent, kinder and better dressed. It was an odd but warm and funny rose-tinted view of late ’50s, early ’60s Milwaukee. Mr and Mrs Cunningham were über-parents any kid would love to have, it never rained, and there was no burgeoning civil rights movement since there were no black people (other than those boxing on the TV). Perhaps they had their own jazz-diner on the other side of reality.
Happy Days was a kids’ show really. Whereas the Korean War comedy M·A·S·H featured a different side of the ’50s, as well as showing where one or two of those black people had got to.
M·A·S·H was for grown-ups. Surgeons up to their elbows in entrails should have been harrowing viewing but since they were wise-cracking in the tradition of the Marx Brothers while they were working, the same jokes they used to get through a shift served to take the viewers’ minds off the carnage too. The gags came so thick and fast it was possible to watch an operating theatre and laugh. Then every so often they’d take a principled stand and draw out some pathos about humanity, inhumanity, or the finer points of distilling alcohol in a war zone.
Alan Alda was the main man in the fine M·A·S·H ensemble and his fast-joking, barely serious, skirt-chasing medic was right up my dad’s street. He loved Alan Alda so much I thought he wanted to be him. I liked Alda because he was called Alan. (I was named after midget movie heart-throb Alan Ladd. After Mum had died, Dad would always mock Alan Ladd, by shouting: ‘He’s standing on a box!’ whenever he came on the telly. He may have shouted that in the cinema when my mum was alive. Let’s hope so.)
Taxi was on earlier in the evening so my dad missed it since he was on his way home from work. This was another ensemble show with a solid emotional heart and hysterical supporting nutcases, a staple form of American sitcom and rarely bettered than here. Alex and Elaine were the central characters whose divorces, disappointments and despondency would regularly be put aside to help their fellow taxi drivers. The two leads were perfect conduits for an audience who wanted good-looking funny people to watch, provided they were struggling a little. A cast of youthful optimists and wizened no-hopers tried to see the glass half-full while Danny de Vito’s tyrannical dispatcher Louis barked at them from within his cage. When Louis first left the dispatcher’s cage, to physically confront someone, and in doing so revealed himself to be only five feet tall and the cage to be actually raised up, it made for one of the funniest television moments I can ever remember. No one, in England at least, had any idea he was so short. The cage put him up at a regular height and he was so loud and bombastic he seemed, well, not to be little. Backed up by Christopher Lloyd playing a ’60s LSD-casualty and Andy Kaufman’s squeaky Eastern European mechanic, Latka, there was a comic strength in depth that left no line unplundered for laughs and no close-up opportunity passed up by comic players of the highest calibre. Taxi was one of my favourite shows but there was no one in there I wanted actually in my life.
Rhoda was another New York-set sitcom with a good-looking thirty-something whose life had gone wrong and who was now trying to muddle through after a divorce. She was actually married in an early episode but, by the time the show was up and running in the UK and I was hooked, she had an ex-husband and spent much of her time dealing with the problems of her younger sister Brenda, played to droll and helpless perfection by Julie Kavner, known for twenty years or more now as the voice of Marge Simpson.
Valerie Harper played Rhoda and created a character that seemed to offer the potential for perfection as a wife or mother. I would have taken either. Plus she was my favourite. No one at home or at school talked about her, no one else watched the show. Only I liked Rhoda. She was beautiful, funny, kind and unhappy; she needed me. Without a mother it was inevitable that other women would be examined, consciously or otherwise, through the mum-shaped prism I stored in my head. This one was a fit.
Rhoda, be my mum!
Then, with an unseen hormonal shift having momentarily adjusted my view of the world, I’d take another look. Seeing Rhoda with burgeoning adolescence about to break like a perfect storm in my life, meant seeing Rhoda very differently.
Rhoda, be my girlfriend!
This is not Oedipal, it is hormonal. Rhoda wore her bea
uty casually, and her warmth and kindness came through. She was immensely appealing in every way. Just watching her deal with slothful Carlton the doorman over the apartment intercom could have amused me all day.
1980
Harry Redknapp
In 1978 I still couldn’t get into any school sports teams, so Dad told me to tell them that I was young enough to play for the year below. It was clearly very important that I play for the school even though I was not good enough. I told the teacher who ran the first year’s cricket team. He looked baffled. This was clearly unprecedented, possibly in the history of the school. All schools perhaps. He agreed to put me in the team if that’s what I wanted. When I turned up, the other players said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘I’m young enough to play with you.’ They assumed I was lying (why would I do that?), only relenting when they’d checked my date of birth in the school calendar.
The game started. They didn’t let me bowl and I was made to bat at number 11. I scored one run. That was the sum total of my school sporting achievement (other than coming fourth in the 200 metres one year, when the race leaders all stopped because they mistakenly thought they’d crossed the finishing line). I did not receive a, peculiarly uncoveted, ‘colours’ tie.
Lacking the confidence for team sports, I preferred skateboarding but that was only good for the summer when I’d go to the Rom Skatepark in Hornchurch with school friends. I loved the Rom. We also went to Skate City by Tower Bridge and the converted cinema, Mad Dog Bowl, on the Old Kent Road, plus there was another indoor one out in West London I went to by myself, or you could skate on the South Bank. There were some fibreglass ramps in Waltham Abbey I liked but the Rom was the best with a huge area and plenty of different bowls on which to stretch the grip of my red 65 mm Kryptonic wheels.
