Care For A Dickie Biscuit?

No Life On Mars lat night! No Life On Mars! Instead the Beeb slung on some boring football match! How dare they!

I have never liked football. I find the whole ethos of the game overblown, pompous and ineffably down-at-heel (ho ho). But I guess it gives those poor kids at school who are only good at woodwork and smoking behind the bike sheds some sort of career opportunity when they leave. God I’m such a snob.

My distaste actually has its source in a childhood where Saturdays were forever locked into a good morning / bad afternoon dichotomy. Basically Saturday mornings were a joyous occasion for me and my sisters: Tiswas and Swap Shop kept us happily occupied for hours and took us right up to lunchtime. And then at 12.30 the televisual circus closed up its big top and was replaced with the dreaded World Of Sport.

Oh how I hated Dickie Davies and his weird badger striped quiff. And I can remember Dickie before his hair even developed that white streak. Ah the horror of advancing old age!

Anyway, my dad would just lock the TV solidly onto World Of Sport for the entire afternoon. Football, rugby, swimming, golf, more football, boxing, wrestling, more football, tobogganing, skiing, motor cross and even more football. And then we’d have to suffer that interminable half hour of the football results being read out at the very end by a bloke who sounded like he had a red hot poker shoved up his backside.

"Wimbledon nil. Queens Park Rangers one. Plymouth Argyll 3. Accrington Stanley 2. West Bromwich Albion and Tottenham Hotspur late result."

On and on forever. And even after World Of Sport had finished there was worse to come. The Grumbleweeds. Russ Abbot’s Madhouse. And then the spawn of Beelzebub: 3-2-1 with Ted bleedin’ Rogers. Aaaargh! God TV was crap in the late seventies and early eighties.

Anyway the whole point of this blog is to ask the salient question: what the hell happened to Dickie Davies? It’s a question that’s been preying on my mind for oooh at least 2 minutes.

The last Dickie Davies media reference that I can recall was by Half Man Half Biscuit in the mid eighties with their glorious musical paean to the sporting maestro - Dickie Davies Eyes (she’s got).

Is he dead? Is he chained up in a madhouse somewhere (with or without Russ Abbot)? Or is he lurking in the wings waiting for the first opportunity to eff up all my Saturday afternoons once more?

TISWAS

I met up with my good mate, Tris, last night for a gentlemanly catch-up of personal news and life happenings over a couple of bottles of red wine in Leamington’s coolest uptown joint, Wilde’s wine bar. And as we sat handsomely in the darkest corner we could find we discussed all the important world issues that have currently been keeping us awake at night and preoccupying our waking minds…

…like the undoubted superiority of TISWAS over Swap Shop.

It’s an unarguable fact that TISWAS was leagues ahead. There was and still is utterly no contest.

I mean just compare the two shows yourself:

Swap Shop had Noel Edmonds, Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin – three presenters who in themselves were enough to give any TV studio sick building syndrome and cause kids to vomit up a week’s supply of penny chews on the spot – but dress them in awful chunky knit pullovers and novelty 80’s jumpers and suddenly you have a recipe for turning kids into dysfunctional psychotic misfits who develop a pathological counter-fashion need to wear lycra and purple shell suits. Take a look out your window right now for evidence that this country has been completely destroyed by the Swap Shop generation…

TISWAS however had Sally James whose major contribution, as Tris rightly pointed out, was a pair of amazing tits struggling to burst out of a tiny waistcoat. For a teenage boy that ticks every boob-shaped box in the book. Anything else is a bonus.

Much as Maggie Philbin was an intrinsically likeable person there was nevertheless something ineffably asexual about her. She was like a school lab technician. Kind of there but invisible. Or should that be visible but not exactly there? It’s very common to develop a crush on a teacher at school but unheard of for anyone to fancy a lab technician. It’s just not possible. It’s like they’re not real people. They’re clones. Or synthetic people. As well fancy a Barbie doll (albeit a very speccy mousy one with sensible shoes and a clipboard).

Sally James, however, oozed earthy, filthy, rock-chick sex appeal from every pore and hair flick. And she got splattered with custard pies and various cream toppings every week.

I leave it up to you to draw your own analogy…