DO YOU ever find yourself listening to a radio programme like Desert Island Discs and wondering which eight records you would choose if you were famous enough to be on the show? I do, but maybe I’ve just got major ego problems.
“Well, Sue, I’d have to pick School’s Out by Alice Cooper. It was the first pop record I really liked. Cruelly released just before the English summer holidays, and hence at the end of the Scottish ones, it played me into my first year at Lanark Grammar School.”
I do the same with Room 101, the television show that has somewhat misappropriated Orwell’s concept of a chamber where one is psychologically broken by one’s worst horror. Room 101, BBC-style, is the destination for celebs’ pet hates, provided they can argue their case.
“My first, choice, Paul, is my voice - as was when I started teaching.”
“Your voice?”
“Yes, you see it wasn’t really used to being raised and sometimes, when I tried to shout at a kid, it went squeaky.”
“Give us an example.”
“I’d try to yell, ‘Don’t talk to me like that!’ and it’d come out as ‘Don’t talk to me like theek!’”
“Do that last bit again.”
“Theek!” (Laughter).
I was at it again during Quote
. . . Unquote, which I find a rather tepid sustitute for Just a Minute or I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Panellists were asked for a motto by which they might live their lives. I’m sure their replies were suitably witty in a “We all live near the M25” sort of way but I didn’t notice. I was too busy thinking up my own answer.
My late granny, in her last years, often feared that she had been conned by bogus door-to-door collectors. “Aye well, the sin’s no’ mine,” she would say, meaning that there was no fault in naively thinking the best in people.
I have had her words come back to me when filling in a positive guidance referral for a child who has shown a consistent improvement. If I hesitate because I fear that I will look foolish should the wean have a relapse, I recall that the sin will not have been mine.
Less idealistic, but easier to live with if you can bring yourself to, is the maxim of the newspaper columnist husband of one of my mother’s friends. When you’ve slogged it out with a class, given your all and then some, only to be rewarded by a lack of success or enthusiasm, try to remember this: “If at first you don’t succeed, sit on your erse and never heed.”
Gregor Steele expects to be on TV as soon as the Bald Reliant Driver channel begins broadcasting.
