Life's Lottery (79 page)

The second
Doctor Who
(1966–69).

The third
Doctor Who
(1970–74).

The fourth
Doctor Who
(1974–81).

Dr Who’s time machine; supposedly able to impersonate anything, its ‘chameleon circuit’ is broken so it always looks like a blue police telephone box. Even in 1963, these phone boxes were disappearing from the landscape as radio-communication between beat officers and patrol cars became more common (another seminal ’60s TV show,
Z Cars
, was even about this new form of policing). Eventually, the BBC bought up copyright on the police box design.

The two main political parties in Great Britain. The Labour Party grows out of the Trades Union movement and supposedly represents the interests of working people, while the Conservative (or Tory) Party supposedly represents the interests of the middle and upper classes. The Labour Party eclipsed the Liberal Party in the de facto two-party system of the UK; the Liberal Party, evolved from the nineteenth-century Whigs, were marginalised in the 1960s but joined with elements estranged from Labour in the 1980s to form what is now the Liberal Democrat Party (Lib-Dems), a major force in local government if still perennially in third-place in general elections.

Comedian, humorous writer and media personality (1937–55). In the UK, best-remembered for innovative stage and television work in partnership with Dudley Moore. Like Moore, he shouldn’t be judged on the low quality of the Hollywood films he made (cf:
Supergirl
).

Labour Prime Minister; defeated Winston Churchill in the first post-war election and established what became known as the welfare state before the phrase had any negative connotations. Attlee’s legacy includes the National Health service.

Harold Wilson. Labour Prime Minister in the 1960s, famous for wearing raincoats and smoking a pipe. His speech about ‘the white heat of technology’ was one of the touchstones for the ’60s image of a progressive, exciting Britain as represented by Concorde and cross-channel hovercraft. He resisted pressure from America and refused to commit British troops to Vietnam; no prizes for guessing what Tony Blair would have done under the same circumstances.

Tory Prime Minister from 1979 and throughout the 1980s – therefore a major figure in this book. See notes on the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike, the Big Bang, Black Monday, etc. Succeeded messily in 1990 by John Major.

Harold Wilson’s successor as Labour Prime Minister after Wilson’s resignation in 1976. Defeated by Thatcher in 1979, beginning nearly two decades of Tory rule.

Leader of the Liberal Party in 1979; later leader of the Liberal Democrats.

Pop star David Sutch, who cut macabre rockin’ numbers in the 1960s (‘Jack the Ripper’, ‘She’s Fallen in Love With the Monsterman’) along the lines of his obvious idol Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and later performers like the Cramps. He was for many years a surreal fixture of general elections, standing for the Monster Raving Loony Party (later the
Official
Monster Raving Loony Party). He committed suicide in 1999.

Other works set in or near this town include the flashback sections of my novel
The Quorum
and the ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’ cycle of stories. It’s roughly analagous to the real town of Bridgwater.
www.bridgwater.net/
and
www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~smedlo/Bridgwater/Bridgwater.htm

A county in the West of England, known for King Alfred’s defence against the invading Danes, Glastonbury (famous for the Tor, a ruined Abbey, the pop festival and John Cowper Powys’s novel
A Glastonbury Romance
), a very strong cider, still-surviving novelty band the Wurzels and the birthplace of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Hero of Michael Bond’s
A Bear Called Paddington
(1958) and sequels.

Gerry Anderson-produced puppet TV series (1964–65), a half-hour colour show made between Anderson’s
Fireball XL5
and
Thunderbirds.
Set in the future, it follows the adventures of Troy Tempest and his sidekick Phones who crewed the wonderfully-designed super-submarine
Stingray.

See also:
The Quorum.

A children’s game, a variant on ‘tag’ in which you couldn’t be made ‘it’ if neither of your feet were on the ground.

A historical character, better known for his walk-on in
Treasure Island.

US television series, 1964–68; first seen on UK TV June 24, 1965 – which doesn’t quite square with the dates here. Then again, Stephen King blithely lies about the US transmission of
The Prisoner
in
Hearts in Atlantis
and apologises in the end-note and nobody writes him whiny letters about it. If anything, the show was
more
popular in the UK than America, perhaps because one of the leads (David McCallum) was British. The BBC screened two seasons of
Man
and one of
The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.
inside a year and a half.

My friend David Cross told me that gangs really did ask this question on his school playground and beat up kids who gave the wrong answer (which, for the record, was Napoleon Solo). A more common fight-starter was ‘who do you support?’, meaning which football team – and not following football was no excuse. The reason I fudge the dates is that David is a year or two older than Keith Marion.

The recurring villains on
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
, a bad guy organisation whose name might have been an acronym for Technological Hierarchy for the Repression of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity. Or it could have been a Cold War way of saying ‘Th’Russians’.

Shorts = short trousers, not underpants. Cardy = a cardigan, the woolly garment named after the Crimean War general.

The UK equivalents of Dick and Jane in reading primers.

See also: the
Where the Bodies Are Buried
collection, which gives more background on his mundane villainy and monstrous reputation.

Physical Education = Gym Class.

Created by Captain W.E. Johns, James Bigglesworth – Biggles – first appeared in
The Camels Are Coming
(1932), in which he is a fighter pilot in the First World War. Johns wrote nearly a hundred books in which Biggles and his pals flew into dangers in subsequent conflicts and as peacetime adventurers in the ‘air police’. Biggles also appeared in a brief 1960 TV series and a weak 1986 film, but may now be best-remembered for a Monty Python sketch lampooning the jargon-filled ‘banter’ of Johns’s dialogue. The first science fiction novel I remember reading was
Biggles and the Blue Flame.

DC Comics character, created by artist Joe Kubert and writer Robert Kanigher in 1959. I’ve always wondered if Kanigher and Kubert were thinking of the same-named character played by Gene Evans in Samuel Fuller’s 1951 film
Fixed Bayonets.

This was the theme to a children’s TV series popular with girls in 1968. It was a girl-and-her-horse show. The hit theme song, sung by Jackie Lee under the name ‘Jacky’, is breathily evocative.

British comic strip space hero, created by Frank Hampson, featured in the
Eagle
from 1950 to 1957. A square-jawed, crisp-uniformed ‘pilot of the future’, he is sort of a sexless Battle of Britain version of Flash Gordon; his arch-enemy is a Venusian tyrant called the Mekon.

A British weekly comic; unlike American monthly comic books, British comics were until recently newspaper format, unstapled (a nightmare for collectors), mostly in black and white (with a colour cover feature and maybe centre-page spread) and ran multiple ongoing series or serials. The
Hornet
was a rather staid effort concentrating heavily on sports heroes, war stories and imperial adventures.

One of several British black and white weeklies (Power Comics) that reprinted Marvel material, with individual issues parcelled out in five-page sections.
Fantastic
ran X-Men, the Hulk, the Avengers and Thor.

See also:
The Quorum.

See also: ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’.

See:
Jago.
The character is named after the friend of mine who told me the childhood anecdote that inspired the ‘Napoleon or Ilya’ choice.

See:
Jago.

A Jaguar. With three syllables.

This London listings/alternative magazine also appears in
Bad Dreams
and
The Quorum.
It’s roughly analagous to the real-life 1980s publication
City Limits
, which I worked for.

The heroine of
Bad Dreams
; also appears in
The Quorum.
Those books reveal a lot more about the ‘complicated pain’ in her background.

Appears briefly in
Bad Dreams.

Early 1970s boy band. Remembered for tartan trousers and unfeasable mullets, they mostly covered standards like ‘Be My Baby’. Recruited to fit a pre-decided sound (few of the band performed on their first single), they were a forerunner to today’s entirely manufactured pop groups. One member of a later incarnation became the British porn star/director Ben Dover.

In 1984–85, this was a major battle between the Trades Union movement and Margaret Thatcher. The strikers were defeated, after much acrimony, and the government set about dismantling the British mining industry. It forms the backdrop to the successful British movie
Billy Elliot.

An anti-nuclear weapons protest around an American air base in Britain. It ran from 1981 to 2000.

Argentine warship, controversially sunk by the Royal Navy during the Falklands conflict, prompting the famously tasteless
Sun
newspaper headline ‘Gotcha!’

Foreign secretary at the time of the invasion of the Falklands. Admitting that he had misjudged the situation leading up to the conflict, he resigned.

Child star of the early 1970s who had a UK hit with ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’. There wasn’t a lad in Britain who wouldn’t happily have punched him in the face, but our sisters were big fans.

Until the early 1970s, the British state education system depended on the Eleven Plus exam, which children took in their last year at primary school (ages 6–11). Those who passed went on to grammar schools and those who failed to secondary modern schools; in theory, the former were more academically-inclined and encouraged pupils to go on to further education while the latter were to prepare children – who would probably leave education at sixteen – for life in the workplace. The Eleven Plus was essentially an IQ test, designed to measure aptitude not knowledge – but, of course, the fact that kids sat mock exams in preparation for the Eleven Plus meant that the format could be learned and mastered. Wealthier parents could (and still can) opt out entirely by sending their children to fee-paying schools. The Eleven Plus was theoretically discontinued in the mid-1970s (it still persists in many parts of the country) and grammar and secondary modern schools were amalgamated into comprehensive schools (roughly the equivalent of American high schools), which practice ‘streaming’ of pupils with different aptitudes under the same roof, without the stigma of labelling two-thirds of them failures at eleven. It could be argued that I am stretching a point in giving Keith the choice of passing or failing, and that the reader should sit an actual exam to decide the rest of the course of his life, but the unacknowledged fact was that most children could be
taught
to pass the Eleven Plus (and weren’t). The issues raised here were debated among kids, many of whom (rightly, to my mind) thought grammar school sounded a lot worse than it needed to be. If you want to play fair, you can download the modern Eleven Plus equivalent from
www.elevenplus.com/
and see how you do – though this isn’t quite what we had to sit in 1970.

Rugby is a contact sport resembling American football, only British boys don’t feel the need to wear all that sissy protective gear when playing it.

Football in Britain = soccer or association football.

At grammar schools, certain boys or girls in the upper sixth form (the equivalent of seniors in America) were invested with powers as prefects – rather like trusties in prisons or kapos in concentration camps. In the 1970s, outside the private school system, prefects couldn’t inflict corporal punishment, though they were entrusted with the power of dishing out other punishments to younger kids.

Reporter hero of a series of comic-strip albums by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé.