Life's Lottery (82 page)

Among the changes to the laws governing the stock market in the UK, the ‘Big Bang’ included an end to the system of fixed commission for traders, the opening up of stock exchange investments to non-members and the abolition of the Independent Certification System. The changes were a reaction to the increasing globalisation of the money market and the upshot was an influx of new investors, more cutthroat competition and a more extreme boom-and-bust economy.

At once a physical area, the City of London, and a term for London considered as a money and securities market.

The rough UK equivalent of American housing projects.

See: ‘The Original Dr Shade’, ‘SQPR’, ‘Organ Donors’,
The Quorum, Seven Stars
, ‘Going to Series’, ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’.

A warren-like area of Brighton; in 1977, full of gift shops and antiques places.

The Brighton local paper.

The Somerset Levels, mostly moorland reclaimed from marshland by drainage schemes.

A tower atop an artifical hillock; a notable feature of the county.

Cf: James Stewart in
The Philadelphia Story.

‘Flaming Torture’ is Episode Six of
Flash Gordon
(1936).

From the Gerry Anderson TV series
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.
Spectrum, the colour-themed good-guy organisation, had SPVs stashed in hiding all over the world and Captain Scarlet could make use of them if necessary.

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Ecstasy.

Woman Police Constable.

A form of tribute/protection money paid by Saxons to mediaeval Danes in return for not being invaded, raped and pillaged.

See
The Quorum
, ‘Going to Series’.

Has a tiny appearance in
Time and Relative.
Not to be confused with the character played by porn star Selen in Asia Argento’s autobiographical film
Scarlet Diva
, though I assume we both took the name from French filmmaker Quelou Parente (
Marquis de Slime
).

A peculiarly 1990s bit of newspeak renamed the unemployed ‘job-seekers’.

When the worth of your house plunges but you’re still having to pay off the inflated price you paid for it.

A scheme whereby students spend time in an office or place of employment, not actually having a job but doing menial chores in the hope that the habit of work will rub off on them.

A piece of scrip convertible into cash at a post office; now obsolete. Billy Bunter was always borrowing money and promising to pay it back when his postal order arrived – but it never did.

UK equivalent of Scotch tape.

In the ITV game show
Take Your Pick
(1955–68), contestants eventually had to choose between taking the money they had already won and taking a mystery prize in a box which could be valuable or worthless. The studio audience would compete to shout advice, ‘take the money’ or ‘open the box’. Hosted first by Michael Miles, this was the first UK gameshow to give away cash prizes. You can see why the reference fits into this novel.

The distinctive stone harbour; it’s a key location in the film and book of
The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
John Fowles turns up in his own novel towards the end to toss a coin in order to decide which of the endings you read first.

Besides referencing
The Merchant of Venice
, this evokes the Vincent Price film
Theater of Blood
to anyone my age, referring to the death of the character played by Harry Andrews. ‘It must be Lionheart, only he would have the temerity to rewrite Shakespeare.’

A joke from MAD Magazine; Club Whoopee was the name of an early 1980s cabaret band I was in.

Scotland Yard’s collection of gruesome murder weapons and other macabre evidence. See the movie
Horrors of the Black Museum
– the most famous item is the trick binoculars with spikes that plunge into the user’s eyes when the focus is adjusted.

A brand of thick felt-tipped pen.

Special Guest Murderer on
Columbo
as often as Robert Culp. See the episodes: ‘By Dawn’s Early Light’, ‘Identity Crisis’, ‘Agenda for Murder’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

At one point, a redrawing of the county boundaries in the west of England created a new administrative entity called Avon in the north of the ancient county of Somerset around the city of Bristol. This was vaguely rescinded later, but the police force of the area remains the Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

Ball-point pen.

A brand of disposable kitchen towel.

Labour Prime Minister.

Tory politician and schlock novelist; part of his self-generated myth is that he sank enormously into debt and wrote the best-seller
Not a Penny More Not a Penny Less
in order to escape. A few years after this, he went to jail for perjuring himself in order to win a big-money libel suit.

Created by novelist David Nobbs in
The Death of Reginald Perrin
(1975), this character became a national institution after Leonard Rossiter played him in the TV series
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
(1976). Perrin fakes a suicide and starts life over again, rather like Flitcroft in
The Maltese Falcon
. ‘Doing a Reggie’ became police slang for this scam.

A former Labour cabinet minister in the Wilson government, Stonehouse saw a series of businesses collapse in the 1970s and perpetrated several major frauds. In 1974, he left his clothes on a Miami beach to give the impression that he had committed suicide and fled to Australia on a fake passport. He was later arrested, convicted and jailed.

Created by writer John Cunliffe and developed for television by Ivor Wood, Postman Pat is a British children’s character, an idealised version of a Royal Mail delivery person.

UK equivalent of a welfare cheque.

A supermarket chain.

Very popular UK TV kids’ characters, controversial in America because it was assumed the one with a handbag might be gay.

Popular BBC-TV children’s show of the 1960s; it always begun with the announcement ‘It’s Friday… it’s five o’clock… it’s time for
Crackerjack
’. Imagine a more educational
Krusty the Klown.

Gerry Anderson puppet series.

Australian TV series, imported to Britain in the 1960s, well before Australian soaps (
Neighbours
,
Home and Away
) began to fill in odd, popular hours of British air-time.

UK equivalent of silly putty.

Yes, there was a third choice I forgot to mention earlier. Though Mary Ann Mobley was cast in the role in a
Man From U.N.C.L.E.
episode/backdoor pilot, April Dancer was played by Stefanie Powers in a brief run of
The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.

Unsuccessful ITV adventure series (1968–69) about secret agents who gained mild mystic powers in Tibet.

A 1966 Hanna-Barbera cartoon series.

Instant soup product.

The local paper. See ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried 3: Black and White and Red All Over’.

By the Sex Pistols.

A tie-in with the Gerry Anderson TV show
Stingray.

The
New Musical Express
; in the 1970s, much more than a pop music paper.

UK equivalent of laundromat.

Catch-phrase from
Lost in Space.

A type of plastic sleeping bag/cocoon, much in use at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.

Perhaps the single most frightening TV hour of the 1970s, this play by Don Taylor was broadcast in a series called
Dead of Night.
Taylor’s script was briefly a West End theatre production in 1975, and the four-hander has often been done in little theatre ever since.

Terence Conran’s chain of upscale furniture and household goods stores.

The loser’s home video, though many maintain its technical superiority over VHS to this day.

A hit for Abba.

Under Stately Wayne Manor, the HQ of Batman and Robin.

A 1980s scheme whereby patients with mental illness were released from institutions, theoretically to be looked after by relatives or social workers; in effect, a collection of disturbed individuals were thrown onto their own devices.

A headband, like that worn by Sylvester Stallone in the
Rambo
films. The film director Richard Stanley started wearing hats because he deemed the headband fashion no longer acceptable after it had been usurped by Stallone.

‘An everyday story of country folk’; from 1950 onwards, BBC Radio’s longest-running soap opera. The daily instalments are edited together and repeated on a Sunday morning.

Originally
Forces Favourites
, this wartime BBC Radio request music programme continued into the 1970s. It was specifically for the families of those serving overseas in the armed forces.

A seminal 1960s BBC Radio comedy show, hosted by Kenneth Horne. Best-remembered for Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick’s use of gay slang in the ‘Julian and Sandy’ sketches.

A BBC Radio sit-com (1957–72), in which middle-aged but diminutive comedian Jimmy Clitheroe played a naughty schoolboy. In retrospect, vaguely disturbing.

Long-running and excruciating BBC Radio show (first broadcast in 1946) in which a smug presenter visited a region of Britain, interviewed various locals about their work and played a piece of music they selected. Week after week, we hoped some old lady who made corn dollies in Little Whumpington would request ‘Fuck Like a Beast’.

1959–2001. A program of easy listening favourites performed in surreally somnolent style by the Cliff Adams Singers.

Originally entitled
How Does Your Garden Grow?
, this was first broadcast in 1947 and continues to this day. Nobody ever asks the team of experts about growing marijuana.

Early Sunday evening prime-time on BBC1, usually occupied by
Songs of Praise
or the like.

Appears briefly in
Jago.
In the
Where the Bodies Are Buried
stories, she is revealed to be a serial killer.

Composer of long-running musical stage shows; one of those enormously successful people whose output no one will own up to liking.

Brand of tea, long-promoted on television by cheerful chimpanzees.

See also: ‘Organ Donors’.

Leftish-leaning daily paper, aka the
Manchester Guardian.

The
New Statesman.
A weekly political periodical with a left-wing slant.

The process, pioneered by the Thatcher government, of selling off state services and industries into private ownership. Caricatured as ‘selling off the family silver’, this contributed to the bubble economy of the 1980 and, arguably, the lower quality of public services like transport and the utilities.