7256/19776
I was up for the earliest breakfast available (fellow dinners including Jess Phillips and Ian Rankin) so I could get home to tag team my wife (not like that) so I could look after the kids whilst she headed off to a gig in Leeds. I listened to an old Desert Island Discs on the drive. It was one of the ones that were lost but discovered recently in an attic somewhere and featured Bing Crosby, who is a pretty high profile guest to have mislaid. The shows seemed to be only 30 minutes in those days which means it’s mainly music, which seems a slight waste, though it is of course interesting to know what someone like him would think was good music. It turns out that it was mainly a load of quite old stuff that sounds weird now, though he did choose Clair de Lune and so made me think of my grandma. Who probably liked Bing Crosby.
There wasn’t much conversation or revelation, though I did like how seriously Bing took the idea of being on the island (I wondered if any guest of DOD has ended up subsequently being stranded on a desert island and chuckled at the irony, but probably not). I am not saying it was a light inquisition but the only question Roy Plomley had about the Road to Movies (maybe the most significant part of Crosby’s acting career) was how many of them there were. Seven apparently. I mean, there was no Google then but surely he could have found that out elsewhere. Don’t waste Crosby’s time by asking him to count his films. Ask him about Bob Hope.
Then I listened to a bit of a Max Bygraves show from the early 60s and just thought about how pretty much everyone on there recording was dead. It gave the knockabout fun an edge that I enjoyed, but it was an unpretentious show about having fun and I respected that. Max would have been 100 today, if like everyone else on the recording as well as Bing and Roy he hadn’t gone and died.
My son was at a birthday party in the afternoon so I got some rare daddy/daughter time. It’s odd, but not totall surprising that it’s nearly always the four of us together and if not then three of us. It’s been five years since Phoebe and I shared significant time together alone. We went and played video games at Hollywood Bowl. As Ernie wasn’t there I got to take the other seat in the visual reality game they’d played last time and I think we’d put it on a different setting somehow, but it was absolutely terrifying. We were basically on a rollercoaster with lava and rocks and weapons coming at us. No wonder it cost £6. It was amazing. I had to keep taking my headset off because I was too scared. Phoebe didn’t. Let’s not say that I am a wuss, let’s just say that she is super brave. It was utterly thrilling though. We spent about £20 trying to win tickets from the machine and won three small chew bars and a tiny pot of slime. Phoebe was happy. So was I though. It was cracking to do something that was just the two of us.
