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Out for a drink with my oldest friend (the one I have been friends with for the longest) Phil Fry (not the one from Futurama - I have not gone mental). You may recognise his name from various childhood stories, notably in this year’s show, the Dave Manager routine (he also makes an appearance in the Red Rogers story). I have known him since 1976 when we were in the same class at Fairland’s Middle School, meaning we are rapidly approaching the 40th anniversary of our friendship. Which makes me feel a little bit sick, but only because that doesn’t seem possible. We’re sliding towards our fifties and the only way to stop them happening would be to kill ourselves, which would be something of a Phyrric victory.
He had brought along various artefacts from our past, including photos of that holiday in Weymouth in 1983 (and a couple of photos I hadn’t seen of me looking rather handsome in about 1991, larking around in a pub with a couple of young women who I have no memory of and who you can be quite sure I completely struck out with in spite of my devastating good looks - that I was unaware of at the time), the school magazine we worked on together and most remarkably a batch of letters that I had written to him between 1987 when I was touring Europe and doing Camp America, through University and even a couple from the early days in London in the 1990s. Some of this stuff feels so very recent that I sometimes wonder if my 20s and 30s were hit by a brush fire and my brain goes straight from 1987 to 2007 with no real memory of anything that happened in between.
I’ve had a brief look at the letters and they’re filled with the kind of soul searching and emotional openness that you can only be so free with as a teenager, plus a bizarre mixture of Puritanism and sexual frustration (well maybe not so bizarre). I was a sweet and sensitive complete little pillock, terrified of and obsessed with sex, trying to be funny nearly all the time, but when I wasn’t being funny offering heartfelt if a little pompous advice about life and finding one’s spiritual side. It’s good to have these letters back though, as they fill in a few of the gaps in the record destroyed by the devastating fire in my life. At one of our early student gigs, apparently, I got a broom thrown at my head by some sporty boys who I managed to get to leave by getting the rest of the audience to tell them to “fuck off”. Which more or less worked. And I wasn’t too bothered as I made £12.50 from the gig.
As with most of my stuff from these early days I reused old flyers and scraps of paper to write letters and comedy, so often what’s on the back of the letter is more interesting than what’s on the front.
One has a photocopy of a letter that I sent to Golden Wonder in 1989 under the pseudonym of Harold Puckser (another name that will mean something to you if you’ve seen “Lord of the Dance Settee”), though it’s really in the persona of one of my first characters Cecil Massey, an 80 something, confused and racist old Somerset man (who appears briefly in the Pie Pie sketch in Fist of Fun).
I sent a few spoof letters to companies in order to see what would happen and in the hope of getting sent some vouchers. In the letter to Phil I reveal that Golden Wonder sent me a £1 token in return. “Easy money, huh?” I write, “So it’s seven packs of crisps and two Pot Noodles for Richy!” A pound would buy you a lot more in those days clearly. Surely not that much though.
Here’s the letter to give you a taste of the comedic stylings of the 22 year old me, who died in that fire in my life.
“Dear Mr Wonder” (what a shame I wasn’t yet at the stage of calling him Ian}
“I am disgusted and appalled by you. You must be some kind of Son of Satan as far as I’m concerned, destroying the Christian fabric of this society with your lies, damned lies. Oh, don’t come the ignorant with me, you know what I’m talking about. You claim Golden Wonder crisps are, and I quote, “Britain’s noisiest crisp.” Tell me, on what evidence do you base this claim. I would be very interested to hear. I didn’t fight in the Second World War, admittedly. I had a bad back and so couldn’t go. But many of my friends died to stop your company being called “Goldenich Achtung Wunderlich” or something similar. It is an insult to their name that you practice such lies in your advertising. I bought 3 packs of crisps- one KP, one Walkers and one so-called “Golden Wonder” and tested them all. None of the crisps made a noise on their own, so I assume you mean your crisps are noisy when you eat them. So on doing so what did I hear? A loud explosion on tasting your product perhaps? Glass shattering all around me maybe? Or maybe my ear drums simply burst? No, none of these. What I heard was a “crunch” and a pretty pathetic one at that, equalled if not excelled by the noise of your two competitors. So tell me, how did you arrive at the conclusion that when it came to decibels your product was tops?
Furthermore, what has noise got to do with anything. Surely taste is a more important factor. Perhaps if your scientists spent more time improving the flavour and less on trying to create an atomic explosion on my tongue, I might have enjoyed you pack most.
Hold it, I feel a poem coming on-
You tell us Golden Wonder are “Britain’s noisiest crisps”, sir
Well I’ve heard noisier whispers
I bought some Golden Wonder for to have in my lunch
But all the noise I heard was a crunch
Now believe me when I say that not all your Food’ll
Annoy me like this. I mean I love the Pot Noodle
So it makes me quite mad, when you make such a blunder
As to speculate (for that’s all it is) that there’s no louder crisp than Golden Wonder.
Yes, I have had much experience as a writer + believe it or not I made that up as I went along. Now, that’s the kind of thing that Esther Rantzen loves and if you do not come up with a good explanation Mr Wonder, you can be sure I’ll send the same complaint to them. I’m 83 you know and not ashamed to admit it. I enclose the offending pack and expect a pretty good excuse - and none of this they were probably accidentally stale non-sense - and my 15 pence back, which is incidentally too much to pay for something like this. That’s 3 shillings I hope you realise. I expect a prompt reply
Yours
Harold Puckser."
They did reply though I don’t have it to hand, but recall them blathering about “noisiest” equally freshest and crispest or something similar. But as Harold/Cecil would have said, “Well you should have fucking said that shouldn’t you?”
Amazingly this scandal did not bring Golden Wonder down.
I should waste more of my time and the time of decent hard working people by doing more of this stuff.
I've wasted my life.
And then forgotten it all anyway.
Lovely to see Phil again. A man with many stories too amazing and personal to tell here. But that I will steal from him and turn into sitcoms at some point. And he will never know. He has no clue that I nicked the story about him falling into a cryogenic freezer and going 1000 years into the future already. Idiot.
RHLSTP with the fab (though very rude about my mum) Richard Osman now up on
vimeo youtube It will be on iTunes and audio formats soon.
