The opening titles of this got me all misty-eyed and wistful and I wasn’t even that big a watcher of the show at the time. This might sound silly but it’s the coats they’re wearing, especially the green Parka with a fur-trimmed hood that Sam has on. Seeing that just whisks me back to the school playground with a veritable Proustian rush. If he had a black Adidas sports bag too I’d be a blubbering wreck. Never had a paper round myself though.

Terrific theme song by Renaissance who had a hit in 1978 with this lovely tune.

I don’t wish to offend any Welsh people and I’m sure that there have been several famous battles fought in Wales (mostly against the English I bet) but I must admit that when I saw this book my first thought was of the old playground jokes about the shortest books in the world — like Italian War Heroes, The Biafran Book of Cookery, The Irish Book of Knowledge, and The German Joke Book.

There was also English Fine Cuisine so we were pretty much equal-opportunity offenders back then.

Here’s someone from the book Famous Welsh Singers which isn’t very long either but is full of quality.

Download: Chills And Fever – Tom Jones (mp3)

One year some naughty boy played this over our school tannoy system on the last day of term, and it still reminds me of the pure joy of running out of the school playground on that day to the freedom of the summer holidays. The girls up on stage look like they’re having the time of their lives too, just watching them gives me a big smile.

We all know the Lord of The Flies cliche about boys being little more than savages beneath a thin veneer of civilization, and anyone who has gone to an all-boys school knows that this is pretty much true. My comprehensive was no different, a pressure-cooker of raging hormones and cruel adolescent power games where the strong mercilessly preyed on the weak, the bookish, the different, the short-sighted.

Not surprisingly our tastes in reading material leaned toward the violent and nasty, and if it had a sprinkling of smut in it too so much the better. There was a sort of underground lending library system at school with certain parent- and teacher-unfriendly books being passed from one kid to another, often with the “good” pages marked for easy reference. Popular reads were Richard Allen’s Skinhead books and Jaws by Peter Benchley, but it was The Rats by James Herbert that was the must-read book we all couldn’t wait to get our hands on. I remember that it had such a cult, talked-about status at school (and a controversial reputation elsewhere), that when I finally got a copy passed to me I felt like I was handling radioactive material and immediately hid it in my Adidas bag until I got home.

Published in 1974, The Rats is a gruesome novel about London being terrorized by giant mutant rats with a taste for human flesh, and is full of lurid descriptions of people being attacked and killed in very, very nasty ways:

But as he stood, one of the larger rats leapt at his groin, pulling away his genitals with one mighty twist of his body. The tramp screamed and fell to his knees, thrusting his hands between his legs as if to stop the flow of blood, but he was immediately engulfed and toppled over by a wave of black, bristling bodies.

As you can imagine we — pardon the expression — ate this up with glee. A tramp had his knob bitten off by a rat! That bloke had his eyes chewed out! They ate a baby! I read it again recently (well, skimmed would be more accurate) and while I wouldn’t exactly call Herbert a good writer he’s an effective and efficient one; the story motors along from one horrific scene to another with no distracting subplots, and the only chapter that doesn’t have any bloody carnage in it has a sex scene instead — x-rated, vividly-described sex of course (chapter eight if you’re interested) — so the book managed to get our adolescent blood pumping into more than one organ. No wonder it we loved it so much, it was if it had been written by a committee set up to produce a book just to satisfy our particular bloody and lusty imaginations.

It’s been claimed that, under the schlocky horror, The Rats is actually a damning portrait of the run-down, dysfunctional state of London — and England — in the 1970s, and reading it again with grown-up eyes I did think that if you took away the killer rats you’d have a social-realist polemic. There are lots of angry references to slum neighbourhoods in the East End, dirty canals, neglected bomb-site wastelands, people living in poorly-built “concrete towers” with stinking rubbish chutes, and at one point the dustmen go on strike forcing the Army to be called in to clear rubbish from the streets which actually happened during the Winter of Discontent in 1979. The rats may have been mutant freaks but the novel makes it clear that they bred and thrived in a city one character curses as “Dirty bloody London!”

So if a teacher had caught me with it and asked me why I was reading such junk, I could have replied “Actually sir, it’s a devastating critique of the social, political, and environmental conditions in London today” — and he probably would have given me a clip ’round the ear and confiscated the book.

Download: Down In The Sewer – The Stranglers (mp3)
Buy: Rattus Norvegicus (album)
Buy: The Rats (book)

I wasn’t much of a joiner when I was a kid (I’m still not), I was briefly in the Chess Club at school but only long enough to learn how to play the game, not long enough to get any good at it (still not either). Apart from that the only other organization I ever joined in my youth was the Boy Scouts and I didn’t stay long there either.

I started going to the 20th Fulham Boy Scout Troop (The Mohicans!) because two of my cousins went and they told me it was a good place to hang out in the evenings and there was a billiard table in the back room of the church hall which you could play on when Scouts were over. I was certainly more interested in that than I was in the whole camping and tying knots, Dyb Dyb Dyb, Bob-a-Job, helping-old-ladies-cross-the-street stuff, and during my time there I think I became a better billiard player than Scout.

I can’t remember how long I actually went but I never got to become a full-fledged, proper Boy Scout and wear the uniform (with the all-important Woggle) because shortly before I was due to go through the ceremony of swearing the Scout Promise (I think you had to do it on the Union Jack) and reciting the Scout Law my career there came to an end, and not because I was rubbish at Granny Knots.

There was a kid from my school in our Troop named Stephen Burgess who everyone called Stephen Birdshit (us crazy kids) and one night during some making-a-fire-with-two-sticks class or something I called him that quite loudly which caused the Troop Leader to take me aside and very sternly tell me to “go home and come back when you’ve learned to speak properly” — those exact words. So I left and still remember walking home in a huff thinking it was all a bit stupid and pathetic — I’d only said shit, I knew far worse words than that! — and there and then decided that Scouts wasn’t for me and I wasn’t going back. I was already a bit dubious about the whole promising to do my duty to God and the Queen bit anyway.

So I was basically kicked out of the Scouts for swearing, it might be the most punk rock thing I’ve ever done.

Download: The Boy Wonders – Aztec Camera (mp3)

I’m very sad to hear about the death of the great illustrator Ronald Searle. His black humour and scratchy, inky drawings pretty much defined English cartooning when I was growing up and, though he produced a lot of other work through his very long and brilliant career, he’ll be best remembered (much to his chagrin) for creating the girls of St. Trinian’s and illustrating the Molesworth books.

The great thing about the worlds of St. Trinian’s and Molesworth — and why we kids loved them — was they showed life in an English school as an only slightly more darkly exaggerated version of the reality as we knew it, a Darwinian jungle with useless teachers trying to keep a lid on total anarchy. I was a bully-hating daydreamer like Nigel Molesworth (though with better spelling I hope) and we all joked and sang songs about setting the school on fire the way the St. Trinian’s girls did.

Searle was a legend to me, one of the greatest illustrators — hell, artists even – that England has ever produced. As any fule kno.

Download: Three Cheers For Our Side – Orange Juice (mp3)

This picture from the kid’s TV quiz show Top of The Form is like a snapshot of English society and the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s. On the top row are pupils from an Aberdeen grammar school with their smart blazers and ties and neat, shiny hair (probably with shiny shoes too) who look like they’ll grow up to be Tory cabinet ministers. On the bottom are long-haired kids from the (in)famous Holland Park Comprehensive which at the time symbolized modern liberal ideas in education about doing away with the stuffy old grammar schools and replacing them with a supposedly more egalitarian system — and obviously a more relaxed attitude toward uniforms and hair. You can almost feel the class tension between the two rows of kids, though in this case it’s the smartly turned-out grammar schoolers who were more likely to be working class than their counterparts from that particular comprehensive.

Located in a very swanky part of west London, Holland Park Comp was the sort of place that sent Daily Mail readers into a rage about trendy lefties. While the student body included plenty of kids from the poorer parts of nearby Notting Hill (it had some back then), its location near the centres of London bohemia and progressive politics meant it also had more than it’s fair share of the offspring of the arts, media, and political elite. Famous parents with kids there included John Mortimer, Ken Russell, Lady Antonia Fraser and, um, Bob Monkhouse (maybe not quite so “elite”). Tony Benn sent all his kids there (son Hilary is second from left above) as did several other prominent left-wingers which led to the school being called “the socialist Eton.” Anjelica Huston was a pupil as was Ari Up whose band The Slits played their first ever gig there on her last day at school in 1977. The teaching staff was no less celeb-studded, at one point two blokes by the names of Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay taught there (pottery and music respectively).

The school had such a reputation for being liberated and groovy that the joke at my rather more grubby comprehensive in west London was that the kids there were all doing drugs and having sex with each other. One year a kid transferred to our school from Holland Park and, even though he looked very normal, was immediately given the nickname “Junkie” which stuck to him for the rest of his school years.

I went to a summer school there one year to take some extra English classes and the teacher, predictably, had shoulder-length hair and all the Holland Park kids called him by his first name. One day he asked a girl to read a poem out and she did it so clearly and confidently it was like listening to professional actress (she might have been the daughter of one for all I knew), nothing like the embarrassed mumblings a teacher at my school got when they asked a kid to read something out loud, and I remember feeling more than a little inadequate and intimidated by the casual confidence of the moneyed class.

Not being an expert in education policy I have no idea if comprehensives were better than grammar schools or not, but I would think the son of a cabinet minister going to the same school as the son of a cab driver was a good thing. Though I sometimes wonder why it was that even though the pupils at my own school included plenty of kids who lived in equally-swanky and rich Chelsea they were all from the council estates with not a single son of a movie director or rock star among them. Guess we weren’t trendy enough.

Download: Show Biz Kids – Steely Dan (mp3)

Though she was cute in a Tennant’s-Lager-can sort of way, I don’t think Carol Hawkins was in the same, er, class as Raquel Welch. The Jayne Mansfield of Comprehensive Education, maybe?

Download: Mary of The 4th Form – The Boomtown Rats (mp3)