Scrapbook of a Wasted Life

By Mike Knowles

Look, if Spike Milligan’s agent can publish his unfinished work after he’s dead then I can publish mine whilst I’m still alive! Brilliant, eh? And I had to do all myself because no agent in their right mind will take me on. Of course, there could be some out there who are NOT in their right minds...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Knowles
• Release date: Jan 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466178977

Book preview

Introduction

I got the idea for this book from Box 18: The Unpublished Spike Milligan. Edited by his agent, Norma Farnes, the book contains Spike’s ideas, part written sketches and doodles. Although not as famous or talented as Spike, I’ve also collected a number of projects I never got around to completing. Mainly because I was far too busy scriptwriting for comics and chasing trolls on the internet. In my heyday I must have been churning out more than a dozen scripts a week. No wonder I look old and haggard.

The Legh Road Bloods!

This photo above was taken back in the late ‘50’s after we’d formed ourselves into a notorious gang. It was supposed to be modelled on the American ones we’d heard about. However, considering the vast differences between New York and a small provincial town in Cheshire, this proved to be harder than we at first thought. But we were young and we were optimistic.

Our notoriety, however, proved to an entirely imaginary one. Even the cannon we constructed out of an old pipe, a banger and a marble was a one-off. (We pretended we were testing a new weapon). Although it blew a hole in an old rug hanging over a washing line, we decided it was too fiddly and dangerous for actual combat. We doubted if our opponents would wait long enough for us to load the thing. Not that we had any opponents. The fact that there were only three of us was also something of a handicap. Worse still, we were reluctant to get into any real trouble. A major problem for anyone setting out to be a juvenile delinquent. So we compromised by pretending to go on the rampage. There was a home for delinquent girls about a mile away and our favourite fantasy involved storming the place in the dead of night and setting them free. Luckily it never happened because they’d probably have eaten us alive! Still, it provided us with material for a bit of private masturbation. Real gang members would probably have wanked in public. And sprayed any passing females with globules of sticky semen shouting, Take that, Bitch! But we weren’t quite ready for that.

The photo is also interesting in that it recalls a bygone sartorial age. You’ll have noticed that the tall streak of piss in the middle is wearing his school uniform. In fact, he probably went to bed in it. (Although, I hasten to add, I never tested that theory). Whereas Tubby and I couldn’t wait to get out of ours. Needless to say, the uniform clashed with our gang culture. How the hell can you raise havoc in a school uniform?

ME: Okay, creep. You’re on our turf and we’re gonna carve our names on your backside with our flick knives!

MAN: Is that before or after you’ve done your homework?

See what I mean? I’m on the right wearing the nearest thing I could get to Marlon Brando’s leather jacket in The Wild Ones. I even tried to get my mother to dye it black. And, when she refused, I was momentarily tempted to use shoe polish on it. Now that would have been a bit of juvenile delinquency! I could just imagine the headline in the local paper: GANG LEADER GOES BERSERK WITH A TIN OF CHERRY BLOSSOM! Things were definitely looking black for the Legh Road Bloods when... And why the hell did I fasten it up, thus taking on the appearance of a bag of shit tied in the middle with string? The kid on the left was another disappointment. I definitely recall telling him that we were supposed to be a bunch of teenage thugs. And look at him. Okay, give him his due he’s part of the way there. The Humphrey Bogart raincoat suggests Casablanca and the violin case is straight out of the Valentine Day Massacre! The problem is his little chubby face. He looks about as threatening as a garden gnome. But we tried to be hard. And I’ve just remembered what that little boy was doing there. Our violinist was no Menuhin and, when he got into his stride, it sounded like the wailing of a 100 tom cats being castrated without the benefit of an anaesthetic by an inebriated vet using a rusty tin opener. So we were about to torture the kid into handing over his pocket money!

A Dysfunctional Family

When my mother died I discovered a large number of photographs I’d never seen before. I was born in Berlin and my mother came over to England after the war. She’d always tried to pick the winning side, but she’d seriously misjudged Hitler and the Third Reich. All those promises he made. The promise of lebensraum, or living space, particularly annoyed her. Initially Hitler had given her all of Europe to roam around in. This was gradually reduced to a few square miles in the capital city. A city where some very angry Russians seemed intent on shooting everyone. Living room became dying room. So it was either the English or the Americans, (Stalin was too like the late Hitler). To my utter dismay she picked the English because I would have loved to become a cowboy.

In this wedding photo my mother is the bridesmaid on the far right. God only knows who those other people were, but it looks like Hitler was one of the guests! I just hope he didn’t bore them with one of his interminable speeches. Not only could that guy talk the back legs off the proverbial donkey, he could amputate the front ones as well!

The photo above always reminds me of the opening scene in Carol Reed’s classic movie, The Third Man. The one where Holly Martin attends the funeral of an old friend. The film where Orson Wells plays a black marketer bent on making everyone in Austria as fat as he was. Again, I have no idea who those people were or whose funeral they were attending. The only clue is the large cogwheel in the foreground. This indicates that the deceased may have either been a watchmaker or an engineer.

I love this one because it has all the hallmarks of one of those Who Farted? photos. And the culprit is clearly arrowed. That expression of mock innocence is a dead giveaway.

The photograph above shows the old German custom of feeding wedding guests with jellies. Let’s just hope they like the flavours. Actually, the plates were empty giving the photo an air of austerity. So I used Photoshop to put some food on their table. Did they thank me? Did they hell!

I can only imagine these people own a racehorse and are toasting a