Chimpanzees in Dungarees: The Collection

By Chris Whitfield

When did you last see a Chimpanzee in Dungarees, laughing at a Sexist, Racist and Homophobic Comedian sat next to a Newly Wed Virgin holding a Baby Called Keith and eating a Meat Paste sandwich while drinking a pint of Mild? And how long is it since you went to a Tupperware Party attended by a member of the Deferential Working Class, a Football Maverick, Bus Conductor and Streetwise Dog? And have you recently seen anyone sporting a Woollen Balaclava and Shellsuit in a Reliant Robin with a Pools Coupon Collector and Spinster wearing an 18 Hour Girdle in the back? What about a Hitchhiker thumbing a lift from a Scary Biker, a Rebel Teacher and an Unrepentant Politician all on their way to enjoy Hogmanay in England? Or a Martian with a Hitler Moustache having a game of Blow Football while eating Pineapple and Cheese on a Stick and listening to an Ugly String Quartet playing England’s World Cup Squad Song? Or how about a Rock Star Planning to Retire, Squatting in a One Screen Cinema, with the Front Door Left Open, watching Desperate Dan in a Bowler Hat teaching the Birds and the Bees to a Cast of Thousands wearing Paper Underwear? Fashions come and go, technology advances, social acceptabilities change and gender roles shift. There are so many reasons why something can be everywhere one day and on the slippery slope to oblivion the next. Chimpanzees in Dungarees - The Collection has two hundred such disappearing things, written with one sole objective...to take the proverbial and have a laugh... or is that two objectives?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Whitfield
• Release date: Jun 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310557958

Chris Whitfield

I am an accountant with a sense of humour, which most people consider a contradiction. I live in the UK on the Wirral with my wife and two bitches. That's a Border Terrier and a Cockapoo, in case you're thinking I'm living the life of an African tribe leader who believes he's a gangsta rapper. I have three grown up children but have never quite managed to grow up myself. At the age of eighteen, I was often mistaken for pop idol, Donny Osmond. Nearly four decades on and ravaged by time, the best I can now do in the look-a-like stakes is Richard Osman from BBC TV's Pointless. Osmond to Osman, how the mighty fall.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Nothing lasts forever. Some things appear to, such as the pantomime staged by your local Amateur Dramatic Society where people of sound mind endure a few agonising hours on the cusp of storming the stage with a Samurai sword to bring the show to a premature end. However, everything eventually will turn to dust.

A few things have disappeared from my own life in recent years, including a tolerance for socks without elastic. Not so long ago, I could have worn a couple of dead racoon skins with my sandals, and I’d have been unperturbed. Today, I pull my socks up so high they give me a scrotal rash. My female admirers have also departed. I have to admit to really missing those moments when someone of the opposite sex caught my gaze and returned a look of licentious desire, though to be fair, now that I use an online courier, I’m not often in the Post Office with the ladies queuing for their pension.

And then there’s my razor-sharp erm... you know... the erm... oh God the wotsit thingy... that’s it, my short-term memory. My mum called me ‘Memory Man’ when I was little because I remembered everything in the minutest detail. I would proudly announce to my Aunty that the boil on my elbow had burst twelve months ago to the day on the 15th October 1962. Now I stand there every morning staring at the chest of drawers trying to remember which one contains my y-fronts. Then there’s a further delay, as I forget whether the Y goes at the front or the back.

Chimpanzees in Dungarees – The Collection is an assortment of items either long gone or on the slippery slope to oblivion. You may disagree with some of the selections, but that’s your prerogative. If you’re reading this and your backside is perspiring like Fatty Arbuckle in the sauna because you’re sitting on a sofa with its original polythene wrapping intact, the ‘Plastic Covers Left on Seats’ section is unlikely to resonate with you. And if you’re that one in a million heterosexual male on your way to the live final in Azerbaijan, you will certainly rebuff my ‘Straight Men at the Eurovision Song Contest’ entry, though if you also love The Golden Girls, Madonna and Joan Rivers, you might want to change your magazine subscription from Top Gear to Attitude.

And so it’s time to sit back, relax, put up your feet, and immerse yourself in the contrast between our modern, fast-paced, digitally-enhanced, technological age, and those days gone by when chimpanzees marketed tea in dungarees, fourteen year old lads hitchhiked to Worksop in a fish wagon, and leather-clad bikers frightened the shit out of you... just for a laugh, of course.

Chris Whitfield

CHILDREN & YOUNG PEOPLE

Bastards

The timeline of life used to follow an established sequence: Born - Piss yourself - Dribble porridge down your front - Go to school - Fail your exams - Start a job - Find a girlfriend - Get married - Move into a house - Have children - Lose interest in everything - Retire from work - Dribble porridge down your front – Piss yourself - Die. Today, the beginning and the end are largely unchanged, though I have bucked the trend somewhat, being in full time work yet at the second wave of porridge dribbling. However, the middle is all over the place and tends to be the exact opposite of what used to be. It is now: Have children - Move into a house - Get married - Find a girlfriend.

Today’s couple have only known each other for a fortnight when they proudly announce they’re expecting a baby. The little nipper enters the world, and this sparks them into finding a suitable place to live, now that the converted cupboard in the city centre apartment block is considered inappropriate for bringing up a family. Soon they decide to tie the knot and have a spectacular £50,000 wedding in Chatsworth House with their child as star attraction. However, a few weeks after the occasion, the groom finds himself a new girlfriend called Chuenchai and buggers off.

In days gone by this wouldn’t have happened. Babies, for example, only arrived after the wedding. The child born out of wedlock brought total shame on the family name, and so any such little ‘bastard’ was packaged off to be reared by a relative in some far distant town. In another reflection of our more tolerant and compassionate society, nobody other than your 110 year old Aunt Agatha refers to the child of unmarried parents as a bastard. Therefore, you should not expect an invitation to a future wedding to read something like this:

‘Andrew, Laura and the Little Bastard cordially invite you to their wedding…’

Mind you, given that Andrew will run away with his Thai bride in a few weeks’ time, a more truthful invitation might read:

‘The Bastard, Laura and Baby Beyoncé cordially invite you to their wedding…’

Bob-a-Job

I lasted obsolete two weeks in the boy scouts, rapidly tiring of reef knots and the ‘Ging Gang Goolie’ song. I had joined because of my mate Bodger who was an out and out enthusiast of Baden Powell’s movement for boys, but the whole thing left me colder than a rice pudding in the freezer at the North Pole. My apathy and detachment was in stark contrast to Bodger’s eagerness. He earned every badge and award available, his shirt adorned like a World War I veteran, and many a scoutmaster admired his woggle. He even dressed like a scout outside of school, the trademark colours of his wardrobe being shit brown and snot green. If he’d had his way, he would have worn a cape, brown of course, and called himself ‘Super Scout’.

I forgave Bodger for my two weeks of tedium, but I couldn’t do the same when it came to the Gang Show. My friend was naturally keen to appear in the cast of the annual theatrical scouting extravaganza - extravaganza translating in this instance as ‘shitfest’ - and he was equally keen for me to attend, which I duly did. If I had been older, the evening might have given me three of the most precious hours of my life, feeding a procession of anecdotal memories, but at the age of thirteen, it was a harrowing experience. Men dressed as women, boys dressed as girls, all singing flatter than the salt plains of Bolivia, it was the longest evening of my young life from which I emerged and remain scarred. If I ever hear the strains of ‘riding along on the crest of a wave’, I have to fight the urge to run amok, slicing limbs from anyone in the vicinity.

The other big commitment Bodger made to the Scouts occurred during ‘Bob-a-Job’ week. Introduced in 1949 as ‘Good Turn Day’, scouts and cub scouts performed jobs and errands in return for a shilling, known as a ‘bob’. This evolved into a weeklong scheme in which scout leaders encouraged the youngsters to knock on the doors of strangers, offering their services for a ‘bob’. Thus Bob-a-Job week was born.

Bodger was tailor-made for the work involved, as he was extremely good with his hands, especially his right hand under the covers at night. So he washed cars, cleaned windows, repaired shelves and tidied gardens, though inevitably, some of the public took the piss.

‘What d’ya want lad?’

‘Bob-a-Job?’

‘Ay, I’ve a few wee jobs.’

The few wee jobs included painting the outside of the house, repairing the roof, and changing the gearbox on the Austin Cambridge, all done for the cost of just one shilling. The only downside for those handing over the cash was the ‘Job Done’ yellow sticker given in return. When adhered to the glass panel at the side of the front door, it was there for good, using the same glue as Liberace’s hairpiece.

The scout movement has suffered a gradual decline over the years, and although it continues to survive, it does look increasingly from a different time and age. Amazingly, the Gang Show is still with us, which is a bit like discovering that Adolf Hitler is alive and well, but Bob-a-Job fizzled out a couple of decades ago. As parents became increasingly paranoid about their children’s welfare, the thought of them calling upon strangers offering to do anything for a bit of small change was both acutely worrying and a terrible financial deal for the scout. Health and Safety considerations established a pincer movement, so that the ‘job done for a bob’ was curtains... ironic in the sense that hanging curtains was another job to which Bodger once put his talented hands, for a shilling of course.

Boys Called Keith

This section was nearly called Boys Called Colin, my deeply unfashionable middle name. I've had enough ribbing over the years to appreciate that there's no longer any chance of finding a proud dad in a queue at the Registry Office ready to give the name of Colin to his new born son. However, the former US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs has put a spanner in the works. Colin Powell calls himself Coe-Lyn, instantly applying a modicum of cool and mystique. Colin, with its new pronunciation, could conceivably make a comeback.

But the same cannot be said for Keith. By any standards, and with apologies to any reader called Keith, it's a shit name, and unless a US politician comes along called Kee-ith, the number of newborn baby Keiths will continue to be counted on the hand of a man who has just lost his fingers in a newly sharpened crop thresher.

Desperate Dan

Desperate Dan was unquestionably the world’s strongest man, and not because he won a competition filmed in New Mexico with commentary by Ron Pickering and shown at Easter on BBC TV, in which he dragged a HGV faster and longer than nine other brutes. He just was. He could lift a cow with one hand, chew iron, and spit rust. His bed was filled with building rubble, and when he went fishing, he didn’t use a rod, he used a crane. To shave his giant chin, Dan called upon a blowtorch and a chisel, and to part his hair he fired a pistol shot. Most famously of all, the oversized cowboy loved nothing more than tucking into a gigantic cow pie with a massive piecrust and two horns sticking out either side.

Dan was the most popular character in The Dandy, a comic that at its peak sold two million copies per week. He first appeared along with the new publication in 1937 and was initially a desperado on the wrong side of the tracks. However, he evolved into a hero, most notably during the Second World War when he shot down German planes and sank U-Boats, with his peashooter of course. By 1950, The Dandy was shifting an amazing 102 million copies a year.

Sadly, time was not kind to Dan, and as the decades passed, society became a very different beast. The publishers felt obliged to tone down the big man somewhat. His habit of smoking through a funnel had long gone, but they made him lose weight, exchange his firearm for a water pistol, and when the BSE crisis hit the beef industry, he stopped eating cow pie. In 1997, the comic’s editor retired Dan in a storyline where he struck oil and walked off into the sunset with the Spice Girls, the big man presumably adopting the name ‘Desperate Spice’. A ‘Bring Back Dan’ appeal succeeded three years later, but it was a temporary reprieve. The publishers replaced traditional characters with Simon Cowell and Cheryl Cole, proving that it wasn’t only Dan now deserving of the ‘desperate’ moniker.

The Dandy’s audience dwindled, the comic evolving from a mass-market publication to a niche product, and by 2012, its circulation was a mere 8,000 per week. The publishers announced its withdrawal from the marketplace, the final printed Dandy appearing at the newsagents in December of that year. There was but one consolation for the fans of the cow-pie munching, politically incorrect cowboy. At least there wasn’t a bloody Spice Girl in sight.

Duck Apple

The supermarket is a very scary place to be at Halloween. I was recently looking for a greetings card in a large out of town store, when I was accosted by a terrifying noise coming from the next aisle. It sounded like the collective wheezing and rattling from a hospital asthma ward where the inhalers and nebulisers had been contaminated with the exhaust fumes of a 1981 Lada Riva Estate. I walked past the Freddy Kruger masks, the dismembered hands, the meat cleavers and skeletons, until I discovered the culprit. It was some kind of talking corpse with an accompanying drone straight out of a Hammer House of Horror soundtrack. It struck me as bizarre that these products were being aimed at kids. And to think, the definition of horror to the parents of some of these children is the sight of a nipple on TV before the watershed, or a daytime DJ broadcasting the word 'fart' over the airwaves just before the advert for debt consolidation.

Halloween is now massive, second only to Christmas in terms of seasonal revenue to the large supermarkets. And yet when I was a lad, October 31st wasn't even called Halloween. It was Duck Apple Night, and it was all about an apple in a washing up bowl or an apple on a bit of string. That's right, it was a bit shit.

Duck Apple was a game where a bucket or a bowl was filled with cold water and the eponymous fruit. The objective was to dip your head in the water and lock your jaws around the Cox. (In the unlikely event this text becomes an audio book read by Stephen Fry, I might have to edit that line.) The apple bobbed about in the water like a dinghy in a hurricane, and the only way of taking a bite was to submerge your head and get soaking wet. My reward for this early version of water boarding was a gobful of cooking apple about as sour as a pint of undiluted vinegar. We rarely had normal fruit in our food stocks. The cupboards were so bare, even Old Mother Hubbard used to take the piss.

The other sporting variation on Duck Apple night involved tying a Granny Smith - that's a shiny green apple and not a geriatric - to a piece of string that was suspended from a door frame. You then had to try and take a bite without wedging the fruit against the sides, countless children thereby perfecting an effective impersonation of Quasimodo sniffing glue. It was another game for the brain dead, adding poignancy to the fact that the talking brain dead now occupy prime space on the Halloween toy shelves of the supermarkets.

The transition from the simplicity and mediocrity of Duck Apple to the present day's super commercialised celebration of death, zombies and vampires, was facilitated by the gradual Americanisation of our British Culture. Halloween had always been big in the States, and its adoption by the UK occurred at the same time as McDonald's, Starbucks, shopping malls and performance related pay and bonuses.

And conclusive proof that this shift has been retrograde is provided by the phenomenon of Trick or Treat, now an ever present annual irritation to the average grumpy householder. Before Halloween took over, it wasn't Trick or Treat. You could have Trick and Treat by eating a Mars Bar at the same time as watching Harry Corbett and Sooty with his magic wand.

'Isn't that right Sooty?.. Speak up Sooty, I can't hear you.'

Goldfish in a Plastic Bag

When my grandmother passed away, I inherited three goldfish. Some people in my position might have been hoping for a wad of cash or a share in some previously unknown Parisian property, but I happily made do with three identical, orange coloured tiddlers and a tank covered in more green gunge than a children’s TV show with Peter Simon. The fish were the last of my nan’s possessions to be handed down, after the domestic electrical equipment had been allocated to family members a bit quicker off the mark than me in house clearance duties. And this aquatic gift proved to be something short of a blessing.

For a start, fish are crap pets. Unlike a dog, they won’t guard your house and possessions, they won’t give you unconditional love, and you can’t take them for a walk in the park... well you could, but at the end of it, you'd have to cook them on Gas Mark 7 and serve them with chips and ketchup. Furthermore, you can’t develop any kind of relationship with them. They give you absolutely nothing in return for feeding them daily, cleaning their tank, and furnishing it with a model of an ancient Greek temple designed by a three year old with impaired vision. What more could any pet reasonably want?

There was a time when every house had a goldfish, yet those who did are likely to have forgotten the fact. For many years, I dined out on the fact that my blue movie name - first pet / mother’s maiden surname - was Brandy Boughey, pretty impressive don’t you think? Unfortunately, I had conveniently forgotten that my real first pet was a goldfish won on the hoopla at New Brighton Fair, christened Alan. It has to be said that Alan Boughey doesn’t sound like someone with a penis the size of a cricket bat... more insurance man than porn star.

Their widespread popularity arose because a goldfish in a plastic bag was the standard prize awarded to a child at every travelling or seaside fairground stall. Three darts in three playing cards meant you won a goldfish in a bag. First in the donkey derby... goldfish in a bag. Three balls in the bucket... goldfish in a bag. Children would return home from a day out at the fair with nausea from the merry-go-round, the onset of tooth decay from eating too much candy floss, and a plastic bag full of water with what appeared to be a slither of carrot floating inside.

Working class families couldn’t afford a fully-fledged aquarium, and so the little orange fish was put in a bowl normally used for cutting hair in the Victorian orphan style. I suppose you had to feel sorry for the goldfish. Even if its memory was only three seconds, it was three seconds of sheer monotony and tedium, recalling its round and round the bowl again daily routine.

I see the attraction of keeping tropical fish, with the endless varieties and vibrant colours providing a bewitching visual experience. The water in the tank has to be maintained at a certain temperature and so the barber’s glass bowl is inadequate. A proper aquarium is required with an electronic heat pump and all the related gear. Tropical fish demand a greater investment of equipment, money and time, and it follows there is a greater return on this investment in terms of satisfaction and reward. But a goldfish is the pet for the pet owner who doesn’t want a pet, so why bother in the first place?

And today, people aren’t bothering. The old fairground prize of a goldfish in a plastic bag has been outlawed. It is now illegal to give live animals as a prize, thereby cutting off the main supply line for the golden tiddlers, and this is good news... and I should know, having been scarred by the triple inheritance from my nan. The buggers lived fifteen years, like me, growing bigger and uglier every year. Towards the end, their orange colour had been replaced by watery pink shading, their eyes bulged more than the crotch of Brandy Boughey's trousers, and they were about as lively as a snail in a coma.

Next time you're disappointed with the Last Will & Testament of a relative, please think of my goldfish inheritance. It will help put things in perspective.

Haversacks

Anybody attending Grammar School in the 1960s was presented with a list of items required for the start of term. This included a school blazer, trousers, socks, shoes, cap, gym kit, fountain pen, pencil, sharpener, rubber, tolerance of sadistic prefects, and a haversack, although regarding the latter, there was the usual gender divide with the girls required to have a leather satchel. The haversack was made from a canvas material thicker than Kevin Potts from Class 1D and could only be purchased from the Army Surplus Stores.

It had originated in the military as a means of carrying spare ammunition, food rations, and a gas mask, but we used it for books and stationery. The watchword for the school was uniformity. No deviation from the dress code was acceptable. Yet, the haversack was the only means of establishing any kind of individuality. It started with writing your name and class number on the outside, but by the end of term, there was your football team, favourite music acts, and the odd picture of the odd teacher, although most masters were a bit odd. The haversack was a badge of identity worn over our shoulders with pride, although not so for one poor guy called Colin from our year.

A keen fan of Liverpool FC, he greeted the news in the Daily Post of Bill Shankly signing Celtic striker Lou Macari by plastering the Scottish striker’s name all over the flap of his haversack, reinforcing the message by using a particularly indelible ink. A few hours later, news broke that Manchester United had hijacked the deal at the last minute, signing Macari from under the noses of Liverpool. Disappointment compounded by shame produced a heady mix for Colin to deal with for the rest of the year.

The haversack eventually gave way to sports and messenger bags and lost its place as the mandatory carrier for schoolboys. I have fond memories of mine, though whether Colin does is somewhat doubtful.

Hopscotch

When I was a young lad, boys played football and girls played hopscotch. You couldn’t walk along the pavements of a terraced street without standing on either white dog shit or the chalk markings made on the paving stones. The girls would toss a small stone into one of the numbered rectangles and retrieve it by hopping through the spaces to retrieve it. We lads were never interested in playing. The game lacked an edge. In hindsight, I’m surprised we didn’t adopt a version that, instead of a stone, involved tossing one of the young lads from the street - I hope that isn’t quoted out of context.

Lucky Bags

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, we children were easily pleased. If I had a spare threepence, I’d wander up to the newsagents and buy a ‘Lucky Bag’. The confectionary and toy offering in a paper bag typically contained a fruit chew liable to glue your teeth together and a mystery toy more fragile than a feather in a hurricane.

‘Look what I’ve got Gary, a glider.’

I’d launch the flimsy flying machine into the air, only for it to plummet to earth and break into pieces, leaving me unable to protest in any way as my masticated chew had already given me lockjaw.

If ever re-launched onto today’s generation, they would definitely have to be re-branded as ‘Unlucky Bags’.

Penny for the Guy

Many people consider begging to be a major social problem of our times, but it’s hardly new. It's only a few decades since the sight of a child begging on the street was as common as a cheese and onion pasty eater in Gateshead town centre. And we're not talking Victorian slum poverty a la Dickens here. This was the 1960s and 1970s when the Welfare State was in full flow.

One common variety was carol singing. This usually involved a group of teenagers knocking on front doors in the build up to Christmas, mumbling a few notes, and then waiting for the householder to make an appearance with cash to hand over. In my group of minstrels, one of the lads was tone deaf, another had a voice that sounded like Scooby Doo, and I sang at the pitch of a dog whistle. The blend of vocal tones lent weight to the adage, ‘What do you get if you mix together three buckets of shit?’ The answer is, of course, ‘A bigger bucket of shit’. We made no attempt to harmonise, and our standard rendition of 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' had all the musicality of a pack of howling bloodhounds whose testicles were in the grip of a grizzly bear with the anger management issues of Naomi Campbell.

An even more widespread begging practice amongst children was the annual ‘Penny for the Guy’ ritual, taking place in the lead up to Bonfire Night. Notionally, it had something to do with the gunpowder plot of 1605 when Guy Fawkes failed in his attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, but to us kids, it was nothing more than a cash cow. We would make our ‘guy’, stick him in an old pram, find a street corner in a busy shopping area, then hold out our hands with pleading faces and a ‘Penny for the Guy?’ request. The passing punters looked down with incredulity at our home made version of Guy Fawkes and threw a few coins at us in pity.

The ideal Guy had a carefully constructed papier mache head with painted facial features and clothes modelled on historical Spanish catholic dress. The typical creation was very different.

The head was invariably an old cabbage that smelt like a wet fart, and there was no attempt to give it eyes, ears or a nose, leaving it with the face of a nuclear bomb victim whose plastic surgery had gone horribly wrong. The clothes were always ragged to the extreme, because if they weren’t, we’d have still been wearing them. This was an era when the clothes in your wardrobe fitted comfortably into a sandwich box. The body and legs of the Guy were filled out sparingly with a few old editions of the Liverpool Echo, giving it the physique of something with a flesh eating disease. We then placed it in an old pram that was so decrepit even a dog would refuse to piss on it. The Guy was ultimately meant to be incinerated at a bonfire on 5th November but would normally end up in the bin where it really belonged. Yet we were oblivious to the shortcomings of our design efforts because we were miniature entrepreneurs focussed on one thing, begging for cash.

But the ‘Penny for the Guy’ tradition disappeared almost overnight in the 1980s. As children opted to stay indoors, waggling their joysticks to Daley Thompson’s Decathlon on their Commodore 64s, and parents became more benevolent with their sons and daughters, the opportunities and the imperative to beg for cash with a cabbage headed monster in a rusty pram faded away. Carol singing reverted back to where it belonged, in schools and churches, and the everyday sight of children begging in the winter cold was gone.

However, there is some reassuring news. The cheese and onion pasty eaters of Gateshead town centre are as common as ever.

Pinball in the Chip Shop

Chip Shops used to have three standard features, the smell of fat, first generation immigrants whose English vocabulary was limited to the words on the menu board, and a pinball machine in the corner of the shop... the more unscrupulous owners also having a dismembered Great Dane or Labrador in the freezer. In my early teenage years, the Chippy was the focal point for the evening. There were no community centres, no youth clubs, no video games, no internet, and only three channels to watch on TV. Unless you wanted to endure the world of boy scouting, which was about as exciting as watching a coat of satin emulsion dry, congregating at the Wing-Wah was the preferred option.

It helped that in our household, my dad perpetuated the message from his old man that you should always leave the dinner table feeling hungry. Portion control was therefore tighter than the Arsenal back four under George Graham, and so it was never an issue of ‘How am I going to fit in a bag of greasy chips just a couple hours after my main meal?’ Yet the chips were an accessory to the evening. The main event was the game of pinball. We played for so long on the same machine that we achieved record scores and etched an amazing amount of value from one 10p coin inserted. Of course, this required a high level