Category: 1990s

My third decade – so, a time of fatherhood, employment, marriage, and sex. Though not necessarily in that order.

Advent #16

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1990s, Christmas, Family

It dawned on me the other day that I’ve been cooking Christmas dinner since 1988. I don’t mean “so the sprouts must be nearly ready” – but it is a long time, gone by very quickly. (Maybe, like TS Eliot (sort of) I have measured out my life in Christmas dinners.)

We DID have a turkey phase, but have been ‘Team Duck’ for many years now. And, as previously mentioned, I’m in charge of the cooking.

To be honest that’s overstating it  – I’m only really in charge of the timing, the ‘synchronise your watches’ arrangement between oven, hob and air fryer. The actual cooking of yer actual Christmas lunch is primarily done by the oven (and hob and air fryer) while I just sit back and let it happen. In that sense, there’s not a lot of difference between me and the duck.

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I like music when I’m in the kitchen, although thankfully I won’t need to rely on Alexa (“Play Christmas Carols? I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”). A Christmas morning fixture is Anneka Rice’s Junior Choice on Radio 2, so I generally prepare lunch singing along to Puff the Magic Dragon, Ernie the Fastest Milkman in the West (which our daughter spent some time teaching to one of her friends during a long car trip to Bristol recently) and Terry Scott’s My Brother (which our daughter has never heard of – ah well, nobody’s perfect).

As a rule my other two-thirds don’t really appreciate me singing and whistling about the place (if it helps to picture me as the Hilda Ogden of Pyworthy, feel free). At Christmas however they’ve no real choice. Some people are said to sing for their supper – in this case they put up with my singing, for their dinner.

Bon appetit!

Advent #7

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1990s, Christmas, Family, Moaning

Not to knock our local shops, but as a rule if we need to do any ‘serious shopping’ we go up the road to Barnstaple – although I’m old (and grumbly) enough to think that, without Menzies, without Woolworths, it’s not what it used to be.

At Christmas however, things get even more serious and we go to Exeter. Exeter doesn’t have a Woolworths either (obviously) but it does have an HMV, two Waterstones, and a Partri– sorry, no, and an outdoor Christmas Market.

Oddly, given that it’s no further from us than Exeter, we never shop in Plymouth.

We did venture to Plymouth at least once when I was young – possibly just once,  given that my Mum recalls it as a fractious and largely-unsatisfying Christmas shopping trip. I don’t remember it at all, so either it was actually perfectly fine and she’s worrying over nothing – or it was so bad that I’ve blotted it out. Either way.

Maybe there’s something about Plymouth that makes it forgettable (I mean, maybe it’s my poor memory but sure, let’s blame Plymouth instead) because likewise I remember almost nothing from another Christmas shopping trip there, during mine and bruv’s ‘hilarious flat-share comedy’ era.

This was in December of 1993 and I can be certain of the year because of the only thing I remember about the entire day (having forgotten why we went, where we went, what we bought, what we did). Which is that our friend Colin came with us and bought the Mr Blobby single on cassette and although we surely CAN’T have had it playing all the long way home (can we??) it very much felt like we had.

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Ironically, given how traumatic an experience that was, I haven’t managed to forget it at all. Blobby blobby blob!

Waking Up With A Huge Election

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1990s, Little Bit Of Politics, TV

Not that I want to suggest all I do is watch TV. But…

…I’ve watched far more election-based programming this time round than ever before, although I don’t know why. Maybe I just don’t have enough DVDs?

From the moment the election was announced in the pouring rain, it felt like an inexorable move towards the inevitable outcome of a Labour win; and yet despite that, and although I would by no means say I’ve sought out everything (because, I don’t mind admitting, I do at least have some DVDs) I have watched a lot. The first of the ‘Sunak/Starmer’ head to heads. Sky’s ‘one at a time’ version of the same. The BBC’s ‘seven at a time’ debate, a mixed assortment of prominent figures lined up as if in some bizarre quiz show (“Angela Rayner, come on down!”). I even sat through the Question Time specials where six leaders each got half an hour (alas, none of them a patch on Tony Hancock’s).

I am not, however, if there was any uncertainty on the question, any kind of political heavyweight, so given that I almost dozed off at a petrol pump the other day there was never any chance I was going to stay up to watch the whole kit & caboodle on Thursday night. I surfaced about 4am Friday though (surprising my dog who usually makes me surface about 5am) so was still up and watching in plenty of time to get the flavour of things.

The last election I can remember being properly interested in was in 1997. That was of course the year of Tony Blair’s landslide, the night of the famous ‘Portillo Moment’, a phrase still used to describe the toppling of a prominent, but deeply unpopular, MP.  Given that he’s spent the subsequent quarter of a century reinventing himself as a sort of poor man’s Michael Palin (well, rich man’s I suppose) I wonder how Mr Portillo feels about giving his name to this phenomenon?

Whatever he feels about it, there were certainly some Portillo Moments to be… Would it be unkind to say ‘enjoyed’? Oh, what the heck – there were certainly some of them to be enjoyed on Friday. Of all the ghastly things he’s done, Jacob Rees-Mogg finally sealed his reputation as a wrong ‘un, causing a furore online by misattributing a quote from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in his speech. (I have to admit I was amazed he’d even seen it – although I suspect he thinks it’s the story of the much-maligned, misunderstood child catcher who is cruelly brought down by a bunch of bloody peasants).

But, to be fair, he did at least make a speech. Compare that with Liz Truss who not only had the appalling bad manners to keep her returning officer and fellow candidates waiting for ages, she then stropped off without a word. She seemed to then spend some time circling the venue looking for the exit before being briefly cornered by a BBC reporter, thoroughly declining to take any responsibility either for her personal defeat, or for that of the party as a whole. After which she wandered off very much with the air of somebody deluded enough to think they’d be back. To paraphrase her own famous comments on cheese imports, She Is A Disgrace.

So, there were winners, there were losers, there were gracious speeches admitting defeat, there were magnanimous speeches accepting victory. There was something from Nigel Farage (but isn’t there always). There was an over-excited Jeremy Vine with yet another over-complicated graphic. There was the controversial co-hosting of Clive M and Laura K on the BBC; and the inexplicable co-hosting of Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Emily Maitlis and (this is the inexplicable bit) Nadine Dorries (!) on Channel 4. There were a few old faces popping up to comment (although I’m pleased he never became PM, still I find it oddly reassuring to see Neil Kinnock pop up). There were tears, there were laughs, there were surprises.

It could maybe have done with a big song & dance number to finish but other than that, yes, a good evening’s viewing!

Advent #8

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1990s, BBC, Christmas, TV

For several years through the 1990s, One Foot in the Grave fielded a Christmas special. Often, but not always, on Christmas Day, not even always about Christmas, but still in a quiet sort of way it was an annual fixture just as much as the far more feted Only Fools.

My memory, which granted may be at fault, seems to think that often, but not always, they flirted with the idea, or at least teased it enough in the hype beforehand, that the latest special might be the last ever episode, that they might even kill Victor off. They never did of course – not at Christmas anyway.

Ironically perhaps, given that its leads are two… older characters, both Richard Wilson and Annette Crosbie are still with us (whereas it’s with real sadness that I look at the regular cast of The Vicar of Dibley and see that only three of them are left now) so in theory at least they could come back and do some more…

…If it weren’t for the fact that, again ironically (I’m beginning to think that if Alanis Morisette had just held on a few more years, she could have got a fifth verse out of this) they DID, ultimately, though not at Christmas, kill Victor off.

There’s a case to be made that One Foot was/is the last great BBC sitcom, and in a way that I can’t quite explain (unless “it’s because you’re getting old, Curnow” is any sort of explanation) it really takes me aback to realise it started over 30 years ago, and ended over 20. I… Well…

I don’t believe it.

Advent #5

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1990s, Christmas

(This post has been rated PG for adult content.)


Not long after I started my first full-time job, in Autumn of 1991, a ripple of excitement went round the office at the visit of ‘The Calendar Man’. One of the directors in particular was very excited – and very thorough, taking an hour or more to decide which calendars our company would be distributing that year.


You may be ahead of my naive younger self, but come December we took delivery of a small quantity of calendars with pictures of wildlife on them, and a much larger quantity with pictures of… of a very different sort of life. I wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea, we weren’t giving out calendars of naked models – but this was only prevented by the very tiniest amount of fabric.


Nowadays, although not quite consigned to history the ‘girlie calendar’ seems the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, the last time I even heard mention of one was a few Decembers back when a sales rep came round to give us a pictorial scenes calendar but intimated, in a black market spiv, ‘back of the van’ kind of a way that he had ‘something else’ if we were interested.


No doubt the wildlife calendar is a step in the right direction away from young women and scraps of cloth; but the shine was taken off them for me when a friend pointed out that the photographers don’t spend months, Attenborough-like, assimilating themselves into the natural world in order to take the perfect picture – the cute animals greeting each new month are all dead and stuffed (in that order).


Say what you like about the not-quite-naked models that ‘The Calendar Man’ used to trade in, at least none of them died for their art!

Thank You For Being A Friend

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1990s, Confused, Family, Friends, TV

Quick disclaimer: it’s not about the sitcom, sorry. (Not this time anyway.)

For the record, though, I’m currently eight seasons in, so just two more to go before Netflix pulls the plug at the end of the year. It seems to have become fashionable in some quarters to proclaim how rubbish it is, but all I can say is that I’m still enjoying it. In fact the pen-penultimate season eight episode (it could have been called, but isn’t, The One Where Rachel Will Do Anything, And I Mean Anything, To Induce The Baby) made me laugh out loud – a lot. (Is LOL-AL a thing?)

As it happens, though, Friends is a good example (oh! maybe it is about the sitcom after all) of the ‘group of friends’ scenario (hence the name of the show, obviously) which is so beloved of TV and film makers. Since I wouldn’t want anybody to think that all I do is watch fondly-remembered television comedies from the nineties, let me say that yesterday evening, in a dramatic change of pace I watched Four Weddings and a Funeral which is an entirely different kettle of fish. (It’s a fondly-remembered FILM comedy from the nineties).

Four Weddings, like Friends, like How I Met Your Mother (another favourite), revolves around a group of (mostly) unrelated but closely connected friends, who seemingly do everything together to the exclusion of anybody else. So, for example, the six friends always meet at Monica’s for Thanksgiving rather than, which I suspect would be far more likely in the real world, independently visiting their various families.

It’s an unrealistic set-up but devilishly appealing, this idea of a miscellaneous group of friends so closely-knit that they would do anything for each other. We don’t really need a detailed explanation of James Fleet’s comment that “nansy’s in residence, might knock us up a plate of eggs and bake over a late-night scrabble” to get the sense of its warm, comfortable, laugh-filled fellowship. Mr Curtis pulls the same trick (but, spoiler alert, not as well) in the not-quite-a-sequel Notting Hill which is nevertheless worth a watch even though you may find yourself pining for a wedding partway through. (Or a funeral.)

Making closer-than-close friendships seems all very easy in delightfully-mannered British films, or in fondly-remembered US comedies – or in Primary School, where you could pretty much form a lasting bond of friendship simply by asking, “do you want to be friends?” It’s far more complicated as a grown-up.

Or maybe that’s just me. Almost certainly, I suspect, in that I do find it a bafflingly elusive thing to do, forming friendships as an adult. That’s not to say that I’m unfriendly, at least I don’t think I am, but that’s not quite the same as being, and as being able to be, friendly.

My wife, on the other hand, she is willing and able to be friendly with anyone. On reflection, I’m concerned that the previous sentence sounds like a bitter euphemism for ‘slut’ so let me clarify, and quickly. It’s almost impossible for us, for example, to pop out to the shops without Mrs C sparking up a conversation with some passing stranger: often about dogs; sometimes about the difficulties, and the graphically described side-effects, of being lactose-intolerant; and occasionally about how annoying her husband is.

It’s (presumably) lovely to be so out-going and, yes, friendly. And although I’m not, I’m fortunate enough when we’re out together that I seem friendly by association. It’s a bit like David Duchovny’s comment on his character in The X Files that Scully is Mulder’s ‘human credential’, making his seeming lack of humanity or friendliness acceptable. So I suppose my wife and I are like that, she’s the human face to my awkwardness, like Mulder and Scully but without the official label of sexiest woman in the world and minus the passionate obsession with mysterious alien hybrid/government conspiracy shenanigans.

Goodness knows, really, how my wife puts up with me (assuming she still does after being variously labelled a slut and NOT the sexiest woman on the planet, in recent sentences).

I guess she’s just a really good friend.