21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (30 page)

Don’t believe me? Then allow me to introduce the winner of the 1993 award.

Step forward Rod Hull, a man who spent most of his career with his hand up a bird’s arse.

And the list of winners since then has rarely reached the dizzy heights of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s including, as they do, bearded West Country comedian Jethro and Cooperman himself, Russ Abbot. Nothing against these mildly amusing men, but neither of them is exactly Eric Morecambe, are they?

The final winner of Pipe Smoker of the Year was Stephen Fry. Now, there are lots of things you can say about Stephen Fry, plenty of accolades you can bestow upon him, numerous great achievements you can associate him with, but how many of you have seen him with a pipe? Me neither.

That was back in 2003. The award was discontinued at that point because of fears that it would fall foul of the new advertising regulations regarding smoking and tobacco. If this has led to a decline in smoking, then that is surely a good thing, but I, for one, do miss the sight of an old man, in a tweed suit, lighting his pipe in a shop doorway.

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Chest Expanders

Technically they still exist. I looked one up on Amazon just before typing this entry, but let’s be honest, when is the last time you saw one advertised, let alone someone actually using one?

Before the days of gym membership and personal trainers, most fitness regimes involved a bit of jogging, an exercise bike in the bedroom, some dumbbell weights, and a chest expander (for the men, not as popular with women).

Chest expanders were/are bizarre things. Four long springs running parallel to each other and connected by handles at each end. The idea was take a handle in each hand, pull in opposite directions, and stretch the springs, thereby giving your pectoral muscles a bit of a workout.

Which was fine, and they worked, but woe betide anyone who exercised without a T-shirt on, when those springs sprang back. Especially gentlemen of a more hirsute persuasion.

It bloody hurt.

You may also remember the Bullworker. A thick telescopic tube with grips at both ends that you squashed together to create a similar rippling torso.

If you cast your mind further back, you’ll recall the Charles Atlas ads in the back of comics and magazines for men.

One glance at the physique of the average bloke over 40 and you’ll be in no doubt as to how effective these items were.

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Handwritten Letters

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Football Pools

When I was growing up, every Thursday night at my house would be punctuated by a rap at the door as the pools collector came knocking to collect that week’s entry.

The football pools were the closest this country had to a national lottery before the days of Camelot and their colourful balls. Millions of people paid an entry fee and tried to predict which eight matches from the coming Saturday’s football fixture list would end in a score draw. Points were allocated depending upon the result, typically 3 points for a score draw, 2 for a no-score draw, 1½ points for an away win, and 1 point for a home win. So the maximum you could score was 24.

Each week the person or persons with the highest score would receive a cash prize, known as a dividend. This was often a healthy six-figure sum, but did occasionally top the million pound mark. Essentially, the entry fees from all players were totalled up, a chunk taken by the pools company, then the rest handed out as prizes.

The football pools started out in the 1920s, and the main companies offering the competition were Littlewoods, Vernons, and Zetters. They got round the strict gambling laws because they were classed as a game of skill, rather than chance. The companies employed collectors to call on people’s houses and pick up completed forms.

The forms themselves were long grid affairs, precursors to the Excel spreadsheet perhaps, with a list of fixtures down the left-hand side (starting with the First Division and running all the way down to the Scottish Second) and a number of columns for multiple entries. The cost per line was often just a few pence, or even a fraction of a penny, but most players entered several permutations, or perms, every week. I remember the form and a few silver coins being left by the front door for the pools collector each week.

When BBC’s
Grandstand
broadcast the football results every Saturday afternoon, it included the pools score (3, 2, 1½, or 1) and would show a ‘pools forecast’, essentially a prediction of the likelihood of a jackpot. If there were only 8 or 9 score draws in any given week, then the jackpot chances were high, 15 or more and it was likely that many people would have a decent points total, so the chances of a big payout were low.

In the off-season, when British teams were having a much-needed break, the pools did not stop. Instead they switched to Australian football matches. This really did make it a game of pure chance. While many players could look at the British fixture list and do their best to predict games in which a draw was the likely outcome, hardly anyone knew anything about the Australian teams, so you just had to take a punt.

The competition still exists today, the three major companies having pooled together (sorry!) to form one online company. This was in response to the launch of the National Lottery in 1994. And, while they are still quite popular, they clearly do not have the national reach that they once had, and the role of the pools collector is long since defunct.

I checked with my dad while writing this entry, and he reckons he played the pools every week for 20 years, and won about £58.

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Spot the Ball

Often run by the same companies as the football pools, but also very popular with newspapers, Spot the Ball was a competition in which a photograph of a football match had been doctored to remove the actual ball. Entrants had to place a series of crosses on the photo in an attempt to predict where the ball was located. The position of the football players, their line of sight, and the direction of the crowd’s watchful gaze were all clues as to the ball’s real whereabouts. Your entry fee was linked to the number of crosses you placed.

Oddly, the winner was not always the person who got closest to the ball’s real location as, due to some quirk of the gambling laws, you couldn’t bet on an event that had already taken place, so a panel of ‘experts’ would select the winning location.

All sounds like a fix if you ask me, but then I am probably just miffed as I never won one.

Spot the Ball still goes on, but it is rather harder to find than it once was.

Pun intended.

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Imperial Measurements

The death knell for imperial measurements sounded in 1995, when the government introduced the Unit of Measurement Regulations Act, which declared that all tradesmen must use measuring devices that included metric quantities. Contrary to popular belief, this did not outlaw imperial measurements, but it did mark an official move from feet and pounds to metres and kilos.

Which, given that this is how the rest of the world rolls, is probably fair enough, but it does ignore the fact that imperial measurements were and are, well, far more common sense than metric ones.

Take the inch, for example. An inch is more or less the length from the tip of a grown man’s thumb to his first knuckle. Most men have at least one thumb, often two, and thereby have the means to measure an inch at any time or in any place. It is a very practical measurement, and I am sure it is no coincidence that the words for ‘thumb’ and ‘inch’ in languages such as French, Spanish, and many others are the same or very similar.

A centimetre, on the other hand, is one hundredth of a metre, with no sensible or obvious comparison in the real world.

Twelve inches, as every schoolchild knows, make a foot. And that is another eminently practical unit of measurement being, as it is, based on the length of a man’s foot.