Bob Servant (7 page)

The Great Skirt Hunt started in 1965 and lasted a couple of years. Frank and I were doing bits and pieces with work, I was on the milk for a while for Big Sandy and then the two of us did six months out on the berries which was a good job because the sun made me look like Rock Hudson (and Frank look like a bell-end) and we had weekends off to hit the town.

By 1965 we were getting good at hitting the town and talking to skirt and we looked not too bad at all with the corduroy and so on but we decided we needed a final touch. Women have always liked a man with a gimmick – just look at Rod Hull or Mussolini – and for me and Frank I suggested we head up to Simpson's Silver in Monifieth.

These days Simpson has that big place in the town and he's in the paper all the time with his advert.
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Whenever the advert's in the paper I show the boys in Stewpot's and say ‘More like Bin Laden's cave.'

Chappy always waits till the laughter's stopped and then claims he made that joke about Simpson's advert back in the nineties. As I point out to him, Bin Laden's only hit the big time since 9/11 but according to Chappy he ‘heard whispers' about Bin Laden before then. But even if he had, and he hadn't, then there's no way that any of us would have understood the joke and I would have remembered the fall-out for sure because it would have led to a day full of questions, debate and a few people going home in the huff. Just like 9/11.

(That's an example of a joke when you say something for Shock Value. I'm very good at it but if you're thinking of trying it then pick
your audience carefully. Put it this way, I tried it once at a funeral and the response was absolutely pathetic.)
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Anyway, to kick off The Great Skirt Hunt, Frank and I headed up to Simpson's Silver which back then was just Simpson selling jewellery out his garage. He showed us these two silver chains which, to be fair, looked the bee's knees and he told us they were just off the boat from London. I suppose it should have appeared suspicious that anything would come from London by boat but we fell for Simpson's patter and took them off his hands.

What a joke those chains were. Frank's neck had turned green by the time we'd got back to the Ferry and I wore mine in the bath and it started fizzing and giving off heat. As I said to Frank, after we put the chains in the bin, if Simpson had just told me that the chain would fizz and give off heat when it encountered water then I could have built that into a story or a magic trick, but for it to happen when it was just me and the chain in the bath was a completely wasted opportunity.

We didn't need the chains anyway. It sounds daft but even Frank was getting some attention at the time and that always cheered me up because things went so badly for him. Probably the thing that held him back the most was his habit with skirt that if he didn't think they were listening to his stories he would tap them on the top of the head, which didn't exactly work in his favour. He also put far too much pressure on himself and if things started to go wrong he'd completely overreact, like the time he took some skirt to Dawson Park on a picnic but forgot the plates and it took her three hours to talk him down from the climbing frame.

To be fair to Frank, if I must, I was having my own problems.

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30
See multiple copies of
The Dundee Courier
– ‘
Come to My Aladdin's Cave!'

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See
The Dundee Courier
, 28 August 1987 – ‘
Local Man's Zombie Act Disrupts Funeral,
(“For me, I played the right joke to the wrong crowd,” said Servant, 41)'.

Over the years I've got used to the fact that women can be a bit funny about saying what they really mean. It used to annoy me but these days it just makes me laugh and if anything I feel sorry for them. Women say bad things to me and I just nod and smile and say, ‘Oh really? I'm an idiot am I?' and I shake my head and do that thing with my eyes that veteran police detectives do when they're in the interview room and having to listen to the same old defence from the murderer that they've heard a thousand times before. Back at the time of The Great Skirt Hunt, however, I was still very much finding my feet and learning tough lessons by the day.

The incident that caused me big problems started off innocent enough. I was at The Sands Disco down at the Esplanade with Frank and Chappy. Chappy was off talking to some boys from the golf club and I couldn't see Frank so I thought I'd go and do what I could on the dance floor. I was just about holding my own when this decent bit of skirt with the most wonderful golden hair started giving me the old smile and look away and then quickly look back stuff. So I started giving her the old smile then frown and then the roll of the eyes and the wink. Then she started a tactic I hadn't seen before where she looked a bit to my side and looked scared. I turned to my side and, fuck my luck, it was Frank.

Frank dancing is violent stuff, all kicks and karate chops and lots of eye contact, and it tends to alarm people who haven't seen it before. That night in The Sands my new skirt looked petrified but I was sharp as a tack and went over and shouted to her, ‘I'll have one of what he's having,' and pointed at Frank. Saying, ‘I'll have one of what he's having,' and pointing at someone is one of those jokes
that's useful in loads of situations. I'd say that in my time I've used it on over a thousand occasions. Off the top of my head the best times I've used it were – when David Icke was on Wogan, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and when that guy got electrocuted by the cigarette machine in Stewpot's though I should say I didn't realise he was being electrocuted when I made the joke.

As always the reception to the ‘I'll have one of what he's having' joke was positive and me and my new skirt made our way to the bar. I bought her a drink and went to work with the jokes and the stories. It was hard because of the music so I did some physical stuff including the Buster Keaton one of pretending to walk down a flight of stairs that don't exist although in all honesty that one didn't work particularly well so I pretended I'd dropped my change from the drinks.

She let me see her up the road and I couldn't take my eyes off her golden hair which looked really top class in the moonlight and she lived in the new flats on Forthill Road, which impressed me because by all accounts they were pretty space-age. I got a wee kiss and did a bit of patting and so on and she said that she hoped she'd see me again. Hold tight, I thought, and I suggested we did something the next day. She said she had to go to work (I can't remember what, but it's not vital to the narrative)
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but we could do something together in the evening. I asked what and she said, ‘Surprise me,' and did that sort of saucy, Anything's Possible look that you used to get a lot in the
Carry On
films and from other passengers in the early days of inter-city trains.

I knew exactly what to do. The next day I went up to her flat when she was at work and got in through a window. I took off all my clothes and waited for her in her bed, lying there like a Roman Emperor and with cheekbones like Bobby Moore. After a while lying there like a Roman Emperor with my balls out started to get a bit boring so I had
a wee wander round her space-age flat. She had a bottle of OVD and the way I saw it she'd offer me a drink when she got back anyway so I might as well get the party started sort of thing.

After that there's a bit of a gap. I remember dancing in her space-age living room and bits and pieces but the next thing you know I was lying asleep on her bed and then there was a key in the door and I woke up and I was lying on the bed wearing one of her dresses and a wonderful golden wig. To this day I maintain two things. I was obviously cold and too drunk to find my clothes and that's her fault for having a space-age flat with no central heating. And I'd obviously found the wig and been so annoyed about being duped about her wonderful golden hair that I'd put it on to teach her a lesson and that's pretty much fair enough.

She came into her bedroom and she had short, ginger hair like a fairground worker and I was just about to give her into trouble for lying about her hair situation when she saw me and, well. I did my best, I pointed at the dress and did a face as to say, ‘It's just a joke, don't even worry about it,' but she ignored my face's message and let rip.

Sweet Jesus, the noise that woman made. Well, I don't even know if you could call it a scream. Years later Frank I were watching a documentary about monkeys and one of them turned on the cameraman and let out this noise and I near enough had a heart attack because it was exactly the noise the woman made at the Forthill Flats. It went on and on and on. A few weeks later an old milkman colleague of mine told me that they'd heard her from Big Sandy's Barnhill Dairy, which is about half a mile away.

I tried to calm her down with a bit of ‘calm down' stuff with my hands but it didn't have any effect and to be honest I lost patience with her. It was a complete over-reaction to what was glorified slapstick and who knows the damage it was doing to my eardrums so in the end I just walked out. I was so angry with the woman for her nonsense that I was halfway down Forthill Road before I thought it would have been a good idea to have changed back into my own clothes but by then I'd passed the point of no return so I took my heels – sorry, her heels – off and started running.

I got past Safeways without seeing anyone, which was my big fear, but then I turned into me and Frank's road and I saw him come out the house towards me. I crossed the road and put my head down and
ran full pace past him, got round the corner and peeked back. He was standing watching where I'd been for a while then he wandered off. I slipped back along the pavement, into the house and straight upstairs to get washed, changed and chuck the woman's clothes in the bin.

Frank was in a great mood over dinner, laughing away at my jokes even more than usual and telling his mum how nice the potatoes were. He asked if me and him could go for a drink afterwards and I agreed reluctantly because it was looking from his excitement that he'd come up with a new system to beat Spot The Ball.

I wish it had been Spot The Ball. We sat down with our drinks in the Cuckoo's Nest's beer garden and above the noise of the traffic Frank shouted that he'd met someone or maybe not met someone but seen someone he liked. A bus went round the roundabout so I missed some of it but then he was saying how this woman was top drawer and he'd seen her in the street and she had a ‘lovely running style' and ‘wonderful golden hair'.

I felt sick to my stomach and the worst thing was I couldn't even give Frank into trouble for making me sick to my stomach because then I'd have had to tell him the whole shebang. So I just had to deal with it, which was tough because he spent weeks looking for what he called his ‘Barefoot Bombshell' and I had to pretend to keep an eye out for her myself.

When you're spending your time looking out for a woman that your pal fancies when that woman was actually you dressed as a woman then it's hard to move on with your life and be a Hero. I suppose you're some sort of Hero to your pal but only if you're willing to spend time with him dressed as a woman. Each to their own and all that, but that has to be just about the last kind of Hero that I'd want to be.

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This is a phrase Bob enjoys using after I taught him it during the first book we wrote together (he had included a 500-word description of his eyes and the various messages they are capable of sending to others). For many months after Bob would gain his revenge on the cutting of his eye capabilities by interrupting anything I was saying with a raised hand and ‘is it vital to the narrative?' accompanied by his wink. Bob's winking style, I should quickly add, is of some interest. Not only does he wink, he points at his eye while doing so in case anyone in attendance has missed the comic gesture.

I remember once reading that Shakin' Stevens' biggest regret was not taking on the American market in a determined way, rather than just playing the odd showcase gig and appearing on couple of cable chat shows, and I often think about
Lord Dundee's Lover
in much the same way. For me
Lord Dundee's Lover
was an opportunity as big as the moon and twice as important but I gave up after one setback and for that I only have myself and Frank to blame.

You probably won't have heard of
Lord Dundee's Lover
so let me ask you this instead – have you heard of
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
the famous saucy novel? Aye, you have, of course you have. And then some. Well, let me tell you a little secret. If I'd only held my nerve against the boo boys in Stewpot's then
Lord Dundee's Lover
would have been just as famous as
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and about three times as successful.

It all came about because of the stuff in the papers back then concerning
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. The Government were acting like Jesus and saying how people would lose their minds if they read the book and there were all these protests until they stopped being fannies and let it be sold in the shops. None of the shops in Dundee would touch it, the manager of Woolworth's came out on his high horse and said how Dundee folk wouldn't stand for it and every single person in Stewpot's pointed out that not only would they very much stand for it, so would the manager of Woolworth's who we'd all seen give Dorothy Slaughterhouse the old octopus hands treatment at The Sands when his wife was in Ninewells with angina.

Anyway, from bitter experience,
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I happened to know that if you
went to Broughty Ferry library and ordered any book from the list they had to get in one copy. Frank and I went up there and ordered
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and oh dear the atmosphere was appalling but they had to do it. A week later we went and spent another tough morning picking it up. Watching the old bird behind the counter get
Lady Chatterley's Lover
from the shelf to the desk using a pair of spoons was one of the most painful hours of my life but when I offered to help she said I'd done enough damage already and gave me a look that could kill an owl.