On the dangers of videogames

Living in a seaside town in the mid 80s had its advantages. Most of these centred around the large number of pubs, a high turnover of not too bad looking girls who would occasionally become extremely good looking if you had spent too much time propping up the bar at the Red Lion and the equally large number of arcades. Most of my mates and I were in our late teens by the middle of the 80s so beer, women and videogames played a large part in our life and when we were not working or at the football hoping that the local team might one day find their way out of the bottom of the non-league leagues we were usually found doing something that involved beer, women or videogames or sometimes all three.

Our favourite haunt for games playing was a large arcade on the seafront that had a multitude of machines we could waste our wages on but most importantly it had a four player ‘Gauntlet’ cabinet and this was our game of choice. Each Saturday afternoon we would meet up before heading for the pub and spend some of our hard earned cash rampaging around its dungeons.

Now, as I mentioned at the start of this, living in a seaside town had its advantages. It also had its disadvantages. They were called tourists. Each week a new lot would arrive en masse from some distant part of the country to fry themselves on the beach, drink until they vomited and stuff their faces with doughnuts and candyfloss on the pier…and that was just the kids. Only the accents changed, each lot was usually as obnoxious as the last and on the whole we tried our best to avoid them by choosing our watering holes off the beaten track. Going to the arcade meant that avoiding them was a bit difficult though but we were not about to give up our Saturday Gauntlet sessions.

This particular Saturday we were gathered around the Gauntlet machine slaughtering ghosts, grunts and lobbers and launching the occasional axe, sword or spell at Chris who was as usual playing as the elf when a bunch of townies, think chav without the Burberry and bling, staggered into the arcade having quite obviously had a drop too much lemonade shandy. They were obviously out to impress their girlfriends as after a bit of pushing and shoving they took up station around the Space Harrier machine next to where we were playing and one of their number filled with bravado and piss weak lager climbed aboard. A coin went into the slot and his mates and their white stilettoed girlfriends gathered round to watch the slaughter with encouraging shouts of “Goo awn oor Wayne!” or whatever his name was, the mists of time and what happened next have dulled that particular memory.

As the seat began to rock and buck the townie began to lose his bravado and began to look a bit green around the gills as fizzy lager and heaven knows what else sloshed around inside him. Over the sounds of electronic slaughter the lad uttered the immortal line:

“Ah doan feel too good!”

At the Gauntlet machine we could see what was coming and even though we had racked up some decent scores one thought went through our minds. It was Chris who articulated our thoughts.

“RUUUUNNNNN!!!!”

What happened next certainly would have made a lasting impression on their girlfriends. From behind us came an unmistakeable sound.

BBBBBBBBBLLLLERRRRCCCCHHHHH!!!

The special effects team that did the ‘Exorcist’ would have been proud as a stream of lager, what might have once been chips and something that looked like cockles sprayed across the arcade in a demon possessed gush, covering his mates who had not had the presence of mind to flee, the Gauntlet machine where we had been standing just moments before and the girlfriends as well, the nearest of whom had along with the Gauntlet machine taken the full force of the blast. It took several seconds for the full enormity of what had happened to sink in and then the screaming started followed by one of the now puke splattered girls adding to the mess by throwing up noisily into one of the ashtrays that dotted the place.

As for us lot? We beat a hasty retreat, leaving the vomit dripping and screaming tourists behind and somehow after that did not play Gauntlet again. It may have been because we moved on to other things or it could have been the memory of the half digested cockle sliding down the screen as the machine announced “Great Wizard is about to die!” that did it.

Smut from above

By the age of about thirteen most of the lads in school had a stash of at least one copy of the periodical for gentlemen more commonly known as ‘Razzle’ hidden under their bed or behind the bookcase. That is most except for Nicko who had a school exercise book filled with adverts featuring badly drawn women in lingerie cut from the back pages of the Sunday People and News of the World but we always considered him a bit odd anyhow. Then there was Adam, my mate Colin’s older by a year brother. Through sheer diligence and perseverance Adam had the porn stash to beat all porn stashes and was the undisputed smut baron of the fourth year. Name your perversion and he probably owned it, from hardcore Danish publications through to the extremely dodgy contact magazines of the day where ‘Doris, 53, blonde, 48-52-54, from Milton Keynes’ sought ‘younger man with GSOH and an appreciation of rubberwear’ accompanied by the kind of photograph that makes you want to scrub your eyeballs with Vim and scour your brain with Brillo pads to remove the memory. If you wanted filth Adam was your man and of course his parents knew nothing of this and were completely oblivious to the fact that there seemed to be a constant stream of lads asking for him because they could not wait for the once a week when he set up shop in the last stall of the boys toilets at school where he would dispense ‘requests’ for cash donations.

It’s very possible that if fate had not intervened in the way it did, Adam would now be running an international porn business and doing very nicely indeed. However, fate being the fickle thing it is did intervene and did so spectacularly.

Colin’s parents had decided they were going to convert the large loft areas of the house into another set of rooms as Colin’s mum had recently learnt that she was expecting what turned out to be Colin’s and Adam’s sister. Adam kept his stash in an old suitcase hidden in part of the loft that could be accessed via a hatch from his room. As the day the loft was due to be cleared approached he grew more worried about just how he was going to move it all as it was a large stash indeed and getting it out of the house without arousing suspicion might have been a bit difficult. Worry turned to indecision and indecision meant that come clearing day he still had a suitcase full of smut in the loft.

As fate would have it I was around helping Colin paint some of his extensive collection of war gaming miniatures when Adam appeared in something of a panic.

“You’ve got to help me!” he said “I need to get my magazines out, I can’t let them find them, there’s a lot of investment in those!”

Given that he was renting them out at 50p a night we could see his point so only semi unwillingly and having been promised the pick of the collection we decided to give him a hand. There was no way we could get them down the stairs without being spotted as his dad and grandfather were milling around in the hallway and shifting stuff from one of the other parts of the loft out of the front door to a skip so there was only one thing for it. Lower the case out of the window with a length of strong string where I would wait for it, wheel it round the corner to my house on my skateboard and hide it in the shed until Adam could find somewhere else to hide it. As nonchalantly as I could I ambled out of the house and took up position under Adams window that was on the third floor of the house. A moment later the case was shoved out of the window and began to descend at the end of a length of hairy string.

Now I know what you are thinking, the string breaks, I get flattened, ambulance is called and a discovery of a suitcase of fine quality smut is made. You would be wrong. The string did not break…but the lock on the suitcase did. Being old and not up to the strain being put on it by about fifty pounds of dirty magazines it just went ‘PING’ and next second a torrent of jazz mags was headed my way, fluttering in the breeze and covering the drive, hedge and next doors lawn with a fine selection of tits and arse. Above me Adam appeared at the window, aghast at the scene of pornographic devastation that had appeared below and the fact that his mother had also just appeared to see what the noise was to find a copy of Color Climax hanging on the washing line and me surrounded by more nudity than an Amsterdam brothel owner as pages, picked up by the breeze began to distribute themselves over several more gardens much to the surprise of the elderly neighbour who had been weeding her borders next door only to be confronted by ‘Doris from Milton Keynes’ staring up at her from amongst the Marigolds.

Explaining its presence was difficult to say the least although I did have a good attempt. However, his mum did not quite believe my assertions that I had merely been standing out in the garden when a veritable avalanche of top quality hardcore had just fallen out of the sky and that maybe a cargo plane had accidentally jettisoned its load destined for the top shelves of Soho.

After that Adam kept his collection to the minimum, enough to fill a briefcase that he kept hidden under his bed and certainly not enough to cover an entire neighbourhood. Oh and the elderly neighbour was never quite the same after her encounter with ‘Doris’ and could often be found staggering around the area screaming “My eyes! My eyes!”

Apocalypse Then!

Being eleven years old I suppose we should have known better but like most lads of that age my mates and I had a healthy disregard for life and limb and this being the middle years of the 1970s we still had plenty of places to go to endanger both our lives and our limbs. WWII was thirty odd years past but through a mixture of local council apathy and local resident protestation there were a number of areas that had been bombed back then but not yet redeveloped. The back of the print works was one such place, an area of run to seed allotments, gardens and ruined buildings that held a magnetic attraction for myself and my mates as it was quiet, secluded and we could go there and be away from prying adult eyes with our air guns. That the print works used a corner of it for dumping the kind of hazardous waste that turned wildlife into the sort of hideous mutant beasties that were popular in the 50s films shown on a Wednesday evening just after Nationwide made it all the more attractive.

If we got bored with plinking away at cans with our air guns or trying to find giant mosquitoes we would build bonfires, nothing destructive, we just lit the kind of fire that would make Baden-Powell proud. Thus it was not at all surprising that on this particular day we were doing just that. Bored with setting fire to bits of wood and the middle of paper rolls we scouted around for something a bit more exciting and it was John, rummaging through the toxic waste from the printers who found the ‘Camping Gaz’ cylinder with its dire warnings about exposing to heat. Now, being eleven the only bit we heeded was the bit about explosions. Cool! Bet it would make a big bang if we chucked it on the bonfire then. So, Mark, never one to do things by halves did just that.

Realising the enormity of what he had done and unable to find anything to hook it out of the flames as we had already burnt most of the long sticks, we ran for the nearest cover which happened to be a concrete lined ‘trench’ under the print works fire escape containing a foetid pool of water and a dead cat. Crouched in the mire we waited…and waited…but none of us wanted to risk life and limb so we waited a bit more and Mark, the underage smoker amongst us dug out a packet of Embassy No. 1s.

“Anyone want a ciggy ?” he asked.

“No thanks, mum would kill…”

WWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAMMM!!!!!!!!!

The world went silent, time slowed, clods of earth and stunned worms showered down on us and something clanged against the fire escape. I realised John was saying something. I think it was “Fucking hell!” but it sounded more like someone saying “Fuuunell” at the bottom of a water tank. Mark had fallen over and now had most of the dead cat smeared all over his jeans. Nervously we peered over the edge of the concrete and saw that where our bonfire had been there was now a three foot wide crater and no sign of the bonfire apart from an ominous cloud of smoke rising into the sky and a burning plank stuck in the branches of the apple tree that grew on one side of the area. There was only one thing to do. Pausing only to knock the plank from the branches of the tree as we valued the apples we could ‘scrump’ in the summer we legged it, hurdling the wall and fleeing down the street past the old lady who had emerged from her house yelling something about “The Jerries ‘ave come over to bomb us again!”

The following day at school one of our classmates who happened to live in the next street was full of the story. Apparently his dad reckoned it was the IRA or Black September and they were starting a new bombing campaign. Quite what a terrorist organisation would be doing trying to blow up some derelict houses and a patch of weed covered allotment escaped us. It was hardly striking a blow against the oppressors of the people. It was also pretty doubtful that such terrorist organisations consisted of three young lads, two of whom had reached home and locked themselves in their bedrooms and a third who had been yelled at by his mum for having bits of decomposed feline stuck to his arse. After that we treated the stuff we found at the back of the print works with a bit more respect. At least we did until we found the paint cans…

It's madness, madness I tell you

Having had a relatively quiet upbringing in leafy suburbs I had not really encountered that many local nutters. Sorry, in these politically correct times we have to call them persons predisposed to sanity challenged moments or something don’t we? Back then they were the local nutter. Up until I was about eleven the most bonkers people I had met were the old tramp who seemed to live in the bus shelter on the seafront who would scream “GLEEEEEEEEEEGGGGHHHHHHH!!” at random tourists as they passed by or maybe the chap everyone knew as Stan when I visited my grandmother. He seemed to take great delight in roller skating around the shopping area. Nothing wrong with that except he was in his 50s and wore nothing but pair of satin hot pants and very little else. On cold days he might even wear a skin tight satin T-shirt. That he vaguely resembled Jimmy Saville made it all the more worrying.

However, all this was to change when I struck out on my own. It was 1984, I had just left school and was filling the time between A-level results and university by being a dole monkey in Thatchers Britain. Every couple of weeks would see me signing for my beer money at the local unemployment office like an 18 year old ‘Yosser’ Hughes and the journey to the dole office took me through an underpass that seemed to have been filled with druggies, dossers and the terminally deranged and a few who were all three. This was before care in the community had even been thought of too.

The first you would meet was the ‘Bride of Christ’, a woman in her fifties who wore a wedding dress and would approach you reading loudly from a bible, tell you that you were damned and then veer off at a tangent. If you avoided her you would almost certainly run into ‘Mr Pfffish’ and if your reactions were not up to scratch you would definitely end up face down on the pavement. ‘Mr Pfffish’ would emerge from nowhere and with his walking stick, hook your ankles from behind whilst screaming “PFFFISH!” in your ear. The drug addicts loved him as if they were quick they could be in and have your wallet, watch and loose change before you could get up. If you managed to get past both of them then you could guarantee that you would be targeted by the chap who seemed to have taken his lessons from Stan except instead of satin pants he wore the even more dodgy combination of a pair of leather briefs and a pair of jackboots. The local police must have just loved him.

However, the most spectacular was 'Mrs Beige', who, despite always wearing the same beige suit and would look at you and say "Whenever I see you, you're always wearing the same thing!" even if you happened to be wearing a neon pink cowboy outfit one week and a lime green clown suit the next, not that I sank to such sartorial depths. On approach she appeared perfectly normal barring the fact that her hair always looked like it had been styled by a couple of rutting badgers but as you drew close you realised there was something definitely wrong. It could have been the overpowering stench of stale wee or possibly the deranged glint in her eyes but whatever it was you tried to put a bit of distance between you and her.

Unluckily for me she either lived somewhere in the same neighbourhood as I did or her random perambulations took her through the area as one day as I was leaving the house she was by the gate and stopped me with:

"They're coming to get us you know!"
"Eh ?" says I thinking something on the lines of “Oh arsebiscuits!”
"Them! Sneaky yellow bastards!"
"Y'what ?"
"They're tunnelling underneath us now. The Chinese! Billions of the buggers, like ants they are. Always tunnelling! Armed to the teeth too!"
"What ? It's a long way from China. They would get a bit singed near the earths core!"
"Asbestos long johns, they're going to pop out in their little blue suits and take us over. Tunnelling they are. Right now, they might be ready to jump out on us and rape us all. But I'm ready for them!"

At this point ‘Mrs Beige’ pulled a butter knife from her pocket which to be fair might have done some damage given enough time and possibly the non-intervention of the rest of the billions of Chinese who were about to emerge in a warlike frenzy. Unable to stop laughing any more I made a hasty run for it leaving her to defend the UK to the last. Oddly enough she vanished soon after. For years I thought maybe she had been kidnapped to silence her in case she revealed any more of the Fu Manchu-like evil plot to world safety. In the end I found out from a friend who had worked for social services at the time that she had been sectioned for everyone’s safety after a fracas at the local Chinese takeaway involving a chip fork and two of the local forces finest. The world of the local nutter seemed a little less interesting without her but at least the Lotus Garden could serve their number 34s in peace.

Killer robots of doom

Robots are cool and the coolest robots of all are the Daleks even though they are technically cyborgs. In fact, the only things cooler than Daleks are ninjas or maybe ninja Daleks, oh and vampires. Ok, vampire ninja Daleks are really, really cool. Thus it was not exactly unforeseen that having watched Dr Who us kids decided to build our own Dalek in the hope that we could use it to terrify the owner of the local sweet shop into handing over his entire stock of Anglo Bubbly and Sherbet Lemons.

Simons’ dad just happened to work at a local catering supplies firm and certain goods were delivered in large cardboard drums so with a bit of cajoling we managed to get him to bring one home. To this we added a bucket stolen from my dads shed along with a sink plunger, a bit of broom handle with a tennis ball attached, an egg whisk and stuck two Ski yoghurt pots painted yellow onto the bucket. After a quick tart up with a quantity of poster paints ‘borrowed’ from our class crafts cupboard we had an authentic and realistic looking Dalek…providing you could get beyond the fact it looked like a cardboard tube with a bucket and a quantity of kitchen implements stuck to it and that it had been painted by a tribe of deranged chimps with special needs. Now all we had to do was get it mobile and this tricky engineering problem was solved by tying it to a pull along cart with Simon who was the smallest of us sitting inside yelling “EXTERMIIINAAATE!” To be fair we did make some holes in it so he didn’t suffocate, well, not too much.

For a couple of hours we dragged it around the area scaring the grownups with its death dealing awesomeness and muffled “Exterminates” punctuated by “I can’t breathe.” And “I need a wee!” until we got bored and noticed that the ice cream van had arrived at the park. As in most stories from my childhood, this is where things started to go downhill, rapidly and in this case literally. As we stood debating whether cider lollies actually contained alcohol or whether we had enough money to buy a Screwball each we forgot four things. The park was on a hill, the Dalek was on wheels, the cart did not have brakes and Simon was still inside it. We became aware of this when John turned round to ask whether our killer robot of doom wanted a ‘99 and realised it was halfway down the hill going backwards. If we had known a few swear words I am sure most of them would have been used at that moment. However, being eight, John and I went “Argh!” instead and ran after it leaving the other two and the ice cream van owner watching in fascinated horror as we chased down the hill after the runaway robot that was no longer yelling “Exterminate” but was now yelling something that sounded suspiciously like “I want my mum!”

Seconds later and just before we reached it the cardboard drum and cart parted company, the latter coming to rest against a tree and the former, shedding the bits that had made it vaguely resemble a Dalek like an explosion in an ironmongers went the other way. Unable to stop it John and I watched as it rolled, with Simon still inside, across the grass and through the park keepers prize winning flower beds until it came to a jarring halt against a bench of surprised pensioners who had up to that moment been enjoying a peaceful day out in the sunshine, not expecting to be mown down by low flying seven year olds in badly painted cardboard tubes. In the distance we could see the park keeper emerging from his hut and the look that passed between us said it all…”Oh arse! We’re in trouble again!”

Looking back from the safety of thirty odd years the mayhem and devastation our homemade robot caused was most impressive but I’m sure that real Daleks didn’t get bollocked by an irate parkie and grounded for a week by their parents every time they accidentally destroyed some distant galaxy. However, we did all agree that maybe next time we decided to build a killer robot we would stick to Cybermen, they were much safer and anyway, my gran had loads of tin foil in her kitchen cupboard that we could wrap a willing victim in.