The pilot episode of Back Up first aired in November 1995 and pulled in nine million viewers. Things were looking good.
I had the opportunity to remount my 'Dick' at The New Theatre, Cardiff that Christmas and it was a huge relief to get rid of the blue serge I'd had to wear all summer and get back to the flouncy stuff. I say it was a relief. To be honest, panto was beginning to lose some of its gloss for me. It didn't help either that this was to be the first Christmas I lived in a different house to my children - my partner and I had decided that life would be better for everyone if we weren't within shouting (or throwing) distance. Whether life is better or not, the jury is still out on, and certainly, that December, wounds were fresh and I had a lot on my mind.
So I rented and rattled around a five bedroomed house in Penarth, by the sea, and drove the fifteen minutes into Cardiff every day in my recently acquired, chestnut brown, Mid-Life Crisis - otherwise known as a Triumph Stag.
The Stag has always seemed to me one of the most beautifully designed cars around - all swoops and burble. I'd had the chance to have a spin in one once. After Mandy and I became an 'item' in the December of 1984, we were both invited up to her parents' place in Scotland to see in the New Year. Mandy's mother and step-father lived in a huge lodge with a drive longer than the M6. As we rounded the last bend of the drive in our taxi, the lodge revealed itself and there, nonchalontly parked at a jaunty angle, was a highly polished, regularly serviced, purple Stag. I could hardly contain myself. It was Mandy's mother's car and she very kindly gave me the keys the next day and suggested Mandy and I go for a drive.
I slid into the driver's seat, turned the key and felt the sodden power surge through me. We spent the rest of the afternoon sweeping majestically through the snow-topped hills with "Wanna be Startin Something" on the stereo as soundtrack. The V8 bubbled behind us leaving an eddying wake of power as you put your foot down. Newton became a distant memory as you effortlessly swooshed from zero to hero in the blink of an eye. The car had that dangerous quality that most 'luxury' cars have of cushioning you from the harshness and consequences of high speed - no effort to get there and no wind or noise to warn you just how far around the speedo you'd got. After a couple of hours, we headed back home. I'd been given a glimpse of vehicular heaven. As the car approached the gates of the lodge, the engine was so quiet you could hear the gravel crunching under your tyres.
You could hear the gravel crunching because the engine had, in fact, chosen that moment to break down.
The infamous radiator had overheated and cracked, thus graphically illustrating the double-edged sword that is the Triumph Stag.
Despite this, my love affair with this motor-cruiser continued quietly over the years and, after the filming of the first serial of Back Up, I found myself in a dealer's garage in Hounslow, running my hand along a very fine example.
How did I get there? Well, apart from the old gag which involves my saying that I took the A315 exit off the Chiswick Roundabout, I seemed to find myself in the position many men find themselves in their mid-thirties: suddenly being able to have a holiday from 'life'. By 'life', I suppose I mean 'responsibility', the responsibility we all have towards the people we find ourselves responsible for - if you see what I mean. I have a good friend who calls this the 'admin' - the necessary giving and taking, coaxing, bargaining, accounting and generally soul-destroying compromising that goes on in the houses of happily loved-up couples throughout this green and pleasant. The slow death that is the... (pause for dramatic effect) 'relationship' (end pause).
Unfair? (Yup) Sweeping generalisation? (Probably) Unbalanced view brought about through seeing things through the disfiguring net curtain of the past? (Pardon?)
Anyway, there I was, in Hounslow, with more money than sense, free to be able to be a complete idiot again, running my hand along the curves of what was very soon to be my new toy.
I'd heard so many horror stories of overheating and cracked aluminium cylinder heads, sand in the bottom of the engines and tiny radiators giving up the ghost, I made sure I bought the best example I could find and paid top-dollar. Despite this, I could never quite let go and enjoy the car. I was always staring down at the temperature guage and seeeing it rise worryingly close to the red as the fuel guage moved alarmingly fast in the opposite direction.
I joined the Stag Owners Club and received the club magazine once a month. This only served to scare me all the more as I stared at the indecipherable drawings of bits of engine and read the many stories, sent in by other 'enthusiasts', of journeys home on the back of an AA lorry. Once a month or so, meetings would be arranged by your regional branch of the club. You'd all meet up in some country pub for an "N & N" (answer at bottom of the page). I went to a couple of these. There were about seven or eight of us and, as far as I could see, I was the only one who'd actually driven there in the car. The other guy's cars were all in bits on their garage floors or were so pristine and highly tuned that actually getting it out on the road in the autumn and risking a falling leaf damaging the bodywork would have been utter madness.
A week after buying mine, I stocked up on the AA cover, threw caution to the wind and took it over to Ireland for a long week-end. Not only was I a nervous wreck while driving it, I was also convinced that the car would be pin-pointed by every car thief for miles wherever it was parked. A shiny, brown Triumph Stag with the roof off is not a car to blend in with. People look as you sweep past, leaving you not knowing whether to wave regally, look cool, calm and collected or smile broadly at them as you drive into a lamp-post.
The trip, though, generally speaking, went very smoothly. My new steel-statement in brown behaved beautifully, even making a friend after its first night in Kinsale, waking up to find another Stag parked right in front of it! (excuse the sad personification of an inanimate, cold object. I promise I won't do it again - apart from when I mention my boys' mother, of course...) It was here, in Kinsale, that I had my second "meal-of-a-lifetime". (The first was after my dabbles with drugs in Portugal ten years before). Kinsale is known for having more gourmet restaurants per square foot to gallop around than anywhere else in Europe. Well, my friend and I trotted in and had a dinner to savour. Tastes, far from dulling as the meal progressed, got more intense. Each mouthful of wine, slurped from the biggest goblet glasses we'd ever seen, hit with as much intensity as the first. Each slither of beef burst flavour. The oysters were sublime. I can taste them now...
Over the next year or so, certain events conspired to cool my attachment to the car. One was the bill handed to me after its first service - large enough to buy the Fiat Uno my friend had given me a lift to the garage in, outright!
The second was a result of the attention the car seemed to get wherever you drove it. Some wino in Kilburn punched me in the shoulder as I slowed at a junction with the roof down one summer's day. He just leaned in and had a swipe, consumed with anger at the injustices of society (or maybe he was just consumed with Tennants).
Finally, the car itself was attacked, Basil Fawlty style, over the New Year. I'd gone away for a few days and, while I was gone, the alarm had been set off by a gust in the early hours of New Year's Day. Someone had got so annoyed by this that they'd got out of bed and started to punch my car with their fists, breaking the windscreen in the process (original, tinted, expensive). I know this because he was arrested and ordered to pay compensation through the courts (I eventually received £20 - about half a tank of petrol).
All this left me with a bad taste in my mouth and the car spent more and more time sat outside, cracked windscreen, scraped by White Van Man, looking very sorry for itself, daring me to risk bancruptcy and take it in to the men with the spanners.
Now I don't mind forking out to pay for something I'm getting enjoyment out of - CSA payments, VAT bills etc. - but, as soon as the pleasure begins to pall, I start to look for ways to avoid throwing money at it.
(My willingness to open my wallet has a direct link to the pleasure I derive from whatever's demanding the money. Therefore, as we speak, I own a Ducati Monster and beautiful VW Camper, but no kitchen.)
Update! 21.05.05.
That was written in the summer of 2003. The Ducati was stolen from outside my house a year and a half ago in November 2003 but you'll be pleased to hear that, despite this, I still do not own a kitchen.
I decided to cut my losses and take it back to Hounslow. They very kindly took it off my hands for 40% of the original purchase price and put it back on the forecourt two months later with the other 60% tagged back on. Thanks, lads.
Answer:
Noggin and Natter. (Natter is self-explanatory. Noggin? Sounds very dodgy to me...)