Tag Archives: 80s

Yesterday’s TV Presenters: A Journey Through Time & Space

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In the 80s and 90s a small coterie of TV presenters and game-show hosts strode over British culture like colossi. You may not have liked them, you may have actively hated them, but you could never escape them. Their faces were everywhere: on your TV screen; splashed across the red tops; staring out at you from billboards and bus-shelters. Their names were on everyone’s lips: from the living room to the water-cooler, and everywhere in between.

It’s difficult to imagine such heights of absolute celebrity in today’s fragmented pop-culture landscape. Thanks to the internet, and gaming consoles, and YouTube, and countless streaming platforms, media consumption has become as much a curated expression of individuality as fashion. As a consequence, very few figures in the light entertainment industry today possess the power or influence to unite us in shared language and experience. Simply put: the jig’s up.

I decided to wade into the nostalgic depths of our shared past and track down those once mighty, now forgotten titans of the TV world. To chronicle a lost era. To find out how its stars adjusted to civvy street and oblivion-flavoured retirement in the wake of their celebrity being usurped by the likes of Blippi, Big Brother, and some bloke who goes on YouTube for six hours every night to list all the women he’d like to pump.

Where are they now?

Locating and interviewing every light-entertainment celebrity of the Thatcher years was always going to be outside the scope of this article. There are simply too many of them. Some weren’t available or evaded my efforts to reach them. Some I just couldn’t be arsed speaking to.

Michael Barrymore declined my request for interview, telling me he preferred to be left to live out his days in relative obscurity. He currently lives in Bethnal Green, working as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool. When I reached out to Paul Daniels, he trotted out the lame excuse that ‘he was dead’. And Jimmy Savile, everyone’s favourite eccentric uncle, appears simply to have fallen off the face of the earth. I guess we’ll never know what became of that loveable rogue.

I began by going after the big guns, and there was no bigger gun back then than Noel Edmonds. I’m not talking about his penis, per se, but it’s indisputable that he had a massive chopper, which can be seen, even to this day, hurtling through the skies above Kent, dangling over the edge of his helicopter.

Edmonds’ career began in the 1970s with a show on London Weekend Television called Look at my Fucking Jumper!. Each week Edmonds would wear a different jumper and invite his studio audience and panel of guests to ‘fucking look at it’. From there he went on to dominate the schedules, with show after show filled with pure, uncut, light-entertainment heroin, which the great British public was only too keen to shoot directly into its veins. There was Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, which saw Edmonds trading slaves live on air; TV Addicts, where contestants battled to have sex with men in dresses; and, of course, Noel’s House Party, where Edmonds shared the stage with a fat, pink blob with a fixed manic grin who repeated the same phrase over and over to the audience in an irritating high-pitched squeal. Keith Chegwin sadly died in 2017.

Edmonds’ career wasn’t without scandal. In 1987 a deeply regrettable incident on his prime-time Saturday evening BBC show What a Bunch of Daft Cunts You All Are, Seriously, I Can Barely Stand to Look at You threatened to knock him off the top spot. Rehearsals for a stunt segment, featuring an ordinary member of the public, resulted in the death of that contestant. Barry Barryton, a chartered surveyor from Leeds, had been rigged up for a bungee jump from a bridge, but health and safety protocols weren’t followed, and seconds later Edmonds accidentally launched an RPG at him from his helicopter.

During his time presenting Deal or No Deal Edmonds courted controversy again when he claimed that he could cure cancer simply by growling at it and ‘calling it a cunt’. It was for this reason, among many others, that Edmonds was eventually banned from Great Ormond Street Hospital.

But the biggest uproar came when it was revealed that Mr Blobby was actually a kidnapped Venezuelan sailor, Caesar Consuela, that Edmonds had pumped full of hallucinogens and sealed inside a giant rubber suit, with his mouth connected to an artificial voice box that translated his anguished screams for help into ‘BLOBBY BLOBBY BLOBBY!’ The furore only died down when Caesar agreed to marry Edmonds in a lavish ceremony at Kensington Palace. Unfortunately, he later tragically died when he fell from Edmonds’ chopper, breaking his neck on the bedroom floor.

I arranged to meet Edmonds inside a white, formless void that he called The Eternal Ether of the Hinterlands of Nothingness. It’s in Basingstoke, not far from the train station. Edmunds had his hair brushed back into his trademark lion’s mane and was wearing ceremonial robes that flowed to his feet.

“NO-EL!” he shouted as I stepped towards him, the shock of which rooted me to the spot. “But what if there really was no ‘L’? What then? WHAT WOULD IT BE THEN?”

“Em… Noe?” I shrugged.

He nodded sagely. “And THAT’S why I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

We stared at each other for a moment, the silence stretching between us until it became uncomfortably loud. Mercifully, both silence and tension were broken by the sudden ringing of a phone. Edmonds reached inside his robes and retrieved the handset.

“Ah, Mr Banker. We’ve been expecting your call. Mmmm mmmm. Oh, interesting. Oh that’s hardly fair.”

He lowered the handset from his mouth, arched an eyebrow and whispered conspiratorially to me: “He’s not saying very nice things about you.” Then he continued talking. “Mmm mmm. Yes, I’ll pass it on.”

He replaced the handset inside his robes and regarded me with a look halfway between smug and pitying.

“He says you played a good game to begin with, but things have started to fall apart. So he’s prepared to offer you… £1000.”

I regarded him with a look of my own: resolutely, incontrovertibly pitying. “I couldn’t help but notice that when the phone rang the noise came from your mouth, Noel. And the phone itself: that was your own hand, wasn’t it?”

He stretched his arms out like Jesus on the cross. “YOU FOOL! I HAVE TRANSCENDED OBJECTS! DO YOU DOUBT IT?”

“Em… yes,” I told him.

He chuckled. “So I suppose you doubt that I can cure cancer by dressing up as Scooby Doo and farting in a nun’s mouth?”

I nodded.

“And I suppose you also doubt that ‘Deal or No Deal’ was actually a cover for my real mission to use red boxes to manipulate events in the multiverse?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Even when I used the movement of boxes in the game where Tariq Ali from Bradford cashed in his 50p box for £75,000 as a cover for creating an entirely new universe where Spit the Dog was man-sized and fully sentient and had a charming hand-puppet called Bob Carolgees the Human?”

“Yes.”

He was laughing very hard by this point. “And I suppose you think that rather than a formless void this white room is actually a secure cell inside a mental institution and my nurse is about to walk through that door at any second and tell me it’s time for my medication?”

“Medication time, Mr Edmonds.”

“Fuck.”

As the nurse dragged him flailing and screaming from the room, the once-great entertainer filled the retreating space with the full force of his madness, roaring out fevered confessions and surreal gibberish. “Tell them I killed Hull! There was somebody at the door that day, alright. By fuck it was me! I was the one who knocked! Knocked him right off the bastard roof! Tell them Emu was innocent! EMU WAS INNOCENT! [Emu is currently serving an indefinite stretch at Broadmoor for Rod Hull’s murder]”

But one thing he did yell piqued my interest, especially when it turned out to be true. “Somehow…” he slurred, as the drugs began to kick in, “…Beadle has returned.”

I had a lot of time to think on my space-flight to Exegol, the planet on which Beadle was rumoured to be amassing a secret fleet of TV crews. I pondered the trail of breadcrumbs that had led me out into the cosmos. Immediately after Edmonds had succumbed to his medication, I booked a visit with Emu in Broadmoor. It was a sorry bird indeed who popped up behind the Plexiglass. One eye missing, bedraggled fur, the unmistakable mottle of herpes over his lips. He looked jaded and defeated. Broken. The governor told me that Emu had been targeted by prison gangs and brutalised in ways that went far beyond simple beatings. Constant violation and degradation. No-one on the outside seemed to care. All had turned their backs on him after Rod’s murder. Only Grotbags still visited.

“How are you, Emu?” I asked. He could tell by the notes of pity and concern in my voice that the governor had talked to me.

“What the gangs do to me, you mean? I’ve had a hand up my arse for sixty years. You think the fuckin’ showers bother me, son?”

It brought a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘doing bird’. I changed the subject, but, unfortunately, to one that was just as uncomfortable for Emu.

“I talked to Noel,” I said.

Emu lunged at the Plexi-glass and tried to bite me through it.

“He confessed to the murder,” I added, in a bid to console him.

Emu lurched to a halt. His head disappeared under the screen for a second, but only because the guy operating him had to scratch his itchy arse and balls.

“No wonder I’ve got fucking herpes,” said Emu, as he re-emerged. “Did that prick Edmonds say anything else?”

“Yes, something cryptic about Beadle somehow returning.”

“Yeah, you mug, that’s who put Edmonds up to it. Pulling the strings from beyond the grave. Except he ain’t dead. He’s in Exegol, in the Unknown Regions. Trying to get a new series of ‘Beadles About’ on the go. Bit risky, you ask me.”

“Bringing back ‘Beadles About’?”

“No, using a Star Wars reference in this article, especially as Exegol and the fleet and all that is in the ‘Rise of Skywalker’, the one that absolutely everyone hated, and probably no-one’s seen.”

“Yeah, I did worry about that Emu, and the fact that I’ve now got to completely break with reality and go on a journey through space. Stretching it a bit, isn’t it?”

“That’s quite an inconsiderate way to phrase it given what’s going to happen to me in the showers again tonight.”

“Sorry, Emu, I didn’t mean to rub your face in it.”

“YOU FUCKING DID IT AGAIN!”

“TIME’S UP!” shouted a prison guard from the corner of the room.

“Well, safe journey to Exegol, Jamie,” said Emu, visibly resigned to his fate. “Clear my name, will you? Anyway, I’m off to the shower block to see a group of men about a frightening number of Pink Windmills.”

As Exegol loomed large in the viewscreen I had time to reflect on one of the luminaries of light entertainment I hadn’t been able to find. Cilla Black began life as Priscilla White, before being resurrected as Cilla Black following a fatal altercation with a Balrog on an episode of Surprise, Surprise. She didn’t die in 2015 as was widely reported, or at least her condition wasn’t as terminal as the wider public was led to believe. Yes, she died, following a vicious knife fight with the ghost of Bob Monkhouse, but she was resurrected again as Cill the Grey, whereabouts unknown. Rumours abound that she’s ever ready to leap into action to protect the ring.  So it wouldn’t surprise surprise me to learn that she’s Emu’s new lawyer. Her shows may be gone, but her spirit lives on in the US versions of her formats, most notably Surprise, Surprise, Motherfucker, presented by the guy who played Sgt Doakes on Dexter, where serial killers are tearfully reunited with the victims who got away, and Blind, Deaf and Dumb Date, where a trio of contestants perch on stools for forty-five minutes in confusion and silence. It’s still better than Mrs Brown’s Boys.

I disembark from the craft on the dark, misty, sinister surface of Exegol. Within minutes a bearded man dressed as a traffic warden is telling the pilot that the spacecraft has violated parking law and has to be seized and crushed. We’re worried for a while – how will we get home? – but the traffic warden soon takes off his hat and glasses to reveal that he’s actually Jeremy Beadle in the process of pranking us. He smiles his giddy, toothy grin as he puts his arm around the pilot, and points at a set of cameras that clearly aren’t there. The pilot bursts out laughing and calls him a ****ing **** ******* ***** *****.

“Mr Beadle,” I say, as I approach him. “You’re alive after all.”

“One of my minions,” a crooked voice croaks from the shrouded darkness. “One of… many minions. Clones, Mr Andrew. Enough of them to spread my practical joke mayhem to every corner of the universe. Oh, Beadle, I’m afraid, is most definitely About.”

And out he steps, Beadle mixed with Emperor Palpatine, a transformation he’s undergone purely to maintain a comedic throughline for the whole Star Wars angle I’ve foolishly chosen, as this article goes ever further off the rails. He tries to zap me with Force Lightning but forgets to factor in his withered little hand, and accidentally cracks himself in the balls with it. Canned laughter accompanies his pain. When he recovers he hollers ‘BEHOLD’ and a multitude of giant TV screens, the sort you’d find in stadiums during rock concerts, emerge from slits in the rocky wasteland behind him. All at once images flicker to life on each of the screens. Horrifying images. Gut-churning images. Disasters, terrorist attacks, massacres, episodes of Mrs Browns’ Boys.

“Ukraine, 9/11, Sudan, Israel and Palestine, every earthquake and tsunami of the last four decades, ALL OF IT orchestrated by ME for a new series of You’ve Been Framed. It’s been expensive as fuck, too. I’ve had to send £250 quid each time. I’m basically funding Hamas at this point.”

Suspicious, I marched up to Beadle and pulled at his face, which came away in my hands, all rubbery and floppy. A mask! The face I was now looking at belonged to Noel Edmunds. He began laughing manically, before launching in to his usual tirade:

“I guess you’re just crazy enough to doubt that any of this is real, and probably think that we’re still in the mental institution and all of this has been in my head and none of it actually happened?!”

“Medication time, Mr Edmonds!”

“Fuck.”

Read Jamie’s interview with the maligned stars of the breakfast cereal boxes HERE

Read Jamie’s interview with Elmer Fudd at Looney Tunes HQ HERE

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The Madness of Greenclaws

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In the late 1980s children in the UK were introduced to the eponymous Greenclaws, a king-sized, waddling worm-beast, with – it probably won’t surprise you to discover – green skin and claws. Physically, he was a monstrous medley of Jabba the Hutt, the Azorbaloff from Doctor Who, and Penn Jillette; psychologically, he was a creepy co-mingling of Norman Bates and Alan Titchmarsh.

He lumbered around his house with the wide, unblinking eyes of a man who’d been pumped full of psychotropic chemicals and then forcibly mutated into a gigantic maggot as part of some failed government experiment. He wore dainty little SS-style spectacles, and dragged behind him both a ponytail and an actual tail, between which two points of protrusion sat enough body-fat to make a week’s worth of jumbo fry-ups for King Kong, and still have enough left over to sculpt a life-sized chess-set made entirely of saggy-titted, puffy-faced Piers Morgans.

Of course, Greenclaws wasn’t called Greenclaws simply because he was green and had claws; his name was also a monstery spin on ‘greenfingers’, the phrase we humans use to describe people with a love of plants and horticulture. That’s why greenclaws had a greenhouse and loved plants, see? Do you see? Do you understand? DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO YOU NOW? It’s layered, see. Oh, the layers. The exquisite layers. I can feel a dissertation coming on. Once I’ve finished my current thesis, of course. The world shouldn’t be made to wait any longer for my bold masterpiece: Jess and Feminism: Postman Pat and the Patriarchy’s Last Parcel.

Greenclaws lived in a cluttered house that looked as though a messy pensioner had lain dead in it for sixteen years. Appended to the house was a greenhouse, inside of which lived Greenclaws’ best pal, a robot owl called, I don’t know, owl-face or something. Owly? Mrs Owl? Owlma? Yes, Owlma, that was it. Pretty poor effort, if you ask me. I would’ve opted for something a bit funkier, like Owl-abama, Owling Wolf, or Owlmageddon. Or gone completely left-field and blended hip-hop and scat chat to bring the world ‘Owl Movement’, a rapping robot owl with a talent for free-style shitting. A wasted opportunity.

Most episodes began with Greenclaws getting excited about taking part in some human ritual or milestone – going on holiday, taking a trip to the supermarket, learning how to synthesise meth – and then not actually doing it, because doing it would entail going outside, which Greenclaws couldn’t do, presumably because he suffered from some description of serious anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. Or perhaps he couldn’t go outside because he was prohibited from leaving his property under the terms of a recent court order. That seems the most likely explanation, given that Greenclaws had the soft drawl of John Wayne Gacy and the same terrifying, bulging eyes as Ted-Bundy.

So instead of venturing out into the world, Greenclaws would recreate inside of his greenhouse whatever it was he’d been day-dreaming or fussing about at the start of the episode, usually with the help of some obscene plant he’d spent the episode growing inside of a magical tree, which he’d only be permitted to harvest if his robot owl was satisfied that he’d correctly answered three arbitrary general knowledge questions…. erm… It seems a bit crazy when I write it all down like that, doesn’t it? No wonder I’m so fucked up. Kids’ TV was an acid-trip back then, wasn’t it? A nightmare factory. Where was Paw Patrol when I needed it? A bunch of dogs driving police cars and recycling trucks seems positively normal when set against the bug-eyed, botany-based insanity of Greenclaws.

Greenclaws had a human pal called Iris, who was always dropping in to keep an eye on Greenclaws and… Wow, wow, wow. Back up. Wait a minute… Iris. Iris… Iris? An eye. Keeping an eye on him. Iris. The woman who teaches Greenclaws all about the real world; a teacher, so that makes Greenclaws her… pupil. Iris, eye, pupil…. Wow. I mean…

THAT MEANS GREENCLAWS WAS KEYSER SOZE ALL ALONG, RIGHT?!

See what I mean about layers? When I get around to writing this thesis it’s going to make my last paper, Mopatop’s Shop and the Rise of Capitalism in the Communist East, look like something Bodger scrawled in mashed potato with his dying hand.

Anyway, Iris certainly made you wish that you didn’t have any eyes. She was a walking showcase for every horrific fashion faux pas and wardrobe atrocity that was ever spat forth from the dying womb of the 1980s. Her look was more of a clothes-based virus than a style: imagine, if you will, an amorphous, multi-dimensional denim beast enveloping the Sixth Doctor Who’s legs, and then booting him into one of Gayle and Gillian Blakeney’s music videos.

Iris was guilty of the crime of being over-. ‘Over-what?’ you may ask. Over- everything, I say to you. She was over-board, over-enthusiastic, over-enunciating, and, if Greenclaws’ ample bosom was anything to go by, over-feeding. The big beast never left the house, so it figures that someone must’ve been helping him maintain his corpulent physique. Perhaps it’s not fair to lay the blame for Greenclaws’ poor diet squarely at Iris’s feet. That owl was a bit of a wrong ‘un, too, what with it constantly growing things lke beef-burger trees, cake plants, and the like. I guess everyone in that poor monster’s life wanted him dead.

It’s become something of a running joke for those of us who grew up watching children’s television in the 70s and 80s to say that the shows we so enjoyed and accepted as pure and innocent were actually, unbeknownst to us, swimming in sleazy subtext and scandalous filth. Thus, when we look back on them through adult eyes we see their true horror laid bare. This belief, however, is mostly apocryphal: Captain Pugwash didn’t have a crew composed entirely of double-entendres; that episode of Rainbow where Zippy peels a banana and makes a foreskin joke was only made to amuse the programme’s makers and was never actually broadcast. It’s our own developed brains that are the real perverts here. The kids’ shows were fine.

All that being said, Greenclaws is the clear exception to that rule, the dirty fat green bastard. What the hell was going on in that glasshouse of sin? For example, when Iris came round to visit she always asked Greenclaws to ‘plant one of his fabulous seeds in the secret groin place’. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, IRIS? Ah, you might counter, what she actually said was ‘secret growing place’, but I would counter your counter by saying, a) SILENCE! I HAVE SPOKEN! and b) even if she did say ‘secret growing place’… that’s just as bad! I’ve been a little unfair to Owlma in this article. I should’ve acknowledged the fact that the poor beast was witness to years of horrendous sexual abuse. I’m going to start a #meTooTooToToToo movement on her behalf.

Let’s talk Owlma, the owl who replies to every question with the answer ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’. To be fair, every statement she makes is also ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’. That’s literally all she’s able to say, like some backing singer from a 1980s pop group stuck in an infinite time loop.

‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’, however, can carry an infinite range of meanings, and be used to convey questions and statements of every length imaginable. When Owlma says ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’ she could be saying ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘this’, ‘that’, or ‘maybe’. But she could also be saying: ‘My agent got me THIS gig? I made it explicitly clear that I wanted to be in Rainbow. This weird, greenhouse-based bollocks is probably going to get cancelled after two seasons, leaving yours truly here up a tree without a hoot. And then what? Casualty? Coronation Street? I’m a fucking robot owl! I should’ve listened to dad and followed him into the accountancy firm. I’m finished. FINISHED!’

In the end, it’s probably best not to interpret Greenclaws literally, but to see it as the story of Iris, the care-worker for a fat drug addict, one day discovering his naked, unconscious body on the floor of the greenhouse following a bad trip, next to a tree with beef-burgers selotaped to it, and an owl nailed to one of the branches, hoo-ing in agony.

Rainbow: A Work of True Evil

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If you’re a person of a certain age – and by that I mean somewhere around the precipice of middle age – then there’s no doubt you’ll remember Rainbow: the bright, colourful, quasi-educational TV show for young ‘uns that ran – in some form or another – from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

The star of the show is Geoffrey, an adult man who lives with a menagerie of bizarre and terrifying creatures in a house decorated to look like a children’s nursery. His bunk-mates are Bungle, a seven-foot ursine version of Norman Bates, who spends the day naked but always insists upon pyjamas for bed; George, a sexually-precocious, passive-aggressive pink hippo, whose smug, sleepy drawl suggests that whomever he’s speaking to is both the butt of a private joke, and the intended recipient of twelve sleeping tablets and a sore arse later that evening; and Zippy, the kind of puzzling ‘whatever’ that even Gonzo would shun for being too freakish.

And Gonzo has a nose like a big blue cock!

Seriously, though, how exactly did Geoffrey come to live with these creatures? Did he abduct them? Did he create them with a needle and thread, a bucket of DNA and a set of jump leads? Doesn’t he have a wife, or an ex-wife or something? A family? Someone in his life to raise an eyebrow at his incredibly creepy lifestyle that appears to be a strange blend of Dr Moreau, Hugh Hefner and Jimmy Savile?

Doesn’t the gas man at least come round now and again to read the meter?

“Hello, sir, I’m just here to check your meter to make sure that… AARRGGHH! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING? THE THING WITH THE ZIP FACE?!! OH HELP ME! OH GOD HELP ME! PLEASE DON’T HURT ME, I WON’T TELL, I PROMISE I WON’T! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!”

I’d be very interested to see how Geoffrey fills out his census.

“I live with a depressed bear, a pansexual hippo and a creature who crawled out of Tobe Hooper’s darkest nightmares, honest I do, I’m not fucking mental or anything. PS: sorry I wrote this in blood, I ran out of pens.”

Occasionally Geoffrey’s friends Rod, Jane and Freddy come round to sing songs about abstract things like the concept of sharing, something they’re all too familiar with, given that Jane fucked both Rod and Freddy in real life and let’s be honest probably fucked Geoffrey and Bungle, too. Jane practically invented the whole ‘furries’ thing.

Now let’s talk Zippy. What the fuck is he? Was he born with that zip across his mouth, or was he cruelly disfigured in the course of some vile experiment? I’m imagining an origin story along the lines of ‘The Human Centizippy’, in which the poor creature is forced to spend long, hideous weeks with his mouth secured by zip to Big Bird’s quaking bumhole. Perhaps as Mopatop sobs into Zippy’s back-end through a wet strap of velcro.

However it was that Zippy’s zip came to be, why would any sane and compassionate man ever use it to silence him? “Hey, Geoffrey, why not just break a chair over Zippy’s head or shoot him in the shoulder if he starts mouthing off, you total psycho?” And if somebody did do that to Zippy – if some sick, pseudo-Nazi surgeon added a zip to his face without his consent – why would you compound his misery by continuing to call him Zippy? Surely you’d change his name at the earliest opportunity, call him James or Timothy or Geoffrey Junior or something?

If I adopted a mute kid who’d been rendered paraplegic following a hit and run incident, I wouldn’t greet him each morning with a cheery: “Hey Chairy, what do you want for breakfast?” before wheeling him down a hill for not answering quickly enough.

Never mind just changing his name: we have one of the greatest healthcare systems in the world. And it’s free! Why has Geoffrey never referred Zippy to the hospital for surgery? That, I’m sure, is what any one of us would do if Zippy were ever to land in our care. We’d help him. We’d fix his face and accompany him on his journey to reclaim his dignity. We probably wouldn’t look at him and say: “Cool zip you’ve got stitched through your face there, Zippy. That’ll be great for the times when I want you to shut the fuck up.”

The only scenario that makes sense is that the world of Rainbow exists only inside the mind of Geoffrey, who in reality is an unemployed alcoholic and heavy drug-user. He sits all day long in a dowdy, ply-panelled bedsit, with lank, greasy hair and no teeth, waiting for his social workers Rod, Jane and Freddy to come visit him. He rubs his arms raw and rocks back and forth crying in the corner, arguing with himself and alternating between his own voice and his dead mother’s harsh, disapproving tone: “Naughty Geoffrey, going to zip you up. Don’t zip me up momma, don’t zip ol’ Geoffrey up. Oh, I’m gonna zip you up, Geoffrey, no son of mine be lisping like some soft pink hippo. Gonna speak proper, gonna be a man or momma gonna skin you like a bear and zip you up, zip you right up in the mouth. OH NO, MOMMA, DON’T ZIP OL’ GEOFFREY UP, I LOVES YOU MORE’N THE RAINBOW, MOMMA! MORE’N THE RAINBOW! OH SON MOMMA GONNA ZIP YOU UP, ZIP YOU UP REAL TIGHT AND LEAVE YOU HANGING FROM THE CEILING, TILL YOU TURN GOOD AND BLUE AND LET THE RATS NIBBLE ON YOUR DEAD TOES.”

We know a song about that, don’t we, children?