Fergie Rises: How Britain's Greatest Football Manager Was Made At Aberdeen by Michael Grant (Aurum Press 2014)

 

Aberdeen made it back to the League Cup final, which was brought forward to December. The feeling in Scottish football was that they had done the hard part simply by reaching Hampden. They had won all four cup ties against Rangers and Celtic with an aggregate score of 9–3. Indeed, the quarter-final against Celtic at Pittodrie saw a demonstration of virtuoso finishing by Steve Archibald and evidence of how unpredictable and pragmatic Ferguson could be when wayward characters were useful to him. Archibald scored a hat-trick and defied Ferguson’s instructions by taking the match ball home as a souvenir. He was a strong character and a law unto himself, but he rubbed along with Ferguson even though the potential for conflict was never far from the surface. When Ferguson found out about the ball he called Archibald into his office and ordered him to return it. The following day he was sitting in the coaches’ room with Pat Stanton and Teddy Scott, drinking tea and chatting, when the door burst open. Archibald shouted: ‘There’s your fucking ball’ and booted it hard into the small room. The three of them ducked and spilled tea over the floor as it ricocheted around. Others would have been crucified, but no action was taken against Archibald. ‘That was Steve,’ said Ferguson.

Intelligent, strong-willed, capricious, and ambitious: the blond, tousle-haired Archibald shared many of the manager’s own characteristics. He turned up to moan about one thing or another so often that Ferguson said there was ‘an Archibald chair’ in his office. ‘Stevie liked to have his say and Fergie liked that about him,’ said Stanton. ‘He’d probably have done it himself when he was a player because he was volatile too. He recognised something of himself in Stevie. He didn’t want his players to be wee choirboys. Even when he was angry with Stevie he appreciated where he was coming from. They had respect for each other.’ Archibald also happened to be a dashing, reliable goalscorer with great instincts and reactions. He gave Aberdeen real menace.

Freak Out the Squares: Life in a band called Pulp by Russell Senior (Aurum Press 2015)

 

I was living in a flat above a sex shop with a girl who had a bit of a Béatrice Dalle thing going on and was the object of much pining amongst local musicians, including Jarvis. In a bid to impress her, he climbed Artery-style out of the window and made his way along the ledge, only to fall twenty feet onto the pavement in front of the sex shop – his broken glasses and splayed limbs serving as a dire warning on the dangers of pornography to several adolescent boys who had been plucking up the courage to go in.

It seemed touch and go for a bit, he’d broken his hip and was in hospital for a while, then moved out into residential care. But he slowly improved and was able to come out in a wheelchair. We had to cancel a couple of shows but he gamely did the rest in his wheelchair.

I shamelessly milked the mishap for all it was worth and took Jarvis down to London to do press, which included a surreal photo shoot pushing him round a skateboard park in the chair.

For the next show at The Clarendon, London, we brought a coach party down from Sheffield. The trip down to London was always filled with expectation. On the way into the metropolis, the excitement mounted: there were famous people just walking down the street, bold as brass. Rover always seemed to spot Oliver Reed just disappearing into a pub and demand that the van stop, but no one else ever saw him. It was probably just wishful thinking on Rover’s part, like the time when he went past Felicity Kendall in the street and she ‘gave him the eye’. Can’t remember the concert, it got some reviews.

Never one to avoid advancing the greater glory of Pulp by resorting to bad taste, I cut out a picture from a Romania Today, 1968 magazine of a forlorn man wired up with electrodes – onto which I drew broken glasses to make it look like Jarvis.

Rejoice, Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s by Alwyn Turner (Aurum Press 2008)

With a few exceptions – the anonymous narrator of Raymond’s Factory novels, Rankin’s John Rebus exploring the seedier side of Edinburgh with ‘its crooks and bandits, its whore and gamblers, its perpetual losers and winners’ – these characters primarily inhabited the small towns and middle-class world that had characterized the golden age. Even in Taggart, firmly located in Glasgow, the murderers whose stories were told in the first three series included a couple of small businessmen, a guest-house owner, a doctor, a philosophy student, a dentist and an ex-probation worker, as well as a group of bereaved parents meting out justice to the drug dealer responsible for their children’s deaths. Despite the urban setting, this is a world away from The Sweeney; there are no car chases, just Sgt Livingston running after teenagers and getting bitten by the occasional dog, and there is little suggestion of a criminal class separate from society: these are just ordinary, respectable people caught up in their own lives. And, at the other extreme of television detection, there was Jim Bergerac, investigating much smaller problems on Jersey and learning ‘to take the smooth with the smooth’.

Though the backdrop might have suggested a retreat from the city to the closed communities of Agatha Christie (encapsulated by Colin Watson as Mayhem Parva), there was an edge, to the literature at least, that was far removed from the cosiness of Miss Marple, an engagement with society, a desire to comment on contemporary mores. And although the likes of Morse and Dalgliesh spent much of their time behaving as though they were still autonomous detectives in the tradition of Holmes and Poirot, capable of solving any case through the exercise of their intellect, the central characters were still police officers, and couldn’t fail to notice the changing role of the force in the modern world. In one of Rendell’s novels, Inspector Burden initiates the putting of coloured lights in the tree outside the police station ‘in the interest of promoting jollier relations with the public’. His boss, Wexford, disapproves of the gesture, but it’s revealing that there was a perceived need for such a move: ‘surely you couldn’t go on feeling antagonistic towards or afraid of or suspicious about a friendly body that hung fairy-lights in a tree in its front garden?’ Elsewhere Peter Robinson’s character Inspector Banks was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the new role of the force: ‘he had many objections to the way the government seemed to look upon the police as a private army of paid bully boys to pit against people with genuine grievances and a constitutional right to air them.’ He consoles himself with the thought that he’s a detective ‘and he didn’t have to go on crowd control, bashing the bonces of the proletariat.’ But even detectives are affected by the rise of what Reginald Hill’s Andy Dalziel refers to as ‘porkism’, as his own sergeant concludes: ‘A man’s got to be mad to stay in a job where the public hates you and Maggie Thatcher loves you.’

Most political of all was Derek Raymond’s detective sergeant, who reflects on the police powers promised in a new piece of legislation (presumably inspired by the controversial Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984): ‘It was what I thought of as banana laws – the law of a society in the process of breaking down. Once properly tightened up, it would have meant that I could stop and arrest a man in the street simply because I didn’t like the look on his face, or the way his pockets bulged. It would have synchronized nicely with the plastic ID cards that every citizen would be required to carry by then, and before long we would have turned the country into a birdcage.’

God Save The Kinks by Rob Jovanovic (Aurum Press 2013)

Raymond Douglas Davies was born 21 June 1944 and, with six older sisters to coo over him, was instantly the star of the show. The girls used to take turns walking around with him to try and get him to sleep, and would play the gramaphone to help him settle. But his position as baby of the family did not last long.

Shortly after the end of the war, Annie was pregnant again, and Ray's brother, David Russell Gordon Davies, arrived on 3 February 1947. 'Ray's probably resented me since he was three years old,' said Dave. 'I fucked it up for him. He was the baby of the family, the centre of attention for three years. Then I came along and stole his thunder.'

Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s by Alwyn Turner (Aurum Press 2008)

When the Ropers were given their own series, George and Mildred, they moved out of their Earl's Court home (compulsorily purchased by the council) and bought a new house in the distinctly middle class Hampton Wick, despite George’s misgivings about suburbia: 'All BBC2 and musical toilet rolls.' A new element was added to the existing mix in the form of naked class war between Roper and his next-door Tory neighbour, Jeffrey Fourmile (Norman Eshley). 'I’m working-class and and bloody proud of it,' declares George and the resultant tension between his determination to cling to his class roots and his wife's desperation to escape hers provided many of the series' sharpest lines. When Mildred tries to persuade him to join the Conservative association - in the hope of getting a cheap holiday - she insists that the Tories are essentially a social organisation who just organize events, at which he spits, 'Yeah, whist drives in aid of the death penalty.' Meanwhile the estate agent Fourmile was sitcom's first overt Thatcherite; 'Socialism: The Way Ahead,' he says, reading the spine of a book as he sorts out a stall at a jumble sale. 'Hmm. put that with the fiction, I think.'

Despite his protestations, it's not hard to see Roper secretly putting his cross on the ballot paper for Thatcher, nor to see him joined in the polling booth by Garnett, Fawlty, Rigsby and even perhaps Eddie Booth. Alongside them would have been not only Fourmile, but also Margo in The Good Life and from Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? - Bob Ferris, an aspirant member of the middle class who might have voted Liberal in 1974, but would surely have opted for Thatcher in 1979. Against these massed ranks, British sitcoms in the '70s could offer few genuinely left-wing characters, possibly Wolfie, the parody of a revolutionary in Citizen Smith, certainly Mike in Till Death Us Do Part, who would ostentatiously read copies of the Morning Star, Milltant and Workers Press in front of Alf Garnett, but there were very few others.