‘Didn’t you used to be famous?’
AMONG recent obituaries, I sadly read of the passing of Adam West, the actor who played Batman in the cult 1960s TV Series.
He was the only real Batman to the kids of my generation; sending himself up with a straight-faced, yet tongue-incheek comic-book campness.
I’ll always remember the farcical fight scenes with the added on-screen graphics of POW! Or SPLAT! and his supposed ‘climbing’ of vertical walls being achieved by the simple process of turning the camera on its side and wearing a wire-stiffened horizontal cloak.
He took the Mick and we loved him.
However, the reason his passing really touched me was his openness about the direction of his career after the Batman series was pulled after its third season. West really struggled to find steady work after Batman, complaining later that “the people who were hiring were dinosaurs” who “thought Batman was a big accident”.
According to the ex-superhero, his real low point came when he found himself at a provincial county fair, dressed in his Batman costume whilst waiting to be fired out of a cannon.
You can almost hear him asking himself out loud through gritted teeth, as he waits for the blast of the cannon launch, ‘how the **** did it come to this?’
Indeed. How many people once-famous have found themselves in a similar situation; where the inverted U-shaped ‘Bell curve’ of good fortune has finally finished its downward journey?
Maybe poor old Keith Chegwin had pangs of this feeling when he hosted the noughties TV low point of the ‘Naked Jungle’ programme (albeit wearing a hat.)
Most of us only suffer such humiliations on a stag night or when we get a forfeit after losing at drunken blackjack game on tour.
Similarly, Who remembers Ray Wilson? Wasn’t he the bloke from the club who pointed the tiles on your fatha’s bathroom extension in 1990?
No, Ray Wilson was the member of the unforgettable 1966 England World Cup-winning side who everybody manages to forget.
He later became an undertaker in Huddersfield; you can’t tell me that no matter how well balanced or happy he seemed in his new career, that he didn’t have several ‘Batman in the cannon’ moments of self-reflection. Such incidences are going to become sickeningly more common; our culture’s ceaseless creation of semi-famous non-entities of no discernible talent, who briefly splutter into the edges of the media limelight before sliding into the abyss of obscurity, will see to that.
One (almost) genuinely feels sorry for the person who, when challenged for pushing into the burger queue at the match, retorts “don’t you know who I am?”
It will turn out they appeared on the fourth episode of Geordie Shore, made the X-factor final in 2009 or played opposite Ant and Dec in Byker Grove.
However, if they turn around and crow they’ve made the deleted scenes of a big recent movie it’ll probably be me!