Peter Kay’s cockney accent is like George Formby doing Sid James REVOLTING RITUAL OF THE NIGHT:
This has been a marvellous week for seventies schoolboy slang. On Bank holiday Monday we had Lenny henry’s memories of adolescence in Dudley, where everything good was bostin’.
Now, radio presenter Danny Baker’s autobiography, Going To sea in A sieve, about his upbringing in Bermondsey, south London, during the era of glam rock and powercuts, has been adapted as an eight-part series, Cradle To Grave (BBC2).
And that means we heard priceless lines such as: ‘You all look the same, you divaloes!’ and ‘have you gone batchy?’ is there any word in the inane, Americanised gangster slang of today’s youngsters that has half the venom of ‘divalo’?
Not the endless effing and mother-words, repeated so often that they become blandly meaningless.
Divalo was much more vicious than just ‘div’ or ‘divvy’, an underworld word for a halfwit, someone who isn’t all there (a divvy was a portion of stolen goods). A div was a wally, a pillock. But a divalo was a div crossed with a buffalo — a smelly, lumbering, stupid moo-cow. Divalo really hurt.
Batchy just meant mad. it had been around since the 1830s, when the case of Frederick Batty caused a public sensation — he was a barrister who lost his marbles and was confined to the asylum.
Nobody uses that language any more. it has been wiped out by the influx of fake Jamaican and rapper drivel. But Danny Baker remembers it, perhaps because he has been In search of a blessing for his school bus, taking him to Panama on Stephen Fry In Central America (ITV), the presenter visited a Guatemalan shaman — who sprayed him with mouthfuls of alcohol. Good job that isn’t part of the MOT test here. telling stories of his youth with such relish for decades.
They are good tales, it’s true. This script, though, sometimes made them feel too condensed and glib. it is like a greatest hits album, crammed with bonus tracks: how his dad (‘spud’) and his docker mates ran a sideline in liberated cargo that came literally off the back of a lorry; how spud nearly electrocuted himself while fiddling the meter; how a mate fell through the floor of a squat and broke his neck.
That ‘greatest hits’ feel was emphasised by the soundtrack, a lovingly chosen back- catalogue of Jimi hendrix, The Who and Atomic Rooster — with a real gem for the title track, a new song by squeeze, who were touted long ago by Baker and his music journalist mates as ‘the next Beatles’.
Bolton comedian Peter Kay played spud, with a valiant attempt at a south London accent that sounded like George Formby doing a sid James impression. he looked the part, though, with his Brylcreemed hair and spatula side-burns.
Laurie Kynaston was young Danny, and he captured the writer’s distinctive gestures and exaggerated facial expressions. Part sitcom, part social history, Cradle To Grave won’t make much sense to anyone who wasn’t around in the seventies. But if you were, you’ll spend the show saying: ‘i’d forgotten that!’ and ‘We had a teapot just like theirs!’
For mums of that era, only an aristocrat wouldn’t know how to cook tea for their kids. But that’s normal now: 30-year-old Newport mother Kate told Gregg Wallace on Eat Well For Less? (BBC1): ‘My cooking skills are non-existent. i don’t know the last time i chopped a vegetable.’
Partly that’s because home economics is barely taught in schools: it would be sexist to suggest to girls that they might be housewives, when they’re all going to end up as prime minister.
Partly, though, it’s because convenience food makes cookery redundant. As Gregg pointed out, there’s no need to buy a potato when, for four times the price, you can get ready-cut chips.
No need, unless you want to save money or eat healthily.
Kate didn’t seem interested in either — her main concern was to chuck out anything approaching its sell-by date in the fridge, in case it was harbouring germs.
Gregg reckoned her family was wasting £1,000 of food every year, and could save another four grand by replacing processed meals with fresh recipes.
This was depressing viewing. Kate’s children were pitifully grateful when she started cooking good, cheap meals for them, instead of just unwrapping and heating up gunk.
Bland, mass-market slang is bad enough. Bland, massproduced food is just horrible.