Banjaxed Read online

  However, the idea persists that Wogan’s Winner is a Loser, and that to be selected for the honour is as the Kiss of Death. And that’s the way I like it. I have no wish to be accused of undermining the moral fibre of the nation by encouraging the listener to hurl the last of the children’s allowance on the back of some spavined nag.

  Indeed, I stand exonerated, while other tipsters get the knife in the small ribs, by no less a body than the World Council of Churches, with their ‘Report on Gambling’. My activities as a horse-race tipster, it was felt, should be encouraged by all right-thinking people, as my tips constituted a positive discouragement to gambling.

  It’s rather like all these ‘complimentary’ letters I get, that start: ‘Dear Terry, I always stand up for you, when the rest of the factory starts criticizing . . .’

  Wagan’s Woger

  Handsome animal isn’t he? Proud head, strong thews, good temperament, glossy coat, and trained to an hair. The horse looks pretty good, too, considering it’s had to live with the unequal burden of a monniker like Wogan’s Wager. Mark the look of barely concealed disdain on the creature’s face as it correctly diagnoses that the human (the one in the ill-fitting suit) is poised for flight, if it so much as twitches an ear.

  Call me a sissy if you like, but I’ve always been apprehensive of anything that’s got more legs than me, iron hooves, and teeth like a mowing machine. Horses recognize this immediately of course, and on sight of me usually give a couple of cheeky neighs, a swish of the tail, and chase me round the paddock until my six-year-old daughter comes to rescue me.

  I must have been somewhat tired and emotional therefore, when I agreed to take a share in this horse. It wasn’t much – an half a fetlock I think, but they named the poor dumb animal after me. Enough, you would have said, to stunt anything’s growth. And you would have been correct in every detail. This snap was taken when the horse was two years old, and despite eating its head off with oats, nuts and the finest of equine delicacies it never grew so much as a finger, not to mind an hand, after this picture was taken. It’s this strange power I have over animals and women . . .

  Wogan’s Wager had a couple of runs, without breaking into a canter, or indeed a sweat, before I went to see him race for the first time ’neath the ancient city walls of Chester, on the famed Roodeye course. An air of quiet confidence prevailed in the Wogan camp and was maintained right up to the moment when little WW strolled out of the starting gate, and took up a comfortable position 100 yards behind the rest of the field, loping easily. It was a position he held without much trouble for the entire race and the game little chap finished unflurried, and last, with the satisfied air of one who realizes that it’s not the winning that counts, but the taking part.

  That was bad enough, but the crowning blow to my budding career as another Aga Khan or Wildenstein came as the horses rounded the final bend. ‘And last at the moment,’ roared the race commentator to the packed stands, ‘last is Wagan’s Woger.’ I fancy I can hear the ribald jeering yet.

  The little horse continued to enjoy the view of other horses disappearing out of sight in front of him, and eventually, because the cardboard soles of my children’s shoes would scarce have lasted another winter, I sold my interest in Wogan’s Wager. He immediately won three races in succession, at 25–1, 100–8, and 3–1. Lucky Wogan, they call me.

  Wise quacks

  Once, there was a record by The Goodies, entitled ‘A Man’s Best Friend Is His Duck’, which contained such deathless lines as ‘It can give you a nasty suck’. Rejoicing that the spirit of Ivor Novello yet lived on, I played it often. I might have known what it would lead to:

  Quacking Jokes

  What is a piece of repartee?

  A wisequack

  What do political ducks do?

  Paper over the quacks

  What is a glamorous duckling?

  A quacker, a bit of quackling

  What is a crazy duck?

  A quackpot

  Which would you choose between two ducks?

  Eider

  How does one exhort a duck to action?

  ‘Get quacking!’

  Audrey Hundy,

  Worcestershire.

  Naturally, this aroused the clergy:

  Duck Jokes

  What do you get when you cross a worm with a duck?

  An earthquack

  What does a duck eat for breakfast?

  Quacker Oats

  Which is a duck’s favourite television programme?

  Quackerjack

  What is suitable music for a mentally deficient charming little duck?

  Nut Quacker Sweet.

  Revd Edward Barrow,

  Guildford, Surrey.

  And a gagster from Norfolk called Neep:

  What do you call a cat that’s eaten a duck?

  A duck-filled-fatty-puss.

  Mervyn Neep,

  St Germans, Norfolk.

  My old friend Harold Jones, of Clwyd, was not to be left out:

  Ducks

  What is a male French duck? Mongoose

  Poise is behaving like a duck: keeping calm and unruffled on the surface but paddling like the devil underneath.

  When the baby duckling had a lift across the farmyard, it was viaduct.

  Harold Jones,

  Rhyl, Clwyd.

  As always, in this fur-and-feather-loving land, there was someone to remind us of the debt that we owe to ducks:

  Dear Mr Wogan,

  Please refrain from taking the mickey out of ducks. I would remind you that they performed valuable wartime service in Q-ack Q-ack batteries and shot down many enemy carrier pigeons.

  Yours buoyantly

  Donald Ducati

  The Pond,

  Bury, Lancashire.

  And people wonder why I need a holiday.

  Make mine ‘Country’ style

  ‘Country and Western’ became just ‘Country’ music some years back when I wasn’t looking, but, pards, I jest caint control the rebel yell that comes a-bubblin’ to my lips whenever I hear that good ol’ fiddle and banjo. ‘Eeee-Hah!’ I go, and it drives the more ethnically minded country music fan bananas. It appears that my coarse yelling is not treating a very serious art-form with the dignity it deserves. However, last year I was the winner of the Country Music Association’s award for ‘Non-Country Specialist’, and I’m proud of it, whatever it may mean.

  Country music is alive with ringing names: Moe Bandy, Conway Twitty, Boxcar Willie, Porter Waggoner. Among the gals, there’s Billie Jo Spears (The Singing Harpoon) and that musical depression centred over Iceland, Crystal Gayle; Dolly Parton defies the law of gravity every time she takes a deep breath, and Tammy Wynette will not easily be forgotten, if only for that deathless spelling bee, ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’ What other popular music form would even attempt such titles as ‘St Louis Named a Shoe After Me’ or ‘Jeremiah Peabody’s Polyunsaturated Quick Dissolving, Fast Acting, Pleasant Tasting, Green and Purple Pills’?

  ‘Lucille’ was a big country hit for Kenny Rogers – a touching tale of a woman leaving her man in the lurch: ‘You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille, With four hungry children and a crop in the field . . .’ These sentiments may well have struck a responsive chord among the softies who listen to other radio shows, but not my crowd. Their reaction, to a man, was roundly to applaud the woman: ‘It’s no wonder she left him – four hundred children and a croc in the field. Typical selfish male chauvinist!’

  The nude vicar

  ‘Lucille’ is only one of a myriad songs that the ever-vigilant British listening public has deliberately and delightedly macerated. That soulful ballad ‘Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes’ quickly became ‘Love Grows Up My Rosemary’s Nose’ – a very sore thing.

  Neil Diamond recently had a success with ‘Forever In Blue Jeans’, which attracted an hearty response from the minor clergy, who seemed to take it as a tribute to swinging vicars everywhere – ‘The Reverend Blue Jeans’. This same wor
thy band took exception to my condolences to someone in hospital.

  In my manly yet cuddly way, I wished some patient well, and expressed the hope that he or she would shortly be sitting up, and taking the lightly boiled egg with ‘renewed vigour’. How they could possibly misconstrue this as encouraging someone to tuck into breakfast with a ‘nude vicar’ is beyond me.

  Dear Mr Wogan,

  Your remarks regarding patients in hospital attacking the lightly boiled egg with a nude vicar. This is a slur on us vicars who are hard-boiled and fully clothed.

  Ivor Pulpit,

  St Albans.

  It’s partly the singers’ fault, of course. Karen Carpenter’s nasal tones did make it seem as if ‘The best love songs are written with a broken arm’. ‘Broken heart’ was what the songwriter had in mind. Then there was Stu Stevens – ‘The Man from Outer Space’: disillusioned with Earth and bungling homo sapiens, he sang ‘I’m leaving in the morning on a blue electric loo . . .’ At least that’s what it sounded like to my gang.

  Ishar Cohen and Alphabeta won the Eurovision Song Contest for Israel in 1978, with a catchy farrago called ‘Ah Ba Ni Bi’; apparently, my name is mud with the bold Ishar because I ‘sent it up’. Me? I ask you. Anyway, I blame the listeners, your honour. The first line of this epic went something like: ‘Ah Ba Ni Bi, Ah Bo Na Beh’. Hardly Noel Coward, I admit, but well up to Eurovision Song Contest standards. Nothing could dislodge from my listeners’ minds the quaint idea that what Ishar and the boys were singing was ‘I wanna be a polar bear’. This in turn led to some tiring, but erudite, exposition:

  To the handsomest, wittiest, most talented

  DJ on Radio.

  Terry Wogan for King and Jimmy Young for Queen!

  Dear Sir Terry,

  Just practising, you are right, it is polar bear. In fact the lyric is as British as tatty bogles. Tis a true story passed down from hand to mouth over the generations. My great great uncle seventeen times removed – poet, poacher and beekeeper extraordinaire produced a non-sticky honey, which Good Queen Bess massaged into her scalp to titillate the follicles. The result gave her much pleasure until alas one day the promiscuous queen bee went bananas over a brazen bumble in the next hive, and jammed up the juice. Resulting in a bald bonce for ‘Liz’ R, and a quick trip to the Tower for my bemused ancestor.

  Anticipating the chop, he dashed off a quick sonnet which her Majesty duly censored, issuing a Royal Warrant that anyone uttering a word of the said verse would follow the author.

  However, his wife, wishing to make a quick ducat out of his misfortune, flogged a few illicit copies and one found itself you know where! The real version goes thus:

  Ye Barmy Barmy Bee,

  What hast thou done to me,

  Thy misdemeanor hast my Queen undone,

  Her flaming hair she’s lost,

  So in the Tower I’m tossed,

  I wonder where the polar bears have gone.

  The last line was coded; alas we will never know what it meant.

  Grace Whitby,

  Derby.

  Ban’jax vt Middle Irish (cf Dineen).

  To hornswoggle, corpse, knacker, rasher,

  caramelize, malafooster, malavogue,

  powfagg, keelhaul, macerate, decimate,

  pulverize, make rawmeish of. Hence

  Banjaxed, reduced to the condition of a

  pig’s breakfast, and Banjaxing, tearing a

  plaster from an hairy leg.