Today I applied to the BBC Drama Writer’s Workshop. If by some freak of fortune I get the gig, I estimate I will have had a different job for every year I’ve been on the planet. Which is rather a disheartening thought considering my main ambition at school was to be a lollipop man - mainly because you didn’t have to start work til you were sixty five. My idea of an ideal career at the age of sixteen was lounging about in a bed-sit playing the banjo and smoking copious amounts of homegrown weed. Which is hardly original, but it was an existence I felt I was ideally qualified for. Apart from the lack of musical talent and gardening skills that is. As Bukowski once observed, my ambition was hampered somewhat by laziness.
Personally, I have never understood the work ethic. It always seemed a bit of a con to me – breaking your neck to essentially make loads of coin for someone else. The eighties were an ideal time for someone of my limited aims. If you were surrounded by like-minded lollers you could easily scrape out an existence on the margins of society. I was on the dole for five years and I loved every single minute of it. It was mint. You could claim for all sorts then – cookers, carpets, fridges, false teeth, curtains, glass eyeballs. I just went without cookers and carpets and spent the money on the proper essentials, like cigarettes, guitar strings and daft hats. You could even claim you were incontinent and get extra money for rubber sheets. Marvellous times.
But I did get jobs, sometimes by accident. In those days the Nat King Cole would make you apply for jobs and if you didn’t play ball they’d stop your fortnightly cheque. The trick was to go through the motions of doing your best to be an upright citizen striving for the golden ticket, but at the same time drop subtle hints to any prospective employer that taking you on would result in their bankruptcy or on-going mental torment. Sometimes this could be done at the coalface itself, i.e., the dole office. One pal of mine, when challenged by the feller who signed him on to “apply for something today, here and now” picked up the phone on the desk, rang directory services, and asked to be put through to Yorkshire Television.
“Is that Emmerdale Farm? Yeah, I was wondering if you needed any extras? Acting experience? No not really, but I’m good at standing around in the background. I think I’d be ideal in the Woolpack. No? Oh, OK then, ta.”
Replaced the receiver and shrugged.
“They don’t need anyone”.
One interview I went for totally threw me for six. It was a job for HM Customs and Excise. The interrogation was a short one, and mainly involved me staring out of the window at a large trawler while an ageing chap in a dandruff dusted tweed jacket shuffled some papers and asked me what my hobbies were and if I’d ever been in trouble with the police. To my absolute astonishment he offered me the job there and then. Of course, I couldn’t decline else me green beer voucher would have been withheld, so I turned up the next morning on King George Dock East and was directed to a draughty pre-fabricated hut, where an obviously pissed up bloke with a nose like a burst blood orange outlined my duties.
“Right.. see these forms here? Split them up into three. Put a tick in that box there, that box there and that box there. Staple each of the three pieces to another three pieces of paper – a green ‘un, a white ‘un and a blue ‘un, here you are, in that box there, look. Then sign your name on the front of each one and put em in three separate files.”
And that was it. I lasted about six months until a mate of mine promised me half his Christmas tips on his window cleaning round. So I left a potentially glittering career in stapling and box ticking to spend freezing cold mornings barking me shins on a ladder and slopping lukewarm water down me sleeve, while foul mouthed Nana’s berated me for corners left un-cleaned
I was never a very good window cleaner, and when the festive season was over I gratefully handed me chamois leather back and resumed a life of blissful indolence.
I did hang on to me stapler though. I thought it best to keep at least one arrow in me quiver.
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