Vincent “Hangman” Price

On a recent sojourn in Carlisle, I was browsing the shops like the pavement-walking, job-dodging, gum-chewing cad that I am. In one particularly well-known charity shop I came across this little curio:

I did an actual double take. I looked then had to look again. Is that… was that… THE Vincent Price on the front of a board game?

As it happens it is and I wasn’t just having a fever dream, although the fever dreams I have had never involved old horror movie stars.

This was the 1970’s and it seems as though someone thought it a good idea of turning a game you can play with a piece of paper and a pen for free into a game involving an elaborate piece of plastic and trying to charge punters for the benefit.

I couldn’t bring myself to part with the money just to own this tiny piece of history. Did Vincent Price love Hangman that much or was it all for the big, big, shiny cheque handed to him by MB Games? Who knows. The next time you’re trying to guess what the nine letter word is that has four s’s in, think about Vincent and his “classic American game for two”.

Playdays – The Extended Edition

During the 1990’s children all over the UK were enthralled and entertained by ‘Playdays’, a pre-school television programme by the BBC. I was an addict and I would happily sit and watch as many and as much of it as I could. It was before the days of binge watching, or box set binging. You could say that I was, once again, way ahead of my time. It was short and it had lots of colours and silly people in it. I’m sure there was some sort of lesson or hidden educational agenda tucked away between Dave Benson Phillips and a series of puppets; for me though it just wasn’t getting through.

There was a particular stop for each day, so on Mondays you were treated to the Why Bird Stop, which had a multi-coloured Scouser bird who erm flapped about a bit. On Tuesdays it was the Playground Stop, possibly involving a playground. And so on. The BBC had to keep everything light and fluffy.

Recently a document has been uncovered which reveals another five days worth of stops which were considered but never used during the scheduled programming. Here, in atypical and popular list Beans format, are those alternative stops:

The Ice Cube Stop – rapper Ice Cube lives in a igloo made of ice. He encounters problems as he struggles to cope in a harsh, desolate environment. Sometimes he has to fight a polar bear. Sometimes his food rationing makes him pale and illegible. He raps to pass the time, teaching children about why living so far from human civilisation is such as bad idea.

The Cushion Fortress Stop – Emily built a cushion fortress in the middle of her parent’s house and refuses to take it down. The fortress has stood for 167 days straight, blocking her parents’ view of the television, getting in the way of her brothers trying to study for their GCSEs. Her wacky friend Rodross, a mop with a banana for a nose, sings to her and they learn about wildlife in the back garden, where the fortress is beginning to infringe upon.

The Tiny Shop Stop – Tina and Lloyd run a shop in Cheam, but it’s no ordinary shop. It’s a shop where they only sell really small items such as paper clips, washers and single strands of cous cous. If someone comes in asking for anything bigger than a pen lid they blow the magic horn and Dunlop, a flying burglar, flattens them with a series of heavy rocks.

The Undisclosed Medicine Stop – Woofers, a dog puppet, is the most helpful animal you’ll ever meet. Sometimes he comes across unusual plastic containers on the floor, leftover prescriptions that have been lost by people during their busy lives. Woofers takes the medicine to see what it is, and the children watching get to observe what certain drugs will do to you without any proper intervention.

The Ravi Shankar Stop – it’s a collection of relaxed people sat on futons listening to a full hour of Indian music. People are encouraged to meditate, gaze thoughtfully at the sunrise or just talk quietly in the background. Instruments are scattered around for anyone wanting to join in.

It would have been interesting to see how this week would have panned out. All we are left with is the idea of what could have been. If only the BBC hadn’t cancelled ‘Playdays’ in 1997. Ah Poppy Cat, where are you now?

Beans Flashback

There have been no posts to the Beans since the start of April, and it’s the 20th now. What does that tell us? Well, clearly, it indicates that there is nothing of any interest happening this month.

Instead, let us take this opportunity to look back at early 2007 and ask ourselves what was happening on this day in Beans History.

It was in April 2007 that Chris Industries International Ltd. was sold to Richard Branson and became Virgin Petcare. There was controversy over the choice of kestrel as word of the week. And the Saint King thrust himself upon a world that did not yet know his taste for underhanded deceit.

But April 2007 was rather a quiet month on the Beans, and that was because we were all still reeling from the release of a video that I thought I’d lost completely. It turns out I do still have one shoddy, over-compressed version that I am going to post here. Ladies and gentlemen, celebrating its tenth anniversary, I present Seeing Not Doing.

Logical Dreamscape: Bowie Flashback special

It’s a year since David Bowie himself – best known as a regular guest on daytime TV series Essex Highway, of course – passed away. To mark the anniversary, let’s look back now on one of the most poignant and touching parts of his life, which is when he appeared in my dream a few years ago.

(harp music, screen goes wibbly)

It all started when I was driving a caravan around a giant campsite. We were trying to find somewhere to set up camp for the night, but most places were full and everyone was sitting outside their tents and caravans having dinner. Eventually I ended up accidentally leaving by a back gate that wasn’t for public use. I drove under a very low railway bridge – which luckily the caravan fitted through – and then went the wrong way around a roundabout to turn around.

I must have eventually got the caravan parked up because the next thing I remember is being at some sort of communal dining table – a big, long, wooden table with people sitting down both sides of it. The atmosphere was like a cross between a picnic and a viking feast. The table was in a long wooden building and it was dark outside. To my surprise, I was sitting next to David Bowie.

There was a lot of food on the table and people were passing plates around and helping themselves to all the lovely food on offer. I served myself a modest plateful, as did most people, but to my surprise Bowie reached across me to a plate piled high with thick slices of ham and helped himself to almost all of it, heaping his plate with lots and lots of ham.

I thought it was very rude that he would selfishly take so much ham for himself, but obviously I didn’t say anything, because he was David Bowie.

(harp music again, screen goes wibbly)

It has to be one of the best dreams I’ve ever had, hands down. It had it all: the feeling of being on holiday, a musician I hold in high regard, and of course an opportunity to go the wrong way around a roundabout. I hope you’ve all enjoyed sharing in this experience as much as I have.

A taste of Scotland

Where’s this guy been? He’s been taking a month off, is the answer, choosing to suffer the ignominy of a nasty dried pea on the Bean Counter for the sake of enjoying a month free of the obligations of blogging and commenting. Those arduous tasks take their toll on a man, even one as handsome as me, and a few weeks away from it make all the difference. I’m back now, fully recharged and ready to write more glittering blog jewels.

If you want a more literal answer to the question “where’s this guy been?”, then the answer is Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a city in Scotland, famous for the coldness of the weather, the vivid orange of the Irn Bru, the fakeness of the tartan sold in tourist shops and the whisky. The other thing it’s famous for is its castle, an amazing fortress sitting high atop a rocky mountain in the centre of the city, and though few believed me when I told them, it is made entirely of whisky.

I tasted it, and it was delicious. Then I went home. #tastinghistory #edinburghmems

Things On My Desk: 2016 edition

Over the years, the Beans Massive have been careful and diligent in keeping each other informed about items on their respective desks. In 2008, Kev produced an inventory of items on his desk, which was turned into an informative pie chart, and then in 2011 I itemised the objects on my work surface.

More than five years have elapsed since the last update, so it is high time we found out what is now on my desk.

As of 13:57 BST today, the following list is accurate:

Two phones and two mobile telephones
A massive old fashioned sellotape dispenser that weighs a ton
A desk tidy, containing seven biros, three orphaned biro lids, four pairs of scissors and a hoop of white rubber foam with no known purpose
A cafetière, with damp coffee grounds at the bottom
A dispensing tub of antibacterial Azowipes
A remote control with a bit of paper sellotaped to it that reads “RR”
A blue folder containing lots of disorganised bits of paper, open at a page with today’s date on and a note that says “TOMORROW aft ed no” and another one that says “Matt regions”.
A dirty sheet of paper with lots of small writing, titled “Thirteen years and not so unlucky”
A red whiteboard marker
A manual for a laminating machine
A roll of sticky paper tape
My sleeves

In memory of Dick the Brick

We all remember Bert Papps. What a guy he was – but we’ve talked about him enough.

It’s high time we looked back at the life of another modern hero, one who few of us remember but whose life is charted in a thousand minor local newspaper reports of the late twentieth century. I’m talking, of course, about Dick the Brick.

I have to admit that I had never heard of this remarkable chap until recently, but a search of the Sutton and Cheam Gazette archives tells me that on four occasions – in 1964, 1972, 1980 and 1991 – he was drafted in by the Metropolitan Police as a medium and successfully used spirit guides to help detectives prosecute people who had been dumping trolleys in the canal.

Did Dick the Brick ever turn up in your local paper? Let’s unearth some more of his incredible life.

Fracking History: the Georgians

Hello and welcome to another edition of Fracking History, the top-rated infotainment docuhistoriography show here on Beans TV.

In this week’s episode, we’re going to be seeing what we can learn about the Georgians. We begin by drilling vertically downwards some 212 metres into the past, and then turn the drill head horizontally to push through a layer of sediment composed mainly of the late Qing Dynasty until we locate a rich seam of Georgian history.

Our loud, highly destructive machinery now begins pumping a mixture of water, sand and polyacrylamide into history at extremely high pressure. The delay while we wait for results is extremely tense, with our resident geophysical historian, Dr. Cornward Habsburg, nervously checking over his valves and dials. Eventually a thin, dark-coloured liquid begins seeping from the outlet valve, and we have our very first sample of the Georgian era.

What does it tell us about the aristocracy and the ordinary people of Britain in the eighteenth century?

Dr. Habsburg adds a few drops of hydrochloric acid to a sample of the liquid and places it in a centrifuge at a controlled temperature of 76° celsius. The resulting dark residue is then inspected under a microscope.

It reveals Georgian society in all its debauched, vulgar glory. The presence of particularly high levels of carbon nitrates can only be a result of the deeply unpopular Prince Regent openly enjoying affairs with a number of high society women and the early development of the gutter press in the form of short pamphlets and magazines printing salacious gossip.

It’s been a fascinating journey to an important point in Britain’s history and has brought to rich, vivid life a chapter of the past that can be so difficult to accurately reconstruct today. But all good things must come to an end. Join us next time on Fracking History when we’ll be using the latest hydraulic hammer drilling technology to break through a seam of solid, compacted Dark Ages to begin extracting parts of the early Roman era. Until then, goodbye.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Historical