Saturdays with Dickie, Shirley and Mick

 

 

This was the shape of Saturdays for a big slice of my childhood. Only the pointy bit changed when ITV scrapped, U.F.O, their very cool Sci-Fi series and replaced it with their equally cool Sci-Fi series, Space 1999. And this pyramid of warm memories had been on ice until the death last week of wrestler, Mick McManus, reheated them.

I remember that as the top of the day whizzed by, the closing credits of Gerry and Silvia Anderson’s space-age epics signalled the approach of the infinite: World of Sport. It hovered over the day casting a big fat shadow that stretched from 12.30 to gone 5 and if you weren’t that interested in sports (as I wasn’t back then except the Big Occasions; the FA Cup Final; the Grand National and so on) it left you with a black hole to fill until 4pm, because that was when the curtain went up on the biggest piece of fiction of all: the wrestling.

The Partridge-esque titled, World of Sport, was fronted by Dickie Davies, a dapper chap sporting a Jason King-like moustache, bouffant ‘Mallen’-streaked hair and his signature fat-knotted kipper tie. The set was a gloriously un-PC collection of ‘dolly birds’ all tapping away at IBM Selectric typewriters, who stopped only occasionally to hand an efficiently removed piece of paper to one of the Pringle-clad blokes who always seemed to be wandering around as if looking for their car keys.

If you put a photo of him in front of me I wouldn’t be able to identify Ken Walton, but his voice is as familiar to me as my own. “Good afternoon, grapple fans.” He was the ‘voice of wrestling’: the bloke with the mic by the ropes. Even back then I had realised that wrestling was acting in trunks, but my Gran hadn't. She like many other grans took it all very seriously indeed. There were good guys and bad guys, it was both moralistic and entertaining and I think that was what she liked about it. You could take sides. Mick McManus was most definitely the bad guy and Big Daddy (the improbably named, Shirley Crabtree) was the good guy. Of course there were others, but those two, Ken Walton, her boos and hisses and the rustle of the gold paper wrappers of her Callard & Bowser butterscotch form the soundtrack to those Saturdays.

Your best memories are the things you can’t remember, until someone or something reminds you. So thanks Mick.