Saturday 19th August
Everton v Watford
So, I think, what with my evident lack of commitment to keeping a diary, amongst other reasons, that I should call these pieces ‘fair weather fan’. Nobody else replied to my mail and so I just sent off for Silver Memberships for Joss and myself (like, not level 2 at all, but level four out of five (after two different platinumns and gold)). Also, I didn’t go to any of the pre-season friendlies, culminating in a 1-1 draw with Inter and a 2-1 win over Chievo Verona, both at the Vic. Today was Watford’s first game in the Premiership for 7 years and I didn’t go. Never really thought about going either, despite at one point thinking about trying to publish this…
Watford’s first ever game in the First Division was against Everton and we won 2-0. My granddad, who’d been in Mount Vernon Hospital for a couple of weeks, died in the morning, but my dad still took me and my younger brother, Trevor, to the game at 3pm. It was 1982. I was 12. Trevor was 9. It was my mother’s father who died. Jim - as we called him - hadn’t lasted 9 months after his wife, nanny - as we called her, Mary, as he did – died on the morning of New Year’s Day. My mum had lost both parents. Trevor and I didn’t go to the funerals.
I didn’t go to today’s game either. Sat at home and spent a lot of time pretending to be doing my dissertation (on The Global Justice Movements and Human Rights, since you ask) but really making various excuses to sit in front of Sky Sports News (at least, normally, with an old copy of New Internationalist in my hand, scanning it for mentions of human rights). It is only Sky Sports News and Sky One that I get on my cable TV. Fortunately for my relationship with Jun, I dislike Murdoch and his transnational right-wing tax dodging corporation too much to pay (directly at least) for anything he profits from. We got a ninetieth minute goal but had already let in two.
I watched highlights later on Match of the Day. One of the two goals was from a penalty awarded for handball after the ball hit Chris Powell (summer signing from Charlton) smack-bang on the forehead. We played well. it was even said that we didn’t deserve to lose. Gotta say it: we wuz robbed.
Tuesday 22nd August
Watford v West Ham
I said I'd be at Kerry's by 6 but get there at 6.45 and my elder sister makes quiche and potatoes and salad. I ask Joss whether he’s going to shout. I have taken him to fifteen games or so in the last four years. This is my main role as uncle. I take my nephews (and maybe a niece one day) to football if they want to go. So far only 3 of the 7 or 9 have taken me up on it. Kerry’s boyfriend Phil offers us the five minute lift to Vicarage Road, which is, unsurprisingly, one of the oldest roads in Watford and led from Watford Church by what is now the High Street down to a few hundred metres away from where Kerry lives on the Hollywell. Watford’s stadium takes its name from the road that no longer quite meets the church, truncated as it was by the ring-road whose construction meant the exhumation of 15 sets of remains.
Joss got involved with all the singing, even to one he didn’t know. I had to show him Aidy Boothroyd’s name in the programme (£3 each) so that he could articulate a little better the next time it came round. We still chorus “Come on you ‘orns” - which is an imperative not a statement of intent - and “We love you Watford, we do” while “Yellow Army” is perhaps over-used but, fortunately, suits my shouting style. Of course I’m mostly a pacifist though I’ve got the YELLOW ARMY mug in yellow on a camouflage-style green background. So: I own 8 mugs, will buy a couple more this year to balance the six (one got smashed about three years ago) from the late 70s and 80s. Tiny bit nerdish, I accept.
To our right and one row in front on the other side of the aisle is a curly haired guy I have seen before from higher up in the stand. He is the type who turns around when singing to gee up the crowd; Watford need more fans like him. The woman sitting directly behind him, however, is not impressed and asks him to stay in his seat. He is fairly restrained in his reply, but when she doesn’t accept what he says, starts off a “Stand up if you love Watford” chant, which is the final word on the subject. I decline to stand, not because she has a right to ask him to sit but because I don’t want to rub her defeat in. Later Curly starts a few good chants and continually ribs the goalie “Caroll, why’ve you got a girl’s name?”, which Joss particularly enjoys.
We are in The Rookery row CC, 3 from the front, seats 103 and 104 – just to the right of the goal as we look at it. We should be in the background of a fair bit of footage this year. Will have to wear my teddy-bear coat (over a shirt?). Joss wore the shirt that I bought him last year. I might buy him a new one (with the 1881 – 2006, “125 years” legend) on Saturday before the match, but I don’t want one with the sponsor on it. I’ve got two shirts: one from 2001, when my nephew Luke came over from Ireland, and we sat in the Rous stand for a few games before he asked to move to the Rookery, where I’ve been ever since, and one retro one (78/79 season, when I started going with my dad) that I bought just before the playoff final. They are both made in the UK, but I have got a red Rookery T-shirt I bought there that was made in Bangladesh. I want to make sure they aren’t sweatshop labour before I buy another. Watford is ‘the family club’ after all. Nobody wants to be wearing something a child has made or a mother who works in the sort of conditions you could read about for the workers on Nike goods.
I never had a shirt as a kid: don’t think it was that common then. I had a few scarves, and of course my mugs (oh, and I’ve still got my moneybox, though it got chipped (after 25 years) last year when Joss and Kerry stayed for the summer (they call it the blame game)).That’s too many brackets for one sentence, or perhaps for one writing style.
After sustained first-half pressure that saw us hit the post but otherwise never really threatened, Watford’s Marlon King scores first, in the second half, with a curling shot from about 30 yards out but we concede within a minute and a half (or so). Concentration. More pressure from us especially, but the game ends 1-1. Next to the aisle, we move as soon as the whistle sounds. On the way out of the stand, Joss says it’s been ages since the last game. The play-off final, he is talking about.
Thursday 24th August
Pardew has (more or less) said we deserved to win. Moyes (less or more) said we didn’t deserve to lose. Boothroyd, in the first of his weekly emails for the season, has said we didn’t deserve anything other than what we got because we didn’t take our chances and we made mistakes. Good bloody point, Betty. Hope you are as clear-sighted throughout the season.
Yesterday I played a colleague, Paul, at squash and as we sat in the pub after he beat me he told me of ‘a spot the difference’ competition in The Guardian earlier in the week: a picture of Chris Powell’s head next to one of his hand. Paul also quoted them referring to us as a ‘gentle’ club. Watch out Premiership big boys, gentle Watford are your next opponents.
Friday 25th August
I’m on a roll: two entries in consecutive days. Well, actually it’s Saturday 1.20 am, but I haven’t been to bed and that’s what counts. Got a phone call today that’s left me with a hypothetical dilemma and that’s excuse enough to go on about myself a bit. Bear with me, it’ll get to Watford.
Had a day off work a few weeks ago to go to an audition for a new quiz show, 1 versus 100, produced by the same company that did the two other auditions I’ve been to, for Beat the Nation and then Deal or No Deal. They were all different but similar and I got onto Beat the Nation and should have cut my losses then.
I am the sort of person who wants to go on TV shows and win money. I should accept this fact so that I can begin to deal with it. Do they have a group for it?
The answer is yes, and it meets whenever someone commissions an idea they buy from someone else who represents someone who saw something similar-ish and changed it a bit and added a couple of things and then has all the money from exclusive rights over the idea less a bit of commission, all of which is paid for by adverts, licence fee or premium rate phone calls See, I know all about it… At both of the last two, the seating was in rows in a hall and I sat by myself. At the first we were round the largest table I’ve ever been at and so I sat between two people. I can’t even remember - three years later - what sex they were.
It’s uncomfortable for me. Not for everyone, though. People really have a good time: what seems like genuine laughter at the main guy’s jokes, enthusiasm for each of the activities we are asked to do, passion when being interviewed on camera. At the 1 versus 100 audition in a SOAS building a 4 minute cycle ride from our Kings Cross flat, there were groups of people who knew each other from Deal or No Deal and others who recognised some of them from the same programme: “How much did you win?”. One woman in front of me as we sat waiting to give a (non-prepared, in my case) interview answered something in the region of forty five or forty seven thousand pounds. She’s still on the circuit.
C.J., who I vaguely recognised from the hundreds of hours I’ve dedicated sitting on my arse in front of TV, and who’s now on Eggheads, was at the same audition in Shepherds Bush for Beat the Nation. Cocky fucker. In a general knowledge raise-your-hands activity he got more questions right than anyone and had to be asked to stop answering so they could judge the rest of us. Another activity was a tell-us-3-things-about-yourself-and-make-at-least-one-of-them-a-lie-and-then-see-if-people-can-work-out-what’s-true-and-what’s-not activity. I was the only one who swore as part of my statement. Sometimes I think I don’t really fit in with polite company well. Anyway, leaving, C.J. (as I know him now) and I were waiting ahead of the pack at the lift to go down. I tried to make small talk and he condescended. Tut, tut.
This is getting long, innit? I’m gonna cut to the Watford related thing and then maybe write a bit more about my game-show auditions, applications and appearance. That way you can just go from after the football bit to tomorrow’s entry about the Man U at home game, if you want to...
‘Bianca’ rang me and asked whether I’d be available to take part in a pilot (she told me what that was, like I hadn’t seen Pulp Fiction) and that my expenses for my train journey to Wembley would be paid. 9th September (Bolton away). She said it wouldn’t rule me out of getting onto the show when it was filmed. OK, I agreed. Reckon I can live without the Bolton game. Then she told me that filming for the show proper is the following weekend, 15th-17th. We play Aston Villa at home, Sat 16th 5.15 - must be on Sky. I can’t miss the home game, though, especially now I am trying to come to terms with my irrational interest in winning money on game shows. I will put my foot down. I can live with ‘fair weather fan’, ‘never-bloody-goes fan’ is not good.
That was your cue. Jump ahead to tomorrow (ok, later today, pedant) if you want footie chat. I’ve done the whole related-to-football thing. Now I’m back on my Endemol experiences. This is not so much a diary as a memoir until I do a bit more supporting and a bit less drinking and smoking and then turning the computer on. Let’s start at the very beginning, as Maria said. I saw an ad in Metro classifieds (I’m an English teacher in London, I’m always looking) that invited emails to apply to be on a new quiz show. An application form embellished and a few weeks later I was at the audition and some time after that I got a call asking me to go to Nottingham to take part in the show. No black T-shirts.
Jun didn’t come: wasn’t allowed to come to the studio. I went up on a Thursday night, was put up in a hotel and given a taxi-ride there on Friday morning. Green Room: curly sandwiches and my opponents. Watch a pilot: get the idea. Make up: I am told how good my skin is.
Cue game. Foundational idea: questions score points correlating to the percentage of British people who don’t know the answer. Three rounds that each whittle down the number by one and a final against the clock (and the nation). I beat my opponents but don’t beat the nation. I have to come back. People who ‘lost’ and subsequently left won £100. I have won nothing. Go home and come back for the same routine Sunday night and first thing Monday morning with exactly the same result. By this time, I’ve almost managed banter with Tim Brooke Taylor. Finally, in my third show, I am beaten in the third round and get a question right to leave with a hundred pounds. I have lost more than that in wages and it was excruciating.
I didn’t learn my lesson. When I got an email inviting me to apply for a new show that didn’t appear to include trivia, I convinced myself Dare or No Dare was a sort of British Fear Factor. I was well up for it. It was only at the audition that I realised I’d been getting the name wrong despite the number of forms I’d filled in. It wasn’t about ‘daring’ at all. Anyway, I can’t remember much about the interview but the enthusiasm required for the activity (spinning a piece of card) was out of all proportion to its appeal. They never got back to me about that one.
I still hadn’t learned my lesson. But: I will not go the pilot and I will only go to the filming for the show if it doesn’t clash with the Villa match. I am recovering.
We did most of our actions together and kept each other posted on football scores whenever one of us went to an internet café. It is probably no coincidence that it was after he left that I got myself arrested (although we should not downplay the role of the police, who were worse than any soldiers we confronted).
Next thing I know there are four of them bundling me into a van and for some reason I was the only one of the six or seven in there to be handcuffed (behind my back). After we were driven to the police station, they got each of us in head locks and rushed us inside. The scum policeman in front of me was punching the anarchist he had headlocked in the face and fortunately for me, my assailant was more interested in kicking out at the same Israeli activist than he was at ruining my good looks (the Israeli suffered a broken nose and was later taken to hospital). 
