Howard's Way

All aboard the Skylark!

Giles appears to be casting aspersions on my choice of DVD, which were seen behind my lead mountain in the post below!

Well, I love Howards Way! It's so eighties! And cheap looking. And always full of scenes of shivering actors trying to pretend the weather is nice!

For readers who were lucky enough to escape this "aspirational" BBC series from the eighties it was all about the boating set in Hampshire in the south of England. The dreadfully wooden Tom was made redundant from his job as an aircraft designer and set up as a boat designer instead working with old-fashioned, drunken, dinosaur boatbuilder Jack and bringing in all sorts of trendy working techniques and practices (A Thatcherite allegory, perhaps) to the disgruntled but forelock tugging local workmen at the Mermaid Boatyard. Tom designed an ugly new racing yacht, the Barracuda, and a local boatbuilder actually put them into production in real life. My father in law sailed one once and said it handled like a brick.

The slimy Ken Masters: look no shirt!

Tom was soon cosying up to Jack's daughter Avril and Tom's wife was soon having an affair with Ken Masters, possibly the slimiest creature ever to grace a BBC series (you could tell he was no good as he liked powerboats instead of sailing yachts and wore jumpers with no shirt on underneath).

Wooden Tom, dreary Lynne and stupid Leo on a nasty plastic boat.

Also involved was Tom's moronic son Leo and daughter the vacuous but outrageously curvy Lynne. Also on the scene was dreary Abby, daughter of local nympho Polly (very much the best thing in the show) and bi-sexual Gerald. Also introduced in series one was oily big businessman Charles Frere who had a Bentley (but the cheap one with the mesh radiator grill not the proper one with the vertical struts). My (then) future father in law, who had a Mulsanne Turbo at the time, was particularly rude about that! Charles was played by Tony Anholt who was always acting at Windsor Theatre whenever I was dragged there by my mother. The actors playing Charles and Lynne ended up married (although not for long).

My father in law kept one of his boats in the Hamble right next to the Elephant Boatyard which was the fictional Mermaid Boatyard in the show. We used to eat in the same pub as in the series!

So Howard's Way is part of my new nostalgia kick caused by being in my fiftieth year! I am getting more nostalgic for things that remind me of when my life was much less complicated: no demanding children, no school fees, no wife getting me to spend £1,000 on three lights, no having to tell stupid foreign government ministers how to sort out their infrastructure and no commuting. Instead a nice comfortable life at home, just starting in the City and spending most of my salary on classed growth claret and weekends with the engagingly voracious and curvy V (who confirmed everything my father had told me about convent girls).

Those were the days. I think I'll go and watch an episode of Bergerac now...