Skip to main content

Walford in mourning

The death of Mike Reid - former stuntman, comedian and star of BBC TV's Eastenders - deprives British popular culture of one of its last genuine cockney accents. And when I say genuine, I do expect you to be rhyming it with bottle of wine.

Having lived in London all my life, I'm very conscious of changing accents. Face now rhymes with Miss rather than Vice, which is all rather confusing. To hear people talking like the late Mike Reid, you need to head out to the Essex caravan parks around Clacton or maybe play a round of golf on the Costas. You just ain't gonna 'ear it darn the Ole Kent Road, my son.

I can't help having this image of Walford recreated beyond the Pearly Gates. St Peter is, at this very moment, slapping Frank Butcher on the back and challenging him to a game of arrers down the rub-a-dub. "You're a bleeding saint, you are. Go on, mate. Watchu 'avin? Pint of bitter?"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

When one name isn't enough

You may have heard the news reports about the turmoil in Kingston, Jamaica, resulting from the government's attempts to pin down a notorious drug lord on behalf of the US. I was struck by the number of self-styled monikers this guy has given himself. He is, depending on the channel you listen to, known on the street as 'Dudas', 'The Big Man' and 'The President' - worshipped by many impoverished Kingston residents as a benefactor to slum dwellers. It's his real name that seems most appropriate, however. If you were a drug baron called Christopher Coke, wouldn't you leave it at that? It's certainly not a name to be sniffed at.

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...