While I remember,
here's a photo of the painting that looks like my dad. Check out his interview on the Headmaster's Son DVD to see how correct I am.
The four day break has done me good and I was fresh and full of beans for this morning's Collins and Herring show on 6Music and Andrew was less grumpy than he has been on late and we had a whole lot of fun. I had been correct in thinking things that people ate when they were kids would be a fun text the station, but I had no idea just how much fun. My love of drinking chocolate powder and raw Oxo cubes would seem pedestrian compared to the rest of the nation. And especially to Collins himself, who it turned out ate soot out of the chimney and dust off the bottom of his shoes. It explains a whole lot about the way he has turned out. It was a tough life in Northampton in the 1970s and clearly with its chimney sweeps and children eating carbonised dirt it was more like the 1870s for the rest of the country. His memories of the sweep pushing his brush out the top of the flue shooting a cloud of delicious chimney jism into the air had strangely sexual connotations and has probably, I imagine, led to all kinds of perversions and peccadilloes. I don't want to think about it. Oh dear I just thought about it.
We learned much more about him though. As a child he also had a ladybird dressing gown, where the buttons were ladybirds and he could hold them in his tiny soot covered hand and pretend he was holding a ladybird. I teased him a little but he defended himself, saying it was OK for a boy to have a ladybird dressing gown. When Lucy from the production team said she had a ladybird dressing gown too, Andrew felt vindicated, but Alicia the producer pointed out that she was a girl. Poor confused, soot covered, ladybird loving tiny Andrew Collings. That colourful ladybird was maybe the only thing in Northampton not covered in a film of muck.
I think I will have to start calling him Cinders. Collings certainly is the comedy gift who keeps giving. Who knows what other secrets he is going to reveal?
Then again, I can't really talk, as I later skirted around some of the issues involving Ally and Sally the ventriloquist dummies that my Methodist minister, temperance society fan great grandad made and which were bequeathed to me and which were used by the opera director Stewart Lee in an unconventional manner, which I imagine my great grandad would not have anticipated. Lee claims that the incident means I can now only be aroused by ventriloquist puppets.
Perhaps Collings and I deserve each other. Although if there is ever a chimney sweep ventriloquist dummy then we will have to fight over it or make it the filling in a Collings and Herrin sandwich.
But the listeners' childhood treats were almost as strange as Andrew's and it's worth having a listen
on iPlayer where there are a few Herringy treats for you, (alas the episode of Genius has just been taken down, but Objective has been riding high in the radio charts on there) or subscribe on iTunes for the podcast highlights!
