It's not over till the final whistle

[vin_petrol]

Never give up hope...

Friday night I stayed in, ate pizza and watched trash TV (the last thing being somewhat unusual for me). Highlight of the evening was finding "The Sweeney 2" on Channel Five. What a fantastic example of the 1970s that was! Sadly, the two Sweeney films do lack that amazing theme tune. However, we did get plenty of terrifying 70s clothing, swearing, drinking, smoking, shotguns, blaggers on Regan's manor, 70s cars with rubbish suspension squealing round corners, breasts, sexist behaviour, beer guts, etc. The vegetarian tee-total character was presented as an absolute weirdo. Ooh, I had forgotten quite how great/awful The Sweeney was. I'll have to see if any satellite channel is showing it.

Saturday I was off to the Boro to see them play Leicester City. Now, I originally come from Leicester, and ended up as a Boro supporter by very unusual circumstances (basically, Trash got me into football). One of the first Boro games I ever went to was a 6-0 demolition of Leicester City in 1990. However, my dad is still an *extremely* casual Leicester supporter, i.e. when I spoke to him a few days ago he didn't even know Boro were playing Leicester on Saturday). He would waste no time in ringing me up to take the piss should Boro lose.

Boro's first goal came from something I always like to see strikers do: charge down the keeper. It's hard work for a forward doing this all the time (bah! they're paid enough), but sooner or later a keeper gets flustered and kicks it really badly. Walker kicks his Clarence straight into Job, and it rebounds to Juninho, who slots it onto the net. Lovely!

Boro played very poorly in the second half (Job missed a penalty - arrgh), and let Leicester score three goals. The score was Boro 1, Leicester 3 as the 90th minute started and the fourth official indicated two minutes off added time. I needed a slash, so deciding that Boro were doomed I wandered off to the toilet to avoid the post-final-whistle crush. BORO SCORED! So it was now 2-3. It was at this point I was struck by an amazing thought. Clearly, if I stood where I was on the concourse, Boro would be bound to score again 'cos I would miss it. If I returned to my seat, they wouldn't score 'cos I was there. Realising that a draw would make so many people happy, and that point could mean a lot to a crap team like the Boro, I decided to exercise this football hoodoo. I carefully stood my ground in the concourse for another minute. BORO SCORED AGAIN! Grasping a draw from the jaws of defeat, the match finished 3-3 and Boro got a point. I like to think it was all my doing.

Off course, the problem now is I'll have to stand on the concourse for all matches. I suspect this hoodoo only works in stoppage time when a single goal is needed. I'm sure I'll get the chance to try it again sometime.

Saturday night was The Wendy House, where I saw lots of interesting people and danced to lots of nice music. everild made it there for the first time in ages. She was driving, and left a little earlier than miss_wonderly and I were used to. She sent road_runner to fetch us from the bleepy room, and we went all "awww, just five more minutes, please, aww, go on..." like naughty children and pouted at her :-)

Sunday I was sorting out my books for the ongoing re-location of the Male Bits Room. A whole stack of magazines went for recycling, and some will be going on e-bay. I'm even getting rid of some books! I decided that my collection of Sven Hassel books belong to a younger Vin, who reveled in his gory descriptions of World War II. They're not the sort of thing I'm likely to read again. I've kept one (Monte Cassino) as it's actually signed by him - my dad met him in the 70s.

Comments

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

Granada Plus used to have The Sweeney on near-infinite repeat a few years back.

I've got the two movies on video, and six episodes plus the pilot "Regan!" on DVD - I understand that the whole series is becoming available on DVD now.


And you know - in the pilot, Regan's first line was "Get your traaahsers on, YOU ARE NICKED!".

[vin_petrol]

six episodes plus the pilot "Regan!" on DVD

Oooh... I might have to ask nicely to borrow this off you. When watching The Sweeney the other night, it occurred to me that you're getting to watch *two* things, if you see what I mean:

1) The program itself, with its plot, acting, dialogue, etc.
2) an example of *how* programs were made in that era - with different ideas about what could and could not be shown. Hence, less swearing, blood and nudity, but lots more booze, fags, simplistic racist/sexist behaviour, etc.

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

The Sweeney is very important in the history of British TV production - partly because they adopted a lot of techniques that modern action/adventure drama series do - several small crews out shooting mostly on location. Compare the pace of it to other 70s cop shows, it's far faster, there's far more action, a lot of the storytelling is done implicitly or on the run, and it's really the first British cop show that explores the background of the "heroes"...

It wasn't the first British show to get away from the Dixon of Dock Green morality - Special Branch was close, but the cops in that were still glamorous playboys, not two ale-suppers in anoraks. ;)

Vital stuff.

[resyk.livejournal.com]

Sweeney was good, but I have been watching some of the Minder repeats on paramount recently - and that is class.

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

Minder blew a bit hot and cold. Took about half the first series to work out what it was doing, then became magnificent. There was a series somewhere round the middle when Leon Griffiths had a stroke and couldn't write (or indeed speak or anything) and it's a bit patchy. Then it was superb until Denis Waterman started looking a bit old and flabby and he and Cole kept saying each series would be the last - but I really though that Gary Webster was a breath of fresh air, and in particular his first season was superb.

[(Anonymous)]

You can't get rid of the Sven Hassel books - they are classic. I learnt all about douche bags from those books.

[vin_petrol]

You can't get rid of the Sven Hassel books - they are classic.

To an extent, you're absolutely right. There's certainly nothing else like them! :-) I am keeping *one* though, which I can refer to if I ever want to recall the unique writing style of Mr Hassel.

I'm not really getting rid of them though. Someone has already requested them, and the collection will be going to that person.

Have you ever seen "Peter Rabbit Tank Killer"?

http://www.metrowargamers.com/articles/Peter/peter_intro.htm

[(Anonymous)]

er no I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Although I did see Underworld last night which is your kind of film, lots of vampire things. And guess what. It was a load of crap!!