It may seem peculiar that I should associate the hot, slippery dribble of melted butter through a toasted crumpet with the slap and grunt of large men in Technicolor body stockings slamming into each other, but that's what happens when you are the son of a professional wrestling fanatic.
My father Des was not exactly your average wrestling aficionado. An actor early in his career, he had - still has, as a matter of fact - a neatly trimmed beard that was more Velázquez than Giant Haystacks and had also been a fencer, revelling in the finesse and slice of the rapier, which was about as far from the heave-ho of wrestling as you could get. But love it he did, the more so after he attended a live event and was thrilled to see an old lady so swept up in the proceedings that she attacked one of the competitors with her umbrella.
Des was a sociable chap who didn't like to indulge alone. And so on Saturday afternoons in the mid-70s we three children would crowd onto the sofa in the living room of our North Wembley home for ITV's World of Sport. To be honest, I didn't take much convincing. It wasn't the bouts. Entertaining though they were to me, they mostly looked peculiar (especially when I learned that Big Daddy's real first name was Shirely).
It was the promise of afternoon tea, prepared by my mother. It was the slices of dark, sticky malt loaf with the smear of cold salted butter. It was the platter of cream cakes, once my father had nabbed the chocolate éclair. And it was the crumpets, with their crisp toasted shells and their miraculous mattress-sprung innards and the treachery of the melted butter which could easily end up on your shirt.
We would stuff our faces, then stuff our faces some more and shout at whomsoever we deemed to be today's baddie, taking our cue from our dad. He was no fool. He knew it was staged, a complete fix, but he adored the effort to which everyone went to pretend otherwise.
Eating in front of the television in our house was a guilty pleasure, for food was meant to be taken at the table. Mealtimes were about noise and banter, the conversational one-upmanship of gregarious Jews. If we ate in front of the television it meant we were no longer, each of us, the focus of attention, and so it had to be justified. In my memory, therefore, it was only called for if certain programmes were on.
Outside of World of Sport there was obviously Dr Who, starring Jon Pertwee (all other doctors were mere pale imitations of the real thing, who were trying to pass themselves off as him). Then there was the self-conscious jollity of Saturday early-evening telly, Brucie in The Generation Game for the winter months and in the summer the British rounds of It's a Knockout, with Stuart Hall's "I'm going to wet myself" laugh.
To accompany this there was only one possible dish: fish and chips brought in from Louis's in South Harrow, though my brother and I never ordered the fish, insisting their best dish was actually the spare ribs, which were roasted and then deep fried and were a worrying shade of orange.
As a result, eating was a hands-only job. Much cutlery would be brought into the living room only to be returned to the kitchen as "thankgods" (short for "Thank God they're clean and don't need washing up". My family thought this shared slang was utterly hilarious. I realise now it wasn't).
Curiously, there was one thing that we never ate in front of or, should I say, one person, and that was my mother. The 70s was when Claire came to prominence and her television appearances, be they on her various advice series, on her vegetarian cookery show, or turning up for guest spots on Nationwide and the like were frankly so numerous that we quickly became blasé about them.
Wrestlers in body stockings? Why of course. Dr Who in mortal combat with the Daleks? Naturally. Claire Rayner, holding forth on the nation's sexual health? Less of an aid to the digestion, to be honest, and certainly not worthy of a TV dinner. Sorry, Mum.
