The Toothpaste Saga

      30/8/2017       Next-->

I wonder how many years of my life I have wasted - in squeezing the last blob out of the toothpaste tube I hate to think that I am OCD but probably bordering on it!! I can squeeze that dang thing until my fingers hurt!!

For my sins I share the toothpaste with HeeHoo who is my exact opposite when it comes to squeezing!! In fact he squeezes the tube in all the wrong places leaving me exasperated.

I will always remember a TV quiz show I undertook with, I think, Bob Nixon. I was the scorer and he was the quiz master. It was something along the lines of 'Know your Partner' it had some banal name and the couples had to answer independent questions about their partner. It was hilarious with some intimate bedroom secrets sometimes being inadvertently shared !!

One of the inane questions I will always remember if 'Which end do you squeeze The Top the Middle or the Bottom ' Well you can imagine the couples' embarrassment until they found out that it was
'which end of the toothpaste tube '

Now I am a bottom squeezer and HeeHoo is an indiscriminate middle squeezer - Sigh!!!

On that particular show I was the lowly scorer and had very little to do except to try and look glamorous, keep score, and draw the lucky winner for the evening.!!
Back in the good old days we had a newspaper critique who used to comment, scathingly normally, on the local TV shows, I remember Martin Lee and dear Michael Bullivant who stood in occasionally, if my memory serves me correctly.

I think it was the indefatigable Michael who said of the show, and I quote ' The talkative scorer infuriates me by looking at the winner before handing it to the quizmaster' Humpf Michael !! The column in the Chronicle was called 'Cabbages and Kings' and an ardent contributor to 'Letters to the Editor' was the amazing Neil Dacomb!!

Another Thespian was Brian Meikle who was not as extensive in his vocabulary as Michael Bullivant but whose knowledge of the English language was inexhaustible !! Brian married Shelagh Meikle, also of show business fame, Shelagh was part of that famous stage lighting duo Jean Garret and Shelagh Meikle whose brilliant lighting, with limited equipment, worked wondrous magic on the Bulawayo Theatre stage.

Sadly Shelagh died earlier this month which brings to mind another dear colleague of mine, who has also passed onto a better world - Dave Emberton, possibly the longest running broadcaster ever with RTV/ZBC. Dave and I hosted a show way back in the late seventies called 'Double Deal'. It was so awful that RTV never renewed our contract for a further 13 weeks, it was a dubious magazine show about which I still shudder to this day!! Dave and I also co-hosted many hundreds of broadcasts as News Anchors on RhodesiaTelevision before the closure of the Montrose Television Studios in the seventies.

Ah well, these hapless musings, must get back to squeezing out that toothpaste tube!!