I’ve mentioned recently that I used to play truant an awful lot. Until, one day, as with all such enterprises, I pushed it too far, and the events of just two hours saw the end of my truanting career. Me and my mates had bunked off school, acquired the standard early 80s bunking-off kit of 20 Embassy Regals, cider, and two dodgy videos (my mate Kev’s dad ran the local newsagent-cum-video shop, and had a wide range of exotic material under the counter.) As my parents were both at work until late our house was the usual venue in which we’d lie low, smoking, drinking, lying outrageously about our sexual exploits (we were 15 so all lying outrageously) and watching illicit vids. Anyway, we’d sat through Driller Killer, which we all agreed without any sense of irony was boring, and put the other one on.
Approximately seventeen minutes into Swedish Sex Kitten, the VCR started making a noise. That noise. The noise everyone who ever used a video cassette recorder knew and dreaded. The tape was jammed. Now, this was about 1982. Video Cassette Recorders were huge and silver like an expensive suitcase, and top-loaders. I leapt off the sofa, dived across the nylon carpet (severely burning my elbows and nose en-route) and hit the stop button. The noise stopped. Tentatively I pressed the eject button.
Nothing.
I pressed it again. A whirr, a clunk, a whirr… nothing. The carrier stayed resolutely still. I could see through the perspex – the tape had unravelled and knackered the machine. Short of crowbarring it out, there was no way of retrieving the unspooled grumble-vid and returning it to beneath Kev’s dad’s counter before he noticed it had gone, let alone realised it was wrecked. Kev was understandably a bit miffed by this, and in his merrily cidered-state kept mentioning it every twenty seconds. I had graver issues to consider. In those days VCRs cost more than a Ferrari, and so like most people we hired it from Radio Rentals. If anything went wrong, we had to call them to deal with it. It was, by now, nearly 3.30. My mum would be home in two hours. The machine was set to record Neighbours in 90 minutes – this meant I had about an hour to get the man from Radio Rentals out to extract the bongo movie so I could get the old E180 in there, Neighbours would be taped, Mother would come home and be none the wiser.
I rang Radio Rentals. The engineer was out, but he rang in regularly so the receptionist would tell him to come to ours. Kev and I occupied our time scurrying about destroying ancilliary evidence – fag-ends, empty cans – looking with escalating panic at the clock.
Five o’clock came. Five o’clock went.
At last, the doorbell rang. Kev got there almost horizontally in less than a second.
“Oh, thank fuck mate!!” I said to the figure as it came into the living room.
“I beg your pardon??” said my mum. She was home early. She’d forgotten her keys. With her was the engineer. He asked what the urgent problem was.
For possibly the first time in my life, I couldn’t actually say anything, apart from “Erm..” and “tape…” and some dubious pointing. I then had to sit there, with my mum, whilst the bloke extracted Swedish Sex Kitten, looked at it, raised his eyebrows and handed it to her.
She then looked at it. She looked at me. She looked at it again, and went to say something… when at that second – literally – the school rang to tell her I’d vanished after lunch.
It was a very, very long evening. I didn’t do it again.
theoneandonlystuneville 