"SAFARI SO-GOODY"

Christopher Biggins used to say that (every bloody week) on the early 1980s children’s game show “On Safari” when I was at an age when I should have known better than to watch it.

I know! Wretched isn’t it?

That game show also introduced the wider viewing public to Gillian Taylforth, so it’s got an awful lot to answer for, but it’s my own fault for daring to venture across to “The Other Side” for my televisual treats instead of sticking to good old “Auntie” like I ought to have done.

The BBC had a far more “respectable” approach to the whole topic of safaris as witnessed by this magazine I found in a box recently, a publication commemorating the “Blue Peter Royal Safari” as taken by the then Princess Anne and Valerie Singleton way, way back in 1971.

Nowadays, I’m sure that WHSmith would use some sort of ghastly bastardisation of the language and refer to it as a “Bookazine” but back then, despite the stiffness of its covers, it was still a plain old-fashioned “magazine” and would have set you back the Princ(ess)ly sum of 30 “new pence” or “six bob” in old money…

We had, after all, only just been “decimalised…”

(Some of us never really got over it…!)

So, is it worth an absolute fortune, now then…?

Sadly not.

AbeBooks have got a couple going for about four quid, so it was hardly an investment, but it was interesting to look through, especially when you get to this page towards the end when you see two young women walking along the seashore in, what might seem to the casual observer, an ever-so-slightly “raunchy” manner and you have to remind yourself just who it is that you’re looking at as they’re strolling along the sand in their swimwear looking as if they haven’t a care in the world.

I nearly “met” Princess Anne once, you know. I did “meet” one of her security officers who didn’t seem all that pleased with me, I can tell you…

I was in Bristol and was trying to get past the theatre where a crowd had gathered and blocked the pavement. Being just a tiny, weeny bit drunk at the time I decided that I wasn’t going to go around the crowd, and I wasn’t going to hang around waiting for it to go away…

No way…!

I was going to go through it…

And I decided to do it just as H.R.H. emerged from the front door of the theatre…

Oh, we can laugh about it now, but at the time it was… perfectly all right, actually…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 5th, 2012 but not published.