Читать книгу The Men Commandments - Christian O’Connell - Страница 35

By the turn of the twentieth century, we had become the Chelsea of the day. No one liked us and everybody wanted to beat us at home.

The terrible wars defined these times, but I need to draw attention to something without which we wouldn’t be who we are today. Something came along that is possibly the greatest gift man history ever got. No, not fishnet tights.

The television was invented. As the sage Homer Simpson says: ‘TV, teacher, mother, secret lover.’

Thanks to John Logie Baird, we now had an excuse not to talk in the house. On 2 October 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture. It was the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy nicknamed ‘Stooky Bill’. Shame he had to ruin the moment with a ventriloquist act but he was Scottish and we should be grateful he didn’t put the thing in a deep-fat fryer and batter it. He needed another man to help him achieve this remarkable feat and Baird went downstairs and fetched an office worker, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like.

Taynton became the first person to be televised. I would imagine that when Baird showed this moving image and face, another first was born: ‘Is this all that’s on?’ was said for the first time.

So here’s to John Logie Baird, giving men another long-lasting relationship in their lives. Maybe the biggest since being introduced to fire or to the wheel. Neither of those two could give us Going for Gold or Wacky Races though.

You could sum up the Second World War as a pub car park fight. Just when you thought it was finished, everyone had taken a beating and the bouncers had broken it up, someone makes a snide remark and it all kicks off again.

Luckily for men all over the world, Hitler and the Third Reich were resoundingly kicked into submission. Obviously if he had won it would have been bad for the simple reason that he was a horrible dictator hell bent on world domination and also wanted to wipe out quite a few races on the way. Hitler was also a teetotal vegetarian.

With war off the menu for a bit, men had time to breathe a sigh of relief and push new boundaries and do something other than kill each other. Like get back to the important man business of trying to have sex. One of the big changes after the war was the wide-scale availability of the contraceptive pill. The very idea of consequence-free sex is the holy grail for men. The rhythm method was never perfect for a man: as its name suggests, it’s reliant on the very thing men don’t have. Rhythm. Men cannot dance.

During the fifties one of the most essential things for life was developed: rock and roll. Sure, rock copied from the blues and so began a lifetime of thievery in rock and roll. One thing’s for sure, if Elvis Presley hadn’t been invented the world would have been a poorer place. We would never have known about the joys of fried peanut butter sandwiches. Somewhere along the way Kenny Loggins sat down and penned ‘Footloose’. History thanks all of rock’s Kennys: Loggins and Rogers.

Men now had another way to try and get laid. By forming bands. Singers may bang on about alienation and being disaffected but, come on, no one starts a band so spotty kids can like them. If you couldn’t impress the girls at school by getting in the football team the alternative was being in a band. And maybe it’s best those two never mix. Music and football are never a pretty combination. Apart from John Barnes’s rap on ‘World In Motion’.

On 10 April 1951 Steven Seagal was born. Born so that men channel-hopping at one in the morning could find something classy to watch. In most of his great works a simple formula is observed. Steven is a retired US Navy Seal/secret agent/assassin now working as a chef/handyman/IT tech support. Then some bad stuff happens and Steven goes and gets an old bag under his bed that has all of his old killing stuff in and goes back to what he knows best. This book recognises Steven Seagal and will have more on this incredible man later.

By the time Neil Armstrong had stepped down from the lunar landing module on 20 July 1969, America had spent $28 billion and employed just under half a million people in the Apollo programme. Yet they still didn’t know if space pirates existed up there, which is what I was looking for through my binoculars every night as a kid. That and really believing about mice drilling for cheese on the moon. The only useful thing to come out of the Apollo space programme was the invention of Teflon, which means men don’t stick their eggs to frying pans any more (well, that much anyway). But it proves that given the chance, men will waste money in the most spectacular way possible.