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Non-Fiction
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| Rising Media Star | |
| By Snodlander | ||||||||
| 21 December 2006 | ||||||||
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As hinted at in The Porch Door and Terry, the story of one of my TV appearances In December of 1979 we bought a house. It had to be reasonably close to Gravesend, where I was stationed. It had to be within the combined pocket of me and my intended. In the end we settled for a semi in a Kentish village, equidistant from Gravesend and Medway, where my intended worked. It had a reasonably large back garden, three bedrooms (though one was more of a corridor really) and decent local amenities. There was just one drawback to this idyll. The village was called Snodland. At the time we didn’t know about its reputation as being the drug capital of West Kent. We did know about the paper works and the cement works. We didn’t know about the frequent cement discharges that left you unable to identify your car when they all turned grey overnight. We were unaware of the stench from the sewage works in hot summers when the wind was in the wrong direction. But nowhere is perfect, and we settled down in contented married life. My real issue when we first moved there was the name. Snodland. A name guaranteed to raise a smirk on people’s faces. The comments were always the same. Did we live with the magic elves? What did you say, ‘Snotland’? And they always thought that they were so original. So I decided that the best solution was to strike first. I made a web site, http://www.snodland.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk. I liked to think that my affectionate mickey-take was an homage to the Welcome to Balham sketch. ‘Homage’. That’s the word a writer uses when he shamelessly steals from another. On it I lovingly spoofed Snodland’s shortcomings. As a joke, I added my email address to the link for the Snodland Tourist Board. It surprised me that so many people of a certain nationality would email me asking about hotels etc. I won’t detail which nationality, because I don’t want to upset my American readers. And so it sat, lurking on the periphery of the InterWeb for many a year, occasionally picking up the odd hit. I left it up even when, after twenty-odd years, we moved a mere eight miles down river to Rochester. Then on morning in October 2004 I received an email, purporting to come from the Kent Messenger, the local paper. Dear Mr Simms, (the email said) My name is Helen and I am a reporter for the Kent Messenger. I have come across your website dedicated to Snodland. I must admit I laughed and I would love to do a piece on yourself and the website. The phone number had a Maidstone area code. My brother lived in Maidstone. Was this a wind up? I tried the number, and to my surprise it was genuine. She conducted a telephone interview with me there and then. “I’ve only ever driven passed Snodland on the bypass. Is it as ugly as it looks?” “Well, parts of it are pig-ugly, some are not. It’s like anywhere, really.” “Why did you write the site?” And so on, along with the obligatory questions about occupation and age. The interview ended with a promise to send in a photo of myself. And so I went on with my life, not really thinking any more of it, until one Friday a couple of weeks later. I received another email. This time from the BBC. Today’s KM had the article about my site. Could I get down to Snodland for an interview with their reporter from Newsroom SouthEast? Being the egotist and performer that I am, I quickly got leave from the boss to leave work early and off I biked, heading back to Snodland. The first person I encountered at the rendezvous was the chairman of the local rotary club. He had a print-out of my site grasped in his hand. “Oh, you’re the one, are you? It says here that the bus comes to Snodland every other week. It’s every other hour, during business hours, I’ll have you know!” Oh dear. Humour failure. I tried to explain that I would not have lived there for over twenty years if I did not like it. That most of my humour was self-deprecating, and that I had merely extended that to the place where I lived. That it was all done in love. I was rescued by the reporter and cameraman from the BBC. “Do you think the KM article was fair?” “I don’t know. I’ve not seen it.” So he showed me. On the front page it screamed “Computer whiz calls Snodland Pig Ugly.” Then in smaller type underneath: “Villagers outraged. Full story on page 3”. The article was even worse. Gross distortions of what I said, and the locals’ attitude. I defended myself as well as I could in the TV interview. At one point I mentioned that my wife was not best pleased, as she feared hordes of angry residents besieging our house. I arrived home afterwards, much earlier than she was expecting me. Puzzled, she asked why I was so early. “Well, you know that KM article on Snodland…” “Oh God. What have you done now?” She still fails to understand my need for attention, the near pathological drive to show off. She could not see that my appearance on the BBC was a Good Thing. “I was going to Snodland to have my hair done next week. I can’t go there now. What if they find out where we live?” But I assured her all was well, and when the time came we set the video and recorded my magnificent performance that sadly resulted in absolutely no TV work offers, though the article is still on the BBC website. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/3987115.stm By pure coincidence, some two weeks later we had an anonymous brick thrown through the front door. I think it was just the local bored junior mafia, but to this day my wife is convinced that the Snodlanders have a contract out on us.
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