Tuesday 5 April 2016

D is for Dab - #AtoZChallenge

Dab Can be many things but I like to think of it as the dab of ink you put on a bingo card to denote that one of your numbers have been called.
Bingo is a game where people have a number of cards all with 15 numbers on them. 5 on each line. Numbers are called and prizes are awarded for the first person to get a row, two rows and then a full house. Bingo had a resurgence in the nineties with Gala and Mecca setting up clubs that were a huge step up from the grimy bingo halls of the sixties and seventies.
At the seaside bingo callers us different names to highlight the numbers. Calls like 'any way up 69', 'legs 11' and 'two fat ladies 88' are often heard.
Two fat ladies was also the name of a cookery show which featured Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jenifer Paterson and two chefs who travelled around the country with a motorcycle and sidecar.
Another couple often see out and about with a motorcycle and sidecar where Wally and Nora Batty in The Last of the Summer Wine. This was a comedy set in Yorkshire and highlight the pit falls of three elderly gentleman and the scraps they somehow managed to get themselves into. One of the main characters until his death was Compo played by Bill Owen. In everything else I have ever seen him in he was always smartly dressed and well spoken but in Summer Wine he is a grubby little man with holes in his clothes and often weasels in his trousers.
Bill had a part in the very first Carry On film - Carry on Sergeant. The carry on films are much loved comedies based upon the seaside humour of saucy seaside postcards. These films starred many stalwarts of the British film industry in the sixties and seventies and you will often be amazed by some of the bit part actors who starred as youngster in the early films and went on to enjoy there own success.
They had Juliet Mills - daughter of Sir John Mills - and a future bond girl Shirley Eaton.

And so once again the six degrees of separation has led on a magical mystery tour that took us from Dab to Shirley Eaton. Strange were these things lead us.

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