I was absolutely gutted to hear about the death of David Soul – to those of us of an age ‘Hutch’, who I used to fancy like mad as a teenager in the 1970s, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. He was probably one of the most famous men on TV at the time, women adored him – and his partner Starsky. The fame wore him down, he never bettered his role as Hutch, sadly. Though he released two cracking singles: ‘Silver Lady’ and ‘Don’t Give Up On Us’ and I’m still word perfect after all those years so I must have listened to them a lot for them to be ingrained. So rest easy, Hutch. And thank you for the pleasure you gave me all those years ago because every teenager needs someone to make their heart beat faster and prepare them for falling in love with a real life bloke – or writing books about people who do. And you did that by the bucketload.
‘Stand up if you love the darts’. I am stood, because I love darts. Luckily so because we have no choice in our house. Come mid-December the PDC World Championship begins and takes over the telly. And every year we watch it and wish we were there soaking up the terrific atmosphere in Ally Pally in fancy dress with mates.
This year has been particularly thrilling because of the upset caused by a young sixteen year old player called Luke Littler from Cheshire. A prodigy if ever there was one. Luke, admittedly, looks a bit older than his age with his full beard and he acts older than sixteen and I mean that in the best way. He’s mature, he conducted himself with dignity when he won, and when he lost in the final, he was a true gentleman. In interviews he speaks well, even when he is asked if he’s been looking at what people have been saying about him online because he’s a phenomenon, and he answered that he’s seen good and some not so good written. That’s an understatement.
What’s been written by some is beyond vile and I wonder what they’d think if someone wrote such vitriol about their sixteen year old son. So the lad is carrying a bit of extra weight and doesn’t look sixteen. That’s no excuse for grown adults in the press to grind him underfoot. Some no-mark on Jeremy Vine whose name I can’t even be bothered to remember, five minutes after defending Carole Vorderman for being body-shamed, then calls Luke Littler ‘some fat kid who lost’. WHAT?
Showed himself right up there for what he really is hiding behind his #BeKind banner. And this from someone who would be shouting all over social media about his mental health being affected if someone dared to slag off his looks because David Gandy he ain’t. And then a famous columnist in the Mail, who I usually love to read because she’s full of bite, but it was wrong of her, mocking Littler’s size - at the side of her piece about the merits of a full-figured actress ‘giving hope to us larger ladies’. EH?
Don’t get me started on what the lad’s girlfriend has had to put up with – because she’s the grand old age of… twenty-one. You see it all the time of course, the tolerance preached by people who want to appear holier-than-though, until the mask slips and you see the real them. Kindness is no good in any other form than as an action. As the Romans said, young Littler, Illegitimati Non Carborundum.
