My Ruinous TV Debut
How I Upset my Tenpin Bowling Teammate
‘You ruined it,’ Martin said, shoving an angry right palm against my shoulder.
‘Ruined what?’ I replied, perplexed.
‘The other day when I was on the telly. You were in the background being an idiot.’
Being an idiot in the background is something I still do by accident. I gurned on MTV as a teenager. I’ve looked gormless walking down a shopping street in a local TV news report. Best of all, I once snubbed Prime Minister David Cameron when he visited the floor I was on at work. That one was deliberate, though.
This accusation from Martin came on a Saturday morning in the summer of 1988. The BBC visited the GX Superbowl in Belle Vue a few weeks earlier to film a package for Move It, their new sports show for kids. Co-presented by Brookside actor Simon O’Brien, it featured an intro sequence showing a brother and sister on their way to school.
The duo, aged about 10 and 12, respectively, mirrored the sporting activities squished onto the left side of the screen. When a highlight of Barry McGuigan pummelling an opponent appeared, the boy landed a few sturdy hooks to his sister’s school bag, turning any crisps in her packed lunch into fractals of dust. The force of his blows knocked the bag off her shoulder, so he — who must’ve scoffed a jar of syrup washed down with Red Bull for breakfast — sprinted off to mimic the medium-fast bowling action of England cricketer, Neil Foster.
While he celebrated taking an imaginary wicket, the girl overtook him in a race to the next lamppost, accompanied by Ben Johnson’s victory in the 100-metre final of the 1987 World Athletics Championships. He’d lose both his medal and the world record time of 9.84 seconds a few months after the series aired, failing a drugs test following an even faster run at the Seoul Olympics.
Then, invoking Johnson’s arch-rival Carl Lewis’s long jump prowess, the lad hitch-kicked over an abandoned bin lid. It was stirring stuff. The finale was a sprint to the end of the street, with the girl hoofing a can of pop in time to Ray Wilkins curling that masterpiece of a goal for Manchester United against Brighton in the 1983 FA Cup Final.
Both eight years old, Martin and I had been friends for around 18 months. We started tenpin bowling at much the same time; him because his dad was a keen bowler and volunteer coach, and me because my mum was a witness at a murder trial.
The proceedings fell during the Easter holidays, so I spent most of the break at my primary school where my nana was a cleaner. Rather than have me scratching around in their staff room doing puzzles, colouring books, and making pipe cleaner monsters for days on end, Auntie Dot, the caretaker, asked if I’d like to try tenpin bowling.
I would.
Her son, Colin, was a dab hand at it. More than that, in fact. He was on the England team. A good eight or nine years older than me, he took me to Belle Vue as a six-year-old who’d never heard of bowling, to loving the sport in a flash. Even before swapping my trainers for bowling shoes, I was in. The sound was incredible. The jackhammer of the ball hitting the lane, the rumble as it picked up momentum, and the deep burst as it hit the pins, like a thunderstorm performed on castanets.
Colin must’ve done a solid job of showing me the ropes, as I rolled scores of 58 in each of my first two games. This was pre-bumpers and rolling ramps, too. It turns out I had an aptitude for it.
I joined the Saturday morning junior league a few months later, and at my first tournament, the 1987 Nationals in Stevenage, Martin and I teamed up to win bronze in the doubles event for our ‘peewees’ age group.
‘I’ve told my dad you’re not coming to any more tournaments with us,’ Martin said the following week.
‘Why?’
‘You snored the whole way back.’
It was the first in a glut of trophies we’d both win. My parents bought me my own bowling ball that Christmas, a speckled blue 10lb Columbia 300. My average rocketed well beyond the 100-mark, and by the time the Move It crew descended, specifically to film the peewees, I was hitting regular 150-point games and the odd one above 175. Not bad for an eight-year-old.
Although Martin and I were tournament doubles partners and league teammates, I won a clean sweep of individual honours, claiming the highest average, highest score, and highest series (your combined total over three games) prizes in our division. And he hated it.
We played our regular league games that Saturday while the cameramen found arty angles, but it was all building up to one key moment. They’d set up their cheapest camera behind the pins on Lane 29 for what had to be a single-take shot. The camera faced certain obliteration when the ball and pins collided with it, so it had to be someone who would hit the mark. Someone of unflappable nerve. A bowler who could hit the 1–3 pocket as a matter of routine. In short, the best peewee in Belle Vue.
They didn’t pick him, though. They chose the only kid wearing a light blue club shirt. Nobody ever wore those for league games.
‘So then, Martin,’ Simon O’Brien said on camera, while I knelt aghast on the marker’s chair just off it. ‘You’re the champ. What do we do?’
Words that’ll haunt me forever. ‘You’re the champ’. I almost wrote to Points of View.
Martin ummed and aahed his way through the preamble before lining up his shot. His one chance to hit a strike on national TV. A nine with a wobbly last pin would do.
Jet-heeled, he sprinted up the approach, his usual five-step action thrown to the breeze. He propelled his ball down the lane without the finesse that saw him win so many silver medals. I craned my neck to see where his shot was going. It was going left. So far left that it could only graze the headpin, making just enough contact for it to fall at the speed of an autumnal leaf tied to a balloon. He took out all the pins on that side of the lane, but a cluster remained standing to the right. He rolled a six. The camera didn’t even break.
The show aired on Thursday, July 21st, 1988, between Newsround and a five-minute show called The Spanish Are Coming that ate up some time before Neighbours.
Our slot was just after a feature on the National Mountain Bike Championships, soundtracked by Queen’s ‘Bicycle Race’. I don’t recall what musical accompaniment we had, but it’s a pity it wasn’t Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Take the Skinheads Bowling’.
There we all were. Nick, Helen, Lee-Adam, Cathy, a kid with an enormous backswing called Tyson. And ‘the champ’. We all taped it, of course, which meant Martin had around 40 hours before Saturday morning to analyse each frame, accuse me of sabotage, and renounce our friendship.
I revisited the snippet later that day. Pins filled the screen, with Martin looming in the distance and his ball coming into focus. Despite knowing where I was, it took repeat viewings before I saw a tiny blonde blob, no more than 4x4 pixels in size, dart up and to the right when the delivery went awry.
I didn’t ruin anything. I wasn’t even being an idiot for once. He just fluffed his lines and, being a kid, looked for someone else to blame.
Martin didn’t last much longer at Belle Vue. His family moved to The Wirral or Warrington or somewhere else beginning with a ‘W’ soon after, and we never saw each other again. Although short-lived, it was a rivalry for the ages. Just as Carl Lewis never quite hit the same heights after Ben Johnson’s removal from athletics, I plateaued as a bowler. My average hovered around the 140–150 mark for years, and although I’d knock in the occasional 200+, or even 225+ game, the next breakthrough proved elusive.
Belle Vue closed in the mid-90s, being converted into a Bingo megahall. I lost interest in the sport for a few years after that, but picked it up again in the early 2000s, taking advantage of Stockport’s ‘bowl all day for a fiver’ midweek offer. Using a chipped and scratched house ball, I joined their Monday night league for a couple of months. My average of 185 had a ring of ‘look at what you could’ve won’ about it, and I even posted a new personal best score of 256 in a practice game. But that was me happy. A ghost laid to rest.
I’ve not worn bowling shoes in more than fifteen years, but maybe the time’s right to get back on the lanes.
Colin, Auntie Dot’s son, still bowls. He’s still in the England team, too, albeit the senior one now, and has just come back with three medals — two of them gold — after representing his country in a major tournament in Ireland. He really is the champ.
