Someone once told me ‘Luck occurs when opportunity meets experience’.
I was reminded of this recently while listening to BBC Radio 4 Extra – home of vintage comedy and drama.
I’m a latecomer to the station, so I have two large boot-shaped bruises on my backside from kicking myself for missing out on hundreds of old comedy shows over the years.
Radio 4 Extra celebrated the life and work of the comedian, actor and writer Eric Sykes, with a series of archive interviews and clips from some of the many radio shows he wrote for in the 1950s.
In one episode, he told a cautionary tale about the time he was writing scripts for Frankie “Titter Ye Not!” Howerd in the early 50s.
Even then, not content with being Britain’s highest paid scriptwriter, Eric had ambitions to be a comedian and Frankie knew this – and also knew Eric wasn’t ready at that point in his career.
So, rather than be blunt with Eric, during a writing session Frankie subtly suggested Eric should read Frankie’s script out loud to give Frankie ‘A better idea of how it sounds’ while Frankie taped it.
Eric, eager to show that he could deliver a funny line, jumped at the chance and read the 30-minute script while Frankie recorded it, nodding occasionally.
Titter he did not!
Elated, Eric finished, absolutely certain that Frankie would surely now give him a regular spot on his show. Frankie rewound the tape and suggested they listen to it. Eric, still ‘buzzing’ from the experience, was delighted and couldn’t wait to hear the ‘hilarious’ script read by himself.
After just five minutes of listening to his expressionless, flat Northern voice killing dead every potentially funny line, Eric told Frankie, “Please, Frankie. Turn it off!”.
He realised Frankie had just shown him he didn’t have what it took to be a comedian . . . at that point.
He and Frankie continued to work together for many years and Eric’s luck eventually changed when his vast experience gave him the opportunity to became one of the titans of British comedy.
He just had to wait his turn!

If I had a penny for every time my late grandma told me to, “Never cast a clout until May is out,” I’d be a millionaire by now.
She took this saying very seriously and would make me wear a winter coat in the middle of April, just in case the weather turned cold.
One year, I decided to test her theory and shed my winter coat in early May.
Of course, the weather immediately turned cold and I regretted my decision.
My grandma had a good laugh at my expense and said, “I told you so!”
But sometimes, I think she took it a bit too far. One year, I visited her in June and she was still wearing her winter coat, insisting that the saying applies until the end of June.
I couldn’t help but chuckle at her stubbornness.
In the end, I think it’s best to take the saying with a grain of salt and use common sense when it comes to dressing for the weather.
But, I’ll always have a good laugh when I think about my grandma’s extreme adherence to this old saying.

I suppose it’s inevitable, because the performers we admire are no more immortal than the rest of us.  But . . . boy oh boy, 2023 has been a terrible year so far with regard to losing famous people.
When Dame Edna Everage’s lifelong friend Barry Humphries died on April the 22nd in Sydney, we lost one of the true giants of comedy.
Yes, I know we lose comedians and comedy actors year after year, but only a small handful of them can be truly described as game-changing, giants in their field.
“The Dame Edna Experience”, Barry’s hugely popular Saturday night chat show which ran for several years, was the perfect vehicle for the performer’s quick-witted comedy mind.
The series attracted some of the world’s biggest stars who willingly (we have to assume) put themselves at the mercy of Dame Edna’s withering stare and even more withering put-downs.
With much anticipation and delight we watched Dame Edna’s red-lipped mouth contort and her eyes twinkle as an ‘A-lister’ answered one of her seemingly innocuous questions, because we just knew that as she listened she was also formulating a razor-sharp response that would have the studio audience and the hapless celebrity roaring with laugher.
Edna had ribald fun with her guests and would never humiliate them – as some chat show hosts have done.
Many of us still shudder at the memory of Clive Anderson’s infamous Bee Gees moment!
I’ve never had the good fortune to see Dame Edna ‘live’ on stage in ‘her’ pomp, but a friend of mine who saw her at Cardiff Millennium Centre around eight or nine years ago, had this to say –
“Within the first few minutes of Barry/Edna appearing, it was obvious we were all in the presence of a genius.
“From Edna’s entrance to Barry’s curtain call, the performance was pure comedy gold.”
Quite an accolade coming from someone who’s worked with many British comedians and seen several legendary American comedy performers ‘live’, including Jerry Lewis. Jackie Mason, Victor Borge and Alan King.
Dame Edna and Barry Humphries – comedy gold, both.
Goodnight Possums!

Well, the weekend came and went at an alarming speed once again. How does that happen?
For many, Saturday night was spent in that good old traditional way, tuned in to The Eurovision Song Contest.
Personally, it’s not the same without the grand master commentator, the late Sir Terry Wogan.  Without him, the magic has gone.
Social media went crazy for the performers, with comments good and bad from all parts of the globe, which demonstrates that this long-standing event clearly still commands a huge following.
Love it or hate it, people are still drawn to it and the whole production looks like there was no expense spared.
It was ‘showbiz’ at the highest level, despite the fact that not all the performers had the magic ingredients worthy of such a platform.
I still fail to understand the voting system – and so did everyone else I asked!
Could the new system have been designed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer?
You know, like the one he created to stop poor people receiving benefits?
Just asking?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, apart from how to do the Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes whilst blindfolded and tied in a sack thrown into the sea off Mumbles Pier at low tide on a freezing cold Christmas morning, (I’ll you have the full story one week), it’s that it’s pointless stand in the path of progress.
And while I’m dishing out free advice, it’s also a bad idea to stand in the path of the ‘Flying Scotsman’ as it thunders along the track at 100 miles an hour on one of its special summer excursions.  Otherwise, you’ll be chuffed to bits.

But over time, things that were once rudely cast aside in the name of progress can return under the title ‘Retro’.  Take vinyl albums/LPs.
They, along with 7” singles and EPs (who remembers them?), were driven almost to the brink of extinction in the 1980s by the arrival of the Compact Disc with its much trumpeted* superior sound reproduction and durability.
*To be clear, the sound also applied to albums that didn’t feature any trumpets.
But as less new LPs went on sale and the record shops and supermarkets replaced them with CDs, hard-core music aficionados – who might be described as the aural equivalent of real ale enthusiasts – hung on to their precious record collections.  A wise decision as it turned out.
As CDs like “Brothers In Arms” by Dire Straits sold millions of copies, the enthusiasts kept faith with the ‘scratch and hiss’ as their gramophone needles made contact with vinyl record grooves – and they still believe the music sounds fuller and richer.
They continued to be loyal to vinyl and since the 1980s new acts, alongside releasing their music digitally, have also brought out vinyl and CD versions.
And many classic albums by the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Queen and, of course, The Beatles, have been re-packaged on vinyl, selling at prices far removed from the two or three pounds they cost first time around – when they were, of course, mass-produced.
2022 saw the largest volume of vinyl sales since 1990 – with 5.5. million units sold in the UK.
If vinyl isn’t ‘Retro’ enough for you, I now hear that the audio cassette is making a comeback!
Last year, 195,000 albums-on-cassette were sold – up 5.2% in a year according to the British Phonographic Society.
And on 10 occasions in 2022, cassette sales accounted for 10% of the chart sales of Number One albums.
I know you want to ask the same question as I do. Why?
Cassettes were alright at the time and great for playing in your car, but as they lacked the sturdiness of vinyl and CDs, the tapes often got twisted inside the cassette and the thin tape had a tendency to snap.
There must be millions of old audio cassettes buried in landfill sites all over the UK, because charity shops started to refuse to take them around the same time they stopped taking video cassettes. No one wanted them. Even at five for a quid.
I have a feeling that in the not-too-distant future, video cassettes could become ‘Retro’ too.  Anyone want to buy my old VHS player?

As I write this item, my mind is wandering to thoughts about summer and, more importantly, as we live in Wales, will we get one?
I’m not sure if these thoughts of long summer days and warm summer nights could have been triggered by last weekend’s little bit of sunshine and the thought that a relaxing break will soon be needed.
My spies tell me that travel agents are currently very busy with enquiries which may even lead to a record increase in sales.
So, does this mean that the financially hard times are over and that people have more cash to spend, or is it that people will always find the money needed to spend on what makes them feel good?
A change is as good as a rest but, unfortunately, most people will venture overseas in order to guarantee sunshine, which is sad really as we are blessed to live in a truly beautiful part of the world.
One of my friends tried to persuade me to go camping this year, but after some consideration I have now decided that nobody needs friends like this. Life is hard enough.

“Slow down, you move too fast. Got to make the morning last,” sang Simon and Garfunkel on “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy)”.
But in 2023 many people don’t. Slow down, I mean.
You may be the exception, and if you are I’d take my hat off to you if I wore one.
But it seems to me a vast number of people have grown up the last 20 odd years with short attention spans, wanting their demands met now!
There was a time when the only two ‘instant’ things in our lives were instant coffee and Instant Whip (a creamy dessert) – but now, for a whole generation, everything has to be instant.
TV talent show contestants with misplaced confidence and barely any professional experience expect to become an instant success and, while some achieve this, their time in the spotlight is usually brief and over in an . . . instant.
Rather than take the time to make a phone call, they send short texts and WhatsApp messages and if they’re not answered within a few seconds they worry they’ve been ‘Un-friended’!
The poor dears. Get’s you right there, doesn’t it?
Meals must come from fast food outlets.
Broadband speeds must be mega-fast.
They want rapid weight loss instead of doing it gradually.
TV shows must grab their attention immediately or they switch to something else for 30 seconds before switching again…
And now this erroneous endeavour to endlessly expect exhilarating example of extraordinary expediency has reached the work of our greatest playwright – William Shakespeare.
In this, the 400th year after his birth, it’s been suggested that his plays would be more accessible to modern audiences if they were shorter. The plays. Not the audiences.
Unbelievably, this suggestion to ‘trim’ Will’s work came from an Oxford Professor – one Emma Smith – who said straight-faced –
“His plays are long and boring and might be more enjoyable if we skipped the beginning until the main characters appear!”
And then she topped that hilarious comment by adding, “Don’t bother seeing these plays in the theatre. They’re three and a half hours long and no play should be that long!”
Like you, dear reader, I also shook my head in despair when I first read that nonsense.
If Shakespeare’s plays were trimmed, we might end up with “The Merry Wife Of Windsor”, “Eleventh Night” and “One Gentleman Of Verona”.
In a shortened “Merchant Of Venice” he might not have got as far as Italy and set up a stall in Swansea Market instead.
Once we start trimming great works of literature to please people who probably wouldn’t read them if they were reduced to a paragraph (“A paragraph!? I’m not reading a whole paragraph, mate!”) where will this end?
Should we junk half the pages of “War and Peace” to reduce it to a ‘more manageable’ 500 pages and retitle it “War”?
In the cinema, will the three-hours plus “Titanic” be trimmed to just the opening scene “Hello Jack!” to the last scene “Goodbye Jack”?
In that particular case, the Professor might have a point…

Traffic and parking seem to be my main pet hates once again.
Parking fines are on the increase according to one of my loyal readers.
If fines are issued by the local authority, they can be considered another ‘stealth tax’.
It also frustrates me greatly when I see parking charges increasing in our local town car parks – the very towns that are struggling to fill commercial properties and shops.
Small businesses are now fighting hard to maintain market share and attract customers.
Increasing parking costs deters a steady flow of customers with the potential to spend money, which, in turn, supports the local community.
I would like to propose that every councillor, member of parliament and assembly member undertake a recognised qualification in business studies, marketing and management.
Why on earth are we still voting for and electing candidates that have very little or no business or management acumen?
The majority of local government members and councillors that I have personally engaged with over many years demonstrate little understanding of ground roots business matters and what drives the local economy.
This is evident today, in the run-up to the local elections and makes me question their reasons for taking on the role.
For money to be spent locally we need thriving towns and communities, otherwise we will spend our hard earned cash out of the area via the motorways – and I don’t fancy that because I hate traffic.