Pam Ayres summed-up our attitude towards our gnashers in her famous – and still very funny – poem “I Wish I’d Looked After My Teeth”.
Interestingly, when I watched Ms Ayres’ recent TV series, in which she travelled around the Cotswolds, whenever she encountered someone or something that caused her to smile, her teeth seemed perfectly fine to me.
Perhaps in the decades since she wrote the poem she’s been treated by the same Harley Street dentist who apparently looks after everyone currently on TV. Game show hosts, antique experts, newsreaders and weather forecasters all possess supernaturally white gnashers
One of ITV’s lunchtime ‘Loose Women’ has a set of teeth so blindingly white, when she laughs she could stand in for the Beachy Head Lighthouse should the keeper ever run out of shillings for the meter.
On second thoughts, maybe those TV folk didn’t look after their teeth and had to have them improved by expensive veneers and all the other head-spinning expensive cosmetic treatments available for those who can afford then.
I’ve got teeth in my head – where else would they be? – because I read that due to a lack of NHS dentists all over the UK a frighteningly large number of people have been doing their own dental work!
As bizarre as it sounds, because there aren’t enough NHS dentists, one in five people have performed DIY dentistry…including…brace yourselves for this…pulling out their own teeth!
I can’t be trusted to pull a rusty nail out of an old plank with a pair of pliers, let alone one of my own incisors!
More than half of Brits haven’t seen a dentist for over a year because even if they could arrange an appointment with a non-NHS dentist, they believe the cost of treatment, even a basic check-up, is unaffordable. That is a terrible state of affairs.
I can relate to this, because the last time I visited a dentist, as I sat in the chair with my mouth open and eyes closed, I heard him say “Mister Evans, I’m afraid this will have to come out…and this…and this…and this!”
When I opened my eyes, he was taking £20 notes out of my wallet!