My late dad always said ‘No news is good news’ and while he could be a great guy at times it was obvious from that statement that he would never have made a great journalist. He was an engineer, and a very good one too, and he wanted me to be the same, carry on the family tradition so to speak. But I was rubbish at school. I was even thrown out of Scottish Country Dancing classes because, as my headmaster at Westcott Primary School said on my school report for 1961: “He has absolutely no co-ordination between mind and body.” Never mind that. Why they even taught such a thing has troubled me ever since.
Arithmetic wasn’t my strong point either. Whenever I saw my maths teacher with a piece of graph paper I worried he might be plotting something, and he always kept going off on a tangent. “What sort of job do you think you will get if you can only count up to ten?” my dad asked. “A boxing referee?” I ventured.
My dad encouraged me to take technical drawing as a subject and I was hopeless at it. He knew I was mad on films and TV but insisted that I could never make a living out of my obsessions. I was brought up in a time before you could go to university and take a film course, but if I had even suggested it to him then he would have thought I had taken leave of my senses - love that expression, must use it more often.