“Feeling Poorly Again, Are You?”

My dad died when I was 13. Which is a rotten age to lose your dad.

Not that there is any brilliant time, of course. If he’d died when I was 18, I’d say it screwed me up for university.¹ If he’d died when I was two, I’d be upset I never got to know him at all. Still, at 13, I was just starting to have the occasional adult conversation with him. There was the vague sense of the beginning of the relationship we could have had, where I really got to know him. To have him snatched away right on the cusp of that moment makes the sense of loss all the more terrible.

And over the years, I’ve learnt that one of those things we really could have connected over was comedy. I have flashes of my dad’s love for it. There’s the time when I crept downstairs well past midnight, and found him watching Carry On Again Doctor. There was the revelation I learnt from my mother recently that he loved Python. (Being as technical as he was, would have adored the Blu-ray.) And then there was making Hitchhiker’s references in official documentation he wrote for the Medical Research Council:

Official documentation written by my dad, and proof that he was A FUCKING NERD. pic.twitter.com/CnbWOMd4Bl

— mumoss (@mumoss) March 17, 2020

But one moment stays with me more than any other. And on my recent full rewatch of Bottom, it came flooding back. Specifically: the episode Digger.

*   *   *

I distinctly remember sitting with my dad in the living room. I didn’t watch the whole episode, I don’t think. I just remember the last scene, with Richie and Eddie sitting in the ambulance, Richie having nearly died in his latest attempt to actually have sex with a lady. My dad turns to me, a grin on his face.

“Watch this.”

I watched, as Eddie reveals to Richie that he ended up having sex with the Viscountess² instead. Richie takes this about as well as you would expect, and asks Eddie to hand him the defibrillator.

My dad chortles away. I also laugh, but not just because of what was on the telly. I just liked that my dad had let me in on what felt like an adult joke.

*   *   *

Because this is me, I feel the need to track down the date of the above event. We definitely weren’t watching it on commercial video – for a start, Series 2 was released on VHS in 1995, the year after my dad died. I can’t guarantee he hadn’t recorded the original broadcast of the episode to watch later, but unlike me, I don’t think he watched the same things over and over again, so it seems unlikely that he would have kept it. And we obviously weren’t watching the original broadcast on the 1st October 1992; otherwise, how could he have known what was going to happen?

So a bit of work with Genome reveals that the day this happened was almost certainly Friday 5th November 1993, which is the very first repeat of the episode. I think my dad remembered that moment for a whole year, and on a whim decided to share it with me.³ A moment of extreme violence about sexual frustration. I was 12.

He died less than a year later. And the stuff I missed out on still makes me sad, nearly three decades on. A sense of a lost part of my adolescence, when I could have discovered comedy with him. Instead, I had to do it by myself. And whenever I watch that scene, it hits me all over again.

As though Bottom wasn’t melancholy enough.

1. Luckily, I managed to do that all by myself. ↩

2. Lady Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dob, third Viscountess of Moldavia, to be precise. ↩

3. One other thing strikes me about all this, years down the line. My dad was born in 1928; that makes him 65 when we were watching this episode. That is… outside the target age range for a show like Bottom. The show is often compared to Hancock’s Half Hour; my dad almost certainly watched both of them when they were first broadcast. Which shows a certain omnivorous taste for comedy that is deeply pleasing to me. ↩

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