These two photos date from round about 1977/8. The first one is the GEC Social Club Pantomime Section Stage Crew, this snap was taken on-stage at the technical fit-up. (We painted all of the cloths and flats ourselves, they were about half an inch thick from thirty years of previous shows!). We went along every Monday evening from the 1st of September planning, blocking out, painting and making Props. This is the only time I have ever done genuine Am Dram but the GEC Ballroom was a 30s technical nirvana and I thoroughly enjoyed being Stage Manager for that show, Robinson Crusoe I think. (I was much less involved in subsequent years as the job and Eighteen Plus started to monopolise my time).
You can see me looking rather hairy in the back row on the right, wearing a blue Genesis T Shirt. The lad to my right with the rugby top was Graeme Foster and I shared a (very scabby) house with him in Coventry. The only other person I can place is the Guy front left in yellow -he was a lecturer in the First Year Training School Machine Shop (His Wife took the photo).
This is another young me with Colin, the Stage Manager at the Newcastle City Hall, he had just bought himself his first lighting rig, something I was do do myself ten years later when the opportunity arose. I think that was his PA system as well. I don’t actually think there was a show on, he had just set it up to try it out for size and a Band were using it for rehearsals. The photo was taken using a Polaroid camera by Angela (Colin’s Wife and a Life Guard from the swimming Baths next door).
My journey to hospital was via an emergency ambulance. It arrived after about ten minutes and the crew came to have a look at me. They were paramedics, Joan and Suzie. Whilst they were sizing me up, I was sizing them up and started to get a sinking feeling. Why was that? Because I suddenly remembered a blog comment I had read six months or so ago, a about how a similar crew had needed to call a “special handling team” to get someone’s heart attack victim Dad downstairs. Their 9 stone frail Dad in a two storey house…
Fortunately, they had no problem getting me onto the stretcher, as they had a garage full of bystanders to help them. Once on the gurney, it winched up into the ambulance on some tail-lift contraption and they started treating me. At this point I noticed that I was bleeding fairly gushingly- I had punctured my skin with the bone. Gauzed up, we took the trip to the nearest A&E. I was offered Entonox (gas and air) to reduce the discomfort and Joan offered the first bit of worldly advice- never decline pain relief in hospitals, there is no reason to suffer, they have some good stuff on offer, some with high street value! She warned me that Entonox is like having six Pints but I would put it as two drank in rapid succession.
I looked round the ambulance which felt familiar, despite my not having had a trip in one for well over thirty years. That was because I am a regular at Random Acts of Reality and took Blood, sweat and Tea on holiday with me. The most prominent feature inside was a large red warning sign about how the Trust would not tolerate violence against staff. Joan told me what category I had been declared as; B(self called in), in a public place- had I fallen inside the garage then they could have taken up to two hours to respond to me (although I would have been upgraded once someone had told them I was bleeding from a puncture wound). I qualified for a “blue-light” trip to the hospital, although she said that thy didn’t call it that in West Yorkshire, it was something else (although I can’t remember what she called it now). There is an explanation of how they respond to 999 calls in this document.
I asked about a few of the more outrageous claims in Tom Reynolds’ pastiche of the London Ambulance Service- Joan confirmed that they were all too true, especially the ones about unnecessary callouts for people who didn’t need an ambulance at all. She even said that the Ambulances were now starting to become fair game for random acts of violence in certain areas, something the Fire Brigade have had to put up with for years…
