Biker Muppet From Planet Senility

Last week I referred to the kid’s tv show, Biker Mice From Mars, which wasn’t a fault in itself. I didn’t actually slag it off, because I’ve never seen it before, but I mentioned it in the sort of way that old people talk about the internet as being this new fangled thing that most people haven’t heard of yet. Someone kindly wrote to point out that it’s currently the most popular kids show in the UK and was first aired in the 90's.

This is one of the problems with living abroad. Cultural references pass you by. You miss things. You catch most stuff on the internet, on whatever tv channels you can get, or by picking up a newspaper on your visits home, but some things end up slipping under the radar.

Not that this is all bad. For example, whilst residing in West Africa for three years – pre-internet and without tv – we missed the Spice Girls. (And if one of them hadn’t married some guy who plays football or something – apparently he’s with a Spanish team now – we might never even have known they existed.) And while I don’t care that I’ve missed Biker Mice From Mars all my life, I really ought not to mention it, because I end up sounding like some sad old loser, only one step away from writing a column in the Daily Mail, and saying, ‘Everyone is suddenly talking about e-mails these days, but I haven’t the faintest trace of an idea what they’re on about. It’ll never take off.’

Maybe I’m just hiding behind the excuse that I’ve lived overseas for ten out of the last fourteen years. Maybe I’m just really pathetic and middle-aged. We were watching tv last night and an advert came on for one of those awful CD’s of pre-Christmas mince, by Peter Andre and Katie Price. ‘Who’s Katie Price?’ I asked TPCKAM, and she choked on her coffee and put a call through to the Home for the Terminally Sad in the Trossachs that she’s got me lined up for.

It all augurs badly for my future in the family as ‘Dad’. Not yet of course, because the kids are still young enough to not care that they’re dad’s hopelessly un-cool. At the moment, if they mention something that’s entirely alien to me, they start yacking on about it with enthusiasm, rather than looking at me with complete disdain before leaning over and wiping away the drool from my chin with a tissue. Give it a few years, however, and I’m screwed.

Seven years from now, I’ll have two teenagers and be nearly fifty. I haven’t a chance. They’ll be listening to the mince music of the day, playing with the latest electronic gadgetry, and I’ll be looking at them with total horror and disgust, saying things like, ‘But can you whistle it?’ and ‘In my day we had a wooden train set, if we were lucky,’ and, ‘Bananas? They were a treat when I was young, if we could find a place in the cardboard box we called home to put them in a bowl. Not that we had a bowl.’

You want your kids to respect you and to think you’re cool, but really you haven’t a chance. You hang on to both as long as possible, make your choice, and hope you can manage at least one out of two, while reasonably anticipating neither.

The greatest inevitability of them all is that at some stage I’m going to mention Top Of The Pops, and they’re going to fall about laughing and start calling me grandad, and I’ll sulk off, thinking that my kids are from another planet. Mars for example.