Climbing In The Lake District

I believe his thefts were done in gay and absentminded innocence as he conversed away incessantly

. When I stood up to speak and cracked my first joke, the whole company broke into a loud roar of laughter. I realized that the atmosphere was decidedly in my favor. I could say nothing wrong. Each opinion received noisy agreement, and even a mild facetious aside was greeted with loud laughter and applause. When I came to the climax of the speech they were practically rolling on the floor and the clapping and table banging was deafening and the priest on my right was pumping my hand vigorously and breathing my alcohol all over me.

One evening I set off to a Rotary dinner. I allowed myself plenty of time, took some care over my appearance, and drove out into a dark and rainy night. I had a puncture in a front wheel tyre. First I had a struggle to get the jack in position working by the light of a hand lamp lying on a plastic bag in the wet roadside. I had a terrible job to remove the wheel with the feeble little spanner the Land Rover company think is adequate. I then had another struggle fitting the spare as the hand lamp battery was giving up and the light was localized and feeble. However, wet and dirty, I threw the offending wheel into the back and continued the journey, now late, as fast as I dare. I noticed that the steering was tricky; and thought that the obvious fault was that the spare was short on air. I arrived dirty, damp, and disheveled as my audience had just sat down to the meal. However, all went to plan. Then at the end I tackled a friend of mine who was there and was a skilled mechanic and asked if he had a good foot pump.

'Bring your Land Rover over to my garage into the light,' he said. 'We'll soon get itright.'When I did drive into his garage however he looked puzzled, then roared with laughter and I immediately saw why. In the darkness I had managed to put the wheel on inside outward. No wonder I found the steering odd; the wheel stood proud outside the mudguard by inches.

After we had put it right I pleaded with him not to mention my daft error to anyone who did not know already as I did not want too many people to know that I was an idiot. He promised but he was laughing. A week or so later I was at a Mountain Rescue advisory panel meeting when the police inspector handing out the agendas gave one to me and said solemnly, without the flicker of an eyelid, 'This is an instruction sheet on how to change Land Rover wheels.'

Radio and television talks give no problems as they are nearly always recorded and every error can be rectified. But once when speaking 'live' on radio I was leaning on a table while expounding about the peaceful countryside when the thing collapsed with a deafening crash. On a television appearance I was using a 'prompter', my script printed on a long ribbon of paper drawn upwards before me on an ingenious machine, when it stuck and left me adlibbing in thinly disguised panic. My first live appearance on commercial television years ago was very nearly a disaster. Three of us had agreed to take part in an evening discussion on conservation, in between pieces of relevant film, and commercial breaks.

We met the producer-presenter and his team in the studio at lunchtime to decide how we were to arrange the programme: what questions would be put to whom, how we would reply, and where the pieces of film could be slotted in. There was a lot to discuss and the afternoon seemed to fly. We were all exhausted by the time we went to the canteen for a meal. At this point our producer disappeared. Ten minutes before we were due to start we had been to makeup and were in our seats waiting. No producer. Cameraman and floor manager looked apprehensive and someone was sent off to search. At the due time he was still not with us and there was an extended commercial break.

At long last he arrived but to our horror we saw that he had obviously been drinking.

However his notes were put before him and we started. All went well for the first few minutes, but then everything turned sour. His notes were in a mess. He put wrong or irrelevant questions to the wrong people and repeated himself. To avoid embarrassment the cameras kept on us. We managed to hold a three way discussion without presenter and cued the film in ourselves by saying, 'Haven't we a piece of film to illustrate that point?' All the time the floor manager was writhing about under the cameras with his copy of the now useless notes looking as if he were having a violent fit.

During the breaks and films the producer was offered black coffee which he refused angrily, and there was some urgent and heated discussion on how we could continue the next live sequence. Somehow we got through and one of my colleagues summed up at the end superbly. We all then left in a hurry. Strangely everyone who spoke to me about the program me afterwards remarked how good it was. One man went so far as to say that it was the most interesting program me he had seen on the box in years.

by:Adrian Vultur

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