When I was a kid, the big show on TV was the A-Team. In breaks and after school, my friends and I used to be the A-Team. This mainly involved acting out invented episodes whilst running around back lanes or climbing trees down the local park.
There were four main characters of which (in the eyes of an eight-year-old) only two were cool. They were John ‘Hannibal’ Smith and Templeton ‘Face’ Peck.
This of course caused difficulties. Among six or seven of us, only two could be the cool characters, two others had to be the boring characters, and the rest were the ‘baddies’. This should have led to squabbles, arguments, sulks and tantrums, but as a rule it didn’t. Eight year old minds are creative and open and we usually managed to rotate the roles in a democratic fashion before killing each other by the climbing frame.
Except for one kid. There’s always one kid isn’t there? In the case of my childhood, it was a kid I shall call Paul. Mainly because that was his name. Paul was a pain in the arse. He insisted on being Hannibal. If he couldn’t be Hannibal, he would refuse to play. And, worse, he’d generally end up sabotaging our game as we played around him. (more…)