The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures Read online

  THE

  ULTIMATE BOOK OF

  HEROIC FAILURES

  STEPHEN PILE

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. New World Records

  2. Taking the Initiative

  3. Doing It in the Workplace

  4. Leading by Example

  5. The Intellectual Contribution

  6. Doing It When You’re Out and About

  7. Maintaining Law and Order

  8. An Everyday Story of Media Folk

  9. The Show Must Go On

  10. Matters of the Heart and Soul

  11. Working with Animals

  12. This Sporting Life

  13. Using the Latest Technology

  14. It’s Happening Right Here, Right Now

  15. No Smoke without Fire: Stories I Failed to Pin Down

  16. The Art of Being Wrong

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ‘If all else fails, immortality can always

  be assured by spectacular error.’

  J. K. GALBRAITH

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘There is much to be said for failure.

  It is more interesting than success.’

  MAX BEERBOHM

  Success is overrated.

  We all crave it despite daily evidence that our real genius lies in exactly the opposite direction. Incompetence is what we are good at. It is what marks us off from the animals. We should learn to revere it. All successful people are the same. You know, drive, will to win, determination … it is just too dull to contemplate, whereas everyone who messes up big time does so in a completely individual way. Doing something badly requires skill, panache, genius, exquisite timing and real style.

  MY SQUAD

  Like a proud Olympic captain, I now stand in the tunnel waiting to lead my squad out into the arena. This is the A-team, the crème de la crème, gods among men, elite practitioners who were so bad in their chosen field that they soar like fireworks across a dull, grey sky. Never before have so many giants been gathered together in the same place. Looking down the line, I see the all-time greats – here is the atrocious Criswell, the alarming Murrell, the immortal Molina, the disgraceful Stinky Holloway.

  The gang’s all here.

  The crowd hoots and hats are thrown into the air. If I can make myself heard above the din, there is just time to say that we are living in an era of great achievement. This is a golden age. World records have toppled and standards get higher.

  We all thought that Pat Farley’s record of four hundred driving lessons before passing a test would never be surpassed, but no. Thanks to the illustrious Sue Evan-Jones of Bristol we now realise that four hundred is peanuts and Mrs Farley was barely skimming the surface of what is possible in this area. The record for the most call-outs of a lifeboat on a single voyage has shot up from four to a monumental eleven and Frances Toto has equalled the record for the most attempts to murder a spouse without him noticing that anything was wrong (seven).

  Because I take a necessarily international view of all this, I have to tell you that the category devoted to the Most Failed Driving Tests is now closed due to a world-beating Korean called Cha Sa-soon, whose performance is unlikely ever to be surpassed.

  The fastest sending-off in a football match is now down to one second and the worst angler did not catch a fish for forty years. After centuries of democracy we at last have the first ever election at which nobody voted at all. The worst racehorse used to be a fine British animal with no competitive instinct whatever, but now he has been entirely outclassed by a very exciting horse from Puerto Rico.

  The amazing world of crime continues to astonish (the worst mugger left his victim considerably better off ), but the police too have a vitally important role to play.

  The worst weather forecast ever led to the suspension of TV weather forecasting until the climate was more reliable, while the least successful sermon caused the church to burn down.

  In the world of rugby league Runcorn Highfield are the team to beat, having broken Doncaster’s long-standing record for the most successive defeats.

  The least successful film ever at the box office was released at the same time as the first Harry Potter film and only now can it receive the acclaim that it so thoroughly deserves.

  CAN ANYONE DO IT?

  This book sings the praises of exceptional people, but do not be disheartened. This is the pinnacle, the top of the pyramid, but these immortals have merely explored a potential that is in each and every one of us. People sometimes ask: ‘Could I too be really awful at something?’ Well, yes, of course, you could.

  You too could live the dream. This is people’s art and open to all. It is perfectly possible to be incompetent for hours on end. I certainly am and so is everyone I know. The marvellous thing is that it can be done in spare moments, even during a lunch break (see the distinguished Matthieu Boya, Chapter 15).

  The unparalleled exploits celebrated here come from all corners, from Worthing to Wisconsin, from the Outer Hebrides to the North Pole. There are no national boundaries and no class distinctions. Even the Queen Mother got involved. New territories are also emerging and it is a great pleasure to welcome to the fold Syria, which now holds the all-comers record for the driver who got most lost under satnav direction.

  We are also indebted to the great American nation, which affects to be unimpressed by its own achievements in this line, but its genius is second to none. Moose Murders, which is the undisputed Worst Ever Broadway Play, is here reconstructed from reviews of the period so we can all now relive the whole magical experience. Furthermore, this pioneering country has also produced the immortal Ed Wood, who is our Shakespeare.

  Widely acclaimed as the world’s worst film director, he created the template from which the rest of us are fabulous variations. He combined enthusiasm and utter self-belief with a total lack of ability that is only seen once in a generation, if that. The result is that his work backs through badness and out the other side into something so wondrous that it will live forever.

  Ability is accidental and this great man shows that it is possible to do astonishing things without any whatsoever. As one critic has pointed out, ‘He achieved high art through sheer incompetence.’ Mr Wood is the only person, alive or dead, to have three entries in this book. For that reason there is a homage to him in Chapter 9.

  IS SPECIAL EQUIPMENT NEEDED?

  For this life-enhancing activity you need little equipment. Some have done it with just a family-sized bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Others have needed only a flagpole. That said, horses have historically offered quite spectacular opportunities. The important thing, remember, is to improvise.

  You can do it at home or at sea, at work or in a deckchair with helium balloons attached ten thousand feet above Los Angeles. It can be done on stage, in a guesthouse or even standing in a field with two escaped pigs.

  OUR WAY OF LIFE IS UNDER THREAT

  Like the Masai, our ancestral way of life is under threat. Indeed, it will interest Masai warriors everywhere where to learn that in the offshore island of Britain where I live we once had a woman called Margaret Thatcher, whom older people here still remember. In 1980 she made a preposterous speech saying that we are now an island devoted to success, not failure.

  That woman has stolen our birthright. Our land is now awash with people who never tire of telling us that they are delivering excellence, whether they are or not. It is now even possible to earn a living in this country as a spin doctor or a public-relatio
ns guru telling us that everything is going well when it obviously isn’t. These people are actually employed to cover up our mistakes. Why? Whatever for?

  We will not be silenced.

  REDISCOVERING OUR ROOTS

  It is a grave misreading of the human predicament to suppose that everything is going to work out well. Happiness lies in not only accepting that things go belly up, but also rejoicing in them when they do.

  For years we have been told that success is the thing, but in Britain, for example, it only took John Sergeant to start dancing for the whole nation to rise up in his support. The sleeping giant awakes. We rediscover our ancient qualities.

  This outstanding man (he is our top dancer, quite frankly) could not waltz for nuts and there he was on a perfection-crazed TV dance competition. Week after week the judges condemned his exquisite rumbas and called for his immediate departure. Week after week the viewers voted overwhelmingly to keep him on the show and send home his drably excellent rivals.

  It is worth noticing that Maurice Flitcroft, the world’s worst golfer, evoked the same response. By the end of his career you could address a letter to ‘Maurice Flitcroft, Golfer, England’ and it would get there.

  It is not just in Britain that this happens. When Eric ‘the Eel’ Moussambani practically drowned in his Olympic qualifying heat the whole world rose to applaud him. When the Jamaicans entered the Winter Olympics, came last and fell off their bobsleigh, Hollywood were on the phone straight away and made a film about them.

  For me this volume is the culmination of a life’s work in my area of scholarship. It seems a long time now since I formed the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain back in the simpler pre-digital days of 1978 with myself, cocooned in administrative chaos, as president. To qualify for membership you just had to be not terribly good at something and attend meetings at which people talked about and gave demonstrations of their main area of expertise. We had some glorious evenings when you heard snatches of heart-warming conversation (‘Yes, sheep are difficult’ – Not Terribly Good Artist). Eventually, I was thrown out as president and the club voted itself out of existence when it received several thousand applications for membership, some from as far away as Botswana. This can only be read as yet further proof of humanity’s preference for the worst over the best.

  We can wait no longer in the tunnel. Outside the vuvuzelas beckon. I now lead out my team. Onward and downward.

  NEW WORLD RECORDS

  Brazil’s Worst Footballer

  The Slowest Cross-Channel Swim

  The Worst Ever Broadway Play

  The Least Successful Learner Driver

  The Worst Rugby League Team

  The Most Crowded Bank Robbery

  The Most Failed Driving Tests

  The Biggest Football Defeat

  The Worst Racehorse

  The Worst-Selling Film

  The Least Successful Show at the

  Edinburgh Festival

  The Least Successful Gambler

  The Least Successful Navigator

  The Most Pointless Election

  The Heaviest World Cup Defeat

  The Fastest Stage Walk-Off

  The Least Successful Penalty Shoot-Out

  The Fastest Sending-Off

  The Worst Tennis Player

  The Most Boring Day

  ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

  SAMUEL BECKETT

  Brazil’s Worst Footballer

  Universally acclaimed as the worst professional team ever to have played upon the face of this planet, Ibis of Recife in Brazil did not win a game for three years and eleven months. ‘It was a great privilege to have that reputation. It’s better than playing for the world’s best team,’ said their captain, the legendary Mauro Shampoo, who has been hailed as Brazil’s worst footballer. ‘We even had a fan club in Portugal. When we started to win they sent us angry telegrams.’

  A key part of the Ibis strike force, the great man scored one goal in ten years, but his record was otherwise unblemished. His unique and recurrent ability was to fall over the ball when there was no other player near him. ‘Because he is such a terrible player,’ his daughter said, ‘he became famous. And now he’s out there.’

  He is the subject of a sensitive documentary film called Mauro Shampoo: Footballer, Hairdresser, Man. This is how he habitually answers the telephone at his salon, where the walls are covered with memorabilia from his splendid career.

  To this day Sr Shampoo, who called his children Cream Rinse and Shampoozinho, has persisted with his Kevin Keegan 1970s permed haircut long after Kevin decided it was the wrong direction. In the salon he is immediately recognisable because he spends the month of December dressed in an unconvincing Father Christmas suit. The rest of the year he wears his Ibis football kit, including studs, so that between haircuts he can give demonstrations of his celebrated ball control to reassure customers that he has lost none of his old touch.

  The Slowest Cross-Channel Swim

  The fastest swim across the Channel was completed in a hasty six hours and fifty-seven minutes by some frantic Bulgarian, but our sort of swimmer prefers to savour the experience. For seventy-seven years Henry Sullivan’s fine record of twenty-seven hours and twenty-five minutes stood unchallenged as the slowest ever. After six earlier attempts when Mr Sullivan was fished out of the water anything up to five miles away from the French coast, he finally completed the swim in August 1923.

  His record stood as a glowing example until 2010, when Jackie Cobell of Tonbridge in Kent did it in a splendid twenty-eight hours and forty-four minutes. ‘The cliffs of Calais kept disappearing. That’s when the tide took me out,’ said Mrs Cobell, who lost eight stone as part of her training regime with the aid of a gastric belt.

  ‘I’m always up for a challenge,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing the Alcatraz swim next. They’ve got sharks there so it might make me go a bit quicker.’

  The Worst Ever Broadway Play

  An immediate and sensational flop, Moose Murders by Arthur Bicknell is now widely considered to be the worst play ever performed on Broadway. ‘If your name is Arthur Bicknell – or anything like it – change it,’ said the theatre critic at CBS. When it opened and closed on 22 February 1983,

  Frank Rich, the drama critic of the New York Times, wrote: ‘From now on there will always be two groups of theatregoers in this world: those who have seen Moose Murders and those who have not. Those of us who have witnessed it will undoubtedly hold periodic reunions in the noble tradition of survivors of the Titanic.’

  The play, a mystery farce, relates the adventures of Snooks and Howie Keene, Nurse Dagmar, Stinky Holloway and others trapped together one excellent stormy night at the Wild Moose Lodge, a guesthouse in the Adirondack Mountains. Several murders take place, Stinky tries to sleep with his mother and a man in a moose costume is assaulted by a bandage-wrapped quadriplegic.

  There is a thunderclap. The curtain rises on a hunting lodge which is attractively festooned with stuffed moose heads.

  Act One gets off to a corking start when ‘The Singing Keenes’, the in-house entertainers, come on and launch straight into a rendition of ‘Jeepers Creepers’. A scantily clad Snooks Keene sings in an off-key screech. She is accompanied by her blind husband pounding away on his electric organ until the plug is pulled out by the resident caretaker, Joe Buffalo Dance, who wears Indian war paint but speaks with an Irish brogue.

  They are soon joined by the wealthy Hedda Holloway, the Lodge’s new owner. She arrives with her husband Sidney, the heavily bandaged quadriplegic, who is confined to a wheelchair. His attendant, Nurse Dagmar, wears revealing black satin, barks like a Nazi and whenever possible leaves her patient out in the rain.

  In addition to her son Stinky, a drug-crazed Oedipal hippie, Mrs Holloway has a young daughter called Gay, who is permanently in a party dress. When told that her father will always be a vegetable, she turns up her nose and replies, ‘Like a lima bean? Gross me out!’ and then break
s into a tap dance.

  Just before the interval Stinky gets out a deck of cards to give the actors, if not the audience, something to do. The lights go out mid-game and the first of several inexplicable murders is committed.

  ‘Even Act One of Moose Murders is inadequate preparation for Act Two,’ Mr Rich wrote. In the play’s final twist Mrs Holloway serves Gay a poison-laced vodka Martini for reasons that are never entirely clear. As the young girl collapses to the floor and croaks in the middle of a Shirley Temple tap-dancing routine, her mother breaks into laughter and applause.

  The leading lady was supposed to be making her comeback after more than forty years away from the Broadway stage, but she dropped out after the first preview.

  To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its opening and closing the play was restaged as a conceptual art project. ‘Broadway had its chance and they blew it,’ the artist said.

  The Least Successful Learner Driver