The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures Read online

  In a highly competitive field we could not expect Pat Farley’s achievement to last long. By the time she finally passed her driving test at Ashburton in Devon she was a very experienced driver, having already motored six thousand miles during her four hundred lessons, costing £4,500. In February 1997 this record was comprehensively shattered by the gifted Sue Evan-Jones from Bristol, who took 1,800 lessons and twenty-seven years to pass her test, at a cost of £20,000 including a course of hypnotherapy.

  During this fine run she had ten instructors and lost count of the number of times they pleaded with her to stop the car. In that period they only felt confident enough to enter her for a test three times.

  In her first test she hit the clutch pedal instead of the brake and ploughed into coned-off roadworks. On her second attempt she pulled out into the path of a police car, which had its sirens on and lights flashing. By the end Nick George, her final driving instructor, had been giving her free lessons four times a week for a year because he regarded her as a challenge.

  The Worst Rugby League Team

  Setting a new all-time rugby league record, Runcorn Highfield played a mouth-watering seventy-five games without a win between November 1988 and March 1991. For much of this time they were led by their charismatic player-coach, Geoff Fletcher. Nobody knew how old he was, but he used to hang his wig in the changing room before the match.

  Scouring Australia for new talent, Runcorn scouts came back with the only one-armed player ever to appear in the rugby league. Once the entire team went on strike and stood in the crowd booing their own side, having asked for an increase in ‘losing pay’. The management had only offered to increase their winning pay, which was preposterous in the circumstances. Runcorn fielded a team of reserves plus their new coach, a thirty-nine-year-old born-again Christian who came out of retirement to play and was sent off after eleven minutes for violent conduct. They lost 92–2.

  Runcorn easily shattered the existing record of forty matches without a win. This was held by Doncaster, who not only became the first club in any sport to put their entire team up for sale in 1980, but also admitted in a TV documentary that in muddy conditions they did not recognise their own jerseys and often tackled each other. After a streaker had run topless across the pitch before an international match at Twickenham, Doncaster advertised for a woman with a forty-two-inch bust to do likewise at their ground, Tatty’s Field, in a final attempt to attract a crowd. ‘We would quite happily settle for anything from thirty-eight inches upwards,’ the team’s manager, Tom Norton, said when there was no immediate response.

  The Most Crowded Bank Robbery

  In October 1994 awed cashiers in the Paraguayan town of Abai could only watch and learn as their bank became the first ever to be held up by two different gangs of robbers at the same time. The modest amount of cash in the safe that morning was shared equally between them. ‘Apparently they gave each other dirty looks as they scampered out the door,’ a police spokesman said afterwards.

  The Most Failed Driving Tests

  Cha Sa-soon of South Korea blazed the trail in 2009 when she failed her driving test a world-beating 959 times. She had failed the test on 771 occasions when she decided to sit it daily.

  She took her first written theory section of the test in April 2005 at the Jeonbuk Drivers’ Licence Agency of the south-western city of Jeonju. ‘What she was doing essentially’, an official at the agency said, ‘was memorising as many questions and answers as possible without understanding what they were about.’

  Things started to look bad when Mrs Cha passed the theory section in November 2009, but there was no need to worry because she then failed the road-skills section four times and the road test four times as well. In honour of her achievement Hyundai gave her a $16,800 car and she now stars in their national prime-time advertising campaign. ‘I didn’t mind,’ said Mrs Cha. ‘To me, committing every day to take the test was like going to school. I always missed school.’ Her name means ‘vehicle’ in Korean.

  The Biggest Football Defeat

  For more than a century the all-important team in world football was Bon Accord, who lost 36–0 in a Scottish league match against Arbroath in 1885. This feat was completely overshadowed in October 2002 when Stade Olympique de L’Emyrne lost 149–0 to their arch rivals AS Adema in a Madagascar national league game. Even more impressively, they were all own goals.

  In commanding form Stade Olympique took complete control of the match. No member of the winning team touched the ball between the first goal and the hundred and forty-ninth. From kick-off SOE thumped the ball back to their defenders who whacked it past their own goalkeeper, while the outplayed Adema team stood around looking bemused.

  This dominant performance was masterminded from the stands by the SOE coach in protest over refereeing decisions that had gone against them in an earlier match.

  The Worst Racehorse

  The all-conquering Quixall Crossett became the world’s least successful racehorse in 1998 when he lost an impressive 103 races in a row. He was described by the Racing Post as ‘a seriously slow horse that is in danger of becoming a folk hero’.

  According to his breeder, Ted Caine: ‘I’ve put him in some of the worst races there are. He hasn’t got an engine as such, but he enjoys jumping around.’ Quixall Crossett was eventually retired after pressure from the Jockey Club, which was reluctant to renew his permit, noting that he was showing ‘receding interest in getting competitive on the racecourse’.

  The previous worst was Amrullah, who entered seventy-four races without victory. He had his own fan club and his retirement was announced on the BBC News at 10.

  British horses are not what they were, sadly, and the competitive edge has now passed to an exciting Puerto Rican animal called Doña Chepa. To commemorate Doña’s 125th loss in a row at Camarero racetrack in 2007 her trainer, Efrain Nieves, was presented with a plaque.

  The Worst-Selling Film

  January 2006 is mistakenly remembered as the launch date of Harry Potter and the Never-Ending Sequels. Sadly, it drew attention away from Offending Angels, which was released in the same week and became the worst-selling film in cinema history.

  This film had everything. There was a fabulous plot about two laddish, layabout housemates who occasionally go outside to play cricket. God takes pity on them and sends a pair of guardian angels, Zeke and Paris, to lead them back to a life of virtue and industry. Happily, Paris used to be a dolphin and Zeke was formerly a squirrel so divine intervention proves a bit of a mixed blessing. Eventually they all fall in love.

  Just days before the filming was due to begin, the Indian hotelier who had agreed to fund half the budget sent a one-line fax saying the deal was off. The print of the film and the sound mix were both lost twice in the confusion which followed.

  It certainly provoked a reaction from the critics, which is what you always hope for. The Guardian said: ‘The direction is out to lunch and the script is four drafts away from anything usable,’ while Total Film said: ‘To be fair, there is one mildly amusing scene in a Chinese restaurant, but it is the pastoral sex scene and the wet-eyed finale that live in the memory.’

  At a cinema in Croydon the only people who saw the film all week were the projectionist and the usher. Fewer than twenty people around the UK paid to see it. After VAT and the cinemas’ cut, it made a total profit at the box office of £17. When the DVD came out, it became a cult collector’s item and an opportunity to own a piece of cinema history. ‘It might even double my takings,’ said the indomitable director.

  The Least Successful Show at the

  Edinburgh Festival

  Living up to its name, The Empty Space Theatre Company set a new record at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988 when not one person turned up to see its show. Company members handed out dozens of complimentary tickets in an attempt to rustle up an audience, but even then people stayed away.

  Promising ‘A Parable of the Blind’, the evocative blurb read: ‘Blind, blissful, medieval figures dance towards Brueghel’s inevitable ditch, while in a mythical East goldfish have their eyes plucked out in order to sing better.’ The group’s manager, Miss Amanda McClellan, admitted that if she had read that even she would not have gone to see it.

  Mr Gerald Purfield, who had a very quiet time in the box office, said that two people with complimentary tickets did turn up one night, but they were ushered into the wrong show.

  The Least Successful Gambler

  Mr Mick Bates of Wellington in Shropshire won the acclaim of national newspapers in August 1996 when it emerged that in his entire gambling career he had not won a single bet. His glory days began when he first tried betting on the dogs, only to see his chosen hound stop to urinate. Eventually he switched to the horses, but put money on one that dropped dead during the race.

  Turning his attention to athletics, he backed the normally reliable Linford Christie in the 100 metres, who was disqualified after two false starts. He next put money on the triple jump when Jonathan Edwards was having his only off day in years. ‘I just seem to put a jinx on everything I back,’ said Mr Bates, who now took an interest in football. ‘I was so sure England would do badly in the European Championships that I backed their opponents in every match.’ He watched as Scotland, Holland and Spain lost.

  When England beat Germany in extra time, he went to collect his winnings only to be told that for betting purposes it is the score at ninety minutes that counts.

  Eventually he decided to use his great gift for his country’s good. To help Tim Henman and Neil Broad win a gold medal for Britain in their Olympic doubles tennis match in 1996 he backed their opponents. With Mr Bates cheering them on, and for once not wanting to win his bet, Henman and Broad were thrashed. In this way our greatest living gamb
ler ended his outstanding run.

  The Least Successful Navigator

  The existing record for the most call-outs of a lifeboat by a lone sailor used to be four. This was trounced in the summer of 2000 when Eric ‘the Navigator’ Abbott called out the lifeboat services a triumphant eleven times while cruising in the Irish Sea. A fifty-six-year-old unemployed house painter, Mr Abbott first set sail in his home-made yacht in July 1999, blaming an unfair taxation system that had forced him out to sea ‘to find himself’.

  Luckily, his only means of navigation was an AA road map, which is why he was never able to give rescuers even a rough approximation of where he was. Phoning the emergency services, he told them, ‘I can see mountains,’ or ‘I am near a light.’

  His world-beating eleventh rescue came when he made a spontaneous unscheduled landing in full view of the commodore of the Rhyl Yacht Club, which had just given him temporary membership. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a guy this bad,’ the commodore said.

  When their most regular customer radioed for advice, Holyhead coastguards recognised his voice immediately and wasted no time in launching both inshore and offshore lifeboats. Despite their efforts to divert him, Mr Abbott still missed the river channel into the harbour. ‘I was spot-on with my map readings. It was just coming into the harbour that went wrong.’

  At the family home in Northwich, Cheshire, his daughter Julie told reporters: ‘My dad doesn’t have to prove himself to anyone.’ Eventually he agreed to go on a ten-day sailing course offered free of charge by the Royal Yachting Association, which brought his glorious career to an unfortunate end.

  The Most Pointless Election

  Since the dawn of democracy we have waited for the definitive election in which no candidate polled any votes at all. It finally happened when Pillsbury in North Dakota held a council election on 10 June 2008 at which no one voted, not even the people at the ballot station. It is the first time that six candidates have stood unopposed and not one of them has got in.

  ‘Everybody has got a job and they’re busy,’ said the mayor of this small rural community, Darrel Brudevold, who was going to vote for himself, but had crops to tend. The mayor’s wife is the postmistress and also runs a beauty shop so she too was rushed off her feet.

  The council meets about five times a year. ‘Members are each paid $48 annually and a good portion of that goes on doughnuts for the meeting,’ the mayor said.

  The county auditor told the councillors to appoint someone to do their jobs, so they appointed themselves.

  The Heaviest World Cup Defeat

  The Maldives graced the World Cup for the first time ever in 1997. To a competition that was often marked by defensive, tactical play they brought a breath of fresh air. Every game in which they played was guaranteed to be a goal feast.

  They played a key role, for example, in every single goal when Iran beat them 17–0, setting a new record. Consistency is a byword with the Maldives because they lost 12–0 to Syria twice.

  After the Iran match half the Maldives team went to their coach, Romulo Cortez, and said they wanted to give up football. It took some time to dissuade them. In the whole of the World Cup they did nothing so self-centred as score a goal.

  Dwarfing the Maldives’ achievement in a qualifying match for the 2002 World Cup, however, American Samoa lost to Australia 31–0. The coach sought divine intervention before the game. ‘“Frightened” is not the word,’ he said. ‘We are asking the Lord to help keep the score down.’There were so many goals that even the scoreboard operator got confused and FIFA had to confirm the result with the referee.

  The Fastest Stage Walk-Off

  For a quarter of a century the great actor Alan Devlin was unsurpassed in his ability to leave the stage long before the play had ended. Three times he showed his mastery of the premature exit, and his most memorable performance came in the 1987 production of HMS Pinafore at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. He had delivered half his lines when he turned to the audience, said ‘F–––– this for a game of soldiers. I’m going home,’ and clambered through the orchestra pit shouting, ‘Finish it yourself.’

  Really great actors live on in the mind long after they have left the stage and Mr Devlin was no exception. Still wired for sound, he could be heard ordering a round of drinks in the pub next door.

  All his great departures occurred halfway through a production to give the audience some idea how dull the evening would be without his intervention. In January 1998, however, he met his match when the immortal Adrian Hood gave the performance of a lifetime at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and, setting a new world record, walked off after the first line of John Godber’s Weekend Break.

  Playing the part of a stand-up comedian afflicted by anxiety, our man walked into the spotlight, said, ‘I hate flying I do’, and left the stage for the rest of the evening. Oh, he was good. He was very good. Cutting straight through to the heart of this role, he conveyed the wordless essence of anxiety through a perfectly executed panic attack.

  The playwright himself read the part from there on. John Sully, of Leeds City Council, who was in the audience, said: ‘The audience seemed to enjoy it very much. It made for a unique evening.’

  People rushing to the theatre next night were disappointed to find that Mr Hood was word-perfect.

  The Least Successful Penalty

  Shoot-Out

  Penalty shoot-outs are an impatient modern idea to get football games over and done with instead of enjoying the sheer pleasure of replaying the match. Only Mickleover Lightning Blue Sox and Chellaston Boys have done it properly in the longest and most satisfying penalty shoot-out in football history.

  After a 1–1 draw in a 1988 Derby Community Cup match, they missed the first sixty-two penalty kicks. This was a feast of spectacular football entertainment that gave real value for money and showcased their full repertoire, scuffing, muffing, blasting and ballooning balls skilfully over the bar.

  Then a boy called Richard Smith scored for Chellaston. This regrettable event only fired up the other team and John Blatherwick equalised for Mickleover. Chellaston valiantly missed the next shot, but it was downhill from here on. Sam Gadsby, about whom the less said the better, spoiled everything by scoring the winner.

  At ninety minutes this is the first ever penalty shoot-out to last as long as the match.

  The Fastest Sending-Off

  The days are long gone when Giuseppe Lorenzo led the world. Playing for Bologna, he was sent off after a leisurely ten seconds. To show that our modern world is getting faster Lee Todd was shown a red card after just two seconds in a Sunday league match against Taunton East Reach Wanderers. When the referee blew his whistle for kick-off, Mr Todd said, ‘F–––– me, that was loud,’ and got sent off.

  This was not the fastest, however, because that all-time great, the awesome Chris Glanville, was brought on as a substitute for Deanwood in the Medway Sunday League in December 1996. He was sent off after one second for wearing an ear stud, having put only one foot on the pitch.

  ‘The referee told him to take the stud out, but he couldn’t. He’d only just had it pierced,’ said John Wren, the secretary of Deanwood. ‘He was one of our younger second-team players and our manager just wanted to give him a little run out.’ That mission was very much accomplished.

  Even this is not the record, which is jointly held by Keith Gillespie of Sheffield United and Walter Boyd of Swansea City. In separate matches they both ran onto the pitch, immediately lamped an opponent and were sent off. On both occasions the ball was out of play so they were technically dismissed after nought seconds.