WHEN I made my Christmas present list as a child I always used to add, at the bottom of the sheet of paper torn from an exercise book (or roll of wallpaper if I was feeling lucky), ‘and a few surprises’.
Because, let’s face it, a surprise present is a really lovely thing, especially if it’s a thing you wanted but didn’t ask for, or a thing that you didn’t know you wanted before you got it.
There is the other kind of surprise gift which is the thing you didn’t know you really wanted and even when you get it you still don’t want it.
When I was only just in double figures (in terms of age, not neck size) one of my neighbours got me a car-cleaning kit, complete with sponge and chamois leather and special car-cleaning liquid. Surprise! I’m too young to drive a car!
The other time a surprise can go awry is when you’re booked to talk to some people and the organisers don’t tell the people you’re talking to who you are because they want it to be a surprise.
They want to imagine the looks of joy and happiness on the faces of the audience when they realise that their favourite bard has come to talk to them this Yuletide. What a lovely surprise.
Let’s talk about one time the surprise element didn’t work.
There was a golf club somewhere near Hyde that booked me and my old – and much-missed – cartoonist mate Tony Husband, who was a member at the golf club, to do a presentation and the event was billed as ‘Tony Husband and Mystery Surprise Guest Who You Might Have Seen On TV’.
I know: that’s a lot to put on a poster, never mind a flier. I got to the club and, as instructed by the organiser, sat in a room off until it was time for The Big Reveal.
I could hear a rumour spreading round the room from where I was sitting. ‘Who’s the mystery guest?’ someone said. ‘I’ve heard it’s Alan Titchmarsh’ someone else replied.
There was a murmur of appreciation. ‘I’ve heard it’s him an’ all; I hope it is. I like him’ a voice piped up.
The Titchmarsh rumours got more involved and dramatic. ‘I think I saw him in the Post Office earlier’ a woman with blue hair said to a man in a blazer the colour of spilled ink and he replied: ‘yes, I’m sure that was him pulling up in the car park earlier’.
By the time they’d finished fantasising, it was almost as if Alan himself was sitting amongst them distributing gardening tips.
They had a meal and then it was the turn of me and Tony; Tony stood up to warm applause because they all knew him.
The organiser beckoned me in and said, ‘…and now, our surprise guest Ian McMillan, the Bard of Barnsley’.
She may even have said the Bard of Bingley and then corrected. I was greeted by a kind of silence that had the quality of granite or teak. There was silence throughout the show and even Tony couldn’t rescue it. The applause at the end was desultory.
‘I’m sorry I’m not Alan Titchmarsh’ I said at one point, and the bloke in the blue blazer said ‘so are we’. He got the biggest and most heartfelt laugh of the night.
Perhaps the worst bit of the whole event was the trip back to Darfield because the organiser had very kindly, before the event, agreed to give me a lift home.
We sat in a kind of stunned silence most of the way until, at some point on the Stocksbridge bypass she said: ‘Well, I enjoyed it’. The emphasis was one the word ‘I’.
But then, the other week, I was a surprise guest at the Gawber Monday Club’s 50th anniversary lunch and it was wonderful; the surprise worked and the event went swimmingly and it felt like here was a Christmas surprise that really was a success.
Somewhere in the background the ghost of that surprise in Hyde was being laid to rest for ever.
Mind you, I thought I saw Alan Titchmarsh in the car park when I walked in to the Gawber Monday Club do; it couldn’t be him, could it, asking directions to a golf club somewhere over the other side of the Pennines?
