Bruce Forsyth

The other day I casually mentioned, in passing, to Flo that I thought Bruce Forsyth was looking old. Now, I am Brucie’s biggest fan and I didn’t mean much by it, so I was taken aback when she retaliated, on the king of light entertainment’s behalf:

“Well he is old,” she snapped, then added, as if realising she’d been a little curt, “the Generation Game was a long time ago Doris.”

Well, I was never much of a fan of the Generation Game; I always think of Brucie in Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. I was reminiscing when Flo went on the attack.

“Anyway, have you taken a look in the mirror recently?” she challenged me.

“I have, and I don’t recognise the person I see,” I joked, using self-deprecation to defuse a potentially volatile situation. Flo can be perfectly insufferable when she’s had a Warninks Advocaat.

“Anthea should take him in hand,” I said, thinking perhaps his wife could lend him some of her mosituriser.

“He’s not married to Anthea Redfearn anymore,” Flo corrected me.

I’d had just about as much as I could take of Flo’s prickliness.

“Oh, you can be so disagreeable,” I told her in an exaggeratedly exasperated tone. At this moment, Brucie was driving a wedge between us.

“They got divorced thirty years ago,” Flo persisted. “He married Miss Puerto Rico; she was Miss World.”

In modern parlance this was something of a brain dump by Flo.

“And how do you know so much about Bruce Forsyth?” I asked, a tad snappy myself. I also changed the pronunciation of his surname, to emphasis the second syllable as if I knew something Flo didn’t .

“Because I’ve read his biography,” she answered in a “I rest my case” tone of voice, then added, “It was called, ‘Nice To See You – The Bruce Forsyth Story’.”

She emphasised defiantly the first syllable of his surname. My cheek twitched.

Flo knew, that for the time-being, her knowledge of Brucie was unassailable. Although she could have been making it up for all I knew, if she had then the detail about Miss World was a masterstroke.