The Boy Gaz

This was how my old Bedford housemate Steve Renshaw saw me - he drew the cartoons in the style of Viz comic, which amused us both greatly, being full of double entendres and frankly crude toilet humour...

The toaster refers to my well-known loathing for these machines (they have one function in life, which they cannot dispense properly; you either get bread, or carbon. My view is that I can burn toast quite adequately myself, without the need for a specialised machine to do it for me. The toaster we had at the time was supposedly 'microprocessor controlled'. It still burnt the toast!!). To this day I moan like hell whenever the thing sets off the smoke alarm ouside the kitchen!

Here's part two: this one features Ratters (the third member of our shared house, Paul Rattray) and our fixation with Z-list TV celebs. I think that stemmed from when Chandi got me a signed photo of Harry Gration and Judith Stamper from BBC 'Look North', which I used to watch as a student in Leeds in the mid-80s (his sister worked at BBC Leeds, you see!).



Part three features my beloved Ford Capri which was, of course, the vehicle of choice in later seasons of 'The Professionals' - hence the CI5 references!! In this strip, Steve has me at the Job Centre - which is where I was to be found every fortnight for a good part of 1992, all of 1993, and early 1994. I avoided being forced to stop sponging off the taxpayers and go flip burgers somewhere on the pretext that I was 'writing up my PhD', but once I'd submitted my thesis that excuse no longer held water, and Steve and I were 'encouraged' by the DHSS to attend an NVQ in Management at Bedford College...and that's another story.