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The Pebble Mill Dash

Steve Williams pointed out below that the edition of Pebble Mill At One shown on the same day as the raising of the Mary Rose was a special 10th birthday programme, opening with the spectacularly-named Pebble Mill Dash: “a rally in which competitors make their way to the studio in unusual ways.”

Further investigation seems to imply this fantastic idea, one that had been staged before, was limited to various visiting professional sportspeople and the like. This can’t have been right. It should, naturally, have involved the presenters.

Each of them would have been shown at the top of the programme waiting at their respective start points, and cameras would then follow them in a multi-live link-up as they attempted to be the first to complete the Dash.

But what, pray, of the “unusual ways” in which they would undertake such a journey? Of those listed as being present on the day of transmission, the modes of transport would surely have been assigned accordingly:

Marian Foster – something decorous and prone to breaking down; a mini-moke, perhaps, or a pink-coloured scooter with helium balloons on the back.
Bob Langley – something preposterous and bombastic; a giant penny-farthing, or a customised lawn-mower.
Donny Macleod – something to do with the military; ideally, a Sherman tank.
Tom Coyne – something boring; a go-cart he’d made himself, or a jet-propelled hoverbuggy he’d built with help from a team of avuncular factory workers at Longbridge.
Patrick Moore – a giant see-through polythene bubble, like the one James Bond uses to walk across the sea in Diamonds Are Forever.
Frank Delaney – a mobile library.
Leslie Phillips – a hospital bed, pushed by entrants from the 1982 Miss Midlands Today contest.
Fenella Fielding – a mobile sofa on castors, like the kind that roll down roads in Last Of The Summer Wine.
Marjorie Lofthouse – a sedan chair carried by Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Steve Williams

    October 17, 2007 at 1:11 pm

    The best thing about this is that INFAX have placed it in the category “oddness (abnormality)”.

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