Tony Hancock and Me, or Racking Me Brain

My blood this morning was 5.8, displeasingly high, but then I did no walking this morning (blister avoidance policy). Still and all...grr.

Now, today's entry pretty much depends on you knowing who Tony Hancock was. For Americans, or anyone else who doesn't know but doesn't have the excuse of being American (Shame on you!) go here for one of my favourite examples of his work. In short, he was a comedian on radio and TV in the 50s and 60s, and in many ways, he was the British Lucille Ball - the loveable idiot who ruled the sitcome world over here in the UK. His radio and TV sitcom persona was posturing, pompous, know-it-all (while actually knowing nothing), swinging between sucking up to the aristocracy and wanting to be a rebel. Ironically enough, his TV persona was nicer than his real-life self, an alcoholic, wife-beating, paranoic who cut people out of his life without a second thought and, towards the end of his life, was increasingly depressed by his inability to work out the meaning of the universe. He eventually committed suicide in Australia.

So what's all this got to do with the price of Disappearing, I hear you vaguely mutter.
Well, a couple of things. Firstly, though in his youth he was slim and handsome, by the time he became famous, he was chunky and multi-chinned, so for most of his career, his character was referred to by at least one other character as "Tub". Secondly, since I first enountered him when I was a chubby kid staying with my gran on a Sunday night for re-runs, Hancock pretty much spoke to me. I loved the writing, recognising "funny" in both the lines and the delivery, and, quite apart from anything else, he was fat and funny and beloved of the nation and called Tony - all things to which I aspired at the time. He became something of an icon to me when I watched him, and a warning when I learned about his real life - as someone whose biological dad was an alcoholic, and who knows the temptation of taking life way too freakin' seriously while trying to be funny, there was no point at which either the comedy, or the story, of Hancock didn't appeal to me.

Now, tonight, on my way home, I was listening to one of his radio shows that I hadn't heard before - Hancock had been advised by his doctor that he was way overweight, and had to diet - "Eat two carrots and a handful of prunes, every day," said the doctor, "and I'll see you next month." "Not if I stick to that diet you won't," said Hancock. "Besides, I'm not overweight."
"If you were nine feet six, you wouldn't be overweight," said the doctor - and somebody slapped me upside the head. It was me.

That was it - I'm not overweight, I'm radically undertall, that's all. I've been pissing all this time away trying to be the Disappearing Man. I should have just been The Stretching Man. Screw the free weights, there's room for a small rack where the bike is...

Perversely, this got me thinking about the whole BMI thing. BMI, for those who don't have reason to know (The Bastards, as I like to think of you, but hey, welcome!) is the Body-Mass Index, a kind of scientific Nazism that takes the ingredients of your sex, height and weight and combines them to make you feel like shit. That, as far as I can tell, is its only function on this Earth. But I figured, it normally takes your sex, your height and your weight and  then delivers its verdict of "you're a fat fuck, you need to diet now or you'll burst, like that waffer-thin mint guy in Monty Python". How tall would I have to be, right now, to be at the upper limit of my "ideal" weight, acording to the BMI Nazis?

Six feet 11, since you ask. So I can either lose another six stone, or I can gain one foot five. I know there's all the guff about bones stretching and joints popping and yadda yadda yadda, but honestly, I think it might be less painful to go the Stretching Man route!

But in searching for this insane information, I discovered one other thing - when I started this experiment, I would have to have stretched myself to seven feet six to be at the upper limit of "ideal". By other reckonings, I've actually left the region of the Morbidly Obese, and returned to the long-assed world of the merely ordinarily obese. Apparently, according certainly to the BBC's BMI calculator, I've gone from "You need to diet NOW!" to "You could benefit from a life-long dietary change."

So this is me, reporting from the world of casual friendly advice, rather than the world of capital letters and exclamation-marks.
"Stone me," as Hancock would have said, and only a handful of you would have understood. "What a life..."