The Story So Far
fops, tv stardom and messiahs

Yes, the world was my oyster, but unfortunately it didn’t contain any silver pearls. As soon as I had walked out of the school gates I was manhandled by a government official and sent straight to the local careers centre.  Once there I was quickly brainwashed into partaking in a new experimental employment initiative called the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), the sequel to the highly classified YOB scheme. It was here that I met my life long friend and confidante Tim Bailey. I’ll never forget his first words to me. We were trying to programme COMMODORE PET computers to do something useful, Tim glanced at my computer programme and said, “That’ll never work.” Thus, the rest is history.

For the next seven years I was a guinea pig for several such training programmes, each new one grown out of it’s predecessor like some ugly skin graft. We were given the impression that we were being trained for a career that would last a lifetime and earn us a fair wage but we were in fact being deceived. We were trained alright, but only for some two bit schemes to follow. I was allegedly trained in computer and office work on various programmes whose titles changed, but attitude didn’t...YTS, ET (Education Training), JTS (Job Training Scheme), FOP (For Odd People) and GITS (Get It Together Scheme).

I finally got off the schemes round-a-bout in 1989 when I secured my first paid job as a computer graphics assistant in a small company that produced little bits of coloured plastic in the shape photographic slides for business presentations. I spent the next two and a half years in therapy, coming to terms with the fact that I had money.

Unfortunately midway through 1992 the company got sucked into an inter-dimensional pothole and I found myself standing at a crossroads. The idea of selling my soul to the devil did cross my mind but instead, I decided that I’d try and make it big on the small screen. So for one year I became Anne Diamond and Nick Owen’s lackey on the Good Morning show. A tasteless, tacky and cheesy morning magazine programme on BBC TV. Unfortunately I never made it in front of the camera, because I was locked away in a darkened room with a red hot switchboard and made to answer to the hoards of viewers who rang in to the studios, enquiring of the show, “WHHHHHHYYYYYY!!!”

Eventually the programme got so full of itself that it disappeared up it’s own backside and I was cast out into the community, my only souvenirs, a cardboard replica of Anne and Nick and a photocopied diploma in media techniques.   

Fortunately I bumped into HRH Prince Charles down the local fish and chip shop and he set me up on one of his personal development courses with the Princes Trust Volunteers. The course was designed for poor directionless work shy manic depressives, so I fitted in just dandy.

By this point in my life, I had discovered that I had a hidden talent for annoying my neighbours by strumming my out of tune guitar and singing my self-penned songs at the top of my voice. So I decided to put everyone out of there misery by learning the in’s and out of music at my local college.

Once there, I set about turning the traditional music establishment on it’s head, the pinnacle of which was the performance of my radical orchestral work, Symphony for Orchestra and Food Blender. For weeks afterward, I sat by the phone awaiting news of exciting commissions from world famous orchestras.

I’m still waiting.

I was down and out. I thought my life couldn’t possibly get any worse. I began questioning everything. Who I was, where I was going.  I joined several religions and secret societies. For a time I was a practising Native American Buddhist Druid Time Lord known as Star Child. I thought I knew it all. But I knew nothing. I retreated into my own world. By day I was an un-employed lay-about, by night I was XEON, messiah to the masses at the local community centre. For a time I was giving them all a run for there money, the aromatherapy class, reincarnation for beginners, the make your own crucifix woodwork class, Aura photography. Even those from the group who met each Tuesday evening to sit inside pyramids made out of silver foil, migrated to my little meeting for a time.

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