“LOOK – JUST GO AND SEE IT!” TRANSFER VIOLIN on his new play ‘FIVE HOURS IN STORYLAND.’

THEATRE/STAGE

The playwright reveals how words are spoken in his new offering for the stage – their sounds filling the auditorium in a celebration of his late Uncle REX VIOLIN.

“You must come and see my new play. Every scenes an absolute frother” TRANSFER VIOLIN enthuses before I tell him “I’ll be the judge of that” in a lightning fast riposte which should give me the self-esteem boost I need to tell the weirdo who lives across the road from me to buzz off.

One day in October 1974, REX VIOLIN, Transfer's Uncle, went to the shops and came home with a set of 5KG dumbbells and a comically high voice he hadn’t used before. It was as if the living room had been filled by a “total bastard” with Uncle Rex, shirtless, doing 50 rep sets of side laterals as his wife – VIOLIN’s Auntie, lay dying upstairs.

“I watched my Uncle change from a man who quietly went along with what his wife wanted to a one-man fornication machine, using his wife’s funeral to ‘make up for lost time.’ Filling the wake with pungent aftershave and making a point of inviting every single woman in town, REX, who had ‘bloody loved maths at school,’ quickly enjoyed relationships with 83% of respondents – a result he said he would ‘proudly take to my own grave.’

After going to Blackburn to check how they were getting on with ‘the pothole situation’ since JOHN LENNON referenced the problem in A Day In The Life, REX VIOLIN went away. TRANSFER VIOLIN was eight. “One day my Uncle was there, the next he wasn’t. We decided to describe the event as a ‘disappearance’ because no one knew where he’d gone.

A decade later – something happened.

VIOLIN saw his Uncle on Television. “It was Sunday 22nd July 1984 – the British Open Golf at St Andrews – and there was Rex hurdling the Swilcan Burn to follow Seve Ballesteros up the last.”

As BALLESTEROS celebrated holing out for a two shot victory over Germany’s BERNHARD LANGER with his now iconic fist-pump, there was REX VIOLIN, naked save a pair of light blue budgie smugglers and a 1980’s moustache, firing double bicep poses in the victorious golfer’s direction.

REX subsequently tried to get BALLESTEROS to take him on as his motivational coach – petitioning his management with 1,249 letters, mostly suggesting the champion golfer accompany him to bars and restaurants so VIOLIN could meet as many 50-something single women who were ‘up for it’ as possible.

Having failed to receive more than an autographed photo in response, VIOLIN took to following BALLESTEROS on the PGA Tour – once famously captured by BBC camera’s when the Spaniard wildly mis-cued off the tee at Wentworth and had to play his recovery from BRUCE FORSYTH’s garden. REX jumped down from FORSYTH's apple tree – to advise Ballesteros his lie was so bad he had no option but to take up weight training and get a pair of pink Speedo’s like his if he wanted to do anything more than ‘chip out sideways.’

VIOLIN’s obsession endured until the 1985 British Open at Royal St Georges when he made a dull joke about the ‘sandwiches at Sandwich’ and got told to ‘fuck off’ in the Pro Shop.

REX VIOLIN died in 1989 – failing to return from ‘the other side’ as he'd promised in ‘May or June the following year’ – which was a shame TRANSFER says “because he’d have loved Italia ’90.”

Was REX VIOLIN much of a bodybuilder? I ask.

“He wasn’t much of anything” his playwright nephew concludes. “He loved women and he just wanted to be noticed”

He will be now.

'FIVE HOURS IN STORYLAND' – REX VIOLIN’s pursuit of SEVE BALLESTEROS on the PGA Golf Tour with a climactic scene reproduced here in full in a replica of BRUCE FORSYTH’s garden at Wentworth with WIG VEGETARIAN playing BRUCE FORSYTH is onstage for the next 72 nights.

Roger Climb-Down St Peters

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