The Wheel Of Fortune

My dad had been chosen to appear on Adelaide Tonight, as a contestant on 'The Wheel Of Fortune'. Even my four year old sister was allowed to stay up late to watch.

When Ernie Sigley introduced him, my dad looked surprisingly relaxed – much more so than I would have been. Was this a good sign, I wondered?

He sent the wheel of fortune spinning, and when it finally came to rest, Sigley announced, “Well, Barney, just listen to this. Answer this one question correctly, and you will receive” – cue musical fanfare, lasting several seconds longer than it ought to have – “luxury wall to wall carpets throughout your home!”

The audience dutifully ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’, while, in our living room, a look of unadulterated avarice briefly contorted my mum’s normally placid features.

Sigley hid behind a ludicrously exaggerated grin as he waited for the clamour from the audience to die down, then said. “And your question, Barney, is this.” He paused, his face grown suddenly solemn, and stared portentously into the camera. “In which year” – another melodramatic pause – “Barney, are you ready for this?”

“Sure thing, Ernie.”

“OK, Barney. Here it comes. In which year” – Sigley paused again, and may actually have winked at the camera this time – “was the Great Train Robbery?”

Close-up on my dad, who had immediately screwed up his face, either in concentration or from despair. Seconds passed.

“I’m going to have to press you, Barney…….”

Eyes tightly closed to emphasise his uncertainty (was he praying? was anybody listening?), Dad lurched at the answer like a drunk stabbing blindly at a wine bottle with an upside down corkscrew. “Nineteen…..sixty…two?”

There was a massive collective groan from the audience, while Sigley contrived an expression of smugness masquerading as compassion. “Oh, Barney, Barney, Barney!” he chortled-wailed. “So very close! It was actually nineteen sixty……..three.”

Dad nodded ruefully, as though he had actually known all along.

Then, as upbeat music started playing, Sigley went on. “But no contestant ever leaves Adelaide Tonight empty-handed – and so, Barney, as your consolation prize, we hope you’ll accept” – the camera cut to a pouting, glamorous-looking blonde woman, and then - too soon for me to get my hopes raised - started panning out slowly – “this beautiful, fake angora hearth rug!” The blonde woman helpfully indicated the microscopic, snow-white rectangle of carpet that had appeared in camera shot beside her, and ventured a winsome smile that she had no doubt spent hours perfecting in front of a mirror, or a lover.

And that, suddenly, was that.

“Bed time,” said Mum, looking resigned, if a trifle diminished. She, no doubt, was inured to disappointment and anti-climax, whereas to me they were comparatively unfamiliar. I went to bed feeling that something small and indefinable, but nevertheless important, had died within me, and despite what Michael Allen had claimed, once something had died there was never any possibility, ever ever ever, of resuscitation or revival.