Bowen 747.

One of my favourite moments of last Thursday’s show was revealing Jim Bowen was 44 in this picture for a guy at the back to shout, “Fuck off’.




It’s easily the best reaction the photo has ever had as it perfectly mirrors what I thought when I first discovered it. It’s shocking enough to want to trace Bowen’s birth certificate in case he’d been rounding down his age considerably or had a similar ever-present existence to Pennywise from Stephen King’s It.

If Bowen was genuinely in his early-to-mid forties he must have seen some truly terrible things in his lifetime akin to what Winston saw in Ghostbusters II; that or he never troubled his local chemist in search of moisturizer. I don’t mean to cast judgment so much as register my disbelief; you could add twenty years to his age without flinching.

I can only hope that when I reach Bowen’s age in seven years I won’t look as old as him; it’s not too much to ask for, is it? I keep myself relatively fit and have only a few grey hairs to speak of, so surely things couldn’t escalate so much; maybe if hairspray my face daily it will preserve it. Anything’s worth a go.

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