Forgetting Mr Bronson.


One thing the internet definitely serves to illustrate is: whatever enters your mind fleetingly, will be the focus of another person’s obsession.

Let me give you an example:

The other day I was watching an episode of the BBC Four game show ‘Only Connect’ – and quietly seething over the poncy Egyptian hieroglyphs they assign to the categories in every round; you would never have had that on 'A Question of Sport'.


In the third round of the show, the contestants have to solve the ‘Connecting Wall’: a series of sixteen clues, which can be separated into four groups of four connected items. They have to work out what those four separate groups are – and not be confused by a few red herrings amongst them, that could be attributed to more than one group.


(My struggle to explain this is the reason I’d never be good at pitching an idea for a game show.)

On this particular occasion, the wall was peppered with character names from Grange Hill – Mrs McClusky, Tucker Jenkins and the like – and, even though his name wasn’t amongst them, it suddenly called to memory the character of Mr Bronson.

If you weren't a child of the Eighties then I'd better fill you in: Mr Bronson was deputy head of the fictional school from 1985-89; an authoritative figure, with a penchant for wearing a ginger toupee. He was played by the now-deceased actor, Michael Sheard (who you might also recall as Adolf Hitler in ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ and Admiral Ozzel in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’).

As a child I’d been terrified of him (in much the same way that I was frightened of Mumm-Ra in ThunderCats) – but as an adult he had completely escaped my memory, until being unwittingly coaxed back by Victoria Coren Mitchell.

As is often the case, this sudden memory prompted a tweet.



Then, this morning, I woke up to discover the following response:


If it wasn’t for Sheard passing away in the mid-Noughties, I might have believed the tweet to be from the follically-challenged deputy head himself.

How bizarre that a largely incidental character from so long ago would play on someone’s mind enough to create and maintain their own fictional Twitter account.

On the strength of this, I wonder how long it would take me to elicit a response from Wizbit?

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