Magnificent

Brad Dexter

As a guy in his early twenties that was the most important name to know. Absolutely vital.

It was all to do with the pub you see. Back in those heady days before marriage and mortgages, back when we still lived with our mums and had our food cooked for us and our clothes washed for us. Life was much less complicated back then. Problem free and hassle free. As long as you could remember the name Brad Dexter.

You’d roll home from work, get out of your suit, shower, shove on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt. Your mum would have a nice dinner cooked for you. Mince and tatties. Or maybe a pie. Not chips. Chips once a week. That was generally a rule with mums. But a nice dinner nonetheless.

Then down to the pub. The Kings Head in the High Street. Inside. Order a pint of Whitbread PA. Have a game of darts. A good old chinwag with Dave the landlord. Nice bloke. Welsh. Used to play rugby for Neath before injury ended his career.

Meet your mates. The regulars. Whichever ones were in tonight. Have a good old natter.

Only…. these were the same ones you were nattering with last night. And the night before. And there’s only so much you can natter about with the same people. Sooner or later you run out of natter.

Never mind. Play some drinking games instead. Spoof. Or the clapping game. You know the one, where you have to take it in turns to think of something under a particular topic heading without breaking the rhythm.

Or riddles. A man lives on the fourteenth floor. Every morning he gets in the lift, goes down to the ground floor, and goes to work. Every evening he comes home, gets in the lift, goes up to the seventh floor, then gets out and walks up the remaining seven flights of stairs. Why?

Because he’s a short person, and he can’t reach higher than button seven. Except back then we'd have said dwarf or midget, but that's not PC any more, is it?

Or trick questions. Name three England captains who have played football for Scunthorpe.

Ray Clemence, Kevin Keegan and Ian Botham. I never said they had to have captained England at football.

And one thing was for sure. At some point during the night, somebody was going to ask one particular question. The question you knew was going to come up. The question that always came up.

Name all seven of the Magnificent Seven.

Yul Brynner
Steve McQueen
Charles Bronson
Robert Vaughn
James Coburn

Those are the easy ones. Stop and think for a moment…

Horst Buchholz

And…

One more…

The pièce de résistance…

The one nobody could ever remember the name of…

Brad Dexter.