Any idea what happened to it?
D’you remember that training film with John Cleese featuring a Jowett Javelin?
Geoff McAuley suggests you might like to see it if you haven’t seen it before, or just to remind yourself of its humour. We mentioned it in Jowetteer eons ago. Go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9igQ18GIqvc
Did anyone never record a copy for the Club archive?
Well of course we did and has been in
the Media Archive for a good ten years, well before youtube.
The version on keithclements.co.uk which is of better quality is no longer on line. I have not uploaded it to jowett.net as the hosting company might complain.
From Martin Gurdon,
Dear Keith.
You asked for some words on my dad's Javelin and it's starring role in 'How to Irritate People:' well here goes. Please feel free to use it in any way you want. By the way, he has now seen the clip and was delighted.
'Have they broken down yet?'
I grew up in South West London, but my mother came from Westmorland, now Cumbria, and her two sisters had gravitated south to the countryside outside Preston, and every summer we would make our way there for a holiday in my dad's Jowett Javelin, which never quite made it without drama. This was in the late 1960s, and one aunt would ring the other for a progress report at abut the time we were supposed to arrive, but inevitably hadn't.
The Javelin was black outside and for a five-year-old child, huge on the inside. It replaced a genteel Rover 90, and always seemed to need fixing. My dad maintained it himself, and bits of the car were frequently to be found in the house, laid out on bits of newspaper. My mother was not amused.
He 'bought it for a song,' and the car's biggest malady was, inevitably, the gearbox. I still remember the sound of stripping teeth as it tried to select two gears at once. On one of our Lancastrian holidays my father took a spare gearbox and fitted it when we arrived, leaving the old one in my aunt and uncle's garage where it remained for years.
Eventually he replaced the Javelin with another Javelin, much to my mother's chagrin. It was also black and just about as troublesome as its predecessor, but the first one was still on the scene and was about to make its exit in a very public way. My father was a television props and special effects man, working for what became London Weekend Television, on seminal shows like Upstairs Downstairs and On the Buses. When John Cleese and various Pythons went to LWT to make a programme called 'How to Irritate People,' my dad was the man who did the special effects. One sketch, with Graham Chapman and Michael Palin as a dodgy garage owner, called for a car that fell to bits on cue. My father realised he had the ideal vehicle.
This was in 1970/71, when the Javelin was an interesting, cheap older car rather than a revered classic, so the car was duly pressed into service.
For reasons that are now unclear, it was resprayed a lurid green, and I remember it re-appearing outside our house in this strange shade, before vanishing. My pa removed some door hinges and using high breaking strain fishing line rigged the old girl up so that doors, grill and front bumper fell off and collapsed as the sketch progressed. When he saw his handiwork on our black and white valve TV, the car had been sold for spares. The other Javelin was about to be supplanted by a Bristol 401 that cost £150 and was just as troublesome, and the TV episode became a small piece of family folk law.
That's how things remained until, wearing my journalist's hat, I got in touch with Keith Clements, mentioned the sketch and was amazed to discover that it had become a piece of Jowett folk law. Keith supplied me with a YouTube link, and my dad and I have since watched a slightly creaky piece of comedy history for the first time in over forty years. We were amazed to discover that over 600,000 people had done so before us.
These days my father drives a Honda Jazz -the senior citizen's wheels of choice- which never goes wrong, and like the Javelin has a lot of room inside, but is otherwise fairly joyless. It's a good car, but if it was used in an updated version of that sketch I doubt it would cause the same pang of regret I felt watching that tired old Javelin shedding its doors and brightwork in the company of some of the funniest comic actors this country has ever produced. Still, as exits go, it was a good one.
RLB