What is there to do when you’re young and restless, and you live in the back of beyond? When Grange Hill features kids taking heroin, screwing around, spending every Friday night down the youth club disco or spraying offensive words on bus stops, yet you don’t even have so much as a bench to vandalise? There wasn’t a youth club, or even a park to mooch around in and look threatening. There was a sports day once a year, but as that was organised by a family whose members made up a good two thirds of the village, well, they won every event. There was a Christmas party, but Santa always turned up pissed, and got the presents mixed up, and nobody wanted to sit on his lap.

And that was it. There was one road in, and one road out. A bus a week. The village itself was surrounded by squelching marsh and gorse bushes. We couldn’t even get Channel 5 tuned in properly.

Where do you turn when your life is about as exciting as a bag of flour, and anything seems preferable to boredom? Even Channel 5?

Well, there was once source of entertainment, that was free, didn’t require transport, and was just illicit enough to guarantee a cheap thrill without getting into any real trouble. Weirdo baiting.

As I think I mentioned, our little community was stocked full of the choicest cuts of freak. There was always somebody to pick on, wind up or narrowly avoid being assaulted by. If this has been the suburbs, the residents would have had panic buttons installed, or written to the newspapers every time one of us got a bit too close to their geraniums. Being the wild wild west, they preferred to chase us in a 4x4 until the petrol ran out. Never seeming to realise that this was exactly the reaction we were after.

I have very fond, only slightly disturbing memories of Grand Master Flash, who was always a joy to provoke. He lived with his parents, and was a few years older than us, with the receding hairline to prove it. Apparently his girlfriend had decided they weren’t meant to be when she woke up one night and found he had climbed through her bedroom window and was watching her sleep. He claimed she made the whole thing up, and at fourteen, I was no real judge of character, but there was definetely an element of the unstable about him. For one thing, he had never left home. For another, he was far too old to be hanging around with us.

We were convinced he was the next Norman Bates. He was ill at ease with the idea of even standing around outside his house, after a long and forceful campaign we finally got him to let us inside for ten minutes but we weren’t allowed to make any noise. There was no chance of ransacking the wardrobe for bodies, he even accompanied you to the toilet. From the brief glimpse we got of his parents, they seemed normal, so I don’t know what the deal was. Perhaps they didn’t know he was still living there. There wasn’t much conversing with him either. Asked why he had a fish tank in his room, he replied ‘I like fish’, encouraged to talk about his trip to Australia, he mused ‘it was hot’. So really, there wasn’t a lot else to do except wind him up.

Winding GMF up was remarkably easy, a toddler presented more of a challenge. All you had to do was make a joke about his mobile disco or his (non-existent) sex life. And he was gagging for it. We once told him that the oldest Elvis (of Elvis, Elvis and Elvis) was a 22 year old blonde nurse who was up for a good time, and, having never met the family, he actually went up to their house (dodging bullets and crawling through barbed wire along the way) and asked if she was home. Except she was a he. And still at school.

I once engaged him in a conversation about something or other whilst the rest snuck around the corner and let all his tyres down. Watching him attempt to drive home with his wheels flapping about like washing in the wind was a gold star moment. Yet, he still carried on loping around the village with us. He must have really needed the company.

We all found him a bit sinister, but that was part of the attraction. We liked to make up stories about the entire family sleeping together, or GMF using a human head to serve peanuts to guests, but that was just harmless fun.

Turns out, GMF had his own ideas of what constituted harmless fun. One fine day, page four of the local paper announced to the entire county that a Mr GMF had been remanded in custody for exposing himself on a local beach to a group of old ladies. Later that same fine day, news broke that he had also stood naked in his bedroom window as a neighbour walked her dog past, but his mother insisted that he had some special cream from the doctor, and just happened to be rubbing it into that particular area, at that particular moment.

Imagine the delight. Our friend, the flasher! Well ok, our ‘friend’. We confronted him within seconds of finding out. We offered to accompany him on his next outing. When he got nasty, we chanted ‘flasher, flasher, FLASHER!’ And for some reason, he never wanted to follow us around again after that.