A brief set of lyrics there, to help finish off with. And incidentally, we
would add that any resemblance between Alison of The Love Laners and Kylie
Minogue is purely coincidental. They're not related to each other, as far as
we know.
The story
or, in honour of the Great Bangor Climate,
Why Does It Always Rain On Me
BA And The Postgrads and Friends
In the scenic, picturesque north-western corner of Wales, they converged.
The first arrived in 1985 and the others followed. They defied the rules of
comedy by not being funny and yet making others laugh. They allowed the dust
of potential centuries to be dusted off jokes, gags and ideas in order to
give them one more try out for the public. They are The Postgrads.
It's the Postgrads and remember - in cyberspace, no-one can hear you scream.
As they say. But who are the Postgrads? The Postgrads team up in 1986, a set
of undergraduate students who had not previously met. The location of Bangor
in north-west Wales with its hills, scenery, and the waters of the Menai
Strait, and Anglesey along one side and mountains including the ridge known
as Bangor Mountain along another side was ideal. Most people went to halls
of residence and most of the halls of residence were to be found on the
hills or set back from the main area of the city, but others found student
houses. The name BA and The Postgrads was unofficially adopted early in
1987, and the bandwagon had well and truly started to roll.
Water, water everywhere
or A roof over our heads.
Halls of residence have been mentioned in photograph captions in other areas
of the Postgrads' web-site. Neuadd Reichel is the large brick building with
rooftop views of Anglesey, beyond the floodlit hockey pitch and line of
trees, and across over to the Snowdonia national park and the mountains. The
tarmac roof with its high brick parapet was accessible through a sash window
from an upstairs kitchen until a warden had that sash window nailed shut.
This did not however, detract from residents' other pleasures, including
visiting, eating, drinking, fighting with water and running in corridors.
There are some things you just can't put a stop to! Across the two sports
pitches of grass and occasional mud we would pry aside the hole in the
chain-link fence and enter the site containing halls with names such as
Emrys Evans, Llys Tryfan, Plas Gwyn and the building containing the drinks
bar and snooker tables and laundry appertaining to this site. Elsewhere in
the city, whereas the men had Reichel Hall to stay in, the ladies' building,
for ladies only, nestled at the junction of the steep hill known as Love
Lane and the winding path of College Road. Rathbone hall of residence, also
brick-built: it appeared to carry a reputation about it as a building of
'smelling somewhat of floor polish'. The writer admits to not having
detected that kind of smell on his visits in that vicinity, but shall we
move on now.
Things to do.
As mentioned briefly before, the catalogue of potential pastimes for one's
social life could be pretty extensive and varied. Balancing your social life
and work commitments was always important and usually required some means of
compromise and flexibility. If you got up earlier you went to the coffee bar
earlier. If you got up later, you stuffed your course book and note pad
hurriedly into a hold-all and sprinted down to the college, or walked
quickly, in order to get a quick coffee in. How often were you settling or
had you settled to carry out some terribly thought-provoking and necessary
task of course work, when there would be a knock at the door, a friend's
face would appear on opening it and you would just feel obliged to delay the
work project for 'half an hour' in order to make a drink or two, or for you
both (or all) to visit a different hard-working friend (or friends) (or lots
of friends). It's not surprising you generally arrived back in your room at
two o'clock in the morning, is it, with all that socialising to do. It's
just a case of putting it all together and getting a satisfactory result.
And isn't eight hours spent out with your friends just that. If you're
lucky, no-one in the hall would set off the fire alarm during the night by
bungling around beneath one of the smoke detectors with an aerosol can and
matches and you wouldn't have to parade in the inky blackness in your
night-wear in the car park while the Fire Brigade took a careful look around
before you were given the all-clear to get back in. So you'd get a good
night's sleep and awake refreshed for breakfast. More about that later.
So your hobbies could vary from taking a gentle stroll to just gossiping and
exchanging ideas, to the more physical demanding pastimes of water-fighting,
pillow-fighting or the new 'combination' event, running, jumping, weaving,
dodging (these done mostly in corridors or on stairwells but here was scope
for them to be carried on outside as well). With no visible timetable in
sight outside the standard 'lecture times' and these likely to waver amongst
individuals by the occasional ten minutes or half an hour, like aircraft
take-off and landing times in airports - I mean, let's admit it, who's ever
really got off to Tenerife entirely and totally on time without any shadow
of a hitch - people very much rely on setting their own schedules. The
occasional sight, when walking past a hall of residence on the outside, of a
closed set of curtains on view meant that this person had obviously not
scheduled themselves to wake up yet. So a lecture was probably pretty much
out of the question.
Rachie-Rach and friends: The Lovelaners
Five female students arrived at the hillside privately-owned residence on
Love Lane, but only four were really known as The Love Laners, the fifth
frequently setting out on her own projects. If there could be termed a
female equivalent of BA and the Postgrads, the Lovelaners could comfortably
be classed as it. Led unofficially by Rachael with the shock of brown curly
hair and diminutive stature, the Lovelaners also comprised former Emrys Evan
and Essex girl (is Basildon in Essex?) Alison, with the flowing blonde curly
locks; Sarah had the straighter 'mop top with long back' in dark hair and
the famed 'husky' vice and fourth but definitely not least, the frequent
jeans and sweatshirt wearer, action and fun loving, ever-smiling (seemingly)
Kate - shorter dark mop hair. The harmonious foursome may have put flowery
trousers, green coloured tights and sweaters back firmly on the map, and
their jokes may not have been that bad, but they were capable of setting off
into song, even with a dance, almost at the drop of a hat. They could burst
into melodious song seemingly without practice. Even the arrival of Rachael's
twin to stay merely added to the dynamic entourage. Alison had the cycle,
Sarah had the dashing red Mini car. And Kate took it upon herself to leap
off a concrete hut onto a grass verge and spark a whole new chapter in
Postgrad-related folklore by letting herself be photographed in mid-air like
that. Talk about 'sitting duck'. There's always a warm, and excitable,
welcome in the company of the Lovelaners. Plenty of biscuits and tea and
coffee too, so they were what could be termed 'good value to visit'. These
ladies could light up a room with their gleeful banter and cheery outlook .
If they'd set off in the music industry, they'd have been another set of
Bangles. (Who?) Think of 'Manic Monday', who brought you that? Nobody. I
see.
Lara Croft
(Marks 1 and 2)?
By jumping innocently from the concrete roof, Kate had provided a
photographic idea for a super-heroine for members of The Postgrads to work
on. One capable of leaping buildings, able to show great feats of strength
and endurance, one ready and determined to fight the forces of lawlessness
in the student community. A person known as Wonder-Kate. with her WonderKate
costume and totally water-tight alias, Kate fought the menace of the immense
fudge monster mutated surreptitiously from an ordinary tray of confectionery
in a students' hall kitchen by the classic 'bad man' Professor Dudley, in a
script circulated in Bangor and known as 'The Thing That Ate Bangor'. The
monster actually only ended up eating parts of certain halls of residence
which would probably be a little damp in places after pranks played by
students which would no doubt have included the old stunt of blocking the
bath plugs and turning the taps on, creating a sort of indoor waterfall if
your building was constructed on aslope as some of these were. The monster
was attacked by the RAF and jets of near-molten hall of residence coffee,
kidnapped a Lovelaner and sank in the sea with hardly a trace beyond a
couple of raisins. The Lovelaner was rescued of course by WonderKate and her
amazing tenacity. And multi-coloured 'Kateboard' the skateboard proving that
she was after all a 'streetwise' as us all, if a little more gaudy-looking.
Alison of The Lovelaner would also don superheroine gear, as the virtually
nerve-free Rathbo, heroine of a strange parallel place called 'Rathbonia',
menaced by a ruler's quest for supremacy over the favoured 'snow White' type
person, also played ironically by the same Kate. The actual appearance of
Alison as Rathbo featured the use of a bandana and sunglasses, and the
superheroine came complete with a high-powered energy weapon, a kind of
air-blaster device. A cordless hairdryer but then again, when have we ever
been afraid to improvise and get the most out of our 'props'? We choke the
gag-lines to death after all. It's sort of a pity Rathbo didn't detract to
look at a few other places - 'raiding tombs??' - while she was rescuing
Kate.
The Conventlaners
Does anybody fancy a used car? Tim, the car-oriented member of the five lads
living in a quiet students' semi-detached house on a cul-de-sac near a
convent could probably have one spare. The pebbledashed exterior of this
house looked out onto Convent Lane, a lane with a convent. Also a favourite
destination for visitors, this house not only boasted a resident with a
television - luxury indeed, it paid to be on the right side of him when
something important was on - but it also afforded a large living area for
guests and hosts to enjoy and use at leisure, with the dining area and
kitchen not partitioned and ample room to walk through. Add to this Tim's
stereo facilities and a rather extensive collection of books, cassettes and
vinyl records and you have a sound-system and decent recreation area. What
more do discerning friends and visitors need? Tim's trusty yellow Triumph
car and his prized 1969 purple Ford Zodiac machine with the power-steering
and car version of three-piece upholstered suite inside certainly made an
impression. So much so, it could be like an unofficial limousine service,
being driven around Anglesey in an enormous thing like that. People look
out.
Thinking of their bellies.
Eating outside the halls meant food like the dinners in the refectory, that
large, long building with its curved lounge locking onto the main Students'
Union building structure, where conversations would run and ideas would
hatch. And tea and coffee would be drunk of course. Arts students, without
lengthy science- or engineering-based practical sessions to contend with
would possibly already have sampled coffee or tea at the Top College coffee
bar in the building on top of the hill overlooking much of the city and
referred to as Top College. There'd then be a selection of other coffee bars
to consider purchasing from before going back to your room eventually for a
cup of tea. Priorities, you know. And who can forget the Chinese takeaway
shop, Ying Wah, run by a Mr Cheung I believe and not 'Mr Wah' as some people
seem to think. Another mainstay of the menu. The Postgrads have in our ranks
some talented cooks, when it comes to confectionery and toffee and fudge
have been cooked up in great quantities, sometimes to complement the
sweet-and-sour pork or whatever one would be having. One thing about our
diet - we've never been afraid to experiment. Some of the Postgrads' first
song lyrics for our impromptu singing sessions had to do with food and our
reaction to it - from Ying Wah's chicken and chips to Reichel Custard. In
fact, even non-Postgrads had their say. One favourite set of lyrics
suggested the average age of a pork chop served in Rathbone hall might be in
the region of nineteen days. We would add this was merely a song lyric,
which people around the all-men's hall of Reichel found amusing once it had
been circulated.
The Postgrads met up and started in 1986 to produce ideas, re-cycle ideas,
make noises and have dances, jokes, gags and short scripts being used on an
informal, at times totally unplanned and sudden basis. Some jokes and
illustrations found their way on to A4-sized pieces of paper known as joke
sheets which were in Stuart's room in the hall, Stuart being the music
student who preferred to compose and sometimes practice his compositions on
his trumpet late in the evening, drawing attention to himself no doubt from
his hall neighbours. And maybe some people who didn't live so closely in the
building. Tapes of sound effects were played, and Dave of the Postgrads used
his electronic keyboard, often setting it up on an ironing board, no doubt
for stability. Improvisation, inventiveness, fun and general vaudeville had
begun. More of the silly jokes, dances and pieces of script have no doubt
adhered themselves to this web-site. We hope you have fun finding them.
"Can you hear the strange noises too?" Indeed.
