It was the best of times… Just that. There really was no worst of times to be had. This was era-defining, pint-drinking, falling-over, high-score-beating nirvana. It was being sixteen and all that it means. It was having a cousin with a set of ‘wheels’. Okay, the wheels in question belonged to an orange Mini which steadfastly refused to start without someone bouncing on the bonnet several times, but that didn’t matter. The point is, school was quite literally out; Atari STs, snooker and girls were very much in. (Well, all right, but two out of three ain’t bad...)

So the place we wound up most weekends was Spenny’s bar in Bolton. Yes, the nasally-challenged potmeister of yesteryear himself, John Spencer. Downstairs people nursed drinks and admired fag burns in the faux-leather upholstery. Upstairs, however, were the snooker rooms. Fourteen slate-bedded harlots, all heavy lacquer and well-turned legs, waiting to be courted, their supine lushness soon to be chalk-sullied by the feral jab of errant adolescent cue tips. There were eighty-seven steps from ground floor to paradise. I know this because, at nine-thirty in the morning every Saturday, we’d ascend them, taking our time. If we got there too early, the snooker hall patron would make us wait, sensing our over-eagerness; resenting, it almost seemed, our ebullience.

John Spencer, winning “Best of Breed” at the
1972 World Hooter Championships.

Spencer himself could often be seen playing a frame or two on the “special” table, number eleven, which was in its own alcove and had a Chesterfield to sit on. His drinking buddy, Tony Knowles, was every inch Bolton’s answer to Oliver Tobias. I also remember seeing Fred Davis (charmingly friendly) and on one memorable occasion, the “nugget” of that era, Alex Higgins, just as slurring, and equally simian around the table, like some kind of escaped, bamboo-wielding lemur.

But we’re not here to reminisce about celebrities past: nearest the bar was a solitary Scramble machine. I don’t remember the first time I “wrapped” it, but I soon grew to love it. Sectors one and two were second nature; but you might occasionally fall on sector three to a low, spiteful fireball. The fourth bit had you squeezed at the top of the screen, praying the rocket you missed didn’t choose to blast off and annihilate you, whilst you tried to concentrate on hitting the fuel dumps. Finally, the test of the down-left diagonal, cresting the sharp and fast-approaching angles of the up-down claustrophobic tunnels with microns to spare, your wrist creaking from its unnatural position on that crucial diagonal; then not forgetting to time your bomb to obliterate that final squat dalek, the successful clearance of which sent you to the start once more with faster action and more quickly depleting fuel... There was a beautiful symmetry to it all.

Dun, diddle-un, diddle-un dun dun dun dun dun dun dun... etc.

It was 1980 and we were the unknowing fashion casualties of a glam rock hair disaster. We were drinking Coke and smoking cigarettes. Some American kid I’d never seen before was pumping the cab with ten pence pieces. Before long he disappeared and I quickly eased over to the controls.

Barely five minutes into my game a snooker table became free. Number five, with the dodgy pink spot. The lads grabbed their broom handles and disappeared. I hardly noticed: I was In The Zone. Someone had put up a fair score. There was no point trying to destroy everything on screen. I played strategically, making sure the fuel bar was solid-topped yellow, and before I knew it I was through the first wave. The stick was behaving nicely, letting me find its little spot, making my ship appear to be on rails, unerring and confident. Even when I lose a life to those fickle fireballs on stage three, I’m cool, picking it up, calmly negotiating the tall ledges again, shucking bombs in death-dealing arcs from my undercarriage.

A few youngsters had gathered. I heard the American drawl, “I wanna play you”, but it was a dim fizzle of spectral noise, meaningless as muzak. I’m starting to settle in, the tight corridor of my reactions fused onto that scrolling screen. The third round goes smoothly, and this is the furthest I’ve ever been and it’s quick but I’m quicker. By now the Hair Bear Bunch had sauntered back over to cajole me into a game of doubles. I declined but asked one of them to grab me a fag out of my pocket and light it – and that was how I completed round three, with a Peter Stuyvesant hanging from my lip.

Now, a Scramble high score of some 100,000 was by no means an earth-shattering achievement, and I wasn’t expecting Norris McWhirter and a camera crew to come bounding up the eighty-seven steps two at a time to capture the moment. I was eight or nine rounds in, and piling up the lives. I’d managed a sidelong slurp or two of Coke through a straw, and was on my second Stuyvesant. Being able to smoke a full cigarette and play without taking it out was, I thought, a cool and unique thing to do. As it turned out, it stopped me at least trebling that score.

Roy C: “Everybody be cool, this is a Record Breaker!”
Norris: “…Any of you fucking pricks move…”

This is how it happened. My three mates, the American kid and a few other lads had formed a little audience around the cab. Every time I wrapped it, the Yank would whoop and holler a bit. I was trying to play it cool. I don’t know if it was my imagination or a tiring hand, but each reckless dash-and-clunk! around that last up and down section seemed to get harder to nail. The left-down diagonal wasn’t coming smoothly any more. I was losing a life on each occasion. “Aww man, I gotta play you. Right after this I gotta play you, right?” Somewhat irked, I opened my mouth to say something moody and sarcastic, something like “Yeah, all right” – and the lighted cigarette between my lips instantly fell, down toward the carpet.

What happened next was a move which could have gone down as one of the coolest in videogaming history. An inch before the ciggy hit the floor, my two fingers caught it in a loose scissor, a deft swooping movement all the more impressive because my eyes never left the screen. It was a split-second marriage of timing and animal reflex. I heard a low murmur and “you cool fucker...” as I brought the cancer-stick back up to its lip-dangling position.

This is where it went horribly wrong. I could not know that the cigarette had performed a 180-degree revolution on its way down. This single accident of aerobatics meant that the glowing end was now pointing towards my face. I held it two-fingered, roughly in the middle. I put it in my mouth. Instantly, a smell of blistering skin and singed bum fluff pervaded the air, accompanied by a shrill girly scream from me, the sum of which sent my cohorts scrambling in a flurry of sparks. I don’t know which loss was the more demoralising: my dignity, or my fledgling Gary Neville ’tache.

The rest of my lives and glory ebbed away untended as I cursed incoherently with a scalded tongue. A massive, instant blister had formed on my top lip, where the glowing ember had mashed against it. It should have been the sweet taste of high score success, instead I was spitting the bitter ashes of once-molten tobacco into a chunky Carlsberg ashtray.

The Crown and Cushion, Bolton. You can see Peter Kay’s house from here.

Spencer’s bar is now the Crown and Cushion, and it can still be found sandwiched between the shops and building societies on Mealhouse Lane  in Bolton. The snooker tables and arcade cabs are, I suppose, long gone, but perhaps someone, somewhere, is telling their children about the day they saw a guy beat the Scramble high score, then eat a lit fag to celebrate.

F0ZZ, September 2004.

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