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Love hurts

3 min read
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Anyone remember Damon and Debbie? Didn’t think so. This three-part show was a Brookside spin-off focusing on the doomed relationship between rough diamond Damon Grant and mousey, good-as-gold girl-next-door Debbie McGrath. Debbie’s parents deemed her too good for Damon of course, and Damon’s parents – the formidable Bobby and Sheila – thought Debbie’s family were elitist snobs.  So Damon and Debbie […]

Anyone remember Damon and Debbie? Didn’t think so. This three-part show was a Brookside spin-off focusing on the doomed relationship between rough diamond Damon Grant and mousey, good-as-gold girl-next-door Debbie McGrath. Debbie’s parents deemed her too good for Damon of course, and Damon’s parents – the formidable Bobby and Sheila – thought Debbie’s family were elitist snobs. 

So Damon and Debbie eloped, Damon in his regulation Ellesse runners and Debbie in her faded denim jeans, the waistband of which hovered between her navel and her tiny, inoffensive, 1980s boobs. She was no Tracy Corkhill, it’s fair to say.

Inevitably, the relationship – and indeed the series – was doomed from the outset. Damon ended up getting awkwardly and sneakily stabbed to death by, if memory serves, a belt buckle after only three episodes.

The series’ writer, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, went on to bigger and better things. Simon O’Brien would turn up as the presenter of the half-decent football show Standing Room Only, and the gal who played Debbie is enjoying a unspectacular career as a mid-table actor in such pap as Casualty and Silent Witness.

So what does all/any this have to do with Spurs?

Well, Tim Sherwood is a bit of rough. If your daughter brought him home with her you’d be only slightly alarmed. He’d perch on the edge of your sofa and decline tea or coffee. He’d might even blush a bit. Not too bad. At least he’s polite and seems to shave. It could have been worse.

[linequote]Tim Sherwood is Damon Grant, essentially. Cheeky, confident. It’s not hard to imagine him ‘larging it.'[/linequote]

He’s Damon Grant, essentially. Cheeky, confident. It’s not hard to imagine him “larging it.” Bit of breaking and entering even. Your daughter is naive and almost pretty. She can’t compete with some of the plastic women you see around these days. She’s had some disappointments, some false starts. You’d have hoped she’d have more taste this time around.

That last boy, the foreign lad for example, very respectful, clean and hardworking. The serious maybe. Thought she could have given him a bit more time to settle down and relax a bit.

This new fella, you console yourself that it won’t last too long. He’s got his feet under the table but it all feels a bit stopgap. He’ll let her down you feel, not in a vicious, humiliating way. But enough that she will see sense. Nice boy, but plenty more fish in the sea. Maybe someone with a bit of education. This new guy; he’s all instinct.

You wait for it all to go wrong. There are occasions when it does and you feel sad for her, but in the long run, it’s for the best. These things happen. The summer’s coming anyway. Get yourself a nice tan, some nice clothes. You never know who might be just around the corner.

You rub her back a bit and make her a cup of tea. And then the next thing you know he’s after surprising you again. Oh god. She’s gonna think he’s great again now and on and on it goes. One week it’s great. The next week he’s forgotten something. Or he’s said the wrong thing and she’s taken him up all wrong and the world is going to end.

[linequote]Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt[/linequote]

He doesn’t mind talking, this lad. He had the cheek the other day to say that another guy “doesn’t mind himself, does he?” That made you laugh a bit. Not exactly the strong silent type is he? You can’t help being intrigued. But, there’s something not right.

Is he a total idiot?

That’s your biggest fear. Sometimes he makes you think of that guy Swanley from the gypsy wedding programme.

Maybe he’d be better off playing it cool for a while. Just turn it down a bit. “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” as someone said once, maybe in a another press conference. As long as they don’t do something stupid like get married.

We all know what happened when Damon and Debbie got married, don’t we?

Oh, we don’t. So they got married – kind of – in a hotel room, in York. Fancy. Then Damon only went and got himself stabbed and started talking complete gibberish to a perplexed Debbie [“Damon, you’re scaring me….I can’t understand what you’re saying…[/linequote] before dying in her arms accompanied an appalling, sub-Neighbours soundtrack.

It was never gonna work, was it? It was only a matter of time.

Some fools rave on happiness
Blissfulness, togetherness
Some fools fool themselves I guess
But they’re not fooling me

All views and opinions expressed in this article are the views and opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of The Fighting Cock. We offer a platform for fans to commit their views to text and voice their thoughts. Football is a passionate game and as long as the views stay within the parameters of what is acceptable, we encourage people to write, get involved and share their thoughts on the mighty Tottenham Hotspur.

9 Comments

  1. The Whale
    26/03/2014 @ 3:33 pm

    Damon out of Brookside? What on earth are you talking about man? How long did you spend writing this? I’ve seen some tenuous analogies in my time but seriously…

    • DubaiSpurs
      26/03/2014 @ 5:55 pm

      What the hell was that all about…. Some 80’s rubbish series and Tim Sherwood. Oh wait !!

  2. Spurgatso
    26/03/2014 @ 4:47 pm

    Oh God another Harry Hatespurs,hate Tim cos he’s a bit of rough,not your sexy continental type manager is he?Neither was ‘arry and he didnt do to bad ,but strangely our new bright young thing was’nt.Go and be a fan of some other mob we dont need you or your ilk.COYS

    • cyril
      26/03/2014 @ 6:26 pm

      arry did not do all right. he wasted two great ops to cement cl place, including by being distracted by the england job rather than worrying about the guy paying his wages. he was crap, he had bale and modric and van der vaart, and yet………………
      he bankrupted portsmouth, soon not to be in the league at all and seems hell bent on doing the same to qpr
      “run about a bit”, fine when you have those players but not fine if you have players that need coaching
      in a million years he would not be able to do what martinez has done. he was a disgrace and an embarrassmen to the club.

  3. The Whale
    26/03/2014 @ 5:06 pm

    “When I was a child I used to watch a TV show called The Wombles right and there were all these furry fellas and they would pick up lots of rubbish and one of them was called Bungle and that’s what Sherwood is right he’s a bungler right and I think he is rubbish is that clever enough? Can I have a job writing for the Guardian’s website yet?” etc etc.

  4. beset by ludites
    26/03/2014 @ 6:16 pm

    Now you know how AVB felt, Neil, hated by the mob for being a bit too clever, too many long words and “all that bleedin’ tictacs bollox, innit bruv !.” I wouldn’t worry about it though, this lot would have been burning books in the Reichland!

    • Gareth
      26/03/2014 @ 7:27 pm

      There are a couple of c-units on this site. I got branded a “parasite” by a particularly nasty little wanker because he thought I belonged to the wrong class to be supporting ‘his’ side. I can’t help where I was born (on the Cambridgeshire/Essex border on the Cambridgeshire side), just as I can’t help which side I support. I certainly wont apologize for my level of education (currently up to an MA in English Literature – soon to be a PhD, hopefully) – why should I not want to educate myself?!

      I love the Spurs. That is all that should matter here. I might not love the Spurs the same as others, but so what? I can’t get to matches because I live in Germany. So I stream. If we win I’m smiling all week. If we lose I’ll have a bad evening and then find a way to smile all week anyway. It’s sad that we can’t all get along, seeing as we have a shared love of this great club in common. When I first joined the site I thought that I’d find only decent people, because all the Spurs fans I’d met face-to-face over the years have been diamond; only the Gooners were wankers…not so! At least you seem to have have sense as well as great taste in football teams.

  5. The Whale
    27/03/2014 @ 10:15 am

    It is nothing to do with class or reverse snobbery. It isn’t even anything to do with our present manager, or his predecessor. It is to do with the turgid nature of this particular metaphor, ie dragging up a couple of soap opera characters in a clumsy attempt to shoehorn in a football reference. It simply does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

    • Neil Ardiff
      03/04/2014 @ 1:06 pm

      You’re right. It doesnt really. Never mind. Damon and Debbie though, eh?

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