Dave Shilson 1977 - 2022

 

No doubt Dave would have been amused by the fact that his passing coincided with a period of national mourning, though there may have been some annoyance that the TV schedules hadn't been disrupted for him.

Not that he would have expected quite the same coverage as that given to the late monarch – on that Thursday evening GB News appeared to be showing something called The Queen Dies, every hour on the hour, as if they were forcing her to do it again and again. I'm sure Dave would have been content with a few rerun episodes of Spaced, or Time Team – on Dave, of course.

A lot of my memories from being his housemate in five houses over seven years seem to centre around the TV, and the no-doubt-hilarious commentary we provided on offerings such as Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men or Ghosthunting With The Happy Mondays. We could have been on Gogglebox if that had existed at the time, and they'd let us.

Our tastes were at odds to some degree (he hated Abba, I hated Queen) but some programmes, like Flight of the Conchords, TV Burp or Bellamy's People (which I doubt if anybody else remembers) we both liked, although I now feel a bit guilty at the thought of how many hours of Coronation Street, and Deal Or No Deal I must have made him sit through (or 'shared with him', as they say nowadays). Although he always had his laptop open as a defence against whatever was on.

Confronted with some new trash TV atrocity I often wonder what Dave – or the audience that comprised Dave and I – would have made of it, and now I will have to go on wondering. Of course, with the advent of TOWIE, whose epicentre was Brentwood, TV soon merged with our 'reality', but Dave preferred the more authentic Essex experience offered by places like Jaywick, an unapologetic shithole. Though in the end that got on TV too.

By that stage, he had left Essex. It was easy to understand and approve of his relocation to Malvern with Claire. Malvern seemed as he described it like a place especially imagined for him, with an endless supply of real ale, feral Morrismen, and hobbits hiding in the hills (to be glimpsed only after quaffing large quantities of the ale). I don't think Claire even had a TV. He should have had longer there, but that he had the time he had is something we have to be grateful for.

Not that I want to sell the Essex years short. There was plenty of incident: post-rave air base mash-ups, ambient experiences in the secret nuclear bunker, flea infestations, the Pink Toothbrush, the Coming of Ross. But it is the routine, and rituals like the consumption of two bottles of good red wine every Friday night, that stick in the mind.

Much of it is recorded, somewhat fitfully, on this blog, which I have been attempting to reread. Dave rarely commented on a post, and when he did it was characteristically laconic. 'But still', he writes on one occasion, a reference to the concern I had expressed that I was overusing this particular phrase.

Looking for words of wisdom from Dave on here I could only come up with (in relation to a preference for hotel vending machine snacks over fast food): 'You can't get dysentery from a Yorkie' and (advice to Mat, who was struggling to reach something): 'You need to be taller.'

Hardly adequate as a summing-up of a life, if such a thing were possible or even desirable (his 'last words' online – 'could be worse' - seemed to do that more effectively). But still.