Going DEAF for GEOFF!!!
The populace, in full Geoff-fervour mode, yesterday
story by Alicia Ruby
Celebrities, famous people, folk in the public eye – you can't have failed to notice that right now, if it’s hot, it’s Geoff. In fact, if you took all the t-shirts the kids are wearing these days that flaunt the name or face of some famous Geoff or other, and then laid them end to end, you’d cover the path from North Sydney station to Luna Park, as though it were some crazy Geoff-brick road. Yes siree - everywhere you go the hordes of Geoff-crazed fans hailing their heroes make enough din to swing a cat. So what is it with the new G-craze? Alicia Ruby investigates.
These days you can’t hurl an abandoned car seat out of a fourth-floor window anywhere in the civilized world without having to call an ambulance to come as quickly as possible to the aid of a celebrity Geoff. Bridges, Fahey, Beck, Hurst, Capes, Rush, Lynne, Wiggle and the one off “Rainbow” – if you look up “Geoff” in the dictionary today it says “star”. Or possibly the other way around.
With his hair, either short or, sometimes, quite long, and his jeans that fit like casual blue trousers around his legs, the Geoff is here and he’s here to stay. TV, music, cinema and sports – the world of entertainment is so absolutely dominated by Geoffs you'd have to have spent the last few years buried alive under a rock fall, pinned by boulders and unable to make your pitiful cries for rescue heard, sickeningly aware that as each second passes your gossamer-thin hopes of survival fade further and further into nothingness, maddened beyond panic at the sheer horror of your ordeal, not to have noticed.
It's all a considerable haul from the time, not so very long ago, that the Geoff was languishing in the name doldrums, a moniker backwater. Says Moira Hanwengering, some random in her early to mid thirties, "When I was young, you never got any Geoffs. None. Never. You just didn’t get any."
Stuart Kitchener, of the Southend Rotarians, a distinguished elderly gentleman of military bearing, goes a little further. "Oh, yes well, Geoffs," he remembers. "You’d hear about them, of course, turning up underneath a skip or something. there would always be some tale about how the town elders had got rid of it – cutting it up into small bits, wrapping it all up in clingfilm and gaffa-taping the entire grisly package to the underside of a lorry destined for Belgium or whatever – but you’d never actually meet one."
If that sounds a little excessive, Mr Kitchener adds: "Over the years I’ve come to realise that so-called 'sightings' of Geoffs were little more than urban legends, put out by parents and teachers and milkmen to terrify us gullible children into good behaviour. I don’t think it did us any harm, though," he adds, polishing his enormous collection of grenades.
Annette Fry, a third-year student of science at the Birminghma Institute of Science, says that saw her first Geoff when she was about sixteen. "I was about sixteen when I saw my first Geoff," she says. "It wasn’t really a big problem. You wouldn’t give it the time of day or anything, but… Actually I think we ended up putting it in the stocks and throwing eggs at it…"
"The very real problem for these proto-Geoffs," explains Sociology Professor Allan Ljund of the Sociology Department of the Biringham Institute of Science, "was that everybody was called Steve, or Mike, or in the racier suburbs, Lex. There was a smattering of Lukes, the odd Phil, and if you were really paying attention you may have come across a Barry or two. But Geoff? No. So from the outset there was a resistance in a socio-political sense, a sort of anti-Geoffism that prevailed until, well, very recently, really."
But now, it's all aboard the HOT NOW!!! train to Geoff Central out there. At Geoffrey Rush hour! And the name's mysterious power doesn’t stop with the glitterati – the world of literature and books, not to mention film and television, is littered with characters called ‘Geoff’. In the 1986 film ‘Withnail and I’, Withnail – not, coincidentally, called Geoff – makes a clear reference to an athlete called Geoff Wode. Enid Blyton used the name more than once, most notably in a short school story about a boy who wasn't very tall, and I’m sure one of the characters in Carla Lane’s classic TV series from the early eighties, ‘Butterflies’, was called Geoffrey. Except that might have been the name of the actor who played the husband. In which case, chalk up another famous Geoff.
Celebrity worship has always tended to end up taking some odd forms, and the current Geoff hysteria is no exception. One facet of the stellar Geoffs, their astonishing propensity for beards, has inspired a group of online admirers to create what they happily admit is a cult - the Cult of the Bearded Geoff.
"With us, it's all about the beards," says the organisation's 'High Priest' Clifford Smallman. "The beards and the Geoffs. Bearded Geoffs. That's what it's all about." And what exactly do you do at your meetings? "Well, we don't exactly meet, as such," explains Smallman. "But occasionally a couple of us will chat on Facebook or Yahoo, you know. Catch up on all the news. Swap stories about where we were when we saw our first bearded Geoff." And where were you, Clifford? "Um, Brighton."
"From one perspective, it's not so surprising," opines Professor Ljund. "Firstly, you have the beard as an amblem, a totem if you like, of manly vigour - something that has always loomed large in cultural lore. But then we apply those considerations to the specific examples of the Geoffs, and we see that among them you run as it were the gamut of beard types - the beatnik goatee of Bridges, as sported in the Big Lebowski, the trimmed full Sprout-on of Jeff Lynne more or less at every moment in his career, and the altogether wilder Hairy Hoofmaster of the Capes. It all adds up. From another perspective, however, it is of course completely fucking preposterous."
eRsaTz:
HOT NOW!!!
This irresistible outflow of Geoff has gripped the world with a glove of surprise, and has even led to a recent survey that reveals how everyone, statistically, is called, on average, Geoff. This controversial report has created a storm of controversy amongst scientists and the general public alike.
"Well, I’m not called Geoff," points out a Mrs Moira Pickering of Derbyshire. "And nor’s my daughter Natalie."
"Certainly, the assertion that everyone is called Geoff doesn’t ring altogether true," agrees Dr David Hardwick, Head of Names at the Birmingham Institute of Science. "As with any research, it's all about the data, and in this case I think we need plenty more, closely scrutinised in accordance with due scientific method, before we can start to entertain such a claim." So we can call it controversial? "Ah... sure," agrees Dr Hardwick. "If you like."
a storm of controversy - a storm of controversy - a storm of controversy
But this overwhelming wave of success doesn’t mean to say that all is calm in the Geoff camp. A storm rages amongst this glittering fraternity over the spelling of the name. Mr. Fahey, for example, star of, um, “The Lawnmower Man”, and also “The Lawnmower Man – the director’s cut”, oh, and “Woman of Desire” with Bo Derek, insists on the more modern J-E-F-F – and woe betide anyone who gets it wrong.
"No, it’s Jeff with a J, not a G," affirms Tedd Muffy, lifelong schoolfriend of the LAwnmower Man star. "That’s just the way he spells it. People don’t tend to get it wrong these days, because he’s quite famous, but back at school, oh yeah, people used to get it wrong all the time. G-E-O-F-F, you name it. Even the teachers. It would drive him crazy, as you can imagine, especially if something was being done in, you know, like, alphabetical order, and everyone wanted him to line up after the F’s, and he’d be like, no, I have to go after the I’s, cos I spell it with a J."
a split in the ranks
But let Mr Muffy try telling that to Mr. Capes, former Britain’s and the World’s strongest man. The pie-eating musclebound athlete goes by the name Geoff – and he doesn’t care who knows it!
"That’s right, Geoff with a G, that’s me," says Geoff Capes, the former World's Strongest Man. "G by name and G by… well, by name, anyway. When I was just starting out as an unknown shot-putter, people used to spell my name any way they liked – with a J, with a G, I even had one bloke spell it with a… oh no, actually that was just with a J. But anyway, when I took the world of the World’s Strongest Man by storm, they soon changed their tune! Everyone made pretty sure they got the spelling right after that! After all, would you want to risk the wrath of the World’s Strongest Man?"
Not us, Geoff!
the ages of Geoff Capes: (clockwise from top left) The youthful shot-putter, about to take on the world of strong and win; Pot Noodle advert-era Geoff; Geoff Capes now
Everybody knows famous actor Geoffrey Rush – but you may not have known that ‘Geoffrey’ is just another form of that ubiquitous name 'Geoff'.
And what about England’s 1966 hat-trick hero, Jeff Hurst? We have this exclusive on his credit card agony, when a credit card company sent him, through the post, a credit card bearing the name Geoff Hurst. 'Toby', an old friend, takes up the story...
"Phew! Yeah. What a nightmare. What happened was, a credit card company once sent him a credit card bearing the name Geoff Hurst. You know – G-E-O-F-F. What a nightmare that was. He had to send it back and ask for a new one, with the right spelling. It turned up about four or five days later. No, maybe it was six. I can’t remember. It was a while ago."
Death Row inmate Jeffrey Dahmer was unavailable for comment, but ‘Jeffrey’ is simply another way of saying ‘Jeff’ – rather like the way ‘Geoffrey’ is another way of saying ‘Geoff'.
Not everyone is so crazy for the Geoff, however. The late Elizabeth Taylor, star of films like ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ and many more, wouldn’t have them in the house, as exclusive footage recorded hours before she passed away reveals.
"I’m pretty sure one of the men I married was a Geoff," said the erstwhile queen of the silver screen. "Of course, my memory isn't what it was and to be honest it was always kind of hard to keep up with them all at the best of times. But I think there was a Geoff, and if I remember rightly he was a proper pain in the arse."
But however you look at it, the Geoff explosion, kept for so long under wraps, is now well and truly under way. One day, our children may well be living on planet Geoff.
