And now for something completely different...

As a teenager I wanted to be different. I guess most of us go through that stage of not wanting to be the same as all the others, not wanting to conform, not wanting to be a sheep.

‘I want to be different!’ I can hear the echoes of that particular frustrated cry even today, the weakness of my rebellion still ringing in my ears. I think it really meant: 'I don't want to be my dad'.

Well that didn't work then.

Once in an act of outrageous outraged pique, I walked out of the school speech day because I wasn’t allowed to be awarded the book I’d chosen as my Art Prize. I’d picked Monty Python’s Big Red Book and my headmaster didn’t think it was quite the kind of thing that Lord Longford (yes Lord Longford, anti-porn campaigner and supporter of Myra Hindley) would feel comfortable passing over to me as my prize.

Well what did he know!

I stood up, thrusting back my chair and almost knocking out the teeth of boy behind me. Then I stomped to the front of the hall, past the stage and an open-mouthed Lord Longford, breezed out of the main doors jauntily whistling the Red Flag and letting them slam shut with a bang behind me. I wasn’t going to let the ‘Man’ tell me what I could or could not be presented with. I was different and that proved it.

Of course it didn’t and I wasn’t. What I was really was a teenage boy who’d made a bad choice of book given the type of school I attended, the headmaster’s view that comedy was somehow only funny if a Goon was involved, and of course the strangely warped ideas of the politician doing the presenting.

Ironically the headmaster’s son went on to write the music for Blackadder, the Vicar of Dibley, and worked with most of the Python team - at the time though he seemed so ordinary, so very un-different.

Of course I realise now that really I wanted to be pretty much the same as everyone else – same general look, same possessions, same aspirations. Oh, maybe I had a go at introducing some slight variation to my peers attempting to make myself stand out. My light brown hair was sometimes red and sometimes black, my clothes a little more flamboyant that the usual uniform. I worked at having different ideas about things like art and politics. I had four piercings (all in my ears of course), and I even tried to be into bands other than Deep Purple and Led Zep like Bowie and Roxy Music.

And it seemed so important to be different back then.

Looking back on it now though what seemed so important was really so unimportant and I realise that none of it made me any different at all. Not even that time I shaved off a huge chunk of hair on one side of my head just to be different, just to be out there sticking it to the man.

Actually it was an accident, but I managed to convince everyone that it was an act of indignation and rebellion.

How cool was I? God, I was so gloriously different!

I was watching a documentary on the TV last night. It was about seven dwarves, real ones, who were appearing in a pantomime (I bet that you can guess which one) and I suddenly realised how awful it must be to be really different. Suddenly that whole different thing, so wanted by teenagers for generations, seemed something to be avoided, not courted.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with being a dwarf, but it came across that they felt very different and generally found it really hard. Such a pity, because apart from their size they were pretty much the same as everyone else – same ambitions, same fears, same needs, same wonder, same silly drunkenness.

It made me ask the question; just how different would any of us really like to be? Would we like to be dwarves, or have no arms and legs, live locked in an internal world unable to communicate, or any of the other terrible differences that we could have to bear? I don’t think so.

Maybe none of us want to be that different. Maybe most of us simply want to be the same.

Maybe that is what that teenage thing is all about – a period of experimentation with difference before admitting that the comforting inclusiveness of sameness is what we really need and want.