Remember when we used to speak in weird American lingo? Millennials still do, but this was when many of us were caught up in the CB radio craze.
Citizens’ band radio started in America in the late 1960s, and eventually also swept the UK. It was bizarre. It spawned an entire language of its own.
Every driver under 30 had a CB handle, their call sign by which other CBers would know them. I was Sitting Bull at my RAF stations in Morayshire and Ayrshire, but when I came back to Stornoway everyone put an extra letter in Sitting.
Don’t laugh. Not funny.
The rigs we had were not, er, entirely legal back then, being American-made and non-licensable. In the 1980s, the UK Government did legalise CB here but on different frequencies, so you couldn’t use sets from across the pond.
I would have to buy a new rig. That’s when I lost interest. Another former island CBer explained his subsequent life to me recently: “Iain, I also was too tight to invest and now I’m too tight in my vest.”
Much as I loathe the Americanisation of our language today, we all succumbed during the CB craze. If you had a girlfriend, or just a female passenger, she was a “seat cover” in CB chat. Charming.
We thought we were so cool when we signed off with caring messages to other boy racers like: “Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down.”
The cops of the Western Isles division of Northern Constabulary were our targets as we tried to keep a step ahead of them. They were smokies, bears and even Kojaks, from the lollipop-sucking star of a popular New York detective series.
American cops already had speed guns and, even though they didn’t come to the UK until the late-1980s, we talked as if they were already here. If you saw a panda car pulled off the road, you’d transmit a warning about “a Kojak with a Kodak”. We were so ahead of our time.
What really helped the CB craze take hold was a 1976 hit song called Convoy from a Kris Kristofferson movie of the same name. Even if you’re too young to have been a music fan then, it gets played a lot on the box whenever they mention American trucks, police chases or, of course, CB radio.
Who sang Convoy? I bet you didn’t remember it was CW McCall or Rubber Duck. Remember the words?
“Yeah, them smokies is thick as bugs on a bumper
They even had a bear in the air
I says: ‘Callin’ all trucks, this here’s the Duck
‘We’re about to go a-huntin’ bear'”
Pure poetry. It was later sung in my local pub in south London by a very popular performer called Rita, from Wyoming. She packed the place out at weekends – every darned weekend.
In her Stetson and cowboy boots, she also had a loud sound effect machine, like a honking truck. Oh, and did I mention that she played piano and many other instruments too? She was extremely talented.
And did I mention one of the reasons the pub may have been rammed? At the end of the evening, Rita would perform topless. Remind me to tell you why she eventually could not bear to go bare.
A bear in the air
That line about a bear in the air is a classic. It was CB-speak for a police helicopter; that phrase proved to be very prophetic this week. From another Morayshire RAF base, jet fighters were scrambled to also go a-hunting bear.
Russian tanker aircraft called Tupolev-142 Bears are again testing the UK’s readiness to respond to Russia’s illegal incursions into our airspace – just as they did all those years ago, when a young CB enthusiast from Stornoway helped launch F-4 Phantoms to do the same thing. I was that airman.
Cheeky blighters, these Russians. There was yet another incident on Monday, when Typhoon jets from RAF Lossiemouth had to intercept Bears north of Shetland and tell them to get lost in coarse language.
Oh, I was going to tell you what happened to yon slightly-coarse performer, Rita from Wyoming. She was an amazing musician who played piano and any other instrument she was asked to. Before I left London, she announced on stage she had given up her topless routines.
There were gasps all around. Why on earth did she have to give up when she was pulling in punters from around the Home Counties?
She sobbed: “I just made a mistake. Yes, sirree – I could play all these instruments but I learned a painful lesson. During the topless part of my show, someone asked me to play the accordion.”
Iain Maciver is a former broadcaster and news reporter from the Outer Hebrides
