Little Shop of Horrors

Ron Waller

Browsing the dim back corner of a musty antique shop, opened an old book of poetry. Angels flew out of the pages, I caught the whiff of a soul.

There is one place at Adams Park where you don’t have to queue. And it is the only place. The Programme Hut stands alone, like a proud war veteran dressed only in his pyjamas, the pin from his medals drawing blood from its heavily wrinkled man boob. That hut reminds us of the football we all love, reminds us of the players, the goals, the blood thirsty challenges, the embarrassing defeats, the thirty yard screamers and the squandered open goals. Too often at Wycombe Wanderers other things get in the way – politics and personalities, ticketing and bickering, drab internet characters sapping the life from football with battles of semantics. But in the hut, it’s all there, there in black and white and occasional smeared colour.

You can never underestimate the influence of musty smells and nose hair on the smbu generation – a sizeable collection of Wycombe fans trapped between a bookish romanticism for football’s history and traditions and hedonistic matchday drunkenness, designed to take the edge off dreary fixture lists. Programmes, comics, fanzines, annuals; they all played their part in captivating the imaginations of young kids. Whether it was Hot Shot Hamish for whom scoring an overhead kick from 30 yards was an easy tap-in, or the puzzle page in a programme, the earnest football literature of the past somehow resonates like no other. And it’s all on offer in one tiny, less-than-shiny hut. Go on, give it a try.

As one smbu contributor put it, The Hut has seen a whole lot of sex and a whole lot of memories, and it’s hard to believe that at least one of the sales team in The Hut hasn’t given the thumbs down to a home game with Macclesfield in favour of double locking the plywood door and getting down to an afternoon of bespeckled rumpy-pumpy with a saucy classroom assistant from Widmer End. Even the most conservatively minded readers must have wondered why those Bob Lord Trophy programmes are quite so crumpled and why Barry White bellows from a tinny speaker behind the FA Trophy collectables.

But even the steamy side of The Hut can’t diminish the innocent, wide-eyed romance of the place, a haven for the quixotic dreamers that reminisce of the days before four course executive lunches and club websites with 15 full-time writers with sales targets, ringing Wall Street style bells when the hits reach 50 for the day. That Hut might as well sell Mills and Boon and be staffed by Barbara Cartland look-a-likes, such is the soaring romance. Take a look through just one of the programmes, any one; they’re all the same. Slanted diagonally across the cover are the Match Sponsors, local shops or gangs of yobs who’d drunkenly decided to sponsor a game after staying for one too many on a Thursday night. Today’s match sponsors are Ted, Bob and Reg from Downley – thanks for the tenner you tight bastards. Fast forward twenty years and the same sponsors would need a countrywide bucket collection just to pay for a match day ticket at Adams Park. To sponsor a match, they’d be flogging kidneys or splashing petrol round head office like a mid-nineties Phil Mitchell.

Then there are articles. Actual articles – you remember them. Bits of writing designed to inform and entertain, not just try and sell you something or brainwash you into NEVER STOPPING GIVING US YOUR MONEY. People even offered their own opinions. John Goldsworthy’s programme notes of the late 80s read in 2008 like polemical tirades from The Morning Star¬ – rallying against ID cards and the like. It is astonishing, life affirming and when it’s topped off with grainy photos of perms, taches and kits you’d long since forgotten, it’s hard to beat.

A world away then from the thought of watching Wycombe in a 20,000 capacity, all-seater black and gold monstrosity up in Booker. But even that lies in the shadow of the programme hut, and all it stands for. Who would bet against the club’s articles of association having a lost clause that any new stadium must incorporate The Hut within the dugouts or main stand? Many in the Valley End believe that if nuclear war were to hit Sands, The Hut would stand, with only minor tearing to the covers of a few Reserves team programmes in the front plastic boxes.

The history detailed in 50 years of programmes isn’t one of bitterness, but one of glory and style. The overriding feeling on leaving the queue-less Hut is a positive one. It hammers home why we bother, why we started a bizarre ritual of traipsing round the county supporting a football club from Buckinghamshire. It documents everything we’ve experienced, loved and hated, ate and drank. The point of it is to revel in the past and make us bother with the future. There’s a lot of moaning, resentment, fear and loathing about the future, and sometimes, on the Internet and at the ground, it becomes all encompassing. To let that happen is to miss the point and a crying shame. Supporting Wycombe Wanderers shouldn’t be joyless and grey and textbook.

Look at Celtic Day last season. On paper, and on the gasroom, a strange and perhaps insulting idea that our support is so poxy that we need to take the begging bowl round to Celtic to try and get some pity filled, second club fans. In reality, it was superb. A chance to meet some fanatical followers of a big, weird football club, sing some super songs and witness up-close some of the biggest glasses ever manufactured. Vests and blazers, teeth like wheelie bins but hearts like dustbins, the 40 Celtic fans embraced the day by drinking from 7am and rounded it all off by being dragged screaming out the double doors of the Vere Suite and chased round the car park by some of the unfittest looking stewards in the Western World. In 20 years an 18-year-old Wycombe fan will read the full story of that day in a programme bought, well, you know where.

Hit the Hut.

04.11.2008. 10:46

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