As a boy, I loved The Six Million Dollar Man. He was an iconic figure in my childhood, and that show was arguably the first thing in my life I ever got hooked on. Loving something, anything, doesn't come easily to me. I don't believe it should either, and I'm inherently suspicious of people who seem to love everything they run into. Consequently, when I do fall for something, it's such an alien concept to me that it almost overwhelms me and perhaps I go too far the other way.
Tears for Fears.
New Order.
Batman.
Roland Rat.
NYPD Blue (David Caruso era only).
Deadwood.
Coffee.
Dermatology.
Cravendale.
Hot chocolate.
My obsessive love for these above things at one time or another could all be traced back to what I'd once felt for The Six Million Dollar Man.
When I was four, my dad got me a red tracksuit for Christmas that matched both Steve Austin's (The Six Million Dollar Man) and his own. My cousin and I would run through Brixton's new Angel Town estate in southwest London in our tracksuits pretending we were Steve Austin, jumping off any high-to-four-year-old obstacles on our route, adding bionic sound effects to our every jump.
Perhaps more importantly, the actor Lee Majors' much overlooked moustache in the final year of The Six Million Dollar Man gave me a lifelong obsession with facial hair and much later, regardless of the good cause, a fierce opposition to Movember, which I feel reduces the moustache to a karaoke-like status.
All of a sudden, my Six Million Dollar Man Kenner action doll no longer looked like Steve Austin. I had just started school in Clapham, and ended up stealing some plasticine from class so I could fashion a moustache for my doll. I became and remain, I guess, obsessed, with how a man can just alter their looks simply by growing facial hair. A decade later, I was even thrown out of my English GCSE class after being caught sketching what I felt was a rather flattering montage of my clean shaven English teacher, who looked uncannily like Christopher Biggins, sporting facial hair at various stages of growth.
