A few days before the show Dad even toyed with the idea of entering the show himself, announcing that his Elvis impersonation ‘wasn’t half bad’. Good sense prevailed when Mum pointed out it wasn’t ‘half bad’ because it was ‘completely awful’. He sulked a bit, but I reckon he was a little bit relieved when the original bravado had worn off.

The day of the show arrived and people got up just as they always had. They went shopping. They cleaned their cars. They read newspapers. They gossiped over garden fences.

They made their way to the green.

Simon, Lilly and I were near the back, cross-legged on the grass, drinking reasonably cold Cokes from the Happy Shopper, and watching Mr Peterson’s act with something close to horror.

Mr Peebles was even more hideous than I remembered.

A grotesque papier-mâché head, like a dried-up orange, sat on top of a square, unnatural-looking body. The dummy’s eyes sort of moved about – they were actually little more than very poorly painted ping-pong balls – but they only went from one impossible cross-eyed position to another.

Every time Mr Peterson operated the thing’s mouth there was this horrible, hollow knocking sound that was often louder than the thin, falsetto voice that was supposed to come from Mr Peebles.

To call Mr Peterson a ‘ventriloquist’ is to insult the profession because there was no art to what he did. It implies that his lips didn’t move and there was at least an illusion that it was the dummy doing the talking.

Not Mr Peterson.

Mr Peterson’s lips always moved.

They moved when he was doing his straight man routine as himself, and they seemed to move even more when he was speaking for his dummy.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think Mr Peterson ever practises. Between one talent show and another I think Mr Peebles went back into his box and stayed there.