It might be hard to believe for you young uns out there, but back in the seventies, there was a whole cultural phenomenon built around the art of streaking. Taking your clothes off in public and just generally running around and hollering, often waving an item of clothing around your head as you did so. Usually your pants.

This didn’t just happen at major sporting events, it could happen anywhere. For whatever reason it briefly caught on in popular culture, like marbles or hula hoops. It inevitably led to the formation of a Benny Hill chase scene, as a bunch of either outraged or laughing authority figures ran in pursuit of the errant streaker.

Oddly enough as it may seem now, it was incredibly popular at my primary school, or at least it was with big boofy Bradley Read. Ready, god bless him. I can still see his big grinning oafish face. He started out as a major school bully, but by grade 7 had developed a wicked sense of humour, and if you could make him laugh, as I frequently did, then he was your best mate. I loved the guy.

Anyway, I think Ready had witnessed a few streakers at the cricket on telly, that’s where he no doubt got the idea of popularising the streak around the school playground. Well when I say popularising, it was only really popular with him. I’m pretty sure nobody else ever took it up. The first time he did it, we were all completely stunned and in shock, but naturally we wept with laughter and egged him on.

We were all milling around, probably waiting to start a sports lesson. There was a sudden wild yell, and Ready appeared from around a corner or behind a bush, stark bollock naked and running at full pelt. Racing around the quadrangle and down the ramp across the oval, waving his trackie daks around his big grinning head. I don’t remember his dick at all, but we all must have seen it.

To this day I can still picture Ready chucking laps around the school, twirling his brown Adidas stretch tracky dak pants in his arm as he ran, hollering. Pursued by a bunch of moustached and mulleted teachers, the ones who weren’t doubled over laughing. Come to think of it, most young men aged between 25 and 35 in the seventies looked like porn stars, or rather, the stereotype of porn stars as we remember them from old 8mm loop films… as I remember them from old 8mm loop films. The cool thing was they were all in on the joke. They didn’t really mind Ready livening up our summer afternoons with a streak. I hope the girls didn’t mind either. Today, it would have resulted in a series of psychological assessments and a lengthy suspension, some police charges for indecent exposure, a possible lawsuit and some traumatised school girls.

I’d like to think he’s still doing it today, as a middle aged man, to entertain the kids at family barbecues. And I hope he’ll still be doing it as an old man in a nursing home, leading the nurses a merry dance, twirling his incontinence pad around his head as he yelps and hollers around the corridors. Mmm nurses. Now THAT really will be like the Benny hill chase scene.

Anyway, that was life in the 1970s. They were simpler times. There was no Internet, no Playstations, no 24 hour hour pay tv networks. We had to make our own fun. I’m not making this stuff up. There was a song about it too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtzoUu7w-YM