Don’t lose your marbles!

This indomitable favourite from the Ideal Corporation brought a plastic revolution to games, with strange new shapes and dayglo colours liberating us from the boxy, beige and racing green world of the boring old British board game. Over-perspexed, over-played and over here; truly the Americans had landed.

Yes, as all children knew, plastic was ace. And Ker-Plunk was the trailblazer. Resembling the central console column of a 1950s Soviet TARDIS, the fully assembled rig - base tray, two clear plastic beakers one on top of the other, with a load of good old fashioned have-your-eye-out pointy “straws” stuck through the middle at various angles, with the marbles nesting on top - towered above its more low-level board game rivals with a lurid, Vegas-style promise of raucous gravity-derived antics to put their bookish, dice-rolling shenanigans to shame. Initially, it was great – unashamed, no-brainer, straw-pulling anticipation. Would the marbles fall? Not yet. No, not yet, either. Nor, indeed, quite yet. Hmm. What’s for tea, I wonder? Then, allofasudden - Ker-Plunk! Or, more accurately, rat-atat-atat-atat! Aye, for all the onomatopoeic promise of the brand name, unless that base tray was three feet deep with water and each marble the weight of a bag of sugar, the ending was always a clattering anti-climax.

However, it’s almost impossible to convey to today’s young generation with their Harry Potter iPods and polyphonic Robosapians the sense of joy that used to be gleaned from what was, essentially, observing some marbles fall a distance of roughly eight inches, so it’s fortunate none of them will be reading this. But we just know, don’t we - Ker-Plunk was The Fucking Daddy for ages four to eight¹?

Scholastic post-script - the intermittent tap-tap-tap of marble on plastic must have worked like Chinese water torture on primary school teachers, at least round our way, because the last day of term “bring in a game” ruling was, soon after the likes of this (and the placcy-scattering Buckaroo!) appeared, hastily amended to “bring in a QUIET game”, thus introducing many a child to the despotic tendencies of the harassed authority figure.