Battling Tops

For no apparent reason I got all nostalgic for Battling Tops tonight.
It was just after watching Nick Griffin on Question Time but there's no deep significance in that.
The BBC took a huge gamble letting him on, but on the whole it probably paid off. He was completely unable to answer a straight question and made an utter pillock of himself. In that respect, the job's a good 'un.
Would anyone watching have been more likely to vote for him after seeing him squirm, fidget and lie his way through the programme? No.
Would it have made people less likely to vote for him. For all our sakes let's hope it's yes.
Anyway, I then got all nostalgic for Battling Tops, a game in which two, three or four little plastic spinning tops were unleashed into an arena and the last one standing was the winner. The picture on the box lid is actually a pretty fair representation of the game. Those American kids are really getting into it, eh? And the dad looks like Paul Whitehouse being Arthur Atkinson.
It was a great game, and I'll bet Popee and Tom Down Under had it. Probably the Caerphilly Kid, too.
You might think that being an only child was an obstacle to rewarding games of Battling Tops, but I developed a technique of firing them off in quick succession, so I was happy. They were simpler times.