Oh! I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth

I have just completed reading a book called “The Works” which is a collection of much loved poems by the comic poet and entertainer Pam Ayres.

I don’t know if you remember her, but she was the lady who gained fame by appearing on the ITV talent show “Opportunity Knocks” in November 1975. The youngest of six children, Pam was born in Stanford-in-the-Vale in Berkshire in 1947. After leaving school she joined the civil service as a clerical assistant, but soon lost interest, and this prompted her to join the Women’s Royal Air Fore (WRAF). It was whilst she was in the WRAF that she developed a love of singing and acting, and began to entertain thoughts of becoming an entertainer.

By now the poems she had written as a hobby began to be performed by her in local folk clubs. In 1974 a friend arranged for her to go to her local radio station (Radio Oxford) to read one of her poems. Pam’s broadcast was selected for BBC Radio 4’s “Pick of the Week” and was subsequently repeated on the 1974 “Pick of the Year programme!”

In 1975 she decided to audition for ITV’s “Opportunity Knocks”, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Having recently paid a visit to the dentist for an extraction I was reminded of her poem “I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth”, which was voted into the top ten of the UK’s 100 favourite poems.


Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth

Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.
And spotted the perils beneath
All the toffees I chewed,
And the sweet sticky food.
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.

I wish I’d been that much more willin’
When I had more tooth there than fillin’
To give up gobstoppers
From respect to me choppers
And to buy something else with me shillin’

When I think of the lollies I’ve licked
And the liquorice allsorts I picked,
Sherbet dabs, big and little,
All that hard peanut brittle,
My conscience gets horribly pricked.

My mother, she told me no end,
“If you got a tooth you got a friend,”
I was young then, and careless
My toothbrush was hairless,
I never had much time to spend.

Oh, I showed them the toothpaste all right,
I flashed it about late at night,
But up and down brushin’
And pokin’ and fussin’
Didn’t seem worth the time – I could bite!

If I’d known I was paving the way
To cavities, caps and decay,
The murder of fillin’s,
Inspections and drillin’s,
I’d have thrown all me sherbet away.

So I lie in the old dentist’s chair,.
And I gaze up his nose in despair,
And his drill it do whine
In these molars of mine.
“Two amalgam,” he’ll say, “for in there.”

How I laughed at my mother’s false teeth.
As they foamed in the waters beneath.
But now comes the reckonin’
It’s me they are beckonin’
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth!