Tim McCann still remembers the day more than 50 years ago his grandad brought him a rather unusual gift – a fruit machine.
What sticks in his mind, decades later, was the look of shock on his father’s face after Tim’s granddad Cornelius McCann presented him with the present.
“It was a great heavy thing. I was wondering what on earth it was, I had no idea at all,” explains Tim, now 64, of East Boldon, Tyne and Wear.
Cornelius, who is described as having a wicked sense of humour, passed away aged 86, just a few years after he gave the 10-year-old boy the “one-armed bandit”.
However, Tim knows he was just as unique as the gift. His grandad was a banjo-playing antique dealer with his own record label, who dressed like a Peaky Blinder. Tim said: “He was a real character, he was Dapper Dan.”
And his grandad’s gift was a hit with friends. “Anybody who came around seemed to love it and, as I got older, I built the bar up in the bedroom, and we had the machine at the end of the bar.
“Friends used to come around and we put music on and it was unique. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody else who had a fruit machine in the house.”
But 20 years ago, the machine, which was made in the early 1960s, ground to a halt while his children were playing with it.
“One day, I saw the handle was looking rather limp, and nobody knew how it got broken. Then it just got put away in a corner and it had probably been in that corner for 20 years.”
Then Tim decided to enlist the help of BBC One’s The Repair Shop, and the dad of three appears on the show tonight.
“I tried to fix it,” he said. “But I couldn’t find out what was wrong with it.
“We started watching The Repair Shop in the middle of lockdown. It’s a magical programme because they just bring things back to life.”
The show features arcade games aficionado Geoff Harvey, and Dominic Chinea, as they restore the machine, which works with tokens or sixpences.
The end result thrilled Tim, who said: “I was absolutely delighted.” And as if getting his prize possession repaired was not good fortune enough, he struck lucky when he went to play the machine after two decades of it gathering dust.
“I got the sixpence and I put it in. And I think I won three or four times in a row, which was quite amazing,” said Tim.
“It now has pride of place in the dining room until we decide where we are going to put it. Everybody has been playing it, nobody has been winning though and all the sixpences are inside the machine!”
Tim is so pleased he said he plans to visit Geoff to buy him a few pints.
And now Tim has a one-year-old grandson, Vincent, he plans to give him the machine, returning the favour of being a cool grandad with unusual gifts.
“Although it’s not everybody’s idea of an heirloom, it is unique,” he said.
- The Repair Shop, Wednesday, 8pm, BBC1.
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