Tom Potter

SMN ‘Meet the Team’ Questions

List of Tom’s reviews

Modelling

What first attracted you to Scale Modelling?
It was an interest in aircraft and that blue Airfix Spitfire made it possible to have an air force hanging from the bedroom ceiling.

How long have you been scale modelling for?
Since that first Airfix Spitfire, which must have been about 1955 – God was it that long ago!

Specialist area of Modelling?
Aircraft of the RAF.

Preferred Scale?
1:32, but if the subject is right, I’ll do any scale, although I tend to shy away from 1/72.

What is your favourite real subject of all time (aircraft, armour or maritime)?
Has to be the Avro Lancaster.

The best thing you’ve ever built?
Revell 1:32 Hawker Hunter FGA9 – others may say different.

And finally: Most memorable Modelling disaster?
Splashing white spirit all over a freshly painted Hasegawa Spitfire. Or, you could say anytime I sit at the modelling bench.

Scale Modelling Now

How long have you been a reviewer for?
From the start of SMN.

What made you get involved with SMN?
A persuasive person by the name of Geoff Coughlin, whatever happened to him?

What’s your favourite thing(s) about SMN?
The immediacy of it.

Favourite SMN review?
Anything by Les V.

About You…

Sum yourself up in no more than five words.
Grumpy man with some humour.

Biggest hobby/hobbies outside of Scale Modelling?
Showing people around the BBMF and telling them something of why they are able to do it.

Favourite food/meal?
Noisettes of lamb Shrewsbury followed by Omelette Stephanie. Ask nicely and I’ll let you have the recipes.

Three famous people who you admire
Bob Stanford Tuck, Douglas Bader and Winston Churchill.

And finally…tell us a (clean) joke…
On a transatlantic flight, a plane passes through a severe storm.

The turbulence is awful, and things go from bad to worse when one wing is struck by lightning. One woman, in particular, loses it. Screaming, she stands up in the front of the plane. ‘I’m too young to die,’ she wails. Then she yells, ‘If I’m going to die, I want my last minutes on earth to be memorable! Is there anyone on this plane who can make me feel like a WOMAN?’

For a moment there is silence. Everyone has forgotten their own peril. They all stare, eyes riveted, at this desperate woman in the front of the plane. Then an Australian guy stands up in the rear of the plane. He is handsome, well built, with dark brown hair and blue eyes. He starts to walk slowly up the aisle, unbuttoning his shirt, one button at a time.

No one moves. He removes his shirt. Muscles ripple across his chest.

She gasps.

He whispers . . . ‘Iron this. Then get me a beer’.