Life A LEAN, BLEAK FELLOW in a bowler hat and
a black suit, shuffling his adjectives like a con-man with other people's banknotes, made a tinted out- burst about Blackpool Illuminations. Th' Lights, he said, were not only a spectacular presentation, 'but a colossal production, an outstanding spec- tacle, a brilliant colorama, a fabulous autumn presentation, a magnificent spectacle, the greatest free show on earth.
The Mayor blinked apprehensively at this civic emissary, a latter-day town crier peeling off pub- licity instead of using a handbell. A smaller light glinted from the mayoral chain, and he fumbled among his notes for the evocative phrase. 'A fairyland,' he announced at length, was a true de- scription of six illuminated miles, and he gathered an obedient brood of reporters to patrol the promenade. Their eyesight would deduce tl every speech had been an understatement.
A sickly yellow coach, excised from shouk height, purred into an endless vista of bu dangled like beads across the road, along evr pavement, entwining themselves around blamer lamp posts. Even a lavatory cannot be left t touched.
The coach coughed and crawled, passed by to flighty trams screeching like jolly women in gauc hats whose posteriors had just been pinch And a technocrat, easily identified by his rainbo changing expression as the Illuminations a Public Street Lighting Officer, strolled the coat explaining his sprawling subtopia. This ' Sleeping Beauty, he said, stabbing through t petrol fumes at a grotesque woodland settit Princess Briar Rose and episodes in Delight) Sceni-color. It was all tied up with a new Disn film. 'Aah wunder 'ow much Walt slipped '( fer that'?' gasped a rebellious Blackpudlian in 1 corporation party.
Royalty, twitching starlight, a recumbent Sar Claus, 3-D tableaux from notable• novels, pant mime figures and flickering electrical hula-hi girls quivered along the promenade. A rude col mercial intrusion to Join The Army was in dat ness. The technocrat imbibed oppressive hai burger odours and said his proudest displays we believe it or not, working, reversing silhouett a tableaux team of acrobats and Cossack claw elevated in appearance to animated rice puddii The expert sunned himself in the glow a asked if there were any more questions. `Yus,' s. a crouched figure in a corner, 'when do we them drinks at t' Town 'All?'
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