Blackpool Mon Amour
AFTERTHOUGHT
By JOHN WELLS
Blackpool, I was told again and again before I went there last week to record a brief satiric sketch for the Late Show which opens on BBC-1 on Saturday night—and how's that for a big fat plug, Sir Huge Greene—was ghastly. The hotels were appalling, the weather was always dreadful, and, worst of all, the place so stank of fish and chips and wet mackintoshes and bad breath and sweaty feet and armpits—Alan Brien will forgive me if I venture for a moment into his cherished preserves—that the sensitive aesthete could only reel back holding his nose and feeling his way past the ticket-collector for the first train back to airy civilisation.
My first impression, I must admit, as we rolled out of the station at Blackpool North was a gloomy one. As I stood on the pavement in the rain opposite a dull frontage of late-Victorian houses and watched the rather timid illumina- tions on the station portico flickering on and off—three little outlines of bells picked out in yellow light bulbs that were intended to create the illusion of a silently swinging bell—I took a shallow breath. True, there was a faint whiff of fish and chips—I could even see the shop—and in the rain it seemed to be mingled with a slight dankness suggesting drains.
The next morning at the Pleasure Beach, with the strangely surrealist atmosphere of the vast deserted pleasure ground in concrete and steel, silent except for the mocking mechanical laughter of a shaking life-size dummy clown in a glass case, the sun shone bright and there was only the clean smell of the sea. I wondered why no one had mentioned the fun fair. Apart from being one of the biggest in the world, with the huge white arches of the roller-coaster and the giant clown operating the Ferris Wheel rising way up above the stalls, and a square primitive face in imitation rock at least sixty feet high, there was a mass of vulgar delights that seem to have disappeared from less enterprising places of entertainment.
Arcades on arcades of pinball machines, penny- in-the-slot peep-shows called 'The Last Days of Hitler' or 'The Miser's Doom,' in which brightly painted mechanical figures moved through two or three basic actions and then stopped awk- wardly in mid-movement with the red-painted devil still visible behind the half-shut door, endless shooting galleries in which dusky enemies rose and fell rhythmically behind cardboard ridges, piles of 'Kiss Me Quick' hats, candy- floss and illuminating bow-ties, and enough vibrant Pop Culture to keep the most discerning Conservative happy for weeks. Perhaps the most attractively vulgar feature was the larger-than- life-size Noah's Ark at the entrance to the Pleasure Beach, where a small metal lion sat behind the bars of a cage and recited in a slow lugubrious voice, 'Children. Do not throw your sweet papers on the ground. Feed them to me, the paper-eatin [sic] li-on.'
Sated with these simple pleasures, we climbed into one of the rickety horse-drawn vehicles that ply for hire along the front and which feature prominently in Blackpool's curiously worded travel literature, sharing it with two unusually fat Scotsmen and their unusually fat wives, one of whom did an astonishingly expert impersonation of Her Majesty the Queen, and passed slowly along the facade of whelk stalls and souvenir shops and Pots of Tea for the Sands that conceal the glum fronts of the houses, finally all falling out at the foot of the Tovier.
The complex of aquarium, menagerie, amuse- ment arcades and bars in the building beneath the Tower must form one of the finest fun palaces in the country. A Joan Littlewood dream, plastered and stuck with pagoda4ike false roofs beneath the ceiling, over-decorated with green and reds and electric-light bulbs and stained- glass windows and huge red plush sofas to the point where it takes on its own blaring brass- band style, it even contains a huge dance hall, with tiered red balconies rising to the roof, where at eleven o'clock in the morning neat couples in blazers and flannels and flowered frocks were moving through the steps of a Victor Silvester Dancing Club to the music of a theatre organ.
The Tower itself is not so exciting, except for the alarmingly hesitant lift and the endless rivets of the ironwork clanking past like a massive industrial assemblage symbolising nineteenth- century progress. The Golden Mile at night, on the other hand, with its ropes of golden light across the road and constantly irradiating suns, the green and blue and orange lights that click on and off and rise and fall in fountains, the garlands and chandeliers of lights on all the lamp-posts, and the trams covered with electric- light bulbs in the shapes of railway engines and rocket ships, create a glittering firework display of a splendour that would make even the most jaded Tory shout with delight.
It occurred to me, as I left the golden promenade and returned to the hotel, that I had forgotten to sniff during the day, so I cannot vouch for the purity of the air even now. But, standing in the quite hair-raisingly ugly bar with its pendant greenery and muzak saxophones, sitting opposite a platinum blonde straight out of some film of the 'thirties, so overpainted that I should have believed her to be a transvestite , had it not been for the enormous white-powdered breasts bursting out of her silver-lame dress, I found it impossible not to be thrilled by the sheer style of the place. And now perhaps Black- pool Corporation will let me handle their travel brochures for them. The least I expect is a fat cheque from the Corporations of Brighton and Scarborough.
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