I was absolutely flipping furious. Temple throbbing, fists clenching, cold sweat forming in the armpits; as angry as I've been in years. I hope the reason is obvious. Generally, I like London cabbies but here was one of that unpleasant few whose bigotry and ignorance extend to anything outside the M25. This bastard had heard my accent, deduced that I was northern and assumed that I was a peasant who lived in a backstreet hovel somewhere unspeakably far north of Rugby. What made this little scene all the more ironic was that I had spent the afternoon interviewing Stephen Poliakoff, the esteemed dramatist, and Ken Loach, the leftist film director. The cabbie would never see this interview as he would doubtless be watching You've Been Framed on ITV3, perhaps in a string vest, and probably thought Stephen Poliakoff was a midfielder Chelsea were after from Dortmund. Ken Loach might have put the whole thing in one of his films.
When the more ignorant Home Counties man thinks of the north, they see wheezing men in clogs and donkey jackets searching their trouser turn-ups for a dog-end. They see women in shawls waiting for the bailiff to take their tin bath. They see filthy children scouring the municipal tip like seagulls. They see striking miners and ragged urchins. They see poverty.
The idea of the north as poor and primitive is rooted deep in the national psyche. It's a notion reflected in music, from 'Dirty Old Town' to 'Liverpool Lullaby' to 'Jarrow Song', in literature from Hard Times to Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole, and in films from The Full Monty to Billy Elliot. All of these contribute to the belief that the natural condition of the northerner is desperate near-destitution or at the very least a life spent watching the pennies.
Mind you, there's a certain factual basis for all of this. The Jarrow Marches weren't invented by Alan Price for his jaunty seventies hit; they really happened. Similarly, during the seventies and eighties, northern cities crumbled sometimes through wilful neglect. As whole industries were strangled, so were the towns that depended on them. In the case of steel, it was Consett and Irlam. Hundreds of pits closed and took their towns and villages down with them.
Not all southerners were as hard-hearted as Mrs T, sinister henchman Tebbit and monkish, demented cohort Keith Joseph, who once called for the compulsory sterilisation of the working class. I had family members at Golborne Colliery and during the strike, food parcels would arrive from sympathetic communities and individuals in the south. Being irredeemably Lancastrian in his outlook to food, my Uncle Brian, though grateful, was hostile. He was mildly terrified of the contents within; weird, inedible things like pasta, curries, herbs and spices. Even the tins of French onion soup and spaghetti bolognese (my old fave, remember) sent in solidarity from the Heinz workers at Kitt Green were regarded with suspicion. Rumour had it they'd become contaminated with flavour and tastiness and contained no pastry whatsoever.
So rather than waste them he passed the parcels on to me, then an impoverished student. Thus I played my part in the last great class conflict of the age. It was a sideline role in the drama, admittedly, eating Pot Noodles and tinned chicken madras in solidarity. Hardly as pivotal a role as Scargill or Mick McGahey or even Ian McGregor. But I was there. With a sachet of mango chutney.
Poverty and its close associates, rickets, diphtheria, alcoholism and whooping cough, form a goodly part of the comedy caricature of the north. We've even taken it on board ourselves. We like to think of ourselves as 'simple folk, poor but happy' and all that malarkey. Even before the coming of Roman Abramovich, Chelsea were generally disliked in the north for their 'Flash Harry' Kings Road playboy image. We don't like ostentatious displays of wealth. We can be quite parochial in this respect. In the mid-1990s, looking out at our wilderness of a garden, my wife suggested that we pay someone to come and tidy it up as neither of us had the time or inclination. Apparently, I reacted with shock and outrage. 'Hire a gardener? A gardener? OK, why don't we buy some top hats and monocles while we're at it?' Old habits die hard.
It's all bollocks. The north is rich. In the newly revitalised cities you can practically smell money. The restaurants are full and the girls are dressed in Vivienne Westwood. Of course there are sink estates and cars on bricks and urine-damp stairwells, but the south has its fair share of these too. London has the highest poverty rate in Britain and the two poorest boroughs in the UK are Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The capital has the highest rate of families living in low-income households at twenty-seven per cent. The south is no place to be poor. In fact, with its grotesquely inflated house prices and overcrowding, it's no place to be a nurse or a teacher. You get a London weighting, of course. But until it comes in gold bullion I'd still rather teach in Kendal or Keighley.
The days when visiting Chelsea and Arsenal fans would sing 'What's it like to have no job?' at Scousers or wave wads of money at Geordies are pretty much gone. Mancunians still sing 'In your Liverpool slums' towards the Kop but that's tribal hatred not socio-economic analysis. If you want some proper facts then how about these unearthed by Judith Holder in her book of the TV series It's Grim Up North. There are more private swimming pools in the north than in the south. They raise more money for charity in Cheshire than anywhere else in Britain. Geordies buy twice as much champagne per head than Londoners.
Regeneration has been a buzz word in the north for years now. There are bars called Regeneration which used to be called things like the Clog and Two Whippets or The Boilerscrapers Arms. It's hard to date exactly when the northern renaissance began. Some might say it was that moment, iconic and ironic, when Thatcher's government conjured up a 'Minister for Liverpool', the gorgeous, bouffanted Michael Heseltine, and sent him up north to bring us solace. Having just spent £10,000 on booze and nibbles at a birthday party for his daughter – a Lancashire semi's worth at the time – he popped up to Toxteth and launched a massive and frankly long-overdue tree-planting campaign. Naturally, he was carried back to his ministerial Jag shoulder-high through the streets of Liverpool 8 by tearful scallies in ceremonial Lacoste with an honour guard of grateful Bullmastiffs who now had somewhere to cock a leg.
All sarcasm apart, a fair bit of money, much of it European, did begin to flow to the regions in the late eighties. As the song has it, the north did pick itself up, dust itself down and start all over again. By the time New Labour came to power in 1997, Militant and Derek Hatton were a nasty memory and the new north was more about branding and ciabattas than class struggle.
And so it came to pass that, not far from the Orgreave coking plant where the forces of the state clubbed British workers for having the temerity to defend their jobs, not far from the roads where riot police stopped the free movement of British citizens, they did open the first branch of Harvey Nichols outside London. In the grand scheme of things, opening a branch of a posh department store may not seem to be as culturally pivotal as the great Miners' Strike of 1984. But blimey, the fuss!
When Harvey Nicks came to the Victoria Quarter of Leeds in 1996, broadsheet journalists in Fulham reeled. Reams of comment and columns were dashed off, much of it gently and perhaps unintentionally patronising. The Lonely Planet Guide began to refer to Leeds as 'the Knightsbridge of the north' (though we will only truly know, comrades, that the battle for sophistication has been won when they start calling Knightsbridge 'the Batley of the south'). All things considered, people couldn't have got more in a flap if they'd opened a branch of Waitrose on Neptune. Roy Hattersley said of the opening: 'I can't say it fills me with joy but it's a good sign.' Mind you, what would fill Roy Hattersley with joy?
We've never looked back, cocker. As we sip our frappuccino at a pavement cafe in Wakefield's Latin Quarter, taking time out from our job at the blue-sky-thinking consultancy, we reflect on how far we've come. Regeneration has become a gleeful mania in the north and my favourite current regeneration story reunites us with our old friend Anthony H. Wilson.
Tony and his partner Yvette Livesey were recently hired by an agency called Elevate East Lancashire to come up with some 'blue-sky thinking'. They may even have called it 'imagineerin
g' with a fairly straight face. The intention was to regenerate Burnley and what is rather fancifully called the Todmorden Curve, the string of mill towns left to rot by economic mischance. These are the ones of which Brian Sewell once said, 'Are they worth regenerating? The best they can hope for is another plague, or a bout of Russian flu which depletes the population by twenty million. Then we could demolish them.'
Tony and Yvette have somewhat bigger and better ideas. In their twenty-page report which rejoices in the brilliantly anti-corporate tide 'A Wish List. A Series Of Consummations Devoutly To Be Wished', they call for a fashion tower, a series of Philippe Starck-designed 'chic sheds', a canalside curry mile and a new name.
With a typical flourish, Tony suggests that the whole area be rebranded as 'Pennine Lancashire' which will, he hopes, become abbreviated LA style, to 'PL'. This then avoids calling the place East Lancashire: 'Anywhere with a compass direction in the name is a bureaucratic concept, not a place.' People in the West Riding and South Shields might disagree but you have to like the cut of his jib. The chic sheds will encourage hip young professionals to grow organic vegetables, the fashion tower will chime with the area's rich history of textile work and the curry mile will celebrate the influence of the large Asian community. They unashamedly evoke the name of Richard Florida, US regeneration guru, the man who identified the boom in the Pacific Northwest of America. In fact, Wilson is already talking, nineteen to the dozen, about Burnley being 'the new Seattle'. I love him for stuff like this and I hope he's right.
Being a creature of the media, Anthony H. knows that any attempt to change the image of the north fights against nearly a century of enshrined and ingrained imagery from films and television, a kaleidoscope – a grimy kind of kaleidoscope, admittedly – of representations that have shown the region not as one stereotype but rather a pick'n'mix of stereotypes like the old Woolworth's sweet counter: a bit of anger here, a scoop of whimsy there, humour, grit, sentimentality, all bagged up together like white mice, cola bottles and red liquorice shoelaces.
Back in the 1930s, the north could be seen on screen in different lights, depending on how it was being illuminated, by miner's lamp or toothy smile, by cold fury or warm glow. The cloth caps and mufflers looked the same but there are two different norths glimpsed in, for instance, Love on the Dole and the films of George Formby and Gracie Fields.
Walter Greenwood's novel Love on the Dole was written in 1933 in the middle of the worst depression the industrial north had ever suffered. It was set in Hankinson Park, Salford, where Greenwood had been born and bred, and where he was 'burning up inside with fury at the poverty'.
It's not a cheery tale. There are no funny male strippers or anything of that sort. Just one family, the Hardcastles, being gradually destroyed by the scourge of unemployment. Son Harry can't find work and is disowned when he marries. Daughter Sally falls in love with a principled but ineffectual Marxist activist and is pursued by a local gangster. It was an instant commercial and critical success. Poet Edith Sitwell – later to collaborate successfully with an Oldham lad called William Walton on something rather more refined called Façade – wrote, 'I do not know when I have been so deeply, terribly moved.' It was soon adapted for the stage and a riveting production opened at Manchester Rep within a year, a Look Back in Anger twenty years before its time, with realistic themes and language never heard before on a British stage. One reviewer said it had been 'conceived and written in blood'. It toured Britain with two companies playing up to three performances a day. A million people had seen it by the end of 1935 in, among other places, London, New York and Paris.
For all its impact, Ronald Gow's stage adaptation is much gender than Greenwood's bleakly angry book. Gow said he 'aimed to touch the heart' and this he does while shying away from actually blaming anyone for the plight of the northern poor. It's just one of those things, basically, pitiable but unavoidable, like a little matchgirl's bronchitis. Even so, the British Board of Film Censors would not allow a film to be made for nearly ten years, fearing that this 'very sordid story in very sordid surroundings' would inflame the workers into insurrection. It was eventually filmed in 1941 with Deborah Kerr as Sally, by which time war had come and British society was convulsing anyway. And by which time we had Our Gracie and Daft George to take our minds off our wretched lot.
As you'll know if you've ever listened to Roy Hudd or Bob Monkhouse for more than twenty seconds, a great deal of northern humour and light entertainment of the inter-war era didn't travel. South of about Daventry, it became untranslatable, unfathomable, unintelligible. While southerners liked their humour spivvy and saucy, as exemplified by Max Miller (who we in turn found charmless and grating), our favourites, like the superb Frank Randall, 'never appeared to extend his bailiwick beyond his homeland of terraces and mills, chimneys and ginnels, whippets and ale houses, Golden Miles and Alhambras' as cultural historian C. P. Lee put it. Some did manage it, though, exporting a brand of regional daftness so successfully that it may well have been injurious to the north's health, contributing to a view of northerners as good-hearted simpletons with alarming dentistry and a penchant for the banjolele.
Like me, George Formby is a Wiganer. There may be other similarities, too; you'd have to ask my southern mates, I guess. Northerners generally have a problematic relationship with George. To some hard-liners among us, he's a Lancashire version of Stepin Fetchit in the 'coon' movies, an insulting caricature of a proud people; to others he was a gifted, skilful comedian, a shrewd businessman in conjunction with svengali wife Beryl and even a formidable weapon in the fight against Fascism. When he died, 100,000 people followed his cortege to his final resting place in Warrington where he was buried, little stick of Blackpool rock and all. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to make window cleaning seem an attractive career option. Oh, and winning the Isle of Man TT races and Grand National in most of his films, from what I remember.
Personally, I've always found toothy George a great deal more palatable than Gracie Fields, who, though long dead, cast a dark shadow over my childhood via various Sunday afternoon films. It wasn't just the bandsaw voice, the mawkish material and the asinine plots. No, even as a toddler, I had strong philosophical objections to Our Gracie, who always seemed to be leading a phalanx of dolts down the street while bellowing some ditty about 'getting back to work at t'mill and not grumbling'. Some of these prejudices were handed down from my gran. Like many of her generation, she was inexplicably keen on Fields's down-to-earth persona, a teeth-rattling combination of the shrill and blunt – but disapproved of her decision to relocate to Capri with her second husband, an Italian, for the duration of the war. For many northerners this was considered desertion and treachery. One assumes, though, that Fields was taken by the climate and cuisine rather than any deep political allegiance to Il Duce. Whatever, her career never really recovered, possibly because Elvis and The Beatles came along to invent real pop music and Fields's mawkish old guff fell out of fashion. Trivia fans, here's one for the pub. Grace Fields's real name was Stansfield but she was no relation to that other titanic Rochdalian songthrush, Lisa.
As a small boy I watched a lot of telly with my gran. Much of what my gran enjoyed, such as The Good Old Days and the grotesque Hughie Green, left me cold. Nothing left me quite as frosty and distressed as Gracie and George though. I like to think that even while I was still in a romper suit, I could tell that the pair of them couldn't sing in any meaningful sense of the word and that their outlandish, life-affirming adventures were unlikely to be replicated in any factory, mill or scout hut near me.
Sometimes, though, if I was lucky, BBC 2 would put on another kind of film of a Sunday afternoon and a different kind of north would be revealed to me, watching blue-faced before the 625 lines in the November dusk. These are still my favourite films. I never tire of them. They have provided me and Morrissey alike with some of our favourite catch-phrases and the British film industry with its crowning glories. That's the truth, as Albert Finney as Art
hur Seaton would say. All the rest is propaganda.
Finney is a god in my house. As is Tushingham, Courtenay and Bates. Just as Kenneth Tynan said that he could never really love anyone who didn't love Look Back in Anger, I'd have trouble even working up the enthusiasm for a store-cupboard snog with anyone who didn't love A Taste of Honey, A Kind of Loving, Room at the Top, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Billy Liar or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This glorious swathe of films about the experience of love, sex, work and struggle among the working classes of the industrial north – I know Sillitoe's book of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is set in Nottingham but Finney and his film are indisputably northern – came to be known as the British New Wave or, disparagingly, as 'kitchen sink dramas' by Terence Rattigan fans in cravats. After decades of Kenneth More and Noel Coward, of Anna Neagle and Pet Clark, of stiff upper lips and cheery Cockneys and London Pride being handed down to us, these films were electrifying, revelatory, astonishing. Here was life as it was lived in our towns and cities, filmed in a way that made our lives lyrical, sexy, vital, tough, tender and raw.
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