Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  So for the first time in years, I find myself on this chilly, drizzly spring morning aboard a packed Northern Trains sprinter service from Preston to Blackpool North. In the early years of tourism, travelling to Blackpool was a bona fide expedition, not for lightweights; two days from Yorkshire and a day even from Manchester. The situation was transformed in 1840 when the Preston and Wyre Railway was built and brought the cheap excursion trains from industrial Lancashire. Since then, almost any day of the year will find the spiritual and actual descendants of those early day-trippers and holidaymakers heading for Blackpool in search of some very northern r'n'r.

  In its own way, the train and its passengers were as queer and colourful as a trip to the hill station at Darjeeling or overnighting on the Trans-Siberian Express. It was a kind of carnival on wheels. Less charitably, some might have called it a travelling freak show. Though maybe I was the freak. When I took out a book and began to read, the whole carriage looked at me as if I'd taken out a cuckoo clock or a lacrosse stick.

  There were entire families who appeared to be in fancy dress. Surely that's not what they wore normally: Stetsons, gold lame tracksuits, helmets with horns, replica football kits. It was a kind of uniform. They were dressed for fun. They had planned for fun with military precision and every shred of their being was focused on its acquisition. I found that quite sweet, but this early on a nippy morning on a grubby train, it was also kind of tough on the nerves. Everyone, young and old, was shouting. Some were arguing, some were demanding attention, some were shouting merely from the sheer unalloyed joy of being on a train to Blackpool. One man had a toy rifle. Two Asian girls were dancing to cheesy dance music from a radio on the table. There was a shy-looking girl holding a giant furry prawn over a shoulder.

  After all this, Blackpool North was a deadening experience. It looked less like a railway station than a decontamination plant. If this were your first time in Blackpool on the first day of a long-awaited holiday, you must surely wish you'd booked for somewhere else. A disused naval base in the Bering Straits, perhaps.

  Blackpool, I've been told, has a large transient population and a big drugs problem. Everywhere there were signs telling me what would happen if I were caught taking crystal meth by the booking office or whatever. The gents toilet was like a vision of hell, lit with a sickly and unreal deep vermillion. This is anti-drug lighting, so called because you can't find a vein to hit in this light. Or maybe because everything looks so weird and disorienting that you decide you don't need any more drugs anyway.

  But get out of the station and head down Talbot Road and things get better. After a few hundred Poundlands, a couple of branches of Greggs and several discount book shops, I spotted the North Pier. It could have been the big kid in me, or the race memory of the northerner, but suddenly my heart lifted and my step quickened. I was nine again. The sun came out. The amusement arcade beckoned. I had a pocketful of change and when it ran out, I didn't have to ask my dad for more. Bliss. Freedom.

  I'm glad to report that amusement arcades haven't changed that much in thirty years. Yes, there are huge terrifying-looking machines that you have to be strapped into like a Navy Seal into a stealth fighter and where you attempt to eliminate the Vorgon race at unbelievable volumes. Yes, there are virtual reality games where cadaverous life-size zombies try to sever your head with a rusty scythe. But if you look hard enough you will find the treasures of your childhood and fall on them with fetishistic pleasure. There are still the Penny Falls, which are now ten pence obviously but still as blatantly fixed as ever; teetering piles of coins never quite cascading over the lip, perhaps due to the gobbets of super-glue keeping them in place.

  There is still a perspex box where you can signally fail to get a grabbing hand to ensnare some kind of gift. Once upon a time I seem to recall this was twenty B&H or some kind of rubbish 'Swiss' watch but now it's a disfigured gonk. It doesn't matter. It's not the prize, it's the tantalising Sisyphean swing of the grabber that lures us, a lesson in the ultimate futility of desire. There's still a tired woman in her late fifties who'll give you your change with a muttered 'There you go, sweetheart' and a look in her eyes that suggests this isn't where she thought life would lead her. There are still those funny bingo stalls where you sit on stools and slide little plastic shutters across in the hope of winning a massive teddy bear. Here, it is always just before opening time and a man with a mike is trying to drum up trade with a desultory 'eyes down' and his only customers are two elderly ladies who are in their own way as addicted as a Moss Side crackhead. If I were a French philosopher, I might conclude that amusement arcades were a bit like sex, entered into with youthful brio and enthusiasm but afterwards strangely melancholic and carrying echoes of mortality. Funny people, the French.

  Fish and chips on the prom sounded a cheering idea and so it proved to be. My fish was bought from a man who seemed to have arrived that morning from Uzbekistan (so dark and phlegmy was his pronunciation of 'haddock') and was without doubt the fishiest fish I have ever eaten. It tasted rankly and pungently of the sea, which at Blackpool is not always a good idea. Feeling a bit weak, I sat in a bus shelter and marvelled at an advert for an afternoon performance by Charlie Cairoli. Surely not the same one who blighted my Easter Mondays with his sinister, unfunny routines on Billy Smart's Circus. He must be a hundred by now. It has to be his son. Maybe his grandson. Maybe a virtual reality hologram.

  Cairoli Junior was appearing at Blackpool's famous tower which, as you probably know, is a scale model of the Eiffel Tower. I'd tell you more about this fine landmark structure and its attractions but it was twelve pounds flipping fifty to get in so sod that, I thought. Instead I decided I would spend my money on something that I've always fancied but never done. Something which has haunted my imagination since I were a child. Something a little naughty, wicked even, that my grandma would have shuddered at and ushered me by with alacrity.

  Romany Pearl is one of a score of gypsy fortune tellers plying their trade along the Golden Mile. I don't know why I chose her. There were more salubrious, even quite flashy-looking fortune tellers on offer. One had a picture of George Michael and Sandra Bullock outside. They can't have come here, I thought, and on closer inspection they hadn't. Gypsy Petrulengo had simply got their birthdates off the internet and ran up a horoscope. George is going to be the first man on Jupiter and then be eaten by a horse, apparently. Only joking. They're both going to have successful and exciting careers, you'll be glad to hear.

  But I picked Romany Pearl's place, accessed directly off the prom through a little curtain next door to a burger bar. In a room the size of a telephone box with a little half-door over which you can look out onto the street, sits Pearl, a woman with a deep leathery tan and a baritone acquired by a lifetime of Embassy Regal. She sits like the Sphinx. The Sphinx with cerise talons and bangles and black candy floss for hair. She may be pushing sixty. But if you told me she was ninety I'd believe you.

  I went for palms not tarot. 'One hand or both?' asked Romany. 'What's the difference?' I asked. Two, she said, gives a deeper reading and, crucially, costs a tenner rather than a fiver. Feeling giddy, I opted for the full ten pounds and both hands.

  'You've always been lucky,' Pearl tells me in a voice like sifting gravel. 'If you fell in the canal in your old suit, you'd come up in a new one. And you'll never want for money.' Great. Also, I'm not going to die of a disease but of old age. I nearly say that strictly speaking you could say that's a disease. I think better of it in case she changes her prediction to 'You're going to be beaten to death by an irate gypsy of indeterminate age.'

  She tells me that in a month's time I'm going to have a really big surprise. A happy one but a big one all the same. Well, the month has gone and I'm still waiting but I'll keep you informed. As I leave, Romany Pearl asks if I want to buy a lucky charm. 'I don't need it, do I?' I laugh at what I think is quite a smart remark. Romany Pearl doesn't seem to get it.

  My little session with a palm reader was reassuring bu
t frankly a bit dull, more like going to see a very bland counsellor than a mistress of the dark arts. Part of me would have preferred it if she'd looked into my hand, screamed and said, 'I can do nothing for you, sir. Please be gone,' and crossed herself. In the last analysis, all fortune tellers have one fatal, obvious flaw. If you really could see into the future (a fairly useful skill, I'd have thought), wouldn't you have ended up somewhere a whole lot nicer than chain-smoking cheap fags in a little pavement booth in Blackpool? But maybe I'm misunderstanding the gypsy temperament.

  I'm back on the front and looking out to sea. Once upon a time, this whole Fylde coast was an area of impenetrable bog and oak forests. By 1500, this particular hamlet was called simply 'Pul' and later, thanks to its dark, peaty waters, 'Blackpoole'. You can see a kinship with the land across the water, by the way, when you consider that the Gaelic for black is 'dubh' and for pool 'linh'. Hence, Dublin is Blackpool.

  The hamlet by the sea grew. By the mid-1700s, there were four hotels to cater for the tourists who came for the invigorating Irish sea air and bathing. There were the beginnings of a promenade, a 200-yard length of grass the width of a goalmouth across which 'a perpetual assemblage of company, when the weather permits, may be seen upon this elegant little walk'. Sea bathing and seawater drinking was a national craze at the time. A bell was rung when it was time for the ladies to bathe, and during this time, any gentleman found on the shore was fined a bottle of wine.

  The father of modern Blackpool is one Henry Banks, he who built the first holiday cottages and really got the hotel trade moving. Today Blackpool has more beds for rent than the whole of Portugal. There is, as the brochures have it, 'accommodation to suit every taste and pocket'. At the top end of the scale are the Paramounts and De Veres with saunas, solariums, gym facilities and 'elegant dining'. At the other end, truer I drink to the spirit of the town, are countless little family guest houses and B&Bs tucked down every side street where, and I quote from one's literature, 'Your hosts, Daphne and Shane, guarantee your every comfort and the highest level of customer care. No Stag or Hen Nights.'

  Such nights are a real bone of contention in modern Blackpool. They bring in the dosh and the bar owners love them but there are many in the Blackpool Chamber of Commerce who pine for the good old days when the town's clientele was decent working families who wanted nothing more than a shared TV room for Match of the Day and a choice of Britvic or Sugar Puffs at breakfast. When you've seen a blank-eyed girl in a bridal outfit and L plates urinating in the street, you take their point. Blackpool's traditionalist lobby is resisting moves to build a Super Casino here and turn the resort into the Las Vegas of Europe. 'Casinos will definitely scare all t'families away. Blackpool will lose its old seaside image,' said Pat, who sells sweets on the prom. 'There's enough alcoholics and gamblers anyway in Blackpool.'

  Along the crowded front, most of the hotel names I remember from childhood are still here: the Craig Y Don, the Balmoral, the Gainsborough. The Lyndene offers, implausibly, a five-course dinner for £8.95. I'm seeing all this from the window of a tram, the only way to travel in Blackpool, except for donkey, of course, and I'm en route to the Pleasure Beach, where I haven't been in donkey's years. I'm feeling a little bit sick. It could be long-dormant excitement. Or it could be the fish.

  The Pleasure Beach is a huge amusement park at the southern end of the Golden Mile. It's Blackpool's Coney Island. You can't go to Blackpool and not go to the Pleasure Beach. It'd be like going to Mount Rushmore and saying, 'Oh, we didn't bother with the big carved mountainside thing. We just had a look in the gift shop.'

  You have to pass through a metal detector to get into the Pleasure Beach now. Sad, isn't it? But before I lapse into full 'damning indictment of our troubled society' mode, I should say that fairgrounds have always hung heavy with latent violence. Remember Albert Finney getting duffed up by those squaddies in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning? This simmering threat of trouble mingled with a little illicit sex and the hugely amplified sound of The Sweet's 'Ballroom Blitz' from the waltzer is what has always made them so intoxicating to me. One of my favourite photographs ever is found on the back of The Smiths' The World Won't Listen album. It shows four teenage girls, circa 1964, hair piled high, faces beautiful and feral, resplendent in their best Rita Tushingham finery on the platform at the side of the waltzer. It is just perfect.

  The Pleasure Beach these days promises a more corporate, familial day out. Thanks to the metal detector, I never feel that a Teddy Boy will razor me at any point. It's twenty-nine quid for a wristband that entitles you to ride the 145 attractions all day. If that's not enough, you can even stay here at the 'chic, modern' Big Blue Hotel where 'each child's bunk bed has its own built-in TV to put an end to fighting for the remote control!' While the kids lie in bed watching TV, slack-jawed with exhaustion and doped on Slush Puppies, Mum and Dad can watch Joe Longthorne do his 'amazingly accurate' vocal impressions at The Paradise Room. These days his act includes him doing the Pet Shop Boys, which actually I'd really like to see. Not as much as I'd like to see him do Captain Beefheart, obviously, but I imagine there's no call for that. According to its promotional material the 'Pleasure Beach® can also offer you a choice of unusual venues to add dimension to your next party, conference, exhibition. Innovative locations in five-star surroundings'. Somehow I can't see the CBI having their next EU trade tariffs debate hanging upside-down from the Pepsi Max Big One or the Irn-Bru Revolution but I'm sure they'd approve of the corporate branding.

  In among all this slick innovation, the Pleasure Beach still has much of the trashy, dangerous flavour that made it so thrilling to the youthful Maconie. The whole place is a cacophony of competing barkers, each trying to antagonise slightly drunk men into securing their girlfriends a cuddly toy by throwing darts/knocking coconuts off stands/shooting pop guns. One is a kind of basketball thing in which the prize for a 'hoop' is a giant furry prawn. I can't fathom the basketball/crustacean connection but it at least explains where the girl on the train got hers from.

  The Ghost Train looks a little tame now compared to Trauma Towers, and a new ride called Pasaje de Terror, whose poster – a sort of skull-faced monk promising me 'an abyss of pain' – really gave me the willies. Charmingly, there is still a Tunnel of Love, I notice. Who'd have thought that this relic of a bygone age could still survive? I'd imagined most amorous teens would just check into a Travelodge for the afternoon if the sap started rising but, no, there are still some who crave the forbidden thrill of ten minutes with their hands down each other's pants in a rowing boat in a flooded and dimly lit shed.

  Disappointingly I discover that the sign reading 'Tunnel of Love' is in fact merely a leftover bit of set dressing from when Coronation Street filmed here. It's really just an entrance into that venerable old fave the River Caves. I'm sure you could still get up to a spot of hanky panky here, though, as the ride is rarely crowded. Today's thrill seekers clearly prefer to be catapulted hyperventilating through space rather than taken on a fairly sedate cruise through various grottos, gold mines and at one point, the temples of Angkor Wat. Connoisseurs of fairground architecture will instantly recognise, in the ride's faux-Cubist look, the characteristic style of designers Joseph Emberton and Percy Metcalfe. You can tell that it's an 'old-school' ride by the mannequin of an ebony-skinned native with huge rolling eyes and a bone through his nose, one of several fantastically politically incorrect representations of the peoples of the world. Mind you, the white man doesn't come off much better. I'm sure the British Council of Explorers isn't happy with the depiction of one of its brave members as a goofy midget with a hat made from a coconut.

  The Pleasure Beach, I'm happy to say, does have a sense of its own history and the River Caves is one of several rides displaying the fairground equivalent of a Blue Plaque. The Wild Mouse, a mini-version of the Big Dipper, has been rattling the fillings of kids since 1958 and is one of only three wooden Wild Mouse rides in the world. The Log Flume, where generations of Lancastrians h
ave had their best clothes soaked and caught a head cold, was the longest in the world until, as I was putting the finishing touches to this book, it closed down. Sales of Lemsip and poultices will surely suffer.

  To the dismay of my health-conscious friends, another thing I love about fairgrounds is what the Americans call 'Fair Food'. While I yield to no man in my admiration for a nice truffle oil risotto with a parmesan and beetroot foam, there are times when only a Westlers lungburger eaten outside a van will do. It helps if you're quite drunk. I wasn't but I still couldn't resist the dark, savoury, intoxicating odour of fried onions wafting over the park. Be honest. Can anyone? The Pleasure Beach (I'm quoting again) 'has over thirty-five restaurants and cafes offering an amazing choice of food. From pasta and pizza at the Italian Job to a burger at the largest Burger King restaurant in the UK'. I did, though, spot a worrying trend towards culinary gentrification, with several outlets openly offering skinny decaf lattes and focaccia. And what's that 'over thirty-five' supposed to mean? Do they mean thirty-six?