Hay and Formby aside, many of the other ‘household names’ of the period such as Leslie Fuller, Hal Gordon, Bobby Howes or Gene Gerrard are now only names in the households of real comedy buffs. You can find some of their work on DVD and YouTube and it’s not noticeably funny, but then again it’s not appreciably any less funny than most British TV comedy today. For the 1936 variety, it helps if you really like men dressing up, men getting into scrapes with ‘coppers’ or men pretending to be very drunk – or all three, as with Teesside’s Jimmy James’s classic ‘drunk sketch’ filmed in 1936 and surviving on YouTube. Though clearly a daft, northern, working-class fellow, he’s dressed as impeccably formal as Fred Astaire in Top Hat for reasons that are never adequately explained. Perhaps you had to be there.
I was there at the middle Monday of the 2016 Harrogate Comedy Festival and for much of the evening I wished I was pretty much anywhere else, recalling within seconds of taking my seat that I generally would feel more comfortable and relaxed at a public witch trial or the controlled explosion of a suspect package than at stand-up comedy gigs. There are about 30 or 40 of us in an upstairs ‘studio’ and there are a couple of comics on the bill tonight. I’m not going to name the ‘turns’ because my grim evening wasn’t their fault, not entirely anyway. Hey, stand-up comedy! It’s not you, it’s me! Although it is a bit you.
It doesn’t help that the chap sitting alongside me nearly recognises me. Being recognised is never a problem. It’s largely a delight. But ‘nearly’ being recognised is always a complex and fraught social transaction, involving assuring people that I’m not their postman or Trevor from purchase ledger and culminating in having to explain why my face might be familiar and watching the blank and faintly disappointed look emerge. That’s why, unless I’m going to get something particularly useful from it, like a great interview or story, a free curry, or maybe a private tour of an art gallery, haunted castle, gin distillery or secret nuclear installation, I tend to prefer to be ‘a bit incognito’, the better to observe and eavesdrop. I remembered exactly why when, as I got out my little notebook, my large, voluble neighbour shouted, ‘Are you from the Yorkshire Post?’ Shortly after, a sort of real recognition dawned and we engaged in difficult small talk. ‘Shame about Terry Wogan, wasn’t it?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ I reply, this being the only possible answer a person in possession of their senses could give. Nicely awkward now, I’m well set up for an hour of discomfort.
The discomfort wasn’t all about the comedy, although some was, like the long, excruciating anecdote from one act about the size of her father’s appendage that had not even the merciful relief of a punchline. Then there was the obligatory ‘preaching to the choir’ about ‘issues’. Whilst she doesn’t get cross about the underwhelming size of the audience she does mention it. ‘I don’t have a pension so I’ll be doing this when I’m 90,’ she said, pausing to look out. ‘Playing to 17 people on a Wednesday night in Harrogate.’ Then she falters and realises what that sounds like. ‘Not that I don’t want to. I would love that.’ Wise move this; old pros have an adage: ‘never have a go at the ones who’ve turned up.’
But, I repeat, my bad night out was not the comic’s fault. No, mainly it stemmed from us, the small audience who were either ‘silent smilers’ (a perfectly reasonable thing to be, but terrible for a performer, who thinks they’re dying) or loudly and persistently trying to get in on the act.
‘Anyone in from Canada?’
My neighbour: ‘YES! … YOU!’
‘Who was the best Spice Girl, do you think?’
‘SCARY BECAUSE SHE’S FROM YORKSHIRE!’
Terrifyingly, the comedian notices us and leans forward into the spotlight, shading her eyes.
‘Are you guys on a date?’
‘HEE HEE SQUEE! HEE HEE HEE HEE!’ comes the worrying, delighted squeal from my new chum.
‘NO! NO, WE’RE NOT.’ I shout far more quickly and loudly than is strictly necessary for someone not a raging homophobe.
Four women on the front row shriek at pretty much every word, the way that teenagers do in the street, clutching each other, in a desperate attempt to convince the world that they are ‘crazy’ and having fun. Is this a new thing? Maybe I did it when I was a daft kid but I don’t think so. Like selfies and Facebook, it feels part of a new culture of relentless self-assertion and promotion. Eventually, the house lights come on, and before they are up to full, I am away into the night.
Later, brooding in the Bell Tavern over a small, strong craft beer, I conclude again it’s no one’s fault. I mentioned F1, Billy Smart and Verdi; to that I could add The Apprentice, rugby union and taramasalata. Stand-up is just not my thing. I repeat: it’s not you, it’s me. We should start seeing other people. And starting tomorrow, that could either be Claude Debussy, Jean Michel Jarre or the Chuckle Brothers, which are all possible diversions available in my next destination. Leeds awaits, as it did the Jarrow marchers, and I am going to make a part of the journey to one of my favourite cities in England in proper Yorkshire style.
STAGE SEVEN
HARROGATE TO LEEDS
13 October, 15 miles
Harrogate claims to be the happiest place to live in Britain, an assertion often backed up by various surveys. The Jarrow marchers and I had a lovely time here in our different ways, 80 years apart. I would have been sorrier to leave were it not that Leeds was my next stop, and that having walked much of the intervening route previously on my rest day, I was going to treat myself to a ride on the No. 36 from Ripon to Leeds via Harrogate which, from its marketing, was less of a bus, more of a lifechanging experience.
As a Lancastrian, I often say, deliberately provocatively and not entirely seriously, that Yorkshire is wasted on Yorkshiremen. Of course, I don’t mean this and for reasons that are many and include Alan Bennett, Jarvis Cocker, Stan Barstow, Richard Hawley, Henry Moore, Ted Hughes, The Human League and Jake Thackray, a fabulously gifted, witty, touching, saucy singer, guitarist and songwriter from Kirkstall who was quite the celebrity in the 1970s. Inspired more by jazz, chansons, beat poetry and musicals than pop, he was the George Brassens of the South Riding, the north country Noël Coward. His song ‘The Rain Upon the Mountainside’ may well be the best song ever written about the north of England; spare and dark, beautiful but unsentimental. But today it was another of his tunes that I had in my head. ‘Country Bus’ was his tribute to the rattling antique transport of his youth that ran between the villages of remote Yorkshire and the big market towns and cities. The ‘notorious … amorous … rumbustious … malodorous country bus’ was a vital network of commerce, adventure and romance.
The 36 provides all those functions certainly but without even a whiff of the malodorous or notorious. In fact, its website seems to promise the most sophisticated, advanced, luxurious bus ever made. Crucially, they run every ten minutes, so I have the leisure to catch up on the news over a cup of tea before embarking. Eighty years ago this morning, still glowing from the public meeting the night before, the marchers breakfasted on ham and beef paste sandwiches and were told by the deputy mayor as they left town, ‘I don’t think we let you down here. The meeting at the Winter Gardens last night was the finest I have seen in that hall in the past 30 years. It was representative of all sections of Harrogate society. That is saying a great deal as Harrogate people are difficult people to get to turn out at night.’ Last night’s young comic would agree, if not the staff at Norse or Wetherspoon.
I work through a pile of morning papers. ‘Full steam ahead for HS2’ says the Express on the controversial new high-speed train link. The Times T2 section goes with the big stuff too: ‘Squeak! The Return of Leather Trousers!’ The Guardian matches it with its splash, ‘Is Spag Bol a Culinary Crime?’ The Mirror’s ‘bombshell’ is ‘Will Quits Strictly’, an item about the fact that former pop singer Will Young has left a TV dancing show. Dark rumours abound with the computer tech genius behind the Amstrad emailer Lord Alan Sugar speculating that ‘Will’s clash with head judge Len G
oodman over the weekend may have prompted him to walk away.’ The Daily Mail has seen fit to ignore this in favour of a foam-flecked rant about Brexit that takes up most of the front page and reads like a communique from Enver Hoxha’s Albania: ‘Damn the unpatriotic Bremoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people!’
Suppressing a desire to shout ‘Parklife!’, I expect it to continue, ‘The heads of dissidents must be smashed against the iron walls of party discipline and unity’. But they have gone with something about Fiona Bruce’s shoes instead. More seriously, on various news websites there’s party politics here and abroad. The BBC website reports on the toxic clashes between Trump and Clinton last night, ‘The tawdriest exchanges in 56 years of televised presidential debates’. At home, a NEWS ICM Guardian Poll puts Labour at 26 and the Tories at 43, the second highest Tory lead in the history of polling.
I’m thankful when the next bus turns up, to be honest. I haven’t been on a bus in a long while so I can’t tell you whether the sleek, suave 36 with its free WiFi, USB ports, plug sockets, reclining leather seats, tray tables and small library of paperback books is now the industry standard or an extravagant aberration but it was certainly a surprise to this traveller. My single to Leeds is £6. ‘Do you do contactless?’ I ask the driver/conductor. ‘Of course,’ he replies, smoothly and somewhat pityingly, as if I had asked whether the bus had wheels or an exhaust pipe. I take a front row seat upstairs and am soon joined by a lady sitting across the aisle from me. ‘Hoping for a good view!’ she says excitedly and takes out a tin of travel sweets. Maybe this is her first time on the 36 too. She offers me a barley sugar. I feel a little giddy.
The 36 follows the road the marchers would have taken, the A61 from North into South Yorkshire, through verdant Harrogate suburbia until it reaches the River Wharfe near Dunkeswick. This was my cue to tear myself away from the cosy reclining seats and Spotify and disembark. Just around here, halfway on the day’s itinerary as the marchers crossed the broad Wharfe, a contingent of policemen led by an inspector appeared from nowhere to escort them the next few miles into the outskirts of Leeds. The reason was clear. The march was passing by Harewood House and its vast estate. Owned by Edwin Lascelles, first Baron of Harewood, it was built and sustained with money made from plantations using slave labour in the West Indies. The Lascelles first came here on a previous wave of immigration known as the Norman Conquest and by the time the Jarrow marchers passed by it belonged to Henry George Charles Lascelles. He’d gone from the merely aristocratic to the positively regal by marrying the Princess Royal, daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. Princess Mary was a shy soul, active in charity work, who for a time worked two days a week as a nurse and who did not warm to life at court. So perhaps she was in residence in her beloved Harewood when the police steered the marchers away from its grand baronial halls and nearly 30,000 acres of lush parkland.
Today there’s only me, so I reckon I could have slipped in under the constables’ noses at least as far as Harewood Village. I enter the village in fine rain, breath condensing in the damp air, the first real sign of approaching winter. Like so many huge and opulent homes of the aristocracy, Harewood House has now opened its doors, on its own terms, to the people of England – plantations and the slave trade not being the big earners they once were. Thanks to such generous and democratising advances, you can now get married here, stroll the gardens or peek inside the house and admire the Renaissance masterpieces. ‘There are exquisite family portraits by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence and Richmond as well as a fine collection of Sèvres china, among many other delights. You can even search the servants database and find out whether one of your family members was a footman or scullery maid here, but be warned, it might take you a while; there are several hundred former servants on the list.
I bump into a hearty, friendly group of walkers in the car park of the village hall. They’ve heard of the Jarrow march (‘they were hungry and needed work, didn’t they?’) but didn’t know it passed by the ancestral seat of the Earls of Harewood. They recommend a trip to the house and a circuit of the grounds. ‘It’s a good three miles but well worth it. It’s where they film Emmerdale! A special purpose built set! You can’t go in, but you can look at it from afar, like.’ The long-running Yorkshire soap does seem to rather preoccupy folks around these parts, and I have visions of couples from Batley hiding in the undergrowth with bootblacked faces and binoculars trained on The Woolpack. I take another of their recommendations though; a mug of tea and a sit down in the village’s Muddy Boots café, packed even on a damp and chilly midweek afternoon. I don’t stay long. Country houses aren’t really my thing and while Harewood is pleasant enough there is far better down the road, through the affluent suburbs of Moortown and Chapel Allerton and into the beating heart of one of the great cities of the north.
Leeds always gives me a heck of a thrill. With all due respect to its peers, to Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool, and local rivals like Sheffield and Bradford, nowhere buzzes and throbs like Leeds with that feel of a grand industrial city on the make and on the move. It’s a big, brash town with money in its pocket, and a ceaseless, restless appetite for enjoyment and culture found in its hundreds of pubs and restaurants, galleries and gig venues. Maybe it’s a vestige of my teenage enthusiasm for Don Revie’s dark and saturnine anti-heroes of 1970s football, those brooding and malevolent Heathcliffs in Admiral sportswear; Lorimer, Clarke, Giles, Bremner, Cooper. But I love this town.
In Chapel Allerton I decide to hop back onto the 36 for the last mile into Leeds and thus arrive in style. At the bus stop near the library by Gadget Exchange and Tandoori Hut, I meet the first non-white woman I’ve seen since leaving Jarrow, an Asian mum with little lad in tow, waiting to go shopping in Leeds. Within minutes the bus is here and I take my now regular seat, top deck front, where someone has obligingly left today’s free paper. Former pop singer Lily Allen is getting ‘trolled’ online for apologising to the people in the Calais Jungle refugee camp about their predicament. On the next page though, something that depresses me even more. Art history A Level is being scrapped and I decide to take it personally. This leads directly to me having a brief spat in a hotel bedroom in Leeds with Michael Gove, former Education Secretary and arch Brexiteer.
He wasn’t there, I should point out. Our minor contretemps was via social media, via which I angrily and it seems too hastily berated him for being responsible for the scrapping of art history A Level. But I was seething. Seething at the reductive view of education that thinks we plebs don’t need to know about the finer things in life – class war conducted by stealth.
At the dawn of the 1980s in my late teens in Wigan, I found myself briefly academically becalmed before beginning my degree, and chose to fill my time with two extra A Levels chosen pretty much on a whim. One was British social and economic history, a subject I would now find fascinating but of which I now remember little except for the pioneering Speenhamland benefits system of rural Berkshire and the six demands of the Chartists. My other choice though was art history, and almost every moment of it – every languorous afternoon in the dark, hot and intimate audio visual room flipping through the slides of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, Munch, Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian – has stayed with me ever since. Those long, absorbing hours taught me that the creation, appreciation and love of art is not just the mark of a civilised society, it is the clearest mirror you can hold up to that society, telling you more of its time than a thousand academic histories or earnest documentaries.
Picasso’s Guernica is an astonishing piece of visual art but it’s also a bulletin of blazing, angry reportage that awakened the world to the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. British war artists like Nash and Nevinson evoked the horrors of the Western Front with a dreamlike serenity that is at the same time the stuff of nightmares. But even when not reporting the actual, art brings to us vividly and pungently the authentic cultural flavour of its day. In the work of the Italian
Futurists, one can see all the dangerous and muscular allure of both Fascism and Communism. Piet Mondrian’s geometric grids sing with the pulsating joys of the jazz age whilst Andy Warhol both celebrates and satirises 1960s consumerism within the same gaudy frame.
Sometimes the insights of art history were more personal. Stanley Spencer’s work haunted me and shaped my view of a kind of mythic, phantasmagorical England where sex, nature and religion combined in works of beauty and strangeness, like The Resurrection, Cookham and Man Goeth to His Long Home. The Blaue Reiter group from Germany fed my cravings for existential teen darknesses where I could brood moodily (Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Woman with a Bag is, essentially, The Scream for cool kids; look it up). From Modigliani I learned a lot about sex. Not the act itself but the real nature of the thing. It’s not just that his nudes and portraits of women are sexy – they are achingly, breathtakingly so – but they tell you everything about the nature of longing, desire and heartbreak, as well as the myth of the doomed romantic genius. Art history taught me to see the brilliance, bravery and sheer fun in the experimental in every medium, especially music and film; the need for art that challenges the dreary orthodoxies of the day. Without the revolution in the head that the study of art history fired in me, I doubt I would ever have loved or ‘got’ free jazz, John Cage, Webern, drone, Morton Feldman or Peter Greenaway. This was not a world I was naturally born to in seventies and eighties Wigan. But in their gentle way, my art history classes and teachers helped me storm a citadel I’ve lived in ever since.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 14
