The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  Less glumly than Moz but still evincing no great enthusiasm, there are lots of adages and axioms about work, most of them wry. ‘I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours’ said Jerome K Jerome in loafer’s bible Three Men in a Boat. It’s the ‘curse of the drinking classes’ according to the old T-shirt gag. Cilla Black sang ‘Work is a Four-Letter Word’ (covered by The Smiths, funnily enough).

  There are lots of earnest and pious homilies about the virtues and values of hard work. But for most working people they ring a little hollow and smack of a lecture from the boss. But if Freud’s love and work are two poles, two extremes, then surely between them lies play. In a sense, it is where the two come together and have a good time. Play is work invested and enriched by love, it’s love bolstered with the seriousness and dedication of work. At this point, Mark Twain can usually be relied upon to say something smart and he did; ‘work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions’.

  Here comes the science bit. In 1938, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga wrote perhaps the definitive text on play, Homo Ludens, or ‘man the player’. In it he claimed that not only was an element of play necessary for the health and transmission of human culture and ideas, play was in fact pretty much all that culture was. When we weren’t digging, building, reaping or sowing (or teaching, marketing or graphic designing) in order to put food on the table and shoes on our feet, we were playing.

  J S Bach, Hamlet, Chief Wiggum from The Simpsons, ‘The Waste Land’, Crewe Alexandra, hopscotch, Citizen Kane, Beowulf, The Rubettes, Finnegans Wake, ten-pin bowling, Guernica, Look Back in Anger, ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, Oedipus Rex, A Brief History Of Time, The Incredible String Band, Middlemarch, the collected works of Don Estelle and Windsor Davis – and for that matter Don DeLillo and Peter Maxwell Davies – Ingmar Bergman, orienteering, the novels of Alan Titchmarsh … the entire gaudy, profound, dazzling tapestry of our culture was woven from play. It was what defined us, what made us.

  From the Puritans to the Taliban, spoilsports of every creed, class and colour have tried to put a stop to it. But they all failed and will always fail because it is at the heart of who we are and what we do. Banning Christmas (by the former) or ridding life of music (the latter) were probably some of the smaller of those two ideologues barbarities. But they were significant ones. More to the point, they failed. You can’t keep a good man the player, Homo ludens down.

  Huizinga was a sociologist of a sort; a subject that has been getting a bad press for years. In fact, sociologists were probably delighted when media studies came along to take some of the heat off them. Sociology is a Mickey Mouse subject comprised of left-wing claptrap, as we all know, and I am proud to say I taught it for several years at colleges in the north of England before getting involved in this crazy business we call ‘show’. Some bits of sociological research always engendered heated debate among the single mums, recently made redundant factory workers and unemployed scallies of Skelmersdale and Wigan. One such was Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s Embourgeoisement Theory.

  In the early 1960s, John Lockwood and David Goldthorpe surveyed a sample of the workforce at Vauxhall Cars, Skefco Engineering and La Porte Chemicals in Luton. In the subsequent book, The Affluent Worker, they put forward the idea that these manual workers were becoming ‘privatised’, more middle class if you will. They were more family focused, less driven by notions of class. Other theorists disagreed, claiming that these workers didn’t see themselves as middle class and still voted Labour. What it actually seemed to boil down to was that they were spending more time watching Double Your Money and less in the Boltmakers Arms, Keighley.

  Whether Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s theories were ever really true is highly contentious. And even if they were true of Luton in the 1960s, years of economic upheavals, the death of our manufacturing industry, the financial big bang, Thatcherism, New Labour and all the other seismic shocks to the British system seem to have knocked the Embourgeoisement Theory on the head. Yes, working-class people stay in and watch X Factor and Doctor Who with their spouses and families sometimes. But as I found out over a very enjoyable year of research, they also go to speedway, visit museums, play bingo, climb up hills, eat out, play crown green bowls, go to comedy clubs, join brass bands and take part in large-scale zombie apocalypse enactments.

  Television may have insinuated itself into our lives but it is nowhere near as important to us as the commissioning editors think it is. En passant, pretty much none of the things I went along to in my year of days and nights out would look good on television, with the possible exception of football, and even that is much more fun in the raw. You can’t convey on the gogglebox the feel of wind and rain on your face on a brisk walk up Dovestones or Cat Bells, the methanol tang of the speedway, the overpowering aroma of coriander and garlic on Rusholme’s curry mile, the sweat and lager cocktail of a gig at The Ritz, Manchester or the Brudenell Club, Leeds.

  Technology is said to have revolutionised work and play. But, where leisure’s concerned, that revolution has been more about organisation and information than the activities itself. Sure, bored commuters play Angry Birds and Kandy Krush to numb the passing miles and kids (and me) do spend hours in front of Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty on the Xbox. But, from text messages and email to Snapchat and Grindr, we are using the internet simply to make it easier to hang out. Social media is just that, media that helps us be more social.

  During the course of my researches I read an interview with Janet Street Porter where, while singing the praises of affluent Whitstable, she shared with us that she’s ‘not a big fan of Manchester, to be honest. It’s just not my kind of town. It’s a bit flashy and vulgar. All those women dressed up to the nines on a Friday night. I just can’t cope with it.’ Janet presents a programme called Loose Women on ITV at the moment, which tells you everything you need to know about the sincerity of television and how it views its audience.

  I love Manchester, I love the fact that its women (and men) like to dress up on a Friday night. I love that, as you shall see, from the tapas bars of Halifax to the pubs of Berwick-upon-Tweed, from the bowling greens of Chorlton to the grand hotels of Hull, from dodgems at Silloth to the Women’s Institute meetings of Carlisle, my north still puts its coat on and goes out, makes an effort, gets dressed up, refuses to stay at home mortgaged, munching and passively consuming dire telly shows.

  I was out of work for about six months in the mid-1980s. I hated it. I was by no means, and by no one’s reckoning, a driven careerist or nascent workaholic. But I felt that I had become unmoored, becalmed, that life was passing me by and being lived elsewhere. Then I got an office job with Courtaulds that was even worse. But at least it kick-started in me the desire to be somewhere else. Getting the bus to Bolton every day to work in the peculiarly hateful environs of a male office in the eighties made me realise how awful, how genuinely soul-destroying it is to have a job you hate, and how grateful one should be to have one you like. Saul Bellow wrote that ‘death is the dark backing a mirror needs if it is to see anything’. I think I know what he means, and I think the same applies to work. Work is the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl of life.

  Polly Wiessner is one of the anthropologists who’s explored the relationship between humans and leisure and its roots in that mastery of fire. She has been studying Kalahari Bushmen for years and it’s her theory that the camp fire gave us culture, art and play. In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences she wrote ‘there is something about fire in the middle of the darkness that bonds, mellows and also excites people. It’s intimate. Night-time around a fire is universally time for bonding, for telling social information, for entertaining, for a lot of shared emotions.’ All of this still rings true, as I found out in these travels; fairgrounds at night, floodlit football matches, Blackpool illuminations – the thrill never leaves you.

  The great American film critic Roger Ebert called Annie Hall �
�just about everyone’s favourite Woody Allen movie’. My favourite scene takes place in the cinema queue, when a cultural studies blowhard is boring his date with an exposition of the works of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Allen, forced to overhear all this too, drags the real Marshall McLuhan out from behind a hoarding who berates the bore by telling him ‘you know nothing of my work’. ‘Oh if only real life were like this,’ says Allen ruefully to camera.

  McLuhan is best known for his ‘medium is the message’ mantra which you’ll be familiar with if you’ve even as much as accidentally wandered into a media studies class – essentially, McLuhan thinks the whole environment and weight of TV, radio and other modern media is more powerful than any individual bit of content. Less well known is his work ‘Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age’.

  In the future – the near future, he thought, writing in 1965 – technology and automation will free us from the drudgery of much labour and the result will be a society where individuals, liberated from work, will be free to pursue other interests and lead meaningful lives. The new, vibrant technologically driven economy will produce enough wealth to pay people to live like this in a new, non-competitive kind of society.

  The relative affluence and peace of the fifties and sixties and a certain naive Panglossian faith in progress led intellectuals like McLuhan to make all sorts of pronouncements about the future. Don Marler, Robert Theobald and Eric Fromm all wrote soothingly of the elimination of work and how unemployment was not a scourge but a victory for society. All we needed to soften the blow and have us all using our new found leisure to learn Mandarin Chinese and master the lute was that old ‘guaranteed income’.

  Ken Dodd once disparaged Freud’s theories of humour by saying ‘the trouble with Sigmund Freud is that he never played second house at the Glasgow Empire after both halves of the old firm had just lost’. Similarly, while I have a lot of time for Marshall McLuhan, he never had to outline the blissful future predicted in ‘Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age’ to unconvinced, unemployed teenagers and the laid off languishing on the scrapheap in a ravaged, northern new town. In a way, it had come to pass, if you counted dole money and Jobseeker’s Allowance as ‘guaranteed income’. Those rich and meaningful lives, and those robot butlers, seemed a long way off though when I walked through the ravaged, concrete concourse of Skem, with its packs of wild dogs, tributaries of piss and boarded-up shops.

  Those once fashionable theories emerged from the book-lined, lamp-lit study rather than the dole queue, and they pre-suppose a view of the world, like the functionalist sociologists, like Fukuyama’s End of History theory, like Star Trek if you will, where class conflict, self-interest and corruption have all disappeared, and we stroll around ornamental gardens in long silver robes listening to harp music all day, while unseen automatons dig coal, clean the bathroom and rustle up risottos. It didn’t turn out quite like that, obviously. This distant academic view of the workers and their fun has always been either innocent, patronising or just plain wrong. Alan Sillitoe’s fabulous creation, factory worker and full-time hedonist Arthur Seaton, put it brilliantly in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  I’m a fighting pit prop that wants a pint of beer, that’s me. But if any knowing bastard says that’s me I’ll tell them I’m a dynamite dealer waiting to blow the factory to kingdom come. Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not because they don’t know a bloody thing about me! God knows what I am.

  So I spent a year travelling and thinking about what working Britain does now when the hooter – metaphorical or not – goes and it’s time to clock off. The focus of my travel and thinking was still primarily northern, and in some cases I did follow in my own footsteps from Pies and Prejudice. But times change quickly and in the end this is more a companion piece than a sequel. The view from the terrace and the stalls, from mountain top and seaside, from the bingo hall and the chip shop, the concert hall and the best table in the Michelin-starred house.

  In the heady world of sociology, sixties totems like Goldthorpe and Lockwood are now wildly unfashionable. They belong to an era of ‘polytechnics’, Nelson Mandela bars and pear drop collars on Open University programmes in the small hours. An era before that even; duffle coats and skiffle and Aldermaston marches. These days, a growth area in sociology is leisure studies. Once this largely meant training graduates in how to run sports centres à la Gordon Brittas. Now, though, it’s a fast-growing area of critical post-Marxist sociology, dealing with leisure as a ‘cultural space’ within global capitalism.

  Determined to put the hours in on your behalf, dear readers, I picked up a couple of books and listened to a few very earnest podcasts. Even I, long inured and even mildly affectionate for the kinds of top quality flummery at the highest levels of the social sciences, found these pretty indigestible. Many of the commentators were keen to make the point that modern leisure was a global and corporatist phenomenon, usually regulated and commodified by capitalism. Well, yes, I suppose. But the people I met and hung out with, and the things I did over my year or so of research, didn’t smack remotely of being dupes or playthings of ‘the man’, even if they did sometimes have to buy a ticket or a hot dog.

  It felt, naively maybe, much more like freedom than sitting passively in front of the telly. Or, for that matter, a lecture on the sociology of leisure. I prefer to think of what I was trying to get at – when I visited the Rochdale United’s Spotlands ground, the Weardale moors, the Gala Bingo at Salford, the fairground at Silloth or the bars of Manchester – as maybe trying to do what John Updike said he wanted on his tombstone; that he was someone who had tried ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due’.

  Just as my year of research was ending and I was settling down to the serious business of writing, Johnny Marr came into my radio studio again with a new record to promote. He asked me what I’d been up to and I told him about this book and how it had been partly inspired by his quoting of Freud to me and, more to the point, about how it had got me thinking about love and work and play. And coincidentally Johnny’s new album was called Playland.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about that too. I’ve been reading this book by a guy called Huizinga. Dutch bloke. It’s a bit obscure so you may not know it. But it’s called Homo Ludens …’

  Back in the buffet bar at Stalybridge railway station, the evening is starting to blossom as the sun dips behind the hills. In the conservatory, a gang of young people are chatting amiably, one wearing a Ghost B.C. T-shirt, my favourite Scandinavian death metal band. A glamorous Afro-Caribbean woman sits alone and relaxed at the bar reading a magazine. A young couple come in and perch by her on stools, he orders a pint, she a large Baileys with ice. Apropos of not much, the barman enquires out loud, ‘Right, name me the three pale blue monopoly properties.’ The Afro-Caribbean lady raises a perfect eyebrow and laughs but almost instantly the lad with the Baileys-and-ice girlfriend offers, ‘Euston Road.’ The lad in the Ghost B.C. T-shirt, who turns out to be Paul the landlord’s grandson, chirps up, ‘Angel Islington.’ From the knitters room comes the shout ‘Pentonville Road!’

  Later I have a drink in the ladies’ first-class waiting room, now a kind of secret back-room sanctum, with the chatty members of the knitting circle, one of whom gives me a jar of home-made chutney and honey. Outside, on the darkened platform, my train was pulling in, and so I thanked her, and shoved preserves and book into my manbag, and made reluctantly for the door. ‘Don’t miss it,’ shouts a knitter, ‘it’s a long walk to anywhere from here.’

  I just made the last train from Stalyvegas. This time I had the carriage to myself, plus the odd rolling beer can and scrunched up Yorkshire Post and Manchester Evening News, as the northern night enfolded me like the hills. As the old railway guards at Euston and Kings Cross used to say, ‘We are for the north’ and we have work to do.

  Or maybe not.

  CHAPTER 1

  PLAYING AT WORK

  Rotherham, Beamish and a Diversion to Swindo
n

  In a high, girdered, cavernous hall, part of a cluster of hulking industrial remains on the outskirts of Rotherham, a man is singing sweetly in the liquid glow of a spotlight. A full symphony orchestra sits behind him and before him a thousand people are listening, rapt in an echoing, sepulchral space that would once have been a cauldron of flames and noise. Thirty years ago, this would have been no place for sweet melodies, but rather a cacophony of struck metal, a miasma of sweat and flames, and that glow on his face would have come from a 10,000 tonne electric forge made by Sheffield Forgemasters International.

  Welcome to the Big Hall at Magna, a £46 million visitor attraction that has won design awards around the world and become one of the landmark structures of South Yorkshire. It’s truly enormous; the length of ten football pitches and a dizzying 30 metres high. Even so, it’s only a fraction of the size this site was a few decades ago, when this huge building, now standing alone in its majestic enormity, was surrounded by similarly sizeable siblings, cogging mills and cooling beds, vast tracts of land and machinery.

  This was once the melting shop of the Templeborough steel works owned by the company of Steel, Peech and Tozer, one of the region’s major employers. Massive and massively productive, they called it ‘the anvil of South Yorkshire’. Built in 1917 to produce steel for artillery shells used in the First World War, it was a prime target for the Luftwaffe in the Second World War – it saw them off naturally – before being modernised in the 1950s with the introduction of electric arc furnaces that produced molten steel at a temperature of 1630°C. They’ll tell you in these parts – and, for once, it’s no Yorkshire exaggeration – that passengers on the buses passing between Sheffield and Rotherham could actually feel the heat pulse through the windows. Those buses would have to turn on their headlights as they passed through the thick orange smog drifting from the melting shop.