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

by Stuart Maconie

  Kay may be a classic northern circuit comic but his rise to fame came through the comedy clubs, which is a modern innovation just like zombie apocalypses, ghost walks or, for that matter, laser quest, quiz nights, locked room HintHunt games, or even Grindr and the varyingly dubious social media hook-up sites.

  Stand-up comedy has been with us since the aforementioned greats of the late music hall and variety, but the comedy club is a modern development. A ‘comic’ would appear on the halls or in the clubs as part of a package of varied entertainment; a song here, a dance there, a ventriloquist, a magician, perhaps even someone who would ‘fill the stage with flags’ or spin plates. That’s why so many northern comics like Morecambe and Wise also had soft shoe or tap or some other variant of song and dance – comedy acts sometimes arose out of the ‘patter’ between numbers. Dedicated comedy clubs were an eighties phenomenon, taking hold in bigger cities, usually with big youth and student populations who became the new and core audience for live comedy.

  I’d been tipped off to the XS Malarkey comedy club in the heart of Manchester’s student quarter by a fine comic and actor of my acquaintance Justin Moorhouse, who I first met in a Farnworth Labour Club on the set of the Phoenix Nights sitcom. The club has been going every Tuesday night since 1998 and described by the Guardian as ‘a great example of how a club should be run’. It has played host to all the stars, cult or otherwise, of its comedic era; multi-award winning, much loved and not for profit.

  You can tell you’re in a student pub when they don’t sell whisky of any description but do sell ‘Jägerbombs’, ‘shots’ or any number of small scarlet bottles of flavoured sugared water with glucose and a dash of vodka called TurboDoom or Vermillion SkullCrush or Satan’s Eggnog – all alcohol by volume roughly 2%. This has the dual effect of making me feel a) hugely sophisticated and b) enormously old. (I’m reminded of the time I asked for Scotch and Dry Ginger in a Salford boozer and the barman said, ‘What do you think this is, Life on Mars?)

  The reason I didn’t know XS Malarkey maybe is because I’ve lost any appetite I ever had for stand-up comedy. I suppose I must have had one once as I can still remember every gag of The Comedians album of the seventies’ ITV comedy show my Irish grannie had (George Roper, Dougie Brown and Ken Goodwin were my favourites I seem to recall, I didn’t like Manning much even then). British stand-up now often seems to consist of overgrown male students telling me in a plonking sneer that people who believe in god are ‘idiots’, or that celebrities, television shows or cartoons are ‘a bit rubbish’ or that former Tory chairman Eric Pickles is ‘fat’. Moreover they seem to get an awful lot of chances to tell me this, on pretty much every TV programme aired after nine o’clock at night, a tsunami of strident man-baby entitledness, with no jokes.

  So it was nice to see that the first comic up at XS Malarkey on the Tuesday I was there was a young Canadian woman. Were it not for the occasional gag about blow jobs and periods, there was a rather sweet, slightly over-eager and nervy enthusiasm about her that you might even have described as ‘jolly hockey sticks’. She was engaging enough and in my notes I have written down that I ‘liked joke about student loan or baby’. Clearly I thought that I would remember the actual joke when I re-read it. This, of course, as John Cleese’s irate customer said in Python’s Cheese Shop sketch, is ‘an act of the purest optimism’. Maybe someone who was there could remind me. It definitely made me laugh into my pint of gassy lager.

  Stand-up comedy, a staple of working-class leisure through music hall, holiday camps and working men’s clubs, declined somewhat in fashion during the sixties and seventies. Then in 1979, Britain’s first ‘hip’ US-style stand-up club, The Comedy Store, opened in London, and a network quickly spread across the UK, with the dominant style on offer being observational or satirical, rather than randy milkmen and mothers-in-law. Though some think the live comedy circuit is declining because of TV, that medium – with its raging insatiable appetite for comics on its many panel shows – can prove a massive career boost. John Bishop went from selling just nine tickets for the basement club of the Leicester Square Theatre to selling out Wembley Arena a year later, with the same act, thanks to one appearance on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow.

  The Zoo pub where Malarkey is held is considerably smaller than Wembley, and there are considerably less than 12,550 in tonight, but they are lively, receptive and young. We are deep in the heart of Manchester’s densely populated student stretch, the Oxford Road corridor, with the fabulous new library at one end and the clubs and kebab shops of Rusholme at the other, a metaphorical and literal journey from bookish to bibulous. In the Victorian era, this area was notorious for its squalor and destitution; the area around Oxford Road train station, ‘Little Ireland’, was what shocked Engels into writing his The Condition of the Working Classes in England. Nowadays, though the BBC has decamped to MediaCity, Salford, the area is still vibrant and, according to the council’s blurb, ‘now a focus for knowledge-driven, innovation-orientated economic growth’. Most of Manchester’s 60,000 students will pass along here every day and a couple of hundred of them are here tonight.

  Compère Toby shuffles on stage and is withering about the audience in a very funny, affectedly decrepit and sour way. They love it. He makes a very rude remark about his ex-wife – in the audience – and then laughingly but genuinely apologises over a storm of appalled giggles. To do this thing properly, I realise, you have to have no filter really, to abandon any fear or shame or need to be liked. It reminds me of something I once heard novelist John Niven say, ‘You have to write as if both your parents are dead.’

  Next on the bill is Michael Legge, a comic I know and who comes to join Justin and me for a pint. He seems more relaxed than I would be in the circumstances, given what he’s about to do (Will Ferrell called stand-up ‘hard, lonely and vicious’). But then, he does know what he’s doing and the audience seem sweet and generous. I always thought stand-up comedy clubs were bear pits. ‘A lot of them are,’ says Michael. ‘You should come down to the Frog and Bucket (another Manchester club) on a Friday night when the stag dos and the lads are in. I once was getting so much hassle and aggro from some pissed guy in the audience that I actually said, “I’m not sure why you’re here, mate, you’re not enjoying it. Why don’t you do something else?” And he got up, and he was a huge bloke, and said, “I’ve just got out of prison after 13 years. I can do what I want.” And I had to agree really.’

  Michael drains his pint and walks straight on stage. He bounds into a very funny twist on the old music-hall song ‘A, You’re Adorable’, which I’ll let you go and see for yourself rather than mirthlessly describe in print. Interestingly, the audience get this, but a later reference to eighties musical Starlight Express seems to go straight over their collective head. Michael goes down well, though, and seems pleased as he comes off stage and I hand him another pint.

  He’s got a gig in London tomorrow so he’s getting the Megabus back tonight after midnight rather than a hotel in Manchester. Michael’s very good at this comedy lark. He’s always working, he’s highly rated by his peers and audiences love him. But as I think of him in the dank, pissy chill of an empty city-centre bus station in the small hours, I realise that, of the thousand or so working comics in Britain, most are neither playing to nine people in a basement or 12,000 in an arena, but somewhere vaguely and for them tantalisingly in between.

  Michael drains his pint and leaves to claim a spot at the bus station. I still fancy that whisky that I never got, and so I draw up a mental checklist of the pubs nearby, ‘boozers’ if you are plain speaking, ‘hostelries’ if you are that kind of ‘hail fellow, well met’ drinker. Somewhere I could get a night cap or two.

  It was almost time to call it a night, and call time on a year of enjoying the leisure of the working north. But there was time for one for the road, and I knew just the place.

  EPILOGUE

  DRINKING UP

  The Briton’s Protection. Don’t be put o
ff by the name. Yes, it sounds like the kind of place where snarling, bull-necked men drink gassy lager in front of the Chelsea game, or perhaps where a chap in a Barbour jacket asks mine genial host, Geoff, for his tankard. It isn’t like that at all. But come to think of it, yes, do be put off by the name. It means I’ll get served quicker.

  The Briton’s Protection is a famous Manchester pub. Legendary may not be too strong a word. It stands on the corner of a busy road junction, just by an unprepossessing road bridge off Deansgate and next door to the Bridgewater Hall, which is why about 9.30 you’ll often find the second violins and the bassoons dashing in for a pint. It’s stood here since 1795, when it was called The Ancient Briton. But by the time it featured in the Pigot & Dean’s New Directory of Manchester & Salford for 1821, it had been renamed The Briton’s Protection, a reference it’s thought to the pub being a regular recruiting venue during the Napoleonic Wars, when drunk patrons were often shanghaied into the military.

  Should anyone want to pressgang me into service, it’s not unusual to find me in one of the pub’s six characterful rooms. Maybe by the open fires in the bar parlour on a winter’s night, or on a stool in the front bar under the gleaming russet ceramic tiles, with their distinctly old school municipal flavour, or in the corridor by the large mural of the Peterloo Massacre that lines the walls. Maybe on a summer’s night in the tidy white-washed beer patio, Manchester weather permitting. It is always busy, with the odd popstar, film director or writer mixed in among the clientele of office workers, tourists, shoppers and old hands who have been supping here for decades. It keeps good real ales, there are home-made venison, hare and turkey pies on offer, as well as 300 malt whiskies.

  Like the Buffet Bar at Stalybridge station, this makes it sound akin to Orwell’s Moon Under Water, i.e too good to be true. But The Briton’s Protection is very real. It’s one of my and many another’s favourite Mancunian watering holes, and there are plenty of great ones to choose from. There’s The Eagle by Elbow’s Salford studios, a pub with a music venue in the partly converted terraced house next door. The Port Street Beer House is what craft beer enthusiasts call a ‘catwalk bar’, designed to show off mouth-watering ales at sometimes eye-watering prices. The Molly House in the gay village does great tapas, cooked behind the bar by a genial Ecuadorian, and I have hatched radio series in The Kings Arms in Salford, owned by Housemartins and Beautiful South singer Paul Heaton, and featuring his quirky collection of ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs on the walls.

  But it was right that, if we were to finish our voyage into the northern night with a pint and a chaser somewhere, it should be here. In 2008, I threw a little ‘do’ in the upstairs function room to launch a book called Pies and Prejudice, so it seems fitting now that it’s become a second home, and that that book has led to this one, to raise a glass here.

  Britain invented the pub as we know it, although it evolved from what you might call a fashionable Italian wine bar. As every proverbial schoolboy knows, the Romans brought us roads, and with them came tabernae, roadside inns for the traveller’s refreshment. When the Romans left Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, Jutes and Vikings worked a variant on these ‘taverns’ that formed the basis of our pub system today. Alehouses developed out of ordinary domestic dwellings. An ‘alewife’, the precursor of today’s landlady, would hoist a green bush up on a pole to signify she had ale brewed and ready to drink. These ‘public houses’ became community hubs as well as places to booze and grew so popular that King Edgar limited their spread to one per village. He also introduced a drinking measure whereby a peg was placed on the side of a barrel as a means of controlling the amount of alcohol an individual could consume. This gave rise to the expression ‘to take someone down a peg’. Two famous early British pubs were the Tabard Inn in Southwark, immortalised by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, and Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem in Nottingham where Richard the Lionheart recruited for his crusade to the Holy Land.

  In 1577 there were around 17,000 alehouses, 2,000 inns and 400 taverns throughout England and Wales. Their rampant popularity was not just due to a populace desperate to get hammered, however. Remember that beer, fermented and brewed, was a much safer drinking option than water in the early modern world. ‘Small beer’ was the term for the very weak ale given to women and children, and persists as a term for a trifling matter. The hard stuff arrived in the eighteenth century, when cheap brandy from France and gin from Holland ushered in the social crisis and moral panics found in Hogarth’s etching ‘Gin Lane’ and other moralising accounts of the times.

  During the nineteenth century, pubs and inns developed a mild system of segregation similar to the railways. Pubs would typically be split into several rooms and bars in order to cater for the preferences of the differing type and class of customer. You can the find the vestiges of those days of ‘internal zoning’ in the labyrinthine layout of pubs like The Briton’s Protection, or the Stalyvegas Buffet Bar, or the Liverpool ‘Phil’ on Hope Street. It was the case in my teens in the long-gone Market Tavern in Wigan; its warren of back rooms, still with the old but sadly non-functioning bells for waitress service, were perfect for underage drinkers, trysts, political conspiracies and gossip.

  I like a big pub with nooks and crannies, and I like it even more if it’s in a city or town centre. Town centre pubs are usually busy which is best. Finding some places empty and deserted is a delight – a swimming pool or a railway carriage, a golf course, I imagine. But an empty pub, like an empty restaurant, makes your heart sink. I like a brisk feel and a healthily mixed clientele. None of that Slaughtered Lamb insular weirdness, that ‘you’re not from round here, are you boy’ silence when you walk in.

  Even Christopher Snowden of right-wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs spotted the difference when he wrote, ‘When politicians and metropolitan pundits disingenuously pay homage to the “great British pub”, these are not the kind of establishments they have in mind at all. Their vision of a pub is essentially a mid-priced restaurant with horse brassings on the wall; somewhere to take their children on a Sunday afternoon. Somewhere to read The Sunday Times for four hours while nursing a solitary pint.’

  A different kind of pub is the one in the worker’s blood. The official history books will tell you that Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in the reading room of the British Museum, but the landlord of the Museum Tavern across the road tells visitors to his establishment that he ‘researched’ it in the corner of the bar, nursing a stout and a brandy. The boozer has been both spark and dampener of our radical fires, as heard in that famous old war cry of the left, ‘As soon as this pub closes, the revolution starts’, immortalised in Alex Glasgow’s funny and sweet song of the same name.

  The pub as a metaphor for the ordinary man at his leisure has a rich pedigree in literature. In T S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, a Queen Vic-like East End watering hole becomes a symbol for the emptiness of modern culture. A young woman tells the odd tale of losing all her teeth while a cockney voice tolls ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’.

  More sympathetically, in Graham Swift’s Last Orders, the regulars at the Coach turn out to have rich and complex lives and histories that he celebrates. And the opening section of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning finds Arthur Seaton drunk in the fervid, sloshing wildness of a Nottingham pub at the weekend.

  The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must all have know he was dead drunk, and must have seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him or lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the topmost stair to the bottom …

  Floors shook and widows rattled and leaves of aspidistras wilted in the fumes of beer and smoke. Notts County had beaten the visiting team, and the members of the White Horse supporters club were quartered upstairs …

  For it was Saturday night, the best and bingeist g
lad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath.

  You can feel the heat and sweat and alcohol tang coming off the page, and feel it pulsing off the screen in the famous film version. It speaks of excess and indulgence but that is only part of the story. In the absence of what Priestley identified as well-lit and book-lined rooms to take their ease in at home, the pub was also a place of solace for the tired worker, somewhere to slake their thirst in quiet conversation, perhaps, foot on the rail, to the slow, contemplative music of the snooker ball’s gentle clack.

  Do not underestimate the need for manual workers to slake that thirst. Middle-class wits may mock the workman’s tea with its slosh of milk and four sugars but, as a letter writer to the New Statesman pointed out, you need sugar for energy and liquid for rehydration if you are in hard physical work, less so if you spend your day gazing at a flickering computer screen. Christopher Snowden was perhaps exaggerating the attitude of some to working-class pub culture, but maybe not much, when he wrote:

  The aim of the chattering classes is not unlike that of the early Anti-Saloon League … to rid the country of what they see as the scourge of drink-led, politically incorrect, smoke-filled, privately run, child unfriendly, sports-watching boozers that are frequented mainly by working class men – pubs that have customers who are indifferent to food because they don’t go there to eat. Proper pubs, in other words; havens from sterile, prod-nosed Britain. A place for grown ups.