The Pie At Night

by Stuart Maconie

It’s still as balmy as summer in Cap D’Antibes as afternoon gives way to evening, and I head back to the front and the welcoming and familiar sight of Silcock’s Pleasureland. As a child I would get giddy at just the very sight of this place, with its implicit promise of any number of mad and pointless ways to lose my pocket money while making myself sick. I would tremble at the thought of the funhouse with its scary, funny, rickety rides and shows; the joywheel, a polished wooden centrifuge that flung you to the floor in a giggling heap and where someone was guaranteed to wet themselves from fear or laughter. Then there was the cakewalk, the ‘social mixer’, and what I have always thought of as ‘that gigantic rotating barrel thing’.

  Later, as a student, we would come here after the pubs had shut, eat greasy burgers on the beach, hang out under the pier, play Asteroids in the bright, jangling cacophony of the midnight arcade. We were carrying on one of the great traditions of our people; Pleasureland has been amiably parting the working folk of West Lancashire from their wages since 1912.

  On 14 September 2006, when pictures were posted on the web of beloved ride the Cyclone being dismantled, the outcry was such that two protesters climbed to the top of it (which is bloody high) and stayed there for three hours in a doomed effort to save the famous roller coaster. They came down eventually and so did the Cyclone.

  But Silcock’s Pleasureland was just the upstart little brother of a far more famous and bigger institution, Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach, at the heart of a town that’s a byword for excess, for freedom from work, a behemoth of northern fun. People go to Blackpool all year round, the elderly returning tourists strolling down the prom, the gay clientele at the spectacular Funny Girls cabaret, the hen and stag dos coming in like an inebriate Luftwaffe on a Jägerbombing mission along the Golden Mile.

  But just as you think the summer’s over, Blackpool saves a little fun for the end of the season. It still has a late burst of autumnal oohing and ahhing for you as the nights get cooler and the clocks go back. Like many a Lancastrian before us, we were off to ‘th’Illuminations’.

  Whichever direction you come from and however you come, everyone north of Oxford knows the trip. They know that final endless stretch well across the flat acres of the Fylde plain, the narrowing arterial roads and the sparse dunes. They know the special pride in being ‘first one to see the tower’, because as far as the north goes, there’s really only one tower. It doesn’t matter if you make your journey by car, or by train or even by air; I’ve often peered through my little porthole over the wing to spot gleefully that black exclamation mark on the graceful sandy curve of Morecambe Bay since seeing Blackpool Tower, ‘the tower’, brings a skittish thrill that never entirely fades. It is the promise of good times just up ahead, of life off the leash. Here is a building erected just for fun, and for the profit that comes from fun: a monument to leisure. In centuries gone by, humans built towers like Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia or the Hassan II minaret in Morocco to be nearer to God. In Blackpool, they built a tower to put you further away from your wages, and to be further away from the ground and the everyday, to leave behind the mill and the mine and the factory hooter.

  As the earth has its seasons, so did Blackpool. During the Industrial Revolution, the tradition of the wakes week (originally a festival encouraged among the unruly Britons by Pope Gregory) became a fixed and regular summer holiday in the north of England. Each locality would have its own nominated ‘wakes week’, when the factories, mills and mines would close for seven days, maybe fourteen. All through the summer, one town after another would be on holiday in succession and the great rattle of industry would fall silent in Bolton, then Oldham, then Wigan, then Preston, and on and on. Sea bathing and sea air were thought good for the lungs and constitutions dulled by long shifts underground or in cramped, dirty factories. So seaside resorts boomed and none more so than Blackpool.

  As noted, Liverpudlians and the more genteel took their holidays in Southport. Morecambe was a destination for the mill workers of the West Riding, giving it the name Bradford by the Sea. But the Lancashire working classes only had eyes for Blackpool. At its height in 1860, 23,000 people came from Oldham to Blackpool in one wakes week alone.

  Then in 1879, in a smart attempt to extend the season and prolong the fading summer, Blackpool staged what it called a display of ‘artificial sunshine’. Eight big arc lamps bathed the promenade in golden light during the evening. As this was a year before Edison patented electric light, it was fabulously new and futuristic. In 1912, 10,000 lights were strung in ‘festoons of garland lamps’ in what really was the first incarnation of the modern lights. With the odd dark interludes at times of world war, the Blackpool Illuminations, or ‘the lights’ as they are known, has grown into a late summer, early autumn institution, a last hurrah for fun and freedom before the coming of winter and darkness.

  Every year, the honour of switching on ‘the lights’ is bestowed on a different luminary, which is absolutely the right word here. It is an eclectic list, and one which provides a marvellous commentary on the shifting nature of celebrity. It includes Ken Dodd, Jayne Mansfield, the cast of Dad’s Army, Sir Josiah Stamp (a former director of the Bank Of England), The Bee Gees, Stanley Matthews, Soviet ambassador Yakov Malik, Red Rum (a horse), Status Quo and the prime minister of Westphalia. You will not be surprised to see that the current Blackpool tourist website describes the Illuminations as ‘iconic’, an adjective so widely and nonsensically applied (footballers, pieces of chamber music, volcanoes, fish) as to be now almost meaningless.

  Alongside the dazzle of ‘The Lights’, Blackpool has a darker side too. A sobering New Statesman piece in 2014 described how:

  Every year on 10 November, Blackpool’s nightly illuminations are switched off, marking the end of the holiday season, and around 2,500 people become unemployed overnight. Cheap air travel has been slowly killing the local tourism trade for decades but no one has come up with an alternative to halt the town’s decline.

  Two hundred metres inland from the promenade, pebble-dash terraces that were once guest houses and B&Bs have been converted into bedsits renting for around £65 a week and attracting a new kind of visitor. Blackpool has become a town where ‘you can turn up with a bin bag and £150 and get a flat,’ says Simon Blackburn, leader of Blackpool Council.

  It went on to describe in harrowing detail how, according to the Centre for Social Justice, British seaside towns such as Blackpool had become ‘dumping grounds for people facing problems such as unemployment, social exclusion and substance abuse’. The transience and anonymity of seaside towns like Blackpool mean they’re a magnet to those who are running away from something. If you want a sobering afternoon, especially if you’re writing a book celebrating the north, wander around Morecambe. The butt of jokes since the seventies, its decline seems permanent and impossible to arrest, the glorious refurbished art deco Midland Hotel gazing with a sigh over streets filled with cheap nail bars, hair salons, decrepit B&Bs and scrub.

  But for decades, all that the bulk of Blackpool’s visitors were running away from was the daily grind. They came from the crowded streets of urban Lancashire, as I came to Blackpool as the dark nights began to draw in. The first sight of Blackpool tower twinkling in the dusk may still be faintly magical; the KFC and Poundland at its feet less so. Heading north along the front, Blackpool shows its cheerful hand early. There’s an enormous rotating disco ball near the Headlands Hotel of which one TripAdvisor review states ‘clean and friendly staff’, praise which I think needs a comma. It’s getting on for eight o’clock but everything is open. Madame Tussauds is ablaze with light and boasts a prominent effigy of shrill, camp TV personality Alan Carr. This prompts one passer-by to remark, ‘Why would you pay to see a waxworks of Alan Carr; the bloody real one’s never off the telly?’

  Like Richard and Linda Thompson, I wanted to see the bright lights tonight, and just after the North Pier, the Illuminations come into their own. Traditionally, the Illuminations consisted of coloured bulbs,
lighted objects and figurines hanging from the lampposts on the promenade. You could probably piece together a pretty accurate cultural history of Britain from what these have featured down the years – I’m guessing Stanley Matthews, Brains from Thunderbirds, the Bay City Rollers, Magnus Pyke, the Teletubbies, that sort of thing. These days though the affair is more high tech if still disarmingly low rent at times. There are now a variety of tableaux and series of large plasma screen TV-style panels called, with admirable concision, The Panels, which project many and varied delights into the misty autumn air. One is called Haunted Blackpool and is really, tremendously creepy; ghostly faces projected on to storeroom mannequins in Edwardian garb. Next – the randomness is all part of the considerable charm – is a section on the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt followed by a massive, glowering Noddy and Big Ears who terrified me so god help any passing toddlers. There are some vampires, then a section on Hindu weddings (obviously) and then one based on the work of the late rock cartoonist Ray Lowry and featuring drawings of The Clash. That’s some line-up, I think you’ll agree.

  I pause for a while by the giant screens playing vintage episodes of Sooty and Thomas the Tank Engine and watch my fellow tourists pass by, as varied and lively as the panels themselves. There’s a pack of teenage girls with a poodle, a Down’s syndrome man, a laughing Polish family. We all stroll along amiably past, you’ve guessed it, more panels. Some are self-consciously classy, like the Boodle’s jewellers sponsored ones in Narnia-style white jewellery. Some are predictable, like the Doctor Who display, and some are plain weird, as in the giant Damien Hirst style illuminated and eviscerated cow.

  At Gynn Square, hunger strikes, and with a recommendation in mind and noted in my smartphone, I jump on a tram. Anyone who was sentient and had a television in the late 1980s can never board a Blackpool tram without feeling a frisson of fear and excitement. For they will surely recall the famous Coronation Street scene in which abusive nutter Alan Bradley tracked down estranged lover Rita from the Cabin to Blackpool Prom, specifically just outside the Ambassador Hotel, and, in the ensuing chase, got run down and ‘offed’ by the number three to Bispham. By the standards of today’s gory and ludicrous soaps, Bradley’s demise is tame stuff, but back then it was Hitchcockian in its tension and drama. ‘Corry’ staged another tram accident in 2010 which by comparison looked like the Titanic disaster. But it was rubbish and no one remembers it, Bradley’s end being far more … yes, I’m going to say it … iconic.

  Tonight the trams are packed and cruising stately along the promenades, lit up like neon battleships. Like Bradley’s fatal tram I am bound for Bispham, the north shore bit of Blackpool. As I disembark and stroll along jauntily, for who wouldn’t here, I observe that nearly every hotel bar is thronged and lively. I gaze up and see a man seated in an armchair in the large landing window of one of the hotels. He is quietly reading a novel and I think how cultured an evening he is having, until I realise that he is completely naked. Later, on my return walk, I see the same man, this time spruce in his short-sleeved shirt worn outside the trousers, at the bar watching a football match with a pint of lager. He catches my eye and smiles. Under the circumstances, it disconcerted me somewhat.

  My destination is Bispham Kitchen, a chip shop of some repute, indeed, one of the north’s premier chippies. I had come across several glowing mentions online of this establishment. One man even claimed to take his annual holidays in Bispham itself just to be near it. Clearly, this was to be the venue for my tea at ‘the Lights’.

  By way of testament to the chippie’s quality, there are four minibuses parked outside. It’s absolutely rammed to the gunnels; mainly with Scottish people. I’m used to this. Wigan had the same wakes week as Glasgow, so whenever I came here as a kid the guesthouses, pubs and cafés were always full of ‘weegees’, loud, good-natured and completely incomprehensible. I find a table right at the back of the large dining room, pushing and picking my apologetic way through buggies and backpacks. The Bispham Kitchen boasts a large and varied clientele: smart elderly ladies, a young family with a kid still in her school uniform, a posh woman in a plaster cast, two trendy young hipsters with vinyl albums.

  The queue is long but moving swiftly thanks to a crack team of staff, handpicked it seems like a Premier League football team from every nation in the world on the basis of their brisk and friendly expert chip retail skills. I order haddock and chips, white bread and butter, curry sauce; traditional but sound. As it is that most rare and marvellous of things, a licensed chip shop, I go nuts and order some wine. The menu sports a carafe for a few quid, so I assume it’ll hold a couple of glasses tops. The Chinese girl at the till laughs, ‘Are you thinking of getting drunk?’ I laugh too, though the significance of this is lost on me for now.

  Despite the crush, the food arrives quickly. It comes on a tray – the curry sauce in a china gravy boat, which is classy I think, a plate that can barely contain the enormous denizen of the deep that lays battered upon it, and a carafe of red wine that I would guess holds a normal bottle and a half. Now I understand.

  The food is delicious. For dessert I have a vanilla slice, obviously. Like Grandma Pollards eastwards over Todmorden way, this chip shop does sensational home-made cakes. The menu contains a history of the place and my favourite section tells of its origins as an amusement arcade with the ‘kitchen only separated from the rifle range by a net curtain’. Having drunk about a fifth of the wine, I decide that it’s a waste to just leave it and offer it to the nice women at the next table. They seem a little unsure, and on reflection it was a little odd of me, but the sole man at the table agrees with gusto and pours himself a large one. It turns out he is their minibus driver.

  I walk back down the promenade past the endless hotels. Every one of the bars is still full, and outside every one is a little knot of smokers. One such group I pass contains a Scottish man in a tinsel wig talking quite knowledgably about archaeology. I pop into a large hotel to use the loo and there’s not a single table to spare. In the huge back function room, a floorful of cross-legged kids are being entertained by a magician. They look enthralled, entranced, delighted to be here.

  But then why would they not be? Why would this not be fun? If I were a child, I would far rather come here for my holidays than the Dordogne, or Florence, or any of the other wonderful places that the adult me might love. Childhood is, to a degree, classless. Kids belong to a secret group whose membership cuts across class strata. What kid wouldn’t feel the magic in Blackpool at night? The drama and glamour of fairgrounds in the dark, the romance of the distant sea and the lights offshore, and, let’s not forget, the opportunity to eat your own body weight in batter and fried onions. What little kid wouldn’t love that? This big kid certainly did.

  It’s easy when passing something like the tiny, unassuming Bona Vista Hotel to think it small or sad, a melancholy kind of place to spend a holiday. Then you read what people say about it on the forums and such and you realise that people come here, have fun, are well treated, enjoy themselves and come back again and again. It would be a dull world if we all liked the same things, and not everyone wants to go wine tasting in Provence for their holidays. I know I don’t. I would rather go wine tasting in Blackpool since you can have haddock and chips, and not the most over-rated cuisine on earth, and then go on the amusements afterwards.

  Fashions in fun change, just like fashions in trousers. When turn-ups and flannels held sway, Blackpool was the leisure destination of choice of the working class northern family, something it remained through the era of flares and hotpants. Nowadays you are quite likely to encounter someone sans trousers entirely on the Golden Mile, as it has become the prime venue for downmarket (or ironic) hen and stag do’s, something the resort is awkwardly ambivalent about, since it provides much needed revenue but isn’t great for the brand. Through all this though, Blackpool remains impervious, its smile as fixed as the Funhouse mannequins, its eyes forever on the glittering horizon. And whatever we think of the things pe
ople get up to after dark here, perhaps until the whole of a person’s life is known, we should be slow to critcise their choice of fun.

  Consider a relevant and wise quote from 1969, and an unlikely source, the sporadically dim Rodney Marsh, late of Queens Park Rangers and Sky Sports:

  Most people are in a factory from nine till five. Their job may be to turn out 263 little circles. At the end of the week they’re three short and somebody has a go at them. On Saturday afternoons they deserve something to go and shout about.

  I couldn’t put it off any longer. The Bovril and rattles and floodlights were calling, in as much as inanimate objects can. It was all about to kick off.

  CHAPTER 7

  KICKING A BALL ABOUT

  One night in Rochdale and a tale of two Uniteds

  The names, the fixtures, the opponents, are so evocative of place and time that they verge on parody. Goole Town, Gainsborough Trinity, Hyde United and Worksop Town, Matlock, Chorley and Great Harwood. No ‘Classicos’ here, no Beautiful Games or Theatres of Dreams. The Northern Premier League of the early 1970s was about as far removed from the vainglorious, bloated, rapacious, money-sloshing global juggernaut that is modern football as you can imagine.

  Look back at games of that era, even the very top flight ones, and what you see is a different world; a grim prehistoric epoch of sheepskin and mud, sleet and violence, malevolent toothless grins, Stone Age sideboards and pale, skinny wraiths from the back streets of the arse ends of the land. Compare this to the sleek, airbrushed glamour, the toned pulchritude of modern footballers and it is like looking at the early footage we have of miners or ragged children in back alleys, or the wounded coming home from war. It looks primitive, it looks poor, it looks wretched, and it was all these things.

  But that didn’t stop me spending silly amounts of my free time at Northern Premier Football League football between 1970 and 1974. But then I was a child and knew no better: some of the men who stood alongside me on ‘the cowshed’, Wigan Athletic’s decrepit stand built of turf and corrugated metal and salvaged rubbish, well, some of them were grown men with wives and families. People who really should have known better. People like my dad, come to think of it.