Authors: Alan Carr
The other time I’d been there was with my mates, and they’d booked us all into Thompsons Hotel. While most Blackpool hotels have a selection of pamphlets on the front desk advertising the Winter Gardens or the Tower Ballroom, Thompsons has the latest North West STD figures and a sachet of complimentary lubricant. Apparently in the summer of 2004 gonorrhoea was more popular than Bobby Davro. The place was basically a knocking shop, with no locks on the door and the smell of sex permeating every nook and cranny and, believe me, there are a lot of crannies. At least we didn’t have to be disturbed by the chambermaid in the morning asking if we needed teas or coffees; no, she could just refill the basket through the custom-made glory holes in the wall.
Of course, I was disgusted and outraged, but it’s funny, isn’t it, how after three bottles of wine and copious gins and tonics you get used to the minor design flaws and out-of-date curtains. That Sunday morning I woke up in Thompsons with the worst hangover I’d ever had. I didn’t have my glasses on, but even through my myopic haze I could see that the man lying next to me had special needs. Then I felt someone turn over on my other side, a man who looked relatively ‘normal’. Oh no! Please, dear God, please don’t tell me I’ve had an orgy on a Sunshine Coach.
The helper reassured me that it had been only him and that the special needs man had his own room, but sometimes
he couldn’t sleep so he gets into bed with him. Although I couldn’t remember anything at all, I was happyish with his story and didn’t really want to pick it to pieces too much – yes, ignorance can be bliss. I thanked everyone involved, picked up my clothes and left Thompsons, got on a tram and went somewhere to have a wash.
* * *
Blackpool for me just throws up drama after drama, a bit like the sea does with sanitary products. It’s a place that I just can’t visit without ‘something’ happening to me. That ‘something’ happened again, recently. I was there filming a pilot for Channel 4,
The End of the Pier Show
, with the lovely Lionel Blair as my stooge. Working with Lionel Blair was an absolute scream – he is such a lovely man with a wicked sense of humour. I can honestly say I have never laughed so much on a show; if only the audience could have said the same.
Anyway, we persevered with the show, which was basically a music-hall/cabaret show at the end of Blackpool pier, and to be fair it went all right. So Lionel and I decided to have a celebratory glass of red wine in the bar at the end of the pier. Our drink was disturbed by a hunchbacked man advancing to our table saying, ‘There’s a man trying to kill himself. You’ve got to help him.’ Why, when we were surrounded by lifeguards and first-aiders, he came to the two campest men in Blackpool (and that’s saying something) I will never know.
We followed the hunchback, and he was right. There was a man, shirtless, hanging off the end of the pier in a godawful
blustery gale, wailing, ‘I want to die! I want to die!’ I instinctively thought the show wasn’t that bad, but we decided to help nevertheless. I ran straight over; Lionel tap-danced. The man hadn’t been in the audience (thank God, I thought – I might look confident, but my ego is as fragile as a porcelain figurine), he was mentally ill (hooray!).
Lionel dashed straight over and said, ‘I’m Lionel Blair off the telly.’ The man stopped mid-wail and looked up, totally bewildered. Then I popped my head over and said, ‘Oh hello.’ He looked dumbstruck, so while his brain tried to compute what Lionel Blair and Alan Carr were doing at 10 p.m. on the end of Blackpool Pier, we both pulled him off (not like that) and the police turned up and took him off our hands.
Did they give us a Community Action Trust Reward? No. Did we get any thanks off the man? No, all that Lionel and I were left with was a wonderful anecdote that we could hawk about at parties like the whores we are. We were even more buoyed up now; not only had we finished our pilot, we’d saved a man’s life, so we went to Funny Girls and celebrated. We told the Drag Queen and asked for a dedication – Blondie’s ‘The Tide is High’ – but the drag queen didn’t get it. Ahh!
We spent the summer of 1990 up in Blackpool; we were totally supportive of our father and really wanted this move to work. But even he would admit the excitement at living by the seaside began to ebb away slowly, especially when we ended up living above a launderette. I don’t think it ever stopped raining. The stacks of rain-soaked deckchairs looked a sorry sight, framed by the Golden Mile which through the rain looked the colour of baby poo. Plus the view outside the
window of a flickering pelican crossing wasn’t the illuminations that we’d been promised. The Chairman, Owen Oyston, sensed our disappointment and soon had us installed in a room at the Imperial Hotel, which sounds fabulous, but when you’re 14 do you want to sleep with your family in the same room? It’s Blackpool, not the fucking Blitz. However, we persevered with the weather, the cramped conditions, and everyone keeping schtum about the fact they weren’t really enjoying this experience; this was Dad’s job, and the family that sleeps together sticks together, if you see what I mean.
The job wasn’t really going as Dad had expected either. The Blackpool fans, unlike the loyal Cobblers ones, didn’t really take to him and he’d started receiving abuse. Abuse from people who’ve chosen to live in Blackpool – now I’ve heard everything. Sometimes it takes something totally unrelated to snap people out of a situation. Ours happened one morning with Dad coming through the hotel door, dripping wet, white as a sheet, holding Minstral in his arms like Superman did to Lois Lane.
‘Why are you wet?’ asked Mum. Minstral had fallen off the end of Blackpool pier and thankfully the tide had been in. Minstral in a panic was doing the doggie paddle (what else?) to get back to the shore, but instead due to the waves was getting pummelled against the sea defences. Dad dived in. Just like those people in the paper that you tut at for being so stupid who dive in to save their beloved pets and they end up dying whilst the pet swims quite happily to the other side thinking it’s a game.
Yes, in a split second Dad turned into one of those have-a-go heroes. Minstral was saved and spent the rest of the day in
shock lying meekly in his basket, although Mum was certain he was ‘just being dramatic’. Surely the dog was too fatigued to be giving my mother dirty looks. This dramatic moment brought it all home to us, and we all agreed that none of us was enjoying this at all, and now even the dog agreed with us. We all decided that this was shit.
In November we were put out of our misery; Dad lost his job, and so we went back to Northampton. I’d never been so happy to see the place. We could tell we were getting close – we could see the Express Lifts Tower erect in the distance dominating the landscape like an extended middle finger.
* * *
After all the worry and the stress and ups and downs of Dad’s career, the summer of 1992 was all about me. My GCSEs had finished and it was now time to choose where I wanted to take this sorry excuse of a life onwards. The different subjects floated around my head. Science and Football were automatically no-nos. One of the languages, perhaps, Religious Studies, Home Economics, I just couldn’t decide. Maths had got so difficult with all the Pythagoras theorems and Pi signs; if I took it at A-level, I swear I’d have a stroke. I was none the wiser. I always think it’s a shame that you get to do your A-levels at that age just when you’re discovering the delightful distractions of going out, alcohol and partying. Believe me, when you’re 16 and desperate to experience ‘having a drink’, even the dodgy nightlife of Northampton has a strange allure. I’d experienced being the other side of the bar when I was a
glass collector at a singles night at Sywell Motel. It wasn’t me. Being groped by menopausal women and answering crank calls from your own father asking if the ‘Grab a Fanny/Dig up a Date’ night was still on can get quite wearing, believe me.
I would often go drinking with my friend Carolyn. We had known each other since lower school, she being just another girl in my ever-expanding gang of ladies. Well, Carolyn and I would head down Bridge Street and drink ‘K’ cider. Just typing that letter makes me shiver. I don’t know what was worse: the taste on the way down, or the taste on the way back up. Thankfully ‘K’ cider is no more. They used to cost a pound at 40’s, the bar of choice for illegal underage drinkers, and looking back I still feel robbed.
Why do first-time drinkers always choose cider as their gateway drink? Is it because they think that the apples in the cider make up one of their five a day? I don’t know, but I always drank cider. K, Strongbow, Woodpecker, anything. I can remember shitting myself in the Saddlers Arms after having three pints of Scrumpy. I was well pissed off because they were new flares. I use the word ‘new’ very loosely. Carolyn and I were going through that well-worn phase of becoming obsessed with the Seventies, the music, the fashion, the attitude, everything about it. So after getting high on the sounds of Chic, Parliament and Candi Staton in Carolyn’s bedroom, we would scour the charity shops for funky clothes to emulate our soul sisters and brothers whilst doing the ‘Wellie Road’.
The ‘Wellie Road’ – or to give it its full name, the Welling-borough Road – is basically a long road with pubs and bars
on either side that leads into the town centre. It can get quite rough at the weekend, so why Carolyn and I chose to walk down it dressed as Shaft and Cleopatra Jones is beyond me. Of course, we thought we looked funky and superfly and that’s why people were staring and pointing and shouting abuse. I realise now there’s nothing superfly about smelling of musty piss or wearing clothes that have names like ‘Elsie’ and ‘Wilf’ sewn into the back of them. We were meant to look like we were from the Seventies, not
in
our seventies. Carolyn was and is a really pretty blonde girl, with these sparkling blue eyes and a curvaceous figure, and we would always play the same trick in all the pubs. She would go up to a man and say, ‘Do you want to buy me and my friend a drink?’ Of course he would buy two drinks waiting expectantly for another pretty blonde young lady to return from the toilet, but no, it would be me, in a sheepskin, smelling like a dead Alsatian. ‘Thanks, mate,’ I would smile cheesily as I took my first slurp of free scrumpy.
How I didn’t get my head kicked in, I don’t know – but then again, some of the men Carolyn picked were so paralytic, they thought I was a woman anyway. They probably thought I was a member of Boney M, popped in for a cider and black on the way to a Memphis recording session. Often we would end up at the Roadmender, which had only recently been revamped and reopened – by Roger Daltrey, no less. As you can imagine, we absolutely adored the monthly ‘Carwash’ nights. A whole night dedicated to the Sounds of the Seventies; we had the look, and now we had the music. It would always be worth hanging around to the end because more often than not a fight would break out and you would see grown men
punching and kicking in Seventies’ clothes, afros would go flying in the air, blood-spattered afghans littered the floor … It was like Sister Sledge had trod on a landmine. It was one of the funniest things you’d ever seen.
We thought naively that it was where we belonged, and we became quite protective about it; the Roadmender was for people like us. Those nights were pure madness, always ending up having an adventure, or waking up at some dodgy person’s house. We’d each tell our parents that we were staying around the other one’s house, so that gave us a free rein to make mischief and see where our Cuban heels took us.
Once I remember waking up one morning in a strange house with a Jack Russell sitting on my face. I know this sounds perverse but the house was so cold I let her sit on it for a bit longer; you can’t beat a warm face. Worryingly, if the dog had sat a few inches down, I would have suffocated to death. Thankfully, the stench of K cider repelled her from my lips.
* * *
Although I loved the dressing up, the disco and the kebabs and chilli sauce that I would inevitably find plastered to the hem of my flares the next morning, I was itching to find people who danced my end of the ballroom, if you see what I mean. I wanted to see if there were any people in Northampton like me, so on a few weekends I would go out by myself, lie to my parents about staying at Carolyn’s house and venture out, hungry to taste Northampton’s gay scene myself, alone.
The only problem is there is no gay scene in Northampton, no bars, clubs or anything, so you would spend half your time trying to find clues and following camp men around town seeing where they were heading. A lot of the time they were going home and you would end up on a housing estate at ten o’clock at night none the wiser and sober as a judge. I remember thinking with my collars up as I slid from doorway to doorway, ‘This must be what it was like to be in the Resistance.’
After weeks of intense research, I struck gold. There was one bar, Cabanas on Sheep Street, and every Thursday there was a poetry night which I took to be a positive sign. Come on, surely there were some gays at a poetry night. I turned up paralytic. I had been drinking heavily out of sheer terror of meeting a genuine homosexual in captivity. The bouncers refused to let me in because I was so drunk, which probably did me a favour, looking back. But I shuffled home dispirited – so near yet so far.
I returned to Cabanas in the following weeks and saw that it wasn’t exclusively gay, but a mixed crowd. No, it wasn’t Studio 54, I grant you, but it had a lovely relaxed vibe, and after the poetry the tables and chairs would be pulled back and everyone would dance to acid jazz. I felt really at home, it made such a change from the haze of Ben Sherman shirts and tight perms that crammed the pubs and bars on the Wellie Road.
Sadly Cabanas closed down shortly after, but in its place a proper gay club was built and the same crowd would turn up, and the partying would carry on as if nothing had happened. And I started to get lucky. I don’t know whether because they
fancied me or because I was fresh meat on the lazy Susan that was Northampton’s gay scene.
At 17 I lost my virginity to a guy who took me back to his house. I was very drunk, so can’t remember much; what I do remember isn’t good. He had a hideous fern display on the wall and rugs on the floor that wouldn’t look out of place in a nursing home. For a split second I thought, ‘Oh my God! He’s blind!’ but alas he wasn’t. Anyway, more to the point he was good looking which I suppose made up for at least some of the vile decor.