by Tim Moore
Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, as he is better known, had earnt his place on my playlist by virtue of a collaboration with the band Smokie. This was a 1995 cover of their 1976 hit ‘Living Next Door to Alice’, which customised a story of unrequited neighbourly love with a discourteous rhetorical phrase that I have chosen to spare you. Comfortably outselling the original, this peaked at number three and remained in the UK charts for nineteen weeks, shifting half a million copies along the way. Eight years later it made the top twenty in Channel 4’s worst-singles poll.
The Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown I knew was a stand-up comedian who had fashioned a career from the humorous potential of relentless profanity and being fat, and doing both of these while wearing a multi-coloured patchwork suit and an old flying helmet. I have to confess an unfamiliarity with his musical output as it existed beyond that aforementioned family singalong standard, and was surprised, when I located a copy of it, to find an associated greatest-hits album. Its track titles alone demanded that this entire work be drafted into my anthology forthwith.
I could perhaps have mentioned Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown earlier as a feted son of Middlesbrough, or as a regular performer on the seaside stages of Great Yarmouth and Skegness. But as things stand he’s being introduced here as the lyricist and performer of the movingly confessional composition, ‘I’m a Cunt’. So Roy severally insisted above the jaunty tinkling of a pub piano, as the rain intensified and a small quadrant of Spaghetti Junction loomed up sideways before me. His self-denigration built to the bluntest imaginable climax: naturally I’m not inclined to share this with you.
As Mr Brown’s Wikipedia entry emphasises, ‘Roy’s shows are very rarely seen on television, as nearly all of his material contains a lot of strong language, especially the word “cunt”.’ The man’s own website proudly, if a little coyly, boasts of his claim to fame as ‘the first person ever to say the C word on stage in the UK’. On this basis, the ditty that now faded away seemed an unimprovable encapsulation of both his talent and his appeal. But Roy was not done yet. As Ozzy saw us past his birthplace, Aston, with a 21-fuck salute, so Chubby embarked on a retrospective tour of festive fellatio. At inevitable length this segued into ‘Toss Me Off’, ‘I’d Use Your Shit for Toothpaste’ and other such considered appraisals of the human condition.
Battered by coprophilic single entendres and the bluntest, least imaginative expletives, I tried to understand how such material could ever be deemed entertaining. A review I’d read of a recent Chubby gig described an audience that didn’t laugh but cheered: it wasn’t a comedy show so much as a joyous rally, a mutual celebration of secret universal truths about asylum seekers, single-sex relationships and, above all, the curiously magnetic repulsiveness of the female pudenda. It was all very strange, and I wondered if this helped explain why The League of Gentlemen had chosen to endow their very strange fictional village with Chubby’s real name. But what’s truly arresting about the whole phenomenon is its inexhaustible popularity. Roy Chubby Brown performs across the country to 350,000 people every year, and has to date sold more than 4.5 million DVDs. To get an idea of what these figures actually mean, carve them into a table while shrieking at the very top of your lungs.
As I swung off the M6, the rain died away and my neck slowly ratcheted back to its usual position. Chubby chose this moment to check out, and did so in some style. ‘Hello, my name’s Awful the Duck,’ he talk-sang, in ickle-girl Lancastrian, ‘and I know a man called Teeth Harris.’ Here an ‘Our Tune’-style instrumental backdrop swelled poignantly. ‘Sometimes Teeth sticks his dick in me, and gets all my feathers sticky with his bellend.’ Then it was on to Terry Wogan’s ‘Floral Dance’ and the worst road in Britain.
In line with Johnny Nash’s musical farewell to precipitation, I could see clearly now the rain had gone. I could see – whoa! – all obstacles in my way. Above all I could see the sign advertising ‘MHS Horse Disposal’ that welcomed me onto the 8.1 -mile stretch of the A34 Ringway from Cannock to Walsall – declared Britain’s fourth worst ‘driving road’ (by sports-car enthusiasts), its ninth most tedious stretch of tarmac (in that Cornhill survey) and runner-up to the nation’s most poorly laid-out mixed-use urban boulevard (as declared by some West Midlands-based regeneration committee who chose not to reveal their sources, or indeed the winner). No other thoroughfare came close to matching this all-round performance, and I was keen to see what made the A34 Ringway so multivariously awful.
Pebble-dashed, chimney-potted terraces hard up by the kerb, units to let on a brown-glass trading estate, a high street where you’d struggle to spend over a pound unless you fancied a second Greggs Steakbake or a tattoo: the initial stretches seemed no more than a drive-through compendium of twenty-first-century Britain as I’d been experiencing it. Following a short blurt of countryside after Cannock, we broached the fringes of Britain’s second largest conurbation, and thereafter all was single-carriageway, mixed-use, mid-urban non-controversy. I eventually came to realise that the A34 Ringway bore but one distinctive feature, and that this alone explained why so many motorists had singled it out for castigation. I might have noticed it sooner in my previous life as the owner-driver of a vehicle capable of rapid progress, though just in case I now activated the relevant sat-nav option. And so for the balance of those 8.1 miles, my highly strung navigator, Mr J. M. Osbourne, was accompanied by his carer: a calm and assured woman who kept him in check with almost unbroken repetitions of her soothing mantra, ‘Warning, Gatso ahead, speed limit 30 miles per hour.’
Home to twelve yellow boxes on poles in its first 3 miles, and another thirty-three between then and Birmingham, the A34 Ringway is the most densely camera-policed road in Britain – in fact anywhere in the world. It has thus found itself routinely vilified in the press, and targeted by motoring-rights extremists: in 2007, fifteen of its cameras were sabotaged by fire or the judicious application of aerosol paint, with a sixteenth ‘pulled over by unknown means’. Like Gladiators and horseradish sauce straight from the jar, driving too fast is something I have been known to enjoy but cannot defend. Even blessed with the right machinery I don’t think I’d have been tempted on the A34 Ringway, wending its way through heavily built-up areas in a manner that said, ‘You know what, chaps, even thirty is probably pushing it.’ Unless you’re the Daily Mail you can’t argue with figures: since the West Midlands police and local authorities went snap-happy, the annual toll of serious injuries on the region’s roads has very nearly halved.
The A34 Ringway did at least have one trick up its tarmac-adam sleeve. I spotted it on the forecourt of a ‘Funeral Centre’ in Bloxwich, lantern-jawed but demure, staring blank-eyed at the traffic from under a granite fringe: the notorious ‘Black Diana’. Commissioned at the height of national mourning by Andrew Walsh, grief-stricken MD of Walsh Memorials, this ill-starred statue of the late Princess of Wales was intended for display in Walsall’s new bus centre, then under construction. However, Walsh’s choice of raw material and the free-spirited artistry of the Indian masons he contracted drew the wrong sort of gasps at the unveiling ceremony. ‘Demonic,’ whispered one local dignitary; ‘creepy and offensive,’ shuddered another. Eleven years on, their choice of words seemed more a reflection of the febrile hysteria of the hour. ‘Totally’ and ‘hilarious’ would have been my own selections: it was as if along with his cheque for £16,000, Walsh had handed the craftsmen a negative print of the bloke from Dollar wearing a ballgown. As I watched, two passing housewives stopped before it and shook their heads in amused wonder, still in thrall to the statue’s glorious wrongness.
But back then it was far from a laughing matter. To keep pace with the press-fuelled national outrage, Buckingham Palace issued a cold statement forbidding the statue to be labelled or identified as an image of Diana. Her family even threatened to ‘look further into the matter’, presumably hoping for a conviction under the Rubbish Sculpture Act, with Andrew Walsh put in the stocks on Bloxwich Green, or ideally turned to stone. Asked to defend himself, the co
nfused and bereft businessman could only mumble: ‘It’s a finely carved life-size tribute which weighs 1.5 tons.’ And so it still stands there, nameless and unloved, facial extremities fading to light grey, just next to the granite kitchen-worktop showroom that Walsh Memorials now runs as a sideline.
A couple of miles and six cameras up the A34 I turned off Gatsowoman and recalibrated my crapometer, keen to know precisely when the seamless mixed-use sprawl around started to call itself Walsall. Sightings of the word on a carpet warehouse and a shed offering to buy scrap copper for cash placed me on full alert: I was nudging into a town that has been decreed the most hideous on earth. ‘Nowhere in the world is it possible to travel such long distances without seeing anything grateful to the eye,’ wrote Theodore Dalrymple in 2000, describing a visit to Walsall for the benefit of subscribers to the US arts review New Criterion. ‘It is possible that there are uglier towns than Walsall, but if so I do not know them,’ he continued, before encapsulating the place as ‘Ceauşescu’s Romania with fast food outlets’. If Theo was even half right, little wonder that the place had been outed as ‘Britain’s unhappiest town’, albeit in some asinine poll commissioned, with the usual cavalier disregard for commercial relevance, by an internet banking venture. Just 49 per cent of Wallsalludlianerists professed themselves satisfied with their lot, and did so in a regional accent that – as I had been stutteringly, swearily reminded several hundred times a day – is well established as the nation’s least sonorous. It all sounded too bad to be true.
Named after the outcroppings of surface coal that streaked its hillsides, the Black Country welcomed the Industrial Revolution pre-smutted. By the time Queen Victoria was travelling her realm by royal train, Walsall and its neighbouring towns were so unregally slathered in sooty filth that she routinely ordered the blinds to be lowered when passing through the region. By the 1850s, multi-industrial Walsall styled itself ‘the town of a hundred trades’, dominant amongst them that honoured by the museum I now espied, parked outside and entered.
As I’ve discovered at the stockport Hat Museum, Kendal’s Pencil Museum and the British Lawnmower Museum in Southport, museums that sound boring never are. The Walsall Leather Museum dutifully revealed itself as a repository of fascinating insights – no mean feat, given that most were delivered in a particularly nasal variant of the regional drone, by an elderly guide in a shopcoat. In my habitual capacity as solitary visitor I was easy meat: he pounced as I walked away from a display headed, GLOVES – WALSALL’S FORGOTTEN INDUSTRY.
‘In noinedeenundred, alboast every logal fably would have employed at least wun saddler or arness-baker,’ he began, sounding like Mr Woolley off The Archers talking in his sleep. ‘Walzle was the sender of the leather-bacon universe, and that was all down to the roise of the orse.’ It’s easy to forget, unless you’re in the company of an old bloke in a shopcoat, that the railway age was no death knell for Dobbin. Quite the reverse: as I now learnt, the number of horses on London’s streets actually trebled during Victoria’s reign, peaking at 300,000 in 1900. Horses demanded all sorts of leathery accessories, and Walsall – as a longstanding manufacturer of the metal bits that held these together – profitably diversified. The local leathermakers were at their busiest in the early years of the First World War, equipping the million British horses requisitioned for service: one Walsall firm alone turned out 100,000 military saddles from 1914 to 1916. Production rather fell away after that. Over seven thousand horses were killed in a single day at the Battle of Verdun, and by 1918 half a million British horses had perished from disease, exhaustion and injury – almost a third of the pre-war national total. This dreadful cull coincided with the mass production of petrol-engined vehicles, and that was pretty much it for the British working horse in general and Walsall’s leathermakers in particular.
‘Walzle bade fudballs for the FA Cup foinal for a woile,’ droned my guide, ‘and the building we’re in banufactured handbags for Barks and Spencer until the Fifties. And so, well, there we are. Then.’ He seemed rather taken aback to have got through to the end of his spiel; I wondered if it was the first time he’d been allowed to. Aware that I still had at least ten minutes of pay-and-display time on the clock, I took the opportunity to coax him out of his leathery cocoon. As a man who had seen seventy Walsall summers or more, he was surely well-placed to put the town’s recent travails – wholesale civic depression, internationally acclaimed hideousness – into some kind of context.
‘Seen any changes? I boast surdandly av.’ A rueful smile. ‘It’s just the odd workshop bacon wallets and fancy goods now.’
‘Right, but what about in general?’
‘General leather goods?’
‘No, just sort of general life. Changes in the general life of Walsall.’
‘My woife gets her gloves down the barket. Bachine-stitched Choinese rubbish.’
And so I went outside and conducted my own nine-minute overview, scoping out downtown Walsall from the museum’s hilltop car park. It was all distribution barns and rubbled wasteland: not much to force Theodore Dalrymple’s head down to a steaming bowlful of his own words. In fact, the Leather Museum itself was about as becoming as Walsall got: a red-brick, iron-windowed workshop buffed up to its Victorian prime.
When British journalists got wind of Theo’s published opinion, they rushed to Walsall to chronicle the partisan outrage thus unleashed. Yet all they encountered were shrugs, hollow laughter and just the odd nomination for somewhere slightly more horrid (usually Coventry). As a nation we’ve made an art out of doing ourselves down, and the people of Walsall have simply perfected that art. The most-depressed-town survey was a masterclass in asking a silly question, and as confirmed by the psycho-physical assessment I now carried out upon passers-by, Walsall had answered in kind. I scanned features and demeanour for tell-tale signs of dejection: the sagging shoulders of mirthless drudgery, the neck-twitch of murderous despair. But give or take a few lugubrious emos, the pedestrians seemed significantly more lively and upbeat than the ground-down miserablists I see trudging down my London street – some of whom aren’t even en route to my front door.
Yes, Walsall was ugly – but it wasn’t that ugly, not Forth ugly, not Hartlepool ugly. And more than that, it was doing a lot better for itself than almost anywhere else I’d visited. There was much reconstruction to be done, but as the skyline presence of cranes proved, at least it was being done (I hesitate to reveal the fate of downtown Walsall’s most enormous rubble-heap, though as you ask – yes, it’s another über-Tesco, hard up by the UK’s largest town-centre Asda). None of the dead-duck, now-what hopelessness that had infused so many of my destinations.
Walsall’s old trades now lived on only as local shopping malls (whoever decided on the Tanners’ Centre can’t have been familiar with the uniquely repulsive process of curing animal hides) and Walsall FC’s nickname, ‘The Handbags’ (no, hang on: ‘The Saddlers’). But new trades had arrived to take up the slack: local unemployment stood at 6 per cent, and falling. How genuinely depressed can you be when you’ve got a job, and it doesn’t involve hosing down flayed cows with dog piss? When at last I did spot a wince of world-weary dismay it was in Craig’s mirror: I’d just seen the sign announcing the current suspension of pay-and-display parking charges.
Waiting at a red in the dimming light I spotted a hoarding that identified an adjacent swathe of semi-regenerated brownfield as Longbridge, the former Austin Rover factory. To think that this had once been the largest manufacturing plant not just in Britain but anywhere in the world, employing 30,000 workers and producing over 200,000 cars a year. Five million Minis alone rolled off the Longbridge lines. All that, and now nothing. In fact worse than nothing, as the Chinese motor corporation who acquired the pathetic remains of British Leyland – by then not much more than the MG Rover brand and the Longbridge leasehold – is now producing an insultingly tiny number of awful, cheap sports cars in some distant corner of the site, having flogged the rest off for housing, a furth
er education college and a big trading estate. I’m sure I felt Craig skip a beat as we pulled away. Even though he actually came into the world 50 miles down the M40 at Cowley, in bits that some Bulgarians would later ineffectually push together.
In any event, the Black Country was a literal shadow of its former self. No belching, noxious heavy-metal smuts to stain the walls or taint the air. These days – and certainly that day, under a gloomy late-afternoon sky – it’s more of the Beigey-Grey Country, the Taupe Country, the colour of the Bloxwich Diana’s washed-out nose.
I had a horrible-sounding motel lined up in Birmingham, but somehow forgot all about it. The outward-bound commuters were heading home and I just seemed to get caught up in the flow: lights, roundabout, dual carriageway, lights, roundabout. It probably didn’t help that having snapped during Big Country’s unbearably sincere cover of ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’, I’d been listening to BBC Radio West Midlands. Well, I say listening, but it was less active than that: more like being hooked up to some kind of sedative audio drip. The drive-time presenter spoke in an unplaceable monotone cobbled together from the world’s dreariest vowel sounds – one or two of them local, others from as far away as Australia. Everything he said seemed perfectly adapted to this way of speaking.
‘What I love about camping is you just never know who you might meet.’
‘Hello, Jackie, so what’s your problem with foxes?’
I felt my jaw slacken and begin to fill with drool. Drawled snatches of hypnotic inanity swam around Craig’s dark and fuggy interior; it was genuinely impossible to maintain concentration.
‘Now, I’ve got a leather sofa but I have to admit it’s about four years since I last moisturised it … Jeggings: a cross between “jeans” and “leggings”, would you believe? … And this is a great story, by the way … Well, not any more, according to a recent survey conducted by Farnston Drells of MHS Horse Disposal, who joins me now.’ It was as if a malevolent broadcast engineer had found some way of transmitting a parallel silent signal on the frequency – a bit like that traffic-report thing, but with the effect of covertly depressing higher brain function.