You can't watch the opening credits without being sucked in for the umpteenth time, best watched on a rainy afternoon with the drops pattering the windows and a mug of real tea. Whatever you're doing, you'll be transported back to that just pre-Beatle era, of sexual frustration and knitted ties, white Bri-nylon shirts, winklepickers, scooters and transport cafes and smoking on the top decks of buses and football papers on Saturday and squaddies and dodgems and always the hum of the lathes and the insistent throb of sexual desire in a cold, conservative climate. Sex is everywhere, in Bates's coal-dark charisma as he stalks the streets of Bolton, Preston and Southport in A Kind of Loving, in Finney's glossy, priapic quiff and bantam cock strut, in Tushingham's gamine, thrilled terror on the edge of adulthood, even in Courtenay's doleful, melancholic yearning for what Morrissey would call 'the brighter sides to life'.
I've met Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham, though I doubt if they'd remember. To them it was just another interview, I suppose. To me it was as if two of the gods had stepped down from Olympus for a chinwag and a cuppa. Tushingham is still as quirkily, owlishly beautiful as she was in A Taste of Honey and The Knack, and as gracious in real life as she was gawky on screen. Courtenay was frail and tired after a theatre performance but the perfect gentleman and still suffused with that enigmatic sadness. I told him that his book of letters home to his mum in Hull from RADA, Dear Tom, was a wonderful book and he seemed genuinely touched. I meant it; it's a lovely, heart-breaking hymn to maternal love and the spirit of the northern working class. Read it. But not in public, for the tears will flow like Boddingtons, believe me.
Finney has blossomed into a florid mandarin of the British stage but in 1960 he was as potent and sexy as Elvis; Elvis on the Irwell, if you like, a juggernaut of youth and beauty and virility. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, you cannot take your eyes off him for a second, even if you wanted to. You can see why Shirley Anne Field falls for him, even over stale cheese and pickles in that dismal backstreet pub. He was the son of an illegal street bookie from Salford, a situation ironically illustrated in the film itself. It was made in 1960 just before licensed betting shops reopened after a century of censure and in it Arthur Seaton, played by Finney, risks arrest by placing bets with bookies just like his dad. In my family, the story was often told of how my grandad got nicked in a backstreet game of pitch and toss, one of the few gambling activities the proletariat could indulge in, though strictly illegal. Meanwhile, at Crockfords and Whites, the well-to-do gambled fortunes on backgammon and roulette. We plebs had no common sense, though, so it was best for our social superiors to tell us what to do with our money.
I should mention Laurence Harvey, smooth, suave and rumoured to be gay star of the fabulous Room at the Top, if only for the wonderful episode that occurred on the set of The Alamo where he starred alongside John Wayne. Wayne disliked Harvey and made slighting references to his limey effeminacy whenever possible. Finally one day, noticing Harvey mince by, Wayne snarled, 'Can't you even walk like a man?' To which Harvey replied, 'Are you talking to me, Marion?' Wayne's real name, I should add, was Marion Morrison. Now that is true grit.
The north continues to be seen as both gritty and grotty though the golden age of its cinema probably ended round about 1963 and Lindsay Anderson's superb version of David Storey's This Sporting Life. By 1964, a new mood was abroad, of liberated escapist fun, captured in Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and the early James Bond movies. The sixties were beginning to swing and writers like John Braine and Stan Barstow and characters like Arthur Seaton with their brilliantine and beer belonged to another, slightly shabbier world.
There's been nothing quite as good since, of course, nothing quite so poetic and powerful, but films about us still come around with regularity. These days, northern representations will be splattered with vomit, blood and other unmentionables and ring with expletives. But still we need the sweetener of either humour and music (in the case of The Full Monty or Brassed Off or Billy Elliot) or sex (The Full Monty or Rita, Sue and Bob Too).
The real auteurs of the north have, for several decades now, been working on the small screen. Bleasdale's Boys From the Blackstuff as pungent and harsh a view of mass unemployment as Carla Lane's was glib and saccharine in Bread. Lane cops some deserved flak for her lazy stereotypes and barmy opinions but to be perfectly honest, northern comedies have always been a mixed bag. For every Jack Rosenthal or Clement and La Frenais, writers who knew and loved the north but could make fun of its foibles, who could get a laugh from just an expertly placed reference to Fenwick or Crumpsall, there's a Last of the Summer Wine, a drearily whimsical half hour in the company of some depressingly immortal Yorkshire geriatrics. But sporadically the region's true spirit still breaks through the vapid everytown that permeates TV culture. Phoenix Nights was as northern as a club singer with a lilac frilly shirt and his arm in plaster – something I once saw at St Cuthbert's Catholic Club – and The Royle Family was staggeringly good until it became engulfed and obscured by its own fart jokes. Paul Abbott, with shows like Shameless, has become the laureate of northern white trash.
By being sharp, savvy and Armani-suited, Anthony H. Wilson has appeared on TV regularly to confound our image of a northerner. Back in PL, Wilson's visionary schemes are still some way off. But the north has always had its posh bits, the bits that contradict our image of phlegm hawking, tripe eating and shin kicking. As Graham Turner once wrote, 'There are, and have always been, other norths, where these archetypes seem as alien as they would be in Virginia Water or Epsom.' These places like to think of themselves as 'a cut above', even if other northern cities and towns may view them as 'fur coat and no knickers'. Nowhere is more furry and these days quite possibly knickerless than Cheshire.
There's a lot of new money in Cheshire. But Cheshire's desirable status as the north's Hamptons or Beverly Hills is in no way nouveau. It's always been that little bit different, rolling greenery and gentle agriculture rather than smoking chimneys and booming foundries. Money made in Manchester has always bought fancy houses in Cheshire. Why? Because to the west was Salford, pits and chemicals, to the north, the darkened Pennine towns; only south was there a chink in the plate armour of the industrial north, the leafiness these industrial captains craved for their homesteads.
Cheshire has always had its gentry, its Cholmondeleys and Tollemaches. These were augmented at the end of the nineteenth century by the new class of successful businessmen and merchants. Little Budworth has the only polo club north of Bristol. There were two big Cheshire foxhunts before that particular little bit of fun was stopped. Even in the sixties, Cheshire's house prices rivalled the West End of London. Cheshire votes Tory to a large extent and defiantly so, even when the candidate offered is Neil Hamilton.
The real money is concentrated in the Golden Triangle; nothing to do with heroin or triads but an area bounded by Wilmslow, Alderley Edge and Hale and including Mottram St Andrew, where Rio Ferdinand holed up in splendid isolation after his £30-million transfer to Man Utd, and Prestbury, long regarded as one of England's richest and loveliest villages.
You can understand why someone would fall in love with Prestbury. It's exquisite. The gardens of the church slope gently down to the River Bollin, which murmurs through the village. A pretty main street overhung with yews boasts a chic selection of bistros, pubs, delicatessens and restaurants. The newsagent will tell you that, even with competition from required trophy-wife reading matter like Grazia, Hello! and Heat, Prestbury's most popular magazine is still Cheshire Life, a publication which oozes contentment with life's lot.
'Cheshire is a county of wealth, culture and elegance,' its website murmurs seductively, talking of the 'crescent of prosperity that runs from Wilmslow through to Alderley Edge, Altrincham, Hale, Prestbury, Bowdon, Knutsford and on to the stockbroker belt of the Wirral'. In the way that a skilled hotel doorman knows the good tippers and the captains of industry from their Vuitton and Longchamps luggage, Cheshire Life
recognises that 'our affluent readers are keen to know about the best of fashion, interiors, motoring, antiques, education, hotels and restaurants.'
Prestbury isn't everyone's cup of green tea, though. My friend Rhys Hughes, a Radio 1 executive, moved there in 1997. He hated it.
'It was awful. I loathed every minute of the year I was there. It's the snobby north, and the snobby north is far, far worse than the snobby south. There are some "nouveaus" but basically Prestbury is old money and they're suspicious and insular. At the time, I had a shaved head and had just bought my first BMW so me and the missus would go down the pub and it would fall silent as we walked in. It was pretty obvious that the Golf and G&T set thought I was a Manchester drug dealer made good who'd moved out. A couple of footballers lived there too for a while, Cantona and Roy Keane. I think they hated it too. It didn't help that my next-door neighbour was a special constable. They're worse than the actual police, aren't they? Cos they're doing it in their spare time. Unbelievable.'
The odd footballer, Radio 1 producer and possibly drug dealer notwithstanding, Prestbury is old Cheshire money; sober, discreet, frosty. The nearby village of Great Budworth was the model for Stackton Tressel in the Hinge and Bracket TV series and you can see why. It's the sort of place where you feel Sicilian-strength vendettas smoulder at the bring and buy sale and expensive curtains twitch at twilight. But there's another Cheshire too, where the new money sloshes through the wine bars and tanning salons and jewellers and where bling is more important than breeding. This is the Cheshire of footballers' wives and its capital is Wilmslow.
Porsche, Porsche, Daimler, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, BMW, Aston Martin, Jag, Daimler, Alfa Romeo, Porsche. A rainy spring Saturday afternoon in Wilmslow and to amuse myself as I stroll along, I'm playing a little game of Top Trumps (Flash Car version) on the high street. In Chelsea you'd find the odd Ford Focus. In Surrey, they wear their clapped-out Merc or Range Rover like a badge of pride. But Wilmslow believes if you've got it, you should flaunt it, baby.
Strolling through Wilmslow on a Saturday afternoon, though, you won't instantly and automatically notice the sheer, heady wealth that surrounds you. The streets aren't paved with gold, there are no sedan chairs in Sainsbury's and the townsfolk don't sport hats made of rubies or anything like that. There's a Boots and a WHSmiths and even a Greggs if you look hard enough. But slowly, as it did in the town of Stepford, the impression grows on you that all is not quite normal. You begin to notice the quietly astonishing array of top-of-the-range cars. You spot that one street has nine estate agents. On the main high street, you realise that while most towns don't have one designer sunglasses boutique, Wilmslow has about six. One of them, stupidly massive, is clearly some kind of converted cinema. Just how afraid of the sun, or publicity, or hungover, can one town be?
Popping into the Oxfam shop, you now know that normal shopping rules no longer apply. Most Oxfam shops are not good hunting grounds for the brand conscious, unless the brands you crave are Mills & Boon, K-tel and St Michael. Not so the charity shops of Wilmslow. On every rack, there's DKNY, Versace and Armani. I saw the most expensive item I've ever spotted in a charity shop, a pair of rather nice Hugo Boss loafers priced £150. They didn't have them in my size, though, and anyway I was feeling a little nervous. This was the first charity shop where I've felt frightened of breaking something.
Back outside, I counted two more designer sunglasses boutiques, a shedload of solicitors – I guess divorce doesn't come cheap in these parts – and a jewellers where the very first item I looked at, a quite boring ring, cost £125,000. On the other hand, I didn't see a butcher's or a fish shop or a hardware store. I suppose if you eat Malaysian red snapper bisque at the brasserie every night or move house when the battery in the doorbell goes, you don't need such dull stuff as a butcher's. Not when the new Diors and Police have arrived at Designer Sunglasses Universe. I don't know how acutely Wilmslow feels this gap in its retail soul but one local opined to me that 'it's easier to buy a supercar than a sausage in the centre of Wilmslow'.
A little weakened, I lunched at Pizza Express. Having railed against the increasing homogeneity of modern northern street life, I'm now going to renege on all my principles by admitting that I don't mind if it means there's a twelve-inch American Hot in every town with my name on it. Besides, Wilmslow's Pizza Express is nothing like any other I've visited just by virtue of its clientele. At every table except mine there seemed to be several members of just-going-out-of-fashion boy bands, some slightly hard-faced beauticians and sundry variations on a theme by Victoria Beckham. Everyone wore shades, suddenly explaining the need for the superabundance of such stores. No one looked like they were planning to do any grouting later in the day, which perhaps also accounts for the dearth of hardware stores.
This was the real essence of chav, I realised. People with vaults of money and absolutely no taste. People with style can wear a bit of old coal-sack and make it look fabulous. The people in Wilmslow's Pizza Express were designer shod from head to foot but they looked like they'd got it off the market. Everyone was the colour of builder's tea, wore baseball caps and low-slung jeans, had white belts and tattoos and gold things dangling about their person. There was so much fibre-hold hair putty and spray tan and Chanel No 5 in the atmosphere that I kept glancing nervously at the flames licking at the door of the open oven. They were all probably really nice people. But the feeling that I'd walked into the gossip pages of Chat magazine was inescapable. Nearly put me off my doughballs. As I settled the bill, I looked out the window and saw a man in a high-visibility tabard. Bet it was Armani, though.
Leave Wilmslow southbound on the A34 and you are soon in the realms of mystery, with part of that mystery being how one small village can have so many gourmet delis and Ferraris. This is Alderley Edge, a place of fabled wealth and legendary warriors.
Recently those warriors have tended to wear the red of Manchester United, fifteen miles north of here, which is next to nothing in a Ferrari. David and Victoria Beckham lived here and at the time of writing, it is home to the flashy and mildly irritating Portuguese wunderkind Cristiano Ronaldo. This village, it's said, boasts more millionaires and drinks more champagne than any equivalent area in Britain. Once the money came from cotton, now it comes from celebrity endorsements, shirt sponsorship, shaving foam adverts and the odd spot of football.
Even before the coming of these mythic creatures, legends have clung to the Edge. I grew up with them as part of northern folklore as far afield as Wigan, a good half an hour's drive away. Long ago, a farmer from Mobberley on his way to Macclesfield Market was confronted by an old man in flowing robes who wanted to buy his horse. The farmer refused but the old man told him that he would make no sale at Macclesfield and he would meet him again on the way back. The farmer didn't sell the horse in Macclesfield and was met again by the old man on the Edge. This time, he took the terrified farmer to a great iron gate in the hill and there in a cave slept an army of men with their milk-white steeds. The old man explained that one day when England was in great danger, these knights would wake and ride out onto the Cheshire plain to save the country. But one of the sleeping army did not have a horse and that was why the old man wanted the farmer's. The old man is said to be Merlin and the sleeping army King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. When the local paper first printed this bit of folklore in 1806, two nearby pubs instantly changed their names from the Coach and Horses and the Miners Arms to the Iron Gates and the Wizard respectively. Shrewd business folk round here evidently.
These and other ghostly local legends have been used as the basis for classic fantasy tales by the author Alan Garner, a resident of Alderley Edge where his family have lived for 300 years. All Garner's books have been written in the same room. The legend of the 'King Under the Hill' begins his book The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor is set on Alderley Edge and The Owl Service takes place in nearby North Wales. As a kid I remember being terrified by the BBC Sunday afternoon adaptation. I still find F
reddie Jones alarming to this day.
The very name Alderley has a mystical significance here; the Alder tree has long been worshipped as sacred in northern England. For a long time witches' covens from Manchester met on the Edge and marched about with flaming brands until adverse publicity drove them away. Every Halloween hundreds of masked and caped celebrants, filled with the spirit of WKD rather than Wicca, climb the Edge and perform their very own pagan rites, with the local police in close attendance.
In the right light on the right day, the Edge is an eerie place, a lowering, wooded hulk set against the grey Cheshire sky and the flat countryside around. On this day in spring, though, you get a fabulous view from Storm Point of the distant Pennines, and from the escarpment's northern rim the Cheshire plain comes to a sudden halt as Manchester rises in steel and glass, the Beetham Tower glittering in the crystal haze. Jodrell Bank tilts a lidless eye to the sky and way out west beyond Knutsford and Northwich and the curves of the M6 and M56 lies another honeypot, Chester.
Pies and Prejudice Page 24