Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  As I regularly attend football matches in England, it might be worth pointing out a couple of the differences between the two national sports which could explain this unique atmosphere, both impassioned and benign.

  The Irish national games are amateur, the players represent their counties of birth and are followed fervently by their townspeople, neighbours and families. The sacrifices required to represent your people like this shouldn’t be underestimated. The absence of violence in the stands is in stark contrast with the blood and thunder on the pitch. Hurling is a heroic and dangerous game. In contrast to soccer, few concessions are made to injuries of the players. In the likely event of a player getting injured (there’s a lot of wood flying around here), they lie on the field while the game continues and they recover; or they are brought off the field as a ‘blood’ substitute, patched up and sent back out. There is no ‘simulation’, as it is euphemistically called in soccer; there isn’t any advantage to rolling around the turf pretending to be injured. If you’re genuinely hurt, get off the field and let somebody take your place.

  And, for a stadium filled with noise, there is another alien detail to soccer fans. (It’s not just America that calls it soccer, by the way: saying ‘football’ in Ireland usually refers to Gaelic football, hurling’s sister sport. It’s worth noting that ‘Association Football’ has had worse names in Ireland. The Christian Brothers who ran my school used to call it ‘Peil an Banríon’, the Queen’s football, or, even more damning, ‘Peil Luther’, Martin Luther’s football. There was no doubt but that you were going to hell for playing it.) There is no chanting or organized singing at GAA matches; there is none of the to-and-fro wit of England’s vibrant terrace culture. This is mainly because of the difference in scoring systems. Soccer can be a thrilling sport but also dull and uneventful a lot of the time. It’s not surprising that, for long periods of a match, the crowd has to make its own entertainment. Hurling will usually feature about twenty to thirty scores in a match, and there is no such thing as ‘possession hurling’. Action is occurring almost constantly, so the predominant crowd noise is a screaming din, peaking as the ball heads goalwards.

  The only soccer-style song I can recall at a hurling match is a tribute to Offaly’s Dooley brothers Billy, Johnny and Joe, who were the backbone of the country’s All-Ireland winning forward line in the nineties. It is sung to the tune of ‘That’s Amore’.

  When the ball’s in the sky,

  In Croke Park in July,

  That’s Joe Dooley.

  When the ball’s in the net,

  And Kilkenny are beat [pronounced ‘bet’],

  Johnny Dooley.

  And so on. Rather than being sung during the match, though, this is more often heard hours later in a pub, alongside the retinue of county songs which exist independently of sport: ‘The Rose of Tralee’, ‘Molly Malone’, ‘The Fields of Athenry’ – every county has a song. Ireland’s thirty-two counties have a very sharply defined identity, far more than the counties of England. Possibly due to more than a century of organized sporting competition along county lines, there is a real sense of identity to Cork, or Dublin, or Kerry, or Galway. There are ancient bragging rights at stake in these matches; fresh chapters in the endless tussle for superiority.

  Other than at the extremes from London (Yorkshire and Lancashire, Devon and Cornwall), English counties have little enough distinct identity. Wiltshire, Hertfordshire and Rutland anyone? It’s Dara’s First Law of Identity again. If they’ve competed in sports, they’ll have some strong sense of who they are.

  Irish counties compete for perceived personality traits as clearly defined as those we ascribe to our neighbouring nations. There’s the spendthrift county, the backward county, the imperious county. The famous Irish actor and comic Niall Toíbín used to do a routine in which he would perform all thirty-two different county accents.

  It’s this sense of place that underpins the Irish sporting experience. Unlike the superbrands of the Premier League, Irish county teams haven’t detached themselves from their communities. You get your county by birth, and you’re stuck with it. There’s no reason to get violent; it’s not like it’s going to change things. It’s part of who you are. ‘Sure what do you know,’ someone will say, ‘you’re only a Kerryman.’ Or a Corkman. Or a Dub.

  Why do I mention all this?

  Well, if Monty Python had set Life of Brian in Dublin and written a routine called ‘What have the English ever done for us?’, they would have a short enough list. Tithing, famine, poverty and immigration. It’s not even as if the roads are that great. Or the trains.

  But, if you really had to make a list – were forced to – at the head of it would be the counties.

  That’s the punchline to this eulogy for the Irish county. It was a gift from the English. Henry II, to be precise, so you could argue that it’s a gift from the Normans, but who are we kidding? You came over eight hundred years ago, set about organizing the place and divided it up. From 1192 on, there followed four hundred years of map-drawing; piece by piece, the thirty-two counties took form, all the way up to the creation of the final county, Wicklow, in 1607. (That’s the county I’m from, by the way.)

  England devised the counties and then, in our style, we made them our own. We filled them with histories, song and stories and spurious personality distinction. We took the smallest of local differences and, in the manner of a country whose roots lie in hundreds of local kingdoms, we made myth and legend of them. The amplification of such local rivalries and identities may seem a bit ridiculous if you look at it rationally. I mean, are the people of Leitrim that different from the people of Mayo, or Roscommon, or Longford? Of course not. But try telling them that. And when you meet an Irish émigré, see how quickly they tell you what county they’re from.

  The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote about this Irish tendency to craft epics from local stories:

  Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.

  He said: I made the Iliad from such

  A local row. Gods make their own importance.

  That reverence for the local may be the greatest difference between our two countries, and its roots go all the way back to how the English carved up the country. There’s an irony there, somewhere.

  Then again, what do I know? I’m only a Wicklow man.

  Chapter 15:

  Sullen Teenagers and Samurai Swords

  The English tour resumed in October with a collection of bonus dates and, to mark the approach of winter, we hit the beach resorts. In a bizarre confluence of shows which Damon christened our ‘Everyday is Like Sunday’ tour, we played one faded seaside town after the other. I grew up in a faded seaside town, a town called Bray in Co. Wicklow and, while there may be many of you who would envy me the easy access to a set of dodgems and a chance to walk along the prom now and again, being a shy teenager was dull enough without having to spend it in a museum exhibit marked ‘Decline’.

  My home town was built for daytrippers from Dublin, though, and settled into its retirement as a suburb quite easily. It didn’t have the infrastructural investment in summer fun that places like Skegness and Rhyl still have on show; these places look like industry towns pining for raw materials long after the raw materials decided to go to Spain on package holidays instead.

  The proms are still twinkling away, though. British holiday resorts are unflagging in their devotion to using massed light bulbs as a lure. Even in October, on a cold night on an unfashionable coast, the light bulbs are on, the machines are beeping and flashing and the tuppence pieces are all teetering on the edge waiting for that one addition that sends them hurtling.

  There is an aching poetry to an old seaside town. The pleasures on offer may seem simple and unsophisticated, but it’s too easy to look at a shopworn promenade and only see decay. There’s a far more poignant question asked by the bright lights still shining. There’s a confused lament to the holidaymakers who’ve abandoned these towns for faraway shores, that it should
n’t just be nostalgia that keeps these places going.

  If all this was fun once, how can it not be fun any more?

  Skegness is a small town, probably Viking originally (hence the beautiful name), based around a small harbour, and it remained a small fishing village, until the railway arrived in 1875. In that revolution for leisure-time England, Skegness suddenly became a popular tourist destination for workers from the Midlands.

  Skegness achieved legendary status as home to the first Butlins holiday camp, opened by impresario Billy Butlin just north of the town in 1936. The idea was to provide cheap holidays for families, with no-frills chalets, three meals a day, and activities and entertainments included in the price. There was an emphasis on fun activities (knobbly-knee contests, egg and spoon races) and group participation. Overseen by the camp’s famous redcoats, this was the kind of organized, regimented fun that seems very typically English to Irish eyes. We like a bit of fun, don’t get me wrong, but if that man comes to us with the megaphone one more time, they’ll have to remove it from his arse if they want to use it again. It’s like the way that English pubs are burdened with purpose, like quizzes or open-mic nights, or – heaven forbid – food. What’s with all this multitasking? Irish pubs just serve drink and people sit around and talk.

  Are knobbly knees a good thing? Or a bad thing? How did you win that contest exactly? Watching Hi-de-Hi, I could never work that out. The ‘bonny baby’ was a rationing thing, wasn’t it? If you had a fat baby in Britain in the late forties, you were to be applauded. Present the same fat baby now, of course, and they’d put you on The Jeremy Kyle Show.

  Not that we didn’t have a Butlins in Ireland. There was a holiday camp in Mosney, north of Dublin. Currently, it’s a refugee camp for asylum seekers. Organized fun just isn’t our thing.

  At one point, Butlins Skegness housed ten thousand campers and was one of nine Butlins camps across the UK. Now they’re down to three, and that there are even three left would come as a surprise to many. The remaining camps – Skegness, Bognor and Minehead – have been upgraded, probably to the point of being unrecognizable. Skegness now has a spa with hydrotherapy and beauty treatments, but it also has weekends focusing on the young, drunk, can’tafford-Ibiza market. And if you’re wondering what could be more fun than going to Butlins, how about going to Butlins with thousands of evangelical Christians? Butlins Skegness and Butlins Minehead co-host the Spring Harvest Christian festival over Easter, with fifty thousand in attendance.

  You could also go to the extremely popular eighties retro weekends, featuring artistes such as Bad Manners, Doctor and the Medics and Sonia. Are we surprised that that one is so popular? It’s like a nostalgia overdose. In one weekend, you can re-live both the eighties and the fifties.

  Before the show, the lights won me over. I wandered into one of Skeggy’s amusement arcades and was amazed to find signs up advertising a sale on video games. ‘Three games for 50p’ is an impressive return against inflation, even for an industry rendered obsolete by home consoles. I eagerly dropped my 50p into a Star Wars machine so that I could blow up the Death Star once more, for old times’ sake. Sadly for the Rebel Alliance, there was no ping from the machine and no credits appeared on the screen. And, to add insult to injury, no 50p came rolling out of the slot. I banged the machine a couple of times in an increasingly vigorous way, until people began to notice. I hadn’t caused a scene or anything, but suddenly realized that I probably looked a little intense.

  I find that, in those circumstances, it can be very difficult to explain that it’s the game you want, not the 50p. I stepped away from the machine and scurried back to the theatre.

  Skegness Embassy Theatre

  1 warehouseman who transports steel in Sheffield

  1 semi-retired plasterboard worker

  1 police officer

  1 Scouser who came to Skegness to run a guesthouse

  The Embassy Theatre sits on the prom, next to a darkened funfair, and across from a run of shimmering arcades. The crowd was filled with people with solid jobs involving plaster and steel and scrambled eggs.

  We disqualified the police officer from the crime-stories section. Somebody at the back was telling us about a burglary, which I was energetically re-creating onstage when a man in the front row shouted, ‘Your pants have split!’ A quick rummage confirmed this and, while most of the room were laughing, the front rows had a different expression. It wasn’t an eruption of joy at this unplanned moment; it was the relieved look of a siege being lifted.

  ‘They’ve been split for a while, haven’t they?’ I said.

  Lots of nods in the front seats.

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Actually,’ ventured a polite man, right in the middle, ‘it was particularly bad when you mimed going to the toilet.’

  And this wasn’t any old mime of going to the toilet. For reasons far too complex to explain here, it was actually the mime of an adult crouching down to use the toilet of a pre-school child. It was a long, long descent; and then I held the position to – unfortunate phrase – milk the laugh. And I had thought that it went particularly well that night.

  I left Skegness with neither my dignity, nor my 50p.

  Rhyl Pavilion Theatre

  1 retired police officer

  1 lorry driver

  1 man fired from a courier company for opening the parcels:

  ‘It was Christmas Day every day for you, wasn’t it?’

  Carol Vorderman grew up in Rhyl.

  This wasn’t important to my gig there, or indeed to the lives of the people of Rhyl, but I thought that telling you that little fact might save me having to describe the town. I didn’t see the town. It was already dark, windy and rainy when we arrived on our now quite wintry tour, and any of the whimsical poignancy and optimism of the other deserted seaside resorts wasn’t much in evidence here. Even the Sun Centre, in the same complex as the Pavilion Theatre, was closed, which I was particularly unhappy about.

  In an attempt to overcome the basic problem all seaside towns have in the UK, Rhyl has built an indoor alternative. The Sun Centre has a monorail, a beach and a surfing pool, all in a controlled environment under a massive roof. It’s been around for a while now, long enough, in fact, that I threw up there as a twelve-year-old. I was returning to Dublin from a trip to Old Trafford with my under-twelve football team (a dull nil–nil against West Ham, if you must know) and, to kill time before the 3 a.m. ferry from Holyhead, they took us to the Sun Centre. The exact order of events was: run, scream, splash; slide, scream, splash; chips, gobble, gobble; run, scream, splash; feel queasy, puke, pause; run, scream, splash.

  Having thrown up on Rhyl once already, I’m going to avoid the temptation to do it again. It deserves better than that. Despite the Sun Centre, Rhyl has been hit worse than the other towns here by the change in leisure habits.

  The pier and the original five-domed Pavilion Theatre were demolished in the seventies. Ocean Beach funfair closed in 2007. There was a failed campaign to save the rollercoaster and flume ride from the original funfair to send them to Margate, which is similarly trying to regenerate itself to former glories, but the funding fell through.

  Still, Rhyl has got a fighting spirit. It’s the place where John Prescott punched a protestor, Craig Evans, who threw an egg at him. In many countries, this would probably be a very shocking event, so it says a lot about this country that the lack of any real clamour for resignations amidst the usual point scoring shows that it was broadly regarded as a fair exchange. Evans chose the terms of engagement; Prescott responded in kind, and the precedent was set. Your political life is prone to occasional outbursts of violence, as I’ve mentioned before, but we learned that, here, politicians will punch back.

  It wouldn’t be Rhyl’s first fight against invaders.

  The town sits at the northern end of Offa’s Dyke, the massive eighth-century earthwork roughly following the line of the current Wales–England border. It was believed to have been constructe
d by Offa, the head of the Anglian kingdom of Mercia, to protect against invasion from the Welsh kingdom of Powys. This was back in the day, when an eight-foot ditch was enough to confound invaders. Interestingly, the Anglo-Saxons probably should have been watching their backs rather than digging ditches, and ended up being overrun by Vikings and Normans instead. In fact, the dyke may have had the opposite effect to the one intended. Genetic research published by UCL in 2002 indicates that the Welsh gene pool is quite distinct from the English, and possibly a closer match to the original Britons; the English are closer to the Dutch region of Friesland.

  Even the week I was there, Rhyl had reason to be wary of visitors from across the border. The front-page story in the Denbighshire Visitor (an insecure name for a local paper if ever I heard one: move into the area and commit, for Christ’s sake) the day I was there was ‘Outrage over TV Ghost Show at Hospital’. The local town of Denbigh was the site of a former mental-health hospital which was being visited by Most Haunted Live, Living TV’s ludicrous fake paranormal investigation show. If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s all night-vision cameras and presenters looking scared and noticing how cold it seems to have suddenly become. It’s a ridiculous piece of tosh, of course, but it brought the world Derek Acorah and fuelled the boom in stage psychics clogging up theatres all over the country, feeding off the bereaved with made-up messages from their dead, as I’ve bemoaned earlier. Living TV’s crime in this instance was to call the series ‘Village of the Damned’, which was news to the people of Denbigh, who had been going about their business all this time, unaware of being damned. It was particularly galling to the local councillors, who had planned to convert the building into apartments.