Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  ‘Who’s going to live here after this?’ asked Cllr Graham Maudsley.

  It might be time to start digging that ditch again.

  I kept my demands to a minimum when I got to Rhyl. I kept dropping hints about opening up the Sun Centre just for me, but nobody was biting so I let it go. It might have been a bit tragic, just me in a waterpark, all on my own. But for old times’ sake: run, scream, splash; slide, scream, get stuck; stay stuck, start to worry; shout ‘Hello?’, ‘Anyone there?’, ‘Hello?’…

  Bridlington Spa Centre

  1 dentist

  1 fork-lift-truck driver

  1 student of musical technology

  1 trainee teacher

  Mike the design engineer

  Further up the coast, then, to Bridlington. Charlotte Brontë had her first view of the sea here and burst into tears at the sight. I wasn’t quite as emotional, but it is a beautiful bit of coast, and there is little doubting the power of the ocean here, since this area has the highest erosion rates in Europe.

  It was a tiny town before the discovery of a mineral spa source prompted the building of a first hotel in 1805, and the town expanded as part of the leisure boom of Victorian Britain. The Spa Centre, opened in 1896, was a little bit of everything. For sixpence, visitors could stay all day, walk in the gardens, bathe in the mineral baths, have a meal, listen to the band at the bandstand, attend a music-hall concert, the theatre, or go dancing.

  As the industrial north declined, and cheap package holidays became available to destinations with beaches that didn’t front the North Sea, Bridlington’s holiday boom started to decline, but Bridlington has really tried to modernize.

  They had a Bridlington Eye here, yet another of these Ferris wheels that keep appearing all over the country. It may just be the same Ferris wheel, of course, but I’ve seen it at least nine times now. A Ferris wheel in Bridlington might have been a bitter-sweet experience, of course, given the amount of erosion. People probably took one aerial look at the coastline and then ran home to fill sandbags.

  The Spa Centre was gleaming after a multi-million-pound restoration, and attracting all the big acts.

  ‘I see you’ve had Ken Dodd here, then,’ I said to one of the ushers when Damon and I arrived.

  ‘Oh yes. Ken’s an old favourite here.’

  ‘How long was he onstage then?’

  ‘Well, we did have one complaint from a customer who said that the new seats were going to give her deep vein thrombosis. I said, it’s not the seats that are giving you DVT, it’s Ken.’

  A quick wander round the town gave me the measure of the place. This being months out of season, most of the seaside shops were closed, denying me the chance to try Bridlington Fudge, which I’m sure was also the best in the country.

  In a glorious manifestation of retail optimism, however, the ice-cream parlour was open. There were tubs and tubs of gelato, overseen by the world’s narkiest-looking sixteen-year-old girl, sullenly posted at the deepest part of the counter, an ice-cream scoop in her hand and her face in a grim rictus that said, ‘If you walk in here and make me work, I will scoop out your fucking eyeball.’

  Sixteen is a terrible age to be living in a deserted seaside town. It’s the claustrophobia that gets you. All through my teenage years, I couldn’t escape the feeling that life was happening just over the horizon, somewhere else. The whole place just screams, ‘Leave. Leave. This place is old and dead and you are new and alive. Leave!’ I brought this up during the show, of course:

  ‘Any teenagers in?’

  Big cheer.

  ‘Bet you can’t wait to leave.’

  Bigger cheer.

  This says a lot more about teenagers than it does about Bridlington. It’s a bright and cheery town with a gorgeous harbour and top-notch fish and chips, and one of the finest audiences I met all year. There wasn’t a single person I spoke to who didn’t add something to the collective store of knowledge.

  From the dentist, we learned that the pink liquid you spit out after a procedure doesn’t start out pink.

  ‘It goes in blue,’ he explained. ‘It comes out pink.’

  Do you want to know how high a fork-lift can lift? Fourteen foot:

  ‘Have you ever taken it to fourteen feet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve got to push that envelope, man.’

  ‘“I’m taking it to fourteen feet.”

  ‘“Don’t be a fool, John, you’ll tear us apart.” ‘“I don’t care! I’ve got to see fourteen feet. It’s thirteen and a half now. We’re nearly there!”

  ‘“For pity’s sake, John, you’re going to get us all killed!”

  ‘“Almost there… almost there… My God… It’s full of stars.”’

  No, we’ll never know what happens beyond the fourteen-foot event horizon, because our fork-lift-truck driver in Bridlington hadn’t got near it:

  ‘How high have you gone?’

  ‘Twelve foot.’

  ‘Why did you stop there?’

  ‘That’s how high the shelves are.’

  Fair point.

  The jewel in all this nonsense was, surprisingly, Mike the design engineer. It was surprising, because he held out for six or seven questions, in which we learned that he worked in aeronautics for Rolls-Royce in Derby, to a fair level of indifference from the crowd. Then I remember the one strange fact I had heard about Rolls-Royce in Derby, a fact I learned on an episode of QI. And since it’s safe to presume that Stephen Fry could say anything on that show and we’d just accept it as gospel, here was a chance to test his integrity:

  ‘Do you have a cannon that fires chickens into an aircraft engine to simulate birdstrike?’

  ‘Yes. Yes we do.’

  Stephen Fry speaks the truth.

  It’s not difficult to get an audience’s attention with news like this. Or my attention. Suddenly all the questions in the world are jumping up and down in my head and my brain is trying to get them to form an orderly queue:

  ‘Where do you get the chickens?’

  ‘Sainsbury’s.’

  Supplementary question! ‘Why Sainsbury’s? Why not Morrisons, or Lidl, or Iceland? Who needs free-range at a time like this?’

  ‘This is Rolls-Royce, y’know…’

  ‘Do you take the elastic off their legs? You know, to give them a chance? No, wait, answer this one. If a chicken makes it through, does it gain its freedom?’

  ‘No chickens make it through.’

  ‘What’s behind the engine?’

  ‘A housing estate.’

  ‘What’s the machine called, that fires chickens into an engine?’

  ‘I don’t think it has a name…’

  ‘It must have a name! What’s written on the sign on the door?’

  ‘Keep out.’

  Mike was a joy. He even told me the greatest story of industrial espionage. A competitor to Rolls-Royce in the jet-engine trade heard about their technique of testing birdstrike and decided to buy their own cannon. Loading it with chickens, they started the engine up and, when it had reached full speed, blasted the birds through it. There was an almighty explosion as the humble birds tore through the engine, rendering the plane as flightless as they were.

  The boffins went back to their calculations, checked their notes and scratched their heads as to why the chickens had done so much damage. They assessed windspeed, turbulence, ballistics and tensile strength, and there was no answer; until the man operating the cannon suggested, ‘Next time, should I defrost the chickens?’

  Thanks to Mike the chicken man, the first half of my show ran fifteen minutes over, and that was with me dropping huge chunks, even as I was talking to him. When I came out for the second half I said, ‘Enough with the chickens, I have a show to do!’ and determined to get it back on track. Then we hit the crime stories:

  ‘Has anyone here ever interrupted a crime?’

  First up, the story of an eight-year-old throwing bottles at the school. He was asked to stop, didn’
t, so the police were called:

  ‘That sounds like a merry piece of high jinks! What happened then?’

  ‘They took him away and placed him in a secure containment unit.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s actually a very sad story.’

  ‘Well, thanks for bringing it up at a comedy show then. Let’s move on. Anyone else?’

  Next up: ‘My mate went mad with a samurai sword.’

  There were audible murmurs of discontent through the crowd. My antennae were working overtime. This might also be a bad story:

  ‘Did anyone get hurt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Let’s move on. Please God, let the next one be silly:

  ‘My wife was held hostage in a limo for four hours.’

  Bingo:

  ‘Where did this happen?’

  ‘In Flamborough.’

  (Flamborough: small town along the coast, known for its lighthouse. Not previously noted for limo violence.)

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, why was she held hostage?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I never found out.’

  We were discussing how one could possibly forget this one detail, and whether the limo driver’s motives were political and whether you can escape through the sun-roof of a limo; all of this, when a deeper voice calls out, ‘I’m his brother-in-law and this is the first I’ve heard of any of this.’

  And yes, maybe this man was lying to me and maybe he was making the story up as he went along and maybe I shouldn’t have taken him at face value, but here’s my argument for it being true. If you, on the spot, off the cuff, had to come up with the first line of a crime story, would it be anything as brilliant as ‘My wife was held hostage by a limousine driver’?

  And who doesn’t like the idea of a woman coming home four hours late to her husband and him asking why, and her going, ‘Well, you’re not going to believe this but I was held hostage by a limo driver,’ and when he asks why she just looks at him and says, ‘Darling, we’ll never know… Is that the time? Yaawwwnnn. Goodnight.’ And he just shakes his head, mutters, ‘My wife, eh?’ and kisses her goodnight.

  After the gig, I Googled ‘Bridlington’ and ‘Samurai swords’ and two stories came up, some months apart, involving the brandishing of Samurai swords, one in a drunken fight, the other in an armed raid on a dairy – neither of which would have contributed to the gaiety of the evening.

  Bridlington was a joy to visit and, frankly, once they sort out the erosion and all those ninjas, I think they’re going to be fine.

  Chapter 16:

  We Come in Peace

  Bradford St George’s Hall

  1 lawyer from Grassington come to see the show again

  1 café owner from Cork

  1 steelworker

  2 lady teachers

  1 doctor:

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘A surgeon.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Bottoms.’

  Bradford had a bizarre smell when we arrived, just the faint hint of burned coffee grounds in the air. We later found out that this was due to a local mill burning down in a spectacular fashion. It wasn’t the only business being mourned in the town. Only a week earlier, the Bradford & Bingley Building Society had been nationalized and its retail division sold off to Spanish bank Santander. It’s easy to forget from the arid discussion they receive in the financial pages, but British building societies have their basis firmly in the communities from which they take their name; at one stage in the 1800s, almost every town in the country had a building society named after it. For them to have risen to the status of international banking institutions doesn’t make them less of a local concern. When I perform in Halifax, the audience will always include a large number of HBOS employees; similarly the De Montford Hall in Leicester will always have a gang from Alliance & Leicester in. These institutions have a real standing in the heart of their communities.

  So, emotions were a little raw in Bradford about the fate of their bank. Luckily, I was able to give these good people some of their pride back. I blamed the people of Bingley. The headquarters are there, it’s probably their fault. After all, Bingley has little else to be shouting about; it is described, controversially, on its website as ‘the Throstle’s nest of Old England’. (Oh really, Bingley? Are you sure no Throstles nested anywhere else? Can you back that up?) It does have the Five Rise Lock, of course, an engineering marvel of the 1770s which, when it opened, was greeted in the Leeds Intelligencer with the report:

  This joyful and much wished for event was welcomed with the ringing of Bingley bells, a band of music, the firing of guns by the neighbouring Militia, the shouts of spectators, and all the marks of satisfaction that so important an acquisition merits.

  People that excited by a canal gate shouldn’t be left in charge of a massive international financial institution. I’m sorry, Bingley, sometimes live comedy is a numbers game and I had to ditch you for the good of the gig.

  Not that the gig was in any danger. This is Yorkshire, after all, where audiences love to talk (except, of course, in Sheffield – Oh Sheffield, why hast thou forsaken me?). The first crime story, for example:

  ‘My neighbour was being burgled, but when we went to investigate, the burglar had left his keys in his car, so we stole them.’

  ‘Nice move. What happened when the burglar came out?’

  ‘He took umbrage.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We wrestled.’

  [Brief sidebar question] ‘When the burglar walked out, what had he in his arms? What had he stolen?’

  ‘A Dyson vacuum cleaner.’

  [Back to the action] ‘So what happened when you wrestled?’

  ‘He ran off.’ [Big audience cheer.] ‘And then came back with a knife.’ [Audience cheer disappears, replaced by loud murmur.] ‘So we threw the keys at him and he got away.’

  Dyson do a great vacuum cleaner but I wouldn’t take a knife for one, not least my neighbour’s.

  Another person raised their hand:

  ‘Madam, do you have a story you’d like to tell?’

  ‘Yes! We heard a car thief stealing our car so my husband ran out to stop him.’

  ‘What time of the day was this?’

  ‘Midnight.’

  ‘So what was he wearing?’

  ‘Well, emmm, let’s just say he grabbed whatever he could on the way out. He ended up in a waxed jacket, underpants and hobnail boots.’

  ‘So he looked like an industrial flasher. A flasher who pays attention to safety in the work place… Our car is being stolen! Quick! To the dressing-up box! You’re allowed four items! A Stetson, a posing pouch, one stiletto and a four-foot-long clown’s shoe. Perfect! That’s funny.’

  The woman interrupted me:

  ‘That’s not the end of the story!’

  By this time I had noticed her husband, who was beginning to squirm in the chair beside her. In the way one would when one’s tale of heroism was about to turn:

  ‘So, what’s the end of the story?’

  ‘He chased the two thieves out of our cul-de-sac, and on to the main road and…’ She started giggling. ‘He got arrested for indecent exposure.’

  She just about got that out before bursting into laughter. As the audience joined her, she turned to her partner and managed to mouth, ‘Sorry.’

  Credit where it’s due, he stood up when asked and took the applause. He may be on a register, but he’s got a sense of humour about it.

  Bradford gets enough grief. It was once famous as the ‘wool capital of the world’ and, in the nineteenth century, when wool was a high-tech industry, this was like calling it Silicon Valley. Since then, it has suffered the typical problems of post-industrial Britain. Most of the old wool-trade buildings were knocked down in the fifties and sixties and replaced with office buildings and pedestrian subways.

  Bradford still has plenty of open spaces and old buildings m
ade of beautiful stone. It has the nicest Waterstones in the country, in a converted church, filled with air and light. (I didn’t check, but I am really hoping that the science section is right where the altar used to be.) The theatre I was in for tonight’s gig, St George’s Hall, is also one of the more interesting buildings in the town. It was opened by Queen Victoria in 1853. In 1854, Charles Dickens gave a debut reading for Bleak House to 3,700 people here. He described it as ‘a tolerably easy place – except that the width of the platform is so very great to the eye at first’. Dickens never played the Hammersmith Apollo. That would have wrecked his head completely.

  Speaking of having your head wrecked, in 1910, a political speech by Winston Churchill from the stage here was interrupted by suffragettes who had hidden under the stage the previous evening and burst up through the trap door. There is no record of whether they went ‘Ta-daa!’ when they appeared. But then it’s unlikely they were dressed like magician’s assistants at the time. Great girls, the suffragettes, but you could never get them to gussy up.

  The afternoon of the show, Damon and I had been to the National Media Museum (the most visited museum in the country outside of London; and where the woman who sold us the tickets recommended the telly exhibition ‘because you can try reading an autocue’). Then, in the evening, we had a slap-up Indian meal, and watched two girls having a sort of fight while some lads cheered them on. The next day we went to see some Hockney paintings. It was like being on a mini-break. While we were there, the city was lit up for Diwali, the Hindi festival of light, and it was all a delight.