Chapter 17:
We’re Only Here for the Piers
Brighton Dome
1 computer programmer for Second Life
1 travel technology helpdesk supervisor
1 man who worked with ‘banking needs’
1 teaching assistant and her husband who was…
1 double-bass player
If ever there was a place with an identity crisis it’s Brighton. On the one hand, it’s artistic, bohemian and gay, with boutique hotels and lanes filled with antique shops and a thriving music scene; on the other hand, it’s England’s coolest commuter town. Only an hour away from the capital, vast chunks of the population trek northwards every day in a migration begrudged by the locals, who stay put and complain about the rise in house prices. Unfairly, probably, since the only way Brighton can afford its extravagant lifestyle (there are a LOT of antique shops) is from having people make cash in London, Monday to Friday, and then spend it on the south coast at the weekend.
It’s like some dysfunctional family unit: the hard-working elder brother keeps the money coming in, while the flighty younger sibling dresses extravagantly, runs an indie label and dances all weekend. One is kept solvent; the other basks in the reflected cool.
You know that feeling you get during a beautiful tropical holiday when you turn to your partner and say, ‘This is incredible, darling, why can’t we stay here all our lives?’ and he/she says, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, what would we do?’, and the dream crumbles. Well, that’s what Brighton is like for Londoners. An hour before leaving the chintzy pub on the Sunday afternoon of your weekend away, one of you will turn to the other and go, ‘We could live here, y’know,’ and your partner goes, ‘You’re right! All we need do is outbid some local fisherman for a cottage in Hove, and you can spend fourteen hours a week in trains!’ ‘It’s a crazy dream but it might just work!’
Brighton is cool, though, and did well on the all-important ‘how good is your fudge?’ index. It is also the best surviving of the great British seaside resorts; as it should be, since it is probably the oldest.
People began to stay there to take the fashionable seawater treatment in the eighteenth century. It was a particular favourite of the future George IV when he was Prince Regent, and his patronage made the small town popular with the elite, which is ironic, because he originally liked the privacy of Brighton for his various affairs with young ladies of the court. He built the Brighton Pavilion, one of the most exuberantly bizarre buildings in the country, and his patronage played a large role in making the seaside a fashionable destination for the English. Then, as ever, it was the railways which opened this elite resort up, with the first daytrippers arriving in 1841, despite objections from horrified local shopkeepers, who campaigned the rail companies to raise their fares and price the ordinary Londoners out. So, nothing much has changed in 170 years then.
Brighton is also a great place to enjoy one of the most singularly English pleasures: a walk along the pier.
Nowhere else in the world has quite embraced this piece of nineteenth-century whimsy. Walk out over the waters! Feel the small thrill of being on dry land and yet! And Yet! Sort of… not! You can see the waters churn through the gaps in the boards! A watery grave could be only moments away! In the meantime, have some candyfloss and watch some mainstream comedians.
Like the skyscrapers of the nineteenth century into the skies, around the country the piers extended further and further into the ocean, in some King Canute-style effort to extend man’s dominion, and then sell fish and chips there. At one stage, there were over a hundred piers in England and Wales; that figure has dwindled to less than fifty now, with fire, and safety concerns, leading to more and more being closed.
Typically of Brighton, though, even when it comes to piers, they get to have it both ways. On one end of the beach, enjoy the melancholic decline of the ruined West Pier, closed in 1975 and subject to a couple of arson attacks since then, sitting on the water, a majestic ruin. Or, if you’d all like to turn your head to the left, all gaudy lights and compact funfairs, Brighton Pier (formerly the Palace Pier), finished in 1901, one of the last and longest of the Victorian entertainment piers, and intended as the zenith of the entertainment pier industry.
It still does a roaring trade today, and I am a fan, having been drenched on the log flume and petrified on the tiny rollercoaster and then demanding that the entire filming of Three Men in Another Boat be delayed until we played the Dolphin Derby game one more time. Which I won, and then we could move on.
All of which makes Brighton a lot of fun to visit. However, you can have too much fun. My gig there, as part of the excellent annual comedy festival, after starting well, descended into madness in the second half. I threw out one of my usual questions: ‘What do you NOT want to have happened in your home, before you moved in?’
At first the standard answers were coming back. Murder, first, as always, then Brothel, Crack Den, Fire and Flood. All the usual horsemen of a domestic apocalypse. Then the answers started to accelerate, as the crowd began to embrace its role in this moment of interactivity. I hardly had time to distinguish between Death and the Deaf (never underestimate the pleasure in deliberately mishearing an answer) before one man roared ‘Students!’ at the top of his voice. Brighton has a large student population, of whom he seemed to be one, as they all cheered round him at the reflected glory of having wedged themselves into the show. I hardly had time to turn and address this answer before somebody on the other side of the room started shouting, ‘Asbestos’, which seemed a far more interesting thing to talk about than ‘Students’. The floodgates were beginning to open now, and I got the distinct feeling that some of the crowd were so caught up in the thrill of naming things that my part in the conversation, where I turn their answers into something funny, was being happily ignored.
They were just thrilled to get an acknowledgement. They shout, ‘Students’, I say, ‘Students’, they cheer. Was there a point to this? Of course not. This is the drunk logic: ‘I made the man say “Students!” That was me! I was part of the show!’
This is a risk you’ll always run opening things up to the floor, especially as the night gets later and drink begins to take hold. I did a late show at the Kilkenny Cat Laughs Festival a couple of years ago, and by the time I got onstage it was long past midnight and the crowd were getting pretty jolly. It was only a twenty-minute set and, up until the last five minutes, things were going well. Then I decided to finish on that national-characteristics game I mentioned at the start of the book, which as well as making a terribly clever point about how we bracket the people of the world with ludicrous thumbnails of a personality, usually allows me to speak about how the people of Kyrgyzstan are all controlling and ticklish, and the Togolese are ravenous and judgemental, depending on the crowd’s suggestions.
Any subtle commentaries got flushed away pretty fast in Kilkenny that night. When I threw to the floor, ‘Name a far-away country,’ every wag in the room started bellowing Irish counties.
‘Cork!’
‘Ha ha, yes, very funny, but no, I need a country from very far away.’
‘Monaghan!’
‘Leitrim!’
‘No, no,’ I tried again. ‘A country, from far away, that we don’t know much about…’
‘Cork!’
‘Wicklow!’
‘Cork!’
‘No wait…’ I said, and realized that I was beginning to sound more and more like a supply teacher, or that sober guy at the party who’s trying to get everyone to play Twister according to the rules. ‘A country…’
‘Cavan!’
‘Galway!’
‘Wicklow!’
‘Wicklow!’
Me being from Wicklow made shouting it out incredibly funny to one lad in row three. Unfortunately, we were getting to the point that even the punters who weren’t shouting out ‘Donegal!’ had forgotten what the point of the routine was, and it was long past the point where I could save the show.
‘Waterford!’
‘Okay, let’s just knock this on the head, shall we?’
‘Wicklow!’
The really sad thing is that there are probably four hundred people from that gig out there who think my closing routine involves enticing the crowd to shout place names at louder and louder volumes until I eventually slink off. To this day, they must wonder how I’ve made a career of it.
Meanwhile, back in Brighton, I’ve been given an escape route. Somebody has shouted ‘the Irish’ as the one thing they don’t want to have happened in their home. I ride the white horse of mock indignation to safety.
Getting the show back on the rails is surely only a respite, though. In my head, a voice is going, ‘You got away with that one, but you’ve got to ask them for crime stories in a minute. The ending of this show is fucked.’
And lo, it came to pass:
‘Anyone here interrupt a crime?’
‘I was in a shop when people came in to rob it.’
‘Wow. What you do?’ I said, hopefully, expecting the usual story of derring-do.
‘I hid my bag behind a fridge and waited until it was all over.’
‘So, in no real sense did you actually interrupt a crime, did you?’
‘Nope. But I got my bag back.’
‘Inspirational. Anyone else?’
‘I was smoking a spliff.’
‘And who interrupted you?’
‘I did.’
‘What?’
‘Well, I hadn’t finished it and needed to go, so I just stopped it halfway.’
‘No, that’s not… no, y’see… Anyone else?’
‘An old woman was being robbed and I shouted, “I’m coming!”’
‘This is more like it! And what happened?’
‘I walked her home, and she gave me…’
And he paused just a tiny bit too long, allowing someone to shout, ‘Gonorrhea!’ at the top of their voice. And the place erupted.
By this stage they were making their own fun.
Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre
1 IT trainee
1 designer:
‘Designer of what?’
‘Helicopter… bits.’
1 newsagent
1 councillor:
Entire audience: Boo.
The councillor: No, not that kind of councillor. I’m a counsellor.
For all the underlying tension between the locals and the London blow-ins, Brighton is a happy place. Next up, though, is the happiest place of all, at least according to a major survey in 2007. Four out of five people in Bournemouth (81 per cent) said they were happy with their lives, nudging them ahead of such top five joy-centres as Llandudno, Plymouth, Tunbridge Wells and Derby. Walsall was the least happy town in the survey. Of course, surveys are normally bunk, based purely on the deeply unscientific method of asking people in a shopping precinct their opinion; but the interesting thing about both these pieces of research was how much play they got in the media, with local people queuing up to explain why Bournemouth was so great or what was wrong with Walsall – evidence that the English believe that some places really are happier than others.
Bournemouth does make a good case, though. For a relatively young town (it was founded in 1810), it has a ludicrously rich literary pedigree. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is set here. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped while living here. Henry James was a frequent visitor at Stevenson’s house, and his short story ‘The Middle Years’ is set in Bournemouth. Oscar Wilde and Paul Verlaine both taught at schools in Bournemouth, Verlaine coming here in 1876 after his release from prison for shooting the poet Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist (which is probably a poorly chosen place to shoot your gay lover). Oscar Wilde was a regular visitor, and Bournemouth was one of the many places he ‘Bunburied’ to, in order to conduct his second life away from his wife. (‘Bunburying’ is the process, described by Wilde in The Importance of being Earnest, of inventing an imaginary, illness-prone friend who you can use as an excuse whenever you want to go off and party at short notice. These days, you’d have to give them their own Facebook page.)
And for a town once described as ‘God’s waiting room’, due to the number of retirees living here, it’s also quite the place to party. This may be due to the number of surfers in the area. Bournemouth has developed an unexpected reputation among this community, and is reciprocating, building an artificial surfing reef down the beach in Boscombe in order to crank up the waves and thus lure more of the boarders in. This is probably a smart move. As youth subcultures go, surfers are pretty mellow and benign. They talk a lot of quasi-spiritual nonsense, and I’d sooner eat my leg than join in but, like climbers, or divers, say, they’re quite self-reliant and don’t tend to smash places up. You don’t hear many headlines about ‘Surfer Rampage Destroys Town’. We were there on a mild winter’s day, and there were a half-dozen surfers in the water, sitting astride boards, bobbing along and looking extremely relaxed. As well they might, given that there wasn’t a fart of a wave to be seen. You could have skimmed stones to France that afternoon, but still the surfers bobbed and still they waited, and even I, watching them from the pier above, began to feel more relaxed.
This mellow vibe must be contagious. In 2008, Bournemouth was the safest major urban area in England and Wales, with the lowest levels of serious crime; this might be why it’s a relatively safe, welcoming place to go out, as well.
I was gigging in Bournemouth a couple of tours ago and, staying over for the night, was driven out of the hotel by boredom and sought company in the bars along the main drag. Luckily I fell in with a group of twenty-year-old lads and their pretty lady friend. I was curious about life on the coast, and they were asking about comedy, and so we chatted away quite happily, until one of them turned to the girl.
‘Oh, tell him what happened last night…’
‘What happened last night?’ I said.
‘Well, I was with this guy,’ she started, with a fresh-faced candour, and it was clear that they all knew ‘this guy’. I was trying to divine what ‘with’ meant, of course.
‘We were asleep, and something woke me, and I turned around and he was awake and I realized…’
And all the lads were waiting for the punchline…
‘He had tossed himself off, all over my back!’
And they all laughed and turned to me, and I laughed, and they were looking at me for a response and I could not think of a single thing to say. There are very few times in a pub conversation that I can’t hold my own. You tell me a story and, if the mood is on me, I’ll be able to start with, ‘That’s funny, because that reminds me of the time…’
This was not one of those times. I couldn’t think of a single ejaculate-based story that I wanted to tell this twenty-year-old girl. Or at least not one that wouldn’t suddenly make us all feel really creepy.
In the end I just turned into Alan Partridge:
‘Tcch… Men, eh? With their jizz… ummm. Drinks, anyone?’
So has Bournemouth found the key to happiness? A few high-culture mentions and a well-waxed board? Happiness is a thorny problem, particularly in these parts. The media would have you believe that England is permanently in a state of discontent. Your fundamental unhappiness is sold to you here as a given and has been for generations. George Cheyne, the English doctor and writer, who was also one of the foremost proponents of taking the waters at Bath, suggested that the English were a people prone to unhappiness. In his influential book of 1733, The English Malady, the malady in question was that of melancholy and nervous unhappiness. Cheyne’s contention was that this melancholy was a condition of the English way of life. This seems to have been a generally accepted view among Europeans – in Cheyne’s explanation, the title for the book came from ‘all our neighbours on the continent, by whom nervous distempers, spleen, vapours, and lowness of spirits are in derision called the English Malady, and I wish there were not so good grounds for this reflection’.
/> Nowadays, however, you can’t walk down the street without someone asking you how happy you are on a scale of one to ten, which means that we know a lot more about English happiness than we used to.
Surprisingly, the first thing that really stands out in all the research on happiness is that the English are, in their own estimation, a surprisingly happy bunch of people. Survey after survey suggests that roughly nine out of ten people here are happy. A Gallup poll was conducted in 2006, for example, in which 56 per cent of the population were ‘fairly happy’ and 36 per cent were ‘very happy’.
Another thing we now know is how well the UK compares to its continental neighbours. True to form, the United Kingdom finds it very hard to win these things, but it’s certainly not bottom of the pile. In a major survey of Europeans conducted in 2007 by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, the United Kingdom came joint ninth (with Belgium) in terms of happiness, and tenth in terms of life satisfaction. Overall, Britons rated themselves at 7.8 out of 10 on the happiness scale, only half a point behind the happiest nations, Finland and Denmark, who each scored 8.3. The Irish were happier, too, along with Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, but the United Kingdom was well above the least happy nation (Bulgaria on 5.8) and also above the average for both the twenty-seven countries surveyed and the fifteen older members of the EU.
(As a sidebar, it’s worth noting that the Scandinavians are nowhere near the most suicidal people in the world. That hoary old chestnut can be laid to rest. I’d have kept that point for a book called Tickling the Swedes, but by the look of these figures, they don’t need any more cheering up.)
Tickling the English Page 22