Blackpool rock.

 

The last time I stayed at the Forte Grand in Blackpool it was called the Imperial, but not much else appears to have changed since then. The Labour Party conference has always been held there. Rich businessmen from Burnley probably still have liaisons with their secretaries there. And I expect the porters continue to maintain their risibly suave demeanour there in front of Jaguar-driving guests who know they are moonlighting from a bingo hall on the Golden Mile. They know because they've seen them there. But it was, and certainly still is - by the look of it on Breakfast TV today - one of Lancashire's finest. And Lancashire always was a county full of comedians, as we say in Yorkshire.

My stay there one November was caused by the unlikely circumstance of needing to photograph a TV set floating on the waves whilst the image on screen was still there. It was for an advertisement, of course. I remembered from my childhood wide open expanses of golden sand and a gently approaching tide. Well despite the fact that it was two hundred miles north, Blackpool seemed just perfect to the photographer, so off we set in his Range Rover. A case of executive lager to hand for me, the client. The budget on this job seemed too good to be true, which in fact it wasn't. In the scheme of things this was a small job. But we had just returned from an extraordinarily dangerous advertising shoot in Bogota, Colombia and the larger budget for that had somehow got mixed in with this one. Not only the budget, but something of the way of life too.

You see, when a man is far from home on a life-threatening mission like shooting an advert, in a place as unlike Blackpool as Bogota, you get into certain ways. Certain aspects of your character normally kept tightly reined in can work themselves loose and you find yourself behaving like Jack Nicholson on a weekend off. One of these nights for example, I found myself moving a soldier's machine gun onto the floor because it was occupying the seat I usually sat in. And what seat was that, you may ask? It was the one near the bar in the Number 2 brothel in downtown Bogota, of course, the Number 1 being reserved for the President and other big shots. And the main reason I was in there that night was to ask Joseph the barman how he got the Angostura bitters to float upward in his pink gins. You see these details become very important sometimes. More important than anything else, including common sense. Of course it didn't help when the girls came and sat with me at the bar leaving the four shabby Colombian soldiers alone on the other side of the room - not I modestly add, because I'm anything special. It was simply that I made them laugh and the soldiers only wanted to do unspeakable things to them. It was a classic set-up out of a Western. Except there was no shoot out. In the new Wild West, the American Express card has assumed the role of the Peacemaker, and this being the Number 2 brothel out of possibly hundreds, the management was fully up to date on my credit rating and mercifully showed the boys the door. That night, I learned a great deal about pink gins.

So, after a shower and a sumptuous dinner in the Imperial it seemed quite the normal thing to ask a minicab driver where we could find a brothel in Blackpool. Now this was November and the tourist season was at a low ebb. Even the conferences were all dried up, so I don't suppose there was much action in town. Even if there was I doubted whether our cab driver would be that conversant with it. We lurched off into the frosty night in search of forbidden pleasure. 'These gents what to know where there's a brothel, Roger. Over. Roger' ' 'Give us a minute Arthur,' crackled Roger under the front seat. 'There used to be one on the estate out towards Fleetwood. Second turning on the right, number 38 I think.'

Ten minutes later we were grinding around this dingy sodium lamp yellow pebble-dashed housing estate with freezing rain beginning to fall. Hardly the bright lights. 'Perhaps we better give up', I ventured to Arthur, but no, he was a man on a mission. ' Here we are, number 38. I'll go and see if this is the place. Back in a tick.' Obviously Arthur was as keen as we were to discover the hidden delights of Blackpool. He positively trotted off up what looked like the garden path of somebody's home, while we sat in the car slavering like beasts . Well, I suppose in these days post Cynthia Payne, sex has come to the suburbs. After a moment, the lights came on in the hall of number 38 and a man stood there in his pyjamas obviously puzzled by Arthur's question. Arthur beat a hasty retreat as the man slammed the door, and scrambled back into the car. 'That's definitely not the place', he muttered and fired up the engine. We sped down the road. Three doors away, an identical house stood with red light blaring from it's upper windows. 'What's that over there, Arthur, ' I inquired. 'Nothing lad. There's no brothel round here. Any road, if you're looking for a good time, you should have stayed where you were, in the Imperial.' Surely not.. 'Trader Jack's is where you want to be.' And so we returned from the outskirts of Blackpool to the warmth and elegance of our hotel. 'You'll have to change your trousers though,' Arthur helpfully advised.

Jeans off, suits and ties on, half an hour later the photographer and I were to be found propping up the bar as tropical thunderstorms and parakeets raged all around us. Neville the barman wore a Hawaiian shirt and several large necklaces. The drink of our choice was champagne, and as we had a sizable budget to burst, a second bottle was chilling in the ice bucket. It did look as if drunkenness would be our only entertainment that Tuesday evening in Trader Jack's as the place was deserted but for five other escapees from John Collier's window. We quaffed on, and I had just asked Neville to prise open the second bottle when it happened. The doors were flung back and hundreds of women in glamorous cocktail dresses, bouffant hair, dangling earrings and long gloves entered the room. The clatter of high heels was deafening. The perfume was like the bow wave of the Queen Mary as they surged in, eying us men up like morsels to be chewed on later. What on earth was happening? Was it a fantasy brought on by jet lag? Had there been a radio broadcast across the North West, rounding up women to give succour to lonely men in Blackpool? There must have been over three hundred of them, aged between twenty and fifty. All dolled up and looking for a good time. It was a plethora of pulchritude. A surfeit of snatch.

Well you know how it is. Instantly two things happen. You can feel your standards rising and at the same time, you start to get picky so that by the time you've singled out the seven or eight ladies you fancy, you're straight back at the school dance. You're standing at one end of the room, a drink in your hand, and they're sitting at the other, hands demurely clasped in their laps. Well not quite, because this crowd was out for one hell of a good time. Bacardi and Malibu was going down by the crate. The other blokes had already been swept onto the dance-floor and were being boogied senseless by a relentless pack of Lancastrian lovelies. To save ourselves from a similar fate we took our champagne and sat down with two girls in their twenties from Preston. Roxanne said she was a hairdresser and had just started her own salon. She was getting her new Mondeo next week. Elaine was a policewoman from Preston. On further questioning she broke down and confessed that actually she 'd quit the force because she couldn't stand the chauvinism. She'd been married to a Detective Inspector who used to come home once a week and beat her up. Now she was living with her girl friend on a council estate bringing up their children together. But tonight was her night out. We plied them with champagne. We told them we were here to shoot an advert on the sands. They didn't believe us. 'Everybody's got a line in here tonight, love. It's OK. Nobody has to believe you. It's part of being here. I mean this place isn't real either is it?' She had a point. 'Tonight? What do you mean tonight, Roxanne?' 'Oh we come here most Tuesday's don't we, Elaine? Tuesday night at Trader Jack's is Divorcee's Night, love. Didn't you know? Come on let's dance.'

When I woke up next morning, my mouth tasted like the bilges of a Fleetwood fishing smack. The Atlantic Ocean filled my ears and nose. Both balcony windows were wide open and the net curtains were streaming horizontally into the room. Providentially I had ordered several large jugs of tomato juice and these were standing improbably on shelves around the room. It was a running gag from Bogota as a hangover cure and late last night it must have delivered its punch line.

Roxanne was long gone back to her real world as a manicurist in a beauty parlour with her dreams of a four year old Sierra. The shock that we were really there in Blackpool to shoot advertising photographs had been too much and all her bravura had buckled in the face of it. I met up with the photographer at lunch when he returned from Preston by minicab with gloomy tales of council estates, large Duty Free size bottles of vodka and pursuit by Alsatian dogs and grubby policemen's children. Somehow later that day we struggled two miles out onto the sand with a twenty seven inch colour TV set and took the shot.

But every time I think of Blackpool, I think of the Imperial Hotel and remember that Tuesday Night is Divorcee's Night. I wonder if John Prescott has similar memories?

 

October 1994.

 

 

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