‘ANOTHER ‘ORRIBLE DAY in Barra.’ Thus did my landlady see me off into the grey morning, replete with fried bread and the blunt logistics of her pachydermal mania (‘Got first twenty-nine years back. Stopped counting at three and half thousand. Clean buggers with hairdryer.’). But as I drove through the red-brick, rain-polished streets I realised that even in the cold light of a wet day, I rather liked this strange and remote old place.
Seagulls cawed from the town-hall clock tower. The flanks of venerable buildings were faintly emblazoned with hand-painted advertisements for furniture brokers and general dealers. I exchanged a flash of homofocals with an Austin Montego, the Maestro with a boot. I passed along a street lined with steamy-windowed launderettes and cosy little cafeterias, full of headscarved old dears having a natter and a break from the rain. There was a defiant, almost heroically traditional feel to the town, a sense that here at least the Tesco belt hadn’t yet been pulled so tight that it stifled the life out of the place. The radio producer John Walters once declared that ‘human society can be divided into two eras: pre-avocado and post-avocado’. Barrow, the town that time forgot, was stoutly pre-avocado and proud of it. And more than that, it had character, which as I was finding out is about as much as you can ask for from any British town these days. Everything seemed lightly dabbed with the brush of daftness: an ex-ferry party ship moored up by the Morrisons’ car park, the existence of a street called Powerful Road. And a guest house breakfast room where the bland and age-old menu strictures of grapefruit segments OR orange juice OR cereals (porridge on request) were offset by a thousand watching elephants and a warning that smokers would be severely battered about the head and body.
The only way out of Barrow is the same way you came in, and I retraced the A590 at intemperate velocity. We sped across damp green undulations scarred by the occasional quarry, and through villages full of homely, good people – the sort of people who lived next to a big sign advertising The Walker’s Hostel or Canal Adventures and never crept out at night with a pot of paint and a puerile snigger. Ozzy led the way as ever, and was presently accompanied by himself: Ozzy Osbourne’s 2005 covers album, Sing? These Days I Can Barely Talk!, or something like that. This at least had the inestimable appeal of not being Paul McCartney’s ‘Frog Chorus’, which had incited a small off-road adventure near the bog-roll factory. Plus it guaranteed plenty of gratifyingly surreal Ozzy-on-Ozzy action: ‘I am the god of hell fire, and I bring you f-f-fookin left turn ahead!’
I hit the M6, headed a few junctions south, then turned off into the Lancastrian coastal flatlands. Above me the sky cast aside its cloud blanket and let forth the full force of a mid February frost: on went the gloves and scarf, and Ozzy was lost in the heater’s tepid roar. The hedgerows holding the rippled potato plains at bay seemed to blacken and wither around me, as if some fairy-tale curse was passing across the kingdom. Then the heavens darkened anew, and grubby beige flecks began to spatter the screen at a jaunty angle. Three days at the seaside beckoned, and it was snowing.
Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight: it sounds like the sort of gibberish you might see printed on a Japanese T-shirt, but these words are actually the official motto of Butlin’s. They wouldn’t have made much sense to me as a child, and barely do now, but somewhere in that slogan lies the promise of carefree, communal holiday-camp fun that the pre-teen me pined for. For the thick end of a decade I fantasised about summer fortnights in a chalet at Minehead or Camber Sands, days of chips and splashing about and nights of noise and neon and – yes! – Crompton’s Penny Falls. I lobbied hard for a couple of years, but always in vain. When it came to holidays my father was a rolling stone: to him I was just a loose pebble, the smallest of three sliding about on the hot back seat of a Peugeot estate. His was a summer wanderlust that could never be sated. When times were good, we drove all around Europe. When they weren’t, we drove all around Wales. Our family never spent more than a single night at any hotel or campsite, having generally arrived well after dark. We weren’t so much tourists as desperate fugitives.
A holiday camp offered the August inertia I craved, and also the raucous group larks that were always just starting up when we slammed the boot and drove away into the morning, or always just winding down when the Peugeot crunched to a halt on the moonlit reception gravel. The TV ads promised startling attractions – Billy Butlin had introduced the electric dodgem car to Britain, and his Skegness camp was home to the nation’s first monorail – and a heady ambience of juvenile anarchy. I watched children being left alone to get on with it, children given the run of all-inclusive entertainment facilities, children wearing expressions they didn’t wear whilst being dragged around an arboretum in Düsseldorf or Herefordshire’s largest collection of Edwardian bottles. It all looked like a thrillingly unsupervised mass sleepover at a funfair, like Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island without the downsides (enforced cigar smoking, and being turned into a donkey). At some pertinent stage of early adolescence I was exposed to the film That’ll Be the Day, which dramatically broadened the appeal of the British holiday camp by presenting it as a place where even Ringo Starr might open his chalet door to find a queue of young women demanding wanton satisfaction. But sadly, when at last I gained responsibility for planning my own holidays, I’d fallen under the influence of factors that hadn’t hitherto seemed at all important, like hot weather and tremendously cheap booze. Off I went to the Mediterranean. And so did everyone else, which meant that before long there weren’t any holiday camps left. Well, hardly any.
With six hundred chalets and uniformed entertainment officers, Butlin’s Skegness – opened in 1936 – was the first proper British holiday camp. The idea for it came to Billy Butlin during a disastrous week with his family at the Welsh resort of Barry Island: in accordance with a practice then universal and which still lingers on in Barrow, the Butlins were ejected from their seaside guest house at 10.30 a.m., obliged to wander the seafront in teeming rain until the landlady re-opened her doors in the late afternoon. Being British, his fellow holidaymakers thought they deserved no better and put up with it. Born in South Africa and raised in Canada, Billy felt something should be done, and did it. Three meals a day, organised in-house larks and the option of a roof over your head at all times: when the papers ran the first ad for Butlin’s Skegness, under the winning catchline A week’s holiday for a week’s pay, ten thousand families placed bookings overnight.
I’d always thought that Billy expanded his empire through the judicious post-war acquisition of decommissioned military camps, but in fact nearly every Butlin’s was purpose-built. Most of that army-surplus rebadging was carried through by his arriviste competitor Fred Pontin, whose chain of smaller, cheaper, monorail-free holiday camps always seemed a poor relation: like Man City before the sheikhs turned up, right down to the whole bluecoat/redcoat rivalry. By the Sixties, Billy’s nine super-camps were welcoming over a million British families a year, more than twice as many as Fred’s bijou twenty-four. Holiday-camp bookings didn’t actually peak until the 1980s, but by then Fred and Billy – sharp operators both – had seen the budget-flight future and sold up, bagging millions and a knighthood apiece. A succession of huge and stupid entertainment corporations oversaw the ensuing meltdown: today only three Butlin’s camps survive, though the Pontin’s empire, with its portfolio of more modest and economical sites, weathered the storm slightly better. Five remain, amongst them the razor-wired compound hunkered up before me in the twilight sleet.
Pontin’s Southport was opened in 1970, the last old-school, pre-Center Parcs holiday camp ever built in Britain. By then, all the more obvious seasides – Somerset, Devon, Kent, Norfolk – were well covered, but with demand still burgeoning, the operators felt encouraged to tackle more challenging destinations. All the same, and even making due allowance for the time of year, Southport seemed a bridge too far. Driving up to the security gates I could imagine Fred’s executives exchanging panicked glances as the old man pinned that final blue flag in the map on his office wall. Are you completely sure about this, boss? A holiday camp in Merseyside?
The guard slapped a huge and garish Pontin’s sticker on Craig’s filthy windscreen, and invited me to park up by reception. It was by now truly bitter – I had to gingerly half-skate my way from Craig to the check-in lobby. As I approached it, breath wisped forth from my gaping mouth: the place was loudly abustle. People, lots and lots and lots of people, had willingly chosen to go on holiday in Merseyside, in February, and – why else was I here? – in the most poorly regarded holiday camp in all of Britain.
Signs above the long check-in desk sorted arrivals into alphabetical groups; I took my place in the H–N queue. Everything was blue and yellow. A rank of posters advertised a forthcoming 1980s roadshow featuring Toyah Willcox, Paul Young and Brother Beyond, touring under a banner title I now forget – Tears of Shame, Dregs of Dignity or something like that. Most of my fellow arrivals were parents with many boisterous children in tow, but there were a few unburdened young couples – such as the one I now noticed at the adjacent customer services counter, on account of the noise they were making, and the 4-foot length of wood the husband held in his arm. ‘This fell off the bed when I sat down on it,’ he loudly declared, brandishing it like a one-man angry mob. ‘The whole room’s knackered!’
‘And it stinks,’ chimed in his wife. ‘It’s rank.’
It was a compelling encounter, yet as I craned and peered I realised that no one else was paying them any notice – least of all the blue-uniformed woman on the receiving end, who absorbed their outrage with a sort of dutiful, nodding boredom, like a desk sergeant being told about a stolen catflap or the loss of a favourite sock. Her heard-it-all-before demeanour was consistent with the research data. Of the many, many negative opinions I’d scrolled through over the past few months, none were more numerous, more heartfelt or more luridly improbable than those supplied by the erstwhile patrons of Pontin’s Southport. I can’t imagine the typical holiday-camp guest is especially hard to please, yet almost every single one of the 119 visitor reviews I’d read related an experience that had fallen distantly short of expectations. On the hi-de-hi scale, this place was the low-de-low.
I recalled some highlights as the H–N receptionist handed over my key and the sheaf of electricity-meter credit cards I had purchased to procure such holiday indulgences as heating, hot water and illumination.
‘As I walked in, the smoke alarm fell on my head.’
‘We went to search for somewhere else to stay and when we returned to the apartment our food and beer had been stolen.’
‘Someone was thrown through a window, someone was thrown off a balcony … I had to repeatedly tell my wife that it was OK and we would survive.’
‘Opened the bedroom window to let out the smell of damp and it completely fell out of the wall.’
‘Unbelievable filth – complained about the minging carpet and they gave us sheets to put down on it.’
‘Hit on head by bottle thrown from upstairs balcony and taken to hospital in ambulance.’
‘Opened a drawer and it was half full of water.’
New experiences are generally the sign of a good holiday, but at Pontin’s Southport guests found themselves chalking up unwanted firsts: drinking Coke that smelt of lager, going to bed with their shoes on, scrubbing dried blood off a kettle. When praise was delivered, it came couched in the faintest terms: ‘Little kids will enjoy it as they don’t know any better.’ I presumed this factor and the half-term break were one explanation for the healthy attendance. The other: for a three-night stay, I had paid £61.
I’d been required to enter my age when checking in, and understood why as I piloted Craig through the frozen puddles towards. my appointed dot on the camp map. The accommodation was laid out like a huge wheel, with spokes and rim formed of flat-roofed, two-storey blocks. Those closest to the main reception and its attached bars and entertainment facilities were allocated to youthful revellers; further around the perimeter I passed noisy families unloading people carriers. Finally I arrived at the camp’s silent and lonely outer limits, the circle of Pontin’s reserved for childless old men. Thus did the spirit of Cumbernauld Ned pursue me up a rusty staircase, along an undulating balcony walkway and – with the furious shriek of warped and swollen plywood parted against its will – into the gloom of apartment 556.
Finding the meter in the dark involved rearranging a lot of furniture with my shins and elbows, and a protracted end-game fumble with the stupid electrocard. In the harsh fluorescent light thus unleashed I saw straight away that I had drawn one of the longer straws: nothing was hanging off the wall or spattered with body fluids. A quick tour revealed no dramatic horrors. Someone had been plucking fretfully at the bedroom wallpaper, and the carpet looked as if it had been reclaimed from a Kwik-Fit customer waiting area. The dearth of kitchen linen and consumables was mildly disheartening: I’d remembered to bring my own towel, but hadn’t expected it to stand in as oven glove and dishcloth, drying mugs washed-up with shampoo. My bath was one of those half-length jobs that downgrade a long relaxing soak to a shivery, knee-hugging squat, and the ashtray set into the wall by the lavatory conjured few appealing images. Much like the modest, blizzard-vision TV, which proved both unwatchable and unlistenable: its volume knob offered a choice between silence and distorted cacophony.
But more significantly than any of that, apartment 556 was chest-huggingly, face-achingly frozen. That lone coat peg wouldn’t be seeing much action. A technical glitch meant that each of my £1 electrocards notched up £10 of credit, but the surge of glee triggered by this discovery ebbed away as I pressed both hands and a cheek to one of the wall-mounted convection heaters and felt it very slowly attain the temperature of a day-old corpse. I set the oven to apocalypse and threw its door open, and cranked on all four of the hob rings; when I shuddered out into the blackness half an hour later ice was still rimed up the inside of the windows.
It had suddenly become a beautiful evening: a crisp, clear sky of deepest midnight blue inlaid with a Bethlehem crescent and stars. I cocked an ear and detected the gentle lapping of surf. Nature was doing its best, but it had been badly let down by man – 1960s British man. What would have been a moon-silvered ocean prospect was hidden by a floodlit tangle of rusty machinery and old tyres. My apartment block was one of four arranged around an exercise yard of sleet-sprinkled mud, edged with slivers of dislodged masonry. The mossy brick walls looked frail and wonky, the work of a Duplo-reared infant who had been moved on to Lego a couple of years too soon.
Pontin’s Southport was conceived and constructed at the high-water mark of the British holiday camp, but also at the unfortunate zenith of a parallel national boom, in which we led the Western world in the construction of dehumanising edifices that looked shit and fell to bits. You don’t even need to go there to see how bad it looks: as viewed on Google Earth, that weathered concrete wheel says correctional facility or abandoned military intelligence compound. It just doesn’t make sense in any context related to leisure and entertainment, certainly not outside a country never ruled by a politburo. A holiday is supposed to feel like a reward; gripping the banister’s frozen rust I had the sense of being punished for some fairly awful transgression.
The entertainment complex was a great big thronging barn of a place, fronted by a three-ride funfair where little girls in vest tops were whizzing around in the frozen night. I walked in through the fast-food area and into a hall full of men with assault rifles, most of them under seven. The air was filled with gunfire, rage and confusion: ‘Billy! Where you gone, Billy? Take the head shot for me! Take the bastard out!’ Blood coursed down screens all around; I hurried out of the arcade and into the neighbouring bar. In accordance with the generational apartheid that had always seemed to define the holiday-camp experience, all the parents were crowded in here, sat around four-pint jugs of lager. Husbands: very tight short-sleeved shirts, close-cropped heads. Wives: painfully scraped-back hair, meaty bare arms. I did a full 360-degree scan of my surroundings and established that I was at least slightly scared of everyone older than five.
Even the Bluecoat bingo caller up on the main hall’s stage sounded hard, barking out numbers like Windsor Davies doing the national lottery. ‘Four and seven, FORTY-SEVEN! One and oh, THE NUMBER TEN! On his own, Tim the Paedo, PAEDO TIM!’ I thought about joining in – only some of the stout aunties hunched over their cards looked excessively dangerous – but this was not bingo as I knew it. The caller cranked up the speed and the volume; pens darted about number grids. Too fast, too furious. Instead I spent half an hour in the queue for bar meals, watching the small number of unoccupied dining tables dwindle steadily. The last was annexed just as the pimpled youth at the till aimed his next-please grunt at me.
That meant a frigid, rubbery burger from the fast-food zone, coaxed down with a pint at a rare free table near the back of the main hall. Bingo had given way to a Bluecoat formation-dance stage-show featuring heavy Black Lace content, compèred by a well-fed young man with access to no more than two words: ‘lovely’ and ‘jubbly’. It didn’t really matter, because no one was listening or watching. The audience seemed preoccupied with emptying or refilling their lager jugs, exchanging idle profanities (‘Fucking must be minus fucking twelve out there, for fuck’s sakes!’) and plotting the theft of my table. So mine were the only ears to prick up when the announcer cast aside the previous limitations of his vocabulary and bellowed, ‘LADIES AND GENTS, WOULD YOU PLEASE GIVE IT UP FOR THE LEGENDARY MR KEITH HARRIS!’
The house lights went down, James Brown’s ‘I Feel Good’ burst forth, and with saucered eyes I watch a little man in a bright red suit dash out from the wings.
‘How we doing? I said, how we doing?’
Keith’s hairline had done a runner, and through a sea of uninterested heads, most of them facing away from the stage and with a tilted pint glass stuck in them, I could see the poor man’s pride straining at the leash to follow it. ‘It’s brilliant to be here, ladies and gentlemen. You know, I haven’t actually worked in this venue for about thirty-five years.’
He looked around the hall, and I fancied his showbiz life flashing before his eyes: from Pontin’s to prime time and back. I thought: Please don’t say ‘but’, Keith.
‘But tonight we’re going to have great fun. Boys and girls and mums – Orville’s just having his nappy changed. Tough luck, dads – you’re going to have to put up with that bloody duck after all!’
It is the ventriloquist’s curse to play straight man to his own creation, and that curse doesn’t come any cursier with a creation so punchably fatuous. When the gales of laughter swept across the 1980s clubs and theatres and TV studios, how did Keith never once crack? I know I would have. ‘Right, ladies and gents, sorry to interrupt the old merriment, but just so as you know, the duck didn’t say that. I did. It was me. To be honest, without me the duck isn’t really up to much. Oops – there he goes, down on the floor in a heap. What’s up, Orville? Come on, give us a funny. No? Looking a bit lifeless down there, mate. Bit fibreglass.’
But those gales of laughter blew themselves out some years back, and there wouldn’t be much limelight for the pair to squabble over tonight. The audience was chuntering swearily on and milling about and necking Foster’s; Keith kept having to beg for a bit of quiet. Self-deprecation didn’t get anyone’s attention, and nor did a desperate foray into potty-mouthed innuendo, the ‘adult set’ I imagine he keeps in reserve for student-union bookings. I couldn’t quite deal with Orville the Duck’s creator up there saying ‘arse’ and ‘bugger’, and going on about having something big in his pockets. Much of this material flowed from the rigid lips of Cuddles the Monkey, the first puppet out of the big box at Keith’s feet. Cuddles was a bitter misanthropist, endowed with the catchphrase: ‘I hate that duck.’ By the time that duck came out of the box, I was beginning to wonder if Keith had put a lot of himself into Cuddles.
‘I’ve had a hundred and seventy characters,’ Keith recently told an interviewer from regtransfers.com, Britain’s leading online personalised registration-plate broker. ‘I had a snake called Sidney Ram Jam, which I’m not allowed to do any more – he spoke with an Indian accent and wore a little fez. I had a gay rabbit, too, and I’m going back a long time, he was called Percy Pickletooth.’ Keith still couldn’t understand why such inherently more entertaining creations had failed to grab the public’s interest, and I sensed he resented his perpetual professional enslavement to the sickly, stupid bird they had inexplicably fallen for. Keith Harris was a hard-grafting variety entertainer, one of the last of the line, but in the end he’d hit the big time through dumb luck, with a dumb duck. Where was the variety now? Keith had so much more to offer, a multitude of talents honed in his early years on the club circuit: singing, magic tricks, all those Mike Yarwood ‘And this is me!’ moments. As his own website maintains, ‘There is little doubt that Keith’s genius has given him International Stardom for many years.’
Even from 50 yards I was taken aback by the creature Keith now bent down and surreptitiously stuck his right arm up. Orville was much, much larger than I imagined, a big green unit with a head the size of Keith’s and cheeks like polished elephant’s knackers. Retrimming the body beneath must have involved shaving every My Little Pony in the land. Then Orville spoke, in the shuddersome ickle-girl Lancastrian croak with which Keith had blessed him. It was a voice I had heard in my head that very morning, as I read these words on a painted mirror while emptying my bladder in a Barrow cafeteria: IF YOU SPRINKLE WHEN YOU TINKLE, BE SWEET AND WIPE THE SEAT. All part of the baby-faced faux-cute ‘Love Is’ culture that held this country in its thrall throughout Orville’s heyday, and which now incites a terrible urge to sprinkle with abandon, like a dog drying itself.
Orville’s success was as much a mystery to me as it must still be to Keith, as his bird tellingly revealed in the torrent of self-loathing that is ‘Orville’s Song’. At a stretch I could imagine him appealing to those who found Little Jimmy Osmond adorable, and would have found even more adorable had he been an incontinent green animal with extensive learning difficulties. Personally speaking, Orville put the ‘S’ in my mothering instinct. Yet without this infantilised, bollock-cheeked freak-beak, Keith Harris was nothing. This, I decided, was the grotesque irony that still tortured his every waking hour. Perhaps the interviewer from regtransfers.com decided it too, even though he’d only popped by for a quick chat about ORV 1L, recently acquired by the ventriloquist at an auction of cherished registration plates.
The atmosphere was becoming slightly uncomfortable, with a new harshness to the profane badinage around me. People seemed distracted and on-edge, and I soon realised why: they were all really drunk. Was this the only way a British adult now knew how to entertain himself? A few weeks before I’d watched a rerun of an old Morecambe and Wise Christmas show, and had been surprised to find none of it even slightly funny. Yet this had been the pinnacle of comic entertainment, a moment when the nation, the young me included, tuned in and split their Seventies sides open. For all I know I might be repressing memories of sitting there in front of The Keith Harris Show, finding Orville both endearing and hilarious. Perhaps we were just more easily pleased back in the golden age of crap culture. Simple but happy, innocent and certainly more sober. Anyway, something’s changed, and surveying the lairy jostlers around I concluded it probably wasn’t for the best.
Orville simpered croakily on; I nipped out for a tinkle and returned to find my table fully occupied by three big women and a jug of lager. With dismay I saw that the proprietorial scarf I’d draped hopefully across a chair was now wrapped around a pair of heavily tattooed shoulders. I was settling into an awkward hover behind these when a familiar keyboard tootle drew my attention to the stage.
‘We’re going to sing you a song that went to the top of the charts twenty-eight years ago: an actual Top of the Pops number one!’ Not quite, Keith: ‘Orville’s Song’ peaked at number four. ‘And also voted the worst song ever recorded!’ Not quite, Keith: it came second to ‘Agadoo’ in the big Q Magazine shite-off, made number eleven in a Channel 4 ‘worst 100 singles’ poll, and wasn’t even mentioned in my third principal library of musical infelicity, a 2004 survey organised by confectionery giant Mars (why?). ‘Still, I got a house in Portugal out of it, so what do I care?’ And with that mutter hanging in the air, the backing track swelled hugely and Keith and Orville were off and away, giving it up club style.
What happened over the next four minutes was really rather lovely. For some time the children in the audience had been slowly gathering at the foot of the stage, magnetically drawn by the primitive, pre-modern appeal of a talking puppet. As Keith muscled Orville to the song’s key-change climax, the young mob pressed forward and began waving their arms in unison, a good hundred of them by now. Keith saw what was happening and beamed his way through the sign-off chorus, all the bitterness washed away. Orville waved a stumpy green wing at the kids and the kids waved back, and Keith was seen off stage with a resounding falsetto cheer. Their parents might have forgotten how to have good old-fashioned family fun, but these happy young campers were just finding out what it meant. Emboldened with goodwill, I whisked my scarf from its new owner’s colourful flesh and dashed smoothly outside, where a boy of ten was being sick into the fag bin.