LUTON TOWN

‘Hats off to Luton.’

Introduction to the Luton Hat Trail, www.Luton.gov.uk (really? You’re the government and that’s the best you can do?)

‘I used to play football in my youth. Then my eyes went bad. That’s why I became a referee.’

The peerless Eric Morecambe, comedian and Luton Town fan

Nowadays, every team has a celebrity fan. Tom Hanks and Prince William support Aston Villa; Hugh Grant supports Fulham; Robbie Williams supports Port Vale; Stig from Top Gear supports Burton Albion. The list is endless because football is cool and trendy these days and everyone wants to declare their undying love for the team they’ve supported for ever/been to twice.

But it wasn’t always so. When I was young, football rarely made it into popular culture. Occasionally on FA Cup final day, a familiar face from TV would crop up on the pitch, like Freddie Starr dressed as Hitler,† and a ventriloquist called Roger De Courcey had a puppet bear called Nookie who wore a giant Crystal Palace rosette (sometimes I think everyone who was alive in the 1970s should just offer a blanket apology for everything), but for the most part football was only mentioned on TV when football was actually on TV.

The glorious exception was Eric Morecambe. I am, as I’m sure you know, a hard-bitten left-wing stand-up comedian forged in opposition to the casual racism, sexism and self-loathing working-class humour of the sixties and seventies. Hell, one magazine devoted a front cover to myself and Mark Thomas, declaring us the ‘third wave of alternative comedy’. Our job was to make you laugh and bring down governments (which, to our credit, we always did – eventually).

But no one made me laugh like Morecambe and Wise. Even after hard nights driving another nail into the coffin of capitalism, I would come home and put a Morecambe and Wise show on and laugh again at bits I had seen a hundred times. It’s hard to explain now what those two meant to an entire generation (they had an injured, yet slightly smutty innocence that seemed to particularly appeal to young people), but our world was a better place when they were on.

And Eric supported Luton Town. He was from Morecambe, but lived in Hertfordshire and supported Luton. Properly. He went to games. And he wasted no opportunity to mention them on the show. And Luton were about as un-showbizzy a football club as you could get. They weren’t a bad side. In fact, throughout Eric and Ernie’s BBC heyday they were in one of the top two divisions; they just weren’t glamorous. And they’re still not.

Formed out of an amalgamation of Luton Wanderers and Luton Excelsior in 1885, by 1891 they were the first professional club in the south of England, and in 1897 they joined the Second Division of the League, until all the travelling to northern away games took its toll and they went back to amateur life in the Southern League, although from where I’m standing they are a northern club, obviously.

As their official history puts it, since then ‘there’s been ups, there’s been downs – but it’s never, ever, been dull’. Maybe not to a Luton fan, mate, but they’ve never excited me much. The ups and downs bit is certainly true, though, with the ‘ups’ including Joe Payne scoring 10 goals* in a 12-0 defeat of Bristol Rovers in 1936, getting to the FA Cup final in 1959 and winning the League Cup final in 1988; and the ‘downs’ consisting of losing the FA Cup final of 1959, losing the League Cup final of 1989 and being relegated out of the League altogether in 2007 after they started the season with a 30-point deduction, which was scandalously given by the FA for financial misdemeanours by previous owners of the club.

Scandalous though it was, it has to be said that for many other fans there was little sympathy. In the eighties they had been the first club to introduce plastic pitches, the first to ban away fans and the first to introduce identity cards for their own fans. It may or may not have been a coincidence that their chairman was David Evans, who was also a Tory MP and outspoken supporter of Margaret Thatcher.

In truth, some away fans were probably happy to be banned. It was always an antsy town to visit, which we put down to the fact that they could almost reach out and touch London but they weren’t London. Mind you, they hate Watford, so they do have that in their favour.

And that plastic pitch may have looked modern, but it was in a ground you could only describe as weird, or if you were being kind, homely. If your home was weird. And you have to go through someone’s home to get into the away end. You walk along a terraced street, wondering where the bloody hell the ground is, and suddenly there’s a gap between two houses with a turnstile at the end of it.

Apart from the hating Watford thing, something else in their favour is the nickname. I love a nickname that reflects the industry or culture of a town. At one stage, in the 1930s, the town was producing 70 million hats a year so it was fairly inevitable that they would be called the Hatters.

Or was it? In the 18th and 19th century the area was also the centre of the nation’s straw-plaiting industry (you knew that, right?) because local soil conditions produced a type of wheat that was very flexible when it dried.

So, Luton’s original nickname was the Straw-Plaiters. What do you think of that, Eric? Rubbish!

Why You Shouldn’t Support Them

■ No statue of Eric Morecambe outside the ground.

■ I hated plastic pitches.

■ Officially the worst reviewed ground on Tripadvisor. Although what sort of person rates grounds on Tripadvisor?