Twenty Five

Well, if I’m not fed up with that daft ha’peth... - Suzie describes the vicissitudes she faces in managing The Castle’s progress from failure to its restored position as one of the town’s top nightspots. Michael Watson seems unable to make a quick decision on peeling potatoes. Suzie employs new acts and hints at skeletons in cupboards.

Well, if I’m not fed up with that daft ha’peth, Mick Watson. As if I’ve not had enough of him in my life! Once bitten twice shy, I usually say. But he’s already made a mess of things for me at least twice and now he seems hell-bent on reaching the hat-trick. I’ve done this. I’ve done that. I’ve cleaned the place. I’ve fixed the chairs and polished up all the tables. I’ve put in a new menu, I mean, the old one had spaghetti this and Thai green that, but you couldn’t even get a plane omelette! Their burguers and chips weren’t fit to eat. The buggres were as thin as paper, straight out of an economy family pack in the freezer and the chips came part-cooked in a plastic bag, special price for bulk order. What they were made of I just don’t know. They were all the same size and shape, cooked like sawdust on the outside and stayed mushy inside, just like the ones that Kiddingtonians use to fill up their freezers. I mean, when you go out to eat, you want something a bit special, don’t you? You don’t want the same stuff you can put on your table every day of the week. He could at least have put some green tomato chutney on the tables! And a side plate where you could leave the bits of jerkin and salad that nobody eats would have helped. Now I get my meat from a butcher and we use real potatoes. We’ve sold thousands of chip butties since I made that decision.

So what was Mick’s first comment? “You’ll have to sell a lot to pay for Maureen’s time if she’s going to peel taties. I can’t say ‘yes’ to that,” he said. “I’ll have to think it over.” Now a thief thinks everyone steals, but Mick ought to realise that there’s more than one way to kill a cat. Mick’s an old dog and I’m a new trick. And he’s not yet realised that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. He’s taking me for granted! It takes two to tango, and I’m getting fed up with dancing alone.

I wish I had a pound for every time I’ve heard that phrase, ‘I’ll have to think it over’, come out of him in the last couple of months! Whenever I suggest anything, first he finds fault and then he says, “I’ll have to think it over.” And then it takes him a day or more to make up his mind and, usually, I have to ring him to get a judgment. I just wouldn’t find out any other way. The act of picking up a telephone and pressing precisely nine buttons, three of which are repeated, seems to be beyond both his physical capabilities and his powers of concentration. I’ve complained repeatedly, but it’s water off a duck’s back with Mick. Sometimes I reckon he can’t see wood for trees. I tell him that time and tide wait for no man, but it makes not a scrap of difference. I want to reap what I sow, but I can’t get it planted!

Take the potatoes, for example. I said to him, “Maureen will be glad of the money. She would work all day if she could. You know she only has her pension. She worked all her life picking out bruised and broken beans as they sped past on a conveyor belt en route to tins and tomato sauce, so this work is a real Godsend for her. She can talk to people. At first I thought she was dumb. Her mouth never seemed to open, but when she gets going she hardly pauses for breath. And she shouts, but that’s just because a lifetime standing next to eighty delibels of machinery has left her deaf.” So what does Mick say? “I’ll have to think about it.” I lost my rag. “Look, Mick Watson. What do you take me for? I’m an accomplished businessman. The Mullins have more business experience in the family than generations of Watsons. All you ever had was a granddad who was a self-employed plumber. I’ve done all the sums. I can make it pay. I’ll tell you what,” I continued - I can recall the exact words, “I’ll make it self-financing. I’ll offer Maureen’s services to a wider market. I’ll set her up as a hotel potato peeling service in The Castle’s kitchen. She can do that in the early morning when the club’s not even open. I’ll set her on as soon as I’ve got some orders. Whatever she does for me and The Castle will already be paid for out of the profit I make on her peeling. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Heads you win, tails you win. How about that,” I asked.

“I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

I could have throttled him. “Mick,” I said, impatient to say the least, “yes has three letters and rhymes with mess and no has two letters and rhymes with no. Why can’t you just say yes or no? I’m not going to make a mess.”

“It’s not that easy, Suzie. I have to think things through, run projections, work things out properly... There’s the extra hours and taxes to think of...”

“You’re not telling me that any of these people at The Castle are on official contracts are you? I know enough about the way these places work to know that the words official and contract are taboo round here. And what do you mean by run projections? You don’t use one of those sandwich spreadsheets like my Donkey, do you? We could be here until Christmas before we get an answer out of one of those things. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and a stitch in time saves nine. But your way, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”

Well he went away and I heard nothing for a day or two. I’d already put up a notice on our board advertising the new service. “Potatoes peeled, bulk order taken, inquire within” it says. I put it right next to the photo of Kinky Karen, who does one of our after-midnight slots and is advertising a couple of large tubers of her own. I thought it might catch the eye. No doubt Mick knew about my poster the moment it went up. I am under no illusions. That Phil Matthews and his missus were probably on the phone the moment it saw light of day. They’re Greeks bearing gifts are those two, if you ask me.

Within a couple of hours I’d not only had my inquiries, I’d already filled Maureen’s spare time all five mornings a week and had extra in the pipeline to give her some overtime. It makes sense, you see, because the hotel owners can get rid of a kitchen hand or two. They save a lot of money because their people have to be on proper short-term contracts. I’d also already made a tidy profit for The Castle on top of paying Maureen, and I now had my proper chips. I’d killed two birds with one stone.

So I phoned Mick Watson and asked him what he thought of the idea before mentioning that it was already in place. “I have reviewed your suggestion,” he said, sounding all official and managerial - stuck up, if you ask me, “and I can give it a conditional go-ahead for a trial period of one month.”

“Conditional?” I asked. “What are the conditions?” And then he seemed totally confused.

“None that I can think of,” he said, the daft ha’peth.

And so now The Castle has real chips. I had the same song and dance when I suggested we sell variose pukka pies and chicken nuggettes for the kids, so we could compete with Lorraine’s Plaice, the fish and chip restaurant in the alley down the road. He wouldn’t make a decision on any of that either, not without running it through his sandwich spreadsheet. Now he’s got doors so he can hide.

But these weren’t the only times he’s withered. I’ve been fiddling with the turns, trying to set up a higher class of show to attract more up-market punters. I wanted Tia Pepe out from the start, but there were others that didn’t come up to scratch. There’s an important point to make here, however. I’m conscious that this blog of mine is both a memoir and record of how I turned a business around from near failure to astounding success. So I have to take a moment to make an important point about how to manage the turns in a club.

A mistake that nearly all people in business make is to aspire to the best. People with restaurants want the best ingredients. Taxi drivers want the best cars. Club owners want the best turns. But in fact you have to cut your cloth.

Necessity can be the mother of invention. Take the case of the taxi driver. Who can make money running a Ferrari as a taxi? I ask you. Not only will buying the thing bankrupt you in the first place, you’ll spend more on petrol than any fare. You might be able to work a niche market - what a good phrase! - but you won’t get much business running around Punslet or Bromaton, because there’s precious few niches in such places. You might get work down south, where they’ve got plenty of money alongside a comparable lack of brains, but even there I doubt there’s room for a couple of Ferrari taxis in the whole of London.

Now it’s the same with turns in a club. Don’t buy the Ferrari. Don’t even aspire to it. You might have a name throughout the town for having the best singer, the best comic, the best live sex act, and you might fill the place. But if the acts are that good, your punters will spend all their time listening and watching, not drinking. The turns have to be good enough to perform, but never good enough to captivate, otherwise the punters forget to buy their bevvies! To know the road ahead, ask those coming back! I asked around. I looked at the places that got the crowds and took note of who they employed. But I also asked the staff about who did the real business across the bar. It’s only when you put two and two together that you make four.

The Beni-Beatles and The Elderly Brothers pack them in elsewhere, but they weren’t on our schedule, so the first thing I did was sign them up for an hour each on alternate nights. I did a partnership with The Wookey Nookey so that the acts get work every night from them or The Castle. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Competition might be the market’s solution to maximum efficiency, but it comes nowhere near cooperation in the process of making a profit. Business is done by agreement, not conflict!

The Award Winning, Original Abba Cliché was also an obvious outfit to sign up. I wouldn’t say they’re the best thing since sliced bread, but they’re topical. I reckoned that Mad Maori and Zero Zulu, as seen on TV, would add a bit of variation, while the Full Monty Tribute alongside the Polynesian Magic Fire Snake Show would together develop a theme. Sue Joseph’s Drag Show was the perfect lead into Cocks Of The North, the male strippers, while Chanzaville’s Number One Vocalist, Star Of Twenty-Eight Consecutive Seasons On The South Pier, Me Anonymous No Name, was the perfect inoffensive, catch-all for the peak-hour. My idea was that he would do My Way at the end and get all the bingo ladies feeling fancy free enough to go for an extra strip. Obviously we then needed a sing-along eyes down, all snowballs must go session before Kinky Karen, Mondays and Wednesdays, or Randy Sandy, rest of the week, pursued their respective orifices before the live sex act got down to it. Early doors, of course, we needed a straight singer and a clean comic, followed by a belly-dancer and a gay conjuror. Keep it simple!

But would Mick say “yes” to any of this? “I’ll have to think it over” was all he would say. Time and time and time again, even repeatedly, I asked him. “Mick,” I said, “we need breasts, chicken, alongside breasts, Kinky Karen and Randy Sandy, in The Castle. They are complemental.” And would he say “yes”? “I’ll have to think it over,” were his words. It’s the first time I’ve ever known Mick Watson hesitate when there were breasts on offer.

Well, it took an argument or two, but I got what I wanted. I always do. But Mick’s attitude foxed me. Did he really want The Castle to succeed? Sometimes you would have thought not. And here we are just a couple of months later and we have already reclaimed the grey hairs early doors, brought the families in for the peak hours and just about cornered the Extreme Hen and Ultimate Stag niche into the small hours. Plus we now have a roaring lunchtime trade because all the Brits flock in to get away from the fresh vegetables, salads and seafood the hotels serve up. Even the Dutch are turning up. Personally, I’ve never served so many burghers.

I’m not going to let Mick have his hat-trick. I’m going to stand up for what I want, stand up and be counted: one! What I need is what will work. Suzie Mullins is going to succeed at The Castle. Suzie Mullins is going to create the business she would have made out of Mullins The Milliners, if only she’d had the chance. No, Mick Watson will get no hat-trick out of me. He’s had a left shoulder and a lost year in the 1980s, a year lost to me as a result of a fling I should never have flung. Whatever happened to that little... Well, let’s not go into that one.

The shoulder was my fault, as was the other one, I suppose. A frosty night on the back of a bike when you’re too young to know what you want is one thing. A whole fortnight of fulmination in a foursome and then a sexsome on a half-board package, all conducted in a state of constant semi-booze on a litre of gin a day, not counting the wine boxes and the beers, was quite another thing. Sometimes amnesia can offer relief. No wonder our Dulcie ended up in such a mood. We never saw her. I will always remember that night with Pete Crawshaw and his missus in the Benidorm Palace when I daren’t tell Donkey the real reason why I had to stay behind with Mick to reconsider my options. An ounce of invention is better than a pound of cure, but I had clearly not been to the right shop. Well, bitter pills have blessed effects and hindsight is always twenty-twenty. And it was a bitter pill, but it proved a blessing in disguise because it took me back to my Don in the end. I should have known better.

Well it looks like it’s going to be a year to remember. Mick ratted on me a second time and I am not going to allow him a third opportunity. This time I am on my guard. When he says he has to wait to make up his mind, I am not going to be tempted to ask what might prompt him to do things quicker. I know I’m in control this time, so I am continuing to play hard to get. On both of the other two occasions, it was me that agonised over what to do. This time it’s me that knows the score. It’s me that’s pushing the limits. If he says he has to sit and think, then it means that I am still in control. And I intend to keep it that way.