UR TV CAST

Working people have, since the late Fifties, travelled abroad, and come to expect professional standards. Scarborough is a fine resort, with a dramatic setting, fresh sea food and bracing air. Even poor old Morecambe can boast of more – that magnificent marooned ship of the Midland Hotel, those magical sunset views across to the Lakeland peaks.To be anti-Blackpool is not even to regret – as Nye Bevan used to regret – the poverty of working-class imagination. It has not bothered to update since – even the chip fat is the same The only things that have changed are the prices. Blackpool traders always were great gougers.You don’t have to be Richard Hoggart to notice that if, once, Blackpool’s vulgarity was urgent, and its pleasures the fierce, gaudy, urgent pleasures of people with all too little leisure, nowadays it floats in a cultural no-man’s land of plastic tat, entertainment that is second-rate even by the standards of day-time television, and catering which does not seem to have registered the arrival on these shores of McDonald’s.To be anti-Blackpool is not to be anti-North. And in Blackpool’s case, it’s a Garibaldi – stale, anachronistic and fly-blown Cool Britannia, it isn’t.

It’s not even attractive in a masochistic, nostalgie de la boue sense.
At best, it’s a museum of working class taste. Here is a resort which acquired an identity in the days when a mill-hand from Oldham could have a paddle, drink six pints of Banks’s, have a piddle, eat fish and chips and still have change from half a crown. You know you are only there so they can take your money.The politics in Blackpool are live It’s heartbeat is old Labour. I’ve a bloody good mind to go there during conference week, and watch it on the telly.. OBAN may be darker, Rothesay wetter, Bournemouth dearer, Torquay harder to get to – and in Eastbourne the geriatric count is certainly higher – but among seaside towns Blackpool takes the biscuit as the all- round worst place to come, visit or confer. The conference centres at both are soul-destroying concrete boxes. It doesn’t have a tower, or a pleasure beach, or mucky postcards, or a decent Trades and Labour Club Bournemouth has too many hills, and not enough pubs.

Nothing on the south coast remotely compares with Robert’s Oyster Bar, with plain wooden seats, magnificent views of the North Pier and the Irish Sea and wonderful sea food. It is also the only decent BYO eatery this side of Australia. You buys your crate of chardonnay round the corner and quaffs it over a long lunch with a couple of MPs and the delegate from Frome.Brighton doesn’t have trams It doesn’t have Tetley’s or Boddingtons. He remonstrated a little, so she threw his shoes out of the window.And it isn’t true that there is nowhere to eat. As well as having the finest fish and chips outside Yorkshire, Blackpool has some very good restaurants. In Blackpool, it’s surprising the sheets don’t snap in half when the chambermaid makes the bed. New Labour’s morality inspectors have obviously been at work in this week’s deplorable decision Even the hookers have a sense of humour.

One journalist fast asleep in the Imperial was awoken by the noise of a lady of the night clambering into his second-floor bedroom from the outside fire escape. Tonight, it will be a rencontre with Dr Thwaites’ Restorative in the seedy Empress, where Tony Blair (when he was nobbut employment spokesman) was notoriously invited to mate elsewhere by those rough boys, the industrial correspondents of the national press.For Blackpool is nothing if not ruthlessly egalitarian. Where else can you be called a cheeky bugger by a waitress half your age over breakfast in your hotel?And speaking of hotels, grasping though they are, the hoteliers are discretion itself, as long as you don’t make too much noise Past Labour conferences have been adultery on wheels. Back again! Today, it will be gossip, gossip, gossip in the ample lobby of the Imperial Hotel, properly studded with comfortable chairs, where many a late night sing-song has ended with the police being called.