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Saturday 22 November 2008

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's Notebook

When he was a sketchwriter, the former editor of The Spectator Frank Johnson had to come to Blackpool every year. Every year, the cockney sparrow (as he sometimes parodied himself) wrote a diatribe, uninhibited by the delicacy which might restrain ‘privileged’ people, about Blackpool hotels. And every year, the Blackpool Gazette would publish an aggrieved and sarcastic leader in response, along the lines of ‘So Mr Frank Johnson is back in town, and it seems Blackpool is still not good enough for him. He says Blackpool’s hotels do not satisfy his fancy southern tastes. Hasn’t anyone told Mr Johnson that Blackpool boasts a record 87 new rooms with ensuite facilities in the last year alone, etc., etc.’ Frank was right, it must be said, about the hotels, but I did once have a good experience. Arriving late, I had dinner in the small establishment on which I had been billeted by my paper. The wine list said: ‘Chateau Latour 1970, £12’. Even then, the late 1980s, that wine would have cost more than £100 in a restaurant. I though it must be Latour de Something Else, and asked the waiter to bring a bottle. It was the real thing. I stayed in the hotel dining-room all week.

This discovery was all the odder because it used to be the custom that if you asked for wine in a Blackpool hotel, they did not even say ‘Red or white?’ but ‘Bottle or glass?’ When you said ‘Bottle’, they brought Blue Nun, opened it and said, ‘That will be £4.50 please.’ You had to buy the wine separately from the food, at once, and in cash.

My hotel this week shows how Blackpool has changed. It has pretensions to fashion. The lights in the room are so subdued that you cannot see. The cushions imitate leopard skin. The chairs have those strangely high backs and low seats that suggest they are designed for giraffes, and the bathroom (yes, ensuite) has equipment so sophisticated that nothing indicates hot or cold, on or off. Trying to run water out of my bath, I pressed a button which squirted it onto my head. But the plug doesn’t work, and the water is lukewarm, and the walls are so thin that a man’s snoring next door kept me awake for most of the night, so there is continuity as well as innovation.

A final memory of a different age. In the early 1980s, gay rights groups began to have fringe meetings at the Labour conference. There was one in Blackpool, and we hacks from the hated right-wing press went along to mock in our unappealing way. As I entered I was mistaken by the organisers for Peter Tatchell, who was the main speaker. I felt a mad urge, in the persona of Peter, to declare my public conversion to a Biblical view of the evils of sodomy, and then flee.

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