You Are Awful (But I Like You) Read online

  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 suc
h 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.

  Chapter Twelve

  I AWOKE WITH a faceful of sun streaming down on me through the kitchen-paper curtains. A bright dawn was the successor to a clear and bitter night: I’d slept with hands wedged in armpits, and my nose felt like it belonged to someone else, someone who’d been dead for three days. All that £3.86 worth of overnight heating had achieved was to condense my breath over every window, a process which had resurrected ghostly finger art from holidays past, mostly unfinished renditions of the Cerne Abbas giant at play. Steaming hot ablutions were very much in order, and I left the half-bath’s red tap running while shaving the heads off my facial goosebumps. My shuddering respirations brought to life a detailed finger-art tableau in the mirror, featuring Mr Happy being extremely unwell across the initials of many Premiership football clubs. Then I dipped an appraising digit into the bath and found it filled to the brim with glacial meltwater. By the time I located the switch for the water heater – next to the oven, obviously – I was in no mood for the forty-five-minute wait advised by an attached notice (along with a warning that water could not be heated while the cooker was on, an edict necessary to stamp out voltage-crazed holiday excesses such as washing up after a meal). Pontin’s Southport, my base for a three-day regional craporama, was doing much too well at being awful.

  Grimy and ill-tempered, I put on most of the clothing I’d brought with me and heaved open the apartment door. Every other set of curtains was drawn and the exercise yard lay entombed in perma-frost; icicles hung becomingly from every gutter and overflow pipe. The sky was huge and blue and the sunlight pure, pouring gold across the sand-dune crests that rose up beyond the camp walls. Immediately I felt better: it was an absolutely glorious morning, and I had it all to myself.

  I walked round the camp’s deserted perimeter, then headed to the beach. Everything down here was vast: the yawning emptiness of the rippled sand, my thousand-foot shadow across it, the boarded-up Victorian hotel sat between the dunes. The sea looked a million miles away, just a fuzzy silver line out near the horizon. It was all so stirring and epic: a big place for big dreams. In days gone by that meant Red Rum thudding across these sands in pursuit of the speed and strength that would win him three Grand Nationals. Now it means that the dunes behind Ainsdale Beach are home to north-west England’s most active dogging community.

  I crunched back to the camp through crusted sand ridges and puddles of hard sea – when brine freezes over, hell can’t be far behind. From bumper to bumper Craig was thickly dusted with ice, and I allowed myself a self-congratulatory smile: the night before, taking stock of the conditions and Craig’s related medical history, I’d prudently removed the WD40 and de-icer from the boot and taken them up to my apartment. Feeling – and looking – very pleased with myself I now extracted both aerosols from my bag and lavishly unleashed them over glazed surfaces and into locks, as appropriate. Then I climbed inside, aimed another what-the-hell squirt of each behind the choke knob, and to my immense satisfaction coaxed Craig into a first-time start. A q
uick flick of the wipers, and off we … oh. I heard frail machinery endure immense strain and surrender with a reverberating twang; I saw the wipers flop limply down on to the bonnet, useless and dead.

  And so West Lancashire passed by in a smeary blur, my nose pressed up to the screen and my eyes trying to distinguish oncoming traffic from less potent hazards such as roadside vegetation and livestock. As I weaved blindly about the tarmac, my respect for Craig and the men who brought him to life – nearly enormous following his non-stop transnational marathon – ebbed steadily away. The last dregs of it were drained by a very close shave with a stationary milk float. Soon afterwards, I pulled over in a village and made further efforts to wipe away the semi-de-iced chemical sludge, now topped with the spatterings of gritty slush thrown up by motorists who overtook at speed, honking their rage at my lethargic meandering. All around was flat and cold and lightly hazed in fog: I hadn’t been missing much. Then I looked over the road and saw to my surprise and delight that I’d stopped right outside an automotive electrician’s.

  ‘First car I ever bought new!’ declared a cheerful man in overalls after I’d nosed Craig gingerly into the yard round the back. ‘Not many of those left now.’ We exchanged manly wonder-why laughs: with his smeared glass frontage Craig was a soap-windowed shop at the end of a closing-down sale.

  On his instruction I opened the bonnet and activated the wipers; he cocked a practised ear and immediately diagnosed a malfunction beyond his remit. ‘It’s not electrical, that. Whole linkage has gone. First you’ll need to …’ With much oily-fingered pointing he now embarked on a lengthy account of the remedial procedure. I lost track and all hope with the phrase ‘once you’ve got the scuttle out’, but somehow my head kept on nodding. When he was done (‘And reassembly is the reverse of removal, as they say in the Haynes manuals’) I offered thanks via my full repertoire of toe-curling blokeisms: cheers mate, nice one, howay the lads, look at the tits on that. And then I drove very slowly away into a world steadily Jackson Pollocked by accumulating splatter.