Down to the Fish 'n' Chips

If vaudeville is all but extinct, it has, at least, a reservation in Britain, a sort of sanctuary for the vanishing boffolo, where variety acts by the dozen still command high prices and audiences queue up in multiple thousands. Strung out along a seven-mile waterfront promenade, Lancashire's Blackpool could well be called the world's foremost indoor resort. The salt air that attracts so many Britons to the edge of the Irish Sea is so often filled with raindrops that all comers are driven inside to watch everything from burlesque with pratfalls to ballet with waterfalls.

Ten years ago, there were some 60 variety houses in metropolitan London, and today there are none, but in Blackpool the vaudes are often more numerous than the swimmers. Despite "bracing breezes" that raise goose-pimples in August, the crowds come to Blackpool--more than 8,000,000 a year. Last week, when resorts in less invigorating climes were already shuttering up, Blackpool began the biggest six weeks of its season, a grand finale known as the "Street Illuminations," when the city's thoroughfares are a carnival of flamboyant tableaux, ranging this year from a lurid facsimile of Botticelli's Birth oj Venus to a cancan in 3-D.

Towers & Tangos. Blackpool's visitors can poke a curious toe into "the world's largest outdoor swimming pool" (1,600,000gallons of cold filtered brine) or ascend the highest tower in Britain, a red-painted, 520-ft. structure that once in a blue sky affords a view of Wales's Mount Snowdon, 150 miles distant. They yo-yo back and forth between fish 'n' chip houses and some of the United Kingdom's most capacious pubs (Blackpool has 105, one of which can handle 1,000 guzzlers at a time). They also toss away the oversize coins of the realm in penny arcades, and take in Britain's only permanent circus. Even the public toilets have a first-rate box office, bringing in 7,000,000 pennies a year.

But the major attraction is vaudeville, and many people see three 2 1/2hour performances a day. Blue-collar sorts in the main, Blackpool's visitors want unadorned, ramrod stuff, and Blackpudlian entrepreneurs see that they get it. "They like a good belly laugh," says the impresario of the 1,800-seat Queen's Theater, "and they don't mind it good and vulgar. If you don't like someone here, you don't give him subtle insults; you say: 'I'll slap thee in the bloody girt gob.' "*

Rigoletto & Lady Zorro. Along Blackpool's strand last week, 14 vaudeville and burlesque houses were offering everything from rock 'n' roll to arias from Rigoletto, and a "direct from America" girly show featuring a black-masked nude known as Lady Zorro. There was a puppet show, an acrobatic act, a North American dog act, and a show called Don't Stop, You're Killing Me, a revue thinly disguised as melodrama, which incorporated a squad of "police" who, more or less as if sent by Luigi Pirandello, entered the theater telling everyone in the audience to keep his seat until the heavy was apprehended. At the 3,000-seat Blackpool Opera House, the biggest English theater outside London, an expensive collection of British TV and variety stars was headed by Rock Cornish Singer Tommy Steele, earning $3,000 a week. "When it's Blackpool on the line for talent," says one showman, "agents automatically tack on 25%."

For all its common touch, Blackpool's history is alight with great names of show business--W. C. Fields. Bea Lillie, Danny Kaye, Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Lawrence, Tallulah Bankhead. But none of them could rewrite the Blackpool creed. "You can't be chichi in Blackpool" is how one Blackpudlian phrases it. "It's not art for art's sake here. It's art for Pete's sake, and Pete owns the town."

"'Pete" is. approximately, the English John Dough, and in the 1960 era of new prosperity he knows where he wants to spend his holiday money. Last week in Blackpool a Lancashire wool merchant summed up the average Englishman's loyalty to the place. He had been to the Riviera last year and had his fill of incomprehensible French entertainment and Chateaubriand with sauce bearnaise. "We couldn't get fish 'n' chips." he murmured, "and the steak was all covered with bloody glue."

*For "girt" read "big"; for "gob" read "mouth."

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