Travel notes: I go to Blackpool for my ‘oliday

Kyle be switched! Low-brow Brit TV is jolly fun

Mr. Jeremy Kyle — “Jezza” to his mates, apparently — is Britain’s current answer to the stateside TV schlock-peddler Jerry Springer. This sounds like it should constitute at least one redundancy, because Springer, London-born, is extremely popular with UK audiences, in their blind rush to embrace all things Americanisher. This Yankee-loving impulse leads to puzzling sightings, such as the ubiquitous presence of Coors Light in pubs (having appropriated the tap that once might have issued Theakson’s Old Peculier or Charrington Toby), and British Burger Kings offering “Diddy Do-nuts,” a product concept Sean Combs probably thought of and rejected years ago, at the start of his career.

Back to Jezza. I caught a bit of his act last week on the ITV network, and he was singing loudly from the Maury Povich hymnal that morning, letting us know the true DNA-confirmed identity of the baby-daddy would be revealed only after prolonged shrieking and scowling by the momma, a spotty fat girl with lank hair, who offered up a chain of memorably East-end utterances. One I cherish is: “It weren’t like he were a proper father, then, weren’t it?” (I’d attempt to provide a link to the episode, but I suspect we’d all end up transfixed for the entire working day, staring at Jezza’s human train-wreckage, stuck wondering about what it all means.)

William Hogarth may have been the original Jeremy Kyle. Little comfort in that, ducks

The unappealing girl’s Hogarth-inspired appearance and Dickensian syntax recalls the mighty old unapologetic Great Britain of yore, increasingly scarce these days. You can get an excellent cup of coffee and a nice plate of risotto anywhere in the country, and other formerly scarce commodities are plentiful, but the time-honored British shite, the tea-cozy, the Ford Cortina, and the musical recordings of George Formby, have all gone away somewhere. Where?

The brief time spent with our Jezza sent me out in search of other artifacts of bygone England, which is a way of justifying how I wound up spending part of a Saturday afternoon in Blackpool, Lancashire. What little I previously knew of Blackpool was from the great Kinks’ song, “Autumn Almanac,” where Ray Davies, in some sort of character, sings: “I like my football on a Saturday, /Roast beef on Sunday’s alright. /I go to Blackpool for my ‘olidays, /Sit in the open sunlight.” Never a more perfect description of each of the eternal English verities.

I can report that the seaside resort on the Irish Sea is likely the same in 2009 as it was previously, except that there are fewer visitors and possibly a greater proportion of female beach-sitters wearing black robes to preserve modesty — as prescribed by their religion, one presumes. It’s a traditional delight, is what it is, and they don’t even put quotation marks around traditional while they’re trying to sell you traditional Blackpool Rock, traditional three-quid fish ‘n’ chips, and a collection of some of the grubbiest-looking traditional B&Bs seen outside of the area of Paddington Station in the 1970s.

The souvenir shops sell last season’s T-shirts pledging loyalty to Everton FC (Blackpool’s local squad, the Seasiders, have struggled since the transfer of Sir Stanley Matthews, back before Hogarth’s day), and pink cowboy hats, which seem to be purchased and worn by groups of drunken young women in the Yates Wine Bar, a popular spot to drink, scream, and fall down, during the course of those pre-wedding hen parties. The fellers, off from Liverpool, Leeds and Bolton on their separate stag outings, appear in T-shirts custom-made for the occasion, affixed with suitably misogynous slogans. Plenty of affordable fun for the whole family.

This is a scene designed to make progressives queasy, and nostalgics all wistful-like. Donkey rides on the beach. A big clanking roller-coaster. Jellied eel and jars of lager. All in counterpoint to what is going on everywhere else in the land, where the old ways belong to the last millennium.

The previous evening, we’d stumbled into the Trafford Centre in Manchester, a truly grand post-modern retailing showplace that provides some unusual visual touches, including, in a food court, a convincing recreation of a pre-Katrina New Orleans street scene. Here’s your vibrant new Britain, packed with the prosperous young seeking out Gap clothing, 10-pin bowling, first-run American movies, and other modern good-life accouterments. We dined inside the mall at a chain tapas joint, taking our time with a decent bottle of Rioja. It was a nice evening, but one we might just as well have experienced in Dubai, or Duluth.

Blackpool, on the other hand, has strippers, and lewd comedians. It was pointed out to me somewhere on the promenade that, on certain street-corners, the eastern European sex-trade workers are as common as seagulls. Couldn’t tell you about that. I can attest, however, that Bass ale and Carling lager are still vended openly in pubs, and that pinot grigio and Mojitos are not the potables of choice, as is the case one hour’s drive south. I raise a glass of something to good old Blackpool, where I’d guess that any early school-leaver on the dole can still get blotto and go off onto the beach after last call, with some bloke she can barely see, and show up on telly a year or so later, appearing on the Jeremy Kyle program to await the result of a DNA paternity test — providing persuasive evidence that, in spite of appearances, maybe there will always be an England.

You are now entering/You are now leaving Canada. Welcome/Come back soon, Mr. President

Like so many others, I was impressed-as-heck with the U.S. President’s visit this week to the Canadian capital. It was a far less uncomfortable spectacle than when their predecessors last convened in Ottawa, where it was discovered that neither the U.S. leader, Mr. Bush, nor the Canadian leader, M. Chretien, spoke a solitary word of English between them. On that previous occasion, their exchanged grunting and gibbering at a televised state dinner seemed intensified after local organizers arranged for someone’s brother-in-law to look after the AV arrangements, in a contract valued at nearly twelve dollars. The ornate scene was outfitted with a single 40-watt overhead light and a lone microphone declared surplus by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, back around the age of Norman DePoe. The impression I had, watching on television as Bush and Chretien slurped soup, was that the world was scheduled to end in around 10 minutes, and these esteemed leaders were being televised from their refuge in an undersea cavern off the New Zealand coast.

If we had our Strothers, we`d be getting along better with Mr. Martin

Failure to communicate, Strother Martin-style, is far from the problem concerning the facile Mr. Obama, and the earnestly articulate Mr. Harper. Both could talk the scales and bones right off the Arctic Char, as they might say up north. Where the previous two North American leaders were, let’s say, somewhat provincial and cloistered in their outlook and bearing, the current pair seemed perfectly at ease with their respective roles, and with each other. Mr. Obama seems not to be the sort of American visitor to Canada who grows tetchy the first time he notices gasoline being dispensed by the litre, and later becomes unhinged upon determining the scarcity of Pabst Blue Ribbon or that local brand of pork rinds they sell in Tulsa. Similarly, because Mr. Obama was spared the horror of having to converse with minor Canadian political figures such as Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe, he was presumably able to skip the lecture concerning the superiority of Canadian healthcare and the unfair level of transfer payments to Quebec. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who was reminded, as Mr. Obama boarded his plane back to civilization, of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines at the conclusion of Casablanca, chirping about how this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Or not. As effusive as Mr. Obama was in his praise of the neighbor-nation, there are many of his countrymen who still struggle with the difficult concept of a land that looks, sounds and smells like the United States — but isn’t. It’s comparable to the disorientation our English cousins seem to experience after they’ve inadvertently stumbled over the footbridge into Chepstow, Wales, except that the English know instinctively how to handle such a situation, which is to shrug and continue their binge-drinking. An American, separated from his or her homeland, seems to lack that sort of easy adaptability, and feels compelled to begin explaining things, first to themselves and to then anyone unfortunate enough to be in proximity.

Chepstow, a town in Wales, which is another country that isn`t the USA

So it was in Ottawa with the saddest Americans of all, those representing the national media.

Noting the presense at Mr. Obama’s arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, replete with ceremonial scarlet tunics, CNN newscaster Fredrika Whitfield, normally no imbicile, was flummoxed. She admitted her confusion to the viewing public: ”They appear to be some sort of troops.” Other stateside journos, made knowledgable of RCMP protocol by watching Dudley Doright cartoons in childhood, wondered aloud how the Mounties had arrived at the airport without their horses. One bears this foolishness with neighborly good humor; you should hear the nutty things they say about their own country.

Of course, there’s never any shortage of stupidity in the Canadian media, either. The gold standard of local idiocy, the Toronto Star, continues to stick to the plot of its serially published fantasy, which involves an imaginary Canadian political leader named Iggy, who is standing by and about to grab the tiller that steers the federal government. The Star was offering its readers an alternate-reality account of the presidential visit, wherein the American president acknowledged and took a real liking to this fictitious Iggy character, and has him sized up as a better candidate for the role of sidekick than the elected leader of Canada, Mr. Harper.

Indeed, when Mr. Obama finally quits screwing around with the economy and short-hop foreign visits, and gets around to the serious business of buying a dog for his daughters, he could surely find a worse name for the pooch than Iggy. Other than which, it’s fair to assume that the Star’s Iggy must have struck Mr. Obama as a certain type of figure he’d seen in his prior career in Chicago politics, the grinning one-name supplicant — Ziggy the ethnic fellow, or Wiggy the high-strung man, or Piggy the overweight boy with the snout-like nose — who presents himself as qualified for employment as a city library worker, or night custodian at Midway airport, or as a toll-taker on one of Chicagoland’s many fine bridges and thoroughfares.

That is, if he made any impression at all.