Freakshows and fairgrounds return to Blackpool

An English professor is leading a double life off campus as a circus showgirl in a festival of all things Barnum, writes STEPHEN DIXON

'MY FAMILY are O'Connors, and they're from a Travelling tradition," says Professor Vanessa Toulmin. "They came to Britain in the 1920s. My great-grandmother was from an English show family and she and my great-grandfather set up the O'Connor Fair, which has been running in Morecambe for 70 years. I've been backwards and forwards to Ireland many times. I have family in Ireland who are Travellers. I've been thrown out of pubs there for being a Traveller." She's in Blackpool this week as curator of Humbug, a celebration of American showman PT Barnum and all things connected with fairgrounds, freak shows and sideshows which is part of Showzam!, the Lancashire seaside town's annual festival of circus, magic and new variety. "Here I'm a showgirl," says Toulmin, Professor of Early Film and Popular Entertainment at Sheffield University and director of the city's National Fairground Archive. "When I go back to Sheffield I will have to be an academic again. My colleagues think I have a split personality."

There's been some canny thinking behind Showzam!, which began a week ago and ends on Sunday night (Showzam.co.uk). In spite of its famous Tower and yearly illuminations, Blackpool, like many old-fashioned resorts in Britain and Ireland, is a place of tatty, faded grandeur today. But the better days it once saw are helping energise the town for the future. "It's a matter of not rejecting Blackpool's past but embracing it," says festival director Claire Turner. "Mixing the traditional and the contemporary and putting them side by side to see what links them. What I find exciting is that we're getting a lot of children and teenagers in; kids whose main experience of entertainment has always been through a screen, or computer-generated, and they've lost that interaction between an artist and an audience.

This is only our third year, so we’re quite a young festival. From year one to year two we had a 150 per cent increase in visitors coming to Blackpool specially for the festival and a 200 per cent increase in local attendance.” As well as the magic, sideshows, vintage Blackpool movies and Barnum ephemera at the Winter Gardens the week has seen shows at the Tower Circus – a magnificent venue designed by Frank Matcham in 1900 – from La Clique (pictured left), the circus-cabaret troupe familiar here from Dublin’s Fringe Festival, a new-style Ghost Train, Carnival Ball, Queens of Magic – the Harry Potter character Hermione Granger has apparently inspired a generation of girls to get interested in magic – Ockham’s Razor aerial theatre, the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain.

Today there’s a day-long celebration of demented Lancashire comedian Frank “Gerroff me foot!” Randle (1901-1957), star of several slapstick films in the 1940s and known as the King of Blackpool.

An alcoholic with serious mental health issues, Randle often removed his false teeth and threw them at audience members he didn’t like the look of. He destroyed dressing rooms with an axe, burned down a hotel where he’d received bad service, fired a loaded revolver at an extra on a film set and hired a plane to bombard Blackpool with toilet rolls after an obscenity conviction. In some of these antics he was encouraged and assisted by his best friend, Irish tenor Josef Locke, also a former Blackpool fixture. It has been claimed that Randle and Locke drank the bar dry at the Imperial Hotel in one session.

Back at Showzam!, Professor Toulmin says: “You could call what I’m doing cultural heritage tourism. Not in a negative ‘good old days’ kind of way but using heritage as a way of revitalising a new audience. What I do here in Blackpool helps fund my archive in Sheffield. And this is also my outreach. I’m not going to get 20,000 people through an archive in a university, but I’ll have 20,000 people here in Blackpool.”

We talk a bit about show life in Britain and Ireland. “There is so much still in Ireland that has been lost in Britain,” says Toulmin. “I used to go to the Puck Fair in Killorglin. I’ve never seen a fair like it. It’s just how you would imagine a 19th century fair, with all the horses and cattle and sheep right next to the funfair, and the goat hung over the whole fair. Then there’s Ballinasloe, and Lisdoonvarna. The country fair tradition lasted a lot longer in Ireland and is still there, so you don’t get the big industrial fairs like we do in the UK.”

She looks around the show, adorned with superb banners painted by Mark Copeland. “These are all the original sideshows from the 1930s that we’ve hired from a fairground museum and kitted out. We show archive film footage I’ve put together, and that’s appropriate because it’s where films began, shown as a novelty in tents in fairgrounds more than 100 years ago. The people working here are all connected to me in one way or another. My niece Fay works in The Monster Show and does the Headless Lady illusion at the weekends.” Fay joins us.

“What’s your day job when you’re not working Headless Lady illusions, Fay?” I ask. “I teach choreography to drag queens.” Toulmin smiles proudly at her niece and then points to a man hammering six-inch nails up his nose in front of an audience of deliciously-shuddering children.

“That’s Diablo, the human blockhead,” she says. “His name’s Michael.” After Diablo has finished his show and the children have drifted away, chattering excitedly, I ask him how he learned the trick. “Well, it’s a case of trial and error, really,” he says. You’ve got to know more or less what you’re doing, of course. It’s basically an old Indian fakir’s act.”

“And what do you do when you’re not hammering six-inch nails up your nose, Michael?” “Oh, a bit of this and that. Punch and Judy. Sword-swallowing. You know the kind of thing . . .” It’s another world in Blackpool.