BACK IN TIME WITH COLIN BAKER
Bob’s very own Time Lord recalls honeymooning in Blackburn, confusing Oldhamers and Boltonians, and invites you to spend a night at the theatre
Ihave an affection for Blackburn – an unlikely town, I know, to be the object of such a feeling unless you come from there; and even then, perhaps not? My liking is not because of its connection with the cowboys of the 1860s, so wonderfully commemorated by Mitchell and Kenyon in their “world’s first western” but because my wife and I may be the first people ever to decide to travel there for our honeymoon.
I could imagine that there are people who live in Blackburn who may have decided to stay there after getting married without going off somewhere exotic to celebrate, but we decided to get married in Oxford and then honeymoon in the outskirts of Blackburn. It was September 1982. We had booked our wedding day and then I got offered a role in Juliet Bravo, which started in Blackburn two days later. While it was not necessarily the way we had planned to celebrate our happy day; we agreed that honeymoons were more capable of being rescheduled than job offers – so Blackburn it was. We did find a nice country hotel with fourposter bed in the countryside outside the town and while I was portraying a bank robber, my wife took my red setter (who had just become “our” red setter) out for long walks in the hills and bonded forever, as Cleo switched her prime loyalty to the long walk lover. Having been brought up in Rochdale, I must also confess to a fondness for those bleak moors and industrial towns of the north-west.
And speaking of Rochdale, I have still not quite recovered from its extraction from Lancashire and absorption into the sprawling conurbation of Greater Manchester. While it may make sense in terms of administration and the provision of facilities, it is not just nostalgia that brings a sense of loss of identity.
In my childhood I could tell the difference between even the local accents of Bolton, Rochdale and Oldham, which are all now subsumed into one general dialect with only a few linguistic oddities left to remind us of the huge variety of a century ago.
In Rochdale we went to “skewl” on the “buz” and went down a “ginnel” to climb the “brew”. Ten miles away they wouldn’t all know what you were talking about. The joy of local dialects was that it bonded communities but of course we do need now to be more inclusive in our contracting, multicultural world and that is all right and proper – but we have perhaps lost a little colour and individuality in the process.
I am currently touring with a stage version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and have visited several lovely venues from Bury St Edmunds to Gorleston, though sadly not King’s Lynn a venue that I have never played – and there are very few of them left in the country, although I did visit the Worcester Swan for the first time in my 54-year career recently. If you have a penchant for the sleuths of Baker Street, I shall be with my friend Terry Molloy better known to millions as the creator of the Daleks – Davros – (or Mike Tucker in The Archers) who is giving his Doctor Watson with me. It is a new venture. Audiences seem to love seeing a radio play done on stage. We performers are in a “radio studio” with special effects visible – wind machines, coconuts
(for horses’ hooves etc). We are doing one-nighters all over the country until 3 May (crimeandcomedytheatrecompany. co.uk/dates), so please come and thrill to the sound of the hound if we are in your area.