My life in travel Craig Charles
The radio presenter on horrible histories at Conwy Castle and isolating in Barbados
ONCE YOU HAVE HIRED A PRIVATE VILLA, you will never stay in a hotel again. My wife Jackie and I just adore having our own house which we can pretend is our home when we go on holiday. I love Barbados and Sri Lanka and the dream holiday for me always has a private villa, right on the beach and somewhere hot. The sense of privacy is so wonderful.
I DANCE LIKE A GUYANESE AND DRINK LIKE AN IRISHMAN. My dad was one of 21 children in what was then called British Guinea. He came to Liverpool as a merchant seaman in the 1950s and met my mum who is Irish. I haven’t yet been to Guyana but I have been very close to it on various holidays to the Caribbean. I do wonder why my dad gave up the sunshine for a rainy Tuesday near Liverpool. I also feel very at home in Ireland whenever I travel there. My wife is from Galway and I do very much like potatoes, but for me it has to be served with rice – that’s the double-carbs, Caribbean-Irish mixture done to perfection.
MY MUM WOULD DELIBERATELY DRIVE THE LONG WAY ROUND when we went on our childhood holidays. We used to have a caravan in Rhyl but it’s only about 40 miles from Liverpool, so my mum would deliberately take a longer route just so it felt like we were travelling further away. I remember being dragged around Conwy Castle, which is a beautiful place but I don’t remember enjoying it when I was a kid.
I took my two daughters there when they were younger and their reaction was exactly the same. Maybe they’ll like it now that they are older.
THE BEST DJ PARTIES ARE IN SKI RESORTS. I’ve been so lucky to be able to DJ all over the world but some of my favourite gigs have been at ski resorts. I’ve performed at Méribel in France quite a few times and it’s always a fantastic gig. There’s something in the altitude that gets people tipsy a lot quicker and that combination of altitude and alcohol means that those parties are great.
MY TAXI WAS A SNOW PLOUGH WHEN I was up in Newfoundland a few years ago filming
Lexx and the plane had to stop to get deiced. It was -20C (-4F) and people could only get out of their houses by opening their upstairs windows
and sliding down the snow drifts. I realised when I got out of the airport at Halifax that I’d forgotten my coat and stood outside the terminal shivering until a snow plough turned up – that was the taxi that had been ordered to take me to my hotel.
I REALLY MISS FINDING AWESOME INDEPENDENT RECORD SHOPS on my travels. Long gone are the days of finding little bric-a-brac vinyl shops where you could just go crate surfing all afternoon for old records and pick up a bargain. I always found the UK to be the best place for unearthing gold; there were some wonderful shops in Manchester and Bristol. But it all happens online now – it’s a part of travelling that I miss.
I DON’T THINK MY DAUGHTER’S BOYFRIEND EVER wants to travel with me again. I had a pretty disastrous holiday last year in the brief window when we could take holidays. I took my wife,
my daughters and one of their boyfriends with us to Barbados and we all got Covid tested on arrival, then had to go to our villa and isolate for six days. We then had a second test and the young lad dating my daughter tested positive. He had to go to a military facility in Harrison Point where he had to isolate for seven whole days. The poor lad was only 16. We managed to spring him out early but he still had to isolate in the villa for another seven days. Our 10-day holiday turned into three and a half weeks. I missed recording two episodes of The Gadget Show and four radio shows. Plus, it was the rainy season and Barbados in the rainy season is just like Manchester with mosquitoes.
I’D LOVE TO GET MY HANDS ON JOHN SHAFT’S SUITCASE. If I could accidentally pick up someone’s luggage at baggage claim, I think it would have to be Richard Roundtree’s when he was filming the movie Shaft. He’d definitely have some great clobber in there, some
really good cologne, and I’m certain he would have a couple of great, rare funk vinyl records somewhere at the bottom of the case, too.
IT’S DIFFICULT TO GET REALLY GOOD CARIBBEAN FOOD IN Cheshire. I live right in what you might call “footballers’ wives” territory near Wilmslow and, lovely as it is, you can’t get the dishes that I’m dreaming of right now. I adore the food in Barbados and there is such variety. You can go to a really expensive restaurant like The Cliff or you can go down to Oistins Fish Market where you can have dishes such as cou cou and flying fish which, to be honest, are just as good as in the posh restaurants but at a tiny fraction of the price.
Interview by Rob Crossan
The BBC Radio 6 Music Festival will be broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC Sounds, BBC Four and BBC iPlayer from March 26 to 28