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Freak show
THE Ghost Train finally has company. It's not before time. Stick an attraction, even one that's out of this world, in an empty building, out of season, and market it half-heartedly, and it's no wonder the punters won't come.
But give Carnesky's Ghost Train pride of place at the very heart of an exhibition any of our big cities would kill for and this town should no longer be looking like a ghost town.
Well, that if it's promoted properly.
Frankly, Blackpool should leave that to the organiser. Sheffield University Professor Vanessa Toulmin, of the wild hair and unrestrained enthusiasm, is one of the best ambassadors Blackpool's had for years.
She cherishes the heritage of this town the rest of us tend to take so lightly. She had a great ally and mentor, too, in local historian, world's oldest magician and showbiz ephemera magpie Cyril Critchlow, until his death. Her latest show is in his memory.
Vanessa's an academic who runs the National Fairground Archive at Sheffield University and has penned books and theses on social history, but is a show woman at heart, as befits her roots. "Don't call me arty," she stresses. "This is living history."
We're in the Olympia, part of the Winter Gardens complex, a stone's throw from what used to be Cyril's theatre museum on Coronation Street, now a shop selling stuff you'd see everywhere.
Cyril's gone but his legacy lives on. Some of his collection's on display here.
No stuffy show this, but a living, breathing, social history, heady with the sauciness of a bygone seaside, and redolent of a resort which redefined risque.
The Circus of Wonders, which starts tomorrow, and runs daily from 11am to 7pm, until February 22, is part freak show, sideshow, fairground, circus and general perambulation through the social history of the seaside from the 19th century to the 1950s and 1960s.
Five of the shows, The Headless Lady, The Mummy, The Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, Electra and The Living Half Lady, will run as live working shows this weekend and next.
Vanessa has traced some of the original performers too – we've got four or five Headless Ladies still out there and at least one Lotty, girl in a goldfish bowl.
Pictures, posters, and artefacts are there, for sure, but there's the real thing, too, originals, lost masters of sideshows painstakingly restored by specialists such as Jon Marshall, one of the Inner Circle of the world's great magicians, and curator of Circus of Wonders, with Mark Copeland (insect circus specialist!) and Vanessa.
Jon traced a stack of sideshows, neglected but recognisable, rubbed off the grime, and found vibrant bright colours of some of the lost glories of the Golden Mile and other resorts going back some 40 years since they last graced the Prom.
It was the Bearded Lady equivalent of finding the Mona Lisa hidden in the painting by numbers section of a tatty souvenir shop...
"Real tingle factor time," Jon recalls, revelling in the eclectic and eccentric collection.
Other attractions have been recreated. Internationally acclaimed sculptor Anthony Bennett has brought The Great Omi (or Zebra Man) back to life so convincingly women swooned on his last venture out.
The skin tone is spot on, the muscles a marvel of what must have turned grown women weak at knees long ago. Oh my, indeed.
All the sideshows, exhibits (bar all too real human performers taking part) are from a more innocent, less politically crippling age than ours, before the Golden Mile (spiritual home of this exhibition) was sanitised into sedate.
Back then, men would queue to ogle a scantily clad Girl in a Goldfish Bowl, and women would faint when the Headless Lady appeared.
In those days, says Vanessa, the tattooed men would regularly do a bunk with bearded ladies, leaving the sideshow's missus to step in and take their place.
Circus of Wonders is unique and imaginative and old world and Blackpool should take a bow for having embraced the concept, shaped by Vanessa, who presented us with last year's Showzam! extravaganza, and is back to build on what's been achieved.
So now it's up to the rest of us to roll right up and step right in, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, even if the old fairground barkers and spielers are in shorter supply today than back in Blackpool's heyday.
What's more, in these dark days of recession, when we need light and laughter more than ever, the great news is - admission is FREE.
But if you've got a fiver to spare, please ride that quirky arthouse Carnesky Ghost Train ... and find out just what you've been missing...
jacqui.morley@blackpoolgazette.co.uk
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Weather for Blackpool
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
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Temperature: 1 C to 3 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: South east
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