Al Needham (second from left) and me at the Writers’ Industry Conference
The second stop on our Sillitoe Trail is Arthur Seaton’s favourite drinking hole, the White Horse. Here Al Needham will explore the theme of the ‘death of the British pub’ through four essays and a conversational piece with images. I’ll discuss this further when the content goes live on The Space which I hope will be anytime now.
As part of his commission, Al held one of his infamous pub quizzes at the Golden Fleece on Wednesday 13 June but with a Saturday Night and Sunday Morning twist. In the past he has drawn on his time working for pornographic magazines to devise sordid and hilarious picture rounds such as, ‘guess the price of the vibrator’. I remember this one in particular because one of the vibrators was black with vampire teeth. Al informed me the Goth market was thriving. He gets away with such bawdy behaviour because he hasn’t got a seedy bone in him and instead simply exposes the porn industry for exactly what it is.
This time around people had to identify the names of former pubs. This was difficult given that they had metamorphosed into a wide range of evils, such as a Tesco Express or a disused car park. The key to this piece was nostalgia and it was good to see folk smiling and talking about their memories of these now disused pubs or ‘community centres’ as Al rightly refers to them.
For the music round you had to name the song and band that were being played on ‘me Nana’s organ’. This typifies Al’s iconoclastic, tongue-in-cheek humour as he is able to reduce even the most heartfelt song to a banal, repetative cheesy tune that you instantly feel ashamed at once adoring. The song titles alternated between the two days of the weekend so you had ‘Saturday Night’ by Whigfield followed by Lionel Richie’s ‘Easy like Sunday Morning.’ Very clever. It took a few songs before it clicked.
But my favourite part was the book round where I was sure I would max out on points, particularly as I had fellow Committee member Tony Roe on my team who was also filming the quiz for a BBC Inside Out documentary about the Sillitoe project. However, this was short lived: ‘Arthur Seaton drank eleven pints and six gins…how many units is that?’ I should have known better really. His questions are as witty and unpredictable as his editorial style. The only downside to the whole night was the lack of bodies from the Sillitoe Committee, but I won’t moan about this as I won’t be around for our next fund raising event this Saturday.
We’re showing the film at the Nottingham Contemporary with an introduction from David Sillitoe. Tickets are £6. This is then followed by an evening of free music in the Café Contemporary bar from two of Nottingham’s bolshiest bands; the Sleaford Mods and The Smears. DJ Mista Shotta will round up proceedings by spinning classics from the sixties. Our Sunday Morning is a lighter affair with a jazz brunch in the Contemporary Café between 11 and 3pm. Unfortunately, the Ben Martin Trio will not be playing as advertised.