Word: blackpool
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Neil Kinnock was a worried man as he mounted the podium in Blackpool last week. As the Labor Party met for its annual conference, the latest polls showed that only one voter in four expects it to form a government in the next ten years. He knew that once again his leadership was on trial...
Inside the meeting hall at the seaside resort of Blackpool, the feeling of jubilation was palpable. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and 4,000 representatives of her Conservative Party had gathered for the first annual party conference since rolling to victory at the polls last June for the third successive time. Declared Thatcher: "We now have a new Britain: confident, optimistic, sure of its economic strength...
Daughter and father next fetch up in the English seacoast resort of Blackpool, where Billy has caught on with a music-hall troupe. He gets in trouble there too, falling for the company's soubrette, stage-named Maggie Paramour, who is married to a violinist in the same motley ensemble. Ellen, by this time nubile and knowing beyond her years, sees trouble coming from several directions, but not the sexual ambush by Mr. Flushing, whose wife owns the boarding house where she and her father stay and where Billy has fallen a wee bit behind in paying the bills. After...
...Schools of Love. But Ellen's experiences are no more colorful than her manner of reporting them. Burgess turns his heroine's "Uneducated English" into a marvelously supple and comic tool of exposition. When she recalls the job that finally did her father in, a pianoplaying marathon in Blackpool, Ellen tries to give some sense of Billy's repertoire during his last 15 days at the keyboard; several pages of song titles follow, including Beethoven's Mignonette in G, the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tan Houser and Pomp and Circumference March. The sharpie who egged Billy on to this fatal...
Best of all, she makes her disreputable old father seem oddly heroic and their life together, despite the troubles, a comic romp. To read The Pianoplayers is to understand Ellen's observation, gleaned from watching those music-hall routines at Blackpool, on the infectious quality of laughter: "Once an audience starts they'll go on all night...