Real England

yes, that's him: me i disconnect from dob dob dob

"From THIS to THIS" is 1965: http://www.thewestonmercury.co.uk/news/picture_past_april_23_1965_1_4056836 (This was action not words" was the year after by the looks.

(The "Picture Past" section of the Weston Mercury site is absolute gold, as it turns out, but I don't suggest you spend as much time there as I just have (and am about to) Thanks Soref!).

"Heaven and Hell", which was the offering from the Cheddar Young Conservatives, beat "From This to This" FWIW (and I note the absence of male angels in that one).

Wind, rain, hail and sleet blew away hopes of a bumper Easter weekend for Weston. There were no clashes between mods and rockers, and a boat trip to Ilfracombe was cancelled on account of the weather.

would kill for a week in Ilfracombe tbh although maybe at a more holidayish time of the year

I haven't been to Ilfracombe for probably 35 years.

Perhaps it's nicer now.

THIS IS ACTION NOT {runs out of room} is very nearly as perfect a self-clowning as the classic comedy staple THINK AHEA{runs out of room}

NEVER PLA{runs out of room}

I went to Westward Ho! for a few hours in 1987.

I went to Westward Ho! for a few hours some time in the mid 70s as far as I can remember

feel like we covered a lot of the english seaside when i was a kid, with some extremely real england experiences along the way. i don't remember any of the south west seaside places being particularly bad. the east coast tho...

Useful conversation as I'm considering a break at the seaside (probably) in the new year.

Here's a thing I remember from seaside shops as a kid that I have not seen for years. In shops which sold souvenirs, there would be, hung up somewhere, little painted plaster faces of grizzled seafolk types -- one in a captain's cap, perhaps, one with a pipe, I don't remember all the others. They were maybe six inches high -- and I don't recall ever seeing them anywhere except in shops, but presumably someone bought them. They were powerfully ugly, and textured: I imagine batch-produced from moulds (they definitely had more a factory look than an artisanal look). My google-fu hasn't been good enough to find any on the net; though I've lots of other unbeautiful seaside material.

(there were also little model animals in the same style, which would have stood on a dresser or a mantelpiece or a windowsill -- and I certainly spotted these recently enough that the bestiary included some meerkats, but I think by then the faces had vanished)

Pretty we sure we had one of those grizzled old seadog plaster faces.

lol the necessary google term was of course "sea dog"
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/10/27/28/1027285401a970aeb534042f4e6d4d92.jpg

and the name of the art form is CHALK WARE

a full GiS array of chalk ware sea dogs

REAL COASTAL ENGLAND^^^

they are pinging memory currents that I can't quite turn into pictures, definitely. seaside tat shops are some of the most beautiful things from childhood that I can imagine - beach toys, crocks of scrumpy, saucy postcards, funny kitchen wall and toilet door signs, tea towels, plastic glow in the dark horror movie models, clotted cream, Wade Whimsies...

I think the one we had you hung on a wall, definitely the same shit though.

ok now there's pictures

and here is the superbly vintage website of the main purveyors of same: http://www.bossons.info/

(yes, hung on a wall is how i remember them, rather than perversely mounted on a black paper cupcake holder as above)

I bet they do Whimsies too

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lot-images.atgmedia.com/SR/1848/2913013/52-201494134127_original.jpg

ok I've gone full rabbithole

I went to Westward Ho and Ilfracombe in 2015 and had a v agreeable time in both. Ilfracombe has probably changed less over the past few decades, but it has got that big damien hirst statue in the middle of the harbour now welcoming in the ships like a baby colossus. didn't see too much of that stuff though.

ships is a bit of an exaggeration, I'll go with boats

ok I am making a nostalgia-soaked return to North Devon some kind of project for 2017

I've never been to any of those places, we never made it that far south, I shudder to think how long it would have taken us to get there by car.

here's the whimsies page: http://www.wadewhimsie.co.uk/

obviously this is all core scarfolk stuff (tho the scarfolk ppl have IMO a bit of a tin ear for some of the things they parody, which are actually way darker)

(also IMO: ppl ALWAYS COLLECTED THEM BECAUSE THEY ARE DARK: this is not one of those things we are today smarter about; if anything quite the reverse)

There was a seaside tatshop in Seaton (East Devon) which had a little record department in the back. I bought a copy of "Charade" by the Skids there. I'm thinking this was the only place in East Devon you could buy records on a Sunday in the late 70s / early 80s, until the newsagent in Sidmouth opened their own little record department, which I didn't like because when the ex-chart singles went in the reduced box, they put a dirty big shop stamp on the cover, a move I thought (and think) totally unnecessary.

this is a good handbook to this dark world (from 1951):
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51g%2B-fflqdL.jpg

pop artist peter blake is also a good source, but lambert&marx were there first

ppl ALWAYS COLLECTED THEM BECAUSE THEY ARE DARK

yes definitely, all the childhood memories that are still vivid today have a sense of the unheimlich, which I'd've had no word for then, of course, but totally fed into the feeling of joy those shops gave me - plus the sense that I was peering into adult stuff, bits of things I couldn't quite understand would be tucked away in those corners - and of course all that blue/loo humour wasn't really the norm at home in the everyday, the seaside made it ok

the Lapland scam brothers from upthread who were taken to court and jailed for a year, made their own reply video. and i mean well..
see for yourselves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRYSMvlYHJc

chalkware_mr_blobby.jpg

as child of immigrants who took full advantage of every thatcher policy and never once stepped outside london it's nice to think that my only references for these souvenirs are the natwest pigs

this is a good handbook to this dark world (from 1951):
🗻

pop artist peter blake is also a good source, but lambert&marx were there first

initially confused that book with The Unsophisticated Arts by Barbara Jones:

Amusement arcades on the shore house the more recent automatics, horizontal glass-topped boxes on four wooden legs, where a penny releases a number of balls which can be projected by means of a spring through a series of illuminated hazards to score many thousands of points. For really high scores there may prizes.

I suspect both were probably published to coincide with the Festival of Britain.

I'm a Californian, but this seems to qualify.

http://money.aol.co.uk/2016/12/07/hilarious-response-when-angry-mum-complains-to-tesco-about-pota/?ncid=aolshare_facebook

could've sworn we had a great thread on (English?) seaside 'n coasts on here, with pix galore, but search function is failing me again.. Anyone?

There's a sea arches thread, not exclusively British, though. Sea Arches (A Picture Thread)

you're thinking this excellent thread?

The British seaside: Dud or dud?

Thanks guys! Think I lumped several threads together in my mind, Fizzles' seaside one and the Cornwall one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbCPz2OP2ZI&t=105s
funny and entertaining local youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HRZdDpZSBM
grim and thouroughly depressing local youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbCPz2OP2ZI

omg Dewsbury Drifterz <3 <3 <3

http://metro.co.uk/2016/12/21/man-arrested-for-offensive-christmas-decorations-6336953/

It started with this story: http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/models-carried-fashion-shoot-went-12356210 which is just kind of bizarre and maybe belongs in a Milennials thread (if we have one), but then looking elsewhere on the MEN site I found this: http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/murder-probe-after-man-dies-12357286 which deserves to be here for this quote from the policeman in charge:

what should be a happy time turned into violence

When asked why he didn’t dial 999, model Max Dos Santos Leite, 17 at the time, said: “We just came to the conclusion that we needed to get stuff done.

“In all due respect, we only had that time on that day to get stuff done.

“We didn’t have any other free time. With all due respect, it (the body) wasn’t going anywhere.”

lol

I was talking to my mum the other night about the Huddersfield and District Temperance Union NV thing mentioned upthread and she told me about a photo she still has. My dad's sister was sporting a Pioneer badge in the photo next to my mum, the latter with a bottle of lucozade, my mum with a beer. The Pioneer badge was a catholic church badge of shite honour, where you have agreed not to imbibe alcohol until you are 25. My mum says that pious arsehole really fucking wore it with pride, to the point that it drove her to deliberately drink hard + flaunt it just to piss her off.

Doesn't get realer than a pub...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-38384519

http://spicyengland.tumblr.com/

(via https://twitter.com/Mr_Considerate/status/817749614728216576)

https://twitter.com/OUFCOfficial/status/822842648553783296

Oxford's twitter clearly updated by a Streatham Rovers fan. #Neverstopnotgivingup

@Greg_Wilford

Statement from Rolf Harris' solicitor drowned out by a defrocked bishop doing a joyous Irish jig outside Southwark Crown Court.

He blamed a "media frenzy" for making Harris "vulnerable to people making accusations against him".

what a nightmare it must be when so many disparate people are queuing up to accuse you of very similar-sounding things

defrocked irish-jig priest = cornelius (neil) horan ("sometimes referred to as the Grand Prix Priest")

(and not to be confused with neill horan of one direction)