Battered bangers – that’s the delicacy that still springs to mind when I think of motorway service station cuisine, even though I doubt such dubious gastronomic delights have been served in those locations for the best part of 40 years. The uniquely sickly odour that radiated from the battered banger mingled with the pollutants generated by passing vehicles to create a distinct queasiness in the diner whose egg, beans and chips were garnished with two or three of them; along with packets of sugar bearing the stag logo of Trusthouse Forte, these are the signposts that signal the service station as an establishment in my head, though I guess my impression of them remains rooted in the ones I recall calling at during lengthy journeys to holiday destinations as a child. In the 1970s, most retained their original designs – that modernist ‘Scandinavian’ style of the early 60s, resembling the kind of imaginary airport terminals one could imagine Gerry Anderson characters taking off from. Their initial appearance on rural landscapes must have been as much of a surreal site to locals as the super-highways that they were erected to serve, a sample of the future straight from the pages of ‘The Eagle’. With motorways and motorway service stations now having been with us for more than 60 years, however, the sheer ubiquitous nature of both to the British way of life has long since extinguished their exciting novelty.
Whenever one sees early film footage of motorways in this country, the threadbare traffic (not to mention the absence of crash barriers and non-existent speed limits) is a reminder not only that car ownership was considerably smaller at the time, but that the Pathé crews dispatched to capture this Brave New World of high-speed travel on camera missed out on the main beneficiaries of motorways when they first opened, i.e. musicians. Jazz and rock ensembles criss-crossed the road network unlike any other workers outside of long-distance lorry drivers at the time, living hand-to-mouth from gig-to-gig; the arrival of motorways certainly made essential journeys a hell of a lot easier than they’d been when having to use the congested old A and B roads. The innovation of 24-hour services was another welcome development to a nocturnal breed who’d often arrive at their provincial destinations back when the country went to bed early; if they were lucky, the town in question might possess an Indian restaurant. The service station en route was therefore quickly established as a stop-off point, and virtually all of the acts who made their mark in the 60s came to depend on them.
The first two motorway service stations in the UK were Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire and Watford Gap, Northamptonshire; they opened their doors on the same day as the M1 opened for traffic, 2 November 1959, though their restaurant facilities didn’t arrive till a year later. Watford Gap’s standing amongst musicians was based more on its status as a meeting place in the wee small hours than its food, the standard of which had deteriorated by the 70s; indeed, the nosh on offer eventually acquired a reputation to rival that of British Rail, so much so that Roy Harper famously penned a tongue-in-cheek track criticising the cuisine on offer – ‘Watford Gap, Watford Gap/A plate of grease and a load of crap.’ A board member of EMI, Harper’s record company, was also a director of Blue Boar, which owned the service station; pressure was brought to bear and Harper was forced to replace the song on subsequent pressings of the album it appeared on in 1977, though it was later reinstated, long after the fuss had died down.
Perhaps the notorious state of Watford Gap’s food, combined with my own memories of the battered banger, were symptomatic of how the optimism of the era in which service stations were viewed as futuristic oases for the traveller of tomorrow had degenerated by the following decade, like so much of the nation’s road and rail facilities during those harsh economic times. Punch-ups between coach-loads of rival football supporters probably didn’t help either, though the thought that went into the design of service stations during their 60s construction – such as all-weather enclosed bridges linking northbound and southbound sides, or the famous air traffic control-like ‘Pennine Tower’ at Lancaster Services (which once housed a restaurant and a sun deck) – were poorly maintained and allowed to slide into disrepair once their shiny newness had faded. Moreover, innovative amenities didn’t yield much in the way of profit, however good they looked, so the condition of many service stations had gradually become grubbier – and the service they provided increasingly basic – by the 1980s.
An overhaul began in the 90s, when many of the familiar high-street chain-stores started to open outlets at service stations and the buildings themselves were given a facelift, losing the distinctive design they’d had from the beginning. As happened to many government-owned properties in the age of privatisation and deregulation, service stations were sold to private companies rather than being leased to old operators such as Granada or the Rank Organisation, and this no doubt played its part in the changes. As a non-motorist, my main experience of motorway service stations is as a childhood passenger, with my awareness of how today’s versions compare to the ones I remember being fairly threadbare. All that has changed over the past week or so, however, due to stumbling upon a YouTube channel new to me – one that goes by the name of Auto Shenanigans; motorways figure highly on this channel, which I found a refreshing change from the multiple YT channels dedicated to trains and rail travel. One series of videos on it sees the host and his sidekick embark upon the bonkers task of visiting all 95 of the UK’s service stations; I’m only around halfway through this mad challenge, but so far the pair have managed to stop at over half of them, and exposure to service stations as they are in the present day has been an eye-opener.
The majority of the service stations visited in these videos resemble the kind of bland, sterile shopping malls that can be found in most major towns and cities throughout the country, boasting the same tired, over-familiar old coffee and fast-food brands that the public evidently can’t do without. One of the services visited – which one escapes me now – even boasted a bloody Wetherspoons pub, something that seems a tad incongruous considering virtually all visitors are driving; perhaps conscious of this, the sale of alcohol at service stations has a chequered history – banned in 1961, reinstated in 1998, banned again (on new sites, anyway) in 2008 and permitted once more as of 2013. However, some of the newer additions to the service station map are consciously environmentally-friendly, such as Gloucester, which opened in 2014 and rejected the usual chain-store monopoly in order to provide food and produce sourced locally; alongside aesthetically-pleasing ponds and garden areas, the building also has a green roof, intended to help it blend into the landscape, which is certainly something the original design of the first wave of service stations couldn’t lay claim to.
The planning of new service stations is often confronted by opposition from local residents, and a fair few projects have been cancelled as a consequence of such opposition; perhaps the efforts of Gloucester to make them more sympathetic to their surroundings is the way forward for these rather unsung institutions that have been with us now for well over half-a-century. To find a YT channel celebrating instead of criticising service stations – albeit with a knowing humour – is a reminder that, whether we like them or not, motorway services are here to stay, and I suppose the country’s increasingly congested motorways today need them more than ever.
© The Editor
Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?fan_landing=true&u=56665294
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/843169827
Close-knit and incestuous cliques do have a habit of closing ranks if one of the chaps lets the side down. I always think of the somewhat sad scenes in ‘Scandal’, the 1989 movie documenting the Profumo affair, when Stephen Ward is abruptly cold-shouldered by a panicked aristocracy terrified that their rather depraved private lives are poised to become known to the proles whose tugged forelocks they still depend upon to reinforce their crumbling superiority. As long as they continued to project an image of Great British propriety to a public still hampered by hand-me-down deference, they could be as debauched as they liked behind closed doors without fear of frightening the horses; the society osteopath whose address book had fallen into the grubby hands of Scotland Yard therefore had to be quietly excommunicated lest the whole house of cards come tumbling down. I was reminded of this ruthless process around the time that Kevin Spacey, one of Hollywood’s leading darlings, was dramatically cancelled by Tinsel Town in a manner that seemed determined to erase him from history overnight.
I was grateful, in a way, that the Kevin Spacey story enabled me to add a brief obituary for Sinead O’Connor rather than making that the main focus of this post; there are a few too many shades of 2016 for comfort at the moment, when every post seems to be marking a death – and, to be honest, it gets a little bit depressing. O’Connor’s remarkable car-crash of a private life aside, the Celtic chanteuse who became an international household name in 1990 with her tear-jerking cover of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2U’ has spent the last 30 years as an erratic presence hovering on pop culture’s frazzled fringes, instantly recognisable yet not consolidating her fame (or infamy) with sustained commercial success. One could say she sabotaged any prospects of a long-term career as a global superstar when she notoriously ripped-up a photo of the Pope live on US TV in 1992, though subsequent revelations of crimes committed by the Church of Rome on the Pope’s watch have somewhat vindicated O’Connor’s stunt in the years since, and it can now be viewed as her own ‘Punk Rock’ moment, staged at a time when she could least afford to do it. The fact she knew the risks and went for it anyway makes it all the more admirable in retrospect.
Approximately 45 years and the best part of a million miles away from the aggressive product-endorsement industry of the here and now, an ad appeared in the 1970s and 80s boy’s Bible of the beautiful game, ‘Shoot!’ magazine; the tagline was ‘A Close Shave for Trevor’ and featured Nottingham Forest and England forward Trevor Francis promoting a brand of razorblade lost to the mists of memory. Bearing a closer resemblance to the kind of ads non-smoker Stanley Matthews fronted for Craven ‘A’ cigarettes in the 1950s, the ad in question inexplicably re-entered my consciousness yesterday when I heard Francis had died of a heart attack at the criminally-premature age of 69. Yes, footballers were promoting consumer goods long before the present day wrote it into their contracts, but they did so back then with a refreshingly amateurish cheesiness that feels curiously charming in retrospect; they looked almost embarrassed to do so, as though endorsing a product unrelated to their profession was somehow ‘selling out’. Francis may have been British football’s first million-pound signing, but I should imagine his wages were no higher than those of his team-mates at Notts Forest; subject to the often-petty eccentricities of the man who signed him in 1979, Brian Clough, Francis reluctantly plugged products as a means of embellishing his income. He may have been a European Cup winner, but that didn’t necessarily project him into the jet-set at the turn of the 80s.
Tory, Labour, Lib Dem – the three major parties each win a by-election on the same night; no revolution, no dramatic shake-up of the status quo; nobody had a clean sweep, so nobody is preparing for government. Yes, Labour overturned a 20,000 Conservative majority in Selby and Ainsty with the largest by-election victory in its history – and in the process elected a new ‘Baby of the House’ in the fresh-faced shape of another Keir, Mather; but it failed to grab Boris’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, the one it really wanted. Many in the Party are putting the blame on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, whose extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone from the inner city to the outer suburbs has been understandably unpopular with the electorate. A punitive tax on drivers of older vehicles, ULEZ means those whose cars or vans don’t fit the ‘Green’ criteria can be charged upwards of £12.50 a day, a punishment that will come into effect as of next month. Even Labour deputy Angela Rayner has admitted the ULEZ issue probably cost her Party an otherwise entirely winnable seat. The political class’s obsession with eco issues increasingly looks like a backdoor way of taxing the people even further and assuming they’ll fall in line because it’s all about saving the planet innit – and those who can’t afford to do their bit will have to pay for it.
With the death of Jerry Lee Lewis in October 2022, the curtain finally came down on the Rock ‘n’ Roll generation of the 1950s, as ‘The Killer’ was the sole survivor left from the original pioneers who had blown the crooners out of the water. Remarkably, however, when Jerry Lee shuffled off this mortal coil, one of those crooners was still with us and perhaps even more remarkably, he’d enjoyed a top ten album just the year before – at the ripe old age of 95. That album had been the second of his collaborations with Lady Gaga, the sequel to an album they’d recorded together in 2014 – and the first one had sailed all the way to the top of the charts, making Tony Bennett the oldest living performer to score a No.1 album in the US. But there’s a lot about Tony Bennett that made his a life worth celebrating. His death at the age of 96 feels like another era is over, but an era that by rights should’ve been over a long time ago. That he kept going, even despite the crippling affects of Alzheimer’s, is testament to an amazingly resilient spirit; the fact that people were still listening highlights the affection audiences retain for the Great American Songbook and the singers who imbued it with such swagger, style and class.
With a CV like Tony Blair’s, one would imagine there’d be a fair few regrets – though it’s telling that the only real regret the former PM once claimed he had from his time in office was the Freedom of Information Act 2000. It’s certainly one I imagine the public bodies forced to submit to intrusive FOI requests from the plebs over the past couple of decades probably regret; for the rest of us, however, it’s thanks to that particular Act that many of those bodies have had their true colours exposed to the public gaze. Not strictly related, other than perhaps as a sympathetic sibling, is the section of the Data Protection Act 1998 that states, ‘You have the right to find out if an organisation is using or storing your personal data, which is commonly known as making a subject access request’. It was one such subject access request that has enabled Nigel Farage to get at the truth of his recent blacklisting by the Coutts bank; and it would appear his suspicions – dismissed by many as characteristically hysterical hyperbole on the part of Mr Brexit – were spot on. Despite the denials and the rebuttal put about by Coutts that Farage’s accounts were closed because they fell below the financial threshold the bank requires of its wealthy customers, Farage has now gained access to documents that make it abundantly clear that Coutts jettisoned a somewhat controversial public figure from its books on solely political grounds.
In the early months of 1984, Big Brother took the shape of Mike Read; at the time, the bespectacled, mullet-haired DJ was the host of the Radio 1 breakfast show as well as BBC1’s ‘Saturday Superstore’, and a regular presenter on ‘Top of the Pops’; he seemed to be the heir to Edmonds and bore all the egotistical hallmarks of a B-list celebrity fortunate to be operating in an arena boasting huge audience figures. When a record entered the charts by an unknown band with the odd name of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Mike was offended by the sleeve’s blatant gay iconography as well as some of the suggestive slang phrases peppered throughout the song, which was called ‘Relax’; back then, it was possible to be offended by such things and not be sacked on the spot for homophobia. Anyway, Mike declared on air that he would not be playing ‘Relax’, and such was his moral clout at the Beeb, the rest of Radio 1 followed suit; despite being played regularly until Mike intervened, the record was no longer to be heard on Radio 1. Of course, thanks to the publicity, ‘Relax’ climbed all the way to No.1, reducing TOTP to a farce when the show couldn’t even climax with the best-selling record of the moment. In 1984, however, I wasn’t aware this had happened before – albeit 15 years before (which was a virtual lifetime ago to the 16-year-old I was then).
THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING
The phrase ‘a good day to bury bad news’ has become something of a cynical byword for a convenient distraction when a guilty party would rather all eyes were looking elsewhere. There’s a fairly plausible theory that the Yewtree/Midland witch-hunts of a few years back – along with the nonexistent ‘Westminster Paedo Ring’ promoted by a chubby chancer now putting his fat feet up in the Lords (cheers, Keir) – were contrived as a handy diversion from focusing on the actual industrial scale abuse of innocents that was hiding in plain sight at that very moment, rather than 30 or 40 years before, i.e. the grooming gangs in Rotherham and Rochdale. The fact that, even now, anyone pointing out the fact the majority of these crimes were committed against white working-class, underage girls by Pakistani men still results in calls of ‘racism’ shows its grim significance is something a huge swathe of the political class remain in denial of – an uncomfortable truth it’s far easier to turn a blind eye to (as police forces did) than acknowledge as the appalling corruption of children it was.
There should’ve been a nice, neat line that could be drawn under all that unseemly business for good, and it was certainly attempted – blame it on the past, on yesterday’s unforgivably ignorant attitudes and those primitive, dated decades bereft of the more understanding emotional sophistication of our own enlightened age. Middle-aged men in shiny bomber-jackets, of course; it was that lot who got away with murder before the blind BBC eyes for years. Back then we apparently didn’t know any better, so it was possible for such predatory perverts to hide in plain sight, shielded from accusation by doing a lot for charity (which they didn’t like to talk about); how thankful we are that such a thing couldn’t happen ever again, for the stars of today are a much more aware crowd when it comes to the potential abuse of their impressionable audience. They are schooled in the importance of ‘isms’ and tick every approved box to show just how different they are from their disgraced predecessors; it’s not as if they would use these admirable attributes as a convenient cover for less-than acceptable activities in the same way the stars of yesteryear employed their own convenient covers – perish the thought.
If the pandemic threw up its fair share of villains – most of whom have been officially exposed as such in the aftermath of that insane interlude – heroes were in shorter supply. Of course, nurses acquired the kind of heroic sheen once reserved for the likes of the miners at this time, though doorstep and street-corner clapping for the NHS felt more like emotional blackmail than a genuine and spontaneous gesture. With a set weekly time for the confined to legitimately break the curfew and perform their government-sanctioned ceremony before disappearing back indoors again like good little obedient citizens, it didn’t improve the lives of anyone working on the Covid frontline; but it made a lot of people feel better about themselves. One eccentric act that did have an air of honest authenticity about it was the curious case of Captain Tom. 99-year-old Thomas Moore famously marked his impending century by walking 100 laps around his garden with a walking frame at the paranoid peak of Lockdown Mk I in April 2020, receiving maximum feel-good publicity during a time characterised by an abundance of doom ‘n’ gloom. In the end, Captain Tom managed to raise the best part of £38.9 million for NHS charities and was eventually honoured for his efforts with a knighthood courtesy of Her late Majesty.
Once upon a time, a bank would depend upon its respective branch managers to represent that bank in the community and give it a human face, to embody the aims and ambitions of the institution and present them to the customer in a way that made it seem less like an anonymous entity and more of a welcoming local business along the lines of the butcher, baker and candlestick-maker on the same high-street. The bank manager of old, such a familiar fixture from classic sitcoms, has practically vanished now – as indeed have most of the branches he ran – as banks instead connect with today’s online clientele by embracing fashionable causes they imagine will appeal more to yer modern punter than the bank manager’s somewhat antiquated authority. The authority he radiated is, of course, out of tune with contemporary mores and sensibilities as perceived by the powers-that-be; he wouldn’t be seen as ‘touchy-feely’ enough for a corporate world eager to push a particular ideological message it views any objections to as tantamount to membership of the alt-right.
winegumtelegram 