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Reviews of Mark Steel’s In Town:
‘This programme is stand-up comedy at its very best…stand-up on radio is immensely challenging – and often unsuccessful but this programme is intelligent and rich in content, well paced and, moreover, funny…although it is clear that a lot of preparation went into making this programme, the result is fluent, natural and exciting…it was also generous to its audience and to its location – and very much in tune with the sound and appeal of the network.’ The Sony Radio Academy Awards
‘A tough gig…more like shooting fish in a barrel, to judge from the reception he received from the honest burghers of Skipton, North Yorkshire…from the moment he remarked on the fact that the hall in which he was performing was used as a cattle market during the day and was hosed out before the show – and got a roar of approving laughter – Steel must have known that he could do no wrong.’ Times (review of Skipton show)
‘Going to a place and insulting it takes guts and careful strategies…Steel made use of the fact that he is from nearby Swanley both to signal that he knows the area but also that – whatever he was about to say about Dartford – it was better than his hometown.’Guardian
‘A simple idea, kindly and wittily executed by another unfashionably humane Englishman…thank Gaia they still exist.’ Observer
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On the way to a show in Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. So later, during the show, I mentioned this, asking the audience, 'Is that your rival town?' And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, 'Keighley is a sink of evil.'
Based on his award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, Mark Steel's In Town, is a celebration of the quirks of small-town life in a country of increasingly homogenised high streets. Steel's bespoke observations on the small, sometimes forgotten, towns of Britain go right to the heart of British culture today, championing the very people who shape the places we live in now.
“As everywhere hurtles along a route towards being identical to everywhere else, it seems any expression of local interest or eccentricity is becoming a yell of defiance. Scrape away the veneer of Wetherspoons and Pizza Hut-inspired uniformity, and the march of Tesco's towards being reclassified as a continent, and Britain is as magnificently diverse as ever, and ready to celebrate each distinct community. The elements of a town that make it unique are what make it worth visiting; they change a journey from being functional to being an experience. For example, one drizzly dark February afternoon as I came out of the station at Scunthorpe, I got in a minicab, and the driver didn't even look at me, but kept staring straight ahead as he said, 'I don't know what you've come here for, it's a fucking shit-hole.'’
Unearthing some of Britain's most unusual tourist attractions, and noting local quirks and habits, Steel's journey takes him through the backwaters of England, up to Scotland and across to Ireland, where he encounters a country united by a peculiarly ingrained sense of pride, no matter which village, town or city, to give a refreshing take on Britain, its people and its places.
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My particular charming favourite was his entirely reasonable praise for the concrete hippo of Walsall, which has become the main meeting spot of the town and - at the time of his writing - had gathered 1,644 members for the "Walsall Hippo Statue Appreciation Society" on Facebook!
This is a glorious celebration of what makes ALL places in this world uniquely great - its people - and Steel quietly discovers through his observations that people's sense of location quite literally makes them.
There are also some classic lines about certain towns you may not be bothered about eg) [something along the lines of] You can see Didcot power station from anywhere in Southern England, even when you least expect to, as it is on wheels and they move it around to comply with environmental regulations in any given area. Or Milton Keynes and the quadratic equation to work out where you need to go. Or Coventry's history being almost entirely surrounding transport, but it being impossible to leave due to the ring road.
Sometimes though, it is a little dull. On the chapter on Birmingham the author goes off on a massive tangent and it is more akin to Bill Bryson than a humourous and lighthearted travel book.
Generally though the style throughout is fantastic dry humour.
That obvious comparison is to Bill Bryson, though this book is in the rougher pub down the street from Bryson, talking to a man with neck tattoos about the French Revolution. If I have one criticism, it's that by the last few chapters (each is on a particular town and quite short) I found myself thinking "I hope this one doesn't have any paragraphs about eighteenth-century radicalism", but then they all did. Just as this started to annoy me, I realised I was on the last page of the body text and had reached the epilogue. Odds are it would never have bothered me if I hadn't devoured it over the course of a weekend, and you can hardly fault the book on that score.
Listmania!
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