Tuesday 15 April 2008
As I am trying to be good and getting my website together, I’m making another video in the next couple of weeks to bring things completely up to date but in the meantime, here is another little taster.
On May 2nd I’m going to Fontwell Racecourse to judge a Miss West Sussex competition which is an early qualifier for Miss England. I’m very excited because I’ve never been to Fontwell Racecourse and also one of my fellow judges is my friend, Richard Dunwoody and in between gazing at beautiful girls I will be picking his brains about various aspects of National Hunt racing for Village Horse, which is the novel I’m writing at the moment.
The only other time I judged a beauty contest was Miss United Kingdom, back in 1973. Below is the piece in the Sunday Times which I wrote about the experience. I’m horrified what a bitch I was in those days but I do think aspects of the story are quite funny. I hope you enjoy it.
The fifteen beauty queens.
I’ve always enjoyed beauty contests, sitting making bets and ribald
remarks, laughing myself sick and resisting the temptation to hurl boots
at the television set when the contestant I favour doesn’t win.
I was thrilled,
therefore, when Eric Marley of Mecca invited me to Blackpool to be one of the
judges in their Miss United Kingdom Contest. I was less thrilled when
I arrived in Blackpool, and there was no one from Mecca to meet me. Eventually,
after 20 minutes, I discovered a hired car waiting furtively on a side road
outside the station.
I was even
less thrilled when there was no one to welcome me at the hotel. No one
could find the key to my room, either. I sat around asking for Morley
like Oliver Twist.
Eventually
Mrs Morley turned up to see me. ‘I can tell you’re nervous,’ she
said. ‘Judges are always far more nervous than the contestants.’
I was not
nervous by that time – just hopping mad.
Later I
met the other judges, Freddy of Freddy and the Dreamers fame, Chay Blyth, who
after ten months girlless and at sea would have to be lashed to his chair,
a ravishing actress called Madeleine Smith who was far prettier than any of
the contestants, and Mr Morley himself. We were taken into an ante-room.
The walls were decorated with Impressionist reproductions and Mecca henchmen
with middle partings and short Brylcreemed hair.
Mr Morley
took charge. Like Macaulay, his occasional flashes of silence made his
conversation perfectly delightful.
‘You
will now get a chance to meet the 15 finalists in private before transmission,
so you can pick out the last seven,’ he said. ‘They’ll
be wearing evening gowns; the thing to look for is the sort of girl you can
take anywhere.’
‘In
the broom cupboard or the long grass,’ said a wag, as the first contestant,
Miss Basildon, came in.
I imagined
that for evening dress, the girls might have slipped into something louche,
but not a bit of it, all their dresses were sweetly pretty: yards of tulle
or turquoise brocade, straight out of Come Dancing. Their hairstyles
were unbelievable, too, coiled and elaborate like those sketches entitled Doreen
or Valerie in the windows of suburban hairdressers. I kept feeling I
was judging Miss United Kingdom 1951.
As they
sidled in one by one, Mr Morley fired questions at them. By the time
you’d seen 15 it was impossible to remember what the first one looked
like. Miss Blackpool came from Preston, Miss Preston came from Manchester,
Miss Streatham was so well stacked she should have been awarded a Miss United
Front title.
The girls
must have had fun dressing up their hobbies. Miss Liverpool claimed her
favourite pastime was sailing. ‘You’d better tell Chay Blyth
about it,’ said Mr Morley unkindly.
Miss Liverpool
turned green and went sharply into reverse. ‘I’m afraid I’m
only a lazy passenger,’ she said, and started to talk of her lifelong
ambition to go on an archaeological dig.
Another
contestant said she adored looking after handicapped children; another’s
burning ambition was to run a shelter for lonely little animals.
‘A-a-h-h,’ said
we women judges, visible moved. ‘You don’t want to take these
hobbies too seriously,’ said Mr Morley.
Some of
the contestants were dismissed after a couple of sentences, but Mr Morley kept
Miss England talking about her recent trip to New York.
‘I
wouldn’t like to live there, it’s so violent and dirty,’ she
said in her carefully elocuted voice, then, scared she might have said something
adverse, hastily added: ‘But of course New York’s wonderful all
the same.’
What was
so tedious was that the girls all projected this same ‘ever-so-dainty’ Patience
Strong image, as though they were meeting their mother-in-law for the first
time. If one of them had marched in and said her 6 inch heels were killing
her, Blackpool stank, and her hobby was bashing up old ladies, she’d
have had my vote on the spot. In attempting to make any reasonable choice,
I was desperately searching for one spark of character or originality. Alas,
none of the ones I voted for made the last three in the end.
We next
adjourned to the main hall and the contest was on the air. The 15 then
came on one by one in bathing dresses – 15 sacred cows brought to Mecca. Their
make-up was very bizarre. Chocolate brown legs from excessive fake tan,
pale coffee shoulders and pink faces to match their evening dresses – not
unlike a Neapolitan ice cream. They walked like Thames barges.
The audience
mostly consisted of prototype dirty postcard couples, little men with red faces
and eyes out on stalks and fat ladies with their legs apart and their hair
tightly set to last the duration of their holiday.
Although
we’d already selected the last seven by then, to the audience, contestants
and viewing public we were ostensibly judging the last 15. Up to that
moment, we’d only seen them in long dresses, but now they were in bathing
dresses we realised that several of the girls we’d selected had terrible
legs and figures and the ones we’d rejected were far more attractive.
We were
now busy placing the seven we’d picked in order of preference. By
the time the 15 marched off, we’d selected our first, second and third,
and our part in the proceedings was over.
The seven
finalists then came on and gave their all on olde worlde cottages and archaeological
digs to Michael Aspel (who looked as though he was suffering from crumpet fatigue). They
were obviously sick with nerves; you could see the tics going on their ankles. I
longed to shout to them: ‘Don’t bother, the die’s cast anyway.’
I watched
the rest of the contest on the television monitors stationed around the hall. It
was amazing how much prettier some of the contestants looked on camera. Chay
Blyth carefully pencilled out all his markings. ‘Good army training,’ he
said. ‘Always cover your tracks.’
Miss England,
as expected, won the title. She was beautiful and presumably fit to be
taken anywhere. She didn’t bother to pretend to cry as she did
her lap of honour and a BBC man whipped rather desultory applause up from the
audience, nor did she make a Harvey Smith victory sign at the judges as she
passed. I suppose it would not have been a UK thing to do.
The whole
performance had been shatteringly depressing. In spite of all the gin
I’d consumed beforehand, I suddenly felt as sober as a judge.
The finalists,
BBC and Mecca officials, and people from Ski Yoghurt who had backed the contest,
all retired upstairs for supper and dancing. The menu in gold loopy writing
offered us ‘Chicken Chauldfroid and Beaugolais’.
The contestants,
of whom no one was taking any notice, talked to each other and later danced
together.
‘I
want people to appreciate me for my mind not my body,’ said one,
who must have had an IQ in single figures.
‘Her
trouble is she’s got an unphotogenic crutch,’ said another.
I had an
early train to catch and baled out at 2 o’clock. ‘Don’t
go yet,’ protested a BBC man, ‘I’m driving to Leicester in
two hours to organize Holy Communion for the Deaf on Sunday.’
I tottered
back to my hotel. When I lay down the Gideon bible went round and round. I
fell into an uneasy sleep, punctuated by various men from the BBC ringing up
to pass the time of night with me.