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'Anything can happen at the seaside': the troupe who kept Britain grinning

Tony Lidington spent 30 years with the anarchic Pierrotters. He recalls trading songs for mackerel – and lifting spirits with a little lockdown flea circus

Let’s start with a pierrot dangling over the waves at Brighton. “A skinhead took offence at the fact we were camping it up on Brighton Palace Pier,” says Tony Lidington, whose troupe, the Pierrotters, was a mainstay of seaside performance for almost three decades. Five men in white satin and pompoms were a tease to masculinity. “I invited him up to dance with us to The Way You Look Tonight,” Lidington remembers, “and he started getting a bit aggressive. He picked me up and ran off with me, and held me over the pier with my feet over the water. I said, ‘You’ll get the biggest laugh of the afternoon if you let me carry you back in.’ So he did, and I staggered back with him.”

Even the gentlest entertainment causes a ripple. Even a fleeting moment deserves a record. Even the staid British go merrily doolally when the sun shines. And Lidington, now 59, saw it with the Pierrotters and kept the receipts.

Every scrap of “Rotter” reminiscence now inhabits an online archive at the University of Exeter, where Lidington teaches. It’s fitting that this repository of fun fetched up in academia, because the Rotters began in 1983, when Lidington was a student in Brighton, already enraptured by popular entertainment. He left the library, painted his face and moseyed out to the beach with the rest of the troupe. “We used to play to the fishermen who mended their nets under the Palace Pier,” he says on the phone. “As the sun went down we would sing to them, and in return they would give us mackerel. We’d cook it and get stoned.”

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3pzLpvc
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