String ’em up for this Nightmare Freaks show

I can’t help wondering why a team from the BBC’s studios in Manchester had to come all the way to London to make Saturday Night Out.

My theory is that it was made as a warmning to all youngsters in the North about the fate that awaits them if they run away to sinful old London, a place full of weirdos, transvestites and ageing songbirds trying to make a comeback.

Go to London, it seemed to say, and you might fall into the clutches of that classic piece of mutton-posing-as-lamb, Peter Stringfellow. Aaaarghh!

Experience

The programme was actually little more than a plug for one of Stringfellow’s nightspots. But would you want to go there and end up sitting next to Janet Street-Porter, a lady whose attempts at human speech have mostly been confined so far to local London TV?

Maybe people in Huddersfield were experiencing her for the first time, poor devils. There was also a man who put a snake’s head in his mouth, another who was covered with tattoos and when asked why replied: “Damned if I know”, and a gaggle of transvestites.

One of them was accompanied by a small dog, and the pair of them made up The Joan Collins Fan Club. The bigger of the two bitches said he/she was selling Joan Collins relics, bottles of her crystallised bath scum, which would have made me laugh if my jaw hadn’t been stuck in the “dropped in amazement” position.

Kim Wilde sang nicely and looked pretty. Dear old Dusty Springfield proved either that her comeback is a lost cause or else that there was something wrong with the sound system. The ghastly Stringfellow flapped his hands a lot and pretended to be a star. And somewhere in the midst of all this mayhem and mild obscenity sat Liberal leader David Steel, claiming that he often went to such places.

This is not the way to get the young vote, David dear. This is just the way to make yourself look damned silly.