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Brian Mitchell & Joseph Nixon’s thoroughly scurrilous Brighton column

What’s not on

Stage

IN FOR HIM, IN FOR HIM, THEY ALL HAD IT IN FOR HIM
Kenneth Williams, somewhat hammily and unconvincingly portrayed, in a play that seeks to depict him as an angst-ridden genius, which he wasn’t particularly.
Upstairs At The Four And Eleven, 25 November, 8pm, £10/8
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Brian Mitchell & Joseph Nixon’s thoroughly scurrilous Brighton column

The Bare Cheek yoof column!

It seems that these days the media is utterly obsessed with chasing the largely illusory 16 to 22 demographic, despite the fact people that age don’t actually watch TV or read newspapers or magazines. We here at Bare Cheek are no different. We’re desperate to have the young trendy people – with their Nintendos and their Lady Gagas and those belts with the checkerboard pattern on them – read this column, and everybody over 22 can just ruddy well eff off! So on with our trendy yoof column!
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Brian Mitchell & Joseph Nixon’s thoroughly scurrilous Brighton column

Pornography found in pineapple

Hove resident and father of three Derrick Perrick has described himself as disgusted” after finding “vile” hardcore pornography in a pineapple purchased from a local supermarket.
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Brian Mitchell & Joseph Nixon’s thoroughly scurrilous Brighton column

I REMEMBER…

Hove Park! These days, with its ergonomically-designed kiddies’ playground, posh cafe, tennis courts, climbing boulder, and miniature railway, it seems a very idyll. But what was it like at the dawn of the twentieth century? 96-year-old Strongitharm Micklewhite remembers…

“I’m a Hove lad born and bred – born in the year of our Lord 1913. Unfortunately when I was but a nipper of two both my parents died. They made the mistake of mildly rebuking Charlie Chaplin for showing up at a vicarage tea party with a prostitute, stark naked and drunk. So old Chaplin pulled out his pearl-handled revolver (which was, they say, a personal gift from Woodrow Wilson) and shot them both through the heart. Of course he was a big star in those days so he got off with a guinea fine, and I was left all alone in the world. I never held it against Chaplin though, and was always a big fan of his films.

I ended up in St. Mordecai’s which was a big orphanage that used to stand where PC World is now. It was a terrible place – full of misery, degradation, and despair. So no change there then. More than anything else, we orphans dreamed of having a green, leafy, verdant area of land to gambol about on and briefly forget our cares. Now, the land that’s now the park was back then an enormous lunatic asylum – but it burnt down in 1917 when the superintendant went stark staring mad and insisted on serving Crepe Suzette for all the inmates’ suppers. The local council couldn’t decide what to build on the land, but agreed that it should be something to ennoble and bring joy to the human spirit. So they built another lunatic asylum, but that burnt down a month later. So they built a workhouse, but that burnt down also. So they put their heads together and decided to build a cinema specialising in snuff films, but that fell down. After that they decided to turn it into a park.

Of course, it was a very different place in those days. Where the children’s playground now stands was a wild west show. All the greats appeared there – Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Jimmy Greaves. They’d demonstrate all the old cowboy skills – shooting, roping steers, drinking whiskey, wiping out the native Americans. Each show would end with a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand. It was rubbish. But there was very little entertainment available in those days.

You know that huge rock, the Goldstone? Well back in the day it was used as a huge, unwieldy paperweight. One evening I was down by it attempting
to re-enact the opening sequence of Raiders Of The Lost Ark when my arm became trapped under its twenty ton weight.