I left Liverpool to attend art school in London more than 35 years ago, I have visited every two months or so since then, but, in a way, I have never been back at all. All those trips I made over the years had been work or duty, family Christmases, weddings, christenings, performing at depressing unemployment benefits in the 1980s. In 1995, one of the last stand-up gigs I ever did was at the Liverpool Empire Theatre. As I entered my forties, there came the various crises that go along with that period of your life: the late-night phone calls from the ambulance men, the frantic 200-mile drives from London to casualty. I genuinely have the phone number of the Royal Liverpool Hospital on speed dial on my mobile phone, and any time an unknown 0151 number comes up on the screen, my heart skips a beat until I know it isn’t bad news.
Apart from all these dramas, I had grown up in a time when you were considered effete on Merseyside if you drank orange juice or if you wanted a cup of coffee that didn’t taste like it had been made before the Second World War, so the idea that pleasure was to be found in my hometown was an alien concept. Given all this, the idea that I could visit my birthplace for pleasure had never occurred to me until I began making three films for the BBC – films that are a cultural history of Liverpool, but are also the story of my return from exile after over three decades away.
Having a film crew with you is like having a super power: you can walk through walls and turn up in the most unlikely places. I’ve ridden the choppy waters of the River Mersey with the harbour master. I’ve interviewed the Duke of Westminster on the site of his £1 billion development, the Paradise Project. I’ve chatted with champion boxers and one-legged policemen. But even if you don’t have your own film crew, I’ve discovered there is still a massive amount to see in the city.
Since I’ve spent the last three-and-a-half months on Merseyside, a surprising number of friends have been eager to come up to visit me (more than ever want to come to my house in London), so, to keep them entertained, I have had to work out an evening tour of Liverpool. During the day, while I am working, I let them explore the shops, museums and art galleries by themselves, but after I finish filming, we drive out to Crosby to visit Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ figures at sunset.
For those of you who don’t know it, this is a massive installation on Crosby Beach that consists of 100 cast-iron sculptures, moulded from the artist’s own body. The life-sized forms are dotted along two miles of the wide sandy beach. The experience of standing on the shore with these ghostly figures as the waves come in, completely covering some of them, is truly moving.
Then it’s back in the car, a quick look at Liverpool FC’s football ground and then we drive up to Everton Brow. One of the effects of successive councils in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s demolishing huge parts of the North End of Liverpool to build roads is that you can get around very quickly. Another is that, from Everton Brow, where once there were terraced houses and a vibrant community, there is now an eerie 40-hectare park with a lookout spot that gives a magnificent view over the sparkling unblemished tower blocks, the battered older buildings and, beyond them, to the river and the gentle green hills of North Wales.
