22 August - 13 September - The Queen's Theatre

Seaside MemoriesA chat with John GodberDeckchair slumber at Blackpool, July 1939How did you come to write September in the Rain?I wrote it back in 1983 as a follow-up to another ofmy plays called Happy Jack, which I had written formy wife and my best friend to appear in. I wanted todevelop one little aspect of the characters’ lives andlook at that; I thought I’d look at one week of their lifeso that’s how I came to focus in on that one week inBlackpool. The title came about because it was thename of my mum’s favourite song, which wasoriginally recorded by Jo Stafford, I think.And is it true that the play is based on your ownparents’ experiences?Yes, basically I was writing a play about my parents,but I couldn’t say they were my parents because itwould have been a bit too close, so I pretended itwas my grandparents I was writing about. And it wasabout the holidays they had had in Blackpool andwhich I in fact myself had also had for many years. Ithink I went on holiday to Blackpool every year fromwhen I was nine months old until I was around 21.Always to Blackpool; we never went anywhere else.In fact, it’s rather strange that our family didn’t actuallygo to Bridlington or Scarborough, which would havebeen the most obvious place to go, and certainly thenearest. I’m from West Yorkshire, right in the middlenear Leeds, from the mining communities. But wewent to Blackpool instead of Bridlington orScarborough because my mother didn’t like the eastcoast, which is rather ironic since I now live there.I get the impression that going to Blackpool wasa popular choice around that time?Oh it was, yes, especially for people from miningbackgrounds, because there was not really any otheropportunity to go anywhere else. You could only goaway when there was a pit holiday and schoolholidays, and many families simply went off for aweek in Blackpool. I remember there was a holidayperiod every year called ‘Leger Week’, based aroundthe St Leger horse race at Doncaster in September,when it generally rains like anything in Blackpool, andthat’s when we would go!And lots of other people did as well, from other areasof the country. You got Glasgow week, for example,and lots of Scousers and Brummies also went there.Nowadays, sadly, Blackpool is trying to be LasVegas, but back then it was a terrific place to take thekids because you had lots and lots of sand. You justdidn’t get the weather that you get on the Costa delSol, that’s all.And did people really all do the same thing andfollow the same routines, every year?Oh yes, without question. They’d all go to the TowerBallroom and they’d go to the sands and they’d go onthe pier and so on. We always used to say, and I putthis line in the play, that when we got to Blackpool itwould start to rain and it would rain for three or fourdays and then on the way back the sun would comeout. That seemed to be the pattern; I’m sure it wasn’tlike that all the time, but that’s how it seemed.